I watched, stricken with fear, as the headlights of passing automobiles cast animated shadows on the walls of my room. Only God, who I believed loved my singing voice, could protect me from the wickedness lurking in the dark. Thus, I sang all of God’s favorite tunes—hummed when I didn’t know the words—in order to earn His protection. When I ran out of hymns to sing, I made up my own.
I am Your child, God. I am Your child—
It is real, real dark, but I am Your child.
God, I believed, was partial to high-pitched, mournful tunes with simple, direct messages. God was a brooder.
What did I know about His Grace?
What did I know about anything?
Ambition. Envy. Lust. Which was my sin?
I did not want my neighbor’s wife. I did not want his servant. I did not want his ass. There was, however, a girl. Peachie. Brother and Sister Gregory’s eldest daughter.
I had known her all of my life, but when she walked to the front of the church that Easter Sunday, sat down at the piano, and played “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”—my third-grade heart began to know envy and desire.
Peachie Gregory did not pick out tunes on the piano. No, she played with all of her fingers—those on her left hand too. Such virtuosity for a girl no older than I. And the applause!
That was what I wanted. I wanted to go before the congregation and lead them in song, but all I could do was play with one finger. I had to learn to play like Peachie.
An earnest desire to serve the church as a minister of music, then, did not compel me to press my parents—a maid and a school bus driver—for piano lessons, though that is what I claimed. When they said they could not afford piano lessons, much less a piano, I told them a necessary fiction.
“Angels flew down from heaven playing harps. They pointed to this great big giant piano. They wanted me to join them. I trembled because I knew I couldn’t play the piano.” I opened my eyes as wide as possible so as to seem more scared and innocent. “I have never taken any lessons.”
“Were you asleep?” my father asked, one large hand clutching my shoulder, the other pushing his blue cap further up on his head, exposing the bald spot. “Was it a dream?”
Before I could answer, my mother jumped in: “He already told you he was wide awake. It was a vision. God is speaking to the child.”
“You know how kids are,” said my father, from out of whose pocket the money would come. He chuckled. “Elwyn’s been wanting to play piano so bad, he begins to hear God and see visions. It could be a trick of the devil.”
My mother shook a finger at him. “Elwyn should have been taking piano lessons a long time ago. He is special. God speaks to animals and children. Elwyn doesn’t lie.”
My father peered down at me with a look that said, Tell the truth boy, but I kept my eyes wide and innocent, still struck by the wondrous and glorious vision I had seen. My father said to my mother, “But we can’t be so literal with everything. If it’s a dream, maybe we need to interpret it.”
“Interpret nothing!” shot back Isadore the maid, who pursued Roscoe the school bus driver to the far side of the room; he fell into his overstuffed recliner where it was customary for him to accept defeat. “You call yourself a Christian,” she shouted, raising holy hands, “but you’d rather spend money at the track than on your own boy! Some Christian you are.”
My father hung his head in shame. He was beaten.
He did, however, achieve a small measure of revenge. Instead of giving up his day at the track, he told my grandmother, that great old-time saint, about my “visions,” and my grandmother, weeping and raising holy hands, told Pastor, and Pastor wrote my name on the prayer sheet.
How I cringed each week as Pastor read to the congregation, “And pray that God send Brother Elwyn a piano to practice on.”
I believed that God would send one indeed—plummeting from heaven like a meteor to crash through the roof of the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters and land right on my head.
I had lied and liars shall have their part in the lake of fire.
I prayed, “Heavenly Father, I lied to them, but I am just a child. Cast me not into the pit where the worm dieth not.”
Thank God for Brother Morrisohn and his ultrawhite false teeth. If he hadn’t stood up and bought that piano for me, I would have surely died just like Ananias and Sapphira—struck down before the doors of the church for telling lies.
Brother Morrisohn was a great saint, a retired attorney who gave copiously of his time and energy—as well as his money—to the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters. It was his money that erected the five great walls of the church, his money through the Grace of God that brought us warmth in the winter and coolness in the hot Miami summer. It was his money that paid Pastor’s salary in the ’60s when the Holy Rollers built a church practically on our back lot and lured the weaker members of the flock away. After a fire destroyed the Rollers’ chapel, it was Brother Morrisohn’s money that purchased the property back from the bank, putting the Rollers out of business for good.
“I can’t sit by and watch God’s work go undone,” he always said.
On the day they delivered the secondhand upright piano, he told me, “You’re going to be a great man of God, Elwyn,” and he extended his forefingers like pistols and rattled a few keys.
He was already in his seventies by then, but lean and healthy and proud of his looks. His full head of gray hair, which he parted stylishly down the middle, was a contrast to his dark, handsome complexion. He always wore a jacket and tie and carried a gold-tipped cane. Grinning, he showed his much-too-white false teeth. “I love music, but I never learned to play. Maybe someday you’ll teach me.”
“I will,” I said. I had just turned eight.
“I wish you would teach him, Elwyn,” said Sister Morrisohn, the wife who was about half Brother Morrisohn’s age. From a distance she could be mistaken for a white woman with her fair skin and her long black hair cascading down her back. She was the prettiest woman at church, everyone always said, though she had her ways, whatever that meant. She removed her shawl and draped it lovingly over his shoulders. “We have that big piano at home no one ever plays.”
“I’m not cold,” Brother Morrisohn protested, frowning, but he did not remove the lacy shawl. He rattled the keys again.
“I’ll teach you piano, Brother Morrisohn,” I said.
He reached down and patted my head. “Thank you, Elwyn.”
I was so happy. I hadn’t had my first lesson yet, but I sat down on the wobbly stool and made some kind of music on that piano.
A little after midnight, my father emerged from the bedroom and drove me to bed.
“Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” he sang, accentuating each beat with a playful open-palm slap to my rump. It was a victory for him too. Just that weekend he had won $300 at the track. It didn’t seem to bother him that my mother had demanded half the money and set it aside for
