I look away from her and shake my head. How could I have let her talk me into running last night? What is wrong with me?
Lillian stares at Honey, trying to comprehend her words, and then over at me. “Disintegrate into a pile of ashes?” she repeats. “Is that what Emmanuel told you would happen if you missed services?”
My breathing, which is dangerously on the edge of hyperventilation, slows down. “I know all of you think everything Emmanuel ever taught us is wacky, but I don’t.” I stab at the center of my chest with my index finger. “I still happen to believe in some things. And Sunday service is one of them.”
“Okay, Mouse,” Nana Pete says gently. She reaches out and pats my hand. “Okay. Just relax, darlin’. We’ll find you a Sunday service somewhere.”
Mount Olive Southern Baptist Church, recommended to us by the cashier at Perkins, is a tiny brick building with a narrow white steeple and wide red doors, just five miles outside of Raleigh. From the front, it barely looks big enough to hold the five us. As we climb the front steps, I hear loud, strange singing coming from the inside. I stop and hold my breath, wondering if I should tell Nana Pete that this is a mistake.
For starters, I’ve never been inside an actual church. All Sunday sacrament services at Mount Blessing are always held in the Great House, after the long tables have been cleared away and the benches rearranged into neat rows of pews. Second, when Nana Pete asked me what kind of service I wanted to attend, I hadn’t known how to respond. In fact, up until that moment, I didn’t realize any options outside of the Believers even existed.
“Would a Baptist service be all right?” she’d asked. “Or maybe a Methodist one? Lutheran? Catholic?” The words were foreign to me; I stared blankly at her.
Honey rolled her eyes. “I think anything involving Jesus and God will be fine,” she said.
And so here we are, standing outside a Baptist church in the middle of Greenville, North Carolina, where not only am I unsure we will have room to kneel and stretch out our arms, but the sound of singing is coming through the walls. Before I can open my mouth to say anything, the door opens. A thin black man in a neatly pressed suit beckons us inside with a low bow. We nod and take our seats in the very last pew. I am surprised at how much room there is inside. The ceiling is wide and high and there are at least twenty pews on each side of the church, each filled to capacity. The floor is covered with thin red carpet and all along the walls are wooden engravings of Jesus at different stages of his life. But the only thing I can look at is the black woman up on the altar.
She has wild, curly hair and gold bracelets on her wrists. Her shiny purple robe sways with her as she moves back and forth, her eyes closed, holding her hands up to the ceiling.
She is singing a slow, slow song that draws murmurs from the congregation and makes my heart ache.
I’m troubled
I’m troubled
I’m troubled in mind
If Jesus don’t help me I surely will die.
She sings six separate verses, all by herself. Each one is about being in the dark, about trying to find the light. The strange thing is, it feels as if she is singing only to me. I keep looking around, but no one else seems to notice. There is never any singing at the Sunday services at Mount Blessing. Singing, Emmanuel says, disrupts the flow of meditation, which is the whole point. We chant our “songs” instead, repeating strings of Latin phrases endlessly, until it is time for Emmanuel to preach. Here, everywhere I look, people are either smiling or crying with happiness. Some raise their hands to the ceiling along with the singing woman, while others clutch handkerchiefs to their faces, dabbing at the tracks their tears have made.
After the woman is finished singing, a man wearing a red robe (a red robe!) gets up from a chair alongside the altar and walks to the front of the church. He has dark curly hair cut close to his scalp and a strange-looking scar that makes the side of his face look puckered, as if it has collapsed beneath itself. He opens a small Bible and looks at something on the page. Then he shuts it again. I close my eyes. Emmanuel does the same thing just before he begins to preach. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think. Now we’ll have a real Sunday service, complete with stern lectures from the Bible and commands to strive higher, reach farther, try harder to be perfect. But then the man sits down. Right on the top step of the altar.