what the blood remember

Chapter Two: The Man in the Back Pew

Mother Odessa’s church was called Greater Zion Deliverance, though everybody called it Mother Odessa’s, because she had been a deaconess there since before the building had air conditioning, and because, somewhere along the way, the church and the woman had become difficult to tell apart. It sat on Claiborne Avenue beneath the shadow of the overpass, one of the old brick ones, its edges softened by age, and on Sunday mornings it filled with a kind of sound that made the overpass hum in sympathy above it.

Elijah went most Sundays, less out of devotion than out of love for his grandmother, who was ninety-one and still ran the usher board like a woman half her age and twice as intolerant of foolishness. He sat in the third pew from the front, same as always, and it was only when the choir rose for the second hymn that he happened to glance back and saw the stranger standing at the rear of the sanctuary.

The man was striking in a way that made Elijah’s eyes want to linger and his manners insist that they not. He was Elijah’s height, maybe a shade taller, dark-skinned, with a jaw that looked carved rather than grown and a stillness that stood out sharply against the swaying, clapping congregation. He wore a gray suit, well cut but old-fashioned, the sort Elijah associated with photographs of his great-grandfather. His hands were folded in front of him, and they did not move, not once, through the entirety of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” — no clapping, no fanning against the July heat that had the whole church glistening.

But his face moved.

That was what Elijah noticed, and what he turned over in his mind for days afterward. Something passed across the stranger’s face during that hymn — not quite sorrow, but something near it, the particular ache of hearing a song you once loved and had given up on ever hearing again.

After service, on the front steps beneath a sky gone white with heat, Elijah found himself walking toward the man before he had fully decided to.

“You new around here?” he asked.

The stranger turned. Up close, his eyes were a brown so deep it read as black, except for something moving beneath — subtle as light through water — that Elijah would spend a long time afterward trying to describe and never quite manage.

“Something like that,” the man said.

His voice carried a cadence that did not belong anywhere Elijah recognized — not the Ninth Ward, not Uptown, not anywhere at all, really, as if it had been assembled from a dozen accents and none of them recently.

“You didn’t sing,” Elijah said, surprising himself with the observation.

“I used to know the words better than I do now.” A pause. “My name is Marcus.”

“Elijah.” They shook hands, and Marcus’s hand was cool despite the heat, cool in a way that should have been unpleasant and instead sent something curious and warm skittering up Elijah’s arm. “Man, don’t worry about the words. Half this congregation forgets the second verse every single week.”

“I haven’t heard it since 1953,” Marcus said.

He said it flatly, like a fact rather than a joke, and something in his tone made Elijah look at him a second too long — long enough for Marcus to seem to realize his mistake, and for the corner of his mouth to curve into something that was almost, but not quite, an apology.

“You’ve got a good memory for math, then,” Elijah said carefully, giving him the out.

“Something like that,” Marcus said again.

This time, when he smiled, it reached all the way up, and Elijah felt the hum beneath his ribs sharpen into something far more urgent.