Page 219 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 207work days, and he set us up evenings in the rectory library with parish paperwork and some books of essays, Jimmy Baldwin%u2019s new The Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name. We read Ralph Ellison%u2019s novel, The Invisible Man, and Chinua Achebe%u2019s Things Fall Apart. The themes of estrangement thrilled me. Father O%u2019Farrell was a working-priest creating a new kind of parish.%u201cWant to deal with change?%u201d he said. %u201cChange.%u201d Through him, I disappeared under the crush of new parishioners moving from the Deep South of George Wallace%u2019s Alabama and Orval Faubus%u2019 Arkansas to the formerly white parish at the El station of 63rd and Cottage Grove.Daytimes, in the parish office, I mouthed words of encouragement to people in trouble and in sorrow. In the school gymnasium, I could hear myself, shut up, make pious admonitions, yes, almost a priest, really, to hold off, at arm%u2019s length, Negro teenagers almost as old as I was, being friendly with boys talking about Chicago soul and the guitar of Buddy Guy, and nice to girls singing sweet but raunchy along with Etta James, %u201cSomethin%u2019s Gotta Hold on Me,%u201d so they would not ask me questions, %u201cBaby, What You Want Me to Do?%u201d or tell me Confessions about their experiments in the Sixth Commandment.I typed up sheets with lists of doctors and clinics and libraries and turned out purple mimeographs of school services and went door to door, go %u2019way, boy, knocking, knocking, talking through doors that would not open, you got a doctor name?, on all sixteen floors of the new high-rise monoliths of the Robert Taylor Homes.Hank the Tank sent me a postcard: %u201cKeeping tabs thru the grapevine. What movie are you now? Peter says, Angie Dickinson in The Sins of Rachel Cade.%u201d One of the other seminarians or young priests was a spy.In the churchyard, old women and old men pulled on my sleeves. They wanted exactly what white folks wanted, but they wanted it revivalistic, singing where the Church met the Top 10, %u201cFor Your Precious Love,%u201d biblifying with Curtis Mayfield, %u201cPeople Get Ready,%u201d pushing before them any fresh young priest who could save them before he became like the old priests silenced by the world and woe and women and whiskey.Christ was bread and wine. Christ was flesh. Christ was a man. How could I ever be another Christ?With another seminarian, I escaped uptown one night to a theatre in the Loop to watch James Earl Jones performing live in The Blacks.I wanted to hear his voice, learn some secret, see some scene. I tried to add up the equation: literature plus metaphor equals real life. Do actors