Page 252 - What They Did to the Kid

240 Jack Fritscher

I was under more fear than orders.
My family did not see me that summer, because I had to experi-
ence what a priest’s daily life was like in a parish of two thousand
souls. I knew nothing of any folks, especially black folks, but figured
they were like white folks, except somehow more full of secrets they
might reveal. I sat beneath a ceiling fan at Holy Cross Rectory trying
to decipher sense in the parish records of the pastor I had begged to
take me in. His parish had changed from all white to black in less
than twenty-four months.
Father O’Farrell welcomed me, and any help he could get, with
open arms. With a couple other seminarians and young priests, he
put us to work days, and he set us up evenings in the rectory library
with parish paperwork and some books of essays, Jimmy Baldwin’s
new The Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name. We read Ralph
Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart. The themes of estrangement thrilled me. Father O’Farrell was
a working-priest creating a new kind of parish.
“Want to deal with change?” he said. “Change.”
Through him, I disappeared under the crush of new parishioners
moving from the Deep South of George Wallace’s Alabama and
Orval Faubus’ Arkansas to the formerly white parish at the El station
of 63rd and Cottage Grove.
Daytimes, in the parish office, I mouthed words of encourage-
ment 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’s 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, “Somethin’s Gotta Hold on Me,”
so they would not ask me questions, “Baby, What You Want Me to
Do?” 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 ’way, 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.

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