those books badly.
All of the happiness flowed out of me then. For months I moped around. I made money reading contracts and warranties for my neighbors, but every time I’d read a line I’d remember the high shelves of that country library.
By the time I was seventeen I was on a train bound for San Francisco, not because I wanted to vote or was afraid of being lynched. I left because a man told me one night that in California black folks could go into any library they wanted. They could get library cards and check out books from here to Sunday.
It was cold in Frisco, but I read a book a day in the first year. Libraries still make my heart race. There is nothing like a book.
“I understand you, sir,” a voice agreed.
I smiled in my doze, thinking that most people thought I was crazy when I told them that story. A door closed and I was jarred awake. Three men stood in the shadows down the street in front of the curtained church.
Some more words were spoken, but I didn’t understand them. This made me think that I had given meaning to the words I heard in my sleep. Through the darkness I could tell that one of the men was white and the other two were black. One black man was well built, wearing a white suit. He laughed and slapped the white man on the shoulder. That was William Grove. I remembered him going into the church with all of the deacons shaking his hand as he went past. The other black man seemed to be older. He also wore a suit, but it was shapeless, fitting the man like the everyday uniform of a night watchman or usher.
The white man was powerfully built too. That’s really all I could tell about him, except that he seemed to have some kind of foreign accent. They talked briefly, and then a dark-colored sedan drove up. The white man got in, and the sedan drove off.
I crouched down as the sedan went past. When I rose partway up again, the black men were still talking.
They talked for a while more, and then Grove walked away down the street. The older man used a key in the front door to the church and went in.
I had brought myself to the edge of that minefield by asking a couple of good questions and by perseverance. But every step from then on was laid out for a better man than I was. So I sat there trying to will myself up the evolutionary ladder from man to superman. But when I got out of that car, there was no cape dragging behind me, only a tail between my legs.
14
I NEEDED TO RELIEVE my bladder, but I was scared. In a car I was an even match for Leon Douglas; on foot gawky Gella Greenspan had about equal odds to kick my ass.
I knocked on the church door, braced by the cold air and the possibility of finding a toilet. I was standing there for quite a while before a baritone voice asked, “William?”
“It’s Tyrell Lockwood,” I said, loud and clear.
“What you want?”
“I came to speak to Reverend Grove.”
“It’s three in the morning,” the opera voice informed me.
“It’s very important,” I said. “About a woman named Elana Love.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the lock snicked and cracked. The door came open and a frosty-headed older gentleman looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow.
“What about Sister Love?” he asked.
“She hired me to find you, said it was somethin’ important she had to say.”
“What?” His features were African Negro with very little other racial influence. Based on his facial structure you would have expected his skin to be dark, very dark, but instead it was fifty-fifty, coffee and cream.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But my business is with Reverend Grove. I spent the whole night driving around trying to find this place and I got to go.”
“I’m Vincent,” the man said warily. “Father Vincent la Trieste. At one time I was the minister of this congregation.”
“May I use your facilities, Father Vincent?”
There was a moment when he might have refused me, but then he stepped back, allowing me in.
