Rion Scott - Insurrections

My father, despite hustling me, knocked about, collecting his things while I waited for him by the door, and ended up dropping me off after class began. I shuffled into a tiny room with tiny chairs and five faces I had never seen before. The rector barely seemed fazed; he didn’t at all pause or stammer at my interruption. The students — all slumped left and right in uncomfortable poses — sat around a circular table while the rector paced. He wore a black turtleneck and jeans. His bald head appeared freshly moisturized and nearly sparkled, depending on where he stood.

I sat on the periphery of things, behind the circle. In front of me was a girl with long, straight black hair that shone like the rector’s pale bald head. The rector stuttered a bit when I snatched a seat outside the group, but he carried on with whatever he had been talking about. He spoke in his normal mumble, and without a church podium, he paced. After he finished a point, he asked the group to make a space for me. The girl with shiny black hair and the skinny boy next to her parted and I pulled up my chair.

There’s room for all of us at God’s table, the rector said.

This God’s table? I asked. So it doesn’t belong to the church? I glanced quickly at the girl to my left — I assumed somehow, because she was the prettiest, that she was Alana — to see how she responded to my joke. She, like the rector and everyone else, pretended it never happened.

The rector asked me to introduce myself, and I told them my name and that I had spent most of my years on the Southside (this I said with tough, staccato inflections) before moving north. The girl with straight black hair was indeed Alana. There were two other girls. A short girl with a tough creasy face, whom I privately nicknamed the Raisin, and a girl with a soft pretty face and unnaturally meaty arms who, no matter what her name was, became Popeye. Then there were two guys. They looked Italian or something; I couldn’t place it at the time, but somehow different than the few white people I encountered in those days. The smaller one announced proudly that he was the older fraternal twin, Mauricio he said his name was, but we could call him Maurice. The younger twin, taller, handsomer, and more confident, informed us all that he and his brother were Alana’s cousins on her mother’s side.

While the rector droned, I ignored him and looked around the room. Here is where they held Sunday school and the parallel children’s service. Pictures of smiling white biblical cartoon children adorned the walls. Some were shepherds. Some knelt and prayed. Jesus hung on a wooden cross.

Tomás, the tall twin, raised his hand. My uncle says Jesus was black, he said, and then paused almost as a challenge to the rector.

He was God, what does it matter? Alana said.

No, Tomás replied. He was a man. Tomás turned to the rector. Wasn’t he a man, Rector Byron?

Yes, the rector replied softly. But he was a special man. The only begot—

See, so it does matter what Uncle Jonah says. My dad gets mad when he hears Uncle Jonah say that. Says there is no way Jesus was a nigger—

Tomás, will you be quiet! Alana said.

Tomás, the rector said, we won’t have that kind of lang—

What? I was only repeating what my dad says. I like Uncle Jonah. He’s one of those strong black men . My dad says he likes him too. But I got my doubts about that. He don’t like that his sister married him; I can tell. But I don’t see nothing wrong with it. I like Jesus, and if Jesus was black, then there can’t be anything wrong associating with black people and marrying them and stuff. I might marry a black woman, seeing as how Jesus was black. He was black, right?

We all gazed at the rector’s shiny white head, waiting for a reply to what now seemed like the question of the ages. Even White Jesus, hanging from a cross on the wall, seemed to lean in to hear the answer. I had never given the issue of Jesus’s race much thought, but now it was something burning. The rector made several false starts before speaking.

Perhaps we should take a bathroom break, he said finally, standing from the table. Before anyone could respond, he was through the door.

Of all the things I remember from that night — Alana’s neck, the rector returning and pretending the previous minutes never happened, small talk with the Raisin and Popeye, the rector’s admission that Noah was a drunk (which made me think of my father’s old ways), Tomás grilling me for whatever reason — what I recall most brightly is Tomás standing in the hall looking sheepishly to the floor apologizing while his cousin chattered at him. Man, those wild dancing arms of hers.

That night I ate dinner after everyone else. My sister, I learned, had come for a quick bite and gone back to her dorm room. I picked at my rice, thinking about Alana Spencer, so forceful and powerful, backing down her blowhard cousin. And I thought about White Jesus, and I tried to picture Black Jesus but couldn’t. My father sat under a dim lamp reading the newspaper. My mother sat by me, drinking a cup of grape juice.

What did you learn tonight? she asked.

That Jesus was black, I replied.

What? The rector told you that?

No, a kid in class.

Jesus was the son of God. God’s representative. He was Jewish. And it doesn’t matter. Damn negroes want to make everybody black.

It wasn’t a black kid. He was a white boy. I think he’s from Port Yooga.

I never seen white people in our church. Besides Rector Byron, of course.

Maybe they go to the eight-o’clock service.

Look, don’t you pay attention to foolishness. Learn about the church and God and don’t listen to people talking nonsense. White boy or negro.

I looked over at my father and noticed the slim smile on his lips. He didn’t raise his eyes from the newspaper, so it was hard to tell whether he was grinning at us or the funny pages.

I was just teasing my mother. Wanted to see what she had to say. But watching her reaction, I figured anything that annoyed her so much was worth believing in.

Alana Spencer. The name bounced around my skull after that first class and much of the next week. Imagining her became a nice mechanism of escape, especially in church. My mother often caught me staring into space when I was supposed to be singing or praying. You are the one who has to account for your soul, not me, she often whispered in between songs, and it was always loud enough for people around us to hear and give us strange looks. I wondered why Jesus would care if we sang songs in his honor. Why it mattered that we dropped to our knees like the naked women in the Cinemax movies I stayed up on weekends to watch. The need for praise seemed like a black trait. But then I figured that was a ridiculous thought.

I found myself again along this path of thought in confirmation class as the rector spoke. I looked at Alana. She glanced over at me.

You okay? Tomás asked.

What?

Like you want something, but you’re afraid to ask. His brother laughed the laugh of a sidekick. Tomás continued: You keep staring over at my cousin.

Tomás! Alana called. Her brown turned a reddish color. I felt a shudder or something in my core. I didn’t speak. I wanted to punch Tomás in his gut.

Are you all paying attention? the rector asked. My life had made me a master in the art of misdirection, and there was the rector making himself a target.

Yes. Yes, we are, Your Supreme Highness, I said, giving him a salute and a slight bow. Not a single classmate offered even a chuckle.

If you’re done, Robert, we can go on, the rector said.

Wait, I replied. I have a question. A serious question. You said when we reach the altar, you’ll ask us a series of questions to answer in front of the congregation, right?