Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  Finally, when I turn ten, Mother decides I am ready. I gloat around Marshall, who had to wait until his eleventh birthday. First, I sit through a nervous meeting with Brother Paul Van Gorder in his book-lined office. He leans back in his leather chair across the desk from me and asks, “What does baptism mean to you, Philip?”

  I recite the correct answer that I’ve practiced. “I want to make public the change that happened inside me when I accepted Jesus into my heart.”

  “I believe God has great things in store for you, Philip,” he says. “Baptism is sacred. It’s permanent, no turning back. Don’t do it unless you’re ready to commit yourself for life.” I swallow, and it feels like something is stuck in my throat. I pretend strength, nodding that I’m ready.

  Our church schedules baptisms during the Sunday evening service. Behind the platform, curtains hide a baptistry inset in the center wall, and on baptism nights the curtains open to reveal a step-in tub with a painting of the Jordan River in the background.

  Four of us get baptized the same night. After the sermon, the choir starts singing a hymn, and we four make our way to the dressing room. We are all barefoot, and the pastor gives us each a white robe. Though the room is not cold, I shiver as I pull the robe over my T-shirt and white pants.

  Brother Paul reviews the instructions. “Grab hold of my hand and don’t let go. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. I’ll pull you up. Just relax.” I tell myself to relax, but I don’t know how.

  The solemn ceremony begins. I watch from the side as two women disappear under water and come up with dripping hair and the thin robes plastered against their white clothes underneath. It’s strange to see grown women go limp in the pastor’s arms. One woman is crying, with black marks streaking down from her eyes.

  I smell mold from the baptistry and hear a buzzing in my ears. My heart is sliding around in my chest. What if people can see through my clothes? What if I lose my grip and slip and drown? I keep thinking I have to go to the bathroom, even though I just went. I concentrate on holy thoughts instead.

  Brother Paul nods to me, and I step into water that’s cold enough to make me suck in sharply. I try to hold my breath and control my chattering teeth. “In obedience to the command of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and upon the profession of your faith in him, Philip, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  Suddenly I am underwater, my eyes shut tight, feeling a strong hand against my back and another pinching my nose, my own arms crossed in front of me. Then I break through the water and gulp in air. It’s over, just like that. I move toward the steps on legs that feel jointless.

  “Now walk in newness of life,” the pastor says, and half-pushes me up the steps.

  We read to know we are not alone.

  —William Nicholson, Shadowlands

  CHAPTER 8

  LEARNING

  Early on, I sensed the mysterious power of words. But what was their secret? Back when Aunt Kay lived with us, she and Mother would speak in a kind of code. Aunt Kay spelled out the letters one Wednesday night as we drove home from church: “Should we stop for some i-c-e c-r-e-a-m?” I had heard this code before: minisounds that somehow made sense when strung together—made sense to adults, anyway.

  Books used the same code. I would look at the pictures in my children’s books, pointing to them in glee as I recalled the scenes they depicted. But adults could stare at the black marks, spilled like pepper on a page, and repeat the story using the very same words I’d heard before.

  “Mother, what’s this?” I pointed to the black marks.

  “That’s the word for dog. See the picture?” She put her finger on three of the marks, one at a time: “D-o-g spells dog.” I asked the question—What’s this?—over and over, pestering her as she ironed or washed the dishes or read her Bible. With each answer I stored away another piece of the code.

  If I bothered her too many times, she’d refuse to tell me any more clues that day. “Wait until you get to school. That’s their job.” I kept at it, wearing her down. The mystery code must be important, I figured, because adults can unfold a dull gray newspaper, do nothing but move their eyes, and somehow know that it will rain tomorrow or that the Russians have tested a new rocket.

  Shortly before my fourth birthday, I cracked the code. We had a few gold 45-rpm records cued to some of my favorite stories, such as Little Black Sambo, who melted a tiger into butter, and The Little Engine That Could, who made it all the way up the mountain. As the man with the scratchy voice read the story I knew so well, I traced the black marks with my finger, lighting up when I hit a word I recognized. When the dog Nipper on the record barked, Arf Arf, I knew to turn the page.

  On the breakthrough day, I turned off the record player, and still I could follow the story. Though I stumbled on some words, I picked out enough of them to grasp the meaning. Words shot from the page directly into my head, and the jolt gave me goosebumps. I can read!

  From then on, I played less and read more. “He has his nose in a book all the time,” Mother told her friends. I read hungrily, like one of those shrews in our garden that ate double its weight every day. But while the shrew spends its life belowground, reading gave me wings. It let me time travel to England or Africa or Robinson Crusoe’s island. Or to Alaska: Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang made my heart hurt. I could barely read through my tears as the wolf dog lay near death.

  I worked hard to keep up with Marshall, who spent rainy weekends sampling the fat volumes of the Book of Knowledge or The World Book Encyclopedia. Marshall had read every fiction book in his grammar-school library. “Here’s a goal for you,” he said. “Try reading a hundred books before you enter first grade.” I eagerly accepted the challenge.

  Much of what I read went right over my head. In my books, schoolteachers boxed the ears of ornery students—I imagined a boxer in a crouch jabbing at an ear over and over, or a teacher smacking both ears at once with her hands, like cymbals. How do you gnash teeth? I wondered. I giggled over descriptions of a woman doing her toilet. I kept reading, even things I didn’t understand.

  * * *

  —

  As a five-year-old, I decide I’m ready for the most daunting book of all, the Bible. Mother has a fantastic Bible, black leather, with tiny half-moons of gold marking each of the sixty-six books inside. It smells like a baseball glove, and she treats it like one, reverently. I believe that its pages contain all the secrets of the universe. The Bible has its own vocabulary, I find: words such as begat, mammon, thrice, abomination.

  I like stories from the Old Testament, the thick part of the Bible. We don’t read fairy tales in our home, and there’s no need since the Old Testament is just as exciting and also true. Daniel taming the lions, his friends strolling around in a fiery furnace, Elijah slaying the prophets of Baal, Samson torching the tails of foxes, David knocking off Goliath—with television and comic books banned from our house, the Bible’s characters serve the role of superheroes.

  Soon Marshall and I ferret out the racy parts of the Bible. “Hey, listen to this,” he announces one day. “You know those two women who were fighting over a baby before King Solomon? They were prostitutes!” I don’t know that word, but clearly it means something to Marshall. He tells me that the phrase “He that pisseth against a wall” is just a weird way of saying “male.” We point out these passages to our friends in Sunday School, and it draws a laugh. During boring sermons, we turn to the juicy passages in Song of Solomon.

  Sometimes the Old Testament makes me laugh, and sometimes it makes me tremble. How do you love a God you fear? I feel strangely attracted to the scene of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac at God’s request. I don’t question God—only heretics do that—yet I can’t help wondering about God’s way of making a point. Did Isaac ever again trust his father, or God?

  I take some comfort
in learning that God had a soft spot for Jacob, the sneak who manipulated his older brother, though I still feel guilty about my own deceitful streak.

  Always, the story of Hannah abandoning her son to God looms in the background.

  * * *

  —

  Even before first grade I have already gotten a taste of school—a private “Colored school” in the basement of the principal’s home. Some sixty kids attend Miz Henley’s one-room academy, which covers kindergarten through the eighth grade. Many times I’ve accompanied my mother as she teaches Bible classes there. Mother explains that Atlanta’s segregated schools are so bad that Black parents pay extra money for their kids to learn from Miz Henley.

  Miz Henley runs her outfit like an army boot camp. She smacks any student whose attention strays and takes a cane to those who misbehave in class. When my mother walks in, everyone stands up and chants, “Good mornin’, Miz Yancey.”

  On winter days, students huddle around a woodstove, their yellow raincoats steaming with a rubbery smell. At break time all the kids surround me, as if I’m some exotic creature. I notice the different skin tones, from honey-colored to a dark shade my mother calls “black black” or “just as black as can be.” I’m surprised to find that the palms of their hands are baby pink, like mine. A few shyly ask to touch my own skin, which suddenly seems dull by contrast.

  Miz Henley’s discipline makes me nervous about entering school myself, but Mother assures me that public school teachers don’t hit their students with a cane—not in white schools anyway.

  Because of my November birthday, Mother has to apply for special permission for me to enroll in school as a five-year-old. When opening day finally arrives, she drives me to a squat orange-brick building two miles from our home. Marshall leads me to my classroom, where rows of one-armed desks face a teacher’s giant desk. Some cutout letters on the bulletin board spell out “Welcome, First Graders.”

  I can hardly sit still, so full of anticipation. “Hello, class, I’m your teacher, and my name is Miz Honea,” says a smiling woman who wears her hair in a ponytail. She speaks with a liquid Southern voice. “I want to learn all your names, so, to help me out, I have a seating chart. Please gather your things and move where I tell you.”

  As a Yancey, I end up in the very last seat in the very last row, miles away from Miz Honea. I feel hurt, for already I have fallen in love with her. She writes her name with white chalk on the blackboard and tells us that it rhymes with pony, not money. That night I compose poems about “Miz Honea who rides a pony.”

  Within a few days it dawns on me that I already know everything she plans to teach us. When she passes out thin books about Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot, I’m incensed to find that these books substitute color illustrations for perfectly ordinary words like squirrel—as if we don’t know the word. Turns out, not every kid does.

  Bored, I now look for ways to entertain myself: fidgeting, drawing, rolling the pencil around under my foot, finger-tracing the grain of the wooden desk, trying to catch a fly bare-handed, pulling the wings off a dead yellow jacket.

  When she catches me shooting the wrapper of a drinking straw at the girl seated in front of me, Miz Honea orders me to come forward. She draws a circle on the blackboard and instructs me to keep my nose in that circle, as punishment for misbehaving. That lasts a few minutes, until I discover I can play tic-tac-toe on the blackboard, or turn my head and make faces at the other kids. Miz Honea schedules a parent conference with my mother, who recommends spanking me with a BoLo paddle.

  “I could never do that,” Miz Honea says, and I melt under her mercy. Instead, she calls on me to stand in front of the class and lead a reading exercise.

  Halfway through that first-grade year, we move from the country to a place with lower rent in Forest Park, a suburb that has no forests and only one park. I turn shy in the new school because all these students already know each other. Meaner than country kids, they stick out their tongues, use bad words, throw spitballs, and make fun of anyone who does homework. When the teacher asks a question, nobody raises a hand to answer.

  The kind teacher takes me under her wing, giving me special projects that I go over with her after school. One day she brings me to see the principal, Mr. Lewis, who has only one arm. I try not to stare at the limp coat sleeve dangling at his left side. “This young boy has unusual reading skills,” my teacher informs him. After I read some things aloud, Mr. Lewis jumps up, says, “My seventh graders could use some inspiration,” and leads me by his one hand to the seventh-grade classroom.

  When we enter the room, the teacher steps aside and Mr. Lewis takes over. “Boys and girls, I want you to listen to this first grader, who can read better than some of you. Go ahead, Philip, read this story from their book.”

  Panic-stricken, I stare at the big kids rolling their eyes and poking each other. “The first word is Jeremy,” coaches Mr. Lewis, jarring me back to reality. Everybody laughs. I read the story from the seventh-grade book and soon learn that I have just violated a basic rule of school: Don’t look too smart and don’t show anybody up. The rest of that year, seventh graders flick me in the back of the head and taunt me.

  At the end of the year, Mr. Lewis phones my mother. “I’d like you to consider letting Philip skip the second grade,” he says. “The boy is bored. If he goes directly into third grade, he’ll have to work hard to catch up, and the challenge might be good for him.”

  * * *

  —

  My new teacher, Miz Rose, smells like her name. She wears glossy red lipstick and nail polish the same color as her lips. I fall in love all over again and am thrilled when she keeps me after class for extra tutoring. Students who went through second grade have learned to write something called cursive, while I only know how to print. At six, I am the youngest and smallest kid in the third grade.

  Just before Christmas, Miz Rose gets pregnant and a bossy substitute teacher arrives. On her first day she gathers us all in a circle and asks for a reading volunteer. I raise my hand, and she gives me a nod. I start reading as fast as I can and breeze through a couple of paragraphs until she interrupts. “Stop! Enough already.”

  “What’s your name?” she asks. I tell her. “Philip, quit showing off. Reading is not a speed test. The goal is to communicate. Now go back, start over, and this time read slowly.” My cheeks heat up, and I feel an ache in the back of my throat. I repeat the paragraphs, this time pausing and pretending to stumble over words. “Much better,” she says.

  The joy of learning seeps away, and I spend more and more time with my head on my arm, sweating in the overheated classroom.

  Field trips become my favorite part of school. On a tour of the Atlanta airport, I tell my seatmate on the bus about flying to Philadelphia as a baby and sitting on a millionaire’s lap. Unfortunately, I also say, “Wouldn’t it be great to see a plane crash!” picturing fire engines and ambulances with lights flashing and sirens blaring as they speed across the runway. The substitute teacher overhears me, and while everyone else visits the control tower and the observation deck, I have to sit alone on the bus with a fat, sleepy driver. Through grimy bus windows I watch the planes take off, following the white streaks left in the sky as they disappear.

  Partway through my third-grade year, we move again because Mother can’t afford the heating bills, and I enter still another school. Now we are living in something called a duplex, which is really half a house.

  I survive the third and fourth grades and, after another move, enter fifth grade in yet another elementary school. This one, Kathleen Mitchell, proves to be the best of all. The principal, a roly-poly woman, stands at the door and hugs each student as we enter. I spend all of fifth and sixth grades there—two whole years at the same school.

  * * *

  —

  Mitchell Elementary opens my eyes to science, which worries Mother. “Be careful,” she sa
ys. “They’ll tell you stuff about evolution and dinosaurs that contradicts the Bible. You can’t believe everything they teach in school these days.”

  In the world outside, the United States and the Soviet Union are looking for ways to destroy each other, and so both governments have poured money into science education. Ultramodern, my new school has the novelty of closed-circuit television. If our teacher doesn’t know much about, say, nuclear fallout, then an expert lectures us from a studio room while we students sit at our desks and watch him on a TV monitor.

  During one of these lectures, we see a film clip and learn a bouncy song:

  There was a turtle and his name was Bert

  and Bert the turtle was very alert.

  When danger threatened him he didn’t get hurt,

  he knew just what to do!

  He’d duck! And cover.

  Duck! And cover…

  The expert says that if Russia drops an atomic bomb on us, we should move in from the windows, look away from the bright flash, and climb under our desks with our arms over our heads. This will help us survive nuclear war. Over the next few weeks, when an alarm sounds, we practice ducking and covering, like Bert.

  The school keeps searching for ways to excite interest in science. A man who calls himself Mr. Science puts on my favorite all-school program in the auditorium. He dips a banana in liquid nitrogen and smashes it to pieces, like glass, on the floor. He causes a miniature tornado to form inside a glass cylinder to demonstrate how weather works. After the show we swap stories about lightning. One kid claims he knows of a boy struck by lightning as he stepped from a metal boat to a metal dock. “He plumb disappeared, just like that,” the kid says, snapping his fingers. “Lightning got him. They went diving and found nothin’ but a melted belt buckle.”