For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  Outside the windows, Ula’s Access-A-Ride is just pulling up. I smile to myself. In the early years, Ula drove me to distraction with her sharp jabs and sarcastic comments. But we’ve settled into a begrudging regard for one another. She often gives me a hard time, asking me obscure academic questions she must know I won’t be able to answer.

  “I thought you’d know your Christian history better after all that education,” she gibes.

  I roll my eyes at her. “Ula, I didn’t do a PhD on the Reformation, okay? Let me research it and get back to you.”

  Over at the tables, the grandmothers offer a heaping plate of chicken wings to the sculptor from the other side of the canal. She sits down next to them to trade stories about the neighborhood back in the seventies. “Nope, you didn’t cross Court Street,” I hear one of them saying. “Not if you didn’t want to pay for it,” and they all crow with laughter. A couple Lydians are learning the names of the young photographer’s family who just arrived, smiling and showing them the way over to their child’s photo. Across the room, Sydney gives a balloon to a toddler in a stroller who moments ago was wailing. “Do you like orange, or white?” she asks. The toddler points mutely to orange and reaches out to clutch the curled ribbon with her chubby hand, letting loose a delighted laugh.

  I feel sure my heart is going to brim over. Neighbors are meeting neighbors they might never have thought to talk to. We’re all around one table, scooping up rice and beans and sipping Capri Suns. The kingdom of heaven, I keep thinking. At least, for just this moment, we’re all around one table.

  * * *

  Tracey tells me that Mr. Heyward holds a Day of Remembrance for his son every August. She says I should go. And so, on a broiling summer Saturday, I don a clergy collar and a sleeveless shirt and walk half a block to the park that bears Nicholas’s name. The older kids are on the basketball court, the younger kids shouting from the sidelines or chasing each other across the park, faces sticky, smeared with red Popsicle. I’m not sure what to do with myself. I don’t see Tracey or anyone else I’ve met at community meetings. I settle on an awkward white-lady-lurking posture, trying to smile in a friendly but not invasive way.

  Mr. Heyward is talking to the press over near Wyckoff Street. Soon he moves toward a podium and a press conference begins. He recounts the story of what happened to his son, holding up a plastic toy gun with an orange cap. A tall, slight man in a bright polo shirt and a baseball cap, he’s been retelling this story since the nineties, seeking justice for the child he lost.

  Halfway through the speech, his voice cracks and he places a hand over his eyes. His wife rests a hand on his shoulder and we all stand quietly, shifting our weight from foot to foot and fanning ourselves with our programs as he gathers the resolve to continue.

  “Take your time,” someone calls out.

  Clustered around Mr. Heyward are several other families whose children or relatives were killed by police. The sister of Akai Gurley, shot in the Pink Houses in East New York, is there to speak. The father of a little girl named Briana Ojeda says a few words as well. She died in the car as her mother tried to race her to the hospital during an asthma attack, when a cop pulled her over and started writing her a ticket. “She needs CPR,” her mother was screaming. “Do you know CPR?” The officer refused to call an ambulance as he wrote her a summons.

  I realize that I’ve seen Briana’s face before, and a chill passes through me. On my walk to the subway, there’s a house I’ve always wondered about. Candles in glass holders are perennially lit in the front garden; there’s a tree decorated with ornaments that say “angel”; the front door is adorned with a picture of a little girl. Now I know why. Her parents have been keeping vigil since 2010. Our neighborhood is dense with stories like these.

  After the press conference I introduce myself to Mr. Heyward.

  “I’m a pastor of a church just down on Bond Street,” I tell him.

  “Oh, that’s nice, that’s nice,” he says to me vaguely, shaking my hand, before being pulled away by a reporter who wants a quote. I sense a pall of exhaustion hanging around him. His skin is drawn, his eyes weary. He’s been doing this work for two decades.

  * * *

  —

  At Dinner Church the next day, I preach about young Nicholas and his activist father. I tell the Lydians the story of how Nicholas died, and the room grows quiet. Wendy, her offering of home-baked dark chocolate–macadamia nut bars sitting on the counter, is here with Peter. As she listens to the story about Nicholas, she pulls him closer, wrapping her arms around him protectively, and setting her chin on top of his red hair. I tell the congregation about the work Mr. Heyward is doing to try to get his son’s case reopened. Nicholas would have been our neighbor, were he still alive. His father is our neighbor. He lives just four blocks away, but it’s like we’re in different cities. Our kids are safe. His aren’t.

  At least now, we know his story.

  * * *

  These relationships with our neighbors took years to form. Even before we arrived at Bond Street, I taught congregants how to do one-on-ones with community leaders. We held a Season of Listening each spring and invited longtime residents to come and preach. We heard from Raymond, who came of age in the Gowanus Houses in the seventies, and fell in love with a Puerto Rican woman from the other side of the neighborhood. And we heard from Neil, whose parents and grandparents had all been baptized, married, and buried in St. Agnes Church on the corner. He painted a picture of life in the close-knit Irish Catholic community he grew up in.

  These connections were good. We were meeting people and listening to the stories they shared with us, learning the history of the blocks where our church was situated, and coming to understand the unique pressures our neighbors faced. Every new connection was like a seed planted. Some of them sprouted and grew, but a lot of them just lay in the ground, dormant. Maybe the season wasn’t right. Maybe they’d come up later, when the conditions had changed.

  But then we met Tracey, and overnight, a mess of vines sprouted and then flowered. A few seasons later, we harvested a bumper crop. Our friendship with Tracey was the right seed, planted in the right soil, at the right time. Something growing that wasn’t there before.

  * * *

  —

  Through all of it, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just casting out seeds and hoping something might happen. I felt lost and awkward a lot of the time. It would have been easier to stay in the walls of our little church, risking nothing. But I needed to catch hold of the ropes, pull our small wooden boats together. I needed us to be at one table. And maybe all those Sunday nights of practice—sitting at tables with people we barely knew and trying to make conversation—prepared us in some way. We cultivated a new spiritual practice: a tolerance for discomfort and ambiguity. We learned how to reach for one another, even when the gulf seemed wide.

  You know that I was lonely through all of it. Searching for someone whose eyes would light up when they saw me, who would take my hand. I was hungry for love. But buried deep at the bottom of that aching hunger was a different kind of desire. A longing that was rooted not in the absence of a partner, but in the devastation of the world. My salvation came through rice and beans served up from foil trays and passed from hand to hand.

  * * *

  A year later, and it’s time to celebrate Nicholas’s birthday again. I head across the street on another hot August day, but this time I’m not all by myself. I announced the celebration at St. Lydia’s and asked the congregants to come with me. Mr. Heyward has invited us to set up a table, and it’s there that I meet Wendy and Peter. Phil is there too, carrying the St. Lydia’s banner and our welcome book. Earlier this summer at the St. Lydia’s retreat, he and Wendy confessed that they were a couple, to the hoots and hollers and cheers of the entire congregation. Now they’re engaged, and Phil is slowly becoming a dad to Peter. We get the table all set up toget
her, struggling to tape everything down so it won’t fly away in the hot wind.

  Peter is twelve. His hair is just as blazing red as it was last year, and his pale face is scattered with freckles. He watches the other kids on the basketball court, none of them white like him, and sticks shyly to our table before making friends with some girls who grab his hand and run to line up for ice cream. They are just about the age Nicholas was when he died.

  This year the program is different. As we all sit cross-legged on the asphalt, Mr. Heyward tells us he wants to let Nicholas speak this year, in his own voice. He reads from an essay Nicholas wrote when he was eleven.

  “The reason why I picked my nature name to be Nicholas Newt,” Mr. Heyward reads, “is because a newt and I both have similarities. For example, I am rarely seen by people, mainly because I tend to spend my school days and weekends home…I am also a good swimmer because of my quick legs just like newts are quick swimmers because of their flattened tails.”

  We all smile the way you do when a kid is sweet and smart and funny, except this kid isn’t around anymore. Then Mr. Heyward reads from a letter Nicholas wrote when he was ten:

  Dear Malcolm X,

  My name is Nicholas Heyward. I am 10 years old and I live in Brooklyn New York. I admire you a great deal because you taught Black people to be more politically aware and to stand up for their civil rights. And to choose their own destiny. You also stressed that education and political power is necessary to accomplish these goals. I also admire the organization you called the Black Coalition which went to Black communities, teaching them equality and justice for all people and the importance of sticking together with words of nonviolence.

  Mr. X, I believe that I have good qualities such as a standing up for my rights when I am wronged. And I also like to read. I think reading enhances the intelligence.

  Yours truly, Nicholas Heyward

  * * *

  Those were summers of death. We watched name after name become a hashtag on the national stage, while across the block, our congregation learned the story of Nicholas.

  They were also summers of beauty: of astonishing things revealed when those who refused to be voiceless waged their revolutions. I was made breathless by the images of Bree Newsome scaling the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol building, suspended high in the air, the Confederate flag stripped of its power in her victorious hands. The following year Corey Menafee, a dishwasher at Yale’s Calhoun College, reached up with a broomstick and smashed a stained-glass window depicting two slaves weighed down with loads of cotton. “That thing’s coming down today,” he recalled thinking. “I’m tired of it.” He tapped it twice and out it popped, falling from its frame and shattering to pieces on the sidewalk. He was later led out of the dining hall in handcuffs and stripped of his job.

  Their acts were hard-won and came with immense risk. Imprisonment and legal fees. Loss of job and income.

  Perhaps we all reach a moment in life when we’re given the chance to shatter the death-dealing constraints clamped on ourselves or others. When, despite the relentless grind of dehumanizing limitations, we rise, breaking windows and scaling flagpoles, showing everyone who witnesses our ascent that there’s a different way. The photographs capture only the climax: a window shattered, a flag in a woman’s fist. But they do not reveal the fear, trepidation, and uncertainty that qualify the time before and after. The tedium of planning, the infighting among allies, the terror of yielding yourself and your body to handcuffs and prison and the mercy of a network of judges and lawyers for whom you are only a name on a list.

  These moments are racked with the daily hopes and fears that every life is burdened with, made up of seconds ticking by and small decisions made, premeditated or on impulse. Anyone who’s ever done anything extraordinary is ordinary. But when the moment comes, they say yes, and God’s realm comes beaming through.

  You only get there by acknowledging the truth. I grieved through those summers. I always imagined that I earned everything I had in life, through smarts or hard work or perseverance. Turns out I’d just had a lighter workload all along.

  * * *

  Christians have a season for truth telling. It’s called Lent, and it’s a time for repentance, which sounds scary, but really just means “turn around.” Rooted in the story of Jesus’ forty days in the desert, fasting and praying, Christians sometimes give up chocolate or meat in Lent—some small thing that might seem inconsequential in comparison to the ills of the world. The minute practices, though, point to something bigger—the ways we use sweets or alcohol or overeating or undereating or Netflix bingeing to help us avoid the truth.

  Turn around: away from whatever you’re drawn to that’s trying to kill you. From the distractions that keep you from feeling the grief of the loss you’ve endured. Turn around and see the truth: that the Confederate flag must come down. That the stained-glass window must be broken. That even though you believed you loved all your third graders equally, and treated them equally, you were wrong.

  Each week after the sermon at St. Lydia’s, I hand out slips of gray paper and each person writes down a truth they want to confess. We spend some time doing this. Then we sing a song about the grace God offers—here is forgiveness, full and free—and hang the slips of paper from bare winter branches we’ve installed on the ceiling.

  At the end of Lent we arrive at Good Friday, the day that Jesus was hung on the cross. For our worship service, I create stations around the room. At each one, there’s a large photograph in a frame, and candles to light. Congregants make their way from station to station, kneeling or writing, sitting silently with eyes closed, praying.

  The photographs are historical and contemporary. They point not to our individual sins—the lie we shouldn’t have told, or that we drank too much and raised our voice at our spouse the other night—but to what Christians are really talking about when we talk about sin: collective sin. The tragedy of how, simply by living in this world, we take part in a system that is inherently broken—racked with social ills like racism and poverty that we participate in every day.

  We stand in front of The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph of a white man in a rage holding an American flag, moving to strike an African American man with it. Beneath the photo, there’s a caption: “They shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ ” And then, “Pray for communities that turn into crowds.”

  There’s the image of David Kirby, dying from AIDS with his partner at his side. This was the shot that finally awakened the nation when it appeared in Life magazine in 1990, rousing us from the Reagan-induced denial of an epidemic that had already taken thousands of lives. “They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews’ and striking him on the face,” the caption reads. And then a confession: “We have allowed those who are suffering to be ignored, mocked, and brutalized.”

  There is an image of a young woman in Baltimore. Seen from behind, her hands are held up—a mirror of Michael Brown’s “Don’t shoot”—strong and brave, as she is faced down by a phalanx of police in identical riot gear. She is unarmed, unarmored, and alone. “Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged” the caption reads. “Pray for those who are victims of violence at the hands of the powerful.”

  With the irony that is indicative of the Gospel, redemption starts not with self-improvement, but by looking straight at the most broken, twisted part of ourselves and simply saying, “I’m a mess.” What a relief, to remember that we can’t fix ourselves on our own. That, in fact, we’re not even fixable—but, impossibly, we are loved.

  * * *

  —

  There are tears, clasped hands. Time slides by, and I wonder how we can persevere, this tattered human family of love and cruelty and despair. Then we begin to sing. We lift the portraits from their places and bring them outside to our pocket-size garden, unfinished and pockmarked, a little like us. The aluminum
fence posts make the figure of a cross, and we lay the photographs at its base, along with the candle we light every week to represent Christ, nestled in a wooden bowl. We pile our prayers in front of the cross. Then I invite us to make our confession.

  There is silence. And then there is truth.

  “I confess that I keep myself walled off from my family because I’m afraid they might see me for who I am,” someone says.

  “I confess that I use work as a convenient excuse to avoid intimacy.”

  “I confess that I don’t want to feel the pain of the world, and so I try to ignore it.”

  “I confess that I treat some people like they’re worth less than others, even though that’s not who I want to be.”

  “I confess that I’m afraid that I’m too small.”

  It goes on for a long time.

  “I confess that I think I can do everything on my own,” I say without lifting my head. Something unclasps around my heart. It feels good to stop struggling, and just tell the truth. A soft place opens in me. I can see where I’ve fucked up without feeling like I’m going to die. I’ve inherited elitism, passed on to me through education. I pass certain people over, without even realizing it. It’s not pretty to look at. But if everything doesn’t depend on me being perfect, I’m free to be opened, and to learn. Confession won’t solve all the ills of the world, but I wonder if it’s the only place to start.