Step Out on Nothing

by Byron Pitts

  “Sister, sister, please, please call me,” I’d plead. It usually worked. Passage read. My mind was now free to wander. There would be a price to pay later, of course, but why suffer today what could be put off until tomorrow. As long as no one found out, I thought I was safe. At the time the word illiterate wasn’t known to me. I thought I was just stupid. Who could I tell? I adored my mother but couldn’t disappoint her. My siblings already thought I was both spoiled and a geek. Better to find new ways to hide.

  I felt out of place almost everywhere except in church. Church had always been my sanctuary, a place to escape the tension between my parents and forget about my own shortcomings. Through some combination of good fortune and God’s grace, I grew up in one of Baltimore’s grand chapels. It was affectionately known on the black preacher circuit as the big house.

  “We’re marching to Zion! Beautiful, beautiful Zion! We’re marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God!” That was the song that opened every Sunday service at New Shiloh Baptist Church. The old gothic building was originally built as a Lutheran church. In the age before mega-churches, New Shiloh was considered a big church in Baltimore. About a thousand people showed up for two Sunday morning services. A massive stained-glass window framed the pulpit. Scriptures etched in the high ceilings. And long wooden pews laced with soft cushions stood like soldiers in three rows, at least thirty rows deep. In the Baltimore of my childhood there were just a few certainties in every black neighborhood: a black-owned barbershop, beauty parlor, liquor store, funeral home, and the church.

  For most of my childhood and adolescence, New Shiloh Baptist Church was the most sacred place on earth to me. I felt safe. I felt loved. I would have slept there if my mother had allowed it. No matter what had occurred in the days prior in the outside world, the songs, the prayers, the sermon, even the smell of the place, seemed to heal all that ailed me. The music spoke to me: “I’m sometimes up! I’m sometimes down! Almost leveled to the ground, but I’ll keep on holding on!” Lots of people go to the beach for joy and peace, having the ocean waves wash over their toes and bodies. Who needed the sounds of the Pacific or the Atlantic? I had the New Shiloh Baptist Church mass choir and young adult choir twice on most Sundays.

  My mom called church the poor man’s therapy session. Ninety minutes of music and song and prayer and a sermon that sent you on your way encouraged and hopeful. There’s no co-pay, just the offering plate. My childhood pastor once described church to me this way: “A warm spiritual bath.”

  New Shiloh was just one of a large number of churches sprinkled across the country with a reputation for drawing grand orators. Preaching at Shiloh was like playing at Carnegie Hall. Through the years, the voices of Reverends Martin Luther King Sr., Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young echoed in the sanctuary. The pastor, Reverend Harold A. Carter, a former associate minister to Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama, was a preacher’s preacher. He could hoot with the best of them. Sweat profusely on the coldest days. Draw out the name Jesus the length of the Great Wall of China. I could listen to that man read the words on a can of paint. Churches like New Shiloh have always taken great pride in honoring the oral history of the black church. There’s great emphasis given to the spoken word. All my life I’ve known people who could quote the Bible but couldn’t read it. Even in choir rehearsal, we learned most songs from a cassette recorder or at the director’s instruction. “You can’t learn the song by staring at paper,” a choir director once told me. Amid all that joyous noise, it was seemingly a perfect hiding place for a poor reader.

  Since no one in my family yet understood my inability to read, it didn’t strike anyone as odd or alarming that I would volunteer to work for the radio ministry at church. Every Sunday night listeners could hear Reverend Dr. Harold A. Carter deliver one of his best Bible-thumping, scream-the-Scriptures, make-the-faithful-stand-up-and-shout kind of sermons. There was a small army of volunteers who served as engineers. During the morning service, one person a week would sit at the foot of the pulpit, a big bulky headset covering his ears and a reel-to-reel recorder the size of a suitcase at his fingertips, with several microphones strategically set up around the church. I wanted desperately to try; finally someone picked me. How hard could it be? I would soon find out.

  After several weeks of training, I was set to record my first live Sunday morning service. The chief engineer promised he would be with me. That morning the phone rang. “Hey, Byron, I won’t make it to church today. But you can do it. All the equipment’s labeled. The instructions are all written out for you.” A fire alarm should have gone off in my head. It didn’t. I went to church figuring I’d memorized enough to get by.

  The service was rocking. The spirit was high, and the choir sounded like angels from heaven. By accident I hit STOP on the recorder. The tape stopped. I panicked. I wasn’t trained to cue up the tape and record again. Now sweating like the preacher winding down his sermon, I looked at the manual for direction. It might as well have been written in Braille. I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t fix the problem. And soon everyone would know I was stupid. For the remainder of the service I buried my head in my hands. Most people assumed I was praying. I wished I was dead. For the first time in my life, reading really meant something. And suddenly my safe place in church was no longer so safe.

  That night my family gathered around the radio to listen to the service, but rather than Reverend Carter’s rousing sermon from that morning, the city got to hear one of Reverend Carter’s oldies-but-goodies. “What happened to today’s service?” my mother asked. “Must have been technical difficulty,” I replied, with my chin buried in my chest.

  “Hold your head up. I’m sure it’ll be perfect next time,” was my mother’s response. There would be no next time. I was never asked to record the service again, even though in my aching heart I believed I could have gotten it right. And I’ve never entered New Shiloh since without feeling the sting of that day. My family assumed I got nervous or lost interest. I knew better.

  It was at about this age that I developed a reputation for being quiet and sensitive. I would go almost an entire weekend without speaking. Easier still, I could avoid stuttering. Little did I know then that a lot of children struggle with stuttering when they’re first learning to speak. But from my childish perspective, I was simply a freak: The strange one, the one who couldn’t get the words out, couldn’t do a simple thing like speak clearly. For me, it was like living as a prisoner inside a cell. Oh, the things my heart wanted to say, the times I wanted to yell at my parents to stop fighting, stand up to a bully who taunted me, and the times I just wanted lemonade in the school cafeteria but could only say the word soda. I’ve never liked soda. Would never drink it if I had the choice. We stutterers often think we have few choices in life, so during my silent weekends I’d play baseball or football all day Saturday with my friends. Funny thing: I’ve never stuttered, never felt out of place or insecure on any ball field. At the time self-esteem was a term with little meaning in the world of a child, but it’s clear to me now I had very little self-esteem back then. That may explain why harsh words from a teacher would leave me in tears.

  As frustrating as it was, my stuttering never kept me from singing. Like a lot of stutterers, my words flowed smoothly when accompanied by music. So I was excited to hear an announcement about a new community choir. Word went out at St. Katharine’s elementary school that the archdiocese was putting together a mass choir for a highly publicized winter concert, and I wanted in. “Hey, Momma, can I join the Catholic chorus?” While school was rarely my favorite place, I loved to sing and loved being part of my church choir. I figured that enthusiasm would translate to this event. Since it was winter and I wasn’t playing football, I knew I needed something to occupy my time and avoid schoolwork. Rehearsal was at St. Francis Catholic Church, a building just as old and just as breathtaking as my beloved New Shiloh. We rehearsed every Tuesday and Thursday night. Though I’d never become a radio engineer at church, I could sta
nd in the back row of a choir and sing. That first rehearsal in the church basement was packed. Kids from at least a half dozen schools and several adults showed up. Many of them were really gifted singers.

  I had wanted to participate because of my love for the New Shiloh Baptist Church choir. But the Catholic chorus was nothing like Shiloh. At Shiloh, rehearsal usually followed a routine: we would tell a few jokes, stand up and sing for about an hour, then pray and go home. Not the Catholic chorus. There were breathing exercises, stretching exercises, and vocal warmups. This wasn’t choir rehearsal. This was boot camp.

  At Shiloh, tenors stood in the back row. In this chorus, we were positioned by both size and section. God, why couldn’t I be any taller? There I was, front row between a woman my grandmother’s age and a teenage boy who sang like an angel and never once spoke to me. Maybe he knew I was stupid, not worthy of being acknowledged. And, oh yeah, we all had sheet music. This torture went on for weeks, and without a logical excuse it was too late to quit.

  The choir director was a priest from Chicago who was as colorful as he was demanding.

  “You can’t sing pretty,” the director announced. “Open your mouth wide! Enunciate! Sing UGLY, people! Articulate the words, people!”

  I already thought I was odd and ugly without someone insisting I sing ugly. And to articulate words I could not read on paper was also a request beyond my abilities. Suddenly even one of my favorite activities, singing, was now threatened by demands I was unprepared to meet. My hiding places were disappearing. It was late February, the coldest days of winter, and my spirit was as chilled as the weather.

  Despite the frigid temperature on the night of the performance, I couldn’t stop sweating. And then there was the crowd. Not the familiar faces of my home church but hundreds of strangers. I just knew they were all looking and laughing at me. I was ten. I felt like one hundred.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome,” said the director.

  Momma had bought me a new blue suit, white shirt, and brown shoes. Extra money spent, so this had to be a big occasion. My brother and I only got new suits for Easter. The shirt still had that new shirt stiffness. The shoes were still smooth at the bottom so I almost fell as we marched in. Each member of the chorus had a beautiful burgundy folder with our sheet music. It was useless to me. The church was full. People lined the walls. When the director cleared his throat, raised his hand, and cued the pianist, it was time. I was ready. Or so I thought. Through each anthem, hymn, and gospel tune, I mumbled or sang one word: watermelon. Whether we were singing at the top of our voices or in a whisper, slow cadence or at a deliberate pace, “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” were the only lyrics to come out of my mouth, because someone in rehearsal had once told me, “If you’re struggling with a song, just mouth the word watermelon.”

  That’s what I sang for two hours. No one seemed to notice my strange enunciation, except Momma. I caught a glimpse of those piercing gray eyes. There was both displeasure and curiosity in those eyes.

  “What were you doing?” she asked on the ride home. “It didn’t look like you knew a single song,” she said with disappointment. Once again, my poor performance was dismissed as nerves. But steadily the world was closing in.

  The tension level around the house over my academic performance was starting to rise. I was a D student, struggling in a remedial reading class. I would bring home progress reports from school, hand them to my mother, and listen as she read them aloud. Unlike many of my friends, I never tried to steam open the notes from school before my mother read them. Why bother? The notes never made much sense to me anyway. One week, the note home was followed up with a phone call from school.

  “Byron’s failing math.” The Ds were turning into Fs.

  My mother had long believed any of life’s difficulties could be wrestled to the ground with prayer, faith, humility, hard work, and the more than occasional use of harsh words. So Mom tried that same remedy for bad grades: “Got dammit, boy, you can do this!” That soon progressed to punishment. No television. No going outside, and sometimes I wasn’t even allowed to go to choir rehearsal. It didn’t make a difference. My math scores stayed rock bottom. Discussions at school were now about keeping me behind a year. And the biggest sin in my house—I was becoming a discipline problem. I never talked back to an adult, but I began to mouth off plenty with classmates. You see, around the playground, the word stupid was starting to follow my first name. Being polite and quiet was no longer enough to get by.

  “Let’s get Byron tested.”

  Despite the distractions of her own life, my mother was now fully engaged in finding out why I was struggling so with math. Could the school measure my capacity to do math? The archdiocese finally arranged to have me tested. The test took place somewhere in downtown Baltimore. My parents led me to believe we were going to a school. So why did it look like a hospital?

  “Momma, are we in the right place?” I asked.

  “Yes, honey!” Her answer lacked conviction. She put her hand at the nape of my neck as we walked up the stairs. The scene inside was no more reassuring. There were no children walking the halls. No artwork on the walls. It even smelled like a hospital. That wretched clean smell. As we sat in the waiting area, my father read a newspaper. My mother and I played that child’s hand game. She always let met win. My small hands resting on top of her thick strong hands, but I had speed on my side.

  “You’re too good,” she’d taunt me. For a moment I forgot where we were.

  “Pitts family,” yelled a man wearing a sports coat. He had a kind face. He ushered me into a room.

  “Here’s a pencil. Please take your time and answer each question.”

  The room resembled the set from the television show Romper Room. Nothing about it felt natural. I was a kid. I knew my way around a classroom. This place was foreign.

  “Please focus and take your time” one of many gentle reminders from the man with the kind face. He sat behind a plain wooden desk, flipping pages on a clipboard and tapping a pencil holder crammed with pencils. I was through the test in twenty minutes, but it felt like two days. Some answers I thought I knew. Others I was not certain of, and the vast majority I simply made up. I treated much of the test like an art project. Coloring in the answer boxes in order to form a pattern on the page, instead of actually seeking the right answer to the question. When the test was over, I was sent back to the waiting area. My mom and dad were brought into a private room. Their discussion with some other adult seemed to go on much longer than the actual test. My father walked out first. He looked ashen and embarrassed. My mother looked as if someone had just punched her in the stomach.

  “Son, let’s go home.” That’s all she said. “We have to come back tomorrow for more tests.” There was no further discussion that night. Two days out of school? I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

  That next day more tests and more closed-door meetings with my parents. Eventually we were all in the same room. Mom, Dad, me, and a woman they repeatedly referred to as Doctor. She was pleasant and spoke slowly and deliberately with a foreign accent. She asked me a series of questions.

  “Do you like school? . . . Do you have many friends? . . . Do you get along with the members of your family?”

  What’s any of this have to do with math? I wondered. Then, to my parents’ amazement, the therapist took a tape measure out of her pocket, leaned toward me, and measured my head. She wrapped the tape around my head as if she were sizing me up for a ball cap. She even touched my head just like my mother would touch melons at the grocery store.

  My father yelled, “What the hell are you doing?”

  With a straight face, the therapist asked my parents if I’d ever been tested for mental illness. My mother burst into tears. It was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry or even appear vulnerable in public. Mental illness? Does that mean I’m crazy? I’d never felt sadder. Why can’t I hide? Why won’t Momma stop crying? Why does Daddy look so angry? M
y father challenged the doctor’s competence. Momma grabbed my hand, as if the room was on fire, and whisked me away with my father still yelling at the doctor. My head was throbbing, not from pain but from confusion. Wasn’t this just a math test? Someone had neglected to tell my parents I’d failed every test they’d given me.

  But that was the case: I’d failed so dramatically that there was concern my problems might go beyond reading and comprehension to mental illness. My parents were told that the archdiocese was going to seek funding to continue having me tested. And that’s what happened. Weeks later we were sent to yet another testing facility for another tiresome day-long session, this time with psychologists and psychiatrists. I was interviewed by myself, with my mother, and separately with my father; then they were interviewed together. I was asked to draw pictures of my family. I drew a picture of my father in a suit and a picture of my mother as a queen with a halo. My picture of Saundra was of a teenager on a swing, and I depicted my older brother as a small man with no hands. It was left to the psychiatrists to figure out what all of the drawings meant. But they did conclude that I was not mentally ill. In fact, I demonstrated above-average intelligence.

  They could not, however, answer the fundamental question of why I could not read. Their conclusion in a report to my parents: bring him back when he’s thirteen. My mother’s reaction: “Damn doc, we can’t wait that long. He’ll either be dead or in jail.”

  My parents took me home with overwhelming sadness and frustration and no more answers than when we started the testing process. My mother soon asked for a meeting at St. Katharine’s and asked the teaching staff for some direction. In response, a staff member came to our house, bringing more test results and finally put a label on my problem. The diagnosis would set my young life on a new course.