it had collected five thousand dollars.
“So half the people who are going to be freed on this trip will owe their freedom to these children from Iowa, who probably never heard of Sudan before. That’s pretty impressive.”
Quinette couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, and there was a canned, faked quality to the emotion Phyllis had thrown into her voice, like she was trying to tell her viewers what to feel when she didn’t feel it herself.
“Tell us, Quinette, what led you to get involved?”
She hesitated. The rosettes were spreading, their petals touching at the tips. Another five minutes of this, and she would look like she was in a wet T-shirt contest. People would see her bra line, strangers in their living rooms all over the U.S.A. Where the hell were those guys with the goddamned boat? Forgive me, Lord.
“That’s kind of personal,” she said.
“In what way?” Phyllis persisted.
Quinette paused, images reeling through her mind of the Sunday morning service in the church that didn’t look like a regular church, with pews and stained-glass windows, but more like an auditorium, with lots of flowers on the carpeted stage and the choir in pale blue robes at the back and the band on one side, warming everyone up with the hymn “I Want to Be a Christian,” before Pastor Tom got up and led off with Isaiah—” ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound’ “—pausing to let Isaiah’s words sink in, then describing the wonderful thing that had happened in the Sunday school the week before, how the Holy Spirit had touched the children’s hearts, so they could hear and answer the cry for deliverance that was coming from across the ocean. And it’s coming to us, too! Tom thundered, his voice ringing off the walls. He was really fired up, it was one of his best sermons ever, holding four or five hundred people spellbound. “And we must heed it. . . . Our brothers and sisters in faith are being persecuted over there in Africa. . . . Our children are giving us a lesson in Christian duty, and we cannot let them down!” He stood without speaking for a while, his hands on the lectern, his glance sweeping over the congregation so that he seemed to meet each pair of eyes. The kids were going to need a big hand from adults, organizing the drive and making sure it ran smoothly, he said, his tone cooler now and more matter-of-fact. Alice and Terry were busy women, with families to watch after, and couldn’t manage everything by themselves. Anyone who wanted to volunteer to assist them should check in at the church office after the service. Then he announced the special collection and called on everybody to contribute, to get the drive off to a running start. Ushers started down the aisles, passing polished offertory plates from row to row, and as Quinette watched men reaching for their wallets, women opening their purses, she heard a voice. It was her own voice, but it was coming from outside of herself, telling her that here was what she had been seeking ever since she’d been saved: a real purpose, a cause she could devote herself to, and this as well: a channel for the restless energies that tempted her to backslide. She didn’t wait for Pastor Tom to return to his office but approached him at the church door, as he was saying good-bye to his flock. He looked at her and said, “I knew you’d be the first, you’re just who I had in mind when I asked for volunteers.”
How could she sum up all that in a soundbite?
“It was the right thing to do,” she replied to Phyllis’s question. “I’m a Christian, these people here are Christians—”
“Not all of them, maybe not even most of them,” Phyllis interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Some of them practice their traditional religions. Nature-worshippers, ancestor-worshippers, old-fashioned pagans. You didn’t know that? Did the kids in your Sunday school know that?”
There was a slight, scornful curl to the reporter’s thin lips, a vague hint of ridicule in the way she’d spoken.
Flustered, Quinette didn’t know what to say. She and everyone in the congregation assumed the slaves were Christians, because that’s what the