One day when he was no more than seven he was standing out in front of that church with a note in his hand. He couldn’t remember on the number 87b bus who that note was for or from but he could feel the dirt under his bare feet and the hot sun on his forehead.

“What you want there, boy?” a man asked in a commanding voice.

Ptolemy was gazing down on the dark Spanish man’s brown leather shoes in the bus but when he looked up he saw that white man standing in front of the white people’s church.

“Lookin’,” he said in a small piping voice.

“Is that note for me?” the man asked.

Li’l Pea thought the word no, but all he did was shake his head.

The white man wore a white suit with a black shirt that sported a small square of stiff white cloth where his Adam’s apple would have shown. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama straw hat and glasses with gold wire frames.

“Speak up, boy,” he said.

“No, suh. This note is from my uncle Coy to his brother Lupo work for the Littletons down on Poinsettia Street,” Ptolemy said, remembering as he did the origins of the note.

“Then why you standin’ in front’a my church?”

The sun was above and behind the church spire so whenever the man in the preacher’s uniform moved his head, bright sabers of light lanced into Ptolemy’s eyes.

“It’s so pretty,” the man, Ptolemy, remembered saying.

The minister paused a moment, his stern visage softened a bit.

“You like this church?” he asked.

“Yes, suh.”

“Did you evah look inside?”

“No, suh. I jes’ seen the whitewashed walls an’ the windahs and the pretty grass lawn.”

The minister squinted as people did sometimes when they were trying to make out words that didn’t make sense to them. Li’l Pea often wondered how narrowing your eyes could make your hearing better.

“You know that you can never, or none of your people can ever, go into this church,” the man said.