“I believe in God. It’s preachers and people I don’t believe in. That’s who I have a problem with,” Sean said.
“But come on. Just come once. Give my church a chance. It’s different. Trust me,” Anja pleaded.
“Your church … do they have a preacher?”
“Yes, dufus. You know the guy I’m dating, Reverend Wilder. He’s great!”
“First of all I’d be nervous ’bout a dating preacher. But that’s a whole other conversation. They do have people at your church, right? People as in ushers who roll their eyes at you when you don’t want to sit in the tight-fitting pews they point you to? People as in deacons who are always begging for money like ugly men beg for pussy, and people in choir robes who jump up shouting and waving every time your Reverend Wilder says something negative about certain groups? People as in members whose mission is to get heaven to keep other people out?”
“What’s your point, little brother?”
“My point, big sister by only two weeks, is that I know you mean well, but I have had my fill of organized religion. Let’s not talk about this anymore. Okay, baby?”
“Can we at least pray over the phone before you hang up on me?” Anja asked.
“Sure we can, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.”
“ ’Cause someone is knocking at my door,” Sean lied.
“I’ll pray for you.”
“Good, then I’m covered. Got to go. Peace out, my sweet sister.”
Somewhat troubled by the conversation with his sister, Sean hung up the phone and spread himself over the plaid sofa under a hanging lamp, one hand on his exposed stomach, the other nursing a lukewarm beer. He wanted to take a nap so he set the bottle on the hardwood floor, crossed his legs, and nestled his head in his hands behind his neck. Sean couldn’t fall asleep. He opened his eyes and stared at the cream-colored ceiling, listening to the sounds of the city coming from his open window. Though it was one of summer’s last humid days, the large room was cool, flooded in a gentle breeze, aided by a small portable fan.
Sean’s midtown Manhattan studio apartment was untidy. The sign of a brilliant writer, he told himself. With a name like T. S. Elliott, he was destined to become a writer. Even though he spelled his surname differently from the famous poet’s, he had on occasion written poetry, but he made his living writing about arrogant and overpaid athletes. The curtainless windows were dusty, the floor un-swept, and stacks of books and old magazines filled each corner. Empty beer bottles and dirty clothes littered the floor. He started halfheartedly to get up and straighten the place, but decided he could better use this time to map out a strategy for finding work. When drowsiness clouded his thoughts, he decided that maybe a short nap would give him the extra energy he needed to plan out the next couple of months.
Sean was not your typical unemployed black man. He chose not to be on the payroll of a large organization. A year ago, he had left a good paying job as a senior sportswriter at the conservative-minded Atlanta Chronicle to take a chance in New York City. He was drawn by the lure of lucrative freelance assignments, problems with his prior position, and the chance to be close to his half-sister Anja and nine-year-old nephew, Gerald. He had plenty of freelance articles lined up when he moved to New York City, but the baseball strike had erased some of his richest possibilities. At first he didn’t mind because, though he loved baseball and had played himself for a year in college, Sean found the players extremely boring. The Age of Athletic Arrogance he liked to call the current professional sports climate. A group of clueless prima donnas who put their own goals above their teams and the sports they played.
During his down time, Sean had found a New York literary agent and written a book proposal on racism in professional sports management. It was not the book he wanted to write, but his agent had convinced him that such a book was a potential best-seller. And Sean was about making money. He had developed friendships with several professional players in the hope of one day ghost writing one of those premature, quick-to-the-press memoirs that publishers sometimes churned out.
In many ways, Sean was relieved that fall and football were approaching. He knew his phone would begin to ring off the hook with assignments—or at least he hoped so. Even though he liked New York City, he was ready to visit other great cities and spend nights in hotels much nicer than his Tenth Avenue walk-up apartment. For the right assignment, he was even willing to return to his hometown of Decatur, near Atlanta. Decatur stirred up many memories for Sean, both good and bad, but recently, every time he thought of his hometown, he obsessed over the bad memories.
After six years of award-winning work, Sean had resigned from his newspaper job there when a promised column of his own failed to materialize. The paper’s management made feeble attempts to keep him, assigning interns and cub reporters to work under him. But, when they failed to give him a definite timetable for a column, Sean decided it was time to leave. He just could not understand why his editors had failed to see the merits of such a column, a column he had wanted to write since he was a freshman at University of Georgia’s School of Journalism. Editors at the paper said they didn’t understand Sean’s constant complaining and explained that they only had room for the two sports columnists who had been at the paper for decades. They pointed out that Sean had one of the most coveted beats, covering the Atlanta Falcons, as well as the Atlanta Braves, the hottest team in Atlanta.
But a column would give Sean an opportunity to explore important issues that the two other columnists never addressed, like institutional racism, and the images of African-American athletes, the good and bad. He knew that people in decision-making positions in the sports world read columns, while hardly noticing regular coverage. They only cared that articles reported the scores right and spelled their names and those of their star players correctly.
The Chronicle’s rival newspaper, the liberal and larger Atlanta Journal-Constitution, employed two widely read and respected African-American sports columnists, and the few times the Chronicle had let Sean write columns, the paper’s fax machine and mailroom were swamped with praise. Of course, the Chronicle never knew that much of the praise came from Sean’s friends. Even so, the letters and faxes didn’t seem to help. Ironically, when the O. J. Simpson case began to dominate the op-ed and sports pages, Sean’s former editor called and offered big money for him to become a guest columnist covering the Simpson trial. They felt it would make more sense for an African-American to write a biweekly column on the highly sensitive and racially charged trial. Sean declined. He also declined to write columns about Mike Tyson and the burning of football player Andre Rison’s country club mansion, a fire started allegedly by his rap-singer girlfriend. Sean felt very strongly about the image of black men in the media, and was a card-carrying member of the Please Don’t Let Him Be Black Club, when bad things happened. He worried that if he stated the sometimes obvious, that some black sports heroes did bad things, black athletes and the black community would shun him. He didn’t want to be labeled an Uncle Tom like other African-American journalists who wrote pieces going against the community. Once, while in college, Sean had written a piece on several star black athletes involved in pulling a sexual train on a black female student. It was almost a year before any of the black players would speak to him again. Although the article put Sean in a difficult position with his peers, he felt that as a minority journalist he had to report the rape. He knew that black-on-black crime, especially violations against women, couldn’t be ignored. He felt that the same story in the hands of a white reporter would sidestep that issue, and instead blame the incident on all black athletes in one fell swoop.
While Sean had not decided on the guilt or innocence of Simpson, he had other reasons for not joining in the circus of Simpson commentary. Sean knew professional athletes could become violent when the cheering stopped. His own father, Travis Senior, had beaten Sean’s mother, Laura, often, when an injury prematurely ended his potential Hall of Fame baseball career. Unable to play, his father started to drink heavily and dabble in drugs. Many times Sean and his older brother, Travis Junior, had had to pull their father off their mother, wash him up, and put him to bed.
It was during the height of his career that Travis Senior met Beverly Watson in New York City. Travis had to be in New York City several times a year to play ball and an extramarital affair quickly developed. Travis and Beverly were expecting the birth of their daughter at the same time Travis and Laura were anticipating the birth of their second son. Anja was born in New York’s Harlem Hospital two weeks before Sean was born in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital.
It was ten years before Sean, his brother, and his mother found out about Anja. Sean would never forget the look on his mother’s face when Beverly showed up drunk at their home, nor would he forget the beating his father gave Laura when she dared question his morals.
Anja did not accompany her mother down South, but Sean saw the picture of his half-sister Beverly had left with Laura. From the photo Sean could see they shared the same smooth cinnamon skin color, golden brown eyes the color of brandy, high arching eyebrows, and a toothpick-sized gap when they smiled.
After decades of putting up with countless affairs and abuse, his mother finally divorced his father when Sean finished high school. Her leaving forced Sean’s father to finally get himself together with drug and alcohol treatment and therapy. Recently, his parents, who had somehow remained friends, had started dating again. Sean’s father had had no further contact with Beverly, who, Sean later learned from Anja, was also addicted to drugs and alcohol. Sean and his brother were hopeful their parents’ rekindled affair would lead to remarriage. Despite their father’s previous problems, Sean and Travis Junior loved their father and believed that he had changed. But Sean would never forget those violent nights during his youth. So while he despised the attention men like Mike Tyson received, he was relieved it brought attention to a problem he had experienced firsthand. He wanted to believe there was always some good hidden in evil.
While a teenager, Sean vowed never to hit another person in his life. This created problems when his older brother used to hit him if Sean beat him in basketball, and when his peers wanted to display their manhood with their fists instead of their playground finesse. These memories convinced Sean to play baseball because it was not as physical as basketball and football.
When they were teenagers, Anja wrote to Sean and they became pen pals, writing each other at least once a month, exchanging school photos and poetry they had written. Through Sean, Anja was able to collect bits of information about the father she had never known, much to the dismay of Sean’s mother. It was only in recent years that his mother would even say Anja’s name.
They finally met face to face during Sean’s first visit to New York his sophomore year of college. They were amazed at how much they had in common. Anja and Sean both wanted to become writers, they both loved sports and read and collected baseball cards and Archie comic books.
While Sean followed his boyhood aspirations, his sister’s dreams were sidetracked by the birth of her child during her junior year at Hunter College. She and Gerald now lived in Brooklyn, though Anja worked in Manhattan as a customer service supervisor at Chase Manhattan Bank. She took writing classes at the Learning Annex when time and budget allowed.
Six months after Sean moved to New York, Anja began dating the Reverend Theodis Wilder. She had seemingly dedicated her life to the Reverend and his nondenominational church. While Sean was happy with his sister’s apparent religious bliss, his attitude toward organized religion was definitely, “Been there, done that, got the soundtrack.”
Sean opened his eyes from a two-hour nap to find evening had fallen. Rubbing his eyes and wiping tiny beads of perspiration from his upper lip, he noticed a picture of a smiling Anja and Gerald on his desk. Maybe he had been too tough on his sister, he thought. She was only trying to help. Sean got up from the sofa, popped in a Phyllis Hyman CD, and went into the kitchen and poured a big bowl of Frosted Flakes. While eating the cereal, he leaned his back against the sink and moved his head with the music. The CD was a gift from Anja and his thoughts moved from the tasty cereal and music to his sister. He placed the empty bowl in the sink, reached for his phone, and dialed Anja’s number, but after several rings, her answering machine came on and informed callers that she was at prayer meeting at Brooklyn Eastern Church. The message ended by inviting callers to join her and the Reverend Wilder.
Sean smiled to himself as he hung up without leaving a message. He had a meeting to go to himself, where there was a different kind of praying going on.