The healing power had come on Memphis suddenly after an illness when he was fourteen. For days, he’d lain in a state of semiconsciousness, seeing the strangest sights as the fever burned through his body. His mother never left his side. When he recovered, they went straight to church to give thanks. On that Sunday morning at the old Mother AME Zion Church, Memphis healed for the first time. His seven-year-old brother, Isaiah, had fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. The bone stuck up under the skin at a terrible angle. Memphis was only trying to quiet his screaming brother when he put his hands on him. He never expected the intense warmth that built suddenly between Isaiah’s skin and his own hands. The trance came on him hard and fast. His eyes rolled back and he felt as if he had left his body and was trapped inside a waking dream. He saw things in that strange empty space he inhabited for those long seconds, things that he didn’t understand: faces in the mist, spectral shadows, and a funny man in a tall hat whose coat seemed to be made of the land itself. There was a bright light and a fluttering of wings, and when Memphis came to, shaking, a crowd had gathered around him in the churchyard. Isaiah had weaseled out from under his brother’s touch and was swinging his arm around in perfect circles. “You fixed it, Memphis. How’d you do that?”
“I-I don’t know.” Despite the New York summer heat soaking the collar on his Sunday best, Memphis shivered.
“It’s a miracle,” someone said. “Praise Jesus!”
Memphis saw his mother standing at the edge of the awestruck congregation, one hand pressed to her mouth, and was afraid she might slap him for what he’d done. Instead, she hugged him close. When she stepped back, there were tears in her eyes. “My son is a healer,” she whispered, cupping his face.
“You hear that? This boy’s a healer,” someone shouted. “Let us pray.”
They bowed their heads and reached out for him, and as Memphis felt their hands blessing his head and shoulders, his mother’s fingers clasped in his, his fear turned to exultation. I did that, he thought in wonder. How did I do that?
Only Aunt Octavia was skeptical. “Why would the good Lord give that gift to a boy?” she’d asked his mother later, in the house on 145th Street. They were in the front parlor sitting beside the radio and snapping beans for the next day’s supper. It had been too hot to sleep well, and Memphis had gotten up for a cup of water. When he heard them talking, he hid in the darkened hallway, listening. “Sometimes a gift is really a curse in disguise, Viola. A test from the Good Lord. Might be the Devil himself in that boy.”
“Hush up, Octavia,” his mother had said. She rarely stood up to her older sister, and Memphis felt proud of her even as Octavia’s words sowed doubt under his skin. “My boy is something special. You’ll see.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, Vi,” Octavia had said after a pause, and then there was nothing but the sharp snip, snip, snip of string beans being broken into halves and dropped into a bowl.
News of Memphis’s powers quickly spread through the Harlem churches. When Pastor Brown balked at using Memphis’s gift during services at Mother AME Zion—“We’re not that sort of religion, Viola”—Memphis’s mother had taken him to the various Pentecostal and Spiritualist storefront churches, over Octavia’s objections: “Low-class holy rollers—and some of ’em talk to the dead, Vi. Nothing good’s gonna come of this, mark me.”
There, on the fourth Sunday of every month, for eight months running, Memphis stood beside the pulpit looking out at faces both hopeful and skeptical. While the choir sang “Wade in the Water,” and people prayed and sometimes shouted out to God, congregants would come forward with their ailments and Memphis would lay hands on them, feeling the warmth build under his palms, seeing into that other place in his mind, the place of vague faces in the mist. Miracle Memphis. And then, when it had mattered most, the miracle had failed him. No, not just failed—turned on him.
From time to time, he’d catch Octavia eyeing him from the doorway, wearing an expression somewhere between contempt and fear. “Doesn’t take much for the Devil to get inside, Memphis John. You remember that.”
Memphis usually thought his aunt’s obsessive thoughts about the Devil were crazy. But what if she was right? What if there was something terribly wrong, a shadow side to him that was biding its time, waiting? The thought was like his dream—unsettling and unreadable.
The trouble with Jo back at the club had left Memphis rattled, and so, his business taken care of for the evening, he hopped the double-decker Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus going uptown and got off around 155th Street. He walked several blocks north, then west toward the river, where the houses thinned out, until he came to a small African graveyard on a bluff, the final resting spot of freed slaves and black soldiers. There, in the peace and quiet of possible ancestors, Memphis liked to sit and write. Memphis found the lantern he kept secreted inside the knothole of a sheltering oak. He struck a match from the book he’d pocketed at the Yeah Man club. The flame inside the lantern gave off a comforting glow. Memphis perched on the cool ground and opened his notebook. In its way, writing was like healing: a cure for the loneliness he felt. Sometimes the cure took; other times, it didn’t. But he kept trying. He bent his head over his notebook, writing by lantern light, chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets. All around him, Harlem was alive with writers, musicians, poets, and thinkers. They were changing the world. Memphis wanted to be part of that change.