Thrown-away Child

voices all together-uh ... in a mighty, mighty call—to those whose spirits... whose spirits...!” Yes, Lord!
    “Whose spirits live with the Lord- uh!”
    Yeah, you right!
    Bodies swayed in time with the cadence of Minister Tilton’s beseechings, and the oaken pews in the Land of Dreams Tabernacle groaned. And then the mass chanting started, rolling and rolling in throaty waves pulsating the liquid air.
    “Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum... !”
    Three hundred pairs of black hands clapped in syncopation. Three hundred pairs of shoes pounded out the downbeat.
    Mama’s eyes surged with tears.
    She slapped her hands together along with all the others, and beat the floor with her feet every bit as determinedly. She would hear her man. She would believe! And maybe somewhere in all that silver gray steam up on the altar she would even see her Willis, at least in the prism of her tears.
    Sister stepped forward to the very front of the altar. Her bare toes inched over the edge. Her arms flapped. She sang:
     
    “Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!
    Canga bafio, te,
    Canga moune de le,
    Canga do ki la,
    Canga li…!”
     
    Minister Tilton and the congregation joined this new chant, their massed voices gathering to a storm of pathos and yearning.
    “Sis -tuh!” shouted Minister Tilton, rapping his cane, addressing his acolyte. “Sister, prepare! Prepare for the dance-uh—the danse calinda of your revered-uh voudou!”
    Sister picked up a leather-bound flask of brandy next to the crucifix candle, opened it, and poured some of the liquor over a sprinkling of brick dust lining a black ceramic bowl. She set down the flask and bowed in the direction of Minister Tilton, then backed away.
    Dropping his cane to the misty floor, Minister Tiltton picked up the bowl with both hands. A shaft of sunlight glinted off one of his diamond cuff links. He lifted the bowl to his lips, and drank down the gritty mixture of brandy and brick. Slowly, he began rotating his hips and shuffling his feet backward, then forward. His movements accelerated as the congregation lifted their voices again to the canga, now minus Sister, whose face was once more lifted to her Jesus window.
    Minister Tilton poured the rest of the brandy into the bowl and ignited it with his Tiffany lighter. The bowl flamed up high over the altar table. Minister Tilton passed his hands through the flame, and quickened his dance steps as the canga picked up tempo.
    “I call out Willis Flagg!” he shouted. “Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen! I call out Willis Flagg! Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!... Willis Flagg, speak through me...!”
    Silence, or nearly so, as the congregants waited.
    Mama cried softly.
    A tall man in a scarlet robe, his head and face concealed by a hood, called from the rear of the church: “Bomba, hen, hen! ...Bomba, hen, hen...!”
    Minister Tilton was startled.
    Grasping the gris-gris in both his hands, as if he sincerely believed in its power, he asked feebly of the man in scarlet rushing toward him, “What—?”
    But there was no answer from the man running crazily up the center aisle, whirling and leaping and howling until he reached the altar’s edge. Until a thoroughly stunned Minister Tilton tripped over his cane and fell to his knees, and gasped, “No, you mustn’t come up—!”
    Disobeying, the man vaulted over the railing. He scrambled to the altar stage, then turned to the confused congregation.
    He pushed back the hood of his robe and exposed a greased and powdered face with straight, hawkish features, and wavy hair covered in ghostly white powder. Then he undid the laces of his robe, allowing it to slip from his shoulders. Save for a thong covering his groin, and a belted knife at his waist, he was naked. Women screamed, but did not avert their eyes, not even the old ones with the lacy fans and their heads covered in tignons, for the figure before them was a perfect masculine beauty.
    He raised his hands, clenched in huge brown fists, and cried out over a church fallen to dead quiet:
    “I am Willis Flagg! I am Willis Flagg!”
    And from the pew next to the widow Violet Flagg, a trembling Hassie Pinkney stood up, and shrieked, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph—it’s him! Oh La, I can’t believe—it’s him...!” The man sitting beside her with the wooden leg tried to comfort her, but his ministrations were of little use. Hassie screamed, over and over, “La, it’s him... it’s him!”
    The old ladies in tignons fainted away. Children squealed. Men