I remember being shaken out of a dream by my father. I was in my bedroom. The first light of the day was visible in the window, just beyond the foot of my bed. My father, who was a pastor at the time, looked very strange. He was not angry, or panicked, or in pain, or even worried. There was in his face and movements an emotion I had never seen before. He told me we had to go to his church, Mount Zion Methodist (the main black church in the black side of Sharptown, Maryland), because something bad had happened there during the night. My sister was awake. My mother was awake. We were all sleepy. There was no time to change clothes. I put on my nightgown and slippers and walked (living room, porch, lawn, fading stars) to our car (a Datsun 210).

Moments later, we were looking at what remained of Mount Zion Methodist. Much of it had burned to the ground. Smoke rose from smoldering heaps. And all over were the seared pages of Bibles. Some were even blowing about the wind like bats. In fact, my atheism was born right here, at this moment. I was around 10 and amazed that the Bibles, the words of an all-powerful being who created the entire universe, did not survive this fire intact. It puzzled me profoundly. Holy scriptures should be eternal and nonflammable. But these Bibles were as susceptible to something as natural and as worldly as fire as the comic books I hid under my bed. A line like "If your right eye causes you to stumb—-" ended just like that in black. There was no divine protection or interventions for these words. That made no sense to me.

As for the Church, it was later discovered that two white teenage males from the white side of Sharptown were responsible for the fire. They spent much of their time and energy hating black people and demanding that they go back to Africa or the plantation. I also learned from my father and other members of the church that there had been a long tradition of this sort of thing, of white racists destroying and defiling black churches or terrorizing black churchgoers. Nothing new could be said about what happened to Mount Zion Methodist. It was the same old, same old. It was an active part of the American experience then, as it is now.