Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked-at first avid, then groaning-on their sexual careers.
Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen nothing had changed. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid-afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church-and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.
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