The Corner Store: Want vs. Need
The thing that my people say about the church is that if you go on the right day, or at the right time, you can get a little bit of everything you need. You can get fed, you can get saved, you can get a dance that sits in your bones and shakes its way out slowly over the course of a few hours, or a beat that forces your palms together in praise or prayer. The church in my neighborhood was the Barnett Road Baptist Church, and sometimes, on Sunday mornings, you could hear the people praising inside. It was never so loud that it was annoying, but just loud enough to understand that there were people inside, chasing after some small freedom.
A little farther down Barnett Road was Livingston Avenue, and if you turned right there, you would happen upon several things: a sprawling flea market, a beauty shop with pictures of black women with high-picked afros, a few apartment complexes (some with boards on their windows), and finally, a corner convenience store. Depending on the year, the surroundings might change. The flea market, for example, is now a furniture warehouse, something distant from the place where my brother and I would go to buy and trade basketball cards in our youth. The apartment complexes might be either more welcoming or less, but they would always have people inside — people with needs who could always return to the corner store.
