Child Asked Elvis “Why Doesn’t God Answer My Prayers?” — Elvis Said Something He’d Never Said Before 

Memphis, 1956. Bee Street in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon had a particular quality that the same street at midnight never had. The clubs were quiet, their doors shut against the daylight, the neon signs dark and waiting. The sidewalks carried the ordinary traffic of a city going about its business.

 Women with grocery bags, men in workclo, children released from school moving in loose clusters toward home. Elvis Presley drove through it the way he had driven through it a hundred times before he was famous and a dozen times since, which was not very many times yet because Famous was still new enough that he was still figuring out what it meant and what it cost and what exactly he had traded to get it.

 He was 21 years old. Heartbreak Hotel had been out for 4 months. His face had been on television twice and on the cover of a music magazine once, and strangers occasionally recognized him on the street, which still surprised him every time it happened. He was not thinking about any of this when he turned onto the side street two blocks from Beal and saw the boy.

The church was a small white building set back slightly from the sidewalk. Its paint, the particular weathered white of buildings that are maintained with care, but not money, clean, slightly chalky. The wood beneath showing through at the corners where the paint had worn away. A handlettered sign above the door read the name of the congregation in black paint that had faded to a dark gray.

There were flower boxes under the two front windows. the flowers in them real and tended. The boy was sitting on the front steps. He was small, even for seven, slight, with the kind of thinness that isn’t chosen, wearing a shirt that had been washed many times, and pants that were slightly too short.

 His shoes were good, recently polished, the effort visible. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, looking at nothing in particular across the street with the particular stillness of a child who has been waiting for a long time and made peace with the waiting. Elvis slowed the car.

 He was not sure why exactly. There was nothing alarming about the scene. A child sitting on church steps in the middle of the afternoon was not unusual. Was not a situation that required anything. But something about the quality of the boy’s stillness caught his attention. The way certain things catch your attention before you have identified what they are.

 He pulled to the curb and sat for a moment with the engine idling, looking at the child on the steps. The boy had not noticed the car. Elvis turned off the engine and got out. The boy looked up when he heard footsteps on the path. He had the wary assessing look of a child who has learned to read adults quickly.

 Who is this? What do they want? Is this safe? He looked at Elvis with that assessment running visibly behind his eyes taking inventory. What he saw was a young man in his early 20s, tall with dark hair and a face that was not threatening. Not a man from the church, not a neighbor he recognized, just a young man who had gotten out of a car and was walking toward him.

 “Hey,” Elvis said. “Hey,” the boy said back, cautious, but not frightened. Elvis looked at the church steps, then at the boy. “You waiting for somebody?” “My mama,” he said it simply without complaint. “She’s inside.” “Na.” Elvis nodded. He looked at the steps for a moment, then sat down beside the boy. Not standing over him, not crouching to his level, just sitting.

 The way you sit beside someone when you have no particular place to be. The boy looked at him. This was unusual. Adults did not generally sit down on church steps next to children they did not know. But the young man did not seem to want anything. Did not seem to be building toward a request or a lesson or any of the things adults usually wanted.

 He just sat there looking at the street the same way the boy had been looking at it. After a moment, the boy went back to looking at the street, too. They sat in silence for a while. The afternoon moved around them, a car passing, the distant sound of someone’s radio, the particular quality of Memphis heat in the summer, pressing down with the patient insistence of something that knows it has all day.

 “What’s your name?” Elvis asked. James, the boy said. I’m Elvis. James looked at him briefly, then back at the street. The name meant nothing to him. Elvis was just a name. How come you’re not inside with your mama? Elvis asked. James was quiet for a moment. She goes to pray, he said finally. I don’t like to watch. How come? Another pause, longer this time.

the kind of pause a child takes when they are deciding whether an adult is actually asking or just making conversation. He seemed to decide that Elvis was actually asking because she prays for the same thing every time and it doesn’t work. Elvis looked at the boy beside him. What does she pray for? To get better.

 James said it flatly. The flatness of someone who has said the thing enough times that the saying of it has stopped carrying the full weight of what it means. She’s sick. She’s been sick since winter. He picked up a small stone from the step and turned it in his fingers. She prays every Sunday and some Tuesdays and she’s still sick. Elvis was quiet.

 I used to pray too, James said, but then I stopped. Why’d you stop? James looked at him directly for the first time since Elvis had sat down. The look had something in it that was older than seven. the specific quality of a child who has been living with something heavy and had to grow to fit it. Because he doesn’t answer, James said, “I asked and asked, and mama’s still sick, so either he doesn’t hear or he doesn’t care.

” He set the stone down carefully on the step beside him. Which one is it? The question landed between them on the warm stone steps and sat there. Elvis looked at the street. A woman walked past with two bags of groceries, her shoes making a particular sound on the sidewalk. A dog slept in the shadow of the building across the way.

 The afternoon held itself still around the question, waiting. He did not have an answer. He knew this immediately and with complete certainty. There was no answer he had that would hold up to what James was actually asking. He had grown up in the church, had sung in it, had felt in the music of it something real and true and not easily named.

 But he had also sat in enough pews and heard enough prayers to know that the space between what people asked for and what they received was wide and mostly unexplained, and anyone who pretended otherwise was selling something. He could have said what adults usually said to children asking this question, the things that were technically true but didn’t actually answer anything.

 that God worked in mysterious ways, that faith required patience, that the answer was sometimes no. He knew all of these. He had heard them his whole life. He didn’t say any of them. I don’t know, Elvis said. James looked at him. I don’t know which one it is, Elvis said. I’ve wondered that, too. Still wonders. The boy was very still beside him.

 I grew up going to church. My mama, too. She prayed for things. Some of them happened, some of them didn’t, and I could never figure out the pattern. He looked at his hands. I still can’t. Then why do people keep doing it? James asked, not challenging, genuinely asking. Elvis thought about this. He thought about his mother, Glattis, on her knees beside the bed in Tupelo, her lips moving in the dark, the particular quality of her voice when she sang hymns in the Assembly of God on Sunday morning.

something in it that was not performance, not obligation, that came from somewhere real and went somewhere he couldn’t see. I think, Elvis said slowly, because it’s the only way some people know how to say that they’re scared and that they love somebody. He paused. Your mama’s not in there asking God to fix things because she thinks he’s listening like a telephone.

 She’s in there because she’s scared and she loves you and she doesn’t have anywhere else to put it. James turned this over. His face had the careful expression of someone testing the weight of an idea before deciding to trust it. But what about the answer? He said, “What about getting better?” “Maybe that’s separate. Maybe the praying and the getting better are two different things.

 One’s about he searched for the word about not being alone with it. The other one he stopped. The other one I can’t explain. I don’t think anybody can if they’re being honest. The boy was quiet for a long time. The door of the church opened and a woman appeared at the top of the steps, thin, moving carefully with the particular deliberateness of someone who was learned to manage their energy across a day.

 She was perhaps 35, but carried something in her face that made her seem older. She looked down and saw her son sitting beside a young man she didn’t recognize, and her expression shifted into the careful assessment of a mother reading a situation. James, she said, “James,” the boy stood. “This is Elvis. He was waiting with me.” The woman looked at Elvis, who had stood as well.

 He was tall and younger than she’d thought from a distance, and there was nothing in his face that alarmed her. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was quiet and carried the residue of something, the specific quality of someone who has been in a room crying and has carefully assembled themselves before coming back out into the world. “Thank you for sitting with him.

 He’s good company,” Elvis said. She smiled, a small, real smile, the kind that takes effort and means something because of it. She took James’s hand and they started down the steps toward the sidewalk. James looked back once at Elvis with the expression of someone filing something away. Elvis watched them walk down the sidewalk together, the woman’s careful steps, the boys matching his pace to hers without being asked to.

 the two of them moving through the afternoon light toward wherever home was. Elvis stood on the church steps until they turned the corner. He found out where they lived without much difficulty. Memphis in 1956 was still a city where a few questions to the right people produced answers, and the congregation of a small church on a side street near Beiel was not hard to locate if you were known in the neighborhood and asked with the right tone.

 He went the next afternoon. He did not tell anyone he was going. He did not bring anyone with him. He drove to the address he had been given and knocked on the door of a small house on a quiet street. And when the woman opened it, she looked at him for a moment without recognition and then with the specific surprise of someone encountering the unexpected on an ordinary afternoon.

I was at the church yesterday, Elvis said, sat with your boy, she remembered. Come in, she said after a moment. It was a clean house, carefully kept, with the particular quality of a home where not much is owned, but everything that is owned is cared for. James was at the kitchen table doing something with a pencil and paper.

 He looked up when Elvis came in, and his expression moved through surprise to something more settled, as if this was unusual, but not entirely unexpected. Elvis did not stay long. He sat at the kitchen table for a while and talked about nothing in particular. the neighborhood, the church, the summer. He had brought an envelope, which he sat on the table without drawing attention to it, and which the woman noticed and did not comment on.

 Before he left, he looked at James. “You thought about what we talked about?” he asked. James considered some, he said. “You think about it more and let me know what you figure out because I’m still working on it, too.” James looked at him with that same assessing expression from the church steps, testing weight, measuring honesty. “Okay,” he said. Elvis nodded.

He said goodbye to the woman who walked him to the door with the quiet dignity of someone accepting something difficult without making it into more than it was. He drove away without looking back. He did not tell people about that afternoon. It was not the kind of thing that fit into the story that was being constructed around him in 1956.

 The story of the young man from Tupelo who had come out of nowhere and changed what music sounded like, who moved in ways that made television executives nervous and teenagers lose their ability to think clearly. That story did not have much room for a Tuesday afternoon in church steps in Memphis talking with a 7-year-old about whether God heard prayers, but it stayed with him.

 not as a lesson. He was not the kind of person who converted experiences into lessons, who extracted principles and carried them forward in that organized way. It stayed the way certain things stay, as a texture rather than a conclusion. The particular quality of the boy’s question, the way he had asked it, without apology or softening, with the directness of someone who is not yet learned that certain questions are supposed to be asked quietly, if at all.

Which one is it? Does he not hear, or does he not care? Elvis had not answered that. He had not been able to. But he had sat with it on those steps in the weight of a Memphis afternoon, and he had told the boy the truth instead of the answer, which was that he didn’t know that he wondered too that the not knowing was something you carried rather than something you solved.

 He thought about Glattis, about her voice in the assembly of God, the way it moved when she sang gospel, the specific quality of her faith, which was not simple or unexamined, but which she held on to anyway, with the grip of someone who knows that what they’re holding isn’t certain, and holds it anyway, because the alternative is to hold nothing.

 He thought about James walking down the sidewalk with his careful mother, matching her pace, looking back once. He did not know if the woman got better. He hoped she did. He had left what he could leave and said what he could say and sat with a 7-year-old on church steps in the afternoon heat and told the truth, which was that he didn’t have the answer either.

 Sometimes that was what there was to give. Sometimes it was