I Heard What You Said But I Saw What You Did. is a coming of age story in the life of a young man growing up in the walls of both the church and the 60's. For Anthony Johnson, the age was twelve. The year was 1968 in the northeast region of North America. The place was Jersey City, New Jersey. This year would always loom in his memory as his season of change, his epoch of inquisition, the first time in his life he recalls being able to separate the literal from the figurative. He would experience the impact of life and death, joy and pain, fiiendship gained and friendship lost. It would be limiting to say that this city. in this time, shaped Anthony's evolution. The greater influence was that Anthony was a child of the cloth, the son of a dynamic Pentecostal evangelist. He grew up under the watchful eye and scrutiny of church folk. He heard, saw, and experienced things that were, at the very least, life changing. His future belief system and social conditioning could be traced back to his relationship with organized religion. Traced to the church, as in the body of Christ, and the church, as in the edifice for worship. This milieu was his sanctuary and playground, his lead zeppelin and 500-pound gorilla. This was the place and the time when he realized there was a difference in what people said and what they did.