Home Fires (4 page)

Thankfully, Daddy didn’t seem to have heard it.

I sometimes think back to that afternoon and wonder if it would have made any difference if I’d listened harder, taken more seriously all I saw and heard.

“Probably not,” the pragmatist says comfortingly.

“You can’t know that,” says the stern preacher. “Arthur Hunt might still be alive you’d paid more attention.”

Church is a hospital for sinners,
Not a museum for saints.

—Bear Creek United Christian

Out at the farm that evening I asked Maidie, “How come you don’t make Daddy buy a dishwasher?”

She gave the glass she was drying a critical squint and then slid it back into the hot soapy water for me to rewash.

“I don’t need no dishwasher,” she said. “Not for the few little dishes Mr. Kezzie messes up.”

“Oh, come on, Maidie. Daddy’s not the only person you cook for, and you know it. Some of the boys or their kids are over here almost every day.”

“For dinner maybe,” she agreed, referring to the midday meal. “But not for supper. You and Mr. Reid, y’all the first in nearly a month and most times if it’s some of the family, the womenfolks shoo me out and clean up the kitchen theirselves.”

“They better,” I said.

Not that Maidie’s any Aunt Jemima who’d let them take advantage of her. She knows perfectly well how hard it’d be to find somebody to fill her shoes should she decide to leave, which, God willing, won’t happen anytime soon.

She came to the farm more than thirty years ago, a shy and lanky teenager Mother had hired to help out temporarily while the woman I called Aunt Essie was up in Philadelphia helping her first grandchild get born. Aunt Essie found a widowed policeman up there and Maidie found Cletus Holt right here and both women settled where they landed. Aunt Essie was a generation older than Mother and died a few years after she did, but Maidie’s only got about fifteen years on me. She got over being shy about the third day and time has amply padded her once-lanky frame till she’s an imposing figure, but she won’t sit if there’s work to be done and her hands are never empty and idle.

I rinsed the glass and stood it in the drain rack and this time it passed her inspection.

Daddy’d asked me to drive him home from court and once Reid heard that Maidie was making stuffed peppers, he’d wangled an invitation to come for early supper, too.

It was a summer supper right out of the garden that Daddy tends with Maidie’s husband Cletus: sweet bell peppers stuffed with a moist hamburger and sausage mixture, tender new butter beans sprinkled with diced onions, fried okra, meaty tomatoes that really had ripened on the vines, and thin wedges of crispy hot cornbread.

Reid ate as if it was the first home-cooked meal he’d had since he and Karen got divorced. (Since he can’t cook and most of his girlfriends don’t, he’s become shameless about scrounging meals.) He was appreciative enough to answer Daddy’s every question about A.K.’s situation, but his appreciation didn’t extend to helping with the dishes. Shortly after we rose from the table and Daddy went out to the porch for a cigarette, he took off.

Except for the principle of it, I didn’t really mind. Washing dishes with Maidie is always a comfortable task, one conducive to gossip and confidences about all the big and small things going on around, the farm. It’s one of the ways I keep up with the changing community. As a child, I used to stand on a little stool with Mother’s apron tied around my neck to help them wash dishes, scrape carrots or make biscuits. In those years, I had no trouble bouncing back and forth between the rough and tumble of my big brothers outdoors and the soft voices of women working together in a kitchen.

Maidie’s also one of my windows on the black community, just as my family is one of hers to the white community.

Desegregation’s been a real mixed bag down here. Took away some of the old sore spots, brought in a bunch of new ones. No more separate drinking fountains as when my brothers were little. No more separate entrances to movie theaters or separate seating at bus and train stations, no more “No Coloreds” signs on restaurant doors. We go to school together, we swim at the same public pools and beaches, we work side by side on assembly lines or in offices now as frequently as we have always worked side by side in the fields.

For the most part, the law is followed pretty strictly these days.

The letter of the law, anyhow.

But the spirit of the law? In the back rooms? Under the table or in one’s cups? At private pools and clubs? Forget it. There’s still plenty to keep us apart, plenty of cautious mistrust and wary stiffness on both sides.

“We may got to treat ’em all equal,” says my own brother Haywood, who would never dream of sassing Maidie or doing down any of the black tenants who farm with him, “but that don’t mean we got to like ’em all equal.”

My brother Ben is convinced that his tenants quit working the minute he turns his back, yet he can come dragging in from the fields, all tired and sweaty, and declare that he’s been “working like a nigger,” without seeing the irony of his words. Till the day they die, he and Robert and Haywood will always notice a stranger’s skin color first.

God knows life would be a lot simpler if we could all wake up one morning color-blind, but we’re nowhere close to it on either side. Not by a long shot. We continue to lead separate, parallel personal lives, seldom connecting without self-consciousness, at genuine ease only at points of old familiarity such as Maidie and me here in my mother’s kitchen.

“You and Miss Zell still coming to the fellowship meeting Sunday, ain’t you?” she asked as she hung coffee mugs from hooks in a nearby cupboard.

“I never miss a chance to press the flesh or eat your chicken pastry,” I said. “And while I’m thinking of it, remind me again where Balm of Gilead Church is?”

She hesitated, then finished hanging the last mug and closed the cupboard door. “Why you asking ’bout that place? You gonna politick there, too?”

“It’s not the one next to Mrs. Avery, is it? Oh, wait, of course not. That’s Burning Heart of God. And besides, their preacher’s that mean old woman, isn’t she? Sister Wilson?”

“Sister Williams. Miz Byantha Renfrow Williams and you don’t need to be bad-mouthing her just because she’s so Holiness.”

“Why not?” I argued. “She bad-mouths everybody else and their religion. But Balm of Gilead. How come I can’t remember it?”

“Maybe ’cause they used to call it just plain Gilead,” she said. “Remember Starling’s Crossroads? Used to be a gas station when I was real little?”

That connected. Starling’s Crossroads is one of those insignificant backcountry crossings that got dead-ended when I-40 went through a few years back. It’d been dead before that though. That wood-framed store with its two lone gas pumps sat empty for several years until one of the black churches in Makely split wide open over something or other, and part of the congregation came up here and turned the little store into a chapel.

“Starling’s Crossroads?” I handed Maidie another glass. “As in Charles Starling, the boy that was with A.K. when they messed up the Crocker graveyard?”

“He might be some of that same bunch. But they ain’t owned nothing over there in fifteen, twenty years. How come you’re asking about Balm of Gilead?”

“No real reason,” I said. “Their new preacher was in court today to speak up for a member’s grandson. I believe his name was Freeman? Seems real sharp.”

Maidie made a humphing sound.

“What?” I asked. When Maidie humphs, there’s usually a reason.

“Preacher Ralph Freeman’s a sheep-stealer.”

“Now who’s bad-mouthing?”

“You asked me, didn’t you?”

I was curious. “Whose flock?”

“Whoever’s he can get.”

“Surely not any of Mount Olive’s?”

Just as I’d been born into Sweetwater Missionary Baptist a few miles south, Maidie’d been born into Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion a few miles north of us and she was fiercely loyal to it.

“They’s been one or two drifted over,” she admitted. “Ever since they started arguing over getting us on the historical register.”

“That still going on?”

Maidie sighed and nodded.

Sweetwater began as a modest turn-of-the-century wooden structure that’s been remodeled, enlarged and bricked over so many times that few people know (or care) about its earliest lines, but Mount Olive is an exquisite antebellum building that’s been lovingly tended in its original state.

Outside, it’s a two-story, white clapboard box with a simple pitched roof of green wooden shingles. No stained glass here. The tall, one-over-one double-hung windows are rectangles of frosted glass with a beveled cross etched in the center. The only outside ornamentation is a course of hand-cut dentil molding up under the eaves and a large front door that is flanked by plain Doric pilasters and topped by a triangular pediment with more dentil molding. The overall effect is, and I quote, “a harmonious blending of naive Georgian with intimations of Greek Revival.”

That’s not me talking. That’s an article the
Ledger
reprinted a few years back when Mount Olive celebrated its hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The county commissioners had hired someone from State University to do an architectural survey of the county during the Bicentennial back in 1975 and he’d gone nuts over Mount Olive. I remembered hearing Maidie tell Mother how he wanted to have it added to the National Register then and there, but conservatives in the church voted it down.

Martin Luther King once observed that the most segregated hour in Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, but it wasn’t always that way. Not when Mount Olive was built.

Blacks and whites worshipped the Lord together then. Okay, okay, if you want to get technical about it, the whites did sit downstairs and the blacks did sit up in the slave gallery that ran around three sides of the upper level. But they were all under one roof and they all sang with one voice.

No one quite remembers why things happened that way, but during Reconstruction, instead of barring its doors to their dark-skinned brothers and sisters in Christ, the whites abandoned Mount Olive and ownership passed by default to the former slaves and the few free-born people of color.

Back then the congregation barely numbered fifteen families. Fortunately for the building, those families contained carpenters, painters, roofers and masons who scrounged materials from their jobs, salvaged what was being thrown away, and used their God-given talents to keep the fabric of the church sound.

By the late seventies, the congregation had grown until even the most conservative members couldn’t deny the need for more space. Most churches would move walls at that point, sprout Sunday School wings or do a complete renovation.

Not Mount Olive.

After a fierce debate that brought the church to the edge of splitting for good, they reached a grudging compromise. Since the most ardent advocates for maintaining the church’s architectural integrity also had the deepest pockets, that faction prevailed. Not a single new nail got driven into the exterior boards. Instead, they raised money for Sunday School classrooms, restrooms, and a large fellowship hall and the new building went up immediately behind the old. It mimicked the Georgian/Greek Revival lines of the old but inside everything was modern and up to date and the green shingles were asphalt.

This sufficed until Colleton’s cheap land, low taxes and exceedingly elastic zoning regulations, coupled with our easy access to the Research Triangle, made us ripe for housing developments. Church membership is up all over the county, but Mount Olive, perceived as the most middle-class and influential of all the black churches, has really boomed. It now takes two Sunday morning preaching services to accommodate the whole congregation and Maidie says there are many who want to double the size of the sanctuary so that everybody can be seated for one service.

Like our school boards, county commissioners and town councils, Mount Olive has learned that this new wave of people isn’t content to sit in the back pews and keep its mouth shut. Unfamiliar viewpoints rasp up against old traditions.

“Been hot words on both sides,” Maidie said sorrowfully. “Some folks say the church should be about people, not walls. We a church, not a museum. Some of the new brothers and sisters, ’specially those from up the road a piece, say it’s shameful to keep the old slave gallery, say it should have been ripped out a hundred years ago. They don’t want to hear ‘Go Down, Moses.’ They want it all stomping and shouting.”

“What about you, Maidie?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We getting too big, that’s for certain. But I surely do hate to see deacon against deacon till folks start looking for some place more peaceful on Sunday mornings.”

I stuck the last of the knives and forks in the drain basket and rinsed out the last of the saucepans.

“So maybe Preacher Freeman’s not stealing sheep,” I said. “Maybe he’s just looking out for the strays.”

“Humph!” said Maidie. “They gonna need a whole new flock if they build ’em a real church. That’s how come they brought in this new preacher. He raised a new church over in Warrenton and Balm of Gilead’s called him to guide ’em to a new building here.”

She spoke as if a little makeshift church could suddenly raise enough money for a real edifice. It was going to take a lot of barbecued chicken plates to do that.

She handed me some paper towels. I wiped out the black iron skillet in which she had cooked the cornbread and hung it on a nail in the pantry.

That skillet’s been handed down from Mother and Aunt Zell’s grandmother and is never used for anything except cornbread, which is why it’s never washed. Maidie keeps to the old ways with Mother’s ironware. About every four or five years, she sticks the flat skillet and a favorite fry pan on a bed of red-hot coals in the woodstove and burns off all the charred and blackened incrustation that’s accumulated on the outside and then she grumbles for a week till she gets them properly seasoned again so that nothing sticks when she’s cooking.

Mother was a hard worker—“She had to be, with such a houseful of young’uns,” says Maidie—but she had no intention of killing herself to save a penny the way Daddy’s first wife had. She cooked and cleaned and washed and ironed and she would freeze and can any fruits and vegetables Daddy or the boys brought up to the house, but she never worked in the fields and she was never without household help. Not just us children, who had chores and responsibilities as a matter of course, but women she hired right out from under Daddy’s nose.