Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption (11 page)

“Why can’t I get some lovin’ when I need it?” she whispered, and in the distance he heard the hoot of the train that was taking Rick James west.

“Shh,” he said, holding her. “It’s going to be all right.”

She pulled back. “Yeah? How? I need help I can’t get.”

“I’ll help,” he said. 
And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins
. “What can I do?”

“I wanna goddamn fuck! It’s all I’m good for—and . . . I don’t know what to do! Rickie—he was a dickwad—but he was gonna help . . . with the baby.”

“You were trying to get away,” Casper pointed out. “He wasn’t going to help you. He made you put out to other men and didn’t pay you. He gave you that bruise on your neck.” 
Their abominations were according as they loved
.

She grabbed at her jacket to cover the blue finger mark. “That’s why I wanna go to Austin! I know my auntie will help. She’s a black sheep too.”

“How do you mean?”

“My daddy’s sistur—Hermione. She ‘as a hippie before they ‘as famous. Ran off when she ‘as in high skool—ended up down in Mexico. Met this matador who smuggled drugs. Married him on the beach. He got gored—and then got busted. She came back to the Atchafalya swamp—in Loo-eeze-ee-anna. Shacked up with this Cajun. Caught nootrias. Like big rats. They skin ‘em and sell the fur.”

Casper had once eaten a nutria. Cab Hooly talked about serving them.

“Cajun died doin’ stunts for some two-bit movie these coked-up wops from LA made. Left her a deed. One day an oil company gave her a whole lotta money. She moved back to Texas and bought a big white house. Still owns some bayou, though.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?” Casper asked.

“When I’as living with her—before I got busted. She couldn’t get me back ‘cause of the matador’s drug record.”

“She’s still alive? You want to call her? Tell her you’re coming?”

“She don’t have a phone.”

“She go broke?” Casper asked. This was starting to sound fuzzy.

“I tole you—she’s rich. Lives in a big ole house like the Governor’s Mansion. She just don’t believe in phones and technology and shit.”

“I see,” Casper said. “So, you were going to take the Greyhound to Austin? Only you don’t have any money.”

“Thas why I was gonna blow you!” the girl exclaimed. “Duh!”

“You have money now,” he pointed out

“But I don’t have—” and then she broke down crying again.

Her tears stabbed at him. “What about this,” he said. “What if I drive you to Austin? You save your money. You’ll need all of that and then some.”

Casper rolled down his window to let some of the trapped breath steam out, and was perturbed by the change in the air. The wind was rising. There’d been a pressure drop. The scent was one he remembered well. People called it Tornado Fever.

And their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets
. After the Boone Burgers fiasco, Poppy fell into a deep funk and the family returned to Joplin to reconnoiter. The media had gotten wind of Reverend America all right, but not the way the old carnival talker had intended. They managed to survive a roasting in Louisville, but the headlines were the writing on the wall as far as Poppy was concerned. An earnest young Chattanooga newspaper reporter, who was trying to make a name for himself, was niggling them about evangelical scams, and even worse, the IRS was on their trail. They’d always been ones to render unto Caesar—they just weren’t very good about paying their taxes. More importantly, the young faith healing star in the firmament was no longer the child novelty he’d once been. And he may have become schizophrenic. Plus, Cab Hooly had taken them to the cleaners. The Carousel of Progress was a dead dream. The White Angel fire had drowned in bad ink.

Not the sort of people to put much faith in the witch doctoring of psychology (having done a little too much witch doctoring themselves), Poppy and Rose avoided any form of diagnosis let alone treatment for the young Reverend. Instead, they turned to their Joplin neighbor, a black hoodoo specialist that Rose had psychically perceived as the “real deal.”

As quacky as Rose’s mentalist abilities may have been, it could well be there was some truth to them—because the woman in question was the real deal—just not in the way they thought.

Berina Pinecoffin was at that time in her late forties. She put ice cubes in her coffee, read Agatha Christie novels, and could do a fair version of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” while she kneaded her own bread dough. Although she looked like a mastiff and at first meeting seemed like the kind of person who would bite your head off and suck on the bones, she was far from severe once she’d gotten to know you. She’d become Casper’s constant defender. In those days of visitation, she was a door of hope. Many would be the times he’d wish their relationship were official.

She’d grown up an only child after her younger brother was lost to cot death. Unlike Casper’s upbringing, however, she was doted on, and the mirror opposite in their backgrounds was never lost on her.

She’d come from a somewhat prosperous middleclass black neighborhood to the west of Chicago, which had allowed her exposure to animals and gardening. Her father had trained as a dentist and held a position of modest prestige with both blacks and whites. Her mother had been a singer and had made a little money of her own, but her chief calling was hoodoo consultations and supply, which was where Berina had picked up her knowledge.

With the continuing influx of blacks from the South, hoodoo provided a tonic for homesickness and a way of staying in touch with folk traditions. Berina always downplayed the mumbo jumbo aspect, stressing instead what she considered the practical common sense side. “What’s the difference between praying you get a job and casting a spell? You want your lover to come back, you damn sure better cast a spell.”

Her mother had come from the Delta and saw an opportunity in the City of the Big Shoulders. She wrote a Hoodoo Health & Love advice column in the black owned 
Chicago Defender
 and ran a mail order business from their house, until her wares proved so popular she decided to set up a shop in town.

“Papa was a man of science, Mama was a smart witch,” Berina said.

Tired of pulling teeth, her father decided to try his hand at business too and opened the Hoodoo Lounge, a nightclub on the South Side of Chicago. Little Walter and Muddy Waters would go on to play there, along with Albert King. But even in the early days it did so well that her father died in a bungled after-hours robbery attempt, both dumb young culprits shot with the old man’s .38 before he bled out.

Berina had been in college by then, with the hopes of becoming a teacher. Upon her father’s murder, she left school and began helping her mother run the club. It turned out she had all her father’s acumen and more, and the club became so successful the real gangsters moved in and encouraged her to move on—but on her own terms. She cashed out of the Windy City when her mother died, with a lot more pennies than most black women of the day, and she was prudent in how to pile up some more. She moved to Joplin and helped look after an aging aunt, inheriting her house when the old lady passed.

She then purchased a large older place, running it as a boarding house, which she kept full of traveling salesmen and two unmarried ladies who’d retired from the high school as permanent residents. Her garden and domestic skills helped make the boarding house run, while giving her a degree of self-sufficiency. To complement this, her line of hoodoo magic supplies was a practical, mail order-based income stream. It was no con for her—it was a business, to be taken with a grain of salt—along with perhaps some crab shell powder and a black cat bone. She sold vigil candles, herb bags, worry dolls, hot foot dust and anointing oil, from Oakland to Mobile. And she became a beacon to Reverend America.

She was the first one to explain sex fully to him—to put it into the context of love and survival, which was ironic because she was celibate most all the time he knew her and seemed to need no help herself until the very end.

She was open and earthy about bodily functions, and straight honest when he asked her questions. “I can’t have kids ‘cause I fooled around with the wrong man when I was young and hurt my insides. I coulda gotten hitched at least twice since—but the men, they wanted children. A proper black man who really wants a family isn’t easy to find. I wasn’t goin’ to put a spell on ‘em just for my own gain. But the main reason I never got married after that is that I’ve never met a man as good as my Papa.”

Usually, she was gently stern with him, but even that was very different from the prim reservations of Rose. Every so often her girlish excitement would take over, or her native affection, and she’d let a “Honey chile” slip out and give him a squeeze.

She gave him a little understanding of hoodoo—she taught him how to make a mojo hand. But whenever the subject came up, she’d tap his chest and say, “The real hoodoo’s always in here. Don’t you ever forget that.”

More importantly, she introduced him to the hoodoo of what a library is and sparked his lifelong love of learning odd facts.

“You have to be so quiet in here,” he said.

“You have to be quiet in your voice, but your mind is free to make a joyful noise,” Berina replied. “Just learn to listen a new way.”

That was some of the best advice he’d ever be given—like Reverend America coming back to him.

She got him back into school. She gave him the self-confidence to withstand the gibes he got there, and she’d tutor him herself in the evenings, exhausted though she may have been, so that he could regain some of the ground he’d lost academically while on the long path of White Angel Fire and Faith.

Together they’d struggle through mathematical word problems. If Mr. Sweeney has five towns to visit in Kansas and sticks to the speed limit, driving six hours a day, how many days will he need to visit them all?

“I’ve been through Kansas,” Casper would pipe up, “I preached in three of those towns.”

“Keep your mind on the homework, mister,” Berina would answer. “Or there’ll be no butterscotch brownies for you.”

Concerned that he wasn’t getting enough to eat at home, she indulged her own enjoyment of cooking, making him “naughty” foods like pickled pig’s feet, chopped sirloin in cream sauce, meatloaf in brown gravy, and apple pie with custard. As savvy as Poppy and Rose were with cooking on the road, after the Boone Burgers catastrophe they went back to meager ways not much above the Spam and Rado Casper had known in Charleston. Often there wasn’t more than a hock or a celery stick in their house.

Berina taught him patience (“A watched clock never boils.”), introduced him to jazz (he’d heard a lot of blues, bluegrass and country music in his time on the road), and she gave him his love of gardening and things that grow. Together they planted bearded irises, trillium and lavender in her back yard—and he was entrusted with the task of watering all the indoor succulents. “A little green inside goes a long way,” she told him.

For his part, he taught her one thing, which turned out to be a great source of happiness and fulfillment for her. Like many black Americans, for many reasons, Berina had never learned how to swim. And it had always bothered her. Casper had learned how to swim the hard way. Poppy had thrown him into the Pearl River. “We can’t have a Reverend doing baptisms, if he might drown!”

Casper had discovered how to swim, just as he’d learned to survive—out of pure necessity. He wasn’t a great swimmer . . . “But I’m very bad drowner,” as he put it. So, they’d go out in attempted secrecy on Saturday mornings, driving in Berina’s forget-me-not blue Rambler to Shoals Creek, the moment it became warm enough to dip.

“Don’t you be lookin’ at my fat thighs,” she’d say—wearing a bumblebee floral one-piece she’d bought with great embarrassment on Main Street. He’d laugh. She had the inner confidence to be laughed at, which was what he needed most of all. That was the thing he worried about most then—being laughed at.

And while watching the barn swallows and the red-winged blackbirds, he taught her how to float . . . and she let him handle her body in a way that Rose would’ve never allowed. She got so she could paddle, then actually stroke. She came to love the water the way she loved her garden. In all the long days that he’d be gone, she’d come to escape to the local creeks whenever she could in summer. He’d helped her conquer a deep fear. Learning to float. Such a simple thing. But it meant a great deal to her. He was so pleased to see her pride in her growing confidence. He’d given something back, and that giving would return to him in more ways than he could ever say—when Poppy and Rose slipped out of his life and he was once more alone.

“You release that boy into my custody as of this morning—this paper says so.”

“Are you family?” the authorities asked.

“I’m damn family enough and this paper proves it. It’s all I need in this world to convince the likes of you. You put one more hurdle in my way and I’ll take you with me when I go over it. I want to see him now, and we’re going to leave according to these papers.”

The other meeting ground they had was music. Berina’s hands had become arthritic early, but she kept up the discipline of playing her polished upright grand piano that she’d brought with her from Chicago every day. She talked with pride about the famous musicians who’d passed through the family club and had given her lessons. She was good, Casper had to admit—but hearing her play always made him reflect on what a fine, subtle artist Rose was. She really had a gift, without seeming to expend any effort. It made him grieve to think of it, how good she was and yet how little she seemed to care. She preferred her Ouija board and Poppy’s penis—which puzzled him all the more because she was so puritanical about matters of the body generally. Just as with some applied effort, Poppy could’ve become a true stage magician, Rose could’ve become a concert pianist or a professional organist. Something more than Boone Burgers and his breakdown had gone wrong in their lives.

One night in West Virginia, not far from where he was born, he asked Rose about her music and how she’d learned. She dodged the latter question entirely and to the former, replied with a faraway smile, “There’s always, somebody better.” Casper never repeated that to Berina, because it would’ve made her lose all respect for Rose.

Together he and Berina would sing “Divine Love” and “Shall We Gather at the River.” He knew rivers and sang of them as if he did . . . the Tugaloo, the Ogeechee, the Sapelo and the Altamaha—the Rio Grande and the rivers of Eden. The first time they ever sang together she said, “Boy, you got some silk and rock salt in you. Where you learn to sing like that?”

“I was Reverend America,” he answered. He’d learned to sing, literally for his supper, in JESUS LOVES YOU trailer towns amidst white trash and black cabins. As Poppy said, you couldn’t get the pot to bubble over with just hellfire and damnation—the winepress of the wrath of God—or even the succor of the Beatitudes. Their closing number was always Rose’s version of “The New Jerusalem,” her long fingers working out on the sticky keys to an early African-American written melody that stands with Bach. Casper would hear that in his sleep for years to come.

More than anything else though, Berina gave him some new credence just in being. If she thought his behavior was ever strange (and sometimes it truly was), she gave no sign of being offended or afraid. Who wouldn’t be a little odd, growing up as he had? Berina Pinecoffin wasn’t one to judge anyone who met her standard of trying to better themselves. She called him Matty. Summer Shield did too.

Summer was an impish dust brunette who lived two doors down from Berina’s boarding house. Her eyes were the aqua blue of Black Jack gum packs, but as a child she’d been blinded in one by a splash of hot grease from her mother’s frying pan, so one was cloudy, one was clear. The disability didn’t seem to affect her spirit, although it forced her to turn to speak to you. The first words she ever spoke to him were, “Why, you could hide behind a streetlight.” He liked her instantly. She had a lovely simple fragrance of muskmelon. The last thing he’d ever say to her in the flesh was, “I wish I could’ve healed you,” meaning her bad eye. She turned to him with the clear one and said, “You heal me every time we meet.”

Her father ran one of the local hardware stores and was a devout Catholic, which meant that they came in for some prejudice. Persecution would’ve been too strong a word, but Casper had seen how it worked—the business suffered as a result and they only lived in the big house they did because her mother had inherited it.

Her mother was some kind of invalid who remained confined to the home. Summer would later say she was afflicted with “Took-to-Her-Roomatism.” The presumed cause of the obscure nervous disorder was a hushed up attack by a door-to-door notions salesman, but Berina was of the view that the salesman was a fiction. “There’s a lot more to that family than meets the eye, pardon the expression.”