More Sweet Tea

by Deborah Smith

  I scratched my head. And after I confess, then what?

  I STOOD near the chancel, waiting my turn to confess to the members of the Tabernacle Church my sin of watching Sally Rand do her famous fan dance. I dreaded the moment. Since my conversation with my parents on the previous Friday evening, I could think of little else than of what lay ahead for me at the Wednesday night prayer meeting. I had no idea what I would say, if I was able to speak at all.

  Fortune smiled on me. When the preacher, Brother Bobby Flowers, invited all sinners who wanted to confess their sins publicly to join him down front, a Wednesday night confession veteran, Miss Eufaula Burnside, got there first. Her appearance brought groaning and grumbling from both sides of the sanctuary and cries of “Not her again.” I overheard one woman remark to the person sitting next to her, “She just does it to get attention.” A strange way to get attention, I thought.

  In recent weeks, Miss Burnside, a frail, boney, single woman with graying red hair, had confessed to playing a card game with her six-year-old niece, reading a horoscope in the morning newspaper, overeating at the church picnic, and taking a cough medicine that contained alcohol. Miss Burnside deemed no sin too small to confess. “Sin’s sin,” she would say, before launching into her declaration of wrongdoing.

  Miss Burnside stood crying and twisting a lace handkerchief as she waited for Brother Flowers to take his seat on the chancel behind her. She wiped her tears away and began speaking in a low, hushed tone. “Brother Flowers, sin’s sin. I wanna say to you and to the Lord Jesus and all y’all here tonight, I want y’all’s forgiveness of my sins. I want everybody to know I went to the picture show Tuesday night. I didn’t pay no attention to what was playing, if y’all can believe that. I really didn’t. I just walked right up to the ticket window and bought my ticket. I didn’t know it was a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture till I got inside and set myself down. It was a musical. I can’t remember what the name of it was. All I know is it showed a whole lotta dancing. I sat right there and watched them do it. Dance, I mean. I saw them holding on to each other and him swinging her all around and making her dress fly up, showing the top of her legs and all.

  “I know it’s a sin to dance. And even though I didn’t dance, I watched them do it. I hate to say it, but I kinda enjoyed it. I guess that makes me guilty by association, me sitting there and all, watching it like I did and enjoying it. I want y’all to know I’m sorry, and I hope all y’all forgive me. Next time I go to the picture show I’ll mind what’s playing. I think I’ve learned my lesson, least I hope I have. You gotta pay attention to what you’re doing all the time cause if you don’t do it that ol’ devil, he’ll reach right out and grab hold of you before you know it and he won’t turn you loose neither. Thank y’all. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  When Miss Burnside turned around and faced Brother Flowers, he motioned for her to return to her pew. Sobbing, sniffling, and dabbing at her eyes, she meandered up the aisle, pausing every few feet to steady herself. Only after Miss Burnside found her seat on the next-to-last row and I became the center of everyone’s attention did Brother Flowers, gesturing at me with his head, signal that it was now my turn.

  Miss Burnside’s confession gave me an idea. I would simply follow her lead. After all, it appeared to have worked for her well enough.

  With my heart beating a hundred miles an hour, my head bowed, and my shoulders lowered, I stood in front of the pulpit with folded hands. Once my nerves settled, I took a deep breath, raised my head, forced a smile, and stared out at the congregation.

  A variety of faces stared back, some of them scowling and others smirking. A few people appeared sympathetic, but numerous ones—mostly children and teenagers—appeared amused. My big-mouth buddy, Shorty, looked like he always did—half asleep.

  Mama, with one leg swinging and her arms crossed, and Daddy, with an arm around Mama, sat on the front row, staring nails at me.

  “Brother Flowers,” I began, as several of the older people leaned forward in their pews and cupped their hands to their ears, “like Miss Burnside, I, too, watched somebody else dance the other night. I hope everyone’ll forgive me for doing it—like you did Miss Burnside a while ago. Thank you.”

  I stepped toward where Mama and Daddy sat, their mouths hanging open.

  “Just a minute, son. Wait up. Tell it all,” I heard Brother Flowers say from behind me in an even, gentle voice.

  “Sir?” I said, stopping in my tracks.

  “Tell it all.”

  My heart started up again. “Yes, sir,” I said with a grimace.

  I returned to my former position. “Like I say, I saw somebody dance the other night. They danced to that song Swinging on a Star. But I didn’t see no dress fly up or nothing like that happen—you know, like Miss Burnside did. And didn’t nobody have their hands on them or nothing.” I paused, smiled a weak smile, and shrugged. “That’s about it, I think, Brother Flowers. I’m real sorry I did it.”

  “I said tell it all, son. Where’d you see this?” This time Brother Flowers’ voice was raised and insistent.

  “Here in town, sir. There was a lotta people there watching it with me, but I don’t guess that makes it right, though. Like I say, I’m sorry.”

  “Son, you gotta tell the details. We wanna know the name of the show. What was it? Where was it? Was it the same one Miss Eufaula said she saw?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then tell us all about it. Don’t leave out anything. You know, when you pay for a loaf of bread, they don’t give you a half of loaf. They give you a whole loaf. When Jesus died on the cross for your sins, He paid you for a full confession, not a half of one.”

  I looked at Mama. She made a face and mouthed the words “Go on. Go on.”

  “It was the . . . uh . . . the . . . uh . . . the Sally Rand Show,” I muttered.

  Brother Flowers wagged a heavily ringed finger at me. “Talk up. Can’t nobody hear you. Whose show you say it was?”

  “Sally Rand,” I said in a louder, clearer voice

  Brother Flowers bolted from his chair, a hand to his heart. “You mean . . . you mean, that . . . fan . . . fan dancer wo . . . woman?” he sputtered, his round face now the color of an over-ripe watermelon. “You talking about that woman with them fans what runs around on the stage naked as can be?” he shouted as mothers and fathers fought with their children to cover their ears.

  I thought of the body stocking Sally Rand wore. “Well, she wasn’t really naked. Least not when I saw her, she wasn’t.”

  Brother Flowers’ upper lip curled and he laughed. “Okay, then, what was she, if she wasn’t naked?” he roared. “Did she have on a dress?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “A skirt and blouse?

  “No, sir.”

  “A shirt and pair of slacks?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh, sweet Lord!” I heard Mama exclaim.

  Brother Flowers rubbed his chubby hands together and smiled. “Tell us,” he said, almost in a whisper but loud enough for all to hear, “was she wearing her unmentionables?”

  “Her unmentionables?”

  “Her drawers, young man! Her drawers!”

  “No, sir. She was—”

  “Then she was naked! Just like I said,” he shouted. “Naked! Naked! Naked!”

  A loud gasp erupted from the front pews and, like a rushing wave, surged backwards toward those seated in the rear. Women began to fan themselves so furiously that they produced a sound not unlike that of a flock of pigeons taking wing. All at once, a chorus of “I’ve never!” blurted from the throats of women throughout the sanctuary. Five or six men, on their feet, pointed accusing fingers at me and yelled “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Several mothers grabbed their children and hurried them out of the church, ignoring cries of “I wanna stay.”

 
I turned toward Brother Flowers when the tumult subsided. “Can I please go now, sir?”

  He collapsed into his chair, removed a golden, silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his double-breasted navy-blue suit, and wiped the sweat beads from his face and balding head. With a faint wave of the hand and a barely audible “Yes, go,” he dismissed me.

  As I took my seat, almost everyone gazed at me with mean and angry expressions. I felt as though I had a terrible disease of some kind, like leprosy or TB. Mama and Daddy refused even to look my way and Daddy inched closer to Mama when I sat down beside him.

  After the service, the father of the girl I had smooched at school the day Sally Rand came to town met me on the sidewalk in front of the church. “Boy, lemme tell you something,” he said, jabbing me in the chest with his finger. “Don’t you never, ever even look like you wanna date my daughter again. You hear me? I ain’t gonna have her datin’ some kinda ol’ sex fiend. I thought you was Christian.”

  The girl and her mother stood behind him, hands on their hips and nodding their approval.

  I managed to free myself from the irate trio and started to hunt for my parents who had stayed behind to make additional apologies on my behalf. The last I saw of them they stood with Eufaula Burnside, hugging and kissing her and telling her how proud they were of her and how much God loved her.

  Shorty caught up with me before I could find Mother and Daddy. “Shorty,” I said, “you know what’s happened? Do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “I go to church. I get up down front and I make a public confession of my sins. Do folks forgive me? No, they don’t. Why one man, he comes up to me and says I can’t date his daughter no more and then he calls me a name. Calls me a sex fiend. I ain’t no sex fiend.”

  Shorty stared at me a second or two. “Yeah. And you know what else? Wasn’t none of them pennies I got for helping that man sell candy that time a 1943 copper either. Not a one.”

  At first, I thought Shorty didn’t catch on to what I had said. But then I realized that he did. His response to my complaint about the reaction I got to my public confession of sins was his way of saying that we had both fanned out.

  SALLY RAND fanned out herself on August 31, 1979, exiting the world stage at age seventy-six due to heart failure.

  Sally Rand never knew me, but my brief encounter with her taught me an important lesson about confession. I realize 1 John 1:9 and Proverbs 28:13 teach us that confession is good for the soul, but whoever said public confession is good for the soul never got up and did it in front of a bunch of people at a prayer meeting—not with his mama making him do it, he didn’t.

  Following my experience at Tabernacle Church that Wednesday evening, I resolved that, from then on, I would confess my sins the same way that King David said in Psalm 32:5 he would confess his: “I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord.”

  To that I would add, “And unto nobody else!”

  The Healing Touch

  by

  Susan Alvis

  “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”

  —Marcel Proust

  AUNT AGNES is the self-proclaimed healer in our family. Agnes was famous for making mustard and rosemary cold compresses and she invented a sure cure for errant warts.

  There were many folks in and around Raymington who declared her to be a walking miracle worker with an ordained touch.

  Now before you go to thinking that Agnes was one of the overly educated women in the family, you need to remember that she married my Uncle Clyde when she was seventeen. They started having babies and didn’t stop until my Grandmother’s old home place had three children in each of the upstairs bedrooms and twins sleeping on the screened-in porch, weather permitting. Granny was long gone by then. Agnes said she died of natural causes: a combination of fatique, boredom and ninety eight years. How someone could grow bored in that house of bedlam is beyond me. I’d guess age had the most to do with it.

  Agnes and Clyde’s prolific family additions made my own

  Mamma and Daddy convinced they would stop after one manageable child: me. I grew up in the outer orbit of my aunt and uncle’s much larger family, fascinated by the noise and chaos. I am convinced, though, that I went to nursing school because of Aunt Agnes and her healing touch. We didn’t have any other medically minded folks in the family.

  By the time I went to nursing school in Durham, Agnes was in her late fifties and Clyde was somewhere between seventy-five and wrecked. The more worn down old Clyde became, the more enthusiastic Aunt Agnes became about inventing medicines to treat what ailed him.

  My aunt sang as she mixed the remedies that made her famous and treated people right out the kitchen door.

  Now before you get to thinking that Doc Pritchard might’ve resented the competition or that Joe Richman down at the pharmacy didn’t like that meddlesome woman, you need to remember that Agnes had worked her healing powers for both of them, so they were agreeably silent.

  Joe had such smelly feet as a younger man that his dear sweet wife, Acanthus, told him he was to leave his shoes on the porch. She made him wash his feet before each meal and bedtime. Most folks around here believe it’s on account of Agnes and Acanthus creating the habit of this prescribed, ritual foot washing that all four of the Richman boys became preachers, living their lives in Christ’s service, washing the feet of the masses, so to speak.

  Doc Pritchard’s problem was halitosis. He would go to examine someone up close and personal like, and many folks just keeled right over from the odor of it all. It got to the point that he handed his patients the smelling salts before he opened his mouth.

  When Agnes was done, Doc smelled slightly pepperminty and the odor of dried lavender wafted around Joe in a cloud.

  Agnes cured gout with sunflowers, ulcers with coconut milk and shingles with tar and feathers. Her concoctions got more outrageous as the afflictions in the community grew. There were rumblings of concern, but remarkably, no one died. Plenty of people felt enough better that Agnes stayed busy with a cross section of the populace so diverse that the Junior League from over in Raleigh asked her for a few recipes for their new fundraising cookbook’s chapter on healing herbs.

  Pauline Morris and her husband Cane were despairing over their inability to conceive. Aunt Agnes had them eating pickles and peanut butter, using Karo syrup to sweeten their tea and saying prayers. Aunt Agnes always prescribed lots of prayer.

  Even though my relative was renowned for her healing touch, Uncle Clyde had some reservations about enduring suffering that would result in the unusual cures he watched her concoct for other folks.

  My uncle didn’t see anything wrong with hiding a stash of aspirin or taking a long draught from a discreet silver flask of Black Jack Daniels.

  This system of dealing with daily headaches and sneaking an over-the-counter rub for the occasional arthritic pain in the hip worked well for my uncle. His personal self- medicating plan suited him just fine, until a pain in a more private sector proved more than Clyde could manage on his own.

  Uncle Clyde, dressed in overalls, a big floppy straw hat and black plastic sunglasses, came in disguise to see Doc Pritchard about a raging case of hemorrhoids. As the doctor’s nurse, he swore me to absolute secrecy and, as a nurse, it was my promise to help aid in the solace of patients without causing them further pain. That very promise to cause no harm drove me out of the exam room into the hall during Clyde’s check-up.

  This was my attempt to save my uncle some scrap of dignity as much as to spare myself a humiliating and indelibly imprinted vision of the naked hind quarters of a relative on my psyche.

  “Look here, Clyde,” I heard the Doc say, as he snapped off his gloves and opened the door to let me in, “I can give you some cream that will help with your pain a little bit. You’re going to need sur
gery to straighten your problem out. Why don’t you go on home and tell Agnes what’s going on. Call me back and we’ll schedule a visit with the proctologist in Summerton for early in the week.”

  “I’m not telling Agnes anything!” Clyde retorted. Then he pointed a long, gnarled finger at me as I cleaned up the exam room, “And neither are you, Missy! There’s some things sacred to a man, by damn, and if I was supposed to tell a woman what I got, then I’d have HERaroids and not HIMaroids! It ain’t no body’s business but my own.”

  I put my right hand up, my fingers in the Girl Scout promise. Then I crossed my heart.

  “Okay, Clyde,” said the Doc, “Take this script and have it filled. It’s a cream-based salve with a little bit of painkiller in it. Be liberal with it, and it should help.”

  “What’s the liberals got to do with this?” groused Clyde, “A good Republican can have a pain in the arse without politics figuring in!”

  “I mean use a lot of it, Clyde,” Doc said, “You can always have it refilled.”

  I rolled my eyes at the Doc and we ushered Clyde out into the sunlight. That, I thought, should be the last I heard about that.

  I was so wrong.

  After work that afternoon, I went straight to the pharmacy. I needed some Covergirl and had an invitation to try something new.

  Clyde came strolling in right before I left. When he got there, a crowd was eating ice cream at the soda fountain watching a woman with three shades of red hair demonstrating makeup for Mary Kay.

  Every single person in the store asked my uncle a question about Agnes. He was beginning to look a little desperate when Joe glanced over the high pharmacy counter and noted the perspiration dribbling down Clyde’s face.

  “Hey, Clyde,” hollered Joe, “C’mon back here and help me with something, will ya?”

  Uncle Clyde slipped to the back between the shelves of medications. He palmed the script to Joe and stood awkwardly out of view from the sales floor. I could not help but eavesdrop.

  “Look, Joe, I am not talking to Agnes about this! There’s no telling what cure she’d come up with and besides that, a man is entitled to keeping his business, his business!”