BUT, NO MATTER HOW I FELT, life had to go on.
I picked EttaMae up on Sunday morning. She was wearing a royal-blue dress with giant white lilies stitched into it. Her hat was eggshell-white, just a layered cap on the side of her head. Her shoes were white too. Etta never wore high heels because she was a tall woman, just a few inches shorter than I.
On the way I asked her, “You talk to Mouse?”
“I called him yesterday, yeah.”
“An’ what he say?”
“Just like always. He start out fine, but then he get that funny sound in his voice. Then he talkin’ ’bout how he will not be denied, like I owe ’im sumpin’. Shit! I’ma have t’kill Raymond if he start comin’ ’round scarin’ LaMarque like he did in Texas.”
“He say anything to LaMarque?”
“Naw. He won’t even talk to the boy no more. Why you ask?”
“I dunno.”
FIRST AFRICAN BAPTIST CHURCH was a big salmon-colored building, built on the model of an old Spanish monastery. There was a large mosaic that stood out high on the wall. Jesus hung there, bleeding red pebbles and suffering all over the congregation. Nobody seemed to notice, though. All the men and women, and children too, were dressed in their finest. Gowns and silk suits, patent-leather shoes and white gloves. The smiles and bows that passed between the sexes on Sunday would have been scandalous anywhere else.
But Sunday was a time to feel good and look good. The flock was decked out and bouncy, waiting for word from the Lord.
Rita Cook came with Jackson Blue. He probably sniffed after her and moved in when Mouse got bored. That’s the way most men do it, they let other men break the ice, then they have clear sailing.
Dupree and his new wife, Zaree, were there. She had once told me that her name was from Africa and I asked her from what part of Africa. She didn’t know and was angry at me for making her look foolish—after that we never got along too well.
I saw Oscar Jones, Odell’s older brother, on the stairs to the church. Etta was saying hello to all the people she hadn’t seen yet, so I moved toward where Oscar stood.
As I suspected, Odell was there standing in the shadow of a stucco pillar facade.
“Easy,” Oscar said.
“Howdy, Oscar. Odell.”
They were brothers, and closer than that. Two men with slightly different faces whose clothes hung on them the same way. They were both soft-spoken men. I’d seen them talking but I’d never heard a word that one said to the other.
“Odell,” I said. “I got to talk to you.”
“Why don’t you come over here.”
I waved at Oscar and he bowed to me, that was about a year of conversation for us.
Odell and I walked around the side of the church, down a narrow cement path.
When we were alone I told him, “Listen, man, I got some business with a white man work here.”
“Chaim Wenzler?”
“How you know ’bout it?”
“He the only white man here, Easy. I don’t mean here today, ’cause he a Jew an’ they worship on Saturday—or so I hear.”
“I need to get next to ’im.”
“What do you mean, Easy?”
“I gotta find out about him fo’ the law. Tax man got me by the nuts on this income tax thing an’ if I don’t do this he gonna bust me.”
“So what you want?”
“A li’l introduction is all. Maybe something like workin’ fo’ the church. I could take it from there.”
He didn’t answer right away. I know that he was uncomfortable with me nosing around his church. But Odell was a good friend and he proved it by nodding and saying, “Okay,” when he had thought it out.
But then he said, “I heard about Poinsettia Jackson.”
We stood before a small green door. Odell had his hand on the knob but he was waiting for my reply before he’d open up.
“Yeah.” I shook my head. “Cops wanna chase it down, but I can’t see that somebody killed her. Who’d wanna kill a sick woman like that?”
“I don’t know, Easy. All I do know is that you talkin’ ’bout all kindsa trouble you in an’ the next thing I see one’a the people live in your buildin’ is dead.”
“Ain’t got nuthin’ to do with me, Odell. It’s just a crazy coincidence is all.” That is what I believed, and so Odell believed it too.
He led me down the stairs to the basement of the church, where the deacons gathered and suited up before the service. We came upon five men wearing identical black suits and white gloves. Above the left-hand breast pocket of each jacket was sewn a green flag that said First African in bright yellow letters. Each man carried a dark walnut tray with a green felt center.
The tallest man was olive brown and had a pencil-thin mustache. His hair was cut short but it was straightened so that he could comb a part on the left side of his head. He smelled of pomade. This man was handsome in a mean sort of way. I knew that the women of the congregation all coveted his attention. But once they got it, Jackie Orr left them at home crying. He was the head deacon at First African and women were only the means to his success.
“How ya doin’, Brother Jones?” Jackie smiled. He came over to us and grabbed Odell’s right hand with his two gloved ones.
“Brother Rawlins,” he said to me.
“Mo’nin’, Jackie,” I said. I didn’t like the man, and one thing I can’t stand is calling a man you don’t like “brother.”
Odell said, “Easy say he wanna do some work fo’ the church, Jackie. I tole’im ’bout Mr. Wenzler, you know how you said Chaim might need a driver.”
It was the first I’d heard of it.
But Jackie said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So you wanna help out, huh, Brother Rawlins?”
“That’s right. I heard that you been doin’ some good work wit’ old people an’ the sick.”
“You got that right! Reverend Towne don’t believe that charity is just a word. He knows what the Lord’s work is, amen on that.”
A couple of the deacons seconded his amen.
Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.
The other two were old men. Gentle, pious men who could hold a jostling, impetuous baby boy in their arms all day and never complain, or even think about complaining. They’d never want Jackie’s senior position, because that was something outside their place.
Jackie was a political man. He wanted power in the church, and being deacon was the way to get it. He might have been thirty but he held himself like a mature man in his forties or fifties. Older men gave him leeway because they could sense his violence and his vitality. The women sensed something else, but they let him get away with his act too.
I said, “I got a lotta free time in the day, Jackie, and I could get my evenings pretty free if I had t’. You know Mofass an’ me got a understandin’ so that I can always make a little time. An’ Odell says that’s what you need, a man who could make some free time.”
“That’s right. Why’ont you come over tomorrow, around four. That’s when we have the meetin’.”
We shook hands and I went away.
Etta was looking for me. She was ready for the word of God.
I could have used a drink.
— 12 —
FIRST AFRICAN WAS A BEAUTIFUL CHURCH on the inside too. A large rectangular room with a thirty-foot ceiling that held two hundred chairs on a gently sloping floor. The rows of seats came down in two tiers toward the pulpit. The podium that stood up front was a light ash stand adorned with fresh yellow lilies and draped with deep purple banners. Behind the minister’s place, slightly off to the left, rose thirty plush velvet chairs, in three rows, for the choir.
There were six stained-glass windows on either side of the room. Jesus at the mountain, John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalen prostrate before the Cross. Bright cellophane colors: reds, blues, yellows, browns, and greens. Each window was about fifteen fe
et high. Giants of the Bible shining down on us mortals.
We might have been poor people but we knew how to build a house of prayer, and how to bury our loved ones.
Etta and I went to seats toward the middle of the room. She sat next to Ethel Marmoset and I sat on the aisle. Odell and Mary sat in front of us. Jackson and Rita stood at the back. People were coming in through the three large doors at the back of the church, and they were all talking, but in hushed tones so that there was a feeling of silence against the hubbub of voices.
When everybody was seated or situated in back, Melvin Pride came down the center aisle with Jackie Orr at his heel. Melvin was what First African called a senior deacon, a man who has paid his dues. While they came in I noticed that the other deacons had spaced themselves evenly along either side of the congregation. The choir, dressed in purple satin gowns, entered from behind the pulpit and stood before the red velvet chairs.
Finally, Winona Fitzpatrick came down the aisle, twenty feet behind Melvin and Jackie. She was the chairwoman of the church council. Winona was large woman in a loose black gown and a wide-brimmed black hat that had a sky-blue satin band. The room was so quiet by then that you could hear the harsh rasp of Winona’s stockinged thighs.
As I watched her progress I noticed a large young man watching me from across the aisle. He was wearing a decent brown suit that had widely spaced goldenrod stripes. His broad-rimmed fedora was in his lap. His stony dull eyes were on me.
Jackie took his place as lead singer of the choir, and Melvin stood before the group with his hands upraised. Then he looked down behind him, and for the first time I saw a small woman sitting at a large organ just below the podium.
Then there was music. The deep strains of the organ and Jackie’s high tenor voice. The choir sang in back of that.
“Angels,” Etta muttered. “Just angels.”
They sang “A Prayer to Sweet Baby Jesus.” After Melvin was sure he’d guided them into harmony he turned to add his bass to Jackie’s high voice.
Melvin was Jackie’s height, but he was black and craggy. When he sang he grimaced as if in pain. Jackie seemed more like a suitor trying to talk his way into the bedroom.
The song filled the church and I loved it even though I was there for something else. Even though I was going to go against a member, or at least a helper, of that flock, still the love of God filled me. And that was strange, because I had stopped believing in God on the day my father left me as a child in poverty and pain.
“Brothers and sisters!” Reverend Towne shouted. I hadn’t been looking when he came to the dais. He was a very tall man with a big belly that bulged out from his deep blue robes. He was dark brown with strong African features and dense, straightened hair that was greased and combed back away from his forehead.
He ran his left hand over his hair as the last members of the crowd went silent, then he looked out over the faces and grinned and shook his head slowly as if he had seen someone who had been missing for years.
“I’m happy to see you all here this Sunday morning. Yes I am.”
No one spoke but there was a kind of shudder in the room.
He held his big open hands out toward us, relishing our human warmth as if he stood before a fire.
“Was a time once when I saw a lotta empty chairs out there.”
“Amen,” one of the elder deacons intoned.
“Was a time,” the minister said, and then he paused. “Yes. Was a time that we didn’t have no peanut gallery in the back. Was a time ev’rybody could sit and listen to the word of the Lord. They could sit and meditate on his spirit.
“But no more.”
He looked around the room, and I did too. Everyone else had their eyes on him. The women had a kind of stunned look on the whole, their heads tilted upward in order to bask in the peculiar and cool light that flowed from the stained-glass windows. The men were serious, by and large. They were concentrating every fiber of their wills to understand the ways of righteousness and the Lord in their everyday lives. All except the man in the brown suit. His stony glare was still on my profile, and I was wondering about him.
“No, no more,” the minister almost sang. “Because now He is marching.”
“Yes, Lord!” an old woman shouted from down front.
“That’s right,” the minister spoke. “We are going to have to go to the church council to expand the roof of the Lord. Because you know he wants all of you in his flock. He wants all of you to praise his name. Say it. Say, yes Je-sus.”
We did, and the sermon started in earnest.
Towne didn’t quote from the Bible or talk about salvation. The whole sermon was aimed at the dead and maimed boys coming back home from Korea. Reverend Towne worked in a special clinic that tended to the severely wounded. He spoke especially long and poignantly about Wendell Boggs, a young man who’d lost his legs, most of his fingers, one eye, the other eyelid, and his lips in the service of America. Bethesda Boggs, a member of the congregation, wailed as if to underscore his terrible litany.
Together they, mother and minister, had us all squirming in our chairs.
After a while he started talking about how war was a product of man and of Satan, not God. It was Satan who waged war against God in his own home. It was Satan who had men kill when they could turn the other cheek. And it was Satan who led us in war against the Koreans and the Chinese.
“Satan will take on the guise of a good man,” Reverend Towne intoned. “He will appear as a great leader, and you will be blinded by what looks like the fireworks of glory. But when the smoke clears and you squint around to see, you will be surrounded by the wages of sin. Dead men will be your steppingstones and blood will be your water. Your sons will be wounded and dead, and where will God be?”
He had me back on the front lines. I was choking the life out of a blond teenage boy and crying and laughing, and ready for a woman too.
He ended the sermon like this:
“My question to you is, what are you going to do about Wendell Boggs? What can you do?” Then he made a gesture toward the choir, and Melvin lifted his hands again. The organ started up and the choir rose in song. The music was still beautiful but the sermon had turned it sour. There was a collection by the deacons, but many people left even before the plate got to them.
Everywhere people were grumbling.
“What do he mean? What can I do?”
“A minister ain’t no politician, that’s illegal.”
“We cain’t hep it.”
“Communists are against God. We gotta fight ’em.”
Etta turned to me and took hold of my hand. She said, “Take me home, Easy.”
— 13 —
TOWNE WAS OUT IN FRONT of the church with Winona, Melvin, Jackie, and a couple I didn’t know. The couple were older and they looked uncomfortable. They’d probably shaken the minister’s hand every Sunday for twenty or more years and they weren’t going to stop just because Towne gave one sour sermon.
“Easy,” Melvin said. We knew each other from the old days back in the fifth ward, in Houston, Texas.
“Melvin.”
Jackie was wringing his hands. Winona was gazing at Reverend Towne. It was only then that I noticed Shep, Winona’s little husband, standing in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him in church.
“That was a powerful and brave sermon, minister,” Etta said. She walked up to him and shook his hand so hard that his jowls shook.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” he replied. “It’s good t’have you up here, Sister Alexander. I hope you’re planning to stay for a while.”
“That all depends,” Etta said, and then she stole a quick glance at me.
Winona stepped up and said something to Towne, I couldn’t make out what, then Etta asked, “How is that boy’s folks? You think I could he’p ’em?”
I had to laugh at those women fighting over the minister. I think Etta was doing it just because she didn’t like to see Winona flirting there in front of her own hus
band.
I saw Jackie and Melvin move to the bottom of the stairway. There they began to argue. Jackie was waving his hands in the air and Melvin was making placating gestures, holding his palms toward the handsome man as if he were trying to press Jackie’s anger down.
I would have liked to know what they were fighting about, but that was merely curiosity, so I turned back to EttaMae.
She had linked arms with the minister and they were walking away. Etta was saying, “Why don’t you introduce me to the poor woman, I could maybe do the cooking on some days.”
I got to look over my shoulder to see Melvin and Jackie still arguing at the bottom of the stair. Melvin was stealing glances up at me.
“Go get the car, Shep,” Winona said, casual and cruel.
“Okay,” he answered. Then little brown Shep, in his rayon red-brown suit, went away to the parking lot.
“Etta with you, Easy?” Winona asked before Shep disappeared around the building.
“Say what?”
“You heard me, Easy Rawlins. Is EttaMae your woman?”
“Etta ain’t rightly nobody’s, Winona. She don’t hardly even like t’think she belongs t’Jesus.”
“Don’t fool with me,” she warned. “That bitch is givin’ the minister the eye, an’ if she free it’s gonna have t’stop.”
“He married?” I asked, shocked.
“ ’Course not!”
“Well, Etta ain’t neither.”
I shrugged and Winona gnashed her teeth. She went down the stairway in a huff.
I looked down at the bottom of the stairs, but Jackie and Melvin were gone, so I turned to enter the church. I found myself at about chest level with a brown suit that had goldenrod stripes. He was standing on a higher stair but even if we stood toe to toe he would have towered over me.
“You Rawlins, ain’t you?” he asked in a voice that was either naturally rough or husky with emotion.
A Red Death Page 7