Home Fires dk-6

by Margaret Maron

  “An upright young black woman in a black church—why should that surprise you?” asked the preacher from deep inside my skull.

  “Upright but uptight. Maybe a political move?” wondered the pragmatist.

  Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t tell if it was the imminent baptism of Jesus that held her attention or one of the men on the left. Wallace Adderly or Ralph Freeman.

  The church was filled with the hum and murmur of voices as we waited for Sunday School to be over at eleven. Even the preachers and Wallace Adderly were talking together in low rumbles. I leaned my lips to Maidie’s ear and whispered, “Is Cyl DeGraffenried a member here?”

  “Never moved her membership up from New Bern,” Maidie whispered back, “but here’s where she was baptized. That’s her granny sitting next to her. Miz Shirley Mitchiner.”

  Just then, a large woman in a blue lace dress and wide brimmed white hat came in from a side door, went to the piano, and without hesitation swung straight into a rollicking hymn. Children and adults streamed in from the Sunday School classrooms. They filled the few remaining empty pew spaces and soon lined all the sides.

  Singing a joyful praise song, the choir marched down the aisle in royal blue robes with white satin collars and took their places in the stall behind the pulpit.

  The director signalled and soon we were all standing and singing and clapping in time to “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  My mind often wanders during the sermon and today was no exception after Reverend Ligon introduced “my brother in Christ, the Reverend Floyd Putnam from Jones Chapel right here in Cotton Grove.”

  Putnam was an earnest droner and even though the congregation encouraged his peace-and-harmony platitudes with polite amens and murmured yeses, he never caught fire and I soon found my thoughts drifting to Cyl and her grandmother.

  From where I sat, I could see both profiles. Mrs. Mitchiner was at least seventy. She wore a rose linen suit, and a smart hat of pink roses covered most of her white hair. Her skin was so pale that she could probably pass for white if she chose, while Cyl was a dark rich brown. Mrs. Mitchiner’s nose was aquiline and her mouth had a thin-lipped severity. Cyl’s nose was slightly broader, her lips much fuller. If there was a family likeness, it wasn’t in facial features. Rather, it was the way they both sat so erectly, almost stiffly, their backs barely touching the back of their pew.

  I wondered what it must have been like to grow up the darkest member of a light-skinned family. Had her step-mother made her feel like Cinderella? Had her fairer half-siblings and cousins taunted her? Colleton County must have seemed doubly lonely after her uncle left, which made me wonder all over again why she was still here. Her grandmother?

  And why had she been crying in my office on Thursday? This wasn’t the first time I’d cast my mind back to that morning, but I could think of nothing in the usual lineup of minor offenses she had prosecuted that should’ve brought tears. Besides, she’d been distracted from the minute court began. Maybe something happened before she came to work? It occurred to me again that I didn’t have the slightest notion of Cyl DeGraffenried’s private life. For all I knew, she could have a live-in lover and six kids.

  Well, okay, maybe not kids. Someone would have noticed if she had kids; but if she had a private lovelife...

  Which brought my thoughts around to Kidd again. By now he was probably stopping in Goldsboro for a barbecue sandwich on his way back to New Bern and God alone knew when our schedules would next mesh.

  The Reverend Floyd Putnam called for prayer and I automatically bowed my head and closed my eyes, but I’m afraid my prayers were more temporal than spiritual.

  “Amen!” said Mr. Ligon when Mr. Putnam’s tepid prayer drew to a close. “You’ve given us a lot to think about this morning, Brother Floyd, and we thank you. But before we go any further, we want to welcome Brother Ralph Freeman and the whole congregation of Balm of Gilead here today. As most of you know, Balm of Gilead burned down Wednesday night. The Bible tells us to curse the deed, not the doer and we give thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ that no one was hurt.”

  (“Yes, Lord!” came the murmurs. “Praise Jesus!”)

  “Brother Ralph’s family is with him here today and I’m asking them now to stand up and be known to you. Sister Clara? Stan? Lashanda?”

  An attractive, slightly plump woman of early middle age with processed hair stood up in the front row and smiled shyly as welcoming sounds washed over her from the congregation. Her son Stan was probably thirteen or fourteen and looked as embarrassed as most teenagers are when the spotlight hits them, but his younger sister beamed from ear to ear.

  Another twenty or more people got to their feet when Mr. Ligon called for the members of Balm of Gilead to stand. I wondered which were the strayed sheep that Maidie was annoyed about but decided this wasn’t the time to ask her.

  The choir sang again—“The Storm Is Over Now”—and again we all joined in at the end. Then Wallace Adderly was introduced and Mr. Ligon promised that we’d get to hear him speak after lunch, but now we should welcome the words of Brother Ralph Freeman.

  Ralph Freeman was as dynamic as Floyd Putnam had been dull. He, too, talked of trying to live in peace and harmony and racial goodwill, but somehow his words spoke to the heart and made the spirit sing. For that twenty minutes, he made us believe that Martin Luther King’s dream really could happen, that people might quit letting their eyes stop at a person’s skin but keep on looking deeper until each saw the other’s humanity.

  His face glowed, his words soared and we were caught up in it, longing to believe, aching for the communal unity that bound us together for this brief moment.

  After Mr. Freeman concluded, Reverend Ligon poured benedictions down upon us and then the choir led us out into the sunshine of a perfect Sunday morning in the South.

  ✡ ✡ ✡

  Back when I was a very little girl, dinner on the grounds was just that: a picnic dinner spread on long tables beneath tall oaks or pecan trees, with wooden tubs of lemonade and iced tea at either end and every food known to the congregation’s women in between.

  Yes, yes, I know it’s probably healthier to eat inside in air-conditioned coolness, away from the heat and flies and the dust kicked up by unruly children playing tag around the trees. And certainly it’s more comfortable to sit at a table rather than trying to balance paper plates and cups while standing up outside. Nevertheless, dinner on the grounds loses some of its picnic charm when serving tables are set up in a fellowship hall and people sit in folding chairs at long rows of tables draped in white paper tablecloths rather than walking around to mingle with this one, exchange compliments and recipes with that one, before finding a place to perch with yet another.

  Uncle Ash and I fetched the cooler from the car and Aunt Zell set out her fried chicken, potato salad and watermelon pickles next to Maidie’s chicken pastry and huge bowl of butter beans while the men stood around outside, smoked, talked about the fire, and waited to be called in to eat.

  With so many picnic boxes and coolers already stowed under the table, there was no more room for Aunt Zell’s and I slipped out a side door to carry it back to the car. As I rounded a dump of boxwood shrubs, I almost bumped into a skinny black man of indeterminate middle age.

  Clouds of alcoholic fumes enveloped me and I registered his soiled white shirt half tucked into his pants and a wrinkled tie that hung limply over the collar, its knot halfway down his thin chest.

  “Lemme help you with that,” he said, grabbing woozily for the bulky cooler.

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to sidestep.

  “Naw, I’m ’sposed to help,” he insisted.

  Before it could turn into a full-fledged tug of war, Mr. Ligon suddenly appeared.

  “Arthur!” he said sternly and the man let go so abruptly, I would have fallen backwards if Mr. Ligon hadn’t caught me.

  “I apologize for our sexton’s behavior, Judge.” He glared at the other man
, who seemed to shrink back into the bushes.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It was nice of him to offer to carry this, but it’s really very light.”

  I swung the cooler by one handle to demonstrate, nodded pleasantly and kept on walking. Behind me, I could hear Mr. Ligon speaking with controlled fury, then the sound of a door closing.

  I looked back. They were nowhere in sight. I took a closer look and realized that the boxwoods screened a door that I hadn’t noticed till then. It was covered in the same white clapboard as the fellowship hall and the break was barely visible.

  When I returned from stowing the cooler in the trunk of Uncle Ash’s Lincoln, the door was half open. I could hear the drunken man rage, “You can’t kick me out. I’ll tell the deacons. I’ll tell ’em all about you!”

  “Tell whatever you want,” said the Reverend Ligon in an equally angry voice, “but come next week, your sorry behind is out of here!”

  I scooted past the boxwood bushes and was well inside the fellowship hall when Mr. Ligon came through to inquire genially if it was nearly time to ask the blessing.

  ✡ ✡ ✡

  By one-thirty, I was as stuffed as one of Maidie’s devilled eggs. Across the table from me, Judy Cater, who’s the reference librarian at the Colleton County Library in Dobbs, tried to give me a piece of her pecan pie.

  “No way,” I said.

  “But this one’s made without corn syrup so it’s not too sweet,” she coaxed.

  I am always tempted by pecan pie no matter what the recipe, but what’s the good of church if it can’t stiffen your resolve to resist temptation in all its many forms?

  As the last sips of iced tea were slipping down our collective throats, the Reverend Ligon stepped up to the speaker’s podium at the end of the hall and called us to order. He made a graceful thank-you speech for all the delicious food, praised God for the fellowship, then announced that he wanted to recognize all the dignitaries who turned out today to make this interchurch meeting such a success.

  Indeed, there were a lot more whites than one usually sees at something organized by black Christians. But after Balm of Gilead’s burning Wednesday night, I guess the mostly white establishment wanted to avoid the risk of being thought insensitive. All but two of the county commissioners were here, the Clerk of Court, the superintendent of public schools, Sheriff Bo Poole, DA Doug Woodall and “our own Miss Cylvia DeGraffenried,” the county manager, and of course, Ned O’Donnell, Luther Parker and me.

  The list went on: the president of the Democratic Women, a tall and stately black woman; her Republican counterpart, equally tall, equally stately, white; even Grace King Avery was recognized as returning to “her roots, to her homeplace here in the community after years of educating our young people on the importance of good English.”

  It was almost two o’clock before he turned the microphone over to Wallace Adderly.

  Adderly was savvy enough to know that after a heavy meal and long introductions, somnolence was ready to take over his audience. Impulsively, he called to the choir director and soon the whole hall was rocking with an a cappella version of “This Little Soul Shines On.”

  If the Reverend Freeman was the conciliatory side of Martin Luther King, Wallace Adderly was his militant. Settling his gaze on one white official after the other, he exhorted us to take this morning’s spirit of fellowship back into our neighborhoods, our workplaces and (fixing his eyes on me) our courtrooms; to put our principles into economic and social practice.

  To his fellow blacks, he sounded a clarion call to face up to new responsibilities and renewed challenges, to quit whining about the past and to accept that there never had been and never would be any free lunches in America. “What’s passed for free lunches—namely, welfare—has merely been another way to keep the poor and uneducated in a state of dependency. It’s time we all start paying the full price for what we believe we deserve.”

  It seemed to me that he was pretty much preaching the substance of Cyl DeGraffenried’s text and my eyes searched the crowd for her face. I finally located her two tables over, but to my surprise, she wasn’t sitting in Adderly’s amen corner. Indeed, her chair was pushed so far back from the table—and Wallace Adderly—that she crowded the person behind her. She sat rigidly with her arms locked tightly across her chest and her lovely face was frozen into an expression of intense loathing.

  Adderly’s message was stern but just, and the rest of us all went away feeling righteous and tolerant and convinced that we could overcome with just a little more goodwill and Christian charity.

  That night, Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church and Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle were both put to the torch.

  14

  A hint is something we often drop

  But rarely pick up

  —Friendly Chapel Pentecostal Free Will Baptist

  Word of the fires spread through the county, to the state, and leapfrogged Washington to New York.

  During the night, news teams from all up and down the eastern seaboard swarmed through the Triangle. Microphones were stuck in the faces of everybody who answered a knock at the door or stood frozen in the camera lenses. Somebody thought they spotted Cokie Roberts in Raleigh that morning and another swore that Peter Jennings had been seen ducking into the ABC affiliate on Western Boulevard.

  Cotton Grove itself, indeed the whole western part of Colleton County, seemed to be in shock, but everyone—everyone except the Reverend Byantha Williams perhaps—said it was a blessing that the arsonist had begun with Mount Olive. If Burning Heart of God had been torched first, the volunteer fire trucks would have been out there, trying to save that tumbledown excuse for a church while one of the most historically significant buildings in the county burned to the ground.

  Instead, it was Sister Williams who was completely homeless and churchless when the sun came up red-hot on Monday morning.

  “Praise God for Sister Avery here,” said the elderly preacher as television cameras zoomed in on the black hand that clasped the white hand of her rescuer. A hostile tabby cat sat in her lap and hissed at the interviewer. “She took me in and she saved my life.”

  “Not I,” Grace King Avery said quickly, patting Sister Williams’s hand. “Smudge deserves all the credit. He was so restless last evening that he made me nervous.”

  She smiled down at the dog that sat quietly on its haunches beside her, well away from the cat’s claws. Except for that dark patch of gray hairs between its ears, it was all white, and its black eyes gleamed with intelligence whenever she spoke.

  “I’d already locked up for the night.” Mrs. Avery wore a fresh, pale blue shirtwaist and her gray hair was neat and tidy in its usual bun, but the lines in her face and her red-rimmed, puffy eyes attested to a stressful night without sleep.

  “Smudge just wouldn’t settle down. He kept acting as if somebody were prowling around down by the barn, so I turned on all the outside lights and that’s when I heard a car start up across the branch and drive away. A minute later, the whole back of the church seemed to go up in flames. It was just sheer luck that I was watching.”

  “Not luck, honey,” insisted the Reverend Williams, who looked larger than life-size in a capacious cotton robe splashed with bright red and orange flowers. “God was directing your eye last night. His eye is on the sparrow and He put your eye on me.”

  Once again she launched into the story of how she’d gone to bed at nine-thirty last night and was already sound asleep when she heard Mrs. Avery banging on the door of her little trailer. “She was yelling Fire, Fire! and said I had to get out. Well, I couldn’t find Puffcake and—”

  We had already seen Channel 17’s interview with these two women and heard Sister Williams’s tale of rounding up her various cats, so Uncle Ash set down his coffee cup and flipped to Channel 11 where Miriam Thomas in the studio was adding a question of her own to the remote interview with my ATF friend Ed Gardner and the resident FBI agent who’d hastily flown over from Charlotte. Mo
re racial epithets had been found on one of Mount Olive’s unburned walls.

  “—so yes, Miriam, although it’s much too early to say with complete certainty, our preliminary investigations show enough similarities to make us think that these two fires may indeed be linked to Wednesday night’s burning.”

  Miriam Thomas and her partner, Larry Stogner, reminded viewers that Wednesday night was when Balm of Gilead burned.

  Every local news channel alternated between the smoldering remains of the two churches. At Burning Heart of God, the only visible signs left behind the yellow police cordon were sheets of twisted tin from the roof and the burned-out hulk of Sister Williams’s metal mobile home.

  The cameras caught the fire chief shaking his head woefully.

  “We’re just too short of equipment,” he said. “Way this part of the county’s growing, we need at least a substation and another truck.”

  Standing behind him, Donny Turner nodded his head in strong agreement.

  At Mount Olive, the damage looked awful, but much had been spared. The whole north end of the church was black and charred where only yesterday had been bright Sunday School classrooms, a robing room and the choir stall itself. Flames had destroyed the mural of Jesus with John the Baptist and had licked up against the ecclesiastical chairs before they were brought under control, but the fellowship hall next to the church looked like a total write-off. The fire had started there before jumping to the main building. The roof still stood, and so did an exterior wall with its crudely printed words in green spray paint—“Niggers back to Africa”—but the whole interior was a slurry of waterlogged charcoal.

  “This is bad,” said Aunt Zell, who was too distracted to fix anything more complicated than toast for our breakfast. “This is really just too bad.”

  Uncle Ash shook his head as he pulled a burned slice from the toaster and handed it to me.