“You know,” she said as she took the bag with the new phone in it off the table in the foyer, “it’s absolutely wonderful being with you without that phone ringing.”
“Uhh, baby. The phone hasn’t rung because it’s not working yet.”
“Well, it was still nice.”
He put on his coat and hat and opened the door. He put his finger under Theresa’s chin and kissed her lips so sweetly she almost cried.
“I confess,” he whispered, “it was very nice spending time with my baby without that phone ringing.”
The door closed, blocking out the frigid cold. But Theresa had barely felt it. All she could think about was that Lamont was marrying her and had called her “my baby.”
“God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good,” she whispered to herself and then twirled around in that family room giggling like a little girl.
Lamont started up his car and began to back out of the driveway. He stopped and stared at the house for a second. This was his first visit to Theresa’s house and as soon as he walked through the front door, it was as if he had just come home. And now it was truly about to become his new home. He loved his townhouse but knew that this was where the Lord wanted the two of them to be for a while.
“Umph,” he said. “I came over here mad and wanting to whip Theresa’s butt for tearing up my telephone. And for all practical purposes, I’m leaving a married man.”
Chapter Seventeen
IT’S FREEZING OUT HERE, BOSSMAN,” NINA RHODES whined as she stomped around the hard, icy ground near the old Meeting House at Cashmere Estates.
“Nina, hush,” Nicole admonished.
“Yeah, be quiet,” Lauren added. “If you weren’t all decked out in hoochie gear, maybe you would be warmer.”
“For your information, Big Si-ster,” Nina stated, “my ‘hoochie gear’ was designed for very cold weather.”
“What I want to know, Baby Sis,” Nicole said, “is where did you find those boots?”
“They are kinda hot, huh,” Nina said smiling. She knew she was clean this morning in that outfit, which really was quite warm, despite how hot and sexy it was.
Nina, who had purchased her entire outfit at Miss Thang’s, was wearing a denim miniskirt with cream faux fur around the end of the skirt, a heavy cream turtleneck sweater that hugged her hips, and matching denim, hooded swing coat with fur lining and trim on the sleeves that matched what was on the skirt. She had on thick cream-colored tights that complemented the knit pattern in the sweater, a knitted apple hat on her head, and thick, cream leather gloves. But it was those boots that stole the show. They were two-inch-heeled, knee-high cream leather with blue suede patches all over them.
“You really do have on more clothes than anybody out here,” Lamont said. “So, why are you complaining about the cold?”
“She’s not cold,” Nicole said evenly. “She’s just sleepy. Nina hates to get up before seven. And she always complains about being cold when she is sleepy.”
“Forget you,” Nina said to Nicole.
“Double back to you, Nina,” Nicole shot back at her baby sister.
“If y’all don’t shut up, I’m going upside somebody’s head, and it won’t be mine,” Lauren said, cranky and sleepy herself.
Nina and Nicole didn’t say another word.
“Bossman,” Lauren asked, “why did you drag the team out here at seven in the morning? Couldn’t it wait and couldn’t we do it somewhere inside?”
With the sole exception of Rev. Quincey, the rest of the team members were on the verge of echoing Lauren’s sentiments.
“No,” Lamont said firmly. “We could not wait, we had to come here, and we couldn’t go inside, even if there was an inside to go into. Take a look around.”
He spread his arms out to encompass the landscape.
“Nina, can you see what this barren land will become when the first seeds of those beautiful buildings you have designed are planted?”
Nina’s eyes filled with tears as they followed Lamont’s hands and she “saw” people moving into their brand-new homes. Homes the Lord blessed her with the ability to design. Homes that were beautiful. Homes that hardworking people with less-than-perfect credit scores, big hearts, great faith, and small bank accounts could afford. Homes for people who gladly depended on the Lord to supply their every need.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I see it.”
“Team, I called us here to pray us to victory. Because this morning at eight o’clock, one hour before the so-called real meeting is to take place, Jethro Winters and his people have been invited to present their plans without the burden of having to defend themselves against the opposition. I cannot fight that. But the Lord sure can do it for me. So, I need y’all to pray with me, to stand with me, as two or more gathered in His name. Okay?”
They all nodded and he continued.
“I have to admit. I had a sleepless night worrying about this. Then I got up, got down on my knees, and turned it over to the Lord, who led me to read Joshua 10: 8-10: The Lord said to Joshua, Do not be afraid of them; I have given them into your hand. Not one of them will be able to withstand you.
“After an all-night march from Gilgal, Joshua took them by surprise. The Lord threw them into confusion before Israel, who defeated them in a great victory at Gibeon . . .
“That’s us, y’all. The Lord has blessed us with the contract. And if not one person on the DUDC—”
“Uhh,” Craig Utley said quietly.
“Okay,” Lamont continued. “If everybody on the committee but Craig here votes against me and gets on television and all over the radio to say that they want Jethro Winters and his folk, we will still get that contract.
“The Lord told Joshua—”
“Bossman,” Nicole said, “you love yourself some Book of Joshua, don’t you?”
Lamont sighed and said, “Father, give me strength.”
“But I thought that’s why you were all up in Joshua,” Nina added.
“Can we just find out what else Lamont got out of Joshua so we can finish our business and get out of this cold?” Rev. Quincey asked.
“In Joshua 1:9, the Lord said: . . . be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.
“Team, that was for us. This battle has already been won. And to demonstrate our faith, I dragged all of you out here this morning so that we could pray and bless the wonderful new community that we are going to build.”
Rev. Quincey stepped forward and was about to instruct them to join hands. But they were a step ahead of him. Members of the Green Pastures team, including the new folks, were holding hands and waiting to start praying: the Rhodes sisters, Craig Utley, Uncle Joseph, and the Lacys, who had collected so much useful information on the down-low that Lamont had decided to have both Baby Doll and her husband come work for him.
“Father,” Rev. Quincey began, “thank You for this incredible group of folk who have humbled themselves before You and can’t wait to do Your will in this community. Lord, there are so many families who want to live in the kind of neighborhood You will lead them to build here. Let the team see whatever it is You want them to see and show them how to bring Your will to life on this plot of land. And Lord protect the neighborhoods that surround this place and keep them in good standing—too many people have worked too hard and too long to be uprooted and displaced like refugees in their own land.
“Lord, the devil is a liar. And anybody who thinks that Green Pastures will not be building up in here is a fool and one who loves a lie. So, we rebuke the devil in the name of Jesus. And we claim the victory in the name of our precious Savior, Jesus Christ, that this land is Your land, and this time next year a whole bunch of folks who love You will live here. Let all that are standing here and gathered in the name of the Lord say . . .”
“Amen!”
“Now,” Rev. Quincey said. “Let’s get going. I’m hungry, I’m s
leepy, and I am freezing my butt off.”
“Not yet,” Uncle Joseph said. “My Queen made me promise to bless this place and anoint it. So, here, Rev. Do that so we can go.”
Rev. Quincey took the small bottle of Queen Esther’s anointing oil and poured a tiny bit out on the ground. He said, “In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, we ask Thee, Lord, to bless and sanctify the entire complex and the surrounding neighborhood. Make it the kind of community that is filled with the blessings and anointing of Your Holy Spirit. Make it a place where people come to buy a home and end up finding Salvation and eternal life. Make it a place filled with people who are saved, sanctified, and full of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
“Now we can go,” Uncle Joseph said. Even though he was glad to get out of the cold, he knew this place needed to be blessed so that it would not risk becoming spiritually depleted, demoralized, and abandoned again. The old Cashmere had been a great place to live. But it hadn’t been blessed and dedicated to the Lord the first go-round.
Maybe that is what happened to a lot of good affordable communities that fell on hard times and became abandoned or a den of iniquity like the Cashmere. It’s very likely that those neighborhoods had not been anointed and blessed, leaving an opening for all of the wrong things and people to creep up in them and ruin the landscape of community life, chasing away all who were capable of making it a decent place to live. Therefore, they had to anoint and bless this new community, so that by God’s grace folk could have a wonderful, safe, and beautiful place to live.
Craig glanced down at his watch and tugged at Lamont’s sleeve.
“I’m going over to the meeting. I think I need to get there before you.”
Lamont agreed. They shouldn’t walk in together.
“Me and the Mrs. coming, too—if that’s all right with you, Mr. Craig. ’Cause Lamont here will need some extra eyes ’n’ ears when he’s in there.”
“That’s fine,” Craig answered, trying not to stare at Mr. Lacy, who he could have sworn was blind.
“Extra eyes ’n’ ears don’t always have to be the natural ones you sighted folks rely so heavily on all the time. I can ‘see’ a whole lot, you know. And my wife here don’t miss a thang. Do you, Baby?”
Baby Doll started blushing and said, “Naw, I don’t miss much. And I’ll make sure I catch everything going on in that room to protect Lamont.”
“Well, that’s settled then,” Craig said. “Do you two need a ride?”
“No,” Mr. Lacy said, “we has some transportation.”
Craig looked around to see how they had gotten here, realizing that the two of them had arrived before everybody else.
“Don’t try and figure that one out, man,” Lamont said. “It’ll give you a headache. I know ’cause I’ve tried and failed.”
Craig pulled into a parking space at the Washington Duke Inn and hurried in to get out of that freezing cold—which was far below the normal temperatures for Durham this time of year. He took the elevator up to one of the meeting rooms and headed down the hall. The first people he laid eyes on were Jethro Winters and Patty Harmon coming off another elevator. He didn’t miss that their elevator had come down to this floor instead of coming up from the lobby.
His wife always said that “the devil makes people so stupid.” And she was right. Because thinking folk would have taken separate elevators down to the lobby and then back up. But then, clear-thinking folk wouldn’t have a need for that strategy because they would be too busy thinking on how to live right, and not need to think on how to get by with wrong.
Craig honestly wondered what Jethro saw in Patty Harmon. He had met Bailey on several occasions and thought that she was a very beautiful and sophisticated woman. Patty, on the other hand, always made him wonder if she had ever worked as a stripper, or tried to get into the college shoot for Playboy magazine back in the day. She had a decent education, a bit of power and influence, and about as much class as the resident round-the-way girl at the honky-tonk bar—the one who was dressed in undersized clothes, had big, brassy blond hair, and wore harsh, dark eye makeup that did absolutely nothing for her pale skin.
Craig gathered from this location that many of the DUDC’s members wanted to make sure that Jethro had sufficient time to use his charm and his wallet to sway the undecided committee members in his direction without having to answer to anybody. Because if they were in the official offices downtown, anybody from the opposing team would have a right to sit in on Winters’s presentation if they happened to drop by. And if that happened, the committee would be forced to give the opposition—in this case members of the Green Pastures team—equal time and attention.
He found the room and took a seat amongst the rest of the committee, and Jethro’s people. There were only three black people present—Rev. Parvell Sykes, Charmayne Robinson, and the lone black voice on the DUDC, an uptight businessman whose name Craig could never remember. He found it interesting that Sykes and Charmayne were not sitting together. But then that should not have been surprising. Winters was the master of the divide-and-conquer war strategy.
Patty and Jethro finally came into the room. She was grinning like a cat and putting all of her business in the street—especially when she took a seat next to Jethro and sat there with her hand on his thigh. But in a matter of seconds that grin, along with Jethro’s smug expression, were wiped clean off their faces when the next person waltzed through that door.
Even Craig was caught off guard when Bailey Catherine Winters walked in wearing a dark brown mink coat over a beige V-neck cashmere sweater, chocolate suede pants, and matching suede ankle boots. Her thick dark hair was swept up into an elegant chignon, and held in place by a lovely sterling silver and topaz clip. But what set this ensemble off were the diamonds. Bailey had three-carat studs in her ears, a four-carat solitaire hanging off a delicate platinum chain around her neck, and a ten-carat platinum wedding ring.
By this time, the folks huddled in the doorway behind her—Lamont, the Lacys, and the company’s legal representative, Nicole Rhodes—had taken a seat to watch the show. Even though it was still early morning, Craig kept getting a craving for some hot-buttered popcorn and an ice-cold Pepsi-Cola.
Bailey ignored her husband’s silent request for her to sit down, and walked right over to where Patty was sitting. She stared at Patty like she was the cheapest and nastiest thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
At this point, Patty decided that she was not going to kowtow to this high-siddity woman. If Bailey couldn’t hold on to her man, then that was Bailey Catherine’s problem and not hers. So, in that moment of low-class insanity, Patty put the hand that Jethro had quickly removed, back on his thigh and slid it higher.
Bailey’s eyes narrowed and Jethro started sweating.
Charmayne, who had never seen him anything but arrogant and cool, eased out of the chair she was sitting in to one that gave a better view. She never did like that Patty Harmon and couldn’t wait for the show to begin. How often did some black folk get to see some uppity white folks cut the monkey fool with each other?
“I never quite understood what the black colloquial expression ‘skank’ meant until now,” Bailey said in her cool, deep alto and refined Southern lady voice.
“Sugar darling,” Jethro began and then shut his mouth when Bailey’s eyes sliced right through him.
“You want me to hold your coat, Mrs. Winters?” Charmayne asked sweetly.
“No, but thank you for offering, Ms. Robinson,” she answered, glad to have a chance to finally see this Charmayne that Jethro was always mumbling and moaning over in his sleep. She thought her a very pretty black woman and was relieved to discover that Charmayne did not want her husband.
Charmayne didn’t say another word. She knew when Bailey, who had never laid eyes on her, called her by name that this white woman was not one to be messed with.
Patty had heard the word “skank,” too, but never gave it much thought. Now she wished one of the blacks in the room w
ould say something that would shed some light on the specifics of what Bailey had just called her.
“I bet a host of men in this community have paid you to give them a lap dance,” Bailey said, delighted when she saw pure rage burning in Patty’s eyes. She took boxing lessons from a former statewide middleweight champion, Mr. Z. T. Thomas, who had also taught her how to pick a fight.
Mr. Thomas, a tough white farm boy from Hillsborough, North Carolina, had once told her, “Bailey Catherine, the best thing you can do to an opponent is to get them so mad they lose their heads and hop up swinging. All you got to do at that point is stay cool and calculate where you need to throw your first punch.”
“Fake-boob, skank,” Bailey said, satisfied that she had accomplished her first line of offense when Patty jumped up and got in her face.
“You better take that back.”
“Skank.”
“I’m warning you.”
“Your mother is a skank, too. And so is your overly oiled grandmother.”
The black folks in the room—that is with the exception of the wannabe on the committee—hollered with laughter. They could not believe that this classy white woman had called another white woman a “skank,” and then went on to say in classy white woman dialect, “Yo’ mama is a skank and yo’ greasy granmama, too.”
Patty was fit to be tied—especially when the black folks started laughing. She raised her hand and gave Bailey that quick, sharp white woman slap.
Bailey raised her fist and punched Patty so hard she fell out cold on the floor. Then Bailey got the pitcher of water and poured it on Patty’s face.
When she was sure she had come to, Bailey squatted down and said, “You stay away from my man. ’Cause the next time you sneak yourself a ride on my husband, I am going to beat your behind like you just sneaked and tried on my fur coat.”
Bailey glared at her husband and then started walking out the door. Jethro hopped up and hurried to follow his wife out of the room. Last thing he needed was one of her male relatives showing up at his office suite ready to fight and cuss and act crazy. He had too much riding on this deal to have to cope with any more family drama. And Bailey’s family, as snooty as they acted in public, loved to fight and they loved drama.
Holy Ghost Corner Page 27