She wondered why it had come to this, why something that had been so good at first—their lives on this block, their relationships with these people—had gone so terribly bad. Ava’s defiance of the pastor had been the beginning of it, but the death of their sons had set the worst of it in motion. Goode had blamed them, hadn’t been able to see reason. Regina had never understood it. She had loved her son as much as he had loved his, had been torn to pieces by the loss of him, but she had not looked for anyone to blame.
The light in Goode’s office flickered as a shadow moved past the window. Regina got up, intending to go to the porch railing and get a closer look, but without even thinking she went past the railing and on down the steps, on to the sidewalk. She was determined, although she wasn’t sure about what, exactly. When she got to the back door of the church, she tried it and it opened. She went inside, and in the dimly-lit cool of the sanctuary, she was met by the familiar smell of old bibles and hymnbooks. She marveled at how the sense of smell could instantly transport you to another time, and her skin tingled with memory as she recalled Sunday morning services, and Saturday morning meetings, evening prayers, and bake sales. Her hands found the back of a pew in the dim light, and the feel of the wood against her fingertips erased, for a moment, the seventeen years that had passed since she had last been in here, singing and giving praise, her family all around her, her friends close, her God even closer. She had never disconnected herself from the Lord, and still prayed every day and night, but here, in this church, her experience of God had been bigger, more, wrapped up like a gift in the sounds of lifted voices and stomping feet, in the sight of soft, stained-glass light through the picture windows, in the feel of friendship and community all around her. She had left a piece of herself behind here, the piece that was a part of something bigger than Regina, bigger than just family, or just friends, or just God, but was all those things together, and more.
She was pulled from memory by the sound of creaking floorboards and she made her way through the sanctuary to the pastor’s nook, just behind the pulpit. The door was open and light spilled out onto the altar. Regina peered inside and saw Pastor Goode pacing the floor. She watched him in silence for a moment. His shoulders were hunched, his head down, his eyebrows drawn tight together on his forehead. He looked like an old lion in a cage, trapped and troubled, too proud to rest and too tired to roar. Regina remembered him again as a young man, handsome and quick to smile, and she tried to see some of that person in him now, but could not.
She reached up and knocked gently on the doorframe. The pastor looked up, surprised, and when he saw her, his light eyes grew dark. “You aint welcome in here, Regina.”
Regina had not expected to be welcome in the first place, so she entered the room anyway, without hesitation. “It’s time you and me had this out.”
Pastor Goode watched her for a moment, his eyes taking her in, and she was sure he was thinking of the woman she used to be, all those years ago, and not finding much of her left, just as she had seen nothing of his younger self left in him. “It aint nothing to ‘have out’. You on the side of wrong, and I’m on the side of right. Right don’t need to have it out with wrong, right just needs to—”
“Oh, stop it with all that damn sermonizing!” Regina yelled, her voice echoing through the quiet church. “Talk like a normal person for change!”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“You used to be one of those,” she said. “A normal person. We used to like each other. Remember? We was both parents of young children, both devoted to the church. We had a lot in common at one time. I didn’t even know it then, but even our tragedy was the same. My father was killed when I was a child. By white men. Just like yours.”
Pastor Goode moved to the window and leaned against the sill.
“I know what that feels like,” she continued. “I know what that do to your soul. That’s the reason I snapped when my boy died. I didn’t know it, but I was already on the edge, and it wasn’t gone take too much to push me over. What happened to Geo was more than enough. I never got over what they did to my father. I never will.”
Goode sighed and gave her a bored look. “You done?”
“I know it’s hurting you,” she said. “I know it’s eating you up and has been all this time. You lost your father and your son. Just like me. I know.”
He shook his head, mumbled something to himself that she couldn’t make out. Then he leaned his head back against the window, stared up at the ceiling. “You want to know what happened to my father?”
“I already know,” Regina said. “Cops killed him.”
“That’s right. He died in jail. You know the reason he was in there in the first place?”
She shook her head no.
“The reason he was in jail was because somebody attacked a woman out in the suburbs near where we lived—somebody who was tall and skinny and black, just like him. The woman who was attacked identified my father as the one that did it. But it wasn’t him that did it. I know that ‘cause he was home with me and my mother when it happened. We was eating dinner. Biscuits and black-eyed peas—I never will forget it. My mother told the police that, but they didn’t believe her because she was his wife and bound to lie for him. So they took him, locked him up. He was in there three days when we got the call that he’d tried to escape and they shot him.”
Regina remembered, as she and her mother and siblings had lain hidden under their neighbor’s beds, the sounds of gunshots heavy as thunder in the air.
“But that’s only half the story,” Goode said. “My father was a drifter most of his life. He moved around from place to place, farm to farm, city to city, looking for work. He didn’t like to feel stuck, he liked to be able to get up and go when he needed to. When he married my mother and they had me, that didn’t change. We was always moving, never stayed in one place more than a few months. We never got to know our neighbors. I never made any friends, ‘cause if I did I’d just have to leave them, and I got tired of being sad about it. We never joined a church. When my father was arrested, we had lived in Virginia for seven months, and we didn’t have anybody to turn to. There wasn’t no neighbors who could say that he was at home when that woman was attacked, because no neighbors ever stopped by. There wasn’t no church to rally behind him. No reverend to vouch for his character. There wasn’t nobody to help him. After he was killed, and my uncle took me and my mother in, I saw the safety of his community and his church around him, and I wanted that for myself. I decided right then, at fourteen, that I would never be without those things. And that, if I could, if the Lord called me to, I would make sure that nobody I knew went without them, either. And I have done that. I have spent my whole adult life doing just that.”
“Bringing people together in community?”
“That’s right. These people need me. They need me to protect them and support them and keep them close to God, and that’s what I do.”
“Is that what you did for Grace Kellogg?” Regina said. “Is that what you did for us?”
“I tried to. I tried hard as I knew how. It aint my fault your daughter has the devil in her. I tried to put her on the Lord’s path, but she aint want to go that way. So it was my duty to protect the rest of my flock from her influence.”
“You might have started out wanting to help people, to keep them safe,” Regina said. “Maybe that’s true. But somewhere along the way you decided that meant controlling everything they do. It stopped being about the Lord and started being all about Ollie Goode.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what you talking about. I’m gone ask you one more time to leave.”
“I told you I’m gone leave when I’m ready,” she said. “And I aint ready. I got one more thing to say. And that’s this: we are responsible for what happened to Geo. I am responsible for it. Because, no matter what happened, no matter who did the killing, I was his mother, and it was my job to protect him, to keep him safe. I didn’t, so the blame is m
ine. But I aint to blame for what happened to Kenny. Nobody in my family is to blame for that. The Lord wasn’t bringing down no judgment on us that morning. I don’t know why it happened, but I know it wasn’t that. We loved your boy, we let him breathe and be hisself, the way you never did. He loved us. And dedicating your life to making our lives miserable is the worst thing you ever could have done in his name.”
Goode stood there, shaking, glaring at her, and saying nothing.
“Now,” Regina said, “I’m gone leave. ‘Cause I’m ready.”
1959
Maddy and Doris sat on Regina’s front porch, all of them drinking iced tea and planning the next week’s block party. Ava came out of the house and ran down the front steps without saying a word to anybody.
“Ava!” Regina called to her.
Ava stopped.
“I know you aint just walk past Miss Maddy and Miss Doris without saying hello. What’s the matter with you?”
“Hi, Miss Maddy,” Ava said. “Hello, Miss Doris.”
“Where you going, anyway?” Regina wanted to know.
“Nowhere,” Ava said. “Just over to Ellen’s.”
“Well, y’all have a good time, baby,” Maddy said.
Ava smiled and ran off.
Regina thought she saw Doris frown before she turned back to her iced tea.
“I know you got something to say about what Ava did, Doris,” Regina said. “So go ahead and say it.”
Doris shrugged. “Well, maybe I do have something to say.”
“Big surprise,” said Maddy.
“Go on, then.”
“I think your daughter got a point,” Doris said.
Maddy leaned closer to Doris. “Say what?”
Doris frowned. “You heard me.”
“I heard something. Aint no way it coulda been you.”
“Hush, Maddy,” Regina said, and looked at Doris. “What point you think she got?”
Doris looked around, as though checking to see if anybody was listening. There were people sitting out on their porches nearby, but no one was paying any attention to Doris. Still, she lowered her voice a little and said, “That the pastor got too much power around here.”
Regina and Maddy exchanged a look of skepticism.
“I been thinking about it for a while,” Doris said. “Ever since that whole mural idea came up in the first place. I never thought we should have one. I think it’s tacky. But Pastor aint ask me. Matter fact, he aint even ask the elders, and some of them been in that church longer than he been alive. He just decided it all on his own. Well, I didn’t think that was right. But everybody just went along with it, even people I know for sure didn’t want it.
And it just got me thinking.” She looked around again. “Now, I sure don’t condone what that child did, putting us all in chains up on the church like that. That was disrespectful. She always been too wild, if you ask me. But she do got a point, is all I’m saying.”
Maddy reached over and pinched Regina’s arm.
“Ow. What you do that for?”
“I wanted to make sure I aint dreaming this.”
“So, why you pinch me?”
“Oh,” Maddy said. She held out her hand. “Pinch me.”
Regina slapped her hand away.
“Lot of people don’t seem to agree with me, though,” Doris said.
This was not news to Regina. In the week since Ava’s stunt with the mural, not a day had passed when somebody hadn’t told her that her daughter had crossed the line. Vic Jones had even repeated the pastor’s sentiment, that Ava had the devil in her. Malcolm hadn’t said anything about what had happened, but he also hadn’t come by even once in the last week. At church that morning, he had greeted Regina and George unenthusiastically, nodding as he went by, towards a pew a few rows behind them, not sitting with them as he almost always had before.
For every two people who reacted the way Malcolm had, though, there had been another one who seemed to share Doris’ view.
“Sometimes I think Pastor Goode wants to have too much control over folks,” Jane Lucas told Regina one afternoon, as they walked together from the bus stop to their block. “He likes to judge people, but the bible says that’s the Lord’s job.”
Regina sighed. “Well, Ava aint never liked him. And, tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever liked her.”
“What he got to not like about a little girl?”
“I saw it the first time he ever laid eyes on her,” Regina said. “People react to Ava in strange ways, you know, they always have, so I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time. But I think he had a feeling he wasn’t gone be able to control her.”
“So, you agree he’s trying to control people?”
“I don’t know,” Regina said. “But you remember Grace Kellogg?”
Jane nodded. “Of course.”
“Well, I always thought that wasn’t right. I didn’t think she should have been throwed out the church like that. But what really bothered me was how everybody turned on her, just because the pastor said she wasn’t welcome no more.”
“I never did,” Jane said. “I still speak to her to this day.”
“So do I,” said Regina. “And my children still visit with her every now and then. But did you ever tell the pastor you thought what he did was wrong?”
Jane shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I did,” Regina said. “And he aint like it one bit.”
She had gone to him that day after the Easter Bazaar and told him that she didn’t think Grace deserved to be kicked out of Blessed Chapel. “We all sinners in one way or another, Pastor,” she had said. “Aint the church supposed to be there for us even when we don’t do right? Especially then?”
“I gave Grace a chance to repent,” he said. “She refused to. Said she didn’t regret what she had done. It’s my job to protect this congregation from bad influences, from people who would turn them away from God.” He had been calm and polite, even pleasant, in his voice and demeanor, but there had been something very final in his tone, something that had let Regina know that he had made up his mind and that was that. She hadn’t liked it, but she hadn’t argued, because she wasn’t raised that way, wasn’t taught to argue with a man of God. That had been her way of dealing with him ever since. Whenever she disagreed with him about something that she thought was important, she told him so, but when he went ahead and did what he wanted to do anyway, she never challenged him.
Ava had, though. Ava always had.
She said goodbye to Jane Lucas when they got to her house, and then continued home, and when she got there she found Ava in her bedroom, on her bed with her drawing pad in her lap. She came in and sat beside her, and put her arms around her daughter, and kissed her face. Ava didn’t look up from her drawing, but she leaned into her mother a little.
“You an amazing child, Ava,” Regina said.
“I’m not apologizing to that preacher.”
“I aint trying to get you to apologize. I don’t even think you ought to.”
Ava looked up from the drawing. “Good,” she said. Then she shrugged. “It wouldn’t make a difference, anyway. ‘Cause I’m really on his bad side now.”
Sarah had never said anything about Sondra and Ava at the top of the stairs. She knew that Sondra had always hated Ava, since they were little. While that childish dislike barely resembled the loathing she saw in the girl’s eyes that day after church, she told herself, then and for weeks after, that Sondra would never really have done it, that she would have snatched back her foot before Ava tripped, that she did not really want to hurt Ava that much. And that her own failure to warn her sister, then, her hesitation, was not as evil as it felt. She tried not to think about the steepness of that stairwell.
Sitting at the dinner table a few days later, she imagined what her family would say if she told them, what they would think if they knew she had just stood there, had watched her sister walking into danger, and had not said a word.
She kept silent.
Every time Ava left the house, Sarah worried. She took to jumping up whenever she saw her sister headed for the front door, asking where she was going, and wouldn’t she rather stay inside and play cards or something. After the sixth or seventh time, Ava rolled her eyes, annoyed. “Why you so interested in me all of a sudden? You never cared before.”
“I care,” Sarah insisted. “Of course I do.”
Ava frowned and left.
Sarah waited. She sat and waited until Ava came back, and each time her sister walked back in through the door, Sarah felt relief course through her.
One evening, she passed Ava’s room and saw her standing in front of the mirror, brushing her hair. She was wearing a skirt, and dress shoes.
“Where you going?”
“To a party,” Ava said. “And, no, I don’t want to stay home and play Old Maid.”
“Mama and Daddy are letting you go to a party by yourself?”
“No. Geo and Kenny are going, too.”
Sarah went to their brother’s room and found him practicing dance moves in front of the mirror. Kenny was sitting on the bed, reading a comic book. He had eaten dinner at their house for the second day in a row.
“You live here now?” Sarah asked him.
He looked up from his comic, his face turning pink.
“Leave him alone,” Geo said.
“I thought your father didn’t want you over here anymore,” said Sarah.
Pastor Goode had forbade him to go into the Delaney house, in case the Lord rained down fire on it or something. Kenny didn’t seem bothered about it. “I like it better over here than at my house. Especially when my mother aint home. She’s in Jersey at my grandparent’s house, and my dad can’t cook for shit.”
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