by Pearl Cleage
But all that could wait until later. In offering advice, sincerity is worth a lot, but timing is everything.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said again. “I’ll call you if Eddie turns up something. Don’t worry.”
“Right,” she said.
“Okay. Don’t worry a lot.”
“Better.”
She promised to call me later, but the phone rang almost as soon as I hung it up.
“Worry central,” I said, figuring Joyce had forgotten to tell me something.
“Pardon me?” The strange voice on the other end sounded confused. “I’m trying to reach Joyce Mitchell.”
“She’s not here right now,” I said. “This is her sister, Ava Johnson. Can I help you?”
“Is your sister the Joyce Mitchell who’s running the youth program at the church?”
“The program isn’t affiliated with the church anymore,” I said.
“Thank God!” The relief in her voice was so intense, it surprised me.
“Who is this?” I said.
“I have some information for your sister.”
“About what?” I said. In light of the events of the last forty-eight hours, I felt a healthy suspicion of strangers on the telephone was in order.
“About Reverend and Mrs. Anderson. I was a member of their church in Chicago.”
She was visiting her aunt not far away. I gave her directions to the house and put on a fresh pot of coffee. I figured the nap I’d been headed for could wait a little while. This sister sounded like a woman with a story to tell, and I was damn sure ready to listen.
• 9
susan hughes was driving her aunt’s old blue Chrysler and she rocked it to a stop in the yard like she was still getting the feel of the brakes. When she got out of the car, she stopped for a minute and looked at the lake with real affection. I wondered if she had come here as a kid, too. People who haven’t been here for a while are always surprised at how beautiful it still is. They forget that the reason people stopped coming wasn’t because the place stopped being pretty, but because too many folks found the idea of an all-black paradise to be a contradiction in terms. It was sort of like that Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to be a part of any club that would have us as a member. Reminded me of people moving to Atlanta because it’s supposed to be the black Mecca and then running to buy a house in an all-white suburb.
She accepted my offer of a cup of coffee and we sat down in the living room. She looked to be about my age, even though she was stylishly dressed in an outfit made for someone fifteen years younger.
“I read about your sister’s program in the Lake County paper,” she said. “My aunt has back issues for a year stacked beside the coffee table like she’s really going to get around to reading them all one day. I was going through them to prove to her she wasn’t going to miss anything if she went on and threw them out and I saw this picture.”
She reached in her purse and took out the folded page she’d taken from the paper. There was a lot of religious news about revivals and homecomings and bake sales, and right in the middle, a photograph of Joyce, the Good Reverend, and Gerry standing in a group of about ten of Joyce’s Sewing Circus regulars holding up their babies and grinning like somebody had told them to smile and say money. The caption said: Expanded Nursery Program First Step in Youth Outreach Initiative.
Joyce had shown me the picture and laughed about how pissed off Gerry had been and how nervous the Rev was about having his picture taken, but the photographer had shown them the assignment sheet where it specifically called for the minister to appear in the shot. As far as the photographer was concerned, that settled it.
“I guess Reverend Anderson was nervous,” Susan Hughes said. “After what he did, he ought to be in jail. That’s why I was glad when you told me your sister had moved her program away from him. Better be safe than sorry.”
She said that like she had just thought it for the first time. She looked at the picture thoughtfully and then frowned. “Is it just for girls?”
“So far,” I said, wondering when she was going to tell me what she was talking about. “Once we get our own place open, there’ll be activities for boys, too.”
She nodded vigorously. “Good for you. These young brothers need all the help they can get. I have a son myself.”
She reached for her wallet and flipped through credit cards to a school photograph of a boy who looked to be about thirteen. He was looking seriously into the camera like whatever he had interrupted to come and take a picture was waiting for him to get back to it.
“Corey,” she said, touching his cheek with her fingertip delicately like even his likeness might reject such a blatant display of motherly affection. “He’ll be fourteen in August.”
She put the photograph carefully back into her wallet. “He’s really why I called your sister when I saw that picture. I started not to bother her, or you.” She sounded apologetic. “But then I thought how much difference it would have made if somebody had called any of us. Just to warn us, you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said, putting my coffee down and turning toward her sitting beside me on the couch. “Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything you think we need to know.”
“All right,” she said. “I will.”
• 10
by the time Susan Hughes left the house, I had typed up what she told me on Joyce’s computer, printed out five copies for her to sign, and decided I needed to find Eddie. I thanked Susan for coming to tell me what she knew and went to take a quick shower and change clothes before going into town.
I turned on the shower as hard and hot as I could stand it and stood there breathing in the steam and going over what I’d just heard. Now everything made sense. Gerry had no choice about getting rid of youth activities. That was the only reason the Rev wasn’t behind bars.
It seems young Corey Hughes, a member of the Rev’s Youth Corps for Christ in Chicago, had complained to his father that Reverend Anderson kept trying to touch him and hug him after he told the Rev to quit. His father went immediately to the Deacon Board to demand an investigation. The deacons, basking in the glow of all the positive publicity and new members the well-publicized youth program had generated, instead made discreet inquiries among the other parents, who spoke to their sons and soon discovered that the Good Reverend had not only been trying to touch other boys, he had also invited them to take naps with him on a cot in the church nursery and offered them money to visit with him at the parsonage while his wife was away.
Whether or not any of them responded to his invitations was open to question, but the evidence was so compelling, the church fathers had no choice but to respond aggressively. They called the Rev in and told him that several of the parents were prepared to bring charges. They dismissed him from their pulpit, effective immediately, and asked him what he had to say for himself.
That, said Susan Hughes, is when Gerry stood up. She pleaded for her husband’s reputation as if she were pleading for his life. She lowered her eyes and blamed the Devil, reminding them that Satan always tempted most sorely the one most loved by God. She wept and recounted the history of the last ten years she and the Rev had spent tirelessly building that church from a struggling congregation with a sanctuary that was falling down around their ears into a thriving hub of activity that spilled over from the sanctuary into the streets. In a quiet conclusion, she whispered what the consequences would certainly be to the church’s reputation and future viability if this story was allowed to pass beyond these walls.
At the end of Gerry’s plea, she requested that the one without sin among them cast the first stone, and sat down beside the shuddering, weeping wreck of the Rev to await their decision. She didn’t have to wait long. The deacons had a quick caucus during which they decided that discretion was the better part of valor. They agreed to pay tuition at any Illinois public college for any victims in return for their pledges of silence, and they agreed not to press c
harges against the Rev if he left town, promised to get therapy, and refocused his energies away from any youth ministry for the next five years it would take for him to reach retirement and receive a pension.
Someone had heard that one of their smallest churches was looking for a pastor to minister to a congregation made up mostly of retirees. Gerry closed her eyes and thanked the Lord for all his tender mercies, the Rev cleaned out his office, and Susan Hughes’ husband made the deal with the Deacon Board that would send their son to college and told her to forget about it.
“But then I saw that picture of them and it all came back,” she said. “They made it sound like there was nobody up here anymore but people my aunt’s age, but that isn’t true. I don’t want him to be able to do what he was doing anymore. Not to one more child!”
I thanked Susan Hughes for taking the time to come by and she got up to go, then I remembered another question I thought she might be able to answer.
“Do you know what happened to Tyrone’s mother?”
She turned toward me and shivered as if to shake off a bad memory.
“AIDS.”
I finished my shower and got dressed quickly. I folded a copy of Susan’s statement into an envelope and tucked it into my purse. I needed to show this shit to Eddie now. I knew this was part of the lesson. I just didn’t know which part.
• 11
i hadn’t been in town fifteen minutes when I saw Gerry coming out of the drugstore. I guess the Lord does work in mysterious ways. She hadn’t seen me when I pulled up beside her and stopped. The last time we had been together, she was accusing me of seducing Tyrone. I wondered if she’d heard about Imani yet. I double-parked so she couldn’t pull away without talking to me and got out of the car.
She looked surprised to see me and I think a little afraid. I walked over to her so we were standing face-to-face. She shrank back a little, looking guilty as hell, and reached out her hand like she was going to touch me.
“I was sorry to hear about the baby.”
So she did know what had happened, but her fake condolences were the last thing on my mind.
“Stop lying,” I said. “I know everything.”
She looked confused and wary. “What do you mean? Everything about what?”
I reached in my purse and extended the white envelope. “About the Good Reverend. About the Youth Corps for Christ. About Corey Hughes. About you, Gerry. I know all about you.”
When I said that about the Youth Corps, she snatched the envelope from my hand, but then she tried to regroup fast.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Sure you do,” I said, leaning against her car. “Read it.”
“I’m on my way to take some medicine to Sister McNeil,” she said, trying to reach around me and open the door. “I don’t have time.”
“Sure you do.”
She realized I wasn’t going anywhere and a quick look around showed us to be the only ones on the street.
“Go ahead.”
She tore open the envelope slowly and unfolded the one-page statement. Her eyes scanned it and all the air seemed to go out of her body. Everything drooped.
“Why are you doing this?” she said, refolding the letter slowly without looking at me.
“That’s the same question we kept asking you, remember?”
“The Good Reverend is—”
“Save it,” I cut her off. “He’s anything but good.”
“What do you want?” she whispered.
“I want to help you pack,” I said.
“Please.” She grabbed my wrist and squeezed it. “Let me explain. It’s not what you think.”
“Okay,” I said. “What is it, then?”
“Not here,” she said, looking around quickly to be sure we were still alone.
“Where?”
“The church office. I have to drop off these pills and then I’ll be there. It won’t take but fifteen minutes.”
I started to tell her I’d follow her just to be on the safe side, but where was she going to go? I figured while she dropped off the medicine, I’d take one fast turn down Main Street to see if I could find Eddie and then head on over to the church. Nothing was going to change that fast, and whatever lie she spent the next fifteen minutes concocting didn’t mean a damn thing. I had proof.
“I’ll wait ten minutes,” I said. “Then I’m going straight to the newspaper.”
“The newspaper?” She looked at me and her eyes were begging me to understand, but I wasn’t having it. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said. “Don’t be late.”
And she wasn’t.
november
epilogue
we didn’t plan to have a big wedding. It started off with just me and Eddie, Sister Judith and Bill and Joyce and Imani, at the house. But of course, we had to invite Aretha, who got special permission to come home from Interlochen before the Christmas break, and then Joyce announced it at the Sewing Circus and they all took that to be an invitation and started shopping for new outfits and figuring out how to organize the child care and who was going to bring what to feed everybody and calling the oldsters to see who needed a ride and that was that. Bill said Sister Judith doesn’t know how to do a wedding anyway unless there’s a hundred people dancing in the aisles. She said she knew exactly how. The question was, why would she? If you can’t dance in the aisles for love, when the hell can you dance in the aisles? My feelings exactly once I realized there was nothing I could do to stop the wave rolling toward us with such sweet determination. Besides, after everything that happened this summer, we all deserved a party.
Two months ago, celebration was the last thing on anybody’s mind. Imani was still in the hospital. The trials hadn’t even started. The church was in chaos. Gerry had to take the Rev back to Chicago and have him committed. Once we confronted him with the Corey Hughes story, he retreated for good into some dark corner of his mind where all he was required to do was sit where you put him and rock back and forth until you put him somewhere else. Gerry rejoined her old church and prayed for her husband’s forgiveness.
The police picked up Frank and Mattie on the highway less than fifty miles away, headed for Chicago with the gun lying on the seat between them and no alibis. Tyrone’s participation in the robberies earned him a two-year stint in juvenile, which puts him behind bars until his eighteenth birthday.
All that seems like a bad dream now. Imani’s casts came off last week and she kicked her legs in the air all day like they were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. She just figured out how to turn over, and the first time she gave a little twist and flipped from her back to her stomach, she laughed out loud. So did we.
As quiet as she was at first, now she’s making up for lost time. She coos and babbles and laughs all day long and Joyce talks right back to her. Sometimes I sit on the porch and listen to them while Joyce is cooking dinner, and I swear, they understand each other.
We got our grant from the state back, too, once everything came out, and I’m helping Joyce work on some other proposals so we can keep the Circus going the way it’s supposed to go. I knew when I told Joyce she could put me to work, I was in trouble. Now she says she can’t imagine trying to do this without me.
We’ve started going to church again, too. I still like the music, and Sister Judith never talks about the lake of fire, but it’s not really about the religion to me. It’s just that the church is still the place where the most people get together regularly, and that’s worth a lot. Eddie doesn’t come yet, but we’re working on him.
When Sister Judith got here, the first thing she did was come and talk to Joyce about the Circus and offer her back the fellowship hall space if she wanted it. By that time, though, Eddie had almost finished the renovations on Mack’s house and we were headed for our grand opening.
Sister Judith had been sent here by the Baptists, but she’d been in San Francisco for five years, so she ha
d a New Age overlay that appealed to me. When she prayed, she said Mother/Father God just like Joyce, and the robes she wore on Sunday were accented with strips of Kente cloth. Her husband, Bill, was a teacher and a poet who shared Eddie’s passion for Motown music and sang bass in the choir because he thought he sounded like Melvin Franklin.
I was a little nervous when they first got here. Even though they had spent a couple of summers here as kids and said they always wanted to come back to live, they seemed too good to be true. Why would anybody leave a city like San Francisco to come to Idlewild?
When I put the question to Sister Judith directly, she looked surprised.
“San Francisco never really belonged to me. Not like this place does. There’s something about it. How it started. How it used to be, and how it fell apart. I want to see if we can fix it.”
I still must have looked a little skeptical.
“You came here from Atlanta, right?”
I nodded. It seemed a million years and a million miles from Peachtree Street.
“The black Mecca?” She rolled her eyes.
I laughed. “So they say.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Watching the sun rise, I wanted to say. Walking in the woods. Falling in love. Raising a child. Helping my sister. Protecting my family. Living my life.
“Planning my wedding,” is what I said.
We decided to have it the same night we officially opened the Circus. At sunset we all crowded into the house and Joyce stood up front with Imani on her hip and said how happy she was and proud of what they had done and how she knew Mitch’s spirit was proud, too, and she lit a candle.
Patrice and Tomika spoke on behalf of the women who had started the nursery which became the Sewing Circus and lit their candles from the flame Joyce was holding.
Then one of Mack’s friends spoke on behalf of the oldsters and thanked God they felt safe in their homes again and said how much they all appreciated the young people (anybody under fifty was young to them) checking on them when the robberies were happening and how they especially appreciated that they kept on with it now that everything was okay just because everybody enjoyed the contact.