Jackleg
The Old Combee Road Church in Lakeland, Florida, was universally referred to as the Big Church, for indeed it was the largest and most splendid edifice in the faith—nearly three thousand tithes-paying members in a cathedral designed to hold perhaps a thousand. Thus, the Big Church was too big. There were three separate morning services (10:00, 12:00, and 2:00) and alternate evening services on Monday and Tuesday nights, but even this was not enough. Youth hour and the lower-level Sunday school classes had to be held outside, with the children seated on the “foot” of the church, their backs erect—or under the movable canopy when the sun was too hot or when it rained. Sunday parking was a weekly spectacle. Two brethren, who were also officers from the Lakeland Municipal Police Department, were hired to direct traffic in and out of the parking lot and keep it flowing on Old Combee Road.
At the Big Church, standing-room only was yet the order of the day, and had been for the last decade, during which four proposals by the elders to build additional churches to counter the attendance problem had been rejected by the congregation. It seemed all the Faithful in Lakeland and the surrounding counties wanted to attend service at Old Combee Road, crowded or not, and nowhere else. And why shouldn’t they? The Big Church, after all, was the church.
The Big Church was the headquarters of the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters and home to its governing minister and highest saint, Bishop Kirkaby Rogers, great-great-grandson of founder Reverend Dr. Cuthbert Rogers. The Big Church was where church doctrine was written. The Big Church was where the hymnals and tracts were printed and where the national, weekly, half hour radio program Voice of the Shepherd was recorded for broadcast. Ministers from all over the country came to be ordained here. The main campus of Bible College was its backyard.
The Big Church, then, was Mecca, but a Mecca with walls too elaborately designed to be expanded. So the beloved Bishop Kirkaby Rogers himself decreed that another church be established in the small community of Plant City about ten miles due west of Lakeland, and he hand-picked a twenty-one-year-old minister, Reverend Barry McGowan, to be its pastor. Reverend McGowan, a magnificent tenor, was voted “most charismatic” by his Bible College fellows, and charisma, Bishop Rogers believed, was essential when moving a goodly number (at least fifteen hundred, he prayed) of the flock from the Big Church to a renovated barn in Plant City.
So the young McGowans moved into the one-bedroom apartment next to the renovated-barn-turned-church and found that Bishop Rogers was right: the Old Combee Road congregation loved Barry, who set them on fire every Sunday for three weeks as guest speaker and featured soloist. The young minister knew his Scripture, and he was not longwinded: his sermons were pleasant and spiritually uplifting. And no one had ever sung “Grace That Is Greater Than All Our Sins” so perfectly. Heaven must sound like this young man.
The saints of Lakeland rejoiced and wept and cried—
Grace! Grace! God’s Grace
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within
Grace! Grace! God’s Grace
Grace that is greater than all our sins
And they came to the stone altar and threw themselves prostrate before the Maker.
Barry beamed, but Peachie, seated at the white piano, could feel that something was not right. These people smiled, but they kept asking about the baby. How old? How old? And you, Sister McGowan, only sixteen? You must have been an honor student to have finished high school so young, they said. You’ll certainly do well.
With God’s help, maybe. And Barry’s singing. For their baby was indeed conceived out of wedlock and she had yet to complete high school, having just that week enrolled in night school. The confusing thing was that Bishop Rogers had chosen them fully aware of their “condition.” Certainly, the most esteemed member of the church would not have selected them unless he thought they would be accepted by the saints of Lakeland.
Afterward, Bishop Rogers joined Barry at the fore of the pulpit. He extended his arms and shouted: “Saints! Saints! Reverend and Sister Barry McGowan. Don’t you love them?” He clapped his hands, and the sound of applause in the Big Church was mighty like a storm. Bishop Rogers waited until there was quiet before he spoke into the microphone: “Those of you who live out near Plant City—Coronet Road, Jim Johnson Loop, Roseland Avenue, Mud Lake Road—you can join the McGowans for services every Sunday beginning next week. It’s going to be a beautiful time in the Lord!”
Again the applause was great, but Peachie couldn’t help thinking, They will not come.
And she was right.
Oh, the ushers were there, serious-faced, eight of them on loan from the Big Church, decked out in their black slacks and skirts, their white shirts and blouses. They stood at parade rest along the back wall, but once service began the doorway was quiet.
About sixty people occupied pews set to accommodate more than fifteen hundred. The young, vocal ones Peachie recognized as Barry’s friends from Bible College, and the stiff ones with cameras she suspected were church officials who had come to gauge the success or failure of this bold new venture.
There was no choir that first Sunday, so Barry acted as minister of music as well as preacher and featured soloist. Between selections, he made wholesome jokes, at which the congregation laughed uproariously. To break the ice, he called on three friends from Bible College who were in the audience (Brothers Magellan, Philip, and Jackson) and got them to perform their version of “I’ll Meet You in the Morning by the Bright Riverside.”
Bless the Lord!
For Peachie, it was a joyous occasion that Sunday, in stark contrast to the lean weeks that followed. The lean years that followed. Another child that followed. The money problem that followed.
And Barry’s delusions—that he was loved, that the people would eventually come.
Two and a half years later, in the early summer, the church still looked like an empty barn to Peachie, the eighteen-year-old mother of the church, as she played the piano for the couple dozen or so who showed up each Sunday.
Peachie had grown up over the two years. If she had stayed in school, she would have been a senior now getting ready to graduate. As it stood, she had not completed her night-school studies because of her duties as a mother of the children and as a mother of the church.
She had gained fifteen pounds, it looked good on her, and her lanky 5’9” frame didn’t seem so lanky anymore. Her face and hips had become fuller. She still wore her hair in twin ponytails. It took her more than an hour to comb it back into submission, but sometimes she opened it up and let it flow about her head like a mane.
The hair was her hidden wildness. When it was open like that, she felt a freedom she did not possess in actuality. But there was a downside to it.
Barry would see her like this and rush to make ferocious and sometimes satisfying love to her.
However, he feared this side of her too. Sometimes he would see her like this and call her the whore of Babylon and order her to comb it immediately.
That he called her a “whore,” she believed, was highly ironic, but she had no proof, only her intuition.
“I figured it out,” Peachie said one day as she combed her wild hair in front of the mirror. “They want you to sing gospel. They brought you up here to sing gospel. They brought you here to attract the black members of the Big Church.”
“I’m an operatic tenor,” Barry answered. “I don’t sing boogie-woogie.”
“It’s not called boogie-woogie, it’s called gospel. Everybody’s singing it. Stop being so old-fashioned. The church is changing. Welcome to the twentieth century. You hear what’s happening on the radio. Your voice is so beautiful, better than Andraé Crouch—”
He shook his head and laughed at her. “You know that’s not my thing.”
“If you sing gospel, you’ll appeal to that segment of the congregation that likes gospel.”
“The African American segment?” He watched her comb bob and pick into that wild gr
owth of hair. “The black people? I don’t want people to say I’m a minister of a black church. I minister to people of all colors.”
“From the looks of our church,” Peachie quipped, “you minister to people of no color.”
“What did you say?” It was as simple as that. The simplest thing would set him off. He advanced on her with his hand raised.
“Please don’t hit me, Barry,” she said sardonically. She laughed at him as he came to her with his hand up. “Please don’t hit me again, jackleg.”
She said it without flinching. She turned her face to receive the blow. He brought his hand down hard against her face. It hurt, but not as bad as some of the others because he was eager to leave the house. “See what you made me do?” he said, putting on his coat. “See what you made me do?”
“A**hole! Wife beater!” Peachie cursed hoarsely at him. He was so predictable. He was so hot to leave he couldn’t even give her a proper beating. He must really be in love with this one this time. But she had no real proof, only her intuition.
He stormed out and slammed the door. She hollered after him, “Jackleg preacher!”
Peachie knew where he was going. She laughed some more. It was her freedom laugh. It was better than crying. She finished combing her hair and braided her twin ponytails. She dressed the children and took them across the street and left them with Miss Irma. As Peachie waited at the bus stop, she rubbed her swollen face and practiced the words she would say to him when she found him at the place where her intuition told her he had gone. “I want a divorce. Jackleg.”
She grinned.
He hated that word, but it suited him so well.
Now she thought about what her mother and father would say. How they had warned her. How the Faithful would backbite. Skinny, little nothing. Pregnant before she got married. Divorced before she turned twenty. She cried then and couldn’t stop even after the bus arrived.
She got off outside WCRX, the radio station that produced Voice of the Shepherd, and she prayed, for his sake, that Barry was inside where he worked part-time in the music room and sometimes guest deejayed during Your Faithful Prayer Hour with Sister Elizabeth Ling.
Peachie spoke with the security officer and the receptionist at the front desk, both of whom she knew from the Big Church. They were kind, but neither had seen Barry that morning. She thanked them and got on another bus that dropped her off about five blocks from the place where she knew he had gone. As she walked through the affluent neighborhood, she counted Cadillac, Mercedes, Cadillac, BMW. She would tell him: I want a divorce, Barry. It’s been two years of hell.
Jackleg.
She lost her grin when she saw their old Toyota parked outside the sprawling two-story home of Elizabeth Ling, host of Your Faithful Prayer Hour. Now here was a whore of Babylon. Chinese slut.
Peachie knocked. She knocked for two hours. Peachie pounded. Then she “stole” their Toyota with her own key and drove to Brother Philip’s house.
“I’m leaving Barry. I need money to get me and the kids back home. Today,” she told him. “You said if I ever needed anything from you, all I had to do was ask. I’m asking now. I can’t take this humiliation anymore. I found his car parked in front of her house.”
“Yes. Sister Ling. Many of us know about it. Barry and Sister Ling have prayed about it. They’re trying their best to stop. God will work it out in time,” Brother Philip said.
“I want a divorce.”
“I can’t help you with this. Barry is my friend.”
“I’m leaving him one way or the other.” She began to cry again, and Brother Philip came and put his arms around her.
“Now,” he said, massaging her back, “if you were my special friend, I might be compelled to help you out.”
He put his tongue in her ear and she slapped him. “This is not the time for that.”
“When is the time for us, Peachie?”
“Isn’t that betraying Barry? You’re no friend.”
Brother Philip, who had been a star athlete in football, basketball, and track at Bible College, opened his shirt. His chest, like his shadowy cupid face, was smooth and hairless. He had a washboard-tight stomach. His skin was black as charcoal and he was twice as handsome as he was black. “Do you want the money or not, Peachie?”
“You’re a pig.”
At about 5, Barry walked into the apartment and slammed the door. “I don’t know what you think you’re trying to prove. You don’t know what happened today. You’re just jumping to conclusions. We were working on a record album. I swear it. There is nothing going on between me and Sister Ling.”
“Yet no one answered that door for two hours. Yet you smell like a woman’s perfume. Why don’t you go pray over it some more, Jackleg, you and Sister Ling?” She pointed to the boxes of clothes, dishes, and toys for the boys, which she had packed and stacked against the wall. “As you can see, I’ve been busy.”
“Where do you think you’re going? You think you’re going somewhere? You think you’re going to take my children?”
“Then you can keep your damned children.”
“Watch your mouth.” He came at her with his hand raised.
Peachie stretched to her full height. “If you so much as lay a hand on me, Barry Sebastian-Bach McGowan, I’m going to tell everyone what you really are. I’ll ruin you. I’ll divorce you, I swear.”
Barry slapped Peachie harder than he ever had. So hard she finally lost her smirk.
“Divorce?” he said, slapping her shocked mouth a second and third time until her neck hurt from the twisting. Her hands became claws and she went for his eyes. She came close, but he caught her and put her in a headlock and continued to slap her face.
“You can’t divorce me. It’s a sin. A woman shall not usurp authority over the man, 1 Timothy!”
“Thou shalt not commit adultery, Exodus 20!”
“Shut up!”
“Stop hitting me, a**hole!”
“Stop cursing!”
“A**hole! A**hole!”
He pushed her to the ground and began to kick her.
“My God, Barry! Stop hitting me. Stop hitting me. You’re really hurting me.”
“I’m your husband! I’m your husband!”
Barry was crying now too. He was only just sane enough to pull back when he realized he was kicking her in the stomach. He picked up one of her packed boxes and stormed into the bedroom with it. Peachie heard him in there ripping it open. Then it sounded like he was flinging things every which way. This is the sound, she said to herself, of a jackleg unpacking.
Peachie rolled over and thanked God she had left the boys with Miss Irma so they wouldn’t have to witness this. She took one of the other packed boxes and slowly began to remove the things and set them back on the shelves where they belonged. Who was she fooling? She wasn’t going anywhere. Not now. Not ever.
That night, when she was sure Barry was asleep, she snuck out of the bedroom and called Brother Philip from the church phone.
“I’m not going anywhere. I guess I’ll have to give the money back.” He answered, “But it’s yours. Please say you’ll keep it, my darling.”
“I’m giving it back. And I’m not your darling.”
“Okay, Sister Peachie, whatever you say. But I have to tell you that you were wonderful. I’m your slave forever.”
“Well, you’re a slave without a master because it will never happen again, that’s for sure.” Then she conceded: “But you were wonderful too, Brother Philip.”
She checked to make sure the silent barn was really a silent barn.
Then she cooed, “It’s never been so good.”
Mother of the Church
She had promised that it would not happen again.
It did happen again, every day for the next fifteen days, and that included two Sundays. They had to be creative on Sundays. They had to find a reason for Barry to be away from her, and Sister Ling proved the perfect enticement. Peachie would apologize for having acc
used him of infidelity, and to prove her sincerity she would say, “But you have time to practice now. I have perfect faith in you. Go see Sister Ling. Get in a few hours of practice before night service.” Then, after he left, she would take the boys over to Miss Irma and wait for Brother Philip to arrive. She didn’t want to call it a pattern, but she had to admit that its realness was reinforced by its regularity.
His lovemaking was ravenous. He would begin undressing her in the car. She would ascend the stairs to his loft with her bottom exposed and Brother Philip nipping at it. Sometimes he hurt her in his eagerness to fill her. She became accustomed to his power, his size. When he had spent, he would lie atop her and kiss every part of her face and neck, and soon she would feel him growing again. Most of their time together was spent loving, and she was happy with this arrangement, for it left her little time to consider the reckless nature of what she was doing, or to speculate about the stranger aspects of it.
On the fifteenth day, he took a phone call from his disabled mother in the middle of their loving. He doted over his mother. She had been ailing with the flu, and he had made her promise to call him every few hours until she was feeling better. It gave Peachie, naked in his bed, a few moments to consider her problem. She was in love with him. It was wrong what they were doing, but it was good to be in love again. She believed he felt the same toward her, but there were things about him that were troubling. For instance, the words he had spoken the first time he had undressed her: “I will only make love to Faithful women. They are natural like the Lord wants a woman to be—but you, you’re almost bald. You don’t use a razor, do you?”
She had said, “No. That’s just the way God made me.”
She recalled that he had then lowered his head and run his tongue over the fine hairs. And then sniffed them, frowning. She recalled, too, that the loving which followed had been spectacular. She was not so naïve as to believe anymore that she was the only Faithful woman who engaged in premarital, now extramarital, sex, but she could not get his words out of her head. And his mother. Sometimes he was a worse momma’s boy than Barry.
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