More Church Folk

by Michele Andrea Bowen

  “Theophilus, how did she fly low enough under the radar to qualify for that collar she’s wearing?”

  “Son, that girl didn’t fly under anything, unless you consider doing the backstroke a new form of flying.”

  “Who with?” Denzelle asked, disappointed but wanting to know just the same.

  “Ernest Brown—when she first applied to get in the program. She is from District Nine and went through Ernest to get into the training program.”

  “But I thought Bishop Jerome Falls was a decent guy. Why would he let anyone Ernest Brown recommended get admitted into the denomination’s ministerial training program? And what was her reason for becoming a minister anyway?”

  “She told Bishop Falls that she had been called after breaking off with her fiancé,” Percy Jennings said.

  “Uhhh, Bishop Jennings,” Obadiah said, “do you really believe that is a reason to join the ministry?”

  “Nope, and frankly neither did Jerome. But the Ninth District has been coming under more and more scrutiny to get women into the ranks. I believe Nadine is one of their first candidates, and she has let that go to her head. I don’t care how many discrimination lawsuits were being filed against me, I would not have let that Jezebel join the ranks. That is trouble, nothing but trouble.”

  Denzelle had to agree. Since they had been standing in that line, Nadine had tucked four notes down in the sleeve of her robe. It saddened him to see that. There were some good sisters out there who would make excellent ministers and pastors. And this woman was making an already difficult process for women called into the ministry excruciating.

  He looked around the huge gymnasium to see if he could spot some more women ministers. The ones he wished had been in this line were sitting in the audience with their friends, their families, their fiancés, their husbands and children, and members of the churches they were assigned to as associate or senior pastors. Good, saved, anointed, kind, sweet, pretty, dynamic, and Holy Ghost–filled women. He looked back at Nadine and then upward to whisper, “Help us, Father.”

  The musicians tuned up and started playing a smooth and bluesy version of “At the Cross.” The rest of the ministers hurried and got into place and they began the processional. A great big woman, wearing a straight, black satin brocade dress with a huge flap collar trimmed in pink lace and a ruffled hem, stepped up to the microphone. She patted the top of her Jheri curl wig several times, hoping that would ease her itchy scalp. She stood through several runs of the song’s introduction, waiting for the choir to open up in song.

  “I bet that woman can really sing,” Thayline leaned over and whispered to Willis.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked, wondering how his wife could tell all of that just by looking at somebody.

  “Well, she is the soloist at one of the main Triennial Conference sessions, she is big, she has on that outfit, and she has gigantic teeth with a huge gap.”

  “Baby, you are a big, tall woman and you can’t sing a lick,” Willis said.

  “Well, what about the gap and the teeth and this session?”

  “I’ll concede to that until it’s time for her to open her mouth,” he said, still not convinced that woman could sing. Although that dress was making him wonder if she could hold a line of notes just a little bit. It was definitely a church soloist dress.

  The choir started in on “At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,/And the burdens of my heart rolled away,/It was there by faith, I received my sight,/And now I am happy all the day.”

  There were so many people in line the choir had to sing the verse three more times after already having sung it four times. The choir director decided it was taking these preachers too long to get in and sit down. At this rate it would take an hour for the processional alone. So the choir director signaled to the musicians to speed it up so they could get this part of the service done with.

  The musicians kicked up the beat several notches, causing the preachers in the processional to walk faster and with some bounce in their steps. The music was sounding awfully good, and the folks in the audience started singing and rocking with the musicians. This went on for close to fifteen minutes, until the last preacher had taken a seat.

  There was only one woman in that huge sea of preachers, and this after several heated sessions earlier in the week addressing the sexism that permeated the ministerial ranks. Denzelle thought it a crying shame that these men would not let more women march in this processional. And he thought it a travesty that the one female minister accorded this privilege was a fish-house woman like Rev. Nadine Quarles.

  The soloist grabbed the microphone, took a deep breath, and started to sing. The choir was so good folks were up clapping, and a few came out in the aisle to do the holy dance. But that all came to a complete stop when the soloist sang louder and completely out of sync with the choir and musicians, just so she could profile and show off before the bishops and other prominent preachers in the audience.

  A few folks frowned and hit at their ears, just certain that they hadn’t heard what they had heard. The woman would have done well to blend in with the choir. Because even though she had the outward appearance of a good church singer—the black dress with that collar, the big teeth, the gap in her upper front teeth, the big singer’s breasts that looked as if they could help propel sound from her mouth, and the hair—Miss Lady couldn’t sing a lick.

  She looked as if she would have one of those rich and heavy contralto voices, only to reveal a frail and weak voice that had poor tone quality and was terribly flat.

  “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine… oh what a foretaste of glory divine… heir of salvation,” she sang out loudly, heedless of the frowns on the faces of the other choir members.

  “Aren’t they trying to sing ‘At the Cross’?” Willis said to Thayline.

  “I guess,” Thayline whispered back.

  “Then why is that thang singing ‘Blessed Assurance’ like she thinks she is on Star Search?” he said.

  “More like a reunion for The Gong Show,” Thayline whispered.

  “Man, this is terrible,” Eddie, who was sitting next to Theophilus on the raised podium, whispered. “Is she serious?”

  “As a heart attack,” Theophilus whispered back. “But the main question I have is how that thang got up there to sing with anybody’s choir, let alone a solo in the first place. Surely, somebody knew it couldn’t sing.”

  “She is Bishop Rucker Hemphill’s wife’s sister’s oldest baby girl,” Murcheson told them.

  “And nobody told her no when she hopped up demanding to sing the lead at this conference?” Eddie asked. “’Cause I know that is just what she did because there is a presiding bishop in her family.”

  “What do you think?” Murcheson answered him, wondering why folks let being seen at a major church conference override their common sense. There was no way he would have let anybody he knew who sounded like that sing a solo in his backyard, let alone at the Triennial General Conference. Didn’t they think that somebody would get to talking about the girl and her “musical abilities”?

  Plus, Murcheson couldn’t understand how Rucker Hemphill was able to talk those folks into letting that ugly woman with the horrible voice sing. And he didn’t care if the knucklehead was a bishop. Everybody wasn’t in awe or afraid of a bishop. Some folks would have told the bishop exactly where to put that request. This conference just kept getting worse. And he feared that this wasn’t even the worst moment of the day.

  The choir director, who was going to strangle that woman if she sang one more note, looked over at the musicians and signaled for them to bring the song to a close. The choir was so embarrassed. Their church, pastored by one of the few good pastors in the Ninth District, had the best mass choir in the entire district. The only reason that girl, who was out of the Tenth District, had been allowed to sing with them was that Bishop Hemphill had purchased the new robes they were wearing.

  The choir sat down, mad that th
e hot and fired-up number they had practiced for weeks had been messed up. Their original soloist would have turned this gymnasium out and had folks running and shouting all over the place. The only thing that chick had done was make people feel like running out of the building screaming.

  Rev. Nadine Quarles walked up to the podium to welcome everyone to this session of the Triennial Conference. She was actually foolish enough to believe that no one knew she was going with Rev. Ernest Brown, and had used that relationship to get into this spot of visibility. Nadine was ambitious, sneaky, unscrupulous, a ho’, and not even remotely interested in getting saved. In fact, she had only read her Bible to pass her ministerial training classes and obtain her ministerial license.

  It was a travesty that the one woman on the podium at the Triennial Conference wasn’t about anything righteous. There were some dynamic and anointed women ministers sitting in the audience—women who loved the Lord and had been called to serve Him by ministering to the flocks of the Gospel United Church. It was discouraging to have to sit by and watch a collared floozy accorded the privileges and accolades that came with giving the welcome address to their denomination’s most important gathering. But as one woman minister had told a few of her disgruntled sister-colleagues, they had not been called to serve these men. They had been given this calling to work for the Lord. She said, “Let that fish-house hussy have her moment. Because it is the only moment she’ll ever have. Even an old player like Marcel Brown’s daddy knows better than to let her do any more than she is doing right now.”

  Nadine raised her hands for the congregation to stand. She opened the Bible and turned to the Scripture she had picked out, even though Rev. Theophilus Simmons, the preacher for this session, had given her one that complimented what was in his sermon.

  “Good morning, Christian friends,” Nadine began, heedless of the expressions on the folk’s faces. This was the second shock to their systems in less than twenty minutes’ time. First there was the singer from Hell, and now this woman in a very expensive clerical robe was given charge to speak before them, and she was so tongue-tied she sounded as if her tongue were stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  “Essie,” Johnnie said, not caring who heard her, “how does that thang think she is going to deliver a sermon talking like this: ‘Dood mownin’ Chwistun fwends.’”

  “What?” Saphronia asked, clearly annoyed at the woman’s horrific speaking patterns. Saphronia was a clinical speech pathologist and had done some groundbreaking work at the Morehouse School of Medicine with stroke victims who had to learn to speak all over again. And if there was one thing Saphronia could not stand, it was a black person who couldn’t talk right—especially one who had the nerve to get up in front of a bunch of folk and speak in a public forum.

  Johnnie sighed. She really loved Saphronia and liked her a lot, too. But sometimes that girl could be a little bit stuck up.

  “Girl, what that heifer is trying to say is ‘Good morning, Christian friends.’”

  Saphronia looked up and said, “Jesus, give me strength.”

  “Whet uz tuwn…”

  “Did that girl just say, ‘Let us turn’?” Theophilus leaned over and whispered to Eddie, who nodded and said, “Umm… hmmm.”

  Theophilus had had enough. Here he was, the guest speaker for the last session before the election of bishops, and he felt like preaching about as much as he wanted to go around this campus picking up trash with his bare hands. He got up and tapped Nadine on the shoulder. Enough was enough.

  “Sit down, Rev. Quarles.”

  “But,” she said, amazing him with her ability to speak clearly when talking one-on-one.

  “But nothing,” he said. “You have no business up here giving the welcome and…”

  Theophilus just happened to see the Scripture reading on the large Bible on the podium. He’d given her 1 Corinthians 5:9–11, “I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.”

  Instead, this trollop was getting ready to read from Psalm 1. Not that he had any problems with the first chapter in the Book of Psalms. To the contrary—Theophilus loved that chapter. But it had nothing to do with what he wanted and needed to say this morning. This woman had no right to deny his or anyone’s Scripture request prior to preaching a sermon, no matter how powerful the person she was sleeping with.

  “You go and sit your non-talking self down there,” Theophilus ordered, pointing to the first row of seats, where Ernest Brown was sitting next to his son, Marcel.

  But he had underestimated Rev. Nadine Quarles. The girl hadn’t gotten this far being scared of folks. She bristled up at Theophilus, whom she’d never liked, and said loud enough to be heard by everybody, “I am part of this distinguished platform.” She hissed through that tied tongue. “And you have no right to make me sit down.”

  Theophilus Simmons was a good preacher. But he had a mean streak underneath that smooth exterior, and didn’t take any mess off of these preachers—especially one he didn’t think belonged in the ranks. As far as Theophilus was concerned, Nadine Quarles barely had a right to be in this building.

  It wasn’t because Quarles was a woman, or a new preacher. It was because she wasn’t qualified and it showed. She wasn’t well trained and it showed. She didn’t have any respect for this church and it showed. She reveled in being on that podium more than she valued being able to talk right and it showed. And Nadine Quarles was a dumb broad who needed to go get a clue, and it showed.

  “Sit your dumb, non-talking, no-preaching butt-up-on-your-shoulders behind down there before I initiate action to strip you of your license to preach and ordination papers,” Theophilus ordered, and pointed to the floor again.

  Nadine was so mad she was having trouble breathing. Nobody had ever spoken to her like that, even though she was long overdue for a dressing-down. Nadine Quarles was the kind of woman who got away with bad behavior, and had always been able to get away with bad behavior. She expected to get her way and had learned to make that expectation a tangible reality on many an occasion—that is, until now.

  She sneered at Theophilus and walked off, not even realizing how bad she looked to the people sitting in the audience. Most of them did not appreciate the way Rev. Nadine Quarles had carried on with Rev. Simmons, who was a favorite of many of the people in the audience.

  A man sitting in the middle of the gymnasium could not believe the nerve of this woman. And he couldn’t believe that those preachers had had to wait until she messed up big-time to get her straight. He stood up and said, “Would you pa-leeze sit your non-talking self down,” loud enough to be heard throughout the gymnasium.

  Rev. Quarles almost forgot herself and gave that man the finger. She stormed off the stage en route to the first row to sit next to Ernest Brown, but had to go all the way back to row seven to find a seat.

  Nadine was furious over how this had turned out. This morning she had been on cloud nine. And now she had been ordered back here like a lay delegate, and that was totally unacceptable. As soon as she finished pushing past folk to get to the only seat in the middle of the row she snatched a pen out of her bag, wrote Ernest a nasty note, and gave it to an usher to put in his hand.

  The usher gave Rev. Ernest Brown the note. He read it, frowned, crumpled it up, and threw it on the floor under his chair. He waved the usher away and focused his attention back on the podium. As far as Ernest was concerned, Nadine had messed up. He really didn’t understand why that girl didn’t know she was dumb and out of her league.

  It took a minute for Nadine to figure out that Ernest wasn’t going to lift a finger to help her. She was pissed. Ernest Brown wasn’t the easiest
man to get along with. In fact, the two of them fought like cats and dogs. And just this morning Ernest had told her that their fighting was the perfect ingredient for “good and hot makeup sex.” And that proved true only on the occasions when Ernest took some WP21 in a glass of Crown Royal.

  In fact, if her memory served her right, the last time she and Ernest had had a fight, he had cussed her out while they were having dinner at the Darryl’s Restaurant on the 15-501 Boulevard here in Durham. Nadine thought about that fight, a sly grin spreading across her face, as she remembered what she had told Ernest loud enough to be overheard by everybody seated nearby.

  “Don’t let that WP21 fool you into thinking you mack daddy, preacher. ’Cause I don’t need you enough to put up with being disrespected like this.”

  Ernest had turned his mouth down. He’d said, “You are dismissed. And let’s see if that attitude can give you what WP21 and I have been giving you all week.”

  At that point Nadine wiped away the tears that started streaming down her face. She had leaned down and got all the way up in Ernest’s face and said, “Neither you nor your WP21 can compete with the five battery-operated trinkets I brought to this conference with me, just for moments such as these.”

  Theophilus turned back to the choir and said, “Choir, I have a sermon to preach. Now, that first song didn’t work because that girl couldn’t sing.”

  “Dang, Essie,” Johnnie said, “your man is on a roll, girl.”

  Johnnie pointed toward the stage where the soloist was sitting.

  “Look. Old girl is not happy.”

  “Johnnie,” Essie replied, “she can’t possibly be as unhappy as that thang sitting back there.”