Second Sunday (10 page)

“Bert?” Wendell asked.

“We are letting Cleavon make the announcement and that’s final.”

“But . . .”

“Wendell, I am the chair of this committee and I’ve made my decision.
Let
Cleavon tell the church, and then let the Lord handle the rest.”

Perplexed as they were, the pro–George Wilson faction on the committee relaxed. They trusted Bert—but even more, they trusted
the Lord to “handle the rest.”

The next Sunday Cleavon walked up into the pulpit after the morning devotional, pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket,
wiped his face like he was a preacher, and announced, “The search committee has chosen a pastor. As soon as we can straighten
out our differences, we will be hiring and installing Rev. Earl Hamilton as the new leader of Gethsemane Missionary Baptist
Church.”

Nearly every woman in church sat up in shock. Cleavon Johnson must have had a lobotomy, they thought, to remove what little
bit of his mind he had left.

“We’ll just see about that,” Katie Mae’s grandmother said, and wrote a note on her program instructing her church sisters
to keep their money in their purses at collection time. The secret message spread like wildfire through the sanctuary. The
women ushers took the note up to the balcony, where they passed it from pew to pew; and to make sure nobody was missed, they
took it down to the basement, the kitchen, the ladies parlor, and even the bathroom.

All of the offerings that Sunday—regular morning offerings, tithes, sick-and-shut-in and benevolent funds—were pitiful. Because
a lot of the women gave the money for themselves
and
their husbands, the church’s earnings for the week dropped 73.5 percent.

But Cleavon Johnson was unmoved. The next Sunday he took to the pulpit again to proclaim, “Many of you have been calling the
members of the search committee, worrying us about our decision. You need to know that the decision has been made, and it
will not be changed.”

At that point, the women pushed the matter further, by not only withholding their money but also shutting down the after-church
dinner. They went right downstairs when service was over, divided up the meats and other dishes among themselves, and wrapped
them all up in packages to take home. The guest minister—one of a string who had been filling in during the pastoral search—had
to go away unfed, and was so appalled that he put out the “bad-mouth” on the church.

The next Sunday was Communion Sunday, and still the women’s boycott continued. None of the men knew where to buy the crackers
and grape juice for the service, but Cleavon claimed that he had it under control. He went to one of his stores and got some
loaves of a white bread from the day-old section—instead of his more expensive crackers—along with some cheap imitation grape
Kool-Aid. The bread was hard, dry, and stale, and the grape drink was terrible—weak, chemical-tasting, and bitter, even though
the package was clearly marked, “No added sugar necessary.”

As soon as Mr. Louis Loomis chewed on that bread, he winced and reached for the juice, which puckered up his face.

“You alright, Mr. Louis Loomis?” Bert whispered.

“What’s in that juice?” Mr. Louis Loomis asked, through watery eyes. “It’s the nastiest stuff I’ve ever tasted.” He coughed
and then said, “Forgive me, Lord, for saying that at the Lord’s Supper.”

Bert swallowed his juice fast, trying not to breathe. As he did, he heard Nettie’s mother, MamaLouise, praying, “Father, forgive
us our misdeed this morning. We are trying so hard to do Your will, and we need some heavenly help to get this nasty stuff
down and keep it down. Amen.”

The service itself was equally dispiriting. Now that word was out on the strife in the church, their expected guest preacher
had bowed out. On such short notice, all they could do was ask the one ordained minister in the church to lead them in worship.
He was an elderly man, long retired, who had grown tongue-tied and hard to understand. He was also prone to sleeping in church,
and an usher had to wake him up when it was time to preach.

Collecting himself, he rose creakily to deliver the sermon. Lifting up his hands, he proclaimed,
“Leh uz aw tand up in gi fro awergifs ufdu udnez ufdu yaw,”
to the puzzled stares of church members. One of the schoolteachers in the congregation decoded the sentence phonetically
and wrote it out to be passed down her pew. Her note read: “Let us all stand up and give from our gifts of the goodness of
the Lord.”

The entire congregation, men and women alike, was getting fed up. Many decided that as long as the search committee remained
silent, allowing Cleavon to continue to maintain that he was hiring Earl Hamilton, they would forgo attending church on Sunday
and meet privately for prayer and Bible study in members’ homes. They made it clear to Bert, Wendell, Melvin Sr., and Mr.
Louis Loomis that they were not coming back to church until the committee got sense enough to hire Rev. George Wilson.

With no offerings coming in, the church coffers grew so depleted that Cleavon had to pay for gas, electricity, phone, and
water out of his own pocket. He had never conceived of the possibility that the women in his church would turn on him and
the search committee with such a vengeance. Finally he had to acknowledge that he couldn’t win this battle—at least not right
now.

So Cleavon temporarily threw in the towel, conceding to the hiring of Rev. George Wilson, using the split vote to his advantage
to only hire him as the interim pastor. According to the dusty church bylaw Cleavon invoked, interim pastor was a temporary,
six-month position. Once the six months were up, the church could install the interim pastor as the permanent one, or hire
somebody else. It was the “hire somebody else” part that Cleavon liked so much.

Bert sat back at that meeting and let Cleavon put on a floor show. As much as he wanted to see George Wilson installed as
the permanent pastor, he had peace to let the Lord work it all out. He knew in his heart that if they put George Wilson in
that pulpit as the interim pastor, he would win such a following that it would be virtually impossible to remove him in six
months. And Bert felt that, for some reason, Cleavon just hadn’t been able to figure that out.

Rev. George Robert Wilson was installed as the interim pastor of Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church on Christmas Day. It
was a beautiful morning—sunny, crisp, and cold, with soft falling snowflakes cleansing the air. The church looked magnificent,
for the women were so happy with their victory that they had gone all out with their Christmas decorations.

The entire sanctuary was trimmed with fresh-scented evergreen boughs laced with red and gold ribbons and bows. There were
vibrant poinsettia plants on all the windowsills, and two large bouquets of rich red roses stood at the foot of the altar
leading to the pulpit. The dark walnut pews with their red velvet cushions and the deep red carpeting on the floor looked
more warm and welcoming than ever against the background of green branches and red and gold satin. The men had found a lush,
perfect cone of a Christmas tree, which everybody at church, young and old, had decorated with homemade ornaments, strings
of popcorn, and candy canes. And on top of the tree, Rev. Wilson had placed a beautiful black angel wearing a white, gold-trimmed
African robe—his gift to his new parishioners.

Ushers were posted at each door of the church, holding large red baskets tied with white ribbons. As members filed in, they
got a hearty “Merry Christmas,” along with an orange, a candy cane, and a small bag of pecans—a reminder of times when these
were the only gifts many people were able to give.

The first person George Wilson saw that morning, when he took his place in the pulpit, was Sheba Cochran, with her four children.
He smiled when he caught her eye, not missing the blush that spread across her cheeks. George thought that Sheba looked awfully
pretty in a red velvet suit that matched her children’s, over a white lace blouse with ruffled cuffs that flopped out from
under her jacket sleeves, and shiny black patent-leather boots with slick-looking red heels. Her face was made up right nice
too—not too much makeup but just enough to look good to a man—and her hair was fluffed out in a new, very becoming Afro puff.

Watching Sheba Cochran and her four children, George was struck by the thought that he had definitely done the right thing
in accepting the interim pastorship of Gethsemane and that he had very good reasons to fight to stay on—at least five that
he could think of right offhand.

When Sheba saw Rev. Wilson smiling so warmly at her and her children, she felt a little wheel a-turning in her heart. But
that moment of connection was just one small ripple in the wave of fellowship that was sweeping the church that morning. Most
of the members were feeling good and very blessed. The perfect sweetness of the Holy Spirit was so strong in the church, it
was almost as if they could stick out their tongues and taste it.

Rev. Wilson wasn’t one to suppress the Holy Ghost when it was running like a current through a congregation. He told the members,
“I guess my first day here gone be kinda hot and sweaty. Because y’all looking like you ready to cut loose and have what a
bishop’s wife once described as ‘crazy church’ to me.”

“Now you talking, Pastor,” Mr. Louis Loomis said, as the pianist, who could barely keep his fingers still on the piano keys,
signaled to the rest of the musicians to start playing. Sister Hershey Jones broke out singing, further fanning those sweet,
hot, Holy Ghost flames. Then Sister Hershey, a very substantial, well-built sister, picked up the hem of her choir robe and
started in on the dance she was so famous for. As she claimed a spot at the front of the church and started moving her feet—which
were tiny in comparison to the rest of her—at the speed of light, the whole church was set on fire.

Sister Hershey danced with her arms extended in front of her, feet moving and head bobbing in sync with the movement of her
arms. Just watching Sister Hershey made folks want to jump out of their seats. As the music got hotter, they started hopping
up to dance, as if the flames of the Holy Ghost had landed on them the way they had on the folks at Antioch in the New Testament.

At first, Sheba just sat there and watched. But then the Holy Ghost hit her so hard, it felt like she had been smacked right
in the back. She got up out of her seat and pushed her way past her startled children into the aisle. There she placed her
hand on the small of her back as if it ached and started dancing so, she dropped her purse on the floor and would have come
out of her shoes if she hadn’t been wearing boots. Nettie, Viola, and Sylvia rushed to her side in case the girl fell out.
But Sheba simply slowed down to begin walking in a small circle, calling out, “Thank You! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord.
You brought me and my babies here to put our feet on the rock of Jesus. Thank You, Thank you, Lord. You a good God. You a
good
God!”

The entire time Sheba was shouting, George was watching her from the pastor’s chair, with pure joy lighting up his face. It
didn’t occur to him that he should go to her until he saw one of the deacons, Mr. Louis Loomis, leading Sheba’s children down
to meet her at the altar. “Rev. Wilson,” Mr. Louis Loomis said, “I know this is not protocol and that I really don’t have
a right to do this. But I believe that this young woman standing before us done got the Holy Ghost, and she really want to
be saved. You understanding me, Rev.?”

George immediately left the pulpit and joined them. He took both of Sheba’s hands in his and asked, “How long have you been
without a church home?”

“Since I got pregnant with my oldest, Gerald here, when I was seventeen and my mama threw me out on the street.”

“You sure you want to make Gethsemane your church home and your children’s church home?”

“Yes.”

“Then, we gone oblige your certainty this morning,” George said. “Do we have any deaconesses in the congregation who I can
assign this fine family to?”

Louise Williams, Nettie and Viola’s mother, stood up and said, “Reverend, I’ll take this family.”

“Thank you, Sister . . .”

“Louise Williams.”

“Thank you, Sister Williams.”

“It’s MamaLouise, Rev. Wilson,” Phoebe Cates, Viola and Wendell’s daughter, hollered out from her seat in the balcony. “Don’t
nobody call my grandmother Sister nothing. She MamaLouise.”

Everybody was laughing now.

“Thank you,” George told Phoebe, chuckling himself. “Well, Sister MamaLouise Williams, I will assign this fine family to you.”

George squeezed Sheba’s hands. They were rough from hard work but had a sweet strength that touched his heart. He smiled into
her eyes, thinking they were beautiful, simply because they revealed the true nature of her character. After meeting her at
Pompey’s, George had picked up on some gossip about Sheba Cochran, but he didn’t care whether or not the talk was true. Before
him stood a good black woman whose heart was open to the Lord. And she wanted to dedicate her life and her children’s lives
to the Lord. What more could anyone ask of a person?

“State your name and all of your babies’ names for the church,” he said.

“Pastor, my name is Sheba Loretta Cochran. This baby standing next to me is my oldest son, Gerald. He is eighteen. Then, this
girl right here is Lucille Renee, and she is seventeen. Next to Lucille is Carl Lee, twelve. And next to him is my baby, baby
girl, La Sheba Loretta, eight.”

“Are you all candidates for baptism?”

They all said yes, as “Amens” rang out around the sanctuary.

Then Rev. Wilson asked, “Would some deacons come forth to stand behind Sister Sheba and each of her children?”

Bert, Wendell, and Melvin Sr. volunteered and took their places with Mr. Louis Loomis and MamaLouise behind the Cochran family.
At that point, George placed his hands on either side of Sheba’s head, and began to pray. “Thank you, Lord, for bringing this
woman and her beautiful children to our church this morning. Thank you for shining Your light of salvation on them so brightly
that it carved out a path straight to You. Now, I ask in Jesus’ name that You anoint this entire family, beginning with the
mama, making them one with You, so that they will all be saved and sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Let this very
moment signal a new life in Christ Jesus for them all. Forgive them their sins and heal all of their hurts and sorrows. Make
them new in You. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.”