Some of My Best Friends Are Black (48 page)

In that time, James has been a leading voice for that part of the black community very much in favor of integration. Tall and barrel-chested, his dark complexion offset only by a few streaks of gray hair, he’s the kind of guy whose presence really fills a room. As council president, James had little use for the timid politics of the bishop. “We got a lot of crap from the diocese,” he says. “‘Hold down the fuss’ is what they wanted us to do. But the fuss was gonna be had, because God ordained the fuss.”

Despite the council’s biracial membership, James found that it had become more an instrument of division than of unity, as originally intended. “When I came on the council,” he says, “every policy, every action was to keep things like they were, to maintain that separation. The white members of the council felt the black church really wasn’t their concern. Their feeling was that they contributed the majority of the money to the parish, therefore they ought to be able to get what they want. With the blacks, it was always something like, ‘We spent this much money on the main church, so how much will be spent on our church?’ If the subject of coming together was ever brought up, the whites would go to the white side and the blacks would go to the black side. And if you were
standing in the middle, you had problems. But fortunately for this parish some folks were standing in the middle, black people and white people, folks who heard God’s call and understood where we needed to be.”

Charles James chose to stand with the people in the middle, he says, because he refused to put his race above his Catholic faith in man’s common humanity. “I always felt that society should reflect the church, rather than the church reflecting society. That was the basis of our problem—we had brought segregation and that foolishness into the church, rather than being present to God and taking that out into the world. And since I was council president, I felt I had to make a point to talk about that. Well… I didn’t know what I was doing. I was right, you understand.
It
was right. But at the same time, I didn’t realize how challenging it was going to be.”

Unaware of just what he was starting, in the mid-1990s, James began pressing the issue at the weekly council meetings. “I would say, ‘Folks, listen. We’re here for a reason. God ordained us to be here to do
something
. If we don’t grow as individuals spiritually, then we’re all wasting our time. We need to understand what has to happen, and what has to happen is that we need to combine these two churches, literally. These churches have to become one to make
us
one, as God intended. And we need the courage to do that.’”

Eventually, the council came to a tentative agreement on the best course of action: open the discussion to a public meeting and then put it to a parish-wide vote. “Everyone agreed that putting it before the congregation was the right thing to do,” James says. “So I said to them, ‘Okay, I need a motion from someone and a second so we can vote on this thing.’ And all I got was dead silence. Not one person raised his hand.”

In 1972, a black board member had courageously made the motion to accept the white church as everyone’s new home, and the whole council had backed him unanimously. Twenty years later, no one, black or white, would step forward even to sponsor the move to put it up for discussion. “People’s mentality got stuck,” James says. “The priests spent more time
talking
about race than anything else. But when you just stand up and you talk about racism, whites feel that you’re talking about them, which in turn translates into ‘I’m not a good person.’ So they pull back. And the
blacks are sitting there, and we’re all puffed up and smiling, because we say, ‘Hey, we ain’t got to make no effort. We’re the victims here. We don’t have to meet these people halfway.’ So everything just lingered.”

With the bishop’s injunction on one side and a deadlocked parish council on the other, closing the chapel was not an option. After Rimes’s departure, Warren Broussard had been promoted to serve as Pastor No. 10. Together, he and Charles James tried to make improvements where they could. One priority was dialing down the whiteness of the white church to make it feel like everyone’s church, the very thing the 1972 renovations had tried to do and failed. Rather than take a hammer and crowbar to St. Charles’s historic interior, Broussard decided on a less invasive approach. He took some of the dead white Europeans down off the walls and replaced them with works by local artists that depicted Christ ministering to children of all races. “It was a way to begin to create a more welcoming atmosphere,” he says.

To match the changes in the church’s physical landscape, they decided to change the liturgical one as well. Like any halfway decent Catholic, I can breeze through Sunday mass on autopilot. During the first service I attended at St. Charles, I was zipping right along through the Apostle’s Creed. “
We believe in God, the Father Almighty… was crucified under Pontius Pilate… the life everlasting. Amen.
” And there I stopped, like you’re supposed to. But everyone around me kept going. So I stood there like an idiot while the rest of the congregation recited in unison:

“It was a parish mission statement,” Broussard explains. “The pastors came up with it together with Charles James and the council. We began reading it at all of our masses. We felt that if we started praying it, together, every week, people would stop to think about what they were saying.”

He was right. In adding the new prayer, Father Broussard forced his congregation to get out of rote habit and see things from a different angle. Standing in a mixed-race congregation, saying that prayer, one can’t help but be conscious of what it means. Changing the liturgy and the artwork were not insignificant steps, but in five long years, they were the only ones Broussard was able to make. In the fall of 1999, he packed his bags.

As Pastor No. 10 moved out, Pastor No. 11 settled in. Father Dave Andrus arrived at a transitional moment in both the diocese and in the parish. Bishop Flynn had retired, taking with him his protectorship of the chapel. The chapel itself was almost sixty years old and needed major structural renovations; the air-conditioning and electrical systems all had to be gutted and replaced. The Jesuits felt that the parish couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars refurbishing a building that was used only one hour a week by less than half of the church’s population. So as the new millennium got under way, Pastor No. 11 was given one primary task by his superiors: close the chapel and integrate the congregations.

A quiet, soft-spoken man, Andrus did not come in swinging a hammer and crowbar like David Knight. In fact, for months he did little besides study the situation. He finally concluded that the question was not
whether
to renovate the chapel, but
how
to renovate it. The parish had no need for separate churches, but it did need new religious education classrooms and an assembly center for parish activities. The best use of the money would be to convert the chapel to a multipurpose building to serve the whole community.

Knowing that he would need the support of the black parishioners in any such endeavor, Andrus proposed they undertake what in the church is known as a spiritual discernment, calling on the Holy Spirit to lead or give direction in a difficult matter. The parish would hold a series of
meetings, discussions, and prayer sessions. Through this, God would show them the way. Darrell Burleigh worked closely with the priest in making it happen. “Father Dave did it right,” Burleigh says. “We spent a lot of money, sent out a lot of letters informing everyone and giving everyone their opportunity to have input in the process.” In early 2002, after months of prayer, deliberation, and debate, the discernment was concluded. The consensus was that a majority of the parish was in favor of remodeling the chapel into a multipurpose building. Andrus announced that the renovations would go forward. And this time it was the black congregation’s turn to get pissed off about moving the furniture.

By now, Charles James was no longer parish council president, but he was still a board member as well as a singer in the chapel’s choir. He made a point of standing out front at the seven-thirty chapel mass each Sunday to greet everyone and shake hands as people went in. But once James made his support for the chapel renovation publicly known, his fellow parishioners—lifelong friends, some of them—began freezing him out. “One morning I was out front before mass,” James says, “and one of the parishioners walked right past me. I went to go shake his hand, and he wouldn’t do it. We just looked at each other, and he said, ‘You don’t even have any business being here.’

“This was a gentleman,” James hedges, perhaps not wanting to name names, “whose father had had some problems back in the day.”

He’s talking, of course, about Wallace Belson. Under Belson, the same Knights of Peter Claver faction that had organized to protest the seasonal integration in 1994 was now holding meetings and organizing to stop it once again, which meant turning against one of their own. Charles James was a member of the Knights, had been for years. Not anymore. “When I was coming up,” Belson says, “for me to go against my own color for a white man? Oh, no. I’d have got whipped. And that’s how it was with Charles and us. You know what they did to us, so now why you want to side with them? We got rid of him.” Belson says James was forced to leave; James says he quit. Either way, he was out.

After he left the Knights, James says, “the ugliness started getting interesting.” The opposition went into high gear. Petitions circulated. Letters flooded the bishop’s office. Calls were made to the local media, trying
to gin up stories that painted the St. Charles Parish as antiblack. “They literally ostracized anyone who advocated the union,” James says. “It got to the point where they were out in the community, finding people on the streets and saying, ‘Don’t talk to this one, don’t talk to that one.’”

“It was a bad time,” Darrell Burleigh says. “There were some pretty harsh words said. There were people that I had a lot of respect for in the black community, but I had to see another side to them; the things that they said to me and other staff members were very ugly. Anything you would say would be taken out of context. They’d just get angry and start swearing. You know, ‘
Y’all
the ones that’s doing this.’ And, ‘
Y’all
the ones that’s causin’ all this.’ It would just get out of hand.”

Few things will send white folks running for cover like a racial situation that’s gotten out of hand. To look at the public record, one might think that the chapel issue was a matter fought over only by blacks among themselves with the Jesuits acting as referees. As Charles James had learned, the whites in Grand Coteau generally felt that whatever blacks did or didn’t do with the chapel wasn’t really their concern. As Darrell Burleigh had learned, to be white and take a public stance on unification was to invite some harsh words. It was the white man’s catch-22: to oppose the unification of the churches was taboo, because it implied you didn’t want blacks in the main church. Which meant that your motives were racist, or at the very least suspect. So you’re supposed to support integration. But to endorse the unification of the churches was equally taboo, because it meant that you wanted to take the chapel away from the black community. Which meant you were trying to undermine it. Which meant that your motives were racist, or at the very least suspect. Which is why, any time a racial problem comes up, white people just throw money at it and run away.

Or they just keep being racist. Because there was plenty of that, too. Wallace Belson’s faction was not the only antagonistic force at play, just the most visible one. Some whites strongly opposed the union. They had never wanted blacks at St. Charles in the first place, but modern racial etiquette prevented them from crowing about it too loudly. Their public silence makes it hard to gauge how pervasive the white opposition was, but from his central listening post in the rectory office, Darrell Burleigh
saw and heard plenty of it. “A lot of people would come and say things to me they wouldn’t say in public,” he explains. “They’d say things under cover or ‘around the back,’ as I say. They’d go, ‘Why don’t y’all just leave ’em over there?’ Or, ‘We built them that church, and that’s where they should stay.’ I guess by telling me they figured I’d go and tell the priest.”

Which he did. Directly or indirectly, every word from both camps eventually made it back to Father Andrus, and the mounting discord eventually took its toll on the mild-mannered pastor. To those around him, he appeared increasingly despondent, exasperated, and prone to very unpriestly outbursts. “Finally,” Burleigh recalls, “Father Dave just threw up his hands and said, ‘I give up! I’m not going to fight this anymore.’”