Some of My Best Friends Are Black (49 page)

Andrus had reached his breaking point, was almost ready to pack his bags. But rather than scuttle the whole plan on his own, he decided to hold one last parish council meeting, an open town hall in which everyone could air his or her opinions and the council would vote the issue up or down.

On the night of the parish vote, the Knights of Peter Claver made one last, all-out push with a group demonstration in front of the church. “Wallace Belson had a whole bunch of people out there,” Charles James says. “He had people I’d never even seen
at church
, let alone come to a meeting, all walking around with picket signs. Just silly crap.”

But one man’s silly crap is another man’s lifelong cause. When I spoke with Belson, as he was telling me his side of this part of the story, he got up, went over to a closet, and pulled out an old dog-eared piece of posterboard. Then he brought it over. It was one of the signs from the rally.
I WALK THE WALK FOR JUSTICE
, it read.

“You see?” he said as he handed it to me. “My heart? How much it got hurt?”

In my conversations with Father Broussard, he tried to put his finger on Wallace Belson. “I had two relationships with Wallace,” Broussard says. “When we’d meet one-on-one, we could talk. And I think we had respect for each other—certainly I did for him as someone who had been through a lot. I’d do home masses at his sister’s house—she was very ill at the time—and he’d always be there. Our relationship was very friendly. But then at meetings it was this whole other experience with him. We
were always on opposite sides. For me it was more about trying to represent the community, and for him it was more of a representation of his personal pain. There seemed to be a lot of anger toward what had happened when the churches moved together.”

Talking with Belson one-on-one, you won’t meet a nicer guy. He’s generous with his time and his stories. He jokes with a sly grin that tells you he likes to cut up and have fun. But he’s also candid about his resentments. “I didn’t speak to Father Broussard for some time,” Belson says. “If Father Broussard would have told me hello back then, he’d have to fight, you understand? Today I pass by him, and I’m polite but I go my distance and stay away from him.” But that’s not really the person Belson wants to be. “I was raised better than that,” he insists. “I was raised Catholic.”

As to why he’s let anger dictate so much of his life, that much is obvious. So much as mention the incident, and his head cocks a few degrees down and the pain is suddenly right there at the surface. “It hurts me to this day even to talk about it,” he says. “My daddy, after they beat him, he stopped going to church. He’d go every now and then, but before that he’d go every Sunday. That was done with. Then he started drinking even harder than he used to drink.”

And that’s all Wallace Belson says about his father.

Back in front of the church, as the final parish council hearing was about to begin, Belson and his fellow marchers folded up their picket signs and headed inside. The meeting was called to order. Then it descended quickly into chaos. Heated arguments and personal attacks flew from both sides. “For about forty-five minutes Father Dave and I were devils,” Charles James says, “People said a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, I’m talkin’ about lies. I’m talkin’ about folks who stood up and just flat out told lies. And this is from people that I
knew
, you understand? People that I knew well. But as I sat there, God wouldn’t let me say a word. Even with all the stuff people were yelling, I said nothing for that whole time until we were ready to vote.”

Once everyone with a piece to speak had spoken, Father Andrus stepped forward to voice his opinion. He gave a lengthy speech, saying that he believed integration was the right thing to do, but in his heart he
didn’t think the parish was ready for it, spiritually. His recommendation was that they wait, but he would leave it to the parish council to decide. Then each member of the council stood in turn and cast his or her vote, giving the reasons behind it. “It was close,” James says. “Some of those ladies on the council, they were tough. They weren’t intimidated by all that mess.”

In the end, the council was split, and the tie-breaking vote came down to Charles James. “When it got to me,” he recalls, “there was this moment of silence. It was rather dramatic. But you see, now I had a conflict.”

The day before, James had gone to Father Andrus personally. They talked, and James said he believed voting to unify the parish was absolutely the right thing to do. But he also believed if they forced people to go through with it, he didn’t know if that would accomplish anything. The backlash might erase the progress they’d made, and any backlash that did come would fall squarely on the pastor. Given that, James told Andrus he would vote whichever way the priest decided. So when Charles James stood to vote, he said, “Listen, I told Father Dave that if it was his intent to move this thing forward or to stop it, that I would vote whichever way he felt was best. He doesn’t think that we are ready, and I agree. We’re not.”

And then Charles James voted no.

The plan failed. Half the room sighed in disappointment. The other half rose up in cheers. “People were clapping,” James says. “They took some vindication in it. But I told them, I said, ‘Look, if you think you’re fighting me, you’re wrong. If you think you’re fighting Father Dave, you’re wrong. Understand that what we have done is that we’ve said no to God. God has allowed us the opportunity to live out our Christian values, but we, because of fear, have chosen not to. Now God is going to do it the way He wants it done.’”

The meeting adjourned, everyone went home, and Pastor No. 11 packed his bags.

Dave Andrus transferred out in August of that year, the earliest available opportunity. Today, he’s settled at the Jesuit mission on Pohnpei, the main island of the Federated States of Micronesia, way out in the South Pacific, where, presumably, the political climate is easier on his nerves.
Reached by email, he was gracious but clearly reticent to revisit the subject. Not wanting to upset anyone further, he didn’t offer much in the way of commentary.

One observation he did share is that he feels the discernment process, while torturous, brought a kind of catharsis to the town. “It allowed all the arguments,” he said, “pro and con, to ferment in the minds and hearts of the parishioners, perhaps giving the Holy Spirit more opportunity to bring about enlightenment.”

It did.

Charles James voted against integration in the parish council, but soon after he cast a different vote with his feet. The first Sunday following the parish council meeting, he went back to the seven-thirty mass at the chapel, only to let everyone know it would be his last. “I told them I have to do what I believe,” James says, “and I didn’t believe what we were doing was right. So I said, ‘I’m done. I’m not coming to church here anymore.’

“At the end of that mass, I shook the dust off of my robe, and I didn’t go back. I started going to nine-thirty mass over at the big church. And I was all right with that. I told God that, too. I said, ‘I’ve done all I can do, God. I can’t do any more.’

“A friend of mine, he would go to both churches. He was split in the middle. He’d bring me stuff, stories about what was going on over there, all the negative things people were saying. Finally I said, ‘You know what, brother? I don’t want to hear that. I have nothing, anymore, to do with that.’ I felt good about it then, and I feel good about it now.”

Charles James was not the only parishioner who came out of the experience a different man. Wallace Belson didn’t leave the chapel, not until he had to. But he did fold up his protest signs and put them in the closet. And if he hasn’t let go of his pain, he seems to have made peace with it. “My wife,” Belson says, “three years she’s dead. At one time she felt like I felt, but then she changed. She used to sit there and talk to me every week. ‘Forget,’ she’d say. ‘Forget and forgive.’

“I’m not gonna lie to you. I had plenty of hatred in me from that time. I’m not perfect. I used to drink. I used to smoke cigars. I was Al Capone, did everything ’cept kill somebody. But a while back I was helping Father at the Peter Claver hall, and I had a fall from the ceiling, almost killed
myself changing a filter in the air-conditioning. I said, Well, God didn’t take me, so I made a promise to try and get along with everybody and just leave everything behind.

“So I did. I changed, completely, away from that. I respect anybody who respects me. With Charles James, he used to be in Knights of Peter Claver. We got rid of him then. But today I’m nice to him, and he’s nice to me. The white guys in the fire department? My best friends. I get along good with them now. For New Year’s we had a party together. Few years ago, something like that never would have happened.”

“And the church?” I ask him. “Now that it’s integrated?”

“It’s not perfect,” he says, “but it’s better than it used to be. Got two good priests over there right now. Couldn’t ask for better. My grandson, he’s in the ninth grade. He don’t know any different. Today or tomorrow, everybody have to realize we have to get along with one another.

“I don’t have no regrets. I provided for my family. I’m not rich, but I don’t have to worry about my medicines. If I want to go here or do this, I can do it. Most of my friends are dead or in the nursing home, and here I am, still makin’ noise. So I’m happy with life ’cause I know God was good to me. But I also know God’s gonna punish me. When I die, he’s gonna punish me because of the hatred I had in me. So I forgive, but I don’t forget.”

Even as America’s racial landscape has undergone tectonic changes, the average churchgoer still worships in a world that looks remarkably like it did a century ago. America is Duson, Louisiana. St. Theresa’s is still the white church, and St. Benedict’s is still the black church. People can go back and forth if they want, but there’s still a set of railroad tracks running right down the middle, symbolizing our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of each other’s lives.

Some things are different, sure. Overtures have been made by white church leaders, here and there. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a full-throated and unambiguous apology for its role in promoting slavery and Jim Crow, and some of its members have reached out and brought in black preachers to serve at white churches. The other mainline Protestant denominations have all made similar gestures. Evangelical Christianity, which rose to prominence after the end of Jim Crow, prides itself on having always preached and practiced a gospel that transcends race—and with megachurches the size of basketball arenas, they do draw congregations from a
slightly
broader spectrum. But nearly 90 percent of self-identified evangelicals are white. Demographically and culturally, the white church is still the white church. It has no reason to be anything else so long as the black church remains the black church.