I was curious. “Whose flock?”
“Whoever’s he can get.”
“Surely not any of Mount Olive’s?”
Just as I’d been born into Sweetwater Missionary Baptist a few miles south, Maidie’d been born into Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion a few miles north of us and she was fiercely loyal to it.
“They’s been one or two drifted over,” she admitted. “Ever since they started arguing over getting us on the historical register.”
“That still going on?”
Maidie sighed and nodded.
Sweetwater began as a modest turn-of-the-century wooden structure that’s been remodeled, enlarged and bricked over so many times that few people know (or care) about its earliest lines, but Mount Olive is an exquisite antebellum building that’s been lovingly tended in its original state.
Outside, it’s a two-story, white clapboard box with a simple pitched roof of green wooden shingles. No stained glass here. The tall, one-over-one double-hung windows are rectangles of frosted glass with a beveled cross etched in the center. The only outside ornamentation is a course of hand-cut dentil molding up under the eaves and a large front door that is flanked by plain Doric pilasters and topped by a triangular pediment with more dentil molding. The overall effect is, and I quote, “a harmonious blending of naive Georgian with intimations of Greek Revival.”
That’s not me talking. That’s an article the
Martin Luther King once observed that the most segregated hour in Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, but it wasn’t always that way. Not when Mount Olive was built.
Blacks and whites worshipped the Lord together then. Okay, okay, if you want to get technical about it, the whites did sit downstairs and the blacks did sit up in the slave gallery that ran around three sides of the upper level. But they were all under one roof and they all sang with one voice.
No one quite remembers why things happened that way, but during Reconstruction, instead of barring its doors to their dark-skinned brothers and sisters in Christ, the whites abandoned Mount Olive and ownership passed by default to the former slaves and the few free-born people of color.
Back then the congregation barely numbered fifteen families. Fortunately for the building, those families contained carpenters, painters, roofers and masons who scrounged materials from their jobs, salvaged what was being thrown away, and used their God-given talents to keep the fabric of the church sound.
By the late seventies, the congregation had grown until even the most conservative members couldn’t deny the need for more space. Most churches would move walls at that point, sprout Sunday School wings or do a complete renovation.
Not Mount Olive.
After a fierce debate that brought the church to the edge of splitting for good, they reached a grudging compromise. Since the most ardent advocates for maintaining the church’s architectural integrity also had the deepest pockets, that faction prevailed. Not a single new nail got driven into the exterior boards. Instead, they raised money for Sunday School classrooms, restrooms, and a large fellowship hall and the new building went up immediately behind the old. It mimicked the Georgian/Greek Revival lines of the old but inside everything was modern and up to date and the green shingles were asphalt.
This sufficed until Colleton’s cheap land, low taxes and exceedingly elastic zoning regulations, coupled with our easy access to the Research Triangle, made us ripe for housing developments. Church membership is up all over the county, but Mount Olive, perceived as the most middle-class and influential of all the black churches, has really boomed. It now takes two Sunday morning preaching services to accommodate the whole congregation and Maidie says there are many who want to double the size of the sanctuary so that everybody can be seated for one service.
Like our school boards, county commissioners and town councils, Mount Olive has learned that this new wave of people isn’t content to sit in the back pews and keep its mouth shut. Unfamiliar viewpoints rasp up against old traditions.
“Been hot words on both sides,” Maidie said sorrowfully. “Some folks say the church should be about people, not walls. We a church, not a museum. Some of the new brothers and sisters, ’specially those from up the road a piece, say it’s shameful to keep the old slave gallery, say it should have been ripped out a hundred years ago. They don’t want to hear ‘Go Down, Moses.’ They want it all stomping and shouting.”
“What about you, Maidie?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. We getting too big, that’s for certain. But I surely do hate to see deacon against deacon till folks start looking for some place more peaceful on Sunday mornings.”
I stuck the last of the knives and forks in the drain basket and rinsed out the last of the saucepans.
“So maybe Preacher Freeman’s not stealing sheep,” I said. “Maybe he’s just looking out for the strays.”
“Humph!” said Maidie. “They gonna need a whole new flock if they build ’em a real church. That’s how come they brought in this new preacher. He raised a new church over in Warrenton and Balm of Gilead’s called him to guide ’em to a new building here.”
She spoke as if a little makeshift church could suddenly raise enough money for a real edifice. It was going to take a lot of barbecued chicken plates to do that.
She handed me some paper towels. I wiped out the black iron skillet in which she had cooked the cornbread and hung it on a nail in the pantry.
That skillet’s been handed down from Mother and Aunt Zell’s grandmother and is never used for anything except cornbread, which is why it’s never washed. Maidie keeps to the old ways with Mother’s ironware. About every four or five years, she sticks the flat skillet and a favorite fry pan on a bed of red-hot coals in the woodstove and burns off all the charred and blackened incrustation that’s accumulated on the outside and then she grumbles
