Chapter 10
‘Easy! Easy! Time fo’ church, hon!’
It was Miss Alexander calling from the door. I guess she didn’t want to come into a man’s room uninvited.
‘All right,’ I called back. ‘I be up in minute.’ But I was asleep before my mouth closed.
In my sleep I saw my parents sitting at breakfast. My father was reading a paper even though he couldn’t read. My mother was making griddle cakes, singing...
‘Easy!’ Miss Alexander was shaking my shoulder and calling in my ear. ‘We gotta go, honey! Jo gonna be there.’
I remember sitting on the side of the bed with my head between my knees. I had fever and cramps and a pain in my head but I thought it would pass in a day; it’s an amazing thing that young men get any older at all.
I’d slept in my clothes, which was lucky because I don’t think I had the fingers to do buttons and zippers that morning.
Miss Alexander was wearing a plain white dress with a lace green hat and William wore a brown suit with black lines crisscrossing it. Momma Jo was with them. Domaque and Ernestine were behind her. Dom had on the same overalls he wore when I first met him and Ernestine still had on the blue dress with the red-brown cows printed on it. She’d washed that dress though and she had a necklace of tiny red flowers, the kind of flowers that grew at Domaque’s house.
‘Hi, Easy,’ Jo said in a soft voice. ‘You look a little tired, honey.’
‘Hi, Easy,’ Dom yelled. ‘This here is Ernestine.’
‘Easy,’ she said simply.
I looked down at her feet; they were still bare.
We all walked down to the building with the white crosses on the doors and went in. A woman sat at the front playing an upright piano.
It was a lively tune but I couldn’t put a name to it. Theresa was there in a nice violet-and-white dress; she came over and sat next to me. I recognised almost everybody from the dance at Miss Alexander’s but I didn’t remember any names so I just nodded when people said hello.
The room was almost full, about sixty souls there. A big woman and a shrimpy little man went up to the piano and started singing hymns. There was a hymnal underneath each chair and, one by one, people lifted them and started to sing along. I didn’t because I have a bad voice and I just didn’t feel up to it.
When I heard the door open in the middle of ‘Sweet Baby Jesus,’ I turned around to see who it was.
The chill I felt when I saw daddyReese was the cold that a corpse might feel.
He wasn’t the same Reese that I had seen a few days before. That Reese was a powerful man, that Reese had muscle like black iron and a thick mane of nappy black hair. But the Reese who walked through that door on Sunday was an old man. His arms and chest sagged down like flab but he wasn’t fat; he must’ve dropped ten pounds in those few days, I’d never seen a man lose weight so fast. His hair was sprinkled with white, not gray. He was stooped, just a little, and when he walked he had a slight limp.
Some men believe in evil. They’ve seen so much of it in the world and in themselves that it becomes a part of what they know as truth. And when you believe in it the way daddyReese must have, you open yourself up to people preying on that fear. The strength of hatred turns to weakness.
But with all that Reese was bowed - he wasn’t broken. He was wearing a black suit, the old kind that my grandfather wore with five buttons on the jacket. He had a starched, high-collar white shirt and a hat kind of like a bowler.
When he saw me I thought he was going to come in my direction but just then Jo turned to see what I was looking at and that changed Reese’s mind. He took a chair in the back.
Just about then the minister entered the room. Reverend Peters was a fat man with a wide mouth and a black suit; he strode down the middle aisle shaking hands and saying good morning to the people he passed. He was bristling with energy, the kind of man that pious women have sinful dreams about. The kind of man who feels so confident that other men don’t like him too well.
‘Mornin’, brothers and sisters!’ he shouted.
‘Mornin’, reverend,’ said an old woman in a raspberry dress. She was sitting right up front.
‘Yes, it is a good morning. Every one of God’s mornings is a good one.’
‘Mmmmm-hm! That’s a truf,’ the old woman said.
‘And the only thing that’s a bad mornin’ is a mornin’ that you wake up an’ you don’t find Jesus in your heart.’
‘Yes, Lord!’ That was Miss Alexander.
‘Oh, yeah! When you wake up and Jesus ain’t wichya, then it truly is a bad day. Not only for you but for every one of us in the congregation!’
‘Amen,’ a few voices said.
‘Because Jesus loves ya! He loves ya and he wants you to do right. An’ what is right? To have Jesus in your heart. That’s all. Because if you got Jesus with ya you ain’t never gonna do bad. Jesus won’t let ya do bad if you let him in. He won’t let you go astray. No he won’t. The Lord is gonna stick by you just as long as you stick by him. He’s gonna be a extra pair of eyes to see wrong...’
‘Amen, brother, show me them eyes,’ the shrimpy man in the baggy pants said from the piano bench.
‘I don’t need to show you, Brother Decker. I don’t need to show ya because the Lord will show you. He will
