“Yeah.” I shook my head. “Cops wanna chase it down, but I can’t see that somebody killed her. Who’d wanna kill a sick woman like that?”
“I don’t know, Easy. All I do know is that you talkin’ ’bout all kindsa trouble you in an’ the next thing I see one’a the people live in your buildin’ is dead.”
“Ain’t got nuthin’ to do with me, Odell. It’s just a crazy coincidence is all.” That is what I believed, and so Odell believed it too.
He led me down the stairs to the basement of the church, where the deacons gathered and suited up before the service. We came upon five men wearing identical black suits and white gloves. Above the left-hand breast pocket of each jacket was sewn a green flag that said First African in bright yellow letters. Each man carried a dark walnut tray with a green felt center.
The tallest man was olive brown and had a pencil-thin mustache. His hair was cut short but it was straightened so that he could comb a part on the left side of his head. He smelled of pomade. This man was handsome in a mean sort of way. I knew that the women of the congregation all coveted his attention. But once they got it, Jackie Orr left them at home crying. He was the head deacon at First African and women were only the means to his success.
“How ya doin’, Brother Jones?” Jackie smiled. He came over to us and grabbed Odell’s right hand with his two gloved ones.
“Brother Rawlins,” he said to me.
“Mo’nin’, Jackie,” I said. I didn’t like the man, and one thing I can’t stand is calling a man you don’t like “brother.”
Odell said, “Easy say he wanna do some work fo’ the church, Jackie. I tole’im ’bout Mr. Wenzler, you know how you said Chaim might need a driver.”
It was the first I’d heard of it.
But Jackie said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So you wanna help out, huh, Brother Rawlins?”
“That’s right. I heard that you been doin’ some good work wit’ old people an’ the sick.”
“You got that right! Reverend Towne don’t believe that charity is just a word. He knows what the Lord’s work is, amen on that.”
A couple of the deacons seconded his amen.
Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.
The other two were old men. Gentle, pious men who could hold a jostling, impetuous baby boy in their arms all day and never complain, or even think about complaining. They’d never want Jackie’s senior position, because that was something outside their place.
Jackie was a political man. He wanted power in the church, and being deacon was the way to get it. He might have been thirty but he held himself like a mature man in his forties or fifties. Older men gave him leeway because they could sense his violence and his vitality. The women sensed something else, but they let him get away with his act too.
I said, “I got a lotta free time in the day, Jackie, and I could get my evenings pretty free if I had t’. You know Mofass an’ me got a understandin’ so that I can always make a little time. An’ Odell says that’s what you need, a man who could make some free time.”
“That’s right. Why’ont you come over tomorrow, around four. That’s when we have the meetin’.”
We shook hands and I went away.
Etta was looking for me. She was ready for the word of God.
I could have used a drink.
12
First African was a beautiful church on the inside too. A large rectangular room with a thirty-foot ceiling that held two hundred chairs on a gently sloping floor. The rows of seats came down in two tiers toward the pulpit. The podium that stood up front was a light ash stand adorned with fresh yellow lilies and draped with deep purple banners. Behind the minister’s place, slightly off to the left, rose thirty plush velvet chairs, in three rows, for the choir.
There were six stained-glass windows on either side of the room. Jesus at the mountain, John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalen prostrate before the Cross. Bright cellophane colors: reds, blues, yellows, browns, and greens. Each window was about fifteen feet high. Giants of the Bible shining down on us mortals.
We might have been poor people but we knew how to build a house of prayer, and how to bury our loved ones.
Etta and I went to seats toward the middle of the room. She sat next to Ethel Marmoset and I sat on the aisle. Odell and Mary sat in front of us. Jackson and Rita stood at the back. People were coming in through the three large doors at the back of the church, and they were all talking, but in hushed tones so that there was a feeling of silence against the hubbub of voices.
When everybody was seated or situated in back, Melvin Pride came down the center aisle with Jackie Orr at his heel. Melvin was what First African called a senior deacon, a man who has paid his dues. While they came in I noticed that the other deacons had spaced themselves evenly along either side of the congregation. The choir, dressed in purple satin gowns, entered from behind the pulpit and stood before the red velvet chairs.
Finally, Winona Fitzpatrick came down the aisle, twenty feet behind Melvin and Jackie. She was the chairwoman of the church council. Winona was large woman in a loose black gown and a wide-brimmed black hat that had a sky-blue satin band. The room was so quiet by then that you could hear the harsh rasp of Winona’s stockinged thighs.
As I watched her progress I noticed a large young man watching me from across the aisle. He was wearing a decent brown suit that had widely spaced goldenrod stripes. His broad-rimmed fedora was in his lap. His stony dull eyes were on me.
Jackie took his place as lead singer of the choir, and Melvin stood before the group with his hands upraised. Then he looked down behind him, and for the first time I saw a small woman sitting at a large organ just below the podium.
Then there was music. The deep strains of the organ and Jackie’s high tenor voice. The choir sang in back of that.
“Angels,” Etta muttered. “Just angels.”
They sang “A Prayer to Sweet Baby Jesus.” After Melvin was sure he’d guided them into harmony he turned to add his bass to Jackie’s high voice.
Melvin was Jackie’s height, but he was black and craggy. When he sang he grimaced as if in pain. Jackie seemed more like a suitor trying to talk his way into the bedroom.
The song filled the church and I loved it even though I was there for something else. Even though I was going to go against a member, or at least a helper, of that flock, still the love of God filled me. And that was strange, because I had stopped believing in God on the day my father left me as a child in poverty and pain.
“Brothers and sisters!” Reverend Towne shouted. I hadn’t been looking when he came to the dais. He was a very tall man with a big belly that bulged out from his deep blue robes. He was dark brown with strong African features and dense, straightened hair that was greased and combed back away from his forehead.
He ran his left hand over his hair as the last members of the crowd went silent, then he looked out over the faces and grinned and shook his head slowly as if he had seen someone who had been missing for years.
“I’m happy to see you all here this Sunday morning. Yes I am.”
No one spoke but there was a kind of shudder in the room.
He held his big open hands out toward us, relishing our human warmth as if he stood before a fire.
“Was a time once when I saw a lotta empty chairs out there.”
“Amen,” one of the elder deacons intoned.
“Was a time,” the minister said, and then he paused. “Yes. Was a time that we didn’t have no peanut gallery in the back. Was a time ev’rybody could sit and listen to the word of the Lord. They could sit and meditate on his
