Sometimes Mother catches on and reaches over to pinch me. “Pay attention to the sermon!” she whispers, loud enough for others to hear. A few humiliating times she drags me out by the wrist and spanks me.
Whenever possible, I try to sit near blind Mr. Baker, who relies on a German shepherd to lead him around. We kids have been told not to pet the seeing-eye dog unless Mr. Baker gives us permission, so I make it a goal to befriend the kind man. I envy his dog, who’s allowed to sleep during the service. The poor thing must be bored all the time because he always has to obey his master. He can’t even be petted without permission.
Everything changes when Mother agrees to teach a ladies’ class during the church hour. She paroles us to other women, who find ways to entertain us. From humongous pocketbooks they pull out key rings, change for the offering, and goodies such as butterscotch candy and Juicy Fruit chewing gum. These women have different smells than I’m used to—vanilla, apple blossoms, hair spray—and a few even smell like cigarettes. One Sunday I’m assigned to a woman whose husband, a former sailor, pulls up his sleeve to show me a tattoo of a bosomy woman, possibly the first tattoo I’ve seen and definitely the first one in church.
I especially love sitting by Mrs. Horton, who wears a chain of furry animals across her shoulders—a “mink stole,” she calls it. The dead mink have hard, glittery eyes and narrow mouths full of mean-looking teeth. Each animal’s mouth clamps down on the butt of the animal in front of it. Their fluffy tails and tiny black feet hang down, begging to be played with.
As the service drones on, Mrs. Horton draws faces on my hand—an adult, drawing in church!—in such a way that if I wave my fingers the eyes wink. She puts her arm around me and gently squeezes me. She gives me a peppermint, which I move to put in my pocket until she whispers, “It’s OK to eat it now.” It feels like a sin, candy in church, but that makes it taste even better. She lets me drop money in the offering plate and keep a dime for myself. For the first time ever, church becomes fun.
* * *
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Sunday evening services are more relaxed, and often Colonial Hills brings in guest speakers for a “youth night.” Gospel magicians make doves appear and people disappear. A scientist from Chicago hooks himself up to a generator and shoots a million volts of electricity through his body. Miniature lightning bolts spark from his fingertips, and when an assistant tosses him blocks of wood, they burn in his hands, filling the church with a fireplace smell. No one, however, can compete with Paul Anderson, “the strongest man in the world,” who from a squatting position lifts a giant balance scale with eight teenagers standing on it, four to a side.
Afterward, we retire to a large room next door for refreshments, where Mr. Wharton is in charge. Even though he’s an office clerk, with pasty skin and a wandering eye, he quickly becomes a favorite to us kids, because he has his very own cotton-candy machine. He pours sugar into a tube in the center of what looks like a stainless-steel washtub and flips a switch. Presto! All I have to do is hold out a paper cone, and sticky strands of pink cotton candy magically appear, winding their way around the paper and my fingers.
My most memorable Sunday evening service takes place when Dr. M. R. DeHaan, a radio star from Michigan, visits for a weekend conference. It’s like the World Series of church. We arrive early for a parking place, and still we have to walk a long way. So many newcomers show up on Sunday night that Marshall and I get permission to join the teenagers in the usually closed balcony. I feel as if I’m in a sports stadium, looking down on all the balding heads and women’s hats, with the choir and preacher way off in the distance.
On the main floor below, hundreds of fans are rippling, like ragged ocean waves. They’re flat pieces of cardboard stapled to what looks like a Popsicle stick, and you wave the fan in front of your face to create a breeze. The front side of the fan has a picture: Christ at Gethsemane or the Good Shepherd or maybe a photo of our church. The opposite side has an ad for a funeral company.
Teenagers sitting nearby decide to edit the funeral ads. To air-conditioned chapel they add, “Keeps the body from smelling.” Next to ambulance service they print, “Oops, too late,” and by 24-hour oxygen they write in “Just when you don’t need it.” We spend most of Dr. DeHaan’s sermon vying to come up with the best slogans. Marshall suggests an overall motto for the funeral home: “We always let you down.”
After the sermon, our pastor announces that we’ll be collecting a “love offering” for Dr. DeHaan. As the ushers spread throughout the sanctuary, one of the rowdier teenagers drops a couple of M&M’s onto the main floor below us. A few minutes later, he proposes dropping a straight pin on a bald man’s head. Just then, another teenager “accidentally” knocks an overflowing offering basket off the ledge. Paper bills float through the air, swept up and down by ceiling fans, and scores of coins roll around noisily on the slanted wooden floor below. Some coins find the heating grates and dive through with a loud plink! The pastor scowls mightily and deacons rush up the balcony stairs to restore order.
That’s the last time we sit in the balcony.
* * *
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Colonial Hills hosts two hallmark events each year. During the annual missionary conference, foreign flags hang from the balcony, dressing up the church. In five-minute time slots, the missionaries take turns telling us about their adventures overseas. I perk up when they describe things like eating monkey meat and working with pygmies. Some of them show slides, which always end with a sunset.
After the service, the missionaries stand beside booths in the back of the sanctuary, which have displays of blowguns, stuffed crocodiles, butterflies, and even a few shrunken heads. I learn about geography and foreigners from those booths. As I view the displays and talk to the missionary kids, suddenly I’m glad my parents never made it to Africa. I have nightmares about that continent’s bird-eating spiders, and snakes that hide in the roof and drop on sleepers, and something called a guinea worm that crawls around under your skin.
On the final night, people make Faith Promise Pledges. Colonial Hills supports 170 missionaries, and each year its members raise bucketfuls of money. A man on the platform operates an adding machine with a long roll of paper. As ushers collect pledge cards, the pastor announces them: “Here’s a pledge for one hundred dollars. I know this person is giving all they can, sacrificially.” Then he booms, “And all of God’s people say…” and we thunder back, “Amen!” Occasionally we hear a thousand-dollar pledge and everyone claps and says “Hallelujah.”
For several years I have saved pennies in hopes of buying a new bike when I turn eight. Just before the missionary conference, I tell Mother that the Lord is leading me to give my coins to the missionaries instead. She has me put them in a bag, 865 pennies and a handful of silver dollars, and on the final night she prompts me to walk up to the platform and hand them in person to Brother Paul. When I do so, he stops me, puts his hand on my shoulder, and announces to the whole church, “This young boy is giving all these pennies to the missionaries instead of buying a new bike! Praise the Lord!” Everybody claps, and I have never felt prouder, or more holy.
An expert in “the end times,” Paul Van Gorder also organizes an annual prophecy conference. Because we believe that Jesus will return soon and the world will end, our church takes prophecy seriously. We study the Bible for clues to the future. During the conference, large banners hang across the platform: canvas sheets stitched together and covered with drawings of science-fiction-looking creatures. These drawings depict visions from the books of Daniel and Revelation, and speakers wielding long pointers explain how the various toes and horns and eyes and scorpion tails represent various world powers.
Russia makes it onto the charts. One speaker holds up a newspaper report on Russia’s plan to breed horses in preparation for a coming war that will be fought on horseback. He says the Antichrist will arise from a newly united Europe and lead
million-man armies from the north to descend on Israel, set off nuclear bombs, and bring about the battle of Armageddon. “Where’s Gog and Magog, as mentioned in the book of Revelation?” he asks, and pauses for effect before tapping a map on the chart. “If you draw a line straight north from Jerusalem, you’ll hit Moscow, Russia!” A woman behind me gasps. As I listen, part of me wants to be raptured before the Great Tribulation, while part of me wants to stick around and watch the fireworks.
Our church talks a lot about current events. In 1959, the year I turn ten, Colonial Hills hands out hundreds of copies of If America Elects a Catholic President, a book “Dedicated to the thousands of Christians who have suffered for Jesus’ sake at the hands of Romanism.” Despite the scare, John F. Kennedy gets elected and, as far as I can tell, Christians don’t suffer any more than usual.
As the civil rights movement gets under way, lifelong Democrats become Republicans overnight. And after the president sends troops to make schools in the South admit Black students, tension fills our church. Where will they force integration next, we wonder—restaurants, motels, churches? Colonial Hills opens a private school as a haven for whites who don’t want to attend integrated public schools.
Only once have I seen Black people at a church service. When the famous speaker Dr. DeHaan visited—the one time I sat in the balcony—he insisted that some of his Black supporters be allowed to attend. I counted six Black people in church that weekend, sitting together in a roped-off section.
One week in Sunday School, I hear about the “Curse of Ham.” The teacher reads us a weird passage in Genesis 9 that tells of Noah, drunk and naked, cursing his grandson Canaan for some vague sexual sin. “The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers,” declared Noah. According to the teacher, Canaan’s father was Ham, and the word Ham means “burnt black,” so in this passage God was condemning the Black race to a future of slavery. No one bothers to point out that a drunken Noah, not God, pronounced the curse, and that it applied to Canaan, not his father, Ham.
On occasion Lester Maddox visits our church. Maddox is the closest thing to a celebrity that I know. Church people like to eat at his fried-chicken restaurant, the Pickrick Cafeteria. Mother has taken us there a few times, and I remember filing past the “Make a Wish for Segregation” wishing well by the entrance. The restaurant sells T-shirts, a Lester Maddox “Wake up America” alarm clock, and souvenir ax handles like those used by cops to beat civil rights demonstrators. The store displays three sizes: Daddy, Mama, and a smaller Junior version that looks like a policeman’s billy club. Each week Maddox runs ads in the Atlanta newspapers denouncing the federal government for threatening to take away his property rights. At the church’s Men’s Brotherhood meeting, he announces that he’ll close the restaurant if the feds make him serve Blacks. Sure enough, he does—and a few years later gets elected governor of Georgia.
In 1960 civil rights activists announce plans to integrate Atlanta’s churches. Our church recruits lookout squads, who take turns patrolling the entrances against “troublemakers.” The deacons print up cards to give to any demonstrators who might try to sneak in:
Believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God’s word, we cannot extend a welcome to you and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly. Scripture does NOT teach “the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” He is the Creator of all, but only the Father of those who have been regenerated.
If any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God.
(Unanimous Statement of Pastor and Deacons, August 1960)
When no demonstrators turn up, the church eventually softens its stance and permits a few Black families to attend—especially students and faculty from the all-Black Carver Bible Institute, where my father once taught. The dean of students at Carver sends in an application for his daughter to attend kindergarten at the church’s private school, hoping she can get a quality Christian education. His request is denied. Around the same time, a Carver student, Tony Evans, likes the church’s Bible teaching so much that he applies for membership.
Tony Evans’s request sparks a big debate over whether Colonial Hills is ready for integration. One member asks in an open meeting, “Is it the policy of this church to exclude from membership and from its school Black brothers and sisters in Christ?” The auditorium goes quiet. Finally the head deacon, red in the face and with his neck veins bulging, bangs down the gavel and pronounces, “This meeting is adjourned!” The church doesn’t mind a few well-behaved Black people attending. They just can’t become members or enroll in the school.
* * *
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When a Sunday School teacher begins rewarding us with ribbons and shiny metal trophies, I become a model Christian. I volunteer to read the lessons aloud, memorize the recommended Bible verses, and lead the class in prayer. Marshall cheats. The teacher holds a contest to see who can invite the most people to a special youth service. One guy invites 150, and half of them show up. Marshall makes 240 phone calls—only, as soon as the other party answers, he hangs up, waits a few seconds for the dial tone, and then pretends to invite them. He makes me promise not to tell and wins the trophy.
Church services usually end with an invitation. With every head bowed and every eye closed, we listen to the pastor or evangelist make a plea for the unsaved to accept Christ. “You don’t get to Heaven by being good. Or even by going to church. There’s only one way, my friends, and you can do it right now. Maybe someone here today is not sure you’re going to Heaven. Dear friend, now is the day of salvation. Raise your hand if you want it. Yes, yes, I see that hand. Bless you. Yes, all over this auditorium…God bless you, yes, yes.”
Like a circling mosquito, the speaker’s words seem to come closer and closer, and my guilt surges up. “Are you sure your sins have been washed away? Maybe you’re thinking, ‘Preacher, I will someday, but not yet. Let me have my fun for a while, let me sow my wild oats.’ Or you young people, ‘Maybe after school’s out this summer…’ ” Fear closes in around me, squeezing my heart and lungs.
The organ strikes up, and together we sing the invitation hymns. “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling / Calling, O sinner, come home!” Just like the Billy Graham crusades on the radio, these invitations end with “Just as I Am.” We sing all seven verses. The third verse is the one that gets to me:
Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Nothing plagues me more than the question of whether I am really saved. I’ve said the Sinner’s Prayer so many times that I can spell it backward. I go forward and get prayed over by church elders while I keep my hands clasped together and my eyes squinched shut. I do it again, several times, afraid salvation is like a vaccination that may not take. Still, I can never silence the nagging questions: Do I really mean it? Is it genuine?
I remember how Mother offered me to God, as Hannah did to her son in the Bible, and I know I will never measure up. No matter how often I pray, “God, help me be more holy,” I always lapse into my old trickster patterns. When a new kid introduces himself in Sunday School as Doug Turnipseed, I make fun of his name. He never returns, and I presume it’s my fault. Another time, I join my friends in teasing a simple-minded girl with bad vision, sneaking up to tap her on the shoulder and then running away, just to frustrate her.
Guilt feels like acid in my stomach. How can I know for sure that I’m going to Heaven? I look to my brother, Marshall, who has taken the solemn step of baptism. Maybe that’s the key. I ask Mother and she says I’m not ready. “You haven’t reached the age of accountability,” she says, but she won’t pin down when that is. I wait, torn between acting as the good Sunda
y School kid who earns trophies and the smart-aleck kid who is nothing but a sneak. Once I pass that hazy age of accountability, the odds of my going to Hell will surely increase.
A song from Sunday School perfectly captures the dread I live with:
O be careful little eyes, what you see,
There’s a Father up above
And He’s looking down in love,
So be careful little eyes what you see.
Other verses extend the anatomy: “O be careful little ears what you hear…/ O be careful little hands what you do…/ O be careful little feet where you go…/ O be careful little mouth what you say.”
I know about a father up above, for Mother has used that as a threat. My own father, I know, can see every time I pick my nose, every time I sneak behind her back and disobey, every time I tell a lie. God, a Super-Father, is much scarier, equipped with X-ray vision, an eye with no eyelid. Somehow I miss the “looking down in love” part.
I yearn to take Communion, which is supposed to wash away sins. But Mother makes me wait for that, too, and the waiting builds suspense. Colonial Hills only holds a Communion service once a quarter. Each time, I listen to the crunch of crackers being chewed and watch the little glass Communion vessels magnify people’s tongues.
“What happens when you take Communion?” I ask Marshall after one of the quarterly services.
“It’s no big deal,” he answers. “It’s just grape juice, not wine. And the crackers are like the saltines you eat when you’re sick, only they don’t have as much salt.”
He’s right. When Mother finally lets me “partake of the elements,” I rest the cracker on my tongue, letting it go mushy rather than chewing it. I hold the juice in my mouth for a while before swallowing it. When the Communion tray gets passed around afterward, I replace my glass in one of the small round holes, like Chinese checkers. The holy feeling soon wears off, and not much changes. I must still need to be baptized.
Where the Light Fell Page 7
