Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  Separatism begets separatism. First you adjust to it, then you come to prefer it, then you can’t live without it. Even as segregation heaped insult and injury on black America, it also created a sanctuary, a separate world with its own institutions and traditions. Slavery was evil in every dimension, but segregation offered a balm for the very wounds that it inflicted. Which is why Jim Crow was so insidious. Black teachers in the South tried to maintain separate schools for fear of losing their jobs. Black politicians fought to keep black neighborhoods intact because that was the root of their strength. Black businessmen had a profit motive to fight for the same. But the black church has the strongest gravitational pull of all, because church provides something far more important than jobs or money or even power.

  Even as the congregation at Grand Coteau’s main church grew more diverse—perhaps because it had grown more diverse, thus threatening the chapel’s relevance—the holdouts had drifted further and further away, keeping the rest of the parish at arm’s length, insisting that their institutions, cultural traditions, and styles of worship were worthy of being preserved. Which they were, and still are. But as David Knight had noted during the first go-round, the real source of black resistance stemmed from something else. It wasn’t about the building. It wasn’t really about cultural traditions and styles of worship, either. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the theological implications of whatever color Jesus used to be.

  “The only thing the blacks wanted was a little respect,” Wallace Belson says, “and we didn’t get it. I don’t want to be around somebody who ain’t comfortable around me and I’m not comfortable around him. If I’m sitting by you in church and Father says to shake one another’s hand, and you look the other way and I look the other way, we’re not going to church to worship the Lord—we’re going to church with hatred. And that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Church is a place of acceptance, of belonging. No matter who you are in the world, every Sunday morning you can go someplace and with a simple profession of faith you get to be a member of the club—a member of the club, the one going to heaven. At the chapel, Wallace Belson was an important parishioner, and he more than anyone had every legitimate reason to believe that the white church wouldn’t give him the same respect he enjoyed right where he was. So as the Lenten season of 1994 approached and integration threatened once again, Belson and several other members of the Knights of Peter Claver took it upon themselves to be the last-line defenders of the chapel. For weeks, they petitioned Bishop Flynn to step in. They wrote letter after letter, each one more plaintive and insistent than the last, demanding that the diocese keep the chapel open “to preserve the dignity, respect, and needs of our black Catholic community.”

  On February 10, Flynn intervened, directing Father Rimes not to suspend the Sunday chapel mass. Rimes wrote back, requesting that the bishop reconsider, lest he halt the first progress made toward integration in some twenty years. But Flynn would hear no debate on the matter. He simply ordered that the chapel stay open, period, and gave no reason why. The bishop then went one step further. He went over the parish priests’ heads and issued a letter directly to the chapel’s congregation. In it, he offered his personal guarantee that their church would never be closed again at any time for any reason. When the letter was read aloud at the Sunday morning mass, a joyous celebration was had—anybody who tried to close that chapel wouldn’t be here a week. Shortly thereafter, Pastor No. 9 packed his bags.

  “Father Rimes was pretty pissed off,” Warren Broussard recalls. “The way the bishop handled it was very disrespectful of his position. It also didn’t take into account the larger experience of the African-American congregation here. The bishop didn’t solicit any information from anyone except the people who were complaining, and not everyone in the black community thinks the same way.”

  Charles James was born and raised in Sunset, another small country town just across Interstate 49 from Grand Coteau. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, he attended the black parish at Christ the King from baptism to first communion to confirmation. His family left for Houston in 1970, came back in 1973, and he’s been here ever since, working for Exxon Mobil as a maintenance crew chief on the company’s coastal oil pipeline. He’s served on St. Charles’s parish council for a total of twenty-three years, with five different stints as council president.

  In that time, James has been a leading voice for that part of the black community very much in favor of integration. Tall and barrel-chested, his dark complexion offset only by a few streaks of gray hair, he’s the kind of guy whose presence really fills a room. As council president, James had little use for the timid politics of the bishop. “We got a lot of crap from the diocese,” he says. “‘Hold down the fuss’ is what they wanted us to do. But the fuss was gonna be had, because God ordained the fuss.”

  Despite the council’s biracial membership, James found that it had become more an instrument of division than of unity, as originally intended. “When I came on the council,” he says, “every policy, every action was to keep things like they were, to maintain that separation. The white members of the council felt the black church really wasn’t their concern. Their feeling was that they contributed the majority of the money to the parish, therefore they ought to be able to get what they want. With the blacks, it was always something like, ‘We spent this much money on the main church, so how much will be spent on our church?’ If the subject of coming together was ever brought up, the whites would go to the white side and the blacks would go to the black side. And if you were standing in the middle, you had problems. But fortunately for this parish some folks were standing in the middle, black people and white people, folks who heard God’s call and understood where we needed to be.”

  Charles James chose to stand with the people in the middle, he says, because he refused to put his race above his Catholic faith in man’s common humanity. “I always felt that society should reflect the church, rather than the church reflecting society. That was the basis of our problem—we had brought segregation and that foolishness into the church, rather than being present to God and taking that out into the world. And since I was council president, I felt I had to make a point to talk about that. Well… I didn’t know what I was doing. I was right, you understand. It was right. But at the same time, I didn’t realize how challenging it was going to be.”

  Unaware of just what he was starting, in the mid-1990s, James began pressing the issue at the weekly council meetings. “I would say, ‘Folks, listen. We’re here for a reason. God ordained us to be here to do something. If we don’t grow as individuals spiritually, then we’re all wasting our time. We need to understand what has to happen, and what has to happen is that we need to combine these two churches, literally. These churches have to become one to make us one, as God intended. And we need the courage to do that.’”

  Eventually, the council came to a tentative agreement on the best course of action: open the discussion to a public meeting and then put it to a parish-wide vote. “Everyone agreed that putting it before the congregation was the right thing to do,” James says. “So I said to them, ‘Okay, I need a motion from someone and a second so we can vote on this thing.’ And all I got was dead silence. Not one person raised his hand.”

  In 1972, a black board member had courageously made the motion to accept the white church as everyone’s new home, and the whole council had backed him unanimously. Twenty years later, no one, black or white, would step forward even to sponsor the move to put it up for discussion. “People’s mentality got stuck,” James says. “The priests spent more time talking about race than anything else. But when you just stand up and you talk about racism, whites feel that you’re talking about them, which in turn translates into ‘I’m not a good person.’ So they pull back. And the blacks are sitting there, and we’re all puffed up and smiling, because we say, ‘Hey, we ain’t got to make no effort. We’re the victims here. We don’t have to meet these people half
way.’ So everything just lingered.”

  With the bishop’s injunction on one side and a deadlocked parish council on the other, closing the chapel was not an option. After Rimes’s departure, Warren Broussard had been promoted to serve as Pastor No. 10. Together, he and Charles James tried to make improvements where they could. One priority was dialing down the whiteness of the white church to make it feel like everyone’s church, the very thing the 1972 renovations had tried to do and failed. Rather than take a hammer and crowbar to St. Charles’s historic interior, Broussard decided on a less invasive approach. He took some of the dead white Europeans down off the walls and replaced them with works by local artists that depicted Christ ministering to children of all races. “It was a way to begin to create a more welcoming atmosphere,” he says.

  To match the changes in the church’s physical landscape, they decided to change the liturgical one as well. Like any halfway decent Catholic, I can breeze through Sunday mass on autopilot. During the first service I attended at St. Charles, I was zipping right along through the Apostle’s Creed. “We believe in God, the Father Almighty… was crucified under Pontius Pilate… the life everlasting. Amen.” And there I stopped, like you’re supposed to. But everyone around me kept going. So I stood there like an idiot while the rest of the congregation recited in unison:

  We of St. Charles Parish desire:

  To be one family in service to God and to each other.

  To be one people through worship, reconciliation, and renewal who are present to the needs of all God’s people.

  To be a community that in faith welcomes all to be one with us in the Love of God.

  To be in union with Jesus, inspired by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the word of God.

  To hold sacred the celebration of the Sacrament of the church.

  To see our parish as the body of Christ carrying forward the work of Christ on earth.

  “It was a parish mission statement,” Broussard explains. “The pastors came up with it together with Charles James and the council. We began reading it at all of our masses. We felt that if we started praying it, together, every week, people would stop to think about what they were saying.”

  He was right. In adding the new prayer, Father Broussard forced his congregation to get out of rote habit and see things from a different angle. Standing in a mixed-race congregation, saying that prayer, one can’t help but be conscious of what it means. Changing the liturgy and the artwork were not insignificant steps, but in five long years, they were the only ones Broussard was able to make. In the fall of 1999, he packed his bags.

  As Pastor No. 10 moved out, Pastor No. 11 settled in. Father Dave Andrus arrived at a transitional moment in both the diocese and in the parish. Bishop Flynn had retired, taking with him his protectorship of the chapel. The chapel itself was almost sixty years old and needed major structural renovations; the air-conditioning and electrical systems all had to be gutted and replaced. The Jesuits felt that the parish couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars refurbishing a building that was used only one hour a week by less than half of the church’s population. So as the new millennium got under way, Pastor No. 11 was given one primary task by his superiors: close the chapel and integrate the congregations.

  A quiet, soft-spoken man, Andrus did not come in swinging a hammer and crowbar like David Knight. In fact, for months he did little besides study the situation. He finally concluded that the question was not whether to renovate the chapel, but how to renovate it. The parish had no need for separate churches, but it did need new religious education classrooms and an assembly center for parish activities. The best use of the money would be to convert the chapel to a multipurpose building to serve the whole community.

  Knowing that he would need the support of the black parishioners in any such endeavor, Andrus proposed they undertake what in the church is known as a spiritual discernment, calling on the Holy Spirit to lead or give direction in a difficult matter. The parish would hold a series of meetings, discussions, and prayer sessions. Through this, God would show them the way. Darrell Burleigh worked closely with the priest in making it happen. “Father Dave did it right,” Burleigh says. “We spent a lot of money, sent out a lot of letters informing everyone and giving everyone their opportunity to have input in the process.” In early 2002, after months of prayer, deliberation, and debate, the discernment was concluded. The consensus was that a majority of the parish was in favor of remodeling the chapel into a multipurpose building. Andrus announced that the renovations would go forward. And this time it was the black congregation’s turn to get pissed off about moving the furniture.

  By now, Charles James was no longer parish council president, but he was still a board member as well as a singer in the chapel’s choir. He made a point of standing out front at the seven-thirty chapel mass each Sunday to greet everyone and shake hands as people went in. But once James made his support for the chapel renovation publicly known, his fellow parishioners—lifelong friends, some of them—began freezing him out. “One morning I was out front before mass,” James says, “and one of the parishioners walked right past me. I went to go shake his hand, and he wouldn’t do it. We just looked at each other, and he said, ‘You don’t even have any business being here.’

  “This was a gentleman,” James hedges, perhaps not wanting to name names, “whose father had had some problems back in the day.”

  He’s talking, of course, about Wallace Belson. Under Belson, the same Knights of Peter Claver faction that had organized to protest the seasonal integration in 1994 was now holding meetings and organizing to stop it once again, which meant turning against one of their own. Charles James was a member of the Knights, had been for years. Not anymore. “When I was coming up,” Belson says, “for me to go against my own color for a white man? Oh, no. I’d have got whipped. And that’s how it was with Charles and us. You know what they did to us, so now why you want to side with them? We got rid of him.” Belson says James was forced to leave; James says he quit. Either way, he was out.

  After he left the Knights, James says, “the ugliness started getting interesting.” The opposition went into high gear. Petitions circulated. Letters flooded the bishop’s office. Calls were made to the local media, trying to gin up stories that painted the St. Charles Parish as antiblack. “They literally ostracized anyone who advocated the union,” James says. “It got to the point where they were out in the community, finding people on the streets and saying, ‘Don’t talk to this one, don’t talk to that one.’”

  “It was a bad time,” Darrell Burleigh says. “There were some pretty harsh words said. There were people that I had a lot of respect for in the black community, but I had to see another side to them; the things that they said to me and other staff members were very ugly. Anything you would say would be taken out of context. They’d just get angry and start swearing. You know, ‘Y’all the ones that’s doing this.’ And, ‘Y’all the ones that’s causin’ all this.’ It would just get out of hand.”

  Few things will send white folks running for cover like a racial situation that’s gotten out of hand. To look at the public record, one might think that the chapel issue was a matter fought over only by blacks among themselves with the Jesuits acting as referees. As Charles James had learned, the whites in Grand Coteau generally felt that whatever blacks did or didn’t do with the chapel wasn’t really their concern. As Darrell Burleigh had learned, to be white and take a public stance on unification was to invite some harsh words. It was the white man’s catch-22: to oppose the unification of the churches was taboo, because it implied you didn’t want blacks in the main church. Which meant that your motives were racist, or at the very least suspect. So you’re supposed to support integration. But to endorse the unification of the churches was equally taboo, because it meant that you wanted to take the chapel away from the black community. Which meant you were trying to undermine it. Which meant that your motives were racist, or at the very least suspect. Which is why, a
ny time a racial problem comes up, white people just throw money at it and run away.

  Or they just keep being racist. Because there was plenty of that, too. Wallace Belson’s faction was not the only antagonistic force at play, just the most visible one. Some whites strongly opposed the union. They had never wanted blacks at St. Charles in the first place, but modern racial etiquette prevented them from crowing about it too loudly. Their public silence makes it hard to gauge how pervasive the white opposition was, but from his central listening post in the rectory office, Darrell Burleigh saw and heard plenty of it. “A lot of people would come and say things to me they wouldn’t say in public,” he explains. “They’d say things under cover or ‘around the back,’ as I say. They’d go, ‘Why don’t y’all just leave ’em over there?’ Or, ‘We built them that church, and that’s where they should stay.’ I guess by telling me they figured I’d go and tell the priest.”

  Which he did. Directly or indirectly, every word from both camps eventually made it back to Father Andrus, and the mounting discord eventually took its toll on the mild-mannered pastor. To those around him, he appeared increasingly despondent, exasperated, and prone to very unpriestly outbursts. “Finally,” Burleigh recalls, “Father Dave just threw up his hands and said, ‘I give up! I’m not going to fight this anymore.’”

  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.