Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  On the night of the parish vote, the Knights of Peter Claver made one last, all-out push with a group demonstration in front of the church. “Wallace Belson had a whole bunch of people out there,” Charles James says. “He had people I’d never even seen at church, let alone come to a meeting, all walking around with picket signs. Just silly crap.”

  But one man’s silly crap is another man’s lifelong cause. When I spoke with Belson, as he was telling me his side of this part of the story, he got up, went over to a closet, and pulled out an old dog-eared piece of posterboard. Then he brought it over. It was one of the signs from the rally. I WALK THE WALK FOR JUSTICE, it read.

  “You see?” he said as he handed it to me. “My heart? How much it got hurt?”

  In my conversations with Father Broussard, he tried to put his finger on Wallace Belson. “I had two relationships with Wallace,” Broussard says. “When we’d meet one-on-one, we could talk. And I think we had respect for each other—certainly I did for him as someone who had been through a lot. I’d do home masses at his sister’s house—she was very ill at the time—and he’d always be there. Our relationship was very friendly. But then at meetings it was this whole other experience with him. We were always on opposite sides. For me it was more about trying to represent the community, and for him it was more of a representation of his personal pain. There seemed to be a lot of anger toward what had happened when the churches moved together.”

  Talking with Belson one-on-one, you won’t meet a nicer guy. He’s generous with his time and his stories. He jokes with a sly grin that tells you he likes to cut up and have fun. But he’s also candid about his resentments. “I didn’t speak to Father Broussard for some time,” Belson says. “If Father Broussard would have told me hello back then, he’d have to fight, you understand? Today I pass by him, and I’m polite but I go my distance and stay away from him.” But that’s not really the person Belson wants to be. “I was raised better than that,” he insists. “I was raised Catholic.”

  As to why he’s let anger dictate so much of his life, that much is obvious. So much as mention the incident, and his head cocks a few degrees down and the pain is suddenly right there at the surface. “It hurts me to this day even to talk about it,” he says. “My daddy, after they beat him, he stopped going to church. He’d go every now and then, but before that he’d go every Sunday. That was done with. Then he started drinking even harder than he used to drink.”

  And that’s all Wallace Belson says about his father.

  Back in front of the church, as the final parish council hearing was about to begin, Belson and his fellow marchers folded up their picket signs and headed inside. The meeting was called to order. Then it descended quickly into chaos. Heated arguments and personal attacks flew from both sides. “For about forty-five minutes Father Dave and I were devils,” Charles James says, “People said a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, I’m talkin’ about lies. I’m talkin’ about folks who stood up and just flat out told lies. And this is from people that I knew, you understand? People that I knew well. But as I sat there, God wouldn’t let me say a word. Even with all the stuff people were yelling, I said nothing for that whole time until we were ready to vote.”

  Once everyone with a piece to speak had spoken, Father Andrus stepped forward to voice his opinion. He gave a lengthy speech, saying that he believed integration was the right thing to do, but in his heart he didn’t think the parish was ready for it, spiritually. His recommendation was that they wait, but he would leave it to the parish council to decide. Then each member of the council stood in turn and cast his or her vote, giving the reasons behind it. “It was close,” James says. “Some of those ladies on the council, they were tough. They weren’t intimidated by all that mess.”

  In the end, the council was split, and the tie-breaking vote came down to Charles James. “When it got to me,” he recalls, “there was this moment of silence. It was rather dramatic. But you see, now I had a conflict.”

  The day before, James had gone to Father Andrus personally. They talked, and James said he believed voting to unify the parish was absolutely the right thing to do. But he also believed if they forced people to go through with it, he didn’t know if that would accomplish anything. The backlash might erase the progress they’d made, and any backlash that did come would fall squarely on the pastor. Given that, James told Andrus he would vote whichever way the priest decided. So when Charles James stood to vote, he said, “Listen, I told Father Dave that if it was his intent to move this thing forward or to stop it, that I would vote whichever way he felt was best. He doesn’t think that we are ready, and I agree. We’re not.”

  And then Charles James voted no.

  The plan failed. Half the room sighed in disappointment. The other half rose up in cheers. “People were clapping,” James says. “They took some vindication in it. But I told them, I said, ‘Look, if you think you’re fighting me, you’re wrong. If you think you’re fighting Father Dave, you’re wrong. Understand that what we have done is that we’ve said no to God. God has allowed us the opportunity to live out our Christian values, but we, because of fear, have chosen not to. Now God is going to do it the way He wants it done.’”

  The meeting adjourned, everyone went home, and Pastor No. 11 packed his bags.

  Dave Andrus transferred out in August of that year, the earliest available opportunity. Today, he’s settled at the Jesuit mission on Pohnpei, the main island of the Federated States of Micronesia, way out in the South Pacific, where, presumably, the political climate is easier on his nerves. Reached by email, he was gracious but clearly reticent to revisit the subject. Not wanting to upset anyone further, he didn’t offer much in the way of commentary.

  One observation he did share is that he feels the discernment process, while torturous, brought a kind of catharsis to the town. “It allowed all the arguments,” he said, “pro and con, to ferment in the minds and hearts of the parishioners, perhaps giving the Holy Spirit more opportunity to bring about enlightenment.”

  It did.

  Charles James voted against integration in the parish council, but soon after he cast a different vote with his feet. The first Sunday following the parish council meeting, he went back to the seven-thirty mass at the chapel, only to let everyone know it would be his last. “I told them I have to do what I believe,” James says, “and I didn’t believe what we were doing was right. So I said, ‘I’m done. I’m not coming to church here anymore.’

  “At the end of that mass, I shook the dust off of my robe, and I didn’t go back. I started going to nine-thirty mass over at the big church. And I was all right with that. I told God that, too. I said, ‘I’ve done all I can do, God. I can’t do any more.’

  “A friend of mine, he would go to both churches. He was split in the middle. He’d bring me stuff, stories about what was going on over there, all the negative things people were saying. Finally I said, ‘You know what, brother? I don’t want to hear that. I have nothing, anymore, to do with that.’ I felt good about it then, and I feel good about it now.”

  Charles James was not the only parishioner who came out of the experience a different man. Wallace Belson didn’t leave the chapel, not until he had to. But he did fold up his protest signs and put them in the closet. And if he hasn’t let go of his pain, he seems to have made peace with it. “My wife,” Belson says, “three years she’s dead. At one time she felt like I felt, but then she changed. She used to sit there and talk to me every week. ‘Forget,’ she’d say. ‘Forget and forgive.’

  “I’m not gonna lie to you. I had plenty of hatred in me from that time. I’m not perfect. I used to drink. I used to smoke cigars. I was Al Capone, did everything ’cept kill somebody. But a while back I was helping Father at the Peter Claver hall, and I had a fall from the ceiling, almost killed myself changing a filter in the air-conditioning. I said, Well, God didn’t take me, so I made a promise to try and get along with everybody and just leave everything behind.

&n
bsp; “So I did. I changed, completely, away from that. I respect anybody who respects me. With Charles James, he used to be in Knights of Peter Claver. We got rid of him then. But today I’m nice to him, and he’s nice to me. The white guys in the fire department? My best friends. I get along good with them now. For New Year’s we had a party together. Few years ago, something like that never would have happened.”

  “And the church?” I ask him. “Now that it’s integrated?”

  “It’s not perfect,” he says, “but it’s better than it used to be. Got two good priests over there right now. Couldn’t ask for better. My grandson, he’s in the ninth grade. He don’t know any different. Today or tomorrow, everybody have to realize we have to get along with one another.

  “I don’t have no regrets. I provided for my family. I’m not rich, but I don’t have to worry about my medicines. If I want to go here or do this, I can do it. Most of my friends are dead or in the nursing home, and here I am, still makin’ noise. So I’m happy with life ’cause I know God was good to me. But I also know God’s gonna punish me. When I die, he’s gonna punish me because of the hatred I had in me. So I forgive, but I don’t forget.”

  * Because blacks were excluded from the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Church’s principal fraternal service organization, in 1909 black Catholics formed their own, the Knights of Peter Claver, named for a Jesuit priest who ministered to slaves in the seventeenth century. Much like the black and white parishes of Acadiana, both organizations still exist serving similar roles in separate communities.

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  Milk and Honey

  Even as America’s racial landscape has undergone tectonic changes, the average churchgoer still worships in a world that looks remarkably like it did a century ago. America is Duson, Louisiana. St. Theresa’s is still the white church, and St. Benedict’s is still the black church. People can go back and forth if they want, but there’s still a set of railroad tracks running right down the middle, symbolizing our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of each other’s lives.

  Some things are different, sure. Overtures have been made by white church leaders, here and there. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a full-throated and unambiguous apology for its role in promoting slavery and Jim Crow, and some of its members have reached out and brought in black preachers to serve at white churches. The other mainline Protestant denominations have all made similar gestures. Evangelical Christianity, which rose to prominence after the end of Jim Crow, prides itself on having always preached and practiced a gospel that transcends race—and with megachurches the size of basketball arenas, they do draw congregations from a slightly broader spectrum. But nearly 90 percent of self-identified evangelicals are white. Demographically and culturally, the white church is still the white church. It has no reason to be anything else so long as the black church remains the black church.

  If you’re white and you go to a black church, you’ll be immediately swept up in a warm, enthusiastic embrace. Lots of hearty handshakes. Lots of old black ladies in hats saying, “So glad you could join us today.” The black church has always enjoyed the opportunity to show off its Sunday best to outside visitors. But that’s exactly what you are when you’re here: a visitor. As friendly as people are, the longer you sit in that pew—and at a black church you will sit there for a long time—the more you come to realize that this isn’t meant for you. Because it isn’t. It’s the social, economic, political, and cultural hub of a separate black America. Its churchness cannot be divorced from its blackness.

  As the black middle class spread out in search of suburbia, black churches followed the migration. Once established, they became centers of gravity, accelerating the move and concentrating it, eventually giving rise to the stupendously large black megachurch. From Dallas to Atlanta to Washington, D.C., black megachurches and their celebrity preachers are now the fastest growing segment of the faithful. They look like churches, these places, but they function more like independent city-states. With congregations that can range to upward of ten, fifteen, even thirty thousand members in size, they raise millions of dollars to build and maintain their own infrastructure, which can include everything from Bible schools to health clubs. Their extensive ministries offer the black community a full suite of social services, from ex-offender reentry programs to upper-tax-bracket financial planning. One black megachurch in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the fifteen-thousand-member Jericho City of Praise, owns a 125-acre campus that includes its own office park and a $35 million retirement complex.

  It would seem that just about everyone has settled quite contentedly on opposite sides of the spiritual tracks. By the most widely cited statistic, 93 percent of all churches in America are racially homogenous. And if you ever stop to suggest that maybe those churches should do something about it, people just look at you like you’re crazy.

  Down in Grand Coteau, Darrell Burleigh has been parish manager at St. Charles Borromeo for over thirty years now. Year after year, decade after decade, he’s sat at his desk and watched integration not happen. Eventually, like most of the country, he figured it never would. “After the last fight with Dave Andrus,” Burleigh says, “I said, ‘That’s it. It’ll never happen.’ People were talking so bad about the priests you would have thought they were criminals. I said, ‘The only way we’ll ever integrate is the blacks will have to come over and say they want to join the main church, and that’s never gonna happen.’

  “But Charles James, he would always say to me, he’d say, ‘Darrell, you’re gonna see. One of these days…’

  “And I’d say, ‘It’ll never happen.’

  “He’d say, ‘Ah, you don’t have no faith, you.’

  “And I’d say, ‘Maybe I don’t. I might be in the wrong place, havin’ no faith at church.’

  “So ever since it happened, he still reminds me whenever I see him. ‘What I told you?’ he says. ‘What I told you?’

  “And I say, ‘You know, I’m big enough I can admit when I was wrong.’ So I said I was wrong. The only thing I’ve ever worked for was to see the church as one. It was what I’d always prayed for, but I never thought I would have seen it in my lifetime. And I tell you, it went off like a piece of cake.”

  In the fall of 2003, David Andrus’s successor, Pastor No. 12, was transferred out, paving the way for Pastor No. 13, Tom Madden. Father Madden had been dispatched to St. Charles Borromeo as a temporary replacement from Grand Coteau’s Jesuit Spirituality Center just across the way. His assignment was meant to last only a few months—he was technically retired—but all the area priests had been allocated to other parishes. A continuing shortage compelled him to stay on.

  That problem was compounded when St. Charles’s associate pastor took permanent leave due to illness, leaving Madden in charge of running the entire parish. It would have been a heavy workload for a young man in his prime; Madden was seventy-eight. Attempting to carry the whole mass schedule by himself, he suffered a fainting spell at the altar. Then he suffered another, landing him in the emergency room.

  The cost of maintaining separate churches had been wearing on Grand Coteau for years, emotionally, financially, and in every other way. Now that burden had become manifest in the infirmities of its aging priest. “I got to talking with Father Madden about it,” Darrell Burleigh says, “and he admitted he was just too old for it. So I said, ‘You know what we need to do? What we’ve always needed to do: bring that chapel over here. Play the age card. You’re too old, and you can’t do it.’

  “He was a little leery, given what the other pastors had gone through. But I told him, ‘Tom, what can they do to you? You’re already retired.’”

  Madden eventually came around. “I had no intention of making any changes when I arrived,” he explains. “It was never my goal to end the segregation, but I saw this as an opportunity to do so. So I solicited suggestions from the parishioners, black and white, and then proposed we move the seven-thirty chapel
mass to the main church and cut the services down to two.” Everyone agreed. Given the realities of the situation, there wasn’t much choice. Besides, it was only temporary—or, at least, that’s what everyone was led to believe. For several months, as Madden ran the parish without an associate, he quietly dragged his feet in searching for another. “Maybe it was somewhat duplicitous,” he says, “but I felt if we got it in place, we might be able to continue with it, make it permanent. Then the whole problem of having a black church and a white church would be resolved.”

  Stalling tactics would last only so long. Another priest would show up eventually, and the chapel would reopen like always. Fortunately for Madden, as Charles James had predicted, the Lord had decided to do things His way. The integration of the church would be helped along by an act of God. On October 3, 2002, Louisiana had been hit by Hurricane Lili. The storm inflicted some $790 million in damage on the state. In Grand Coteau, the roof of the chapel took the worst of it. Water damage was seeping in. This was on top of the major electrical and heating repairs the building had needed since Father Andrus’s time; they’d been put off by the leadership changes at the parish. If the chapel wasn’t fixed soon, it would be in no shape to weather the next hurricane season.

  Madden faced the same problem Andrus had: spend thousands restoring the chapel, or use that same money to build something the parish sorely lacked. “If we converted it into an all-purpose building,” Madden says, “we could still use it as a chapel, but we could take out the pews and set up moveable walls for classrooms and such. Of course, the chapel had largely been built by the sweat equity of the black community; losing it was very painful for them. But I figured if I did it and moved on, then I could take the blame with me and it wouldn’t be the problem of the successor. So that’s what we did.”