by Ad Hudler
“And what do you mean by that?” she asked.
“I just mean you ask an awful lot of questions. People don’t ask questions in church, Margaret. They just listen.”
Every Sunday morning, Dewayne would slowly roll off the edge of the bed so as not to awaken Margaret, then patter into the kitchen and eat his breakfast of a strawberry Pop Tart and bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes awash in whole milk. Afterward, as quietly as possible, he would shower, attempt to tame the cowlick on the crown of his head with water then put on his white button shirt, blue pants, boots and a red-and-blue-striped tie.
Wearing his SFD windbreaker, Dewayne would slip from the house, out to the curb, the sounds of mockingbirds and cardinals chattering in the cool morning air, and he would find the Reflector, thick and heavy with the Sunday inserts whose coupons he would clip and file away later that day, and return the paper to the kitchen table for Margaret. Then, as if he were going off to some secret men’s club in the middle of the forest, Dewayne would disappear from her side for half a day.
But now, Margaret did not want him away from her side for that long, so she decided to join him.
Beulah Land Hills Baptist Church was a massive, modern, gray-brick structure whose sanctuary had reflective black windows on the front and a steep A-shaped roofline that gave it the appearance of Darth Vader’s head. Connected to this centerpiece and jutting outward like airport terminals were sections that held a full-size gymnasium, day care, lodging for visiting clergy, a formal ballroom, two banquet halls, and an entire wing of Sunday school classrooms.
Like many predominantly white, conservative Selby churches, Beulah Land had abandoned its inner-city location to follow its white members, who continued to flee the city, into the northern, red-clay hills. Indeed, the affluent and upper middle class of Selby seemed to have unconsciously, unofficially seceded from the city to create a new community of their own on the edge of town, close to their beloved Canterbury Academy and Sugar Day. And the retailers seemed more than happy to oblige them. Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pier One, Borders, Orvis Outfitters all had signed letters of intent to locate in a new regional mall in north, white Selby. Nearly thirty years after desegregation, Margaret noted she was witnessing nothing short of a resegregation. The only whites who remained enamored with the inner-city architecture and fried-fish restaurants and hat-and-wig shops and Dollar stores and black, toothless men who pushed their shopping cart homes through the oak-canopied, redbrick streets were the newcomer Yankees, and they were snatching up historic mansions for a song, restoring them to their antebellum grandeur, then proceeding to “play” Deep South. They filled their homes with period antiques. They planted formal English gardens with topiary and fountains of cherubs and goats. They served their Jersey visitors cheese straws and pecans sautéed in butter and mint juleps in sterling-silver cups, accompanied by antique linen napkins monogrammed in the initials of some anonymous, fading Georgia family.
Dewayne pulled off Riverside Drive and into a parking lot the size of Wal-Mart’s. Some urban planner had tried to lessen the immensity of this calm black sea by adding several skinny, curbed islands of yellow and purple and white pansies, each with a spindly, Bradford pear tree that would not shade a car for at least another five years.
“This is huge,” Margaret said.
“Six thousand members,” Dewayne said. “Course, they all don’t come to church at the same time. The sanctuary wouldn’t fit ’em all.”
They entered through the Sunday school wing and began walking down a long, carpeted hallway with pale yellow walls. Above each door was a marquee with a computerized message running across in red letters, like the ones over the doors announcing the movie in progress in the theaters at the new Regal Cinema 20-Plex. Each revealed the name of the Sunday school class and the topic for the day. Margaret noted that every person they passed, whether fifteen or seventy-six years old, carried a Bible in his hands.
They passed twenty-two doors, and Dewayne finally stopped at one whose marquee announced “Welcome to the Mountain Climbers! Today’s topic is TOUCHDOWN FOR JESUS CHRIST!”
Upon walking inside, Margaret immediately felt underdressed; she was the only woman wearing slacks. Dewayne nodded hellos as they worked their way to two chairs near the back of the room. Up front, the leaders of the group appeared to be a husband and wife, she with a large red hair bow in her blond hair and a bulldog-head pin on her lapel. With skin the color of cooked veal and military-precise brown hair, her husband reminded Margaret of Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition. He reached under his chair for a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap and slipped it over his hair, then began waving his hands in the air, crossing them as a football referee does to announce the death of a play.
“Y’all now … y’all now … I need you to be quiet. I need you to look up here.”
The buzzing quickly tapered off, and the man continued, telling his students about the coming week’s activities, including the Tuesday night meeting of the Christians for John Grisham reading group and a diet-support group called Chocoholic! As he spoke, his wife looked at him, smiling, with hands folded in her lap.
“Okay, now we’ve got a fun day planned for y’all, but we’re gonna start with some verse that fits in real good with what we’re doin’ today. Everyone turn your Bibles to one Corinthians fifteen, number fifty-five.”
There was a shuffle of books as everyone reached for and opened the Bibles they brought with them. The husband began to read.
“Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He then looked at his wife, giving her a cue to speak. “Now,” she said. “We know football season’s over …”
“Go, Dawgs!” yelled a man. The room filled with laughter.
She forced a smiled laugh and continued. “We wanna talk about victory,” she continued. “I mean personal victory. Bo and I wanna get y’all to think about what Jesus might think is a good victory. Like, for example, my victory is my children, Mary Margaret and Trey, and that they love God and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.”
“If Jesus were here with us on this earth today, what would he think is a personal touchdown?” the husband asked. “Now I wanna hear your ideas. Speak up now.”
A woman in a flowered dress raised her hand, and the man gave her a nod. “Giving some old clothes to Goodwill,” she said.
“That’s good,” he replied. “Maybe some food to the Salvation Army, too, right?”
A red-haired man with wire-frame glasses and freckles on his arms: “How about stopping to help someone whose car broke down, like on the way to Atlanta?”
“Well, that’s good, but you gotta be careful nowadays, too.”
“Then how about callin’ the police on the cell phone and tellin’ them to go help,” another man said.
“There you go. Now you’re thinkin’.”
Margaret raised her hand. Dewayne smiled to himself—he was not surprised that she wanted to speak up. One thing he loved about Margaret was her curiosity, and how she would stop a complete stranger to ask a question about something she wanted to know more about. To the clerk at the 7-Eleven: What percentage of customers use the pay-at-the-pump option? To the waitress at Fresh Air Barbecue: Do the Japanese like the spicy sauce? To the old woman sitting beneath her carport on Edna Drive: How did you choose the colors for your house (aqua and yellow)?
“Yes, ma’am, in the back, you’re a visitor, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, welcome to Beulah Land. You got a touchdown for Jesus Christ?”
“I do,” she said.
“What is it?”
“How about holding the door open for an African American?”
Margaret noted the absolute, hold-your-breath silence of the room, not even a rustle of clothing from shifting weight or the rearranging of cr
ossed legs. “What I’m trying to say,” Margaret continued, “is that anything we can do to make an underprivileged class feel better about themselves is a good thing. A little bit of dignity will help us all in the long-run.”
Finally, the wife leader shattered the quiet.
“Well now, that’s real nice,” she said, forcing a smile. “That sure is … Anyone else? Anyone got a touchdown for Jesus?”
Dewayne did not look at Margaret, and she wondered if she had embarrassed him. She looked at his hands—hands that had held hers through countless movies … hands that had minced onions and rolled out biscuits and tore romaine lettuce as if it were delicate skin tissue … hands that had created inside her body exquisite, neurological storms that she never dreamed possible. These hands were now holding, of all things, a Bible, turning pages that reminded Margaret of onion skins, dutifully following the scripture as did everyone in the room.
And as she sat there, recalling all the things they had not talked about in their thousands of hours together—Jesus Christ, her phantom father, the flap over redesigning the Georgia flag so it no longer bowed to the Confederacy, the new proposed stretch of freeway that threatened to wipe out a historic black neighborhood—Margaret looked at Dewayne’s profile, those sensuous lips mouthing the words of Samuel 23:29, and she wondered to herself, Who is this man?
Twenty-six
Dear Chatter: In reference to keeping squirrels out of bird feeders: Take a post, stand it up about six feet high, put a hubcap on it and put the bird seed on the hubcap. No squirrel can get over that hubcap.
Dear Chatter: To the nasty man in the white Accord on Ridge Avenue on Thursday afternoon. Opening your car door and spitting tobacco juice on the street at 40 miles per hour three times while I followed you is even more disgusting than watching the lady digging into her ear with the Q-Tip.
The one-page menus at Joe Wren’s changed each day of the week, except for Sunday, when the restaurant on Broadway Avenue was closed for the Sabbath. And though they had updated the kitchen with a stainless-steel Hobart dishwasher and new stovetop, little else in this rambling, low-ceilinged brick building had been altered in eighty-one years. Repainted and recarpeted, certainly, but customers sat in the same, uncomfortable Georgia-pine booths that their great-grandfathers had occupied. Pull chains still hung from the wall-mounted toilet reservoirs. There had never been a black hostess. There had always been a fried chicken plate, accompanied by a pimiento-cheese sandwich on white bread, three deviled eggs, pickle wedge, and a rounded mound of potato salad.
Every June, after the first of the peach crop had been picked, customers could savor Joe Wren’s regionally famous peach ice cream until it ran out. The owners reminded their patrons each Memorial Day weekend with a small ad on the bottom of page two of the Reflector. The size of a business card, it said simply: F.P.I.C.H.N. There had always been debate in town on whether the acronym for “Fresh peach ice cream here now!” was a strategy to save money on advertising space or code to announce the precious, limited resource in a way that blacks and Yankees could not decipher.
It was Wednesday, and Boone Parley’s choices for entrées were fried shrimp, red Alaskan salmon croquettes, or minced steak with mushroom gravy. Two vegetable sides came with each entrée, and Boone considered his offerings of boiled potatoes, lima beans, carrot-and-raisin salad, stewed tomatoes, fried corn, and macaroni and cheese.
Having eaten a filet with Suzanne at the new Longhorn Steakhouse the night before, Boone chose the shrimp.
“That carrot salad’s got mayonnaise in it, doesn’t it?” he asked the waitress.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give me the carrot salad … and the fried corn.”
“Sweet tea?” she asked.
Boone nodded, the waitress walked away, and he snapped open the sports section of the Reflector. For the fourth day in a row now, the lead item was the ongoing saga of a local boy who was now the successful quarterback for the Atlanta Chieftains.
A graduate of north Selby’s Canterbury Academy, Mike Relyea was known for his hot temper and love of speeding down the freeway at more than a hundred miles an hour. And in a bad-boy-does-good interview with Rolling Stone, he made the mistake of letting the reporter accompany him on the number-seven train through New York on his way to a paid public appearance in Queens, where he was to cut the ribbon for a new prototype AdidasLand shoe store. At one point, after getting peeved when a young Puerto Rican man refused to turn the throbbing bass down on his boom box, Mike Relyea let loose with a spit-producing string of epithets in which no minority group was spared—Jews, blacks, gays, Latinos, even New Yorkers themselves—a tirade that lasted for the duration of the ride.
All of this ran in the article, and Mike Relyea’s world came crashing down. ESPN came to Selby to interview the city’s new—and first—black female president of the city council. Boone was disappointed that even the Reflector lined up to punch him in the stomach, with a front-page essay from the new editor that asked “What is wrong with a community that can produce such a man?”
Boone could not deny that the boy was wrong in saying all those things out loud, at least the way he did, everything coated in bitter poison, but he spoke the truth. Yankees were so quick to judge Southerners on matters of race. Southerners were not racist; whites and blacks here simply had a longer history of living together, Boone reasoned. Civil and polite to each other, they knew and embraced those differences—it was okay to point them out. It was no different from saying women always changed their minds or worried too much about kids falling out of trees. Boone knew, for example, that black men liked their women with bigger butts while whites preferred ladies with a leaner frame. “They’re different,” his mother would say. “But we are not any better than they are—remember that, Boone Parley. They did not come to this country by choice, so we have a responsibility to take care of them.”
Boone remembered having drinks at Sugar Day with his banker friend Leonard Woosely, whose entire staff at Middle Georgia Bank and Trust had to undergo sensitivity training after the bank was bought by an Ohio company. The new owners brought in Myra Gravenstein, a consultant who aimed to foster harmony between the races and hopefully curb the number of discrimination lawsuits.
Leonard recalled for Boone how she separated everyone by race, interviewed the groups separately, then brought them together to share the list of prejudices each of them came up with.
“What’d they say about us?” Boone asked, curious because he, like everyone else he knew, had no black friends.
“They think we’re dirty.”
“Come on, Leonard.”
“No, man, really. They said they couldn’t believe how we don’t wash our hands after we go to the bathroom … like in a restaurant.”
“Don’t you wash yours?” Boone asked.
“Do you?”
“Only if someone’s in there.”
“Well, I guess black folks—excuse me, Af-ri-can A-mer-i-cans—wash their hands all the time. And they think our hair stinks.”
“What?”
“I’m serious, Boone. One lady said that she could tell when a white man didn’t wash his hair after two days. Said dirty, white-people hair smells like curdled milk. Sour.”
The waitress brought Boone’s fried shrimp, and since he found it distracting to read and chew at the same time, he took the time to recall the previous night’s secret meeting of the Sugar Day membership committee.
Six Toyota executives had applied for membership into the club, five Japanese and one white guy, Norman Greenman.
Much to their delight and surprise, the committee members enjoyed all five Japanese men and their wives. Through the interviews they discovered that their two cultures had much in common, including strong, dominant men, a distaste for overt confrontation, polite demeanors, conservative dress, quiet dignity and humility, a love of gardening and history and family lineage, and a gentleness and slowness that was missing in Mr. Greenman and his brethren from
New Jersey.
Greenman was the most senior of the six Toyota men, the executive vice president of operations who reported directly to the CEO. And of the three open slots for membership it made good political sense to give one to him and his family. Yet no one liked him; he was as ugly as a Yankee could be. Norman Greenman corrected natives’ grammar in conversation. He wore gold jewelry, a bracelet and rings on both hands, and the Mercedes he drove had the gold accents normally seen only in the black parts of Selby. Norman Greenman was loud, even louder after two Glenlivet scotches, and after three he donned the unbridled abrasiveness of Rodney Dangerfield. There was room for three new members at Sugar Day, which posed the problem for Boone and his committee. Should they admit three of the Japanese and not Greenman, who basically was in charge of the largest employer in central Georgia? Or do they refuse them all and be labeled racist? Boone had no doubt that someone would call the Reflector, and, judging from their coverage of Mike Relyea, Lord knows what they would do with this news.
A lone pregnant woman, blond with a pink-flowered maternity top, entered the dining room. Boone quickly set down his forkful of carrot-and-raisin salad and got up to pull out her chair.
“Thank you so much,” she said. “That’s really kind of you.”
“Oh, no, it’s my pleasure,” Boone replied. “My wife’s fixin’ to have our first child this fall.”
“Mine’s due in April.” She rubbed her stomach with both hands. “Lord help me, sometimes I think this baby’s standin’ up in here.”
He returned to his table and resumed eating, catching glances of the woman as she leaned back and read the menu, resting it on the shelf of her distended stomach. He realized now how much of Suzanne’s pregnancy seemed secretive and out of reach. He had not seen her naked for the longest time. Saying she was tossing and turning most nights and that she didn’t want to keep him awake, Suzanne had asked him to start sleeping in the east guest room. And his mother was right: Why didn’t Suzanne have that sweet, rosy appearance and disposition of pregnancy? Was it the stress of the Dogwood party? Why hadn’t she started putting together a nursery?
