She took a step forward and lifted my chin so that I had to look into her eyes. She was smiling. “There’s no fault here,” she said quietly. “It was what I wanted to happen. It was a kindness, a precious kindness that meant more to me than you’ll ever know.”
“But I thought…”
She shook her head. “You’re here to learn how to be a minister to people, real people with real problems and real flaws. What we did last night is something real people do. If you don’t understand that, you’ll be useless to any congregation you serve.” She released my chin and said, “Now eat up and get going. You’ll be late.” Moving to the stove, she began to dish up her own breakfast. “We’ll talk tonight and I’ll tell you what Walter would have said about last night.”
Thus began my parallel education in the ways of the flesh. I couldn’t have imagined then—as I fumbled through my day, forgetting where I was supposed to be and half paying attention when I got there—how much that education would shape me into the man I have become. I know only that all morning and all afternoon I thought about Sister Bessie and what I’d discovered. Walter had stared at me from so many photographs I imagined him taking shape inside the clothes on the bed, willing himself back into bodily form to point his finger at the wretched sinner now sleeping in his house. But I thought also about the foot Sister Bessie hooked over my calf and the firmness of her backside pressed against me, of the stiffness of her nipples when she guided my hand to them and the three times I slid inside her and exploded. Despite my uncertainty and despite Walter, I couldn’t wait to get home.
For supper we had pork chops, string beans, fried green tomatoes and cornbread. At Sister Bessie’s request, I said grace, stumbling over words that had spilled out of me with automatic precision since the age of seven. When I finished, she said, “Amen,” and began what would have been our customary how-was-your-day small talk. My recounting of the day’s trivia was as awkward as my blessing of the food. Sister Bessie set down her fork and looked at me, and I mumbled through a mouthful of cornbread that everything was delicious.
“All right,” she said. “Last night we did it. We had sex. We made love.” She drew in a deep breath. “We fucked.”
I flinched and forced down the cornbread before my throat could close and choke me.
Bessie reached across the table and placed her right hand over my left. It was warm and soft but firm enough to hold mine in place. “That doesn’t give you the right to treat me like I have the plague.” She squeezed my wrist until I looked up at her. “Or to cast the first stone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m…” I almost said, I’m not Walter but caught myself. “I don’t know what I am…except confused.”
“Then let’s talk about your confusion.” She released my hand and sat back. “Are you afraid you’re a sinner and going to hell?”
I nodded.
“We’re all sinners,” she said. “We can’t help it. It’s how we’re born, who we are. But the forgiveness of sin is perpetual. Walter believed that.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sat forward again, her eyes alight. “God is good, right? They teach you that.”
I nodded.
“Why would a good God send a young man like you to hell?”
“Because I’m a sinner!” I felt my own eyes welling.
“No matter what they tell you, sin is relative,” she said. “Is what we did worse than what Hitler did? Suppose he got a chance to repent and go to heaven while all the people he had murdered never got that chance and went to hell. Does that sound fair? Does that sound like something a good God would allow?”
“But I…I’ve wronged you.”
“How? Did you steal from me? Hurt me or kill me? No. Legally, you’re a grown man who did something grown men do.” She smiled. “Did you bear false witness against me?”
“I didn’t tell a soul,” I said.
“I said false witness. But why wouldn’t you tell something that was true?”
“Because…because it felt…private…between you and me and…”
“And because you liked it.”
I felt my cheeks go hot. “Yes.”
“It was private, between us and God, and we both liked it. Walter believed everybody is forgiven, except for the worst sinners, killers and those who hurt others, willfully and repeatedly. And because we live in a world where some folks are so afraid of pleasure they can’t dance or play, he was never free to say so, but he didn’t believe in hell either.”
My stomach clenched. The great man whose gaze glowed hellfire didn’t believe in a central tenet of our faith. I didn’t ask my next question because she saw it in my face.
“Walter believed the worst sinners could never find grace beside God and would simply enter limbo, an eternal nothingness and not an inferno, because a good God wouldn’t create hell.” She reached across the table again, with both hands this time, and took hold of mine. “A good God would want ministers who didn’t judge but simply did their best to help. A good God would create ways men and women could find comfort and strength with each other to let them face their days with hope. My husband believed in joy and I have kept that part of him as close to me as I can.”
After dinner she went upstairs while I washed the dishes. As I dried and shelved them, I could hear water filling the tub in the large second floor bathroom. Ordinarily, I’d have gone up to my room to begin my evening study, but I was too agitated to do so just then and did not want to risk seeing her in her robe as I went from the second to the third floor. I decided to wait until I heard her get into the tub. But the sound of her feet sliding along the tub bottom as she lowered herself into water—something I’d heard before—did not come. Instead, she called down and asked if I would come up. I closed my eyes for a moment, then mounted the stairs.
The bathroom door was wide open. She stood inside, on the rug beside the steaming tub, naked and shimmering in the light of votive candles on the sink and windowsill.
Occasionally I had seen my mother’s back or too much leg or her whole body moving past me in only a bra and slip. Once or twice I had burst into my sister Marcia’s room to share something urgent, only to find her half-dressed and screaming at me. But until this moment, I had never before, not even in a magazine, seen a naked woman. I couldn’t help gaping.
“Come in and close the door,” she said. “I’m cold.”
I did so, my back against the door and one hand on the knob, though I couldn’t have run if I wanted to. I stared at her candlelight-dappled body, my heart in my throat. For what felt like a full minute neither of us said anything. She had skin the color of ginger, long thin arms, round hips, and dark-nippled breasts large enough to fill a hand but too small to sag. The dark hair at the apex of her legs had been shaped into a palm-sized triangle. A whitish arc of a scar was on her inner left thigh—a childhood bicycle accident, I learned later. Her feet were small, with pinky toes curled almost out of sight. When I looked up at her face, Bessie Samples was smiling. She stepped forward and began to unbutton my shirt, and I swallowed, hard.
“We’re going to take a bath together,” she said, “because sometimes that’s what lovers do.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss me—our first kiss—and her warm lips drew my tongue into her mouth. She sucked it gently, scraping it with her own, then released me and let her heels return to the floor. “Afterward we’ll go to my room and leave the lights on so we can see every bit of each other.” She opened my shirt and peeled it off my arms, then pulled my undershirt over my head. “We’ll make love, joyfully, without shame.” Pressing her face to my chest, she licked first one nipple and then the other. “One day I’ll trim the hair around these and you’ll feel it more when I touch them.” Her fingers undid my belt, unzipped my trousers. “I’ll touch you in ways and places you never thought of, and I’ll show you how to do the same to me.” Her hand freed my now-throbbing penis from my boxers. “I’ll teach you everything Walter taught me.” She sat on the edge o
f the tub and leaned toward me, swirling her tongue around the edge of my penis and taking me into her mouth for several heartbeats during which all thoughts of Walter melted away. Standing, she pushed my trousers down, and I stepped out of my shoes. “We will be lovers,” she whispered, “and we will talk and laugh and learn all about each other and find the most exquisite happiness God offers. We will be lovers but we will never be in love. You must never tell me you love me because you must save that for the woman who carries your children, a woman who will love you in return because you will bring her a joy most other men can’t.” She steadied me as I pulled off my socks. “We will never be in love because I am too old for you, because you could never be the minister you need to be if scandal hangs over your head.”
“What if I don’t want to be a minister anymore?”
“It is your calling,” she said, stepping into the tub first and holding my hand as I stepped in after her. “You can help so many replace their fear of God with a love of life. You can bring so many out of the shadows.”
As we sank into hot water together, I no longer cared if Walter was looking.
That was the first step on my journey out of the shadows of fear and into the light of possibility. For the next four years, by day I studied the history, prophets and philosophy of Judaism and Christianity. I studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic. I read early English translations of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, as well as books about the Hampton Court Conference that resulted in the King James Bible. I read the Annals of Tacitus, which documented our faith with a brief notation of the crucifixion of “Christus.” I pored over maps of the Holy Land and traced the rise of Christianity from Catholicism to the Reformation. Along the way I met not only the holy men and women of the Bible but also Constantine, various popes, Luther, Calvin and the thinkers who had influenced the many paths of the cross. I studied ethics, pastoral counseling, the sacraments, homiletics and ecumenism. I excelled at my course work.
In the evening I discussed what I had learned with Sister Bessie, sometimes at the supper table, sometimes in the parlor over coffee or when she was teaching me to dance, sometimes in bed. Even when one of us was sick and the other brought up chicken soup and medicine, we talked endlessly. I learned to listen and think. We had spirited debates that sometimes led us naked past Walter’s pictures and into his study, where Sister Bessie pulled down books and monographs that explored topics not mentioned at the seminary: popes who had fathered children and committed murders, nuns in convents beside monasteries who had buried in the walls the babies of their unsanctioned affairs, the bloody atrocities of the Crusades, devout reformers who thought the retarded were possessed and attempted to beat the devil out of them, European scholars and Southern ministers who all produced books and tracts that “proved” only whites had souls. She gave me these, she said, so I would never forget that “In the end, everybody is hopelessly human.”
And at night I slept in her arms, or she in mine, after passionate lovemaking that was ever a revelation. It was she who taught me how to touch and be touched, how to catch a nipple between my teeth without causing pain, how to produce shivers with a fingernail in the shallow pocket behind the knee. Together we explored virtually every possible position for intercourse—in my bed and hers, on the floor and the stairs and the davenport in the parlor and two or three times with me standing between her legs as she lay back on the kitchen table. Hers was the first woman’s orgasm I saw (self-induced), the first finger to penetrate me, the first mouth to clamp onto me and let me spend down her throat. I trusted her enough to let her blindfold me or tie my hands to the bed or drip hot candle wax onto my back. The third time she held my ears and steered my face between her legs, she whispered, “Don’t just lick me. Suck me. Kiss me. Inhale me and learn to love the smell.” And I complied, my erection so hard I thought my skin would split.
I set foot in what I’d come to think of as Walter’s room only once more, the weekend before the start of my sophomore year. Having returned early to end my summer celibacy before classes started, I found myself alone in the house that first Friday while Sister Bessie worked at Dr. Bledsoe’s. The room had changed considerably. The walls still carried photos and certificates but the clothes and shoes and personal effects were gone. The curtains were newer and translucent enough that the room seemed more lighted shrine than mausoleum. Walter was here but I could no longer smell him.
Later, as I moved through the house, I began to see his pictures differently. What had struck me at first as severity now seemed intense contemplation and perceptive wisdom.
I told Sister Bessie I loved her only once, as we walked home from the chapel after my final graded sermon for homiletics, near the end of my final year. Before she could begin her speech, I smiled and said, “This isn’t a marriage proposal. I’m just trying to say thank you.” The last time we made love was early in the morning before I drove to pick up my parents at the train station for my afternoon graduation. Straddling me, her fingertips gliding through my thickening chest hair, she whispered, “I love you too and always will.”
We wrote to each other off and on for years. She congratulated me on each of my postings to inner city churches in various parts of the country and offered helpful insights on congregation politics. She came to my wedding four years after graduation and told me she thought Janet was a wonderful choice. She even traveled for the baptisms of our three children. Bessie remained a friend for the rest of her life, and when she passed away, nearly thirty years later, I flew south to attend her funeral.
A special pew was set aside for Sister Bessie’s boys, six of us who had roomed with her during our seminary days. Six black reverends, all strangers to each other and about four years apart in age, all but one younger than I. Four of us looked at the others with more than apparent wonder and the remaining two stared straight ahead, but no one asked the questions I am sure some of us were pondering: How many of us had known with her a more than maternal love? Who among us had thought we were the only one she had loved into better manhood? Perhaps it was the sin of pride, but one line of questioning I believed was mine alone: Was I the first? Had I inspired the change in Walter’s room and perhaps a change in her? As she was lowered into the ground beside Walter, I cried for the wisest, most passionate woman I had ever known—and for the ghost who had shaped her as surely as she had shaped me.
Though this document will remain sealed until fifty years after my own death, this story would have ended with that funeral so many years ago if not for the recent razing of the Samples house, which had passed through several hands since Bessie’s death. Construction workers preparing to lay the foundation for a new elementary school unearthed in the yard something that sickened them and drew the national press. At first the four fetal skeletons inside small wooden boxes led to public speculation that the former nurse had run a secret abortion clinic in the days before Roe v. Wade. Tabloid headlines like Southern Abortion Horror and Fetal Graveyard brought to mind the worried-looking young women I had seen her lead into Walter’s study so long ago. Hungry reporters crawled through her life with maddening persistence. Two or three tried to get in touch with me, but I declined every interview request and never saw a disclosure from any of Bessie’s boys. Later, when matrilineal DNA tests confirmed the fetuses were siblings, a medical examiner concluded Bessie had handled her own miscarriages, and the story died a quiet death.
Sometimes I wonder about those miscarriages. Had she had them during her marriage, or had the found four been sired by one or more of Bessie’s boys? Looking in the mirror at a man who is heavier, wrinkled, bespectacled, white-haired and too often so serious he looks more like Walter than he’d care to admit, I wonder if I did get someone in trouble after all. But I seldom linger on such thoughts—or on whether she ended the pregnancies of desperate girls and buried those remains where they will never be found. I am happy with my own life, with my wife and children and the congregants who seek my counsel and trust me with the
ir deepest secrets, even in my retirement. You see, after nearly fifty years of marriage, and the requisite back pain and stiff joints, I still give Janet a shattering orgasm or two every time we make love. She still licks me into a harder erection than my age should allow, and we grapple with an abandon that sometimes steals sleep from our visiting grandchildren. At such times I know that part of Sister Bessie still lives inside me, in the profound gift she has given me—a mind and a life at peace with themselves. The part of her that sleeps deserves an eternal rest undisturbed by my curiosity.
REYNOLDS’S TALE
Adrian Ludens
It has been written that there are secrets that should never be shared. I am in partial agreement with this assessment. Men and women die daily and nightly, guilt gnawing away at their resolve to live. The thread of their long-kept secret steadfastly unravels the fabric of their mortal coil until they no longer have a tether to this earthly realm. Up these thoughts must drift into the endless inverted abyss. But what if the dreaded secret were revealed at a time not inopportune? Could one’s conscience be eased and death staved off? Perhaps. I have two secrets. I shall endeavor to share one of them, lightening the burden that I bear and thus extending—I fervently hope—my life. I only ask that you hear my tale and judge me not.
Call me Reynolds. A few years ago, on the second of October 1849, to be precise, I sat at a large bow-window of a coffee house in Baltimore. For some weeks I had been in ill health. My body endured the challenges associated with an extended illness, while my mind underwent certain changes. But now I found my strength returning in unprecedented abundance. So also, joie de vivre enveloped me. A happy and inquisitive mood enveloped me. I rushed headlong into each new day with an alacrity and curiosity heretofore unknown to my personality.
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