Then she looked and saw the eruption of blood coming from the Reverend’s throat. He became marinated in his own blood and fell as a paper doll into the ground. She screamed and stood up from the pricker bush as he bled out.
Penelope’s eyes caught Rhea’s, and they carried hate in them. Their eyes met together with a hateful caress like lovers meeting in secret.
Rhea tore off into the trees where the waters were rising. Naked. Terrified. Until she found something that resembled safety in the woods.
When the waters overtook the shore, there was a great cry in the Bramble Patch. The lingua franca of a people who could not conceive of the world changing. Yet the waters did not stop, no matter that they put the sandbags up against what was once the shore. Up and down Mercy City, the shadow of death, her riparian steed, the easterly winds, diagonal telegram lines, pockets of dust, pavement, urbane lipstains, beer, the skeletal remains of Bessie’s other son, all this flooded the rows of iniquity. The whole world drowned, but Reverend Kincaid was not upon it.
It felt like a whole eternity before Rhea was sitting in Marion Chapman’s store, in the embrace of her husband and baby cousin. They wept until they had wrung the water from themselves inside and out. Then they left town, because the river had taken everything but their lives and the white woman would take those, too, if she could tell one darkie from another.
When many years had passed Selene would sit with her husband and her ancient cousin, Rhea, in a little house in Napoleonville. Selene’s husband would weep at the dinner table as the truth came to him.
“Few things I know for sure,” said Rhea. “Your sister and her husband killed your father, the Reverend Kincaid; I saw it as you see me now. They’ll dredge up the river, honey, and they’ll churn up the blood-red mud and soon they will find all the tiny bones folks thought they were careful to hide. Your father will be there, and Selene’s mama, and my Snow-baby. And the last thing I know for sure, there will come a day when all of it will be memory. The river will erode the memories of the land. But us? The people? We will always be here.”
The Bramble Cleared
In 1965, the last roof in the Bramble Patch caved in, crushing Nell underneath rotting wood and the weight of her own heroin-eaten temporal lobe. Her children had long since left her, her husband had long since OD’d. She was in her eighties, old enough to want death. So as the beams creaked, she laid in her bed and closed her eyes. Her husband’s Ford truck was what she saw as the roof fell upon her.
Up at the top of the hill, Peter and his wife, Penelope, watched from their car as the last house of the Bramble Patch fell. A Black boy ran between them and the Bramble Patch. Peter could not see the boy; his cataracts made the world misty. His wife held a flask to his lips, and he pushed it away. “Sistie, don’t.”
“It’s bourbon. You like bourbon.”
“The houses are gone.”
Her liver-spot-speckled hand squeezed his cheeks. His tongue lolled from his flaccid lips and he slit the dorsal surface against his incisors. His dentures were made of sharpened ivory, adorned in steel.
“Did you want coffee, Peter? Cause we don’t have a thermos,” Penelope said. He shook his head. “Bourbon will make it easier.”
“Zehowzezehgone,” he stuttered.
“I heard you the first time.”
Peter smacked away her hand. She let go of his cheeks. “You don’t understand, Sistie. The houses are gone. The people are not.”
Penelope caught her own eyes in the rearview mirror. The city of Napoleonville was behind them, shopping on a Sunday. Her father’s piety came to mind. She hated sinners but hated her father more. Somewhere just in the corner of her—
“Peter, what’s the pink part of the eye called? In the corner there?”
“It’s called the lacrimal caruncle.”
—the corner of her lacrimal caruncle, in the space where she was aware she had a nose but her brain had eliminated it from her field of vision, she felt the darkie called Esther standing there. Esther was in the cobwebbed corners of Penelope’s mind; Esther felt Penelope from far, far away.
“Shut up, Peter!”
She grabbed his cheeks and forced his tongue out of his mouth. She grabbed her brother Samuel’s knife from Peter’s bag. “Like a paring knife against a pear,” Peter had told her. She dug the knife into the flesh. Blood fountained from his mouth until there was no tongue, only a hunk of pink in her hand.
She got out of the car with tongue in one hand and a trowel in the other. She sort of missed the dirt road days but found a little place in the ditch where the overpass was. Cars thundered above her; she watched as her husband tried to plug the wound in his mouth with cotton balls. Next to a patch of wild Queen Anne’s Lace—or hemlock, she didn’t care if it was either anymore—she clawed the trowel and then her fingers into the dirt. She placed her husband’s tongue inside the hole. She left it there under the highway, just before the hedges.
She got back into the car. The leather on the dash was covered with dark, dark blood. Peter looked ashen, but the bleeding had stopped. His cheekbones were collecting his tears.
“It’s done, okay? It’s done. I buried it so that not even God could hear it.”
He shook his head gently.
“Don’t you understand? The whole place’s gone now. The whole place…if you could have held your tongue, Peter. If you could have just fucking held your tongue. Damn it. No one’s going to know. You understand?”
She did not notice his shaking. She didn’t notice how the shaking grabbed his whole body and mind. And even if she did, she didn’t want to take him to the hospital. Not today. “Who even cares anymore? The houses are gone. The Bramble Patch is gone.”
Peter’s last thought before the seizure drove him into unconsciousness was, “But the people are still here.”
From “The Remaking of an American Church”
(Woman’s Home Companion, March 1949)
By Daniel Butcher
This Middle American church has been transformed under the leadership of Reverend Jacob Jonah “JJ” Kincaid, the grandson of the church’s founder, Reverend Samuel Wilkerson Kincaid. Now this hundred-year-old congregation, one of the oldest in this area still operating, faces new challenges and changes at the dawn of the second half of our century.
In the summer of 1909, this little slice of earth called Napoleonville was a world unto itself, isolated from outside influences.
Reverend Jacob Jonah Kincaid’s father, the Rev. Jonah Kincaid, was preaching from the very pulpit the son now uses. “My father was fire and brimstone, through and through. People in this town were scared of him. They’re scared of me, too. Just not exactly in the same way.”
The reverend was just a young boy, then aged seven, when his mother hired a local Negro woman to look after him and his siblings. Their companionship throughout his childhood changed his life.
“She was odd yet kind, a miracle wrapped in skin. I came to understand that life was unequal for her and her family as time went on. Really, I owe her everything.”
JJ, as he is called, has turned his father’s church into the first fully integrated church in his area.
Sunday arrives beautifully clear and warm. JJ introduces me and my photographer to the congregation. “I know we aren’t used to journalists sticking cameras in our faces, but act natural. No one here is Gary Cooper.” He asks the congregation to bow their heads in prayer, and then one of his parishioners sprints in, mid-prayer. JJ laughs. “Father, forgive Brother Miller this morning. Just because he is in Your family, and we all know family is everything, doesn’t mean he can come in when he feels like.” Everyone suppresses a laugh together. “Amen!” they say in one voice.
The choir, which includes JJ’s daughter Beatrice and the tardy Brother Miller, rushes to the front of the church to lead the congregation in song: first, “How Firm a Foundation,” next, “Rock
of Ages,” and finally a livelier one called “Love Is My Wonderful Song.”
In essence, the whole endeavor seems as typical as any Sunday in Anytown, America. But the faces in the congregation are anything but typical.
Today, the reverend preaches on the Psalms, the lyrics of King David. Specifically the 95th Psalm: “For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also. The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.” A smattering of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” erupts from the church. Later, Negro congregant Dinah Lyons will remark, “That verse has a different meaning here than it would anywhere else in the world.” I suppose I am not in on the joke.
The Napoleonville Second Baptist was originally founded in the 1850s by Reverend Kincaid’s grandfather, Samuel Wilkerson Kincaid I. It was once the largest congregation in the white district of this town. When JJ left home for college, he had no intention of shepherding his father’s flock. “My brother Sam was groomed from childhood to take over when our father retired, and frankly, I wanted to get out of here as soon as I could. Then Mother got ill while I was at divinity school. Then my father was killed in the big flood of 1931. Samuel couldn’t pastor the church anymore, so I took over.”
His wife, Mrs. Selene Kincaid, says: “This building used to be the most crowded place in town on a Sunday. But when JJ took over and opened the doors to everyone, most people left. Then again, new people showed up as well.”
People such as Sally and Geraldine “Deenie” Ailey, sisters—both lifelong residents of this area. “Our father Peter was a friend of the Kincaid family, especially Reverend Jacob’s older brother and sister,” says Sally. “My sister and I left the church for a while when Reverend Jonah started his radio program. He was crazy in those days. Then my father and his wife started staying away, when they found out that JJ would be taking over instead of Samuel. Especially because of their views on Negroes.”
“We were wrong,” says the elder sister, Geraldine. “About…many things. We started coming here a couple months ago, I think. It was strange at first, because we sit next to a Negro woman, but now she and Sally talk about baseball and swap recipes.”
After service, the Reverend and I sit down at a local diner. “Good afternoon, Magnolia,” JJ says. The waitress eyes him a moment and then pours him a glass of water. He exchanges smiles with her, introduces me, and orders me a cup of much needed coffee. With my coffee comes more bemused expressions throughout the diner.
After he orders lunch—a fried ham and egg sandwich and a side of cottage cheese—he takes out a travel brochure from his sport coat and reads it like a menu. “Lookithere! Selene and I are planning our first vacation since Bea [their daughter] was little. California and Mexico. Just us two. I can’t stop thinking about it. Bea’s going to stay with Selene’s family while we’re gone. She just turned fourteen, or fifteen. Never can remember. But it’s all day on the phone with her friends or trying to go to the YMCA pool in Marion. My wife’s a bit younger than I am, so she gets it more than I do. But Selene also grew up in these parts. Before we had paved roads, when it was still very segregated. She gets me, too. She’s the bridge between Bea and me.”
As we wait for our plates, I start asking a bunch of questions spitfire.
“Why the beard?”
“People think I’m crazy anyway, so I decided to look the part. I take after those old-time mountain preachers from the pioneer times. Plus, I look so much like my father these days, I have to distinguish myself.”
“Favorite verse in the Bible?”
“You’re only asking that because I’m a reverend.”
“Fine, favorite book?”
“Gulliver’s Travels and then Connecticut Yankee and then the Bible and then Elmer Gantry.”
“That last one surprises me.”
“It shouldn’t. Man like me can learn a lot from it.”
“Were you putting on a nice act for me, when really you’re more fire and brimstone, or…? ”
“Ha. You caught me on a fiery day. No, I find the Words of God in the whispers of the river. You want fire? That was my father all the way. He saw Hell and damnation everywhere he looked. Even in our home. Sometimes I wonder if he was preaching to himself mostly. No man is perfect. Least of all us in the pulpit.”
“Favorite meal?”
“I guess I have two. Esther would make this pork and apple pie on my birthday. It was my favorite thing in the world. My wife’s folks, they were originally from the Carolinas. Did you ever have fried green tomatoes? I didn’t until we met and married. I’d been missing so much.”
“What do you do to relax?”
“Go fishing. Listen to the radio. I like Tommy Dorsey. I sometimes bake. Esther taught me how. Selene is pretty good but my jumbleberry pie has hers beat.”
“You mentioned your brother is a minister as well?”
“Samuel was supposed to be. He got tangled in other things, though. It sours a soul.”
I ask JJ what the phrase means. He chuckles. “It’s just something folks say around here.”
“What makes that fact ‘sour’ your soul?”
“It wasn’t that ministry wasn’t for Samuel. More he wasn’t for it, I think. He knew the Good Book backwards and forwards, but he’d be happier as a…scholar, maybe? Our little brother, Croswell, is an architect. He never even dreamed of taking up the family business.”
“You seem quite normal. I thought you’d be more fanatical.”
“Thank you. I feel quite normal myself.”
“So I have to ask the Big Question: Why are you so insistent on integrating your church?”
“What a question! Ha! Let me ask you a question: Why are you a writer?”
He didn’t wait for my reply.
“What’s flesh and bone and ash—this matter we are—is just stuff. And at the end of all things, it’ll be pulverized. So we mustn’t pretend as if the differences between us are anything but fleeting atoms, bound for decay. We think the world has lines of demarcation, between us and them, the whole and the broken, the dark and the light, the living and the dead. But those lines aren’t really there. In reality, what is the difference between the sea and the wave? After Bea was born and with the War, restlessness overtook me, and I saw in the haze of summer glimpses of what Esther told me. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything for me to do but follow the path laid out.”
Suddenly, he seemed distant, pensive, and indeed a little crazy.
“What path is that?” I asked.
“To put into motion these mechanisms of finality.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I. And Esther, she’s long gone from here, so she can’t properly explain it to me. She was stolen into the night air when those who loved her weren’t looking. But she has one last task in the fate of this town left. And then, to quote my favorite Bible verse, ‘It is finished.’”
“Who was this Esther?”
“In practical terms, she was the Negro my mother hired to help take care of my brothers, sister, and me.”
“Is that all?”
“Of course not! But beyond that, I couldn’t tell you. Enigmatic? That’s a big silver-dollar word. Enigmatic Esther. My sister used to tell me she was a witch. But my sister’s a little crazy. Think it’s a family trait.”
“And you attribute your current feelings on the matter of integration to your family’s nursemaid?”
“I’m not so ungrateful as to use that terminology. I was a strange and shy child who wanted to be righteous and pretended to be cruel, because cruelty was a trait among righteous people here. I’d like to think I’d have come to the conclusion of integration myself after years of study and reflection, but I know I wouldn’t have. I’d have gone on thinking my cruel thoughts and never seeing
beyond them. I’m no one, really, but a boy who was forced to observe the world. It took eyes that could see beyond the waves to make out the sea. And I don’t think I was even Esther’s favorite of us.”
When our food comes, JJ is mostly silent. Occasionally, he will offer a fact about local flora and fauna, especially about the fishing in the area—he is fond of flathead catfish—and where to listen to great music. As he finishes the cottage cheese, he stares at me for a moment and tells me how his mother and father’s families were among the earliest settlers of this town.
“This church has been in the family for over a hundred years now, and I’m only its third pastor. That’s a legacy. My mother’s family, the Croswells, were really, really wealthy for most of the last century. Big spender types. That’s a legacy, too. And my legacy will be the end of theirs.”
I ask him what he means by that and he laughs. He is charming, certainly, and for all his insanity, he has a heart that truly believes.
“Two things may clear up what I mean,” he says. “First, when I look at Selene and Bea, I feel relief. The Kincaid last name’s going to die in these parts. Croswell’s never coming back. My sister’s married and they don’t have…well, she doesn’t even speak to me, ’cause her husband thinks I robbed Samuel of this place. And Samuel’s no more fit for fatherhood than he is for the pulpit. I’ll be the last Kincaid in this church and this town. I embrace that, find it comforting even.”
Mrs. Kincaid walks into the diner, still wearing her tartan dress and bakelite necklace. Even Magnolia’s hard face softens at the sight of the reverend’s wife. She apologizes for the intrusion and reminds her husband that he is obliged to attend a family evening with his daughter, his wife, and her family. He shrugs at me and kisses her hand.
“What about that second thing?” I ask as the reverend stands up to go.
“There is more to us than what we see. Each of us is bones and spirit, water and fire, Sunday holiness and Saturday hully-gully. Each of us is our past and our present and our future, collapsed into one being. And we are all made of the dust we call home. Even if this is the end and they bury our bones, that’s fine. Because where the bones lay buried, the spirit can still dance. And when the spirit still dances, well, brother, these bones will rise again.”
These Bones Page 11
