Dominion (31 page)

Obadiah measured the silence at the table before continuing. “The problem ain’t white folk. The problem’s just folk—black, white, or purple, it don’t matter. Bible calls it sin, and sinners is what we all is.” He seemed to be reaching for a story, and his eyes glowed when he found one.

“When I was a boy, my grandpappy on my daddy’s side was visitin’. It was a hot day and we was fishin’ down by a lake—prettiest little lake you ever seen. Well, Grandpappy, he took off his shirt. And I saw the marks all over his back. I came over and ran my finger over them. They was all healed, but you could still see the pain in his eyes. I asked him, ‘Who did this to you, Grandpappy?’ I knew he’d been a slave, but the stories never made much sense to me till I saw the marks.

“He said, ‘A cruel man did it to me. I’ve asked Jesus to forgive him. I hope he asked Jesus to forgive him too.’ See, he never said it was a white man. He said it was a
cruel
man. I never forgot that.”

Obadiah looked around the table, and Clarence could almost hear an abrupt gear change in his daddy’s head. “You know what’s missin’ in churches these days?”

“What’s that, Daddy?” Clarence asked.

“The mourner’s bench. ’Member our old church in Puckett? They had a mourner’s bench. That was back in the days when you didn’t need no theologian to explain away the Bible. We just believed it. And tried to live by it. ’Member ol’ Reverend Charo, Clarence?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Now that was a preacher. Man had more points than a thornbush.” Obadiah smiled broadly, his white teeth looking like piano ivories. “The Reverend used to say from the pulpit in this big loud voice, ‘It’s no disgrace to be colored.’ Then he’d pause and lean forward and wink at us and whisper, ‘It’s just awfully inconvenient.’”

Obadiah laughed and laughed, mostly on his own, though Geneva managed a few chuckles herself.

“Sunday was the finest day of the week, I reckon. We’d leave behind those cotton fields, that ol’ ramshackle house, and come to the house of God. Without Sundays, we woulda shriveled up and died, worked ourselves to the grave ’fore we was fifty years ol’. We’d put on our Sunday best. Mama, she’d put wheat starch in my collar to glue down the threads on my one white shirt. I’d pick the trousers with the fewest holes. We’d walk the four miles to Sunday school, rain or shine. And we had fun walkin’. ol’ Elijah and me, we was always cookin’ up mischief along the way.”

He looked right at Jonah and Ty and nodded, as an old man who’s never forgotten what it is to be young. Everyone’s eyes focused on Granddaddy. Frail as Obadiah’s body had become, his eyes were strong and he still carried the indomitable authority of a senior black man.

“Pastor served four churches, so he’d be there once a month. We’d take a break after Sunday school, then have a big service. Preacher go up there and say, ‘Remember your mama? How she used to hug you and tuck you in? But she gone now. Can’t tuck you in no more.’ And he’d carry on and on, till we was all snifflin’ and sobbin’. He’d keep remindin’ us of our grandmammies and all our kin that died until we was almost in a frenzy. Then he’d shout, ‘But someday you goin’ to see yo’ mama again. Some day you goin’ to heaven, if you loves Jesus, and there she be— arm’s awide open, waitin’ fo’ you. How many o’ you can hardly wait for that day?’”

Obadiah’s voice had taken on the strength of the preacher’s from seventy-five years ago. “People, they be shoutin’ and clappin’, twitchin’ and tremblin.’ Not like some churches where it’s just a lecture and they has to stop at an hour so you don’t falls asleep. Now, your churches today, they don’t preach about heaven no mo’, not like that anyways. Not like that. Maybe nowadays we thinks this world’s our home. Maybe that’s whys we’s in so much trouble.”

His deep-set eyes surveyed the table as if it were a poker game and he was trying to read in the faces each player’s hand.

“Then there was revival week. Relatives would come back from all over. Church and family was the same, wasn’t one without the other back then. Lots of eatin’, singin’, preachin’, and lots of offerin’s, sometimes two or three in a service if we didn’t collect enough for the poor.”

“I thought
you
were poor, Grandpa,” Jonah said.

“Well, compared to most folks we was. But there’s always people poorer than you, and you always gots to help them. You remember that now, chillens.”

He scanned the children to decide which to light his eyes on, and this time chose Keisha.

“We’d come together and focus on a better life—the life to come. Always read the Scripture that said we was strangers and aliens and pilgrims. Slave stock understood that. Property owners never did. See, Keisha, black folk couldn’t own property back then. A few did, but very few. We was sharecroppers; our pappies was slaves. We knew this wasn’t our home. It’s harder when you think you own things yourself. ’Cause then you starts actin’ like a big shot owner instead of a tenant. This here is God’s world, chillens. No man owns anything. We’s all just sharecroppers on God’s land. But he never cheats us—come harvest time, he’ll give us the rewards of our labor.”

“Doesn’t seem that way sometimes, Daddy,” Clarence said. Geneva looked startled. She didn’t remember him ever taking issue with his daddy in front of the children, at least not on spiritual matters. “Lots of bad things happen in this world. Seems like sometimes our labor doesn’t pay off.”

“That’s because it ain’t harvest time yet, Son. You jus’ wait. You jus’ wait.”

I’m tired of always waiting.

“You trust him, boy, and yo’ sweet Jesus ain’t gonna let you down. These television preachers make it sound like today’s the harvest. Give a bunch o’ money and next thing you know there’s a big Cadillac in your driveway. Show me the chapter and verse fo’ that one, will ya? God say at the proper time we’ll reap a harvest, if we don’t give up. Proper time ain’t here yet. Don’t give up, Son. Just don’t give up.”

The old man’s eyes started to glaze. His mouth kept moving, but he was in transition. “I remembers those ol’ songs, songs black as night, black as the raven. ‘Steal away.’ ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ ‘I’ll Fly Away’. ‘Just Over in Glory Land.’ ‘In the Sweet By-and-By.’ We always sung about ‘one day acomin.’ We knew this weren’t the day.”

Obadiah was somewhere else now. Was he thinking about his mama? Clarence wondered. His wife? His daughter? Little Felicia?

Suddenly, so low and quiet you could barely hear, he began singing a song Clarence vaguely remembered from childhood. “I does not know why all aroun’ me, my hopes all shattered seem to be. God’s perfect plan I cannot see. But one day, someday, he’ll make it plain.”

Clarence envied for a moment the simplicity of his father’s faith. But in another moment, he pitied the old man who clung to promises made to slaves who were beaten and raped and ridiculed and sold like cattle.

“I don’t understand,” the old man continued to sing, “my struggles now, why I suffer and feel so bad. But one day, someday, he’ll make it plain. Someday when I his face shall see, someday from tears I shall be free, yes, someday I’ll understand.”

It was awkward at the table. Nobody knew quite what to do when Grandpa edged off into his other world.

Zeke and Torel left Dani alone to observe through the time portal a great ancient civilization in northern Africa, near modern Sudan. She viewed with fascination the coal black people who called themselves Kushites, whom the Greeks called Ethiopians, which meant “dark skinned.” She watched them develop their own alphabetic language, build pyramids, masonries, ironworks, and complex waterways. She marveled at their excellence in architecture, education, and the fine arts. They were one of the most vigorous and advanced civilizations the world had ever known. Suddenly she saw the writing of the psalmist, and it thrilled her: “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”

She watched as Jeremiah was rescued by a black African, then as Simon—from Cyrene in Africa—carried the cross of Jesus. By the time of Christ, this black people group was sending ambassadors to Arabia, India, China, and to Rome. She saw a number of Africans gathered on the day of Pentecost, converted to faith in Christ. She saw the church at Antioch, among the chief leaders Simeon, called ‘Black Man,’ and Lucius the Cyrenian. She watched the Antioch church send out Paul and Barnabas to evangelize Turkey, Greece, and Italy. It inspired her to see black church leaders sending missionaries to reach pagan white Europeans with the gospel. She wished Harley could see this. She wished she’d learned about it back in the Shadowlands.

She watched, intrigued, as one man came to the fore in this ancient drama, a man born just before Christ. He was the chief officer in charge of Ethiopia’s treasury.

Something inside this man—Dani recognized it as the voice of Elyon—told him there was more than the petty ethnic-centered gods of races and nations, such as the three-faced Kushite lion or the Egyptian ram god. There must be a true God who made all races and nations and reigned over all. This Ethiopian sought to know that one true God. He’d heard of a God who brought justice and redemption to a band of slaves, delivering them from the Egyptians a millennium and a half earlier. This was a God who could not be manipulated, who did not exist to fulfill the agenda of any man or nation.

The Ethiopian welcomed the opportunity to travel to Jerusalem. After a few weeks of observing Jewish worship and faith, he began his long journey back by carriage through the Sinai desert to Egypt, from which he would travel another eight hundred miles to his home. Along the way he studied the Hebrew Scriptures, of which he had obtained a scribal copy for his queen at great price. As Dani watched him riding in his chariot, she felt the longing, the ache in his heart to know the truth. It thrilled her.

Suddenly a man appeared on the scene, Philip, a Jewish Christian convert. He had already gone to reach the Samaritans, who had been hated as half-breeds but whom he knew should be embraced because all racial barriers had been broken down in Christ. Now, sent by God’s Spirit, he went to the Ethiopian.

Dani listened as the black African asked questions, and Philip, the brown Jew, explained how God’s Son had suffered and died and risen for all men that they might be forgiven of their sins and spend eternity with him, along with brothers from all nations and tribes and languages.

The Ethiopian listened in rapt attention, sensing this was the missing piece to life’s puzzle. The man came to faith in Christ as he sat in his chariot. He asked Philip to baptize him in water by the road. Dani wept at the sight of this baptism, feeling as if she were there. It moved her more than any she’d ever witnessed.

Dani watched in excitement as this black national leader continued to study and grow in his faith on the journey home. Back in Ethiopia he became an outspoken witness for Elyon’s Son. She watched many in that nation come to Christ, knowing the descendants of these people would migrate to west Africa and seventeen hundred years later many would be taken to the new world as slaves. She realized her roots for the first time—she and her family were descended from the very Ethiopians she now observed. Churches were established, thriving churches. She watched the decades become centuries as some of the greatest theological minds of early Christianity—including Augustine, Tertullian, and Origen—came out of the black churches of North Africa.

As she watched the courage and conviction of the first African Christians, the strongest bulwark of early Christianity, she swelled with wonder and the right kind of pride. The spiritual heritage of her people, she realized for the first time, did not simply go back a few hundred years to American slaves. Many people of her race embraced the Christian faith before the first white churches were born, before the gospel traveled north to Europe or spread to Asia, and fifteen hundred years before it came to the new world.

She marveled too, as she followed the timeline of history, that the Christian church was solidly grounded in North Africa over six hundred years before Mohammed lived and Islam began. She watched the flourishing ministries of over five hundred bishops in the African church, then grieved as she witnessed Islam’s military conquest and persecution of African Christians. She wondered why she had never before heard this part of history. But she thrilled at the vibrant Christian faith and perseverance of her ancestors, even amid the suffering and enslavement by Muslims.

Dani wept at length, feeling pain eclipsed by joy. Finally she felt a hand on her shoulder. Thinking it might be Elyon’s Son, she peered up at the broad smile of a coal black face she immediately recognized. It was the Ethiopian man, baptized by Philip, now in the full-time service of the King of the universe. Dani and the man walked and talked and exchanged stories. He introduced her to many of his family and old friends, who became her new ones.