Home Fires (17 page)

“Okay, then.” She nodded and again started to walk away, but I followed.

“Look, Cyl, I don’t know how we got off on the wrong foot, but I meant what I said the other day—if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”

Again the skeptical eyebrow. “I could be your token black friend? As in Some Of My Best Friends Are Black?”

“If that’s what you really want. And I can play Little White Missy From De Big House if it’ll help with that chip on your shoulder.”

“Oh, spare me your do-good liberal tolerance,” she snapped. “I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do!” I snapped back. “North Carolina may not be a black paradise but without a lot of do-good liberals trying to make things more equitable, you’d have had to take the freedom train north to get an education and you certainly wouldn’t be prosecuting white offenders in a court of law here.”

“And how long do we have to keep thanking you for letting us sit at the table?”

I’d thought—I’d hoped—things were getting better, yet here I was, looking at Cyl across a gulf that seemed to widen with every word.

“It’s a no-win situation for me, isn’t it? If I try to be friends, I’m either patronizing you or assuaging my own conscience; and if I don’t, I’m a bigot. You get to have it both ways? What’s so fair about that?”

“And you’ve been a judge how long?” she asked sardonically.

I laughed. It was the first crack in her armor.

“It started the summer I was four, when my cousins gave me the paper bag test and I flunked,” Cyl said.

We had fixed ourselves plates of barbecue and were seated at one of the back tables. The first wave of guests had crested and Daddy and the rest of my family could handle host duties while I ate.

“What’s the paper bag test?” I asked.

“Take an ordinary brown paper bag from any grocery store,” she said, pulling apart a hushpuppy with her beautifully manicured fingernails. They were painted the same shade of coral as her soft, full-skirted cotton sundress. “Is your skin lighter or darker? You’ve seen my grandmother?”

I nodded, my mouth full of barbecue.

“And heard the rhymes? ‘Light, bright—all right./Honey brown—stick around./Jet black—get back.’”

“I’ve heard similar versions, yes.”

“All of my mother’s people were as light as Grandma. All except me. And her baby brother Isaac. He said we were the only true Africans in the family and we’d have to stick together.”

She broke off. “This is crazy. Why am I telling you this?”

“My mother died when I was eighteen,” I said.

“But your father didn’t turn around the next month and marry a woman with three blond-headed Miss America daughters who sneered at your hair and put you down because your eyes are blue and not green.”

I added a little coleslaw to the barbecue already on my fork. “I take it your stepsisters could pass the paper bag test?”

“They could almost do milk,” Cyl said with a sour laugh. “I begged my dad to let me come live with Grandma, but he’d promised my mother—” She shrugged. “Just as well. While New Bern may not be the state’s center of intellectual aspirations, at least my stepmother did believe in education. Grandma tried the best she could, but she was fighting against a culture here with lower expectations than New Bern, especially for its men. Even Snake Man couldn’t get them stirred up and God knows he tried.”

“Adderly?”

“That’s what Isaac and I called him. He’d given himself a long African name that meant son of the snake god or something like that, but people kept remembering what it meant, not how to pronounce it, so by the time he got to us, it was just Snake. You should have seen him in those days. Bone skinny. Afro out to here—” Her graceful fingers sketched a balloon of hair around her own head. “—and army surplus fatigues. Don’t forget, I was just a child back then, so all this time, I never connected the Wallace Adderly you see on television with the NOISE activist who zipped into my life and right back out again. Not until he popped up again on television after that first church burned.”

“So
that’s
why you were so upset in my office!”

She nodded and took a sip of iced tea. “Realizing who he was brought it all back again as if it’d just happened. Adderly was here only two or three weeks when he got a message that some of the brothers were going up to Boston. A federal court had ordered desegregation of the South Boston schools by forced busing and the Klan was supposed to be there, so NOISE planned a show of strength, too.”

“And your uncle joined them?” I asked, slipping Ladybelle the second hushpuppy on my plate so I wouldn’t be tempted. She gulped it down in one swallow and turned hopeful doggy eyes to Cyl, who heartlessly finished off the last of her hushpuppies without sharing.

“It was a rough time for Isaac,” she said slowly, as she pushed her plate aside and laced her slender brown fingers around the red plastic drink cup on the table before her.

“I didn’t understand all that was going on. Grandma had to tell me some of it later. Basically what it boils down to is that a lot of his pigeons came home to roost that summer. He’d gotten a deacon’s daughter pregnant at the same time he was sneaking off to see a white girl with a mean brother.”

“Anybody I know?”

“I forget her name. His was Buck. Buck Ferguson.”

I vaguely remember a slatternly tenant family by that name that used to farm with Uncle Rufus before he got tired of bailing father and son out of jail. “Peggy Rose Ferguson?”

“I guess.”

“Didn’t her brother die in prison?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Isaac said he saw him shoot a man in the arm over a spilled beer. You can imagine what he’d have done if he’d caught Isaac in the backseat of a car with that flower of Southern white womanhood he called his sister.”

“Not that Isaac was any symbol of pure black manhood himself.” Regret shadowed her voice. “He had a temper and he’d punched out a white boy, broke his nose. There’s still a warrant for his arrest down at the courthouse. He had so much rage in him. He wanted to marry the girl who was carrying his baby, but her parents sent her up North. They were going to make her give the baby up for adoption.”

“Did she?”

“Who knows? She never came home again. I used to fantasize that they found each other up there and ran away together.”

“Maybe they did,” I said.

Cyl shook her head. “He would never have stayed away all these years without calling or writing. No, he and Snake went to Boston and I figure he either got into another fight or was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tried to trace him when I got out of law school, but after twenty years? And there was so much violence in Boston that summer. I used to think—”

“Hey now!” said Ellis Glover in his heartiest voice. “What’s the two prettiest ladies at this barbecue doing sitting over here with such serious faces? I’ve been challenged to a game of horseshoes and I need a partner.”

“Not me,” Cyl said and quickly stood up. “Last time I tried, I broke three fingernails. Besides, I want to talk to Mr. Ligon before he leaves.”

I could cheerfully have used Ellis’s neck as a horseshoe stake at that moment for interrupting the first real conversation I’d ever had with Cyl. Would she retreat behind her armor again, embarrassed that she’d opened up to me? Pretend it never happened?

I didn’t get a chance to find out that day. By the time Ellis and I beat two pairs of challengers and were then sat down by a third, Cyl had rounded Stan up and left.

And yeah, I broke a thumbnail.

Only God is in a position to look down on anyone.

—Westwood United Methodist

On Sunday, the
News and Observer
carried an in-depth report on the three burned churches: their histories, their significance in the black community, and how their congregations planned to cope with the loss.

Overall, the tone was upbeat. The Reverend Ralph Freeman explained that while the circumstances of Balm of Gilead’s destruction were deplorable and much more precipitous than expected, the onetime service station was never slated to be saved once they vacated. “It has more than fulfilled its purpose and we assumed that Shop-Mark would simply bulldoze it when they began clearing the lot to build. In the meantime, we have an old-fashioned revival tent set up on our new site and we’d like to invite everyone reading this to put down their newspapers and come join us this morning to praise God for His goodness and everlasting mercy.”

The
N&O
thoughtfully included directions to Balm of Gilead’s new location and a schedule of services. It also re-capped how Leon Starling had once owned the old store and the land it sat on and how his grandson Charles was now charged with arson.

Like Balm of Gilead, Mount Olive was also finding mixed blessings in the fire. Previously, Reverend Anthony Ligon had been an enthusiastic, if diplomatic, advocate for expansion and he was almost ebullient when interviewed. He did his share of obligatory tongue-clicking, especially when it came to the tragic death of Arthur Hunt, whom they had buried Friday in a graveside ceremony, but his satisfaction came through more clearly than he perhaps intended.

“Our insurance policy covers replacement costs, not a set monetary value, so our fellowship hall with its Sunday School rooms will be re-sited. This gives us enough space to extend our sanctuary straight back and to double our seating capacity without damaging the basic integrity of the original sanctuary any more than the fire has already destroyed. From the outside it will look very much as it looked before the fire, except that the whole building will be somewhat longer.”

The Historical Society had pledged to help find artisans to duplicate the dentil moldings and etched-glass windows. “We appreciate that this is a functioning church with modern concerns,” said their spokeswoman, “but it is also such a historically important structure that we naturally want to do everything in our power to help preserve its architectural features. The slave gallery has been unsafe to use these last few years. We hope to raise funds to replace the old wooden supports with steel reinforcements.”

Mr. Ligon confessed himself overwhelmed by the generosity of so many. “We’ve already been blessed with enough donations that we’re hoping to begin clearing away the rubble this week. In the meantime, we’re grateful to the County Commissioners and to the County Board of Education for giving us the use of West Colleton High’s gymnasium on Sunday mornings. With God’s help, we’ll be back in our restored sanctuary before school starts again.”

By contrast, the Reverend Byantha Williams sounded like the ill-tempered fairy godmother who crashed Sleeping Beauty’s christening. While Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle would be getting a pro rata share of any unrestricted donations designated to help “the three burned churches,” it was not getting much sympathetic charity from the immediate neighborhood.

Sister Williams had neither the warm humanitarianism of a Ralph Freeman nor the political tact of an Anthony Ligon. Over the years, she had taken too much delight in pointing out the motes in the eyes of her fellow Christians—their sins of the flesh
and
their sins of the spirit. Their reluctance to come to her aid now only confirmed her sour view of them.

“You get back what you give,” says Maidie.

There was no insurance on either the church or her small house trailer and the county had already warned her that she could not put another trailer back on the premises without a modern septic system. The old outhouse’s proximity to the nearby branch was unacceptable, they said.

“God tempers the wind to His shorn sheep,” she responded defiantly. “He will not lay on us burdens too heavy to bear. The sinner may not want to hear His message, but we will deliver it even louder. God has called me to call sinners to His holy cross and while there is breath in my body, I will not deny Him though the whole world denies me thrice before the cock crows three times.”

The reporter seemed a little confused at this point, but put quotation marks around everything as if to deny his part in the confusion.

He reported that Burning Heart of God had been given the temporary use of an empty storefront in Cotton Grove (we later learned that Grace King Avery had persuaded a former student to make the offer) and that Sister Williams and her cats were living in the rooms behind it for the time being.

The article concluded by predicting that all three churches would rise, phoenix-like, from their ashes.

“Humph,” said Maidie.

“Two out of three wouldn’t be bad,” said Daddy.

That evening, A.K. stopped by in his pickup on the way home after serving the second of his three weekends and asked if I wanted to go out for a pizza if I wasn’t doing anything.

“Sure,” I said, putting aside the case files that needed my attention and wondering what was up.

We drove out to a pizza place near the interchange.

“Everything’s cool as far as jail’s concerned, isn’t it?” I asked as we pulled into the parking lot.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “No problem. It’s not how I’d want to spend my life, but I can take one more weekend. What’s going to happen with Charles and Raymond, though? They’re in without bail. Will this count as their jail time?”

I assured him that if they were found guilty, they’d not be worrying about a few weekends in jail. “Assuming they don’t get the death penalty, they’ll be in a federal pen down in Atlanta and that’s no stroll on the beach.”

“
Death penalty?
You shitting me?”

I quickly briefed him on current laws and A.K. looked shaken as he held the door open for me.

The restaurant interior smelled of olive oil and hot yeasty dough. Even though he’d invited me, I had no illusions as to who’d be paying. We slid into a booth with padded red leather benches. He opted for the buffet; I ordered a salad (no dressing) and a slice with sausage and anchovies.

“The thing is,” he said when he’d returned from the buffet stand loaded down with slices of pepperoni and green pepper pizza, “I don’t think they did it.”

“Charles Starling made threats,” I reminded him, “and they don’t have alibis.”

“Aw, Charles.” He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “All front, no sides. He and Raymond can both be jerks—”