Some of My Best Friends Are Black (46 page)

If the white church were the only workable option, a gesture was necessary to prove that blacks would not enter this new parish as second-class citizens, and so Knight proposed a compromise. At the time, Sacred Heart happened to be in need of a paint job and extensive repairs. Knight proposed that they take the opportunity to remodel the interior and make it into a shared space. The side chapel that had once served as the colored section was separated from the main congregation by a separate altar and pulpit. They would tear out that altar and pulpit and move the side pews to join the main congregation—they would lop off the back of the bus, and no one would ever have to sit there again. “Let us make it a new church for a new parish,” Knight said, “a church that will be what it is by the labor of black and white alike.”

Knight’s proposal was enough for the black council members to go along, despite their reservations. On November 8, 1971, in a show of unity, a black council member made the motion to accept the white church as their new, permanent home. Another black parishioner seconded the motion. The entire council, white and black, voted unanimously for its passage. Then they announced the plans to the rest of parish.

“And that’s when everything broke loose,” Charlie Thibodeaux says.

If Catholics get upset when mass gets moved by half an hour, that goes double for moving the furniture. The reactionary faction of the white congregation met the renovation plan with outrage. Nobody had told
them that they’d actually have to, you know, make some sacrifices from their end to move this along. Share a phone line and a bingo night? Fine. Some Global Village thing once a week for the hippies? Sure. But make changes to their own church and help pay for it besides?

Hell, no.

Father Knight found his plan stymied at every turn. He was blackballed by every contractor in the phone book. “There wasn’t a single carpenter in town who would touch that church,” Knight says. “So I finally told everyone that if they wouldn’t renovate it, I’d do it myself. I said, ‘I’ll go in there Monday morning with a hammer and a crowbar and I’ll tear out that woodwork! I’ll destroy it! Then you’ll have no excuse.’”

But Knight never got the chance to do any demolition. Just as the dispute was coming to a head, his mother fell ill; he took leave that December to be with her. Which was just as well. Several dozen families, black and white, had already left the parish. More were poised to follow. Going after the altar with a crowbar probably wouldn’t have helped. “They got me out of there at just the right time,” he admits with hindsight. “I’m not always very bright.” After his mother’s funeral, Knight was transferred to a parish in New Orleans. He never went back to St. Charles Borromeo.

After Knight’s departure, Charlie Thibodeaux assumed the responsibilities of pastor. In March of 1972, after consulting with an architect on the steps needed to do the remodeling, the parish council voted, again, to move forward. And then the backlash got nasty. Digging through the parish archives, I found more letters about the proposed 1972 renovation than I did pertaining to any other subject in the parish’s 190-year history. White parishioners flooded the bishop’s office with petitions. Removing the side altar was “a tragedy” and “a desecration.” It left the churchgoers “sick” and “depressed.” The renovation was being done “out of spite.” It was “revenge” and “retribution” against the whites. Never mind that the black council members had just voted to forfeit their own church
in its entirety
, these whites were being asked to give up three, maybe four pieces of eighty-year-old cabinetry, and that kind of injustice was simply not going to stand.

Given the progress the parish had made in just two years, it almost seems like a bad joke that the whole thing would fall apart over a plan to
move around a few wooden benches. But that’s what happened. Knight’s compromise was sound in theory, but in execution it fell victim to one of integration’s classic blunders. It gave white people their out. It made the argument about something other than race, something that whites could whine about. You can’t move our pews. I don’t want my kid to ride the bus. In the dozens of letters fired off to the bishop, most of them make no mention of race at all. Insofar as they do, most of them have “no problem” with blacks, and “support” integration. They just oppose the one thing that would actually allow integration to take place.

Putting cabinetry on a higher moral plane than the unity of God’s children was foolishness, but the whole episode laid bare the crux of the integration dilemma. Even if you’re on the right side of history, how far can you push people before you’re doing more harm than good? The whites were willing to go to war over the woodwork, and in doing so destroy what progress had been made. The two parishes had become one, in a way. The biracial council worked well together. A few dozen blacks attended weekend mass at the white church and were received, if not with open arms, at least with civility. A handful of whites also went without complaint to weekday services at the black church. Grand Coteau had traveled a great distance since Wallace Belson, and perhaps that was enough for now.

Charlie Thibodeaux decided that it was. The bishop had replied to the deluge of letters with a terse statement saying that the renovations were minimal and everyone should get over it. But Thibodeaux had a better feel for what the parish was thinking and how much more it would take. He shelved the renovation plan. “Charlie was an extraordinary man,” Father Knight says of his successor. “I honestly believe he was a saint. He kept it from becoming violent. If I’d pushed for that renovation, if I’d gone in there and touched that church, we might have had violence. Or who knows what. It would have been stupid of me. But he had the prudence and the gentleness that I lacked.”

Thibodeaux served as pastor for a short while longer. Then he wound his way south of the border to work at his mission in Paraguay under the brutal dictatorship of strongman Alfredo Stroessner, where, presumably, the political climate was easier on his nerves. He has been there ever
since. Father Knight left the Jesuits some years later and now works as a diocesan priest in Memphis, Tennessee. The failure of the whites to make any meaningful compromise was proof to the reticent black congregants that they had been right all along. Unifying the churches was a losing proposition. So the whites held on to their cabinetry and the blacks held on to their building. Both retreated into their own churches, and that’s where they stayed.

From that day forward, St. Charles Borromeo was integrated in much the same way that America was integrated—on paper. This odd duck, this single parish with two congregations, became the new status quo. To differentiate between them, officially, what had been Sacred Heart became known as “the church” and what had been Christ the King was now called “the chapel.” In casual conversation, however, you were more likely to hear them called by their unambiguous possessives:
their
church and
our
church. The phones all rang to one office. The business was all done on the same stationery. The collection plates all went into the same kitty. But socially and spiritually, Sunday morning at eleven o’clock was still the most segregated hour of the week, and it would remain that way for some time. As one parishioner put it, “You have to go through Good Friday to get to Easter, and we went through an awful lot of Good Fridays.”

Nearly every time I sit down to talk with someone in Grand Coteau about the history of the parish, he or she will eventually, inevitably, lean forward to say, “Well, you know, there was a black man tried to go to the white church back in ’64…”

Wallace Belson casts a long shadow over the town’s conscience, but the man himself is no longer here. He passed in the mid-1990s. The closest living source to the incident is his son, Wallace Belson, Jr., now in his late sixties. When I finally reach the younger Belson by telephone to ask about the integration of the churches, he’s fairly candid about his feelings on the matter.

“I ain’t swallowed it right yet,” he says.

Still, he’s happy to talk and invites me over to his home, a modest brick ranch house just a few blocks from the church. Belson’s mother has passed on, too, and his wife. But he has two daughters, one a nurse and one a teacher. Today, he works as the head of Grand Coteau’s volunteer fire department, but he spent many years as a cook over at the Jesuit novitiate. He’s got a stocky build, solid for a man of his age, but his shoulders are stooped a bit, and one of his eyelids hangs slightly lower than the other. Even when he’s smiling he comes across as a bit weary. Overall he gives the impression of a man who’s been struggling against gravity his whole life, which he has.

Like Charlie Thibodeaux, Belson was driven to act by what was done to his father, but Matthew 25 was the last thing on his mind. “When they beat him in the church,” Belson says, “the pastor, he looked the other way. Just a nigger got whipped. That was it. I’ll be honest with you—and I’m not proud to say this—after they did that to my daddy, two Sundays straight I went over to that church for mass. I was ready. I
wanted
them to do it to me. I wanted them to beat me, whip me, kick me, spit on me.”

“So they’d give you the excuse to fight back?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” he says. “I wasn’t gonna fight. I was gonna do something worse than that, you know what I’m sayin’? There wasn’t gonna be no fightin’, no sir. And I know God’s gonna punish me for going into church like that. I went there thinkin’ the same way those white men were thinkin’, with hate. I went there like an animal.”

No one ever assaulted Wallace Belson, Jr., and he never assaulted anyone in return. But when the drive for integration stalled in 1972, Belson became—and would remain—a vocal part of the faction that was glad to see it die.

By 1977, it had. That was the year that Darrell Burleigh started working at St. Charles Borromeo as parish manager. Burleigh looks like the kind of old-time Cajun you’d see in a tourism commercial, a full head of white hair, his face heavily creased with age, his thick Louisiana accent peppered with colloquial French. Thanks to a bad back, today he’s propped up on a pillow in a creaky, old wooden chair, sitting at his paper-strewn desk in the rectory office. Perched at this same desk for the last thirty-plus years, he’s spent a lifetime on the color line, negotiating all the business between their church and our church.