Some of My Best Friends Are Black (47 page)

“In the earlier years,” Burleigh says, “it was civil. But don’t bring up anything pertaining to the chapel versus the church.
Phew!
Everything would blow up. From the get-go, it was my dream that we could just have one St. Charles Parish, but every time a new pastor would come, he’d say, ‘We need to bring that chapel over here. That’s the only way we’ll make integration work.’

“Then word would get around and people would start gettin’ all riled
up. One time, somebody came to me. Down he sits and says, ‘The pastor talks like that, he better have his bags packed.’

“I say, ‘Packed for what?’

“He says, ‘Anybody tries to close that chapel, he won’t be here a week.’

“Then the next pastor would come along, then the next one, and then the next one.”

All told, beginning with Father Knight, thirteen pastors would come and go before the black and white parishioners of Grand Coteau sat together as one. In the 1980s, one priest suffered a nervous breakdown over the matter. As the years went by, tensions did begin to ease up. Younger black families had started coming more and more to services at the white church, but it was still a “white” church—Anglo-European in tone with lots of blue-eyed, blond-haired dead people on the walls. The chapel up the road, meanwhile, had grown only more entrenched in its separateness. It was in the winter of 1993 that Pastor No. 9, Father William Rimes (now deceased) and his associate, Father Warren Broussard, decided it was time for the work of integration to be completed.

“When I got to St. Charles,” Father Broussard says, “all of the liturgies were fairly well integrated at the main church. The four p.m. vigil mass was the least integrated because it was mostly older people, but the family masses were almost fifty-fifty black and white. To me, that part of it was going pretty well. Most of the white community, and probably a good percentage of the African-American community, felt that it was pointless to continue the separation, but the group in the chapel had become even more removed. I tried to be sensitive to their feelings, but at the same time it seemed so unhealthy—separate but equal, only it wasn’t equal.”

Lent was approaching. Since the parishioners would be rededicating their faith to the church, the pastors felt it made sense to have them also rededicate their efforts to unification. Rimes and Broussard wrote to Bishop Harry Flynn, proposing to close the chapel during the seven Sundays of the Lent and Easter season. If all went well, they would do it again during Advent and Christmas. “Worship together during the major liturgical seasons,” the priests wrote, “will stand as symbol and example of the better union of minds and hearts which we all should
seek.” As a practical note, they added, the cost of mounting separate seasonal celebrations at both churches was proving to be a significant strain on parish resources; consolidating the observances would save a good deal of money. The bishop agreed.

For seven Sundays that Lent, the chapel was closed and the black and white congregations worshiped together, completely together, for the first time in decades. The first Sunday after Easter, however, the black congregation went straight to the pastors to make sure the chapel would be reopened. Come December, everyone worshipped together for Advent and Christmas. Again, the chapel was back open before you could say Happy New Year. When the 1994 Lenten season came around, the priests went to proceed with what they hoped would become an annual tradition and a prelude to unification. Only this Lent, instead of Wallace Belson trying to get into the white church, Wallace Belson was trying to get out.

If a church had done to my father what Sacred Heart did to Wallace Belson’s father, I can’t say I’d ever set foot in that church, or any church, ever again. And if a white man had been assaulted at the black church in 1964? Forget it. That church would have been burned to the ground. Yet Belson remains a devout Catholic. He’s one of Grand Coteau’s most dedicated and active parishioners. He considered leaving. He was wooed by his Protestant friends, took some literature from the Nation of Islam, but in the end he came back home. “I’m not gonna change my religion because of somebody else,” he says. “I’m a Catholic, and I’ll die a Catholic. All the money I spent giving my daughters a Catholic education, if I had it today you know where I’d be? In the Bahamas, every summer.” Belson’s devotion to the parish, however, has been almost entirely in service of the chapel alone. As an officer in the Knights of Peter Claver,
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for decades he’s volunteered hours and hours each week to keep Grand Coteau’s black congregation thriving and to keep it separate.

After Martin Luther King died, his civil rights gospel of passive, peaceful reconciliation no longer held the universal appeal it once did. Black Christian leaders had to refute claims like those Malcolm X had made, that they were peddling “the white man’s religion.” The black church needed a new narrative—it needed a new
brand
, one with an aspirational marketing strategy for a newly assertive and Afrocentric generation.

Black liberation theology was born out of this era, marrying the militance of Black Power with the Gospel teachings of Jesus. God’s only son was a fervent partisan for the oppressed and the poor, and because the oppressed and the poor in America were black, it followed that Christ himself was black—literally or metaphorically, depending on whom you ask. This was not the Jesus who turned the other cheek, but the one who cast the money changers out of the temple. Like the Israelites of old, in the American paradigm, blacks were God’s Chosen People. It was their divinely appointed task to emancipate Christianity from the white supremacist ideology that had corrupted it, and in doing so, liberate themselves as well. In the church, as in politics and in business, the path to the Promised Land lay in ethnic solidarity and self-sufficiency, challenging the white power structure from a position of strength rather than accommodating it from a position of weakness.

Though mostly rooted in certain Protestant denominations, black liberation theology would make its influence felt even within the rigid, top-down orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism, where it would be recast through a uniquely Catholic lens: the One True Church would be a universal church for humankind (i.e., would truly be
catholic
) only when it accepted its black members in a full and equal embrace. The black clergy and the black Catholic laity began organizing, making demands straight out of the Black Power playbook: that more black parishes be established to serve black communities, that only black priests be assigned to those parishes, and that they be given direct authority over the affairs of black congregations.

The Catholic hierarchy did what it could to meet many of these demands—and not simply due to political pressure. For the first time in America’s history, the church began making a sincere effort to give black
Catholics their due. Most every diocese with a significant black representation opened a dedicated office for black Catholic affairs. (Lafayette established its office of Black Catholic Ministries in 1973.) In the 1980s, a national African-American Catholic Youth Conference was formed. More black clergy were recruited and promoted to positions of real authority; Atlanta would welcome the country’s first black archbishop in 1988.

The mass began changing, too. Following the acculturation directives of Vatican II, black parishes began incorporating more traditional African and black American customs into their liturgy. By the late 1980s, it wasn’t unusual to walk into a black Catholic church and see a gospel choir decked out in Kente cloth robes and hear the call-and-response of “Amen, brother” coming up from the pews. By creating and supporting a “black Catholic” experience, these programs succeeded in retaining many black congregants and in bringing earlier defectors back to the faith. There was only one problem: the church had already tried this tactic once before, in New Orleans in 1895.

Separatism begets separatism. First you adjust to it, then you come to prefer it, then you can’t live without it. Even as segregation heaped insult and injury on black America, it also created a sanctuary, a separate world with its own institutions and traditions. Slavery was evil in every dimension, but segregation offered a balm for the very wounds that it inflicted. Which is why Jim Crow was so insidious. Black teachers in the South tried to maintain separate schools for fear of losing their jobs. Black politicians fought to keep black neighborhoods intact because that was the root of their strength. Black businessmen had a profit motive to fight for the same. But the black church has the strongest gravitational pull of all, because church provides something far more important than jobs or money or even power.

Even as the congregation at Grand Coteau’s main church grew more diverse—perhaps because it had grown more diverse, thus threatening the chapel’s relevance—the holdouts had drifted further and further away, keeping the rest of the parish at arm’s length, insisting that their institutions, cultural traditions, and styles of worship were worthy of being preserved. Which they were, and still are. But as David Knight had noted during the first go-round, the real source of black resistance
stemmed from something else. It wasn’t about the building. It wasn’t really about cultural traditions and styles of worship, either. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the theological implications of whatever color Jesus used to be.

“The only thing the blacks wanted was a little respect,” Wallace Belson says, “and we didn’t get it. I don’t want to be around somebody who ain’t comfortable around me and I’m not comfortable around him. If I’m sitting by you in church and Father says to shake one another’s hand, and you look the other way and I look the other way, we’re not going to church to worship the Lord—we’re going to church with hatred. And that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

Church is a place of acceptance, of belonging. No matter who you are in the world, every Sunday morning you can go someplace and with a simple profession of faith you get to be a member of the club—a member of
the
club, the one going to heaven. At the chapel, Wallace Belson was an important parishioner, and he more than anyone had every legitimate reason to believe that the white church wouldn’t give him the same respect he enjoyed right where he was. So as the Lenten season of 1994 approached and integration threatened once again, Belson and several other members of the Knights of Peter Claver took it upon themselves to be the last-line defenders of the chapel. For weeks, they petitioned Bishop Flynn to step in. They wrote letter after letter, each one more plaintive and insistent than the last, demanding that the diocese keep the chapel open “to preserve the dignity, respect, and needs of our black Catholic community.”

On February 10, Flynn intervened, directing Father Rimes not to suspend the Sunday chapel mass. Rimes wrote back, requesting that the bishop reconsider, lest he halt the first progress made toward integration in some twenty years. But Flynn would hear no debate on the matter. He simply ordered that the chapel stay open, period, and gave no reason why. The bishop then went one step further. He went over the parish priests’ heads and issued a letter directly to the chapel’s congregation. In it, he offered his personal guarantee that their church would never be closed again at any time for any reason. When the letter was read aloud at the Sunday morning mass, a joyous celebration was had—anybody
who tried to close that chapel wouldn’t be here a week. Shortly thereafter, Pastor No. 9 packed his bags.

“Father Rimes was pretty pissed off,” Warren Broussard recalls. “The way the bishop handled it was very disrespectful of his position. It also didn’t take into account the larger experience of the African-American congregation here. The bishop didn’t solicit any information from anyone except the people who were complaining, and not everyone in the black community thinks the same way.”

Charles James was born and raised in Sunset, another small country town just across Interstate 49 from Grand Coteau. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, he attended the black parish at Christ the King from baptism to first communion to confirmation. His family left for Houston in 1970, came back in 1973, and he’s been here ever since, working for Exxon Mobil as a maintenance crew chief on the company’s coastal oil pipeline. He’s served on St. Charles’s parish council for a total of twenty-three years, with five different stints as council president.