“America is a great nation,” he shouted out, but if America doesn’t deal with its racism, “I’m convinced that God will bring down the curtains on this nation, the curtains of doom.
“You know,” he said, “there are times that you reap what you sow in history.” He pounded his big King James Bible on the pulpit. “I believe it! Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap. America must resolve this race problem, or this race problem will doom America.”
Martin Luther King Jr.,
sermon, July 1967, in
To the Mountaintop by Stewart
Burns
By eleven o’clock on this Sunday morning in May 2005, the weather in Scottsville is clear, hot, and humid. I drive over to Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church for services and make my way inside to the cool, dark foyer to sign the guest book. I hear the organ playing, the choir softly singing, and Pastor McCain beginning the service, as I open the double swinging doors and slip in quietly. I find a seat next to tall, slender Mrs. Ernestine Mattox, whom I’d often seen in church, and just in front of Willie Mae Brown, who gives me a nod of welcome. Willie Mae is dressed in a sharp matching skirt and jacket of vertical black and white stripes, with a matching black hat and veil. R.D. is in front with the deacons, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, a white handkerchief folded neatly in his breast pocket. He gives me a small nod when he sees me come in. But where is Doris? She’s not in her usual place in the front row with the other deaconesses. Despite the number of familiar faces I see, without Doris I feel awkward. Somehow, without our ever having spoken of it, I realize that I’ve been relying on Doris as my guide into this spirit-filled world of the rural black Baptist church.
Suddenly I see her, and I’m relieved. She’s at the end of the row in front of me. When she turns around and sees me, she smiles and my spirits are buoyed up. That smile, along with Willie Mae’s nod and R.D.’s acknowledgement, makes me want to stay despite the headache I feel coming on. Two teenage boys provide the accompaniment for the choir this morning, and their music is painfully loud. A clean-cut sixteen-year-old dressed in a sport jacket, white shirt, and tie keeps up a heavy, happy, percussive beat on the drum kit, while a precocious fourteen year-old, just as neatly dressed, wails on the electric organ. The melody is drowned out by the volume of sound that sets my head pounding.
The choir director turns to the congregation and invites us to stand and join the chorus. I gather my energy. The wooden pews creak and clothes rustle as people pull themselves up. I pull myself up too, determined to find the beat. I need to get with it or get out, I tell myself, that’s the way to treat the headache. I begin to move, to relax with the waves of energy that wash over and swirl around me. I shift back and forth on my feet, let myself sway and clap, try my best to sing along.
“He is able,” the choir shouts, “Jesus can fix it!”
The choir director raises her arms, palms up and open, then turns back to the twenty-member choir facing us from the back of the altar. They are rocking in place, swaying and clapping, beaming, full of conviction. They’re contagious, hollering, “He is able, yes, yes! He can fix it.”
The choir director turns back to the congregation and signals for us all to be seated.
Pastor McCain steps up to the pulpit, an attractive, broad-shouldered man in his forties. The choir hums softly in the background, the organ plays lightly, the drums almost stop. Rev. McCain stands there smiling and nodding, looking around the room through tinted, light-sensitive glasses, greeting everyone from his pulpit. His hair is trimmed neatly into a dark flattop squared off at the corners, like his small moustache. Turning to the choir director, he signals that he is ready to speak. Today is Pentecost Sunday according to the Christian calendar, in the days after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, the day on which Christians believe the Holy Spirit descended and anointed his disciples who were gathered together awaiting a sign. Suddenly, as they sat in the upper room, a whirling wind blew through, disturbing them, disrupting them, and out of the wind came tongues of flames, which hovered over each disciple’s head, filling them with the Spirit, giving them each the ability to speak in tongues, and letting them know that despite Christ’s departure, he had fulfilled his promise to send an Advocate, the Holy Spirit. That Spirit was with them still, whirling in the wind, hidden in the flames.
Pastor McCain signals the choir for quiet and calls up a young woman who is sitting next to his wife on the front row. She is a stout and earthy woman, tall, dressed simply in black, her hair marcelled and waved, pulled back smoothly from her long oval face. She is the guest preacher this morning.
The electric organ comes up softly under her and floats in the air. She steps in front of the pulpit, turns to us, and begins to pray, softly at first.
“Father God, I ask that you anoint my mouth as I stand behind your word, Father God…. Father God, everything I say from my mouth, let it be directly from your throne.” She continues, as her voice grows louder, “Father God, Lord, right now I ask that you saturate me, Father God.” I start warming to this unlikely preacher, to her hefty, commanding presence.
“Father God, let me step bold to proclaim your Word, Father God,” she shouts. “Lord, I ask right now,” she says on a syncopated beat, “Father God, that you allow your anointing to saturate this place.”
“Yes, yes,” people shout in response, “yes.”
Bold, she says when boldly would have been more usual. But “step bold” is arresting, stops me, makes me sit up and notice. It won’t fly past me; I have to think about it.
“In the mighty name of Jesus, Father God…” she calls out more loudly.
“Yes, yes!” everyone shouts. “Alright now, alright!” The energy builds, the call and response, one feeding upon the other, building the intensity.
“Lord, decrease my flesh. Father God, I ask that your Spirit dwell richly within me, Father God, in the mighty name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.”
“Amen, amen.”
“Those who can and are able, please stand and give reverence to the Lord.”
“Hmmm, hmmm,” the congregation says under its breath.
“Today’s reading is from “2 Kings, chapter 5, verses 8–14,” she announces with authority.
Everyone pulls out the Bibles they carry with them for church. I pull a small red and gold brocade bag out of my purse and fish out my marked up, dog-eared, yellow and red, Post-it-flagged, miniature copy of the New Testament.
“I don’t have the Old Testament,” I whisper to Mrs. Mattox, sitting next to me. She sees that I’ve at least got part of the Bible, smiles, puts her Bible where I can read along in the Old Testament with her, and points out the verse we’re on.
The fiery young preacher continues; she chews up her verses, she devours them, spits them back out at us, and showers us with her powerful voice, with her rhythmic, angry bellows. I feel like I’m being attacked with scripture, it’s being hurled at us, forcefully, and it works. It gets through, at least to me. I begin to crack open. The congregation punctuates her talk with their call and response. They seem to be, we seem to be, egging her on to say more, to be bolder, wilder, and she is, thundering now, “And it reads that when the king of Israel…learned of the warrior Namaan’s request that he be healed of leprosy, the king despaired and tore his clothes.
“He thought that Naaman’s king, Aram, had sent Naaman to him as a trick in order to start a quarrel.
“‘Am I a god to give life and death?’ the king of Israel exclaimed when he read Aran’s letter. The prophet Elisha heard of the distress of the king of Israel, and he got word to the king and said, ‘Let him come to me and he will find a prophet in Israel.’
“Naaman came with his horses and his chariots and stood at the door of the house of Elisha. Elisha did not come out. Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying go and wash in Jordan seven times…then Naaman would be healed.
“Naaman says, ‘I thought surely Elisha would come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord, his god, and stretch his hand over the place and heal my leprosy.’ The River Jordan is known to be muddy, Naaman says, so why can’t he wash ‘in the rivers of Damascus? They are clean, can I not wash in them?’ he tells Elisha’s messenger with indignance. The Bible tells us ‘he turned around and went off in a rage’ that Elisha had not personally come out to heal him.
“When Naaman storms off, his servants approach him and remind him that if Elisha had told him to do something difficult, he would have done it. They reason with him. If he would have done something hard, why will he not follow Elisha’s simple instruction to dip in the Jordan seven times? Naaman heeds their counsel and turns back. He goes down to the Jordan and immerses himself seven times, ‘according to the saying of the man of God, and his flesh came unto him again, like the flesh of a little child.’”
“Amen, amen, I say, let us give praise and thanks, you may be seated now,” she said.
“Pastor McCain, and all my brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to let you know that great is my boldness of speech to you today. I have word directly from the Throne.”
Directly from the Throne? I ask myself, caught off guard by such an outlandish claim. In another moment I realize that I have rarely ever heard woman of any color make this kind of claim to power. It’s refreshing. She goes on.
“The subject for the day: anybody been dipped?” she says loudly and knowingly.
“Whoooooo!” a woman shouts. “Come on, come on,” a man calls out.
“To dip means to immerse,” she says.
“Come on, come on, baby,” the man’s voice again.
“It means to re-pent,” she says slowly.
“Come on,” a woman says.
“It means to turn away.”
“Yes.”
“Naaman had a problem with leprosy on this body.”
“I got it.”
“Leprosy is considered an un-clean disease,” she says drawing out the un-clean.
“Yes, yes.”
“His skin was contagious.”
“All right.”
“When people came around Naaman, they might not want to be in his presence, but leprosy was not the only problem Naaman had. No, he had the problem that most of us church folks have right now today: it’s pride.”
That’s right, I say to myself, as a woman’s voice calls out insistently, “Come on now, come on!” I’m right there with her.
“It’s pride. Naaman had a big problem with pride. He felt like because he was a great man of valor and he had won many battles, he deserved special treatment. He felt like Elisha the prophet should come out to him and just speak a word and call on his God, and heal him.”
“Come on, come on,” another man encourages in caressing tones, as if his words could kiss her, arouse her further.
“But Elisha just sent a word. When you are a true man or woman of God, you ought to be able to just speak a word. Speak a word! You don’t have to go out and proclaim and lay hands on nobody, you ought to be able to just speak a word and that situation ought to be healed.”
“Yes, yes, come on now!” Some women are starting to fan themselves; it’s getting hot.
“There’s a lot of lepers in the house of the Lord right now! A lot of church folks right now in the house of the Lord. We got contagious diseases in this house! Here you sit on your pew, Sunday after Sunday, you piled up and you puffed up, you can’t get up and you can’t worship the Lord—you’ve got an unclean disease,” she shouts on a roll, in rhythm, her voice rising higher.
People start clapping.
“You got to be like Naaman, you need to turn back, you got to go back down, go to the Jordan, to the muddy Jordan.”
“Yes,” claps, and “yeah!”
“You got to dip seven times in that water—seven times in that water means completion. I am sick and tired of church folks coming to church: ‘I’m dressed, I’m looking clean, Sunday after Sunday, I’ve got on my best-looking dress, amen, I’ve got on my best pair of shoes, amen.’ But you pumped up and puffed up, you sitting on your pew every Sunday, wrapped up in your pride, and…”
Voices rise louder, shouting starts, and I can barely make out her words, people are clapping, then more shouts, men and women together, she’s getting hot.
“Come on, come on…” a man calls out insistently; he demands of her.
“…you got a contagious disease, you need to go back down in the Jordan, you need to ask the Lord, ‘Cleanse me,’ go down, ask the Lord if there’s anything in me that’s not clean….”
“Yes, yes!”
“I need to purge, Lord, I need you to purge it out of me, Lord, right now! You sit on the pew, Sunday after Sunday, without forgiveness in your heart! Just looking clean, but your heart is dirty!”
“Whoooo!” She’s uncovering it. “Come on now, come on…”
“Clothes ain’t going to take you to heaven, baby. If my heart is right with the Lord, that’s all that matters.”
“Tell it, tell it.”
“Because I been dipped! God taught me you got to love when it hurt!”
Here it is, here it is: love even when it hurts, don’t run away now, that’s what love is, holding the ground, staying on board—the message I need today.
“We need a little hu-mil-ity, we need a little more compassion, I am saying that word today, com-passion. You got to love people even when they hurt you so bad….”
This is my struggle, she’s right on it, exhorting us, encouraging me, all of us, to keep choosing love, to keep being willing to be uncomfortable. I have to give up my pride, I have to not know how Love Cemetery will turn out, I have to keep choosing a vision of reconciliation and healing, even though I have no idea how to bring this about, even though I, as one individual, have utterly no power to bring this about, people have to want it. Is this just some crazy idea of mine? Let go, let go—I have to keep choosing my friendship with Doris, even if I don’t know what’s ahead.
“You got to love!” the preacher thunders now, raining down the memory of Sam Adkins on me. Brought up in slavery, Sam Adkins who said, “You got to choose love when there’s reason to hate, Mabel, choose love. Choose love.”
Love despite pain. It’s easy to love people who like us, who treat us kindly, but the great transformation happens when we love our enemies, love those who despise us, love those who are difficult.
A month before this day at Shiloh, I had led a retreat for fifty people in Charleston, South Carolina. There were two African American and forty-eight white participants.52 Feeling myself carried by the call and response in Shiloh Baptist Church, the ebb and flow of rhythmic voices, I let myself remember how boldly those two African American women had spoken that April Sunday morning, the last day of our gathering, how they described the pain of being black in a white-dominated society. Elayna Shakur was a painter, an African American woman from Charleston who had three daughters. Elayna, a tall and elegant woman in her mid-sixties with short silver hair, large brown eyes, a high forehead, and warm brown skin, explained to us that she had been hugely invested in cross-cultural dialogue and racial understanding.
“Forty years ago, I helped start a group called the Panel of American Women, made up of black, white, Catholic, and Jewish women. We met weekly for ten years and spoke publicly as a panel in the North Shore and Chicago communities about our personal experiences with prejudice. I’ve always been passionately committed to racial reconciliation. Thirty years have passed now since I left that work,” she said, looking around the room at the almost all-white faces, “and I see that in many ways we’re as separate as ever.”
After all these years, including starting another short-lived group in South Carolina when she moved there, Elayna felt close to despair. The state of affairs between races in our country is still bad. “No matter what the appearance, there’s a level at which white people not only don’t understand racism—they don’t care.”
“They just don’t get it,” she said, and then corrected herself, “You don’t.” She was no longer protecting us from her sorrow and anger. “I almost didn’t come back to our group today. I felt like I needed to retreat into the black community. There is just too much whiteness here for me at this retreat, so I went for a walk just now, that’s why I was late. I’d found that beautiful black wrought-iron gate by Phillip Simmons, the famous Charleston black artisan, that’s near here and I just stood there holding on to it, holding on to that beautiful blackness.”
Silence. The room was hushed; no one moved; we were—I was—completely transfixed.
Then Cookie Washington spoke up. Cookie was a fabric artist, a quilter, and a seamstress, a diminutive African American woman with her hair covered by a colorful turban. She began to weep the moment she opened her mouth. “I feel that most of my white ‘sisters’’ commitment to racial healing stops at their bedroom door. I feel like you are sleeping with the enemy, and you would not extend yourself to help me or any other black person if it threatened your relationship with white men.
“I feel so sad when white women still say to me, ‘You speak so well.’ Why are they surprised? Have you people never met an educated black woman? Sometimes I feel like a token black friend. I don’t feel seen as a mother, an artist, as a friend.”
I was stunned by Cookie and Elayna’s honesty. I had never had an African American woman friend open to me in this way before, much less in a group of people. Tears welled up, which embarrassed me: they were the ones hurt—why was I in tears? But as I looked around I could see that almost everyone else in the room was moved to tears too. People were talking softly among themselves. One of the other participants, Sheila Hill, was relieved that we were finally talking about race, that elephant in the American living room; she’d felt it here.
Finally my friend Bonnie O’Neill began to speak, her blue eyes glistening with moisture. She turned to Cookie and Elayna and said to them both directly, “I am sorry for the racism in our country. I am so sorry. It’s terrible, I know it, you know it, we all know it in one way or another,” and then she paused. “I am so sorry for any way in which I have participated in racism, consciously or unconsciously. Please forgive me. I am truly sorry.”
At that, Elayna, ever composed herself, began to let the tears roll down her cheeks. Cookie cried too, even harder, we all did—tears of connection, tears of release. We were no longer trying to act as if this pain was not between us, as if we did not intimately feel the corrosive touch of a past that is still so much with us. It’s the pain of our stitched-together American democracy, torn and unraveling.
People began to approach Cookie and Elayna one by one, off to the side, to offer their own apologies, to ask for their forgiveness. I asked everyone to stop right where they were. This was an extraordinary moment, and it shouldn’t be happening on the periphery. I asked Cookie and Elayna if they would be willing to let us form a circle around them, if they were willing to be in the center. Would they be willing to hear our apologies? “Yes,” they both said.
“This is a rare opportunity for us as white women to apologize directly for racism and to be forgiven by African American women,” I said to the others, “a true gift” for those who feel so moved.
A small, blonde, blue-eyed woman came up to Elayna and Cookie, a woman whom I had dismissed in my own mind as a well-to-do housewife with nothing to do. She began to tell them how she had spent eleven years working full-time with young African American men in prison, and how it had torn her up, how she had seen their pain and all the obstacles in front of them, how our criminal justice system destroyed them, ate them alive—how it killed their hope and hers too. She apologized as Elayna and Cookie nodded, listening, taking in everything, the three of them now in tears. I was startled by the depth of feeling of this participant and brought up short by the shallowness of my own assumption about her.
Another woman apologized because she said that her grandparents brought her up to believe that black people didn’t have souls. They told her she didn’t have to pray for them or worry. She was so sorry she’d ever listened. She knew it wasn’t true even as a child. Over and over I heard, “I am sorry, please forgive me,” spoken by each person there in her own words. So this is what it means to speak in tongues.
This Sunday, a month later in East Texas, was Pentecost Sunday. But for me Pentecost had already come the month before in Charleston. The biblical story says a “whirling wind” entered the room in which the apostles waited on Pentecost. It blew open the windows and doors, this wind, this spirit. It appeared as a dove, then as flames that did not burn but ignited their speech, giving them tongues of fire.
The spirit had been with us that morning in South Carolina, and it was with us here at Shiloh Baptist. I am standing up with the congregation; the preacher is close to ending.
“We got to go back to that muddy Jordan,” she is saying.
The choir is singing—everybody’s singing full out—I’m on my feet too, singing and swaying, clapping and praying.
One singer takes a solo and is then taken over himself by the Spirit. A woman shrieks and cries out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” She screams louder and louder, now, steps into the center aisle, starts up to the front; her arms uplifted, waving, her eyes closed, she stumbles forward. Two young women immediately step in, get close around her, slip their arms around her waist, hold her up, protect her, and begin to fan her. Sweating and crying, “Jesus, Jesus!” She is gone, gone into another world. Her cries get louder, more insistent, “Jesus, my Lord, JESUS. JESUS. JESUS.”
People make sure that this woman’s taken care of—and she is—and just keep on singing. I’ve seen this happen before in a service here, several times. This is being slain in the spirit, filled with God. I know this place, I know this depth of feeling, and in a flash I see the genius of the black church, the key it gives to survival of the human spirit—to say nothing of God.
There is no embarrassment, no hurrying out of this woman, no telling her to stop, to be quiet, that she’s interrupting the service. No, the singing flows on around her, incorporates her cries. She is accepted exactly for where she is with whatever is going on, supported, held up, attended to in a deeply human way that I’ve rarely seen in my own white America. I can’t imagine this in the church in which I grew up. This person would be hurried out, told to get a hold of herself. But not here.53
Another woman in the back of the church on the left cries out from her pew. The organ soars, the choir’s voice rises higher, the drum beats faster, as the intensity grows and goes right through me.
Then a young woman steps into the aisle with a mighty shout and goes down, falling like a tree. Half a dozen other young women rush to catch her. They have her now and lift her up and carry her to an empty pew in the back of the church. They lay her out carefully and hover over her, fanning her and watching over her as her shouts and cries continue, her calling out to God.
The heat in the room grows. The woman up front who went into a trance is weeping now, calling out more softly, sobbing, “In the name of Jesus.” Doris leaves the front of the church now and goes to the back to check the young woman. She takes her pulse. Doris is calm, her years of experience as an LPN at the Veterans Hospital emanate assurance. Each person is safe in the other’s hands, each is cared for and attended in ways that are natural, spontaneous, and deeply human. They are witnessed.
The room is “covered,” as the Quakers say about a meeting, meaning that there is a palpable sense of the spirit being with us; there is a quickening in the room, a benevolence that surrounds us. These women are cocooned in profound acceptance. They are safe in this moment within this community.
The choir’s voices grow fainter; the pastor steps back into the pulpit and begins to pray softly.
“The church is open, does anyone have something to say?”
My hand shoots up, I can’t stop myself. Pastor McCain doesn’t see me. I drop my hand to my lap, then in a moment edge it up—I need to speak. Mrs. Mattox on my left sees me, gets his attention, signals him. Finally he nods and invites me to stand up and speak. I get to my feet, unsure of what I have to say. As soon as I open my mouth I feel the heat rise up, a wave of feeling sweeps over me, washes away my words, strips me of my defenses, and leaves me standing there speechless and bare. I let go of my pride. I may not have another opportunity.
I want to tell everyone about our gathering in Charleston, but as soon as I try, I feel the heat leave me. I try to tell them what I’ve been doing, about Blossom Hall and the unmarked burial ground, about Love Cemetery. I want them to know that African Americans have been part of every story I’ve written, but that’s not what I need to say either. I want to speak so badly, but the words aren’t coming out, not words that will release me, only words that take me further and further away from the heat of what I have to say.
I stop mid-sentence, cut myself off, and say, “Here’s the point.” My voice thickens with emotion, I feel the heat coming back, my voice cracks, I’m still struggling. Tears well up and start to slide down my face. A man steps forward to help, comes up beside me in the pew and offers me a microphone. I shake my head and tell him, “I’ll speak up.” He puts the mike in my hand anyway; I take it, barely aware of my surroundings. I’m burning now and my palms are wet. My voice breaks again, only this time I breathe and push through that crack and speak.
“I know that we live in a racist society. I know that there’s racism of all kinds, white against black, black against white, black against black.”
“Yes, yes! All right!”
“White against brown, against red, against yellow, black against brown, brown against black, on and on—it is endless. Racism is wrong.” This is so easy now, so simple. “I am sorry for my part. I am so sorry for anything racist I have done consciously or unconsciously to hurt you and your people.”
Suddenly, I’m aware that Doris has come up behind me now, her open left palm is warm and strong against the small of my back. I feel her support flow into me. I am so grateful not to be standing there alone any longer.
“I apologize. Please forgive me.”
I take the tissue Doris offers and thank her. I look around at this room full of faces, some familiar and friendly, many unfamiliar, many inscrutable. Doris continues to stand there next to me. She leans over and says warmly, “It’s all right, China,” under her breath. “Yes,” I say. Our rift is mended in that moment. I can feel it now and I know that it is true.
After the service a few people come up to me, shake my hand, and greet me for the first time. No one makes a fuss or says much except for R.D., who comes up to shake my hand and gives me a big smile and says approvingly, “That was beautiful, baby, beautiful!” and goes on about his day. Then a young girl, maybe six years old, with clear bright dark eyes and a fresh young face, comes up to me in her ice-blue dress and simply gives me a hug. I lean down, take her hand and say, “Thank you. My name is China, like the country. What’s yours?”
She tells me that her name is “Russia, like the country.” Then she adds, “It’s spelled R-U-S-S-Y-A, Russia!”