Having decided that Gracefield needed a midweek wing-ding to celebrate its new preacher, Deacon Fanning promptly forgot the whole affair, leaving it for the choir to arrange today’s potluck.
Aura watches Opal chatting and laughing with her longtime neighbors in the sunlit church cafeteria, her walker parked with the other assistive contraptions in a kind of handicapped loading zone nearby. Over paper plates piled high with home-cooked fixings, they talk food and sports and family and politics. There are ham steaks glazed in brown sugar, fried chicken sliding from the bone, baked macaroni casseroles and breaded okra and green beans simmered in bacon grease. More experimental dishes too, like the radioactive, pink-jellied dessert freckled with marshmallows, or the various mystery pies, each overbursting with some strange and fragrant stuffing.
Aura walks the wall of fame, eavesdropping on the chitchat. The wallpaper is merely hinted at, overrun with framed and matted tokens to Gracefield Baptist’s role in the history of Langston and its university, everything from early incorporation papers granted by the Indian Territory court clerk, to sun-faded portraits of past and present parishioners. She never gets tired of seeing civil rights legends like Bessie Coleman, Ada Fisher, Clara Luper. Gridiron icons like Mo Bassett and “Hollywood” Henderson. Marques Haynes, of Harlem Globetrotter fame. They say he could dribble the ball half a dozen times in one second.
one-Mississippi . . .
“Did you watch the preliminary trial on Court TV?” asks Mrs. Thurston. “That Johnnie Cochran is one fine-looking, sweet-talking piece of black man.”
Aura lingers over a sepia-toned print of Langston’s very own Delta Rhythm Boys, crooning together in the fieldhouse gym.
“Now they’ve got Shapiro and Cochran and Dershowitz. How can they lose?” says Mr. Wilson.
“They’re calling it the Dream Team,” says Mrs. Thurston.
“It’s some kind of dream,” Opal says.
Aura finds her own college graduation photograph, a smile stretched tight across her face, just after nursing school commencement exercises. Aura had been a good student. She’d asked the right questions, learned quickly how to snake a Foley line and draw blood. How to run an EKG. The tricks to sponge-bathing a big-boned patient. She’d wanted not just to learn, but to matter. Carl towering behind her in the picture, all of fifteen years old.
She tries touching Carl’s face but her fingertips catch on a greenish fracture webbed across the protective glass. When she got the call he’d been murdered Aura realized she’d only spoken to her baby brother a handful of times in the last two years, all of them on the phone. If he was standing beside her right now it would be hard work deciding whether to hug him or kill him all over again.
“They planted that glove on O.J.,” says Opal.
Mrs. Thurston agrees.
“He’s a strong, proud black man. We don’t have enough of those to go round. There’s bigger things at stake here than a dead white woman.”
“Berta! For shame!”
Pastor Nate breezes in from no place at all to wrap Aura up in a teddy-bear hug. “How’s it going, bruiser?”
Aura hurries a smile into her eyes. “How’s the elbow?”
“I’ll live.” He peers at Aura’s graduation portrait. “That’s a pretty lady you’re looking at.”
That smile’s feeling almost genuine now.
“Is our new pastor already flirting with his congregation?”
Nate’s cheeks are dimpling.
“You know the closer you are to pastor Nate, Aura, the closer you’ll be to God.”
Aura swats the preacher’s thick arm.
“Do you always talk about yourself in the third person?”
“This could be a first.”
“Well. This lady here is ready to whip you in another game of pick-up. How are you finding Langston?”
Pastor Nate dares a double take in the direction of his geriatric welcoming committee.
“You want to know the truth? These potlucks scare the bejeezus out of me. I don’t try a bite of every dish they offer, these women suspect me of the most incredible spiritual turpitudes.”
Aura laughs.
“For me? A potluck tends to feel like a breather.”
“Why’s that?” Nate asks, seriously this time.
“Opal gets to gossiping, she forgets to forget things. It never lasts long. But for a moment, or an afternoon, I sense that whip-smart little old lady who raised me and Carl.”
Pastor Nate lowers his voice. “How has she been getting along?”
“We’re managing. We’ve been making lists. To try and cope with the memory loss.”
“That’s good. Lists can be helpful in these instances.”
“They help me more than they do her.”
“And how’s the new job? You’ve left the hospital to do rehabilitation, I hear, in people’s homes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“There’s more freedom.”
“Take all of that you can get,” pastor Nate says. “You’re doing the Lord’s work, Aura. Keep it up.”
“Thanks.”
“And let me know how I can help.”
“Better put in an appearance at the buffet table before our choir starts searching for another pastor.”
Then the preacher is gone, as quickly as he came, to shepherd the rest of his flock on their weary way through the workweek.
Aura watches him go. This pastor is some puzzle. Playful where he should be profound. Handsome where he should be holy. What would it look like, she mulls, the African-American Amazon settling down with a honey-tongued preacherman like that? It would stew up some kind of scandal. She can already hear the gossip.
Miss Young is saying, “O.J.’s not black. Not on the inside at least.”
“If he ain’t black, what is he?”
“He’s not purple,” Opal says.
“He’s O.J.”
“That’d be, what? Orange.”
“Plenty of pulp for everyone on Hard Copy.”
Opal’s brittle-boned fingers flutter mouthward, trying to contain her elastic laughter. It’s a child’s gesture, this reflex of hers, learned and polite. Something a schoolgirl might do.
“Color’s got nothing to do with it,” says Miss Young.
“Girl . . .” Mrs. Thurston hikes a penciled-on eyebrow. “You and I are living on two different planets.”