IN A SHADY GROVE, IN THE DAPPLED LIGHT OF LATE AFTER- noon, Fred Shuttlesworth took a little time just for himself in the wooded area behind Pilgrim Baptist Church. It was Monday, and he’d come down from Cincinnati to lead his regular Monday-night mass meeting. He sat on a large pitted rock because it helped him identify with the apostle Peter. “Upon this rock…,” Christ had said of Peter, “I will build my church.”
And what was a church—any church—but a Movement? If the spirit inhabited a group of people, it didn’t matter what church walls they were inside. They could be outdoors; they could be marching in the streets. Anybody in a demonstration was really in a church, a church on the move, because the spirit inhabited them and made their feet to move. The body was the temple of God and it was the Holy Spirit that came to live in the body and make it a temple.
This quiet place…with just him alone, quiet—it held a holy moment just like later, inside, when with all eyes turned upon him he would give his body, and his sweat, and his mind. The great flow of words would take form from his tongue and teeth and lips to tumble from his mouth like a mountain stream flowing from a cave in the high hills….
But now for his quiet moment with nature, alone on a rock.
He liked the spotted light, not gloomy and depressed like the shade, not bright and overbearing, urgent and punishing like full sun. He looked up into the lacy leaves. They had special trees here. Landscaped trees they called river birch, with fine cut pale green leaves, and whitish bark, scaly, mottled with gray, unpredictable. Where the Lord leads, I will follow.
What was he without Scripture? More than the full armor of God, the Word was inside him. And the Word was outside him, suggested by the rippling of these little leaves and by the dancing shadows they cast on his skin. He thought of the four little girls who had passed, and his eyes filled with tears. He thought of his own children, their strength and their ready willingness to stand with him. And Ruby, his wife.
He placed his hand very gently, tenderly, on the rough, pocked surface of the rock, and his body remembered how he had lain, horizontal in his bed, and how he was lifted, lifted in his sleep, by the bomb placed under the floor of the house, directly under the position of his bed. It must have been a flash—all in a flash the bomb lifted the floor joists and scattered them, and lifted the floor planks and broke them, and lifted the legs of the bed and the bed frame, and the wire box springs up into the air, and the whole mattress and him on it in his pajamas. The sound roared around him, but he had been in the whirlwind of the Lord, kept safe in the eye of the storm. Fear not, for I am with thee….
In the quiet, he pondered these things and loved the small still voice inside his bosom.
Two boys came walking toward him, nicely dressed, respectable. One was little Edmund Powers, the other was tall, looked like Edmund, his father? No, Edmund’s father had died in the steel mills. No, it had to be his older brother.
“I seek you out, Reverend Shuttlesworth,” Edmund chirped like a little bird.
“Come here, son.”
He held out his arm and had the little boy sit beside him on the rock. He put his arm around him and drew him close. “Howdy-do,” he said to the big boy.
“My li’l bro, he say I must meet you. My name Charles.”
Fred Shuttlesworth took his time. This was the quiet place, later the frenzy and the shouting. He studied their faces, so much alike, smooth and quiet, but the boy’s with a brightness and the young man’s with a calm that meant love. He loved his little brother. He couldn’t do much for him, but he loved him.
“Was there somethin’ you wanted to ask?”
“Edmund, he say I must ask you what mus’ I do to be saved.”
“Saved?” Reverend Shuttlesworth asked shrewdly. “What do you mean by ‘saved’?”
“Saved from sin,” Edmund piped up.
Reverend Shuttlesworth squeezed Edmund’s shoulder, but he said nothing. He continued to look at the big boy. Now the big boy couldn’t meet his gaze. He looked down at his feet. He sighed. Charles threw his head back and stared at the sky, like a prisoner waiting for the verdict.
“Saved from this world, I reckon.” Charles continued to gaze toward the canopy of leaves and the bits of pale blue that showed between them. “How mus’ I be?”
“Come to the meetin’,” Shuttlesworth answered. “Come see what the Spirit says to you. Let the Spirit tell you how you mus’ behave.”
Charles looked right into the minister’s eyes. “Tha’s what Edmund tell me.” Charles smiled. “I mus’ come to the mass meetin’ and I mus’ meet you.”
Again the minister hugged the little boy. “How’s your mama?”
“She fine,” Edmund answered. “Baby, too. She name him Stoner.”
Part of a chain of love, Edmund sounded happy. Shuttlesworth thought: Edmund’s own big brother loved him; now he could love his little brother. Edmund smiled at his minister, and Shuttlesworth felt warmed. Blessed boy, who could bring blessings to others.
“But I don’t work in the grocery no more,” Edmund added. “I a shoeshine boy now.”