A few, all women, stood applauding as the Mae’s, faces flushed and split by their grins, holding hands, bowed, a third and then a fourth time.
“A-men!”
Answered by scattered amens as the Mae’s joined Jenny, and the women resettled, found their fans, and watched preacher Roy Rhodes, proprietor of Rhodes Crossroads general store and postmaster, wipe his brow with his blue handkerchief and begin:
“Pride,” he said, and wiped again at his forehead. “‘. . . Let them be caught,’ it says in Psalms 10 and 2 . . .” He paused, letting that soak in, or for them to try to remember the rest of it.
“Amen.”
“Amen,” he repeated. “But I begin to-day with the word from Ezekiel. 28. 2.”
He began to read from the bible opened before him. “Son of man, say to the leader of Tyre, ‘This says the Lord GOD, because your heart is lifted up . . .’”
“Amen.”
“Amen . . . ‘And you have said, I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods—’”
“Amen.”
“Amen—‘in the heart of seas . . .’”
A chill went through Jenny. She threw up her hand and shouted, “Yes,” making the Mae on either side of her jump and look at their mother, who never said Amen.
Jenny was thinking of Mister P. W. Anderson, thinking he was in the seat of a god where he could lord it over Cotty, as the preacher continued, “‘yet you are a man and not God’—”
“Amen,” she shouted again, her mind racing to when she got home and told Cotty what he had missed about one person trying to put his self above another person.
“Yet you are a man and not God—” which is exactly what Cotty should have, would have said to that Mister P. W. Anderson, if it wasn’t for . . . You mister, are a man and not God—not a prince, not a chosen, just some—boss from headquarters, up north or where ever it was, but all the same . . .
He was a—she couldn’t even think what—Lucifer, fancying himself over and above Cotty and the worth of the job he was doing.
Preacher, like he was talking directly to her to help her remember it, was repeating the phrase just as she was repeating it in her own mind, “Yet you are a man—and not God! For you have said in your heart, ‘I am, and there is no one besides me.’”
That was exactly what she was trying to think to say to Cotty when he had said what he had about how Mister P. W. Anderson had the prideful nerve to disrespect Cotty in front of them niggers. Cotty was a proud man and justified in it. The way he had pulled himself up. Quit drinking, found the Lord, good daddy—and that Mister High and Mighty High Class, in his pride thinking there was no-body besides him that mattered in the conversation, or the way of things here in Mardalwil County, Alabama. He did not have a clue about her Cotty.
And preacher went on and he went on working himself into a lather, from one side of the church to the other and front to back, clapping and shouting and wiping his face, going on about the foolishness and fatality of pride, and she, fanning with her hat, sweat running down her neck and armpits, repeated, “Yet you are a man—and not God! For you have said in your heart, ‘I am, and there is no one besides me.’”
She, a Mae on either side of her, their hands covering their smiles, knew this was their favorite part.
Jenny rocked slightly back and forth and gave witness to the holiness of the Word, and she couldn’t wait to get home and tell him what she’d heard. She wasn’t even going to stay for the visiting after church. The Mae’s would be disappointed, not getting to bathe in the praise for their song, but she had to get home as quick as possible to tell him the heartening words she’d heard.
“A—” said Lollie Mae.
“—Men!” said Sallie Mae.