After more singing we shook hands and the service was over.
I thought Ruth would be happy to hear I had been to church. The family was sitting at the table for lunch when I arrived, and surprise! surprise! Orpah was with them. I blurted out that I was at the church service and was amazed that there were only five of us and the pastor.
“Who was the pastor?” asked Ruth sternly. “Was it the Caucasian man?”
“This is America, Mama, it don’t matter if the pastor is Caucasian,” said Obed.
“Did I say it matter?” asked Ruth.
“It don’t matter ’cause of them Caucasian girls from Guysville,” said Orpah, outing Obed’s shenanigans in a neighboring village. So, brother and sister do talk about things. They do share little confidentialities. And they do betray each other as siblings are wont to do.
“One girl from Guysville,” said Obed. “And it don’t matter if she’s Caucasian or anything.”
“I wouldn’t go to that church again if I was you,” said Ruth. “Especially if that Brother Michael is still the pastor.” I thought she would give me the reasons, but she did not. I turned my attention to the grits and beans and mashed potatoes and pork. I felt my heart pumping in a crazy and misguided rhythm at being so close to Orpah that I could actually smell her cheap perfume. Her presence stole my appetite. I just wanted to watch her as she chewed slowly and deliberately, and as her parents treated her like some visiting royalty, trying very hard to see to it that she was comfortable: Mahlon giving her more meat from his plate, Ruth dishing more potatoes on her plate, and Obed looking at it all unimpressed.
But I wasn’t about to let the church issue go unanswered. “What’s wrong with Brother Michael,” I asked.
“’Cause he’s a sinner,” said Orpah. And then she chuckled sarcastically.
“It ain’t no laughing matter,” said Ruth. “The Good Book in Genesis 2, verse 24 says: Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh. People have ignored God’s principles for marriage.”
Orpah seemed to be eager to explain Ruth’s riddle to me when she noticed my puzzled look. Brother Michael lived happily in Florida and preached the gospel there until he met a woman from Kilvert. Not just a woman, but a divorced woman. They fell in love and Brother Michael left his wife. The couple migrated to Kilvert where Brother Michael took over the church. Ruth led a campaign against him because he was an adulterer. Her biggest tool was the Bible, particularly Exodus 20:14: Thou shalt not commit adultery, and of course the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians 5:33: Husbands, love your wives, wives, respect your husbands. That was how people came to boycott their little chocolate church.
But people could have just as easily forgotten his origins, and would have ultimately forgiven his sin — after all Christ himself was all about forgiveness — if the man had not made things worse for himself by foolishly preaching a sermon that rubbed Ruth and her followers the wrong way. Sister Naomi, the diehard believer in Brother Michael, told the people at the Center that Brother Michael had enlightened her about the heathen messages of the slave quilts.
According to the pastor the story that quilts had a code that directed runaways to safety was a myth created by black women who sold quilts on the roadside to romanticize them and increase their value. This infuriated Ruth, who felt that her heritage was being demeaned by the man.
“You know how Ruth feels about them quilts,” said Orpah. To me what mattered most was that Orpah was at last opening up to me. She was telling me this story and she was looking at me directly. Not at Obed. Not at Mahlon. Ruth was listening quietly, occasionally mumbling an agreement or shock at appropriate places. I did not understand why the pastor would find the code on the quilts hard to swallow. After all in the motherland (which is what the descendants of slaves fondly call Africa) there were many examples of art that spoke. Particularly fabrics and beadwork and even lids of pots. They did not only adorn or cover our nakedness or our food. They transmitted messages in a practical way. They spoke about the status of the wearer or user; about love life, life’s journeys, life’s transitions, emotional states, aspirations, protest, even pet peeves. Why wouldn’t the African carry on with the tradition of talking fabrics in the new world? Even if the codes did not give the fugitives specific directions to safety they functioned very much like the slogans and songs that we chanted and sang during apartheid. They didn’t say anything we didn’t know. They didn’t give us new insights about apartheid and how to overcome it. But they gave us courage and created a spirit of oneness and camaraderie among us. They gave us strength and reinforced our resolve to fight to the bitter end. The quilts did the same for the slaves. As did their spirituals. They contained folk wisdom. They invigorated memory.
But that the matter should cause such a rift between Ruth and her followers on the one hand and the pastor and his congregation of four on the other was beyond me.
“It didn’t help that the man once called us Mulengeons,” said Ruth as if in answer to my unasked questions. “He wrote that he was spreading the gospel among the Mulengeons. We ain’t no Mulengeons. Mulengeons are Roma people. They got Gypsy blood in them. We ain’t no Gypsies.”
“It don’t matter what anyone call us, Mama,” said Obed at last. “We know who we are. It makes no never mind what the pastor says. You don’t have to be pissed off about it, Mama. Let the man live and do his job at the church.”
Orpah. We talk. She does not flee from me anymore. She does not go out of her way to be in my presence either. If she is not in her room, presumably drawing, she sits with Mahlon on the swing. Both are bundled in heavy coats and wrapped in woolen scarves and are wearing woolen hats. You wonder why they want to punish themselves in the freezing outdoors. She quietly stares into empty space while he smiles at his gnomes, now all covered in snow. I have not seen Orpah and her father exchange a word, except when she was agitated because Ruth had destroyed her work and he was comforting her.
Ruth and I no longer sit on the swing. Not so much because of the cold. We no longer sit together anywhere else either. Except at the table at mealtime or when we are all in the living room either watching television or a blank screen. And this saddens me. She does talk to me, when she has to, but she no longer tells me the stories of her heritage or outlines the political situation of the world for me. She is relentless about destroying Orpah’s drawings though. I have offered to hide them for her so she gives them to me. I know Ruth suspects that I am hiding them among my things. But she is too respectful of my personal property to rummage through it and destroy them. In any event I am always there when she cleans my room and I always insist on doing most of the work. All she does is remove the dust from her bottled foodstuff with a feather duster.
Sometimes Orpah and I meet. By chance. Normally in the kitchen where she makes coffee for herself and where I hang out during those times I have noted are her regular coffee hours so that I can accidentally bump into her. And we talk a little bit. Just small talk. Then she passes a new batch of drawings to me. On one occasion I try to convince her to appease Ruth. Draw the traditional patterns and show them to her mother. She will be happy and will once again allow her to use the sewing machine. She can begin by sewing traditional quilts, and then gradually mix them with her own creations. Before Ruth knows it she will be sewing her designs. But Orpah is as much of a hardliner as her mother. She will not compromise. She will not do slave patterns — or African quilts as they call them here — because she does not need to escape to any place. She adds: “Them slaves did all the escaping for me. I want to invent patterns that tell my own story. Like my music. Nobody’s gonna tell me not to play bluegrass on a sitar.”