I was wearing a dark blue dress that came down to my calves and slightly lighter blue medium-heeled shoes. My wide-brimmed straw hat was of a fine weave and white in color. I carried a maroon handbag and wore aqua calfskin gloves that I had taken home from a movie I’d made.
I stood in the back looking around the assembled congregation, listening to the music, trying to feel like I belonged.
On the right side of the auditorium I first recognized Newland, my younger brother. He was standing next to my mom. On her other side was Cornell and past him a woman I didn’t recognize. Behind them was my father’s adopted daughter by an earlier marriage — Delilah — and next to her, singing his heart out, was Edison, my son.
I would have known Eddie if he was a full-grown man, but I only ever saw him on holidays, when I wasn’t working.
I made my way over to the Peel clan. I reached past an Asian woman standing on the aisle and touched Newland’s shoulder while the room cried out in praise-song. Looking at me, uncomprehending at first, Newland’s smile of recognition was a memory that I’d hold dear for the rest of my life.
He whispered something to the small Asian woman and she came out in the aisle, signaling with her hands for me to take her place.
I moved next to Newland and he gave me a one-armed hug.
“Sandy,” he said in my ear. “Mom’ll be so happy you’re here.”
I glanced at the profile of my mother, who hadn’t seen me yet, and saw over her shoulder Cornell’s face. He was lighter skinned than Newland and I and of a heavy build. There was some hair on his chin, but not quite a beard, and a scowl for me that had not changed since the first time the police brought me home and my mother spent the night crying.
The song was nearing its high point. I could hear Edison’s singing in my ears. I closed my eyes and girded myself for the fights and recriminations, for the forgiveness and the loss that would not be dispelled by my brief return.
The singing was over and we all sat looking up at the seated choir hovered over by the empty sky-blue pulpit.
The gospel group’s robes were dark red with cream lapels that went all the way down the front. They sat with military precision, waiting for the next movement in the Lord’s day.
Cornell was staring at me.
My mother realized this and looked my way. Her smile was immediate and she gave me a little wave. She inhaled through her nostrils and held that breath for three or four beats.
I looked away and toward the front of the church. A small woman in ministerial black was making her way, rather inelegantly, up to the platform.
She reminded me of a bug trying to negotiate an unfamiliar vertical climb.
Finally she made it to the podium.
“Good Sunday, brothers and sisters,” she said in a voice that was multitoned, like a jazz trumpet in the hands of a master.
“Good Sunday,” two thousand or more throats murmured and declared.
“I want to thank Brother Elbert and his lovely choir for their singing and Sister Eloise for her organ and this congregation for your voices raised in song and devotion.”
A tremor seemed to go through the audience, a kind of collective hum of satisfaction.
“I know there are many of you out there who come to church each week because you know I don’t mess around...”
Laughter.
“I don’t love the sound of my own voice and I don’t waste time telling you what you already know. I don’t need to tell ya that if you lied this week, or if you cheated someone, that you sinned. You know if you sinned. You know if you did wrong. You don’t need a minister for that.”
“Teach,” someone cried out.
“You don’t need a minister to follow you to the den of iniquity and tell you that you shouldn’t be there. You don’t need me to see you beat your children or your spouse in order for you to know that you did wrong. When you use the Lord’s name in vain you got ears to hear it. And when you turn your back to suffering it’s not my job to point and say, ‘Look there.’ ”
The minister opened her eyes so wide that I could appreciate it from my seat.
“No. That’s not my job,” she continued. “You’ve all been to church before. You’ve heard all, or nearly all, the stories in the Bible. You know about Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babylon, the pharaohs, Moses, Abraham, and our savior on the cross. You know. I don’t have to tell ya about Noah’s ark navigating the great flood, or John the Baptist. I don’t have to talk about Judas’s role at the Last Supper or quote some verse you might not yet have heard. There’s a Bible you can read for yourself in a forgotten drawer in your house...”
More laughter. Even I smiled. I still had my childhood white leather-bound testaments in a drawer at home.
“You can turn the page just as easily as I can. You can get down on your knees without me askin’ it. I’m not here to tell you stories of long ago and far away. I’m not here to point out sin and throw stones. I got my own sins to atone for. I got my own glass house.”
“Amen,” a woman cried.
“Preach,” a fellow parishioner replied.
“I’m tellin’ you,” the minister said. “I’m tellin’ you here and now that this pulpit does not raise me up above you. It doesn’t make me smarter or better, not one whit closer to God. We are all in the same soup down here. And every day we have to reach out” — she raised her arms above her head — “and try to touch Him and feel Him and love Him and most of all we have to do His work.”
The lady minister looked around the silent room. She had us all at that moment.
She was an older woman. Her skin was the brown of an overripe melon. Her face was clear of worry.
“I’m not gonna preach old stories that you’ve heard a thousand times,” she said. “That kind of preachin’ is for the children who are just now learnin’ the path up... and the road down.
“What I’m talkin’ about is you and me and what we might do to make this world something that reflects the teachings of all the great prophets.”
She stopped again and rubbed her nose with the fingers of her left hand.
“Ruby Jenkins,” she said. “Does anybody out there know Ruby?”
She looked around but no one replied.
“Ruby Jenkins,” the preacher intoned. “She lives six and a half blocks from this church. Ruby has an illegal room at the back of a commercial property. She also has a fever and infected sores on her feet and back. I hear that she’s from Tennessee and her family has moved on from these parts. She’s an old woman but she looks older and she feels pain every day. She don’t sleep and she cain’t walk because of her fever and her feet. She cain’t come to God and I believe that God is wondering why no one goes to her. Because you know God does not reside in this house. The omnipotent spirit is not prisoner on Sundays to us in our best clothes and on our best behavior.”
The minister — I never learned her name — looked around the room telling us with her silence to consider her words.
“No,” she continued after that exquisite quietude, “God is not ours. We belong to Him. We are here to do His work. His home is in that back room with Ruby and in the jail cell with some’a your sons and daughters and their friends. He might not even be here today. Your prayers might be on the back burners, in a saved file like in some giant computer. God might not get to readin’ your prayers for a thousand years because He is worried about suffering and the pain that we ignore in this fine house we’ve built.
“But you have to understand, brothers and sisters, that this building looks beautiful in your eyes but it’s no more than Ruby Jenkins’s room in the eyes of the Lord. You come here to plan your baptisms and say your prayers, to hear stale Bible stories and compare hats. But out there” — the minister pointed to her left — “out there is the real cathedral. This earth is God’s palace and real prayer is the succor of sufferin’ in His name.