“Tell whatever you want,” said the Reverend Ligon in an equally angry voice, “but come next week, your sorry behind is out of here!”
I scooted past the boxwood bushes and was well inside the fellowship hall when Mr. Ligon came through to inquire genially if it was nearly time to ask the blessing.
✡ ✡ ✡
By one-thirty, I was as stuffed as one of Maidie’s devilled eggs. Across the table from me, Judy Cater, who’s the reference librarian at the Colleton County Library in Dobbs, tried to give me a piece of her pecan pie.
“No way,” I said.
“But this one’s made without corn syrup so it’s not too sweet,” she coaxed.
I am always tempted by pecan pie no matter what the recipe, but what’s the good of church if it can’t stiffen your resolve to resist temptation in all its many forms?
As the last sips of iced tea were slipping down our collective throats, the Reverend Ligon stepped up to the speaker’s podium at the end of the hall and called us to order. He made a graceful thank-you speech for all the delicious food, praised God for the fellowship, then announced that he wanted to recognize all the dignitaries who turned out today to make this interchurch meeting such a success.
Indeed, there were a lot more whites than one usually sees at something organized by black Christians. But after Balm of Gilead’s burning Wednesday night, I guess the mostly white establishment wanted to avoid the risk of being thought insensitive. All but two of the county commissioners were here, the Clerk of Court, the superintendent of public schools, Sheriff Bo Poole, DA Doug Woodall and “our own Miss Cylvia DeGraffenried,” the county manager, and of course, Ned O’Donnell, Luther Parker and me.
The list went on: the president of the Democratic Women, a tall and stately black woman; her Republican counterpart, equally tall, equally stately, white; even Grace King Avery was recognized as returning to “her roots, to her homeplace here in the community after years of educating our young people on the importance of good English.”
It was almost two o’clock before he turned the microphone over to Wallace Adderly.
Adderly was savvy enough to know that after a heavy meal and long introductions, somnolence was ready to take over his audience. Impulsively, he called to the choir director and soon the whole hall was rocking with an a cappella version of “This Little Soul Shines On.”
If the Reverend Freeman was the conciliatory side of Martin Luther King, Wallace Adderly was his militant. Settling his gaze on one white official after the other, he exhorted us to take this morning’s spirit of fellowship back into our neighborhoods, our workplaces and (fixing his eyes on me) our courtrooms; to put our principles into economic and social practice.
To his fellow blacks, he sounded a clarion call to face up to new responsibilities and renewed challenges, to quit whining about the past and to accept that there never had been and never would be any free lunches in America. “What’s passed for free lunches—namely, welfare—has merely been another way to keep the poor and uneducated in a state of dependency. It’s time we all start paying the full price for what we believe we deserve.”
It seemed to me that he was pretty much preaching the substance of Cyl DeGraffenried’s text and my eyes searched the crowd for her face. I finally located her two tables over, but to my surprise, she wasn’t sitting in Adderly’s amen corner. Indeed, her chair was pushed so far back from the table—and Wallace Adderly—that she crowded the person behind her. She sat rigidly with her arms locked tightly across her chest and her lovely face was frozen into an expression of intense loathing.
Adderly’s message was stern but just, and the rest of us all went away feeling righteous and tolerant and convinced that we could overcome with just a little more goodwill and Christian charity.
That night, Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church and Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle were both put to the torch.
14
A hint is something we often drop
But rarely pick up
—Friendly Chapel Pentecostal Free Will Baptist
Word of the fires spread through the county, to the state, and leapfrogged Washington to New York.
During the night, news teams from all up and down the eastern seaboard swarmed through the Triangle. Microphones were stuck in the faces of everybody who answered a knock at the door or stood frozen in the camera lenses. Somebody thought they spotted Cokie Roberts in Raleigh that morning and another swore that Peter Jennings had been seen ducking into the ABC affiliate on Western Boulevard.
Cotton Grove itself, indeed the whole western part of Colleton County, seemed to be in shock, but everyone—everyone except the Reverend Byantha Williams perhaps—said it was a blessing that the arsonist had begun with Mount Olive. If Burning Heart of God had been torched first, the volunteer fire trucks would have been out there, trying to save that tumbledown excuse for a church while one of the most historically significant buildings in the county burned to the ground.
Instead, it was Sister Williams who was completely homeless and churchless when the sun came up red-hot on Monday morning.
“Praise God for Sister Avery here,” said the elderly preacher as television cameras zoomed in on the black hand that clasped the white hand of her rescuer. A hostile tabby cat sat in her lap and hissed at the interviewer. “She took me in and she saved my life.”
“Not I,” Grace King Avery said quickly, patting Sister Williams’s hand. “Smudge deserves all the credit. He was so restless last evening that he made me nervous.”
She smiled down at the dog that sat quietly on its haunches beside her, well away from the cat’s claws. Except for that dark patch of gray hairs between its ears, it was all white, and its black eyes gleamed with intelligence whenever she spoke.
“I’d already locked up for the night.” Mrs. Avery wore a fresh, pale blue shirtwaist and her gray hair was neat and tidy in its usual bun, but the lines in her face and her red-rimmed, puffy eyes attested to a stressful night without sleep.
“Smudge just wouldn’t settle down. He kept acting as if somebody were prowling around down by the barn, so I turned on all the outside lights and that’s when I heard a car start up across the branch and drive away. A minute later, the whole back of the church seemed to go up in flames. It was just sheer luck that I was watching.”
“Not luck, honey,” insisted the Reverend Williams, who looked larger than life-size in a capacious cotton robe splashed with bright red and orange flowers. “God was directing your eye last night. His eye is on the sparrow and He put your eye on me.”
Once again she launched into the story of how she’d gone to bed at nine-thirty last night and was already sound asleep when she heard Mrs. Avery banging on the door of her little trailer. “She was yelling Fire, Fire! and said I had to get out. Well, I couldn’t find Puffcake and—”
We had already seen Channel 17’s interview with these two women and heard Sister Williams’s tale of rounding up her various cats, so Uncle Ash set down his coffee cup and flipped to Channel 11 where Miriam Thomas in the studio was adding a question of her own to the remote interview with my ATF friend Ed Gardner and the resident FBI agent who’d hastily flown over from Charlotte. More racial epithets had been found on one of Mount Olive’s unburned walls.
“—so yes, Miriam, although it’s much too early to say with complete certainty, our preliminary investigations show enough similarities to make us think that these two fires may indeed be linked to Wednesday night’s burning.”
Miriam Thomas and her partner, Larry Stogner, reminded viewers that Wednesday night was when Balm of Gilead burned.