High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  His people, as they had once called themselves, were at a turning point that Sunday morning, as I was to understand later, when I thought back to the way those in the front pews snorted and rolled their eyes as Grandfather sailed up the steps. Purges were inaugurated in a similar fashion in Westfield’s cafeteria: an ultra-cool kid would eye the kid whose membership in the set was probationary, make the yin-yang, up-down face that signaled “dork at twelve o’clock,” and the others at the lunch table, afraid of losing their status, would also make the happy-crying face, tell the victim who was cool yesterday but today just another dork who had gotten above himself that all the seats were saved, and snicker as the outcast carried his tray to a lonely spot, too wounded to seek refuge with the nerds he had dumped.

  The flame-like bulbs in the candle-like lamps along the walls must have been cued by this solemn arrival. More of Grandfather’s theater: I am the light. I imagined his people inflamed with resentment, like Protestants back in the days of Jacobite mumbo-jumbo. Grandfather’s demeanor suggested that God would show His face only at his personal request. It was plain that he was up there at the rostrum and we weren’t. They mistrusted his scrutiny of Scripture for that reason. I’d been slow to hang up one day and heard him tell my father that his board had refused to vote him traveling expenses to a Bible seminar. They said he had studied long enough to know what he was talking about.

  The choir tiptoed to hold a note, but Grandfather couldn’t wait. He intoned, “I command thee in the name of Jesus” several times, at arbitrary points during the hymn, random interjections, I knew, from the reaction of the organist, who jiggled on his bench as he attempted to control the choir at the same time. Grandfather looked the part of the clergyman, consumed by the image of some wonder across town, over the river, far away. Whenever he barked, “I command thee in the name of Jesus,” the organist struck harder, waved more vigorously, and snapped a look at the madman who’d spoiled his arrangement.

  It didn’t help that the good sisters and brothers in the precious choir placed more confidence in the instincts of the soloist than in the discipline of the ensemble. Grandfather’s call, “I command thee in the name of Jesus,” threw them off even further than their tendency to upstage one another. By the time they reached the last hill of “Keep Working for Jesus,” the altos were in a struggle to hold the tempo and the tenors babbled to catch up with the sopranos, one of whom glared at her neighbor and inched forward to keep herself on key. “I command thee in the name of Jesus,” Grandfather said again. Command thee to do what?—to pay attention, I gathered, but he abruptly took his throne and played with the folds of his robe.

  Perhaps Grandfather had a motive in allowing the uneasy silence that ensued, a simple demonstration to the combative women in the front pews that within their spheres, the Naomi Circle, the Eve Circle, or the Eunice Circle—groups meant to review the business of the congregation and to discuss questions of faith which in reality functioned as grievance committees and conspirators’ dens—they may have been movers and shakers, but when it came down to Sunday they were lost without him, sitting around without the least idea of how to glorify His name.

  No assistant pastor dashed in from the wings; the humbler chairs on either side of Grandfather remained empty. He was in sole command of his stage and studied his robe for some time. Then he gazed into his congregation, but not at any one of us. His look fell behind us, like someone on a porch roused by the familiar greeting of a neighbor coming for a visit. He watched his invisible friend draw near a melodramatic amount of time. The organist dared a patient background chord. I distinctly heard the woman with the pinto-hide face hiss and say, “Crazy as a Betsy bug.” A brilliant, white smile of the purest malice seeped into Grandfather’s coffee face.

  As a child I knew that Grandfather was not Moses because the illustrations in my Sunday-school book depicted a heavyset, thin-lipped beggar with snarled hair. When I saw a drawing of the young, winged Satan among muscular cherubim I didn’t know who Grandfather really was. “Let us pray,” he finally said, and threw open his arms.

  The service had something of the start and stop of Grandfather’s old shoe parked in what he called, in the interest of historical accuracy, “the carriage house.” He could have scared a Marine with his stern messages from St. Paul, but that morning he read as if talking to himself, his voice barely audible above the scraping. The congregation mumbled the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed like a schoolroom aware of collective guilt. “Offertory pans” that resembled deep-fry baskets on long poles went around with much change-making and pantomime of alms-giving. The two ushers sidled away with the cash and never came back.

  The choir warped a few more hymns of adoration, sometimes in collusion with the audience, and always with an experimental, piercing wail from one of the sopranos. No babies were brought to Grandfather’s church and that was as odd as traffic without horns blaring. Through it all Grandfather loomed above us, composed, even during the insulting settling-down hubbub before his sermon. The congregation made a fuss about getting comfortable, as if to say it had been through his walks with Jesus before. I fancied that I heard a newspaper back in the old-timers’ section.

  Walk Grandfather did, back and forth, four steps to one side of the pulpit, then four steps in the opposite direction. Not once did he pause or speed up or slow down. He walked, swung around, walked back, and swung around again. His words seemed to depend on his being in motion, in the way a shark can breathe only if it keeps moving.

  “First of all, their religion got both of them into trouble. Daniel in one way, Elijah in another. That is the perennial fate of the serious religionist, whether his religiousness expresses itself essentially in conduct or articulates itself specifically in worship.” He was in his element, and as he pivoted, he moved his reading glasses from one hand to the other. His robe flared at these turns. Had I ever asked him to join in my old game of king-emperor and tear through my mother’s closets in search of memorial hats and bedspreads I suspected he would have done so with alacrity.

  There was an aspect of the school theatrical to his style. A winning innocence went into his gliding to and fro, and also into the vainglory of his rattling on with such easy authority. Grandfather was two years away from his seventieth birthday, the granite hair had thinned, the crown of his head was beginning to show like an island in the mist, but I had a glimpse of the lithe boy he must have been, committing to memory a speech condemning the slave trade from the set of Pitt’s orations that his father had given him and that he still kept by his bed.

  “Trouble is logically the lot of both types. Daniel got into trouble in the same manner that the first-century Christians did. Publicly, like theirs, his religion expressed itself essentially in conduct. Like theirs, his conduct was open to all but his worship was private. Even as they were, he was ostracized, persecuted, and subjected to martyrdom.”

  He was positively shining. Either his head or his glasses reflected the lights. A white dot followed him along the back wall, like the ball that bounced from word to word on the television screen so that the audience at home could “Sing along with Mitch.”

  “Of Daniel the narrative relates that he was distinguished above the satraps because an excellent spirit was in him, for as much as he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him. Like ours, Elijah’s religious genius went largely into public worship, and conduct was decidedly a secondary matter. Even as we are, he was beset on all sides by denominational antagonists, harassed by sectarian opposition and driven from the field of power. Of him it was said that he was very jealous for Jehovah, that he ran for his life and that he requested for himself that he might die while on his way to Sinai, where pathetically he claimed to be the only real one of his kind left. Of us it can be likewise said that we cling desperately to institutional self-preservation and that we run home to God with our particular excellencies.”

  Grandfather, the step migrant, walked on. The congregation of r
etired drugstore owners and schoolteachers lifted their heads at words like “bloodshed,” thinking they recognized something of the apocalyptic vocabulary from the battlefield states. They had decided that they wanted “heart religion,” like everyone else, but Grandfather could not imitate storefront showmanship. He lectured his congregation on the vanity of piety, his posture announcing that he was as strict as his model, the old Harvard dean, Willard Sperry.

  Ears rolled up among the front pews’ hat flora of taupe, burnt orange, and canary yellow. Molars went on insolent display. One old-timer made a lot of noise getting his watch from his pocket; a woman appeared to be balancing her checkbook. I wished he’d stop for a minute, lean on the rostrum, and tell the story about the women in France who wore such high, elaborate wigs that mice made nests in them. I found myself moving in my seat. My parents gave me a keep-still look. My sisters played tic-tac-toe on a program. We used to play a game when we went to church. We’d each select a word beforehand, “God” and “Lord” were excluded, and count how many times it came up during the sermon. The winner got a share of the losers’ dessert.

  The sheer flow of Grandfather’s words suggested that it was dangerous for me even to pretend that I had fallen asleep. The white dot on the brick wall returned and followed Grandfather in his revolutions. It occurred to me that this was not a reflection from his glasses or his crown, no matter how much they shined. The dot was, in fact, pursuing Grandfather, trying to alight on his head. I turned around: nothing back there but the lolling heads of the old-timers. They were too far away anyway.

  Grandfather also must have finally noticed the moving dot. Any evidence of concentration fled his face. The little spot disappeared, as if someone had clicked off a flashlight attached to a key ring. I couldn’t possibly get blamed for the practical joke, but I felt guilty. Old-timers simply did not pull that sort of schoolboy prank. The beige stepgrandmother ground her metal cane into the floor. I coughed—“germ,” my sisters said—because Grandfather looked, quite suddenly, like a senior citizen on a bus, adrift and in danger of missing his stop. Maybe he was at a crossroads of sorts, trying to decide in what style he should proceed, up or down. His eyes roamed slowly over the hard hearts in the front pews, like searchlights from a guard tower.

  I’d seen that look before: at Westfield Junior High School. The two cool girls, the upper shadies, had written a play, “Twenty Negroes Land at Jamestown, Virginia.” The cast included most of the black table in the cafeteria. For some reason, every word struck me and the other blacks who weren’t performing as hilarious. After the all-school assembly, the two girls confronted us one by one.

  They said if we weren’t part of the solution, then we were part of the problem. Whenever a black tried to do something, they said, other blacks came along and tried to tear them down by acting worse than white people. Black people hated to see another black person get anywhere. Black people hated to see another black person get attention. Black people thought they could do better whatever a black person in the spotlight was doing, just because they were black, too. Then they went home and told their parents, who called my parents.

  “The Daniels and the Elijahs of all time and any time have always gotten into trouble.” Grandfather, the day’s poet of metaphysical need, recovered. “The Daniels will get into trouble with the forces and principalities of wickedness and the Elijahs with other religionists. When Daniel learned of the plot against him he simply went home to his house, where the windows were regularly open toward Jerusalem, and thanked God as before time. When Elijah heard from Queen Jezebel he went for his life across the border and wailed to God on the subject of religion’s futility. The religion which rises to visibility in terms of unassailable conduct is automatically possessed of the potential stuff it takes to face life’s crises in scorn of consequence. The religion which manifests itself solely at the point of correct worship or proper belief possesses no inherent resources against the day of trouble.”

  Even I thought it was small of Grandfather’s people not to throw out an encouraging word, not to part with a single token cry of “Teach,” “Yes, Lord,” or “Tell it.” They didn’t have to mean it. He glanced at the back wall as he turned, but the mocking dot hadn’t reappeared.

  “By a strange paradox,” Grandfather charged, “Elijah religion is finally judged and ultimately defeated on the basis of its conduct, while Daniel religion is eventually persecuted because of its worship. Elijah murdered 850 Baal priests. That was his conduct breach. While Daniel prayed to a forbidden God at the wrong time. That was his worship crime. Thus, in reality worship is judged by the conduct it engenders or permits. On the other hand, right conduct can be persecuted only on the ground of trumped-up charges from another realm.”

  “That’s right,” we heard. Everyone turned in amazement toward the beige stepgrandmother, who nodded her head furiously. The front pews felt challenged and made dissenting noises with their programs.

  “Jesus was criticized not because he healed the sick but because he did it on the Sabbath. Jesus was maligned not because he drove out demons but because it was possible to claim that he did it by the power of Beelzebub. Jesus was put to death not so much on account of the things he did but because his teaching was demonstrated to be in conflict with the accepted tradition. His religion far outstripped that of his enemies, who were content to tithe mint, anise, and cumin and to neglect the weightier matters of justice and mercy. Jesus was crucified not because of his conduct, which had been open and above reproach, but because of his worship, which had been private, misunderstood, and misrepresented.”

  “That’s right,” the stepgrandmother said, and thumped her cane. The sound of angry programs, the equivalent of the gnashing of teeth, increased. I wanted to say something out loud, too, but as a modern Negro youth, I was obliged to wrinkle my nose at the glad noises old darkies were supposed to make when the spirit moved them. I’d heard that Grandfather, when he had a church in Memphis in the 1940s, once interrupted the service, revived a woman, and told her if she wanted to “fall out” to do it in a juke joint, not in his church.

  “Is there no hope, then, for an age in which religion has drifted so far from ethics and which has contented itself so largely with the assumption that good conduct follows automatically in the wake of an elaborated and widely exhibited worship? Is there nothing of potential value in the zeal and earnestness of the Elijah mood? And must the Christian Church go on multiplying theological Mt. Carmels in the very face of their accumulated futility? The answers to these questions are yes, yes, and no. Justice shall roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. If, then, exhortation is still a legitimate function of sermonizing, may we nourish our spirits upon the example of Daniel rather than upon that of Elijah. May we turn our footsteps toward the task at Naboth’s vineyard.”

  The organist intervened with hemidemisemiquavers. “May we confront the new troubles in Jezreel with a greater measure of fortitude. May we courageously address ourselves to the behavior of the Ahabs of our time. Man to man shall be a brother, yet in a day such as ours when the temper of the various nations resembles that of a billy goat it becomes a crime to lean far forward. May we proclaim, after John Wesley, The world is my parish. And lest we forget, the kind of religion that gets itself expressed in conduct will bring with it its own type as well as its share of trouble for those who live it. And let us not forget, the disciple is not above his teacher nor the servant above his Lord. If they persecute me they will persecute you.”

  The front pews understood and were not impressed. The hymn broke, the congregation made to rise, but Grandfather, being Grandfather, couldn’t turn himself off, and we dropped heavily into our warm seats. “Augustine, the guiding star, meets the ultimate matter of the supreme power, the dispenser of values, in his prayer. Be Thou exalted, Lord Jesus, bound, scourged, crowned with thorns, hung on a tree, dead, and buried. Be Thou exalted above the heavens and Thy glory above the earth. Reign, O reign, Master Jesus, reign.
”

  Several old-timers squirmed, as if they had to go to the bathroom or were trying to unstick themselves from the pews. Grandfather’s sleeves were still catching the air like sails. “James Weldon Johnson tells of our reward so sweetly. You’ve borne the burden in the heat of day. You’ve labored long in my vineyard. Rest, take your rest, take your rest.”

  He would have gone on quilting the air before him, but the organist had his revenge. There was no power on earth that could prevent a black church, however annoyed and tone-deaf, from lunging into “Steal Away to Jesus.” Grandfather’s people snatched up the theme—“Ain’t got long to stay here”—and refused to let it go until his retirement dinner some months later.

  Great-grandmother said that black people had a tendency to put you out every now and then if you didn’t keep a hard grip. Grandfather never mentioned his dismissal. His only defense in a series of stormy board meetings had been to repeat over and over, “The proof is in the pudding.” They gave him an engraved silver tray and “peed on” the mover’s bill.

  It happened while I was away, off becoming convinced that everything all-Negro, separate, and tribal was a corral, and anything white a great opening-up to the general dance. The pleasant grammar school on Capitol Avenue had been an extension of our wrecked boat, nothing more. I went up the street to school and then I went home; life contrived somehow to occur in between. Westfield Junior High School, however, was, as I saw it, the Bosporus that led to the wide world.