A Turn in the South (21 page)

The church, so white and plain outside, was full of things inside. It was clearly much used, and looked like a living room or a meeting place for the congregation. The main hall was about fifty feet long by thirty feet wide. It was full of flowers, and it had a piano and an organ. The carpet was green-blue; the pews were upholstered in a green fabric. At the end of the hall was a very big picture of Jesus and Mary Magdalen. It was at least fifteen feet wide and five feet high. The picture had been bought twenty-three years before from a printing house near Boston. The Christ was noticeably white, blond, long-haired, a little bit—as I had noticed in other places—like some paintings of General Custer.

I asked Bernyce Clausell about the representation.

She said, “It doesn’t worry the congregation. I teach them that color is not important. A white Christ is better than no Christ at all. After all, Christ is colorless.”

But she also had a black Christ to show, a black Christ with black disciples. This picture was small, something she held in her hand.

About the carpet and the pew upholstery she said, “Everything was given. We take what is given. That’s why they don’t match exactly.”

On the windows were stained-glass patterns on paper, strips of paper stuck on. The strips had been printed with a floral design. They had been ordered from Spencer Gifts, a mail-order business; and they had been chosen from a catalogue.

The church door opened, and a woman’s voice greeted the pastor. Reverend Bernyce knew the visitor. She excused herself and went to the woman. I didn’t turn to look; I looked at the Boston mural. The woman who had turned up spoke in a low voice, and Reverend Bernyce’s voice matched hers. Their words were not distinct. Only one sentence, of Reverend Bernyce’s, came to me out of the burr-and-bumble. “You don’t have to fall on the floor and jump to the ceiling.” The consultation went on for a while: the second person that morning to have sought out the pastor with a spiritual problem.

And when, after many goodbyes and thanks, the visitor left, Reverend Bernyce explained.

“Her daughter came last week and accepted Christ. She’s going to be baptized. The daughter is fourteen years old. But then somebody told the daughter that she wasn’t ready—and they are really trying to keep her out of the church. Some denominations wouldn’t let you join until you make some kind of emotional, physical reaction. That’s why I told the mother that nowadays you don’t have to jump to the ceiling.”

I asked her to explain a little more.

She said, “You’re born a Hindu. We are not born Christian. We are born black.”

That last thing seemed strange for the pastor to say. But perhaps she meant no more than that people had to choose Christ.

“To become a Christian does not require lots of emotion. In our worship services we are emotional only if we are so moved.”

She led me to the room at the back of the main hall. It was an annex to the main building, and it was called the Clausell Fellowship Hall, in honor of her late husband. It was domestic-looking. There was a stove for cooking, and all about were clothes that had been collected for the church’s charities, especially for Mission Outreach. The mild lady pastor spoke the slogan of the program with perfect seriousness: “It’s our caring-sharing project.” It was part of the “Tallahassee to Tunica” mission. There were clothes (covered with green cloths) on racks, in boxes, in sacks, and on tables. She said that her appeal for the
poor of Tunica in Mississippi, some six hundred miles away, had touched a nerve in her congregation.

All around in this annex, on walls and boards, were photographs of black Americans. “We keep black-American history in front of people, so they will know some of their heritage.” There were portraits of Martin Luther King, Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania), Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and black-American service heroes; and there was a photograph of the black-owned Atlanta Life Insurance Company.

We left the annex and went back through the main church hall. On the wall next to the front door there were many color snapshots of Reverend Bernyce’s European tour in 1972. This—and everything else—gave to the hall the feel of a devout person’s scrapbook. But there was something more. This elderly black lady had been experiencing the larger world, the famous world, as a black person, and giving a little of the glamour of the experience back to her black congregation. Just as the honors that had been given to her were to be regarded as honors given to a black person, and honors therefore to all black people.

In the church porch there were cutouts from magazines of black and white family groups. This was Reverend Bernyce’s way of reminding her congregation of Mother’s Day; and she had been careful to show both black and white family groups. She said, “We’re a biracial country.” The word was new to me; but then she qualified and extended it. “We are black, but the country isn’t all black. We are many races. So in picturing families we have families of different colors.”

The air felt heavy with pollen. On the other side of the road, where her house was, the ground sloped away, so that the house was in a little dip; and the air was heavier. There was a car in a carport. And in her little sitting room, much smaller than one might have thought from the outside, there were many more photographs and mementoes and things. One wall was covered with framed diplomas and plaques. It was warm in the sitting room, even with the door open.

She had been born in Georgia, and when she was nine months old had been taken away by her parents to Columbus, Ohio. “I don’t know what my dad did. My dad was a laborer. He was a little feller. He couldn’t do too much.” And it was probably from her father that she had inherited her own smallness. “We stayed in Columbus a little while. Then my mother died and our auntie took us to New York. I
loved my aunt. I was too young to know my mother. In New York we had everything all around us—reefers, murder, dope—but it didn’t influence us, because of our church life.”

She broke off to talk about the accommodation black country people had to make when they went to the big city. “You lose all the ties to your family, your community, your church. But then there is the chance for you to gain new ties, even in a great metropolis like New York. You can get into a smaller group and be a viable person in that smaller group. Like, for instance, a church, a social club, a political group, or just a street group. Some young people, when they migrate from the South to the North, they still want a group to cling to. So unfortunately they become affiliated to a street group.”

How did she explain the strong religious instinct black people had?

“I think it comes from slavery. And even from before slavery. From Africa. They just had a strong religious heritage. In slavery God was their deliverer. And they felt that some day God would work it out.”

Was it sometimes a form of escapism?

“With some people it might be a form of escapism. I wouldn’t deny it. But primarily Christianity is a way of life. I should say that the white churches that I know are similar to ours. They are doing great mission work. And more than we are, because they have the finances. Religion has had a great part in helping to break down segregation.

“I have to speak personally. I did not experience any racial hostility until I left New York and went to live in Washington, D.C. This was in 1941, when I was twenty-five. I went to work for the government. And there was this experience that tore me up—the first day. The cafeteria in the War Department building was not open yet. So about four of our black girls went to a small sandwich shop to eat our lunch, and we bought sodas, and were about to sit down to eat, and the lady there said very harshly, ‘Can’t you people, can’t you people find some place else to eat?’ Of course we didn’t have much appetite after that.”

“Did this shake your faith or your way of thinking?”

“What it did, it made me wonder about my nation. Before that, I was a hundred percent patriotic. I loved America. But it began to shatter a little my patriotic fervor. It didn’t shake my religion. In fact, because of my religious training I didn’t hold any ill-feeling against the woman in the sandwich shop. Washington, D.C, was not integrated. And
that
was mind-boggling to me, that the nation’s capital wasn’t integrated.

“When we went to the large cafeteria in the War Department building, where we worked, whites would not want to sit at the same table with us. If we sat down with them they would move. We just began to know that this exists. It made me a fighter, all right. We joined a group there that was spearheaded by the Quakers, and our aim was to integrate some of the lunch counters in the city. We would meet—all the Quakers were white—and have prayers and decide where we were going. And we were being told not to show any reaction to any violence that would be shown to us. We had to be trained. You can’t imagine the things that were said to us. People would spit in our faces. If we drank out of a glass they would take it up and throw it away. Christ said turn the other cheek. And finally Washington was integrated, a little later.”

The atmosphere was heavy, with the pollen and humidity of northern Florida. My eyes had begun to smart; and now, thinking of those prayer meetings, I began to cry.

She said, “People have changed. And now some of those people wouldn’t believe that they were that cruel back there.”

It was such a good way of putting it. She didn’t offer a personal forgiveness. She spoke of a larger change of heart. It was immensely moving.

She said, “These experiences helped to build me and give me more character and strength.”

But what of others?

“Some people couldn’t take it. They just gave up. They accepted. For those people it may have been the best thing to do. It’s not for everyone to fight. The Bible says, Let the strong bear the infirmities of the weak.”

She, so frail and spare on her settee in her little sitting room, considered herself one of the strong.

“It’s still an issue. Not segregation, but racism. It’s more subtle.”

I wanted to know her attitude to the past. But the past for her, as for nearly all black people I spoke to, stopped at a certain point.

“I’ve never dug into my roots. I can go back as far as my grandfather and grandmother. Around 1900. And that’s all.”

Now there were other problems beside those of racism. There were the problems of teenage pregnancies, drugs, dropouts, and the behavior of black students at schools who were reported to beat up those blacks who did well at their studies.

“We didn’t have that problem when the schools were all black. Now—I hate to say it—integration has damaged some of the black children. Because in the black schools we had to visit the parents’ homes periodically. If we had problems we would go to the home, and the parents were very cooperative. We had religious activities at the schools. We had fifteen-minute morning devotions. In the integrated schools what happened was that some of the black children began to role-model some of the nonproductive white children. And parents didn’t have that close tie with the schools. Those of us who are in this work have to work harder. You can’t do too much in the schools now.”

She regarded herself as one of the strong. Her religion gave her some of her strength. Had there been any experiences that had confirmed her in her faith?

She said, “Many. All the time. God speaks to people, just like he did in olden days. I knew when I was sixteen that I was going to preach. I told my church in New York. I don’t know how it came. I just knew it. And I know that in 1971, when I became a minister, God had talked to me. They are words in your heart, when God speaks. But there have been occasions when God talked to me in words, when he called my name, and I looked around to see who was there who had called me, and there was nobody there. The first experience of God speaking audibly was when I was a child. He said, ‘Get up and go join the church.’ I didn’t do it then.

“But since I’ve been in the ministry God talks to me all the time. In words. He’ll tell me to do something. And I’ll reply to him out loud. Some of my congregation know about those experiences. One Sunday God spoke to me about a child in the congregation. I had just turned to go back to the pulpit, and God said, ‘Pray for that child!’ I turned around and saw this child sitting in somebody’s lap. The command was urgent. And I said, ‘Whose child is that? Bring that child here.’ I prayed. People cried. A week later the child became ill, but the child did not die. Thank God!”

She normally didn’t speak of these experiences. The one time she did was when she appeared before the Ordaining Council, a group of black Baptists in New York City. “I had to justify my calling. I told how God spoke to me. When I told the Ordaining Council, they understood quite well.”

Her religion had helped her through the hard times in Washington in 1941 and later.

“You see, it’s the holy spirit that guides and protects us in these instances.”

“Did you ever feel abandoned?”

“I never felt abandoned by God.”

“Did he tell you to be a fighter?”

“I don’t know. It was in me. And I felt I had done what I could do.”

She revered the memory of Martin Luther King. But the resistance she and the Quakers had undertaken in Washington was long before the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She was braver than she claimed. But she referred everything to her faith. “So many religious experiences, so many experiences of God.” And she was pleased that both her daughters were religiously inclined, and one “totally dedicated to the church.” To that extent she was passing on the torch as a woman pastor.

“When I was a child in New York we had women preachers in our congregation, so to me it was nothing rare or different. When I married a minister I lost all thoughts of being a minister myself. My husband did not believe in women as ministers. But he knew I wanted to be a minister. He was a perceptive man. He was much older than I. He knew I wanted to be a minister because sometimes in church I would get up and talk. When the spirit moves, you move. He understood I was sincere. When God spoke to me in 1971, I couldn’t help what my husband thought. I had to respond to the call this time. I had to hear God’s voice and not my husband’s voice.”