Baptist DISTINCTIVE: An Adam Mykonos Mystery (The Adam Myknonos Mystries) (9 page)

As I said Bob Jones Sr. was a staunch advocate of
the Separatist Movement, according to his grandson he took this position to
oppose what he considered the idea of a one world order. In doing so Jones not
only took contributions from the Ku Klux Klan, but supported segregation and
wrongfully interpreted the Biblical passage about being unequally yoke to mean
racially different.
 
On this he and Dr.
Rice were in agreement. Now I am not judging these men, this was the 1920’s and
the world was a very different place. Rice and Jones were both from the South.
However, Jones remained a segregationist into the era of the Civil Rights movement,
when he was in his 70s. There are few references to race in Jones's sermons and
chapel messages until the late 1950s, but in a 1960 radio address, Jones
declared that God had been the author of segregation and that opposition to
segregation was opposition to God. This is clearly not what Jesus would have
preached.

Now before I go on let me make one thing clear,
weather it is Bob Jones or John R Rice, or any other leader of our movement
they are men and all men sin and fall short of the Glory of God. It is plain
foolishness to judge the merits of the Baptist Traditions on the words or
actions of the men involved in it. That is why we rely only on the Word of God,
because men are sinful.

In any event, Bob Jones University remained
segregated until seven years after Bob Jones Sr., death and interracial dating
was not allowed until 2000 when Bob Jones III dropped the policy, eight years
later he apologized for the hurtfulness of segregation, and that should have
been the end of the matter, but of course, it never is. What happens is that
when people are raised in a culture where a sin is acceptable, and racism is a
sin, it becomes hard for them to change as the years go by.

Nevertheless it was clear to me when I took over as
Pastor of Calvary that in order to grow, in order to make an impact on the
people of Hagerstown and across the state and eventually the nation, that the
most segregated hour in America, the church hour was going to have to change.
We were going to need to reach all souls.

But the truth is that Sunday Morning in America is
segregated, we have Black Churches and White Churches and we are afraid to
speak about the separation because we are afraid to confront the six hundred
pound gorilla in the room, the fact that both blacks and whites on some level
are comfortable that way. Still I was determined to grow Calvary and to effect
some change and that was when I met your Mother-in-Law.

Chapter Seven

I don’t so much have a Mother-in-Law, as I
have a second mother, a confident, a sounding board and a royal pain in my
neck. The first time she meet me Millicent Thompson said in her wonderfully
mixed hill billy and Jamaican accent “you too skinny.”
 
A month later she told me “you too fat.”
 
And so it has been ever since.

When I walked up, Millicent was sitting in
her rocking chair on the big wrap around porch that encircled her house. In my
hand I held two cups of coffee. Millicent id convinced that I drink too much
coffee and so insists that she drink a cup with me each time I have one. I
think somehow it is supposed to guilt me into drinking less.

I handed her the one that was light with
cream and thick with sugar and took a long swig of my own basic black.

I sat down on the porch steps and stretched
my legs out. “So Ma, tell me about you and Joshua Lexington?”

“I done never touched that boy, he far too
young for me, though he down right handsome enough.”

I nearly fell off the porch steps I laughed
so hard. “Then that poor man truly missed out on a lot.” I told her.

My Mother-in-Law took a long sip of her
coffee, rocked in her chair for a minute and then spoke. “You know how many
cows we own?”

She knew I didn’t. “No.”

“None.”

I squeezed my eyes together. “None?”

“Nope, not a one. See My Father owns all
these cows, He owns all this land as well, and In fact He owns the cattle on a
thousand hills and owns the hills on top of that.
 
What we have here, what I have here has been
lent to me by God. All I am is a care taker.”

I smiled “And a good one.”

“I try. Adam, all the things we have are
lent to us by God. You need to be reminding your wife of that when she deals
with my grandbabies, she keeps acting like they her children. They ain’t no way,
no how, her children. They God’s children lent to her.”

“I’ll try to remember that myself Ma.”

She rocked for a moment. There was no point
in rushing her, she would answer my question when she wanted and in her own
way.
 
I sat there at her feet watching
her and waiting. She was of that indescribable age of some African-American
Women, somewhere between seventy and a Century, her hands were large, made
larger by years of hard work, her fingers long and thin like her daughter’s.
Her hair, fading to wisps as the years crept up, was tucked under a scarf and
she wore a summer sun dress of light beige, her feet, were bare, a pair of
sandals on the porch steps if she needed them.

“Your father-in-law.” She began; referring
as she always did to a man I never met, as if he and I were longtime friends.
“And I came to this country right after the war.”

She sipped her coffee.
 
I pondered for a moment that at fifty, I was
among the last of those who would know without hesitation that ‘the war’ referred
to World War II. Growing up there never was any other ‘war’ to speak of, none
that marred the landscape and changed the world. Younger men may need to ask
her which war she spoke of, but for me and mine we knew when our parents spoke
of ‘the war’ just what they meant.

“Why the Lord led Robert and I here to
Clear Spring, I ain’t never been rightly sure. But he leads us here, with our
Oldest Boy in tow. I’ve been saved for a long longtime you know.”

 
She
let out a silly school girl chuckle “Heck I been saved so long I think it was
John the Baptist himself who dunked me in the river.
 
Robert didn’t get saved tell we’d been here in
the states a good long while, by then Robby, Rhoda and Rita were all washed in
the blood. But Robert was a good man, and the Lord blessed my faithfulness to
my unbelieving Husband by blessing us from the first. We found work, good work,
and hard work.”

She waved her hand up the lane towards the
big house that Rita and I now shared. “That house was on the first plot we
brought and from there the Lord kept on blessing. Oh there were hard times. Bad
times. “

She looked off into the sun. “Like when my
Robby didn’t come home from that awful Viet Nam, or the first time my Robert
coughed blood into his handkerchief, those were hard times, son.”

I nodded.

“But the Lord always smiled on us.” She
grinned.
 
“About ten years ago I was
attending Bethel Baptist Temple in Hagerstown over there on Jonathan Street.
You might call it a black church, we just called it church. We got a new
pastor. Our old one up and died on us. The new one was nice enough but
something seemed missing.
 
It seemed to
me that sometimes when he preached he spoke as if we could lose our salvation.
Now you know that ain’t the case right son?”

“No Man can pluck me from my Father’s hand”
I said believing each word in a part of my heart I often did not let show.

“That’s right. This poor man however didn’t
seem to know that. Then Rita got sick, that ulcer thing she gave herself from
worrying about the boy too much.”

I smiled, ‘that she gave herself’. Rita
would have something to say about that, but I tended to agree with Ma, at least
when my wife was not around.

“She ended up in the hospital. And you know
that preacher never came to visit her. Well I had just hired Stan Grant to run
this here place a few months before that and one day, this far too young, far
too handsome, far too slick, blue eyed preacher boy popped his head into the
room. I had been sitting there reading the Word to Rita and he just stepped
right on in and stuck out his hand and said ‘Stan Grant asked me to stop by,
I’m Pastor Lexington from Calvary Baptist, do you mind if I visit a bit?’.”

“That next Sunday when Rita was out of the
hospital, she and I and Donald, even little Roberta, all went on up to that
church. Well Pastor Lexington preached away about salvation that day, and don’t
you done know that when the altar call came there went Donald walking up the
aisle like a Sunday Stroll down by the river.”

She grinned. “Till then I would have put
money on that boy being bound for a good paying job in hell. Since then I never
had to lift a word of pray bout Him except in Praise to Jesus.
 
The week after that when Donald got baptized
Rita and I changed our membership.”

“And stayed till Joshua left.”

“Yes we did. That wasn’t right and you know
it was a lie.”

She looked at me hard and added “I do not
believe Miss Ivy killed him.” She paused and said softly “But that woman is
capable of murder mind you.”

I smiled in agreement.

“We did good up there. Despite some of
those folks who didn’t much like a Black Woman and her child joining up. And
liked even less that we weren’t no poor misfortunate blacks that they could
feel pity for and help out.”

She looked at me and said something to me
she never said before. “I know you white.” She stopped as if to give me a
minute to accept the reality of my skin color.

She went on, “I know you not like this, and
I am not looking to offend you, but you know that lots of white folks only like
black folks who are poor so that they can feel better about themselves.”

What could I say to the truth of that? She
went on.

“We was like nothing those Longstreet’s and
Sinclair’s had ever done seen. And they all but dropped dead when I signed that
land up in Greencastle over to Joshua so he’s could use it for the radio
station.”

I spit out some of my coffee. “You did
what?”

She smiled widely she loved one upping me.
“Well didn’t you not knows that? I gave Pastor Lexington that land up there.”

Chapter
Eight

An hour later I sat on my own front porch
waiting for my soul winning partner Stan Grant to come by.
 
Two quick phones calls, one to my ever loving
wife and one to my sister’s husband Argon, had given me more information on the
Greencastle property. My wife knew nothing about the matter, which was not all
that surprising if she had known I would have known. Argon, who had been a
deacon back at the old church, confirmed the transaction and reported that it
was held in confidence by the deacon’s board at Millicent’s request. He added
very tellingly:

“Një çift i njerëzve në bordin e dhjak,
sidomos miku tuaj Jim Sinclair ishin të lumtur për ta mbajtur atë të fshehtë.
Ata nuk duan që ajo e di ne kishte marrë një dhuratë të tillë të madh nga një
person zi”

I chuckled, of course Jim Sinclair would
work hard to that it would never become know that the deacons’ board had accepted
such a large donation from an African American. I told my brother- in- law,
that it was bad enough for them that they had an Albanian Deacon. “e keqe e
mjaftueshme që ata kishin një Dhjak Shqiptare.”

Stan pulled up in his vintage 1960 Buick
Lesabre which he had spent most of the winter painstakingly restoring. Like all
good Independent Baptist we go soul winning on Thursday Nights. Guiding Light
Church uses the Spark of Grace method, which was developed by a pastor at a
fellow church here in Washington County. Stan and I were on an MBCC team, which
meant we simply went door to door taking a survey and copying the results over
to other more experienced soul winners. Normally we go from around 6:30PM to 8:00
PM or so but since Rita and I had to meet Ryder Mathewson at Fireside at 8 I
had asked Stan if we could leave an hour earlier.
 
Five thirty is not an optimal time for
knocking on peoples doors, many folks are not home yet, but better to find no
one home than not go at all. We had a short survey board of only twenty houses
over in the Smithsburg area. As we drove over there I asked Stan about the land
sale.

“I knew, mostly because the land was held
by Thompson Farms, Millicent’s company not by her personally.”

I confess ignorance when it came to
Thompson Farms, Millicent knew that while my wife and I loved Clear Spring and
Washington County we had no love of farming, Stan managed the farm and the
company and we liked it that way. I knew that Millicent had control of the LCC
that comprised Thompson Farms, I also knew that my wife, her sister Rhoda, who
was married to a missionary in Jamaica, and Stan also were shareholders. Other
than that I was basically clueless and kind of liked it that way. It was hard enough
to run my own business and help Rita keep an eye on the diner and Donald on his
and Gray’s trucking concerns without further complicating my life with an
industry I knew nothing about.

“I am trying to understand why this land
was so important?” I asked.