Datesville: Out of the Land of Bondage!
Chapter 6 — The River Styx
After dinner and a smoke, I gather my things and George volunteers to accompany me back to the hotel. He’s headed that direction anyway, he says, and I’m glad for the company. At the hotel, I find a hand-written note taped to my door.
“Rent was due today. See me tomorrow during business hours. Manager”
I try the keycard anyway to see if it works.
“That jackass! He changed the code,” I say aloud when the card fails to open the door.
“Come on. You can stay at my place tonight, in the real world,” says George. “You’ve got all of your stuff, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then no problem!”
“So where is this real world you speak of?” I ask.
“Two miles east, but we can hitchhike—maybe.”
“Two miles?” I repeat.
“Yeah, but it’s still early. Let’s go. Here, I’ll carry that for you.”
George takes my bedroll. I leave the keycard in the door of Room 51, and we walk back down the long, dark hallway to the stairs. The elevator hasn’t worked since December.
“Now you’re a free man,” says George. “Hey, you got any camping gear in that bag.”
“Sorry, no.”
“Eh! You don’t need it. I’ve got enough for both of us.”
“George, I don’t mean to put you out like this—” I begin. He cuts me off mid-sentence.
“Hey! Don’t get all genteel on me, okay. First lesson: homeless people call themselves “campers” because that’s what they do—they camp. And second: campers aren’t genteel, right? We don’t do genteel. If someone offers you something, you take it. Period! End of story. Thank ‘em and go on.”
“Okay,” I reply, feeling embarrassed. “Thanks, George.”
“Don’t mention it.”
We step out of the building into the cold night and emerge beneath the overhang where the florescent lights buzz and give the space a feeling of relative safety. Maybe I should have paid the ten bucks, I think, and stayed another week. But it’s too late now. Now, I am committed to the real world, as George calls it.
Beyond the overhang and the green florescent lights is nothing but black and the unknown.
“I wish it was summer,” I say.
“No, you don’t. Too many bugs and ants,” says George. “They’re a damned nuisance.”
“Then I wish it was day.”
“Night’s better,” says George. “It’s familiar and always beautiful except when it rains. Then it’s a dog.” He laughs. “Believe me, Orange, everything is better when you can’t see it. Come on, this way.”
We head north on South Cheyenne. It’s dark as pitch and already the cold begins to seep through my coat and sweater. I feel like a lost soul and George is Charon, ferrying me across the River Styx into Hades. But I am thankful, at least, to have a guide. It’s surreal all the same because at five o’clock this evening when I entered the Dairy Daisy, I didn’t even know George, and now here I am following him into the unknown, into a different world.
We turn at West 3rd Street where there are more lights. West 3rd is a broad, busy thoroughfare that turns into Charles Page Boulevard where it crosses South Houston Avenue and angles due west. We follow it over the railroad tracks and under Interstate 244. From the top of the bridge that crosses the tracks, we can see lights reflected on the Arkansas River in the distance.
As short as he is, George walks as fast as most people jog.
“George! I can’t breath. Can we slow down a bit?”
“You should quit smoking,” he says.
George begins walking backward to let me catch my breath and waves his thumb at cars as they pass. The cars zip by like we’re invisible.
“No takers tonight,” says George.
“Are we getting close?” I ask.
“Not even halfway, but almost halfway.”
Acrid smells drift from the river and engulf that part of town. The stench reminds me of Styx and Hades again.
“Where are we headed, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I don’t mind,” he says but doesn’t elaborate. He appears to be in focused concentration as he continues to thumb the cars passing us. One blows its horn.
“Asshole!” he shouts after the horn blower. “We’re going to the New Block Park Luxury Hotel and Suites. Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“It’s at New Block Park.”
“We’re staying in a park?”
“No, it’s the jungle above the park.”
“Jungle?” I question.
“Yeah, you know—trees, brush, weeds, that sort of thing. We’ve got a camp on the hillside across the road from the park. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ as they say. People don’t care if we exist so long as they don’t have to look at us, and we don’t cause any trouble. Parks are for nice people, Orange, not rodents like us.” George half laughs. “But it’s not bad; you’ll see when we get there.”
“Rodents like us.” It bothers me a little that George liberally includes me as one of the rodents, unworthy of the park. He is walking forward again, determined like a bull. I lengthen my stride which helps me keep pace a little better. I have forgotten about the cold except for my hands. I guess that we’ve been walking for a half hour, maybe more. We haven’t talked the last little while and the traffic on the boulevard has thinned to almost nothing.
“There it is,” says George and points to his left.
“I don’t see anything.”
“See those two lamps and the little block building in between?”
“Yeah.”
Everything is flat and black in the direction George points, except for two low street lamps and a low, hut-looking structure between them.
“That’s the park!” he says. “We’re almost there. Just another fifteen minutes, and we’ll be home sweet home.”
Now, against the sidewalk on our right is a low, stone retaining wall and above that an unkempt tangle of trees and brush which hangs over the sidewalk and us like a canopy. It’s apparently “the jungle” George has spoken of. As we reach the park, we take a right turn onto a narrow street that winds steeply up the side of the hill but, a few yards up, we take a second turn to the left and begin climbing the hill more gradually, on a road that runs parallel to the boulevard below. There are no cars here and hardly any light by which to see. The acrid odors from the river have been replaced with a more soothing aroma—wood-fire smoke. It reminds me of my boyhood in Ohio, when the world was different for me, and the camping trips we used to take in the summer that my father spontaneously initiated and loved.
“I’ve got to rest a minute,” says George. He stops, leans over and grabs his knees with both hands; he breathes heavily for a couple of minutes. The top of his head shines in the moonlight.
“You should quit smoking,” I say between labored breaths. We both laugh.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “Hey Orange—”
“Really, you can call me Harvey,” I tell him.
“I know, but I remember Orange better, and I like it better too. Unless you don’t want me to call you Orange?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Great!”
George stands upright again but still breathes with short, hard gasps.
“So Orange, I wanted to ask you, do you still want to go somewhere, I mean, like, hit the road and travel? But let me just say, before you answer, that you really don’t want to go to California. It’s a bust out there. I was there a couple of years back—well maybe three years now. But I’ll bet I walked half the distance from Seattle to LA—literally walked. I’m not shitting you, Orange! No one would pick me up! Took me half the summer. Anyway, I get there—to LA—and there’s nothing, and the cops are brutal. So I keep going, on down to San Diego; nothing there either! The whole state’s a bust! I thought I was going to starve out there. So, what I’m saying is, you don’t want to go to California, Orange; take my word on this one. And besides, what’s California going to do with another Orange, eh?”
George laughs at his own joke. He starts walking again but slower now.
“I just thought it would be sunny and warm in California,” I answer.
“Warm? It’s hotter than hell in the summer, in Southern Cal. And summer is April through October. In the winter it’s tolerable, I guess; except you can’t see the sun through the smog. You need a gas mask just to go outside. And there’s no water. Now, I hear it’s even worse—the water situation, I mean. And in the big valley, north of LA, this time of year, it’s nothing but fog, thick as pea soup and cold. Cuts right through you. It’s not freezing cold like in the mountains, but, let me tell you, it’s not easy to sleep at night, either.”
“Is northern California better?”
“Sure, sure! It’s a lot better except they’ve got fog in the winter there, too, or snow. But in the summer, the weather in Northern Cal is great! The problem up north is the people. They don’t want you there. They’d rather see you starve to death than offer you a hand. That’s the way it is in the towns up north. Either that or in the cities they’ll help you but they want to institutionalize you, deal with you that way.
“I stayed at this one place in Oakland; it was like an asylum for campers. I’m not joking. “Hotel California”—that’s what we called it. ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ Remember that song? Anyway, they had me attending classes, teaching me how to become a ‘productive citizen.’”
George adds air quotes around productive citizen. I can see him in the moonlight.
“And if you need drugs to help you deal with anxiety, the anxiety of being a camper,” continues George, “the shrink-in-residence is more than happy to supply you with them—lots of them. That part isn’t so bad. But every night, they would lock the place down like a prison. I had to escape in a laundry bag to leave. Well, maybe I exaggerate a little,” says George, “but not much.”
“So you’re not keen on California,” I say flatly.
“You think? No! No, where I want to go is this Datesville place I was telling you about. Why don’t we go there? Well, at least think about it, okay? But we can talk about it later. Hey, here’s our front gate. Tell you what, after devotions, we’ll figure it all out, plan our itinerary and everything.”
I have no idea what George means by “devotions”. He certainly doesn’t strike me as the pious sort, but then again, I remind myself that I’ve only known George for a matter of hours. “Devotions” might involve carved wooden dolls, nails, and chicken’s blood, for all I know.
The so called gate is where the retaining wall has broken and several stones have rolled out and the soil from the hillside has spilled through the opening, creating a ramp. Through the gate, it is nearly a vertical climb, and George grunts as he grabs tree-of-heaven limbs and hoists himself into the breach and up a narrow footpath that creeps and writhes upward into the black wood. I follow him.
“Watch the roots,” he calls back, “they’ll make you stumble.” I stumble anyway and nearly break my kneecap because I can’t see my feet in this inky forest, let alone the roots in front of them.
“This is the bad part,” says George, out of breath. “It’ll get better in a minute.”
George pushes aside a branch. When he releases it, it swings back and crowns me.
“Look out for the branches,” he says. “Don’t let them get you in the eye.” A little late for that advice, I think.
We have been angling, more or less, to our left for the last several minutes. It seems like an eternity; the path is so steep.
“Let’s rest,” says George. We both are out of breath and pant like marathon runners. “It flattens out pretty soon. It’s not far now; I promise you,” he assures me.
The odor of smoke is strong, and there’s a different, more pungent tone in it.
“What’s that smell?” I ask.
“What smell? Oh, you mean that smokey smell?”
“Yeah, that odd, smokey stench,” I say.
“That’s just the campfire and maybe someone’s dinner. They probably burnt the beans.”
I have smelled bad cooking and burnt cooking; and this wasn’t that; but I don’t argue with George.
“George? How many people live in the camp, would you say?”
“About thirty-five, give or take a half-dozen. It changes all the time. People come and go, you know. But yeah, about thirty-five, right now. In the summer, there’s probably twice that many on average. But this isn’t the only camp around. They’ve got camps all over the place. But you’d never find them unless you knew where to look. Yeah, I read somewhere that someone estimated there are in the neighborhood of ten-thousand campers just around Tulsa. That’s quite a few.”
“George, do you think they’ll accept me? I mean, they don’t know me from Adam.”
“Oh sure, no problem! They’ll like you, Orange. But the better question is: will you accept them? That’s the question you need to ask. Come on. You’ll do fine.”
We begin our climb again up Kilimanjaro, but pretty soon, the path turns back on itself, and we head to the right as we angle up the hillside. Finally, the grade does flatten and the path is better. We can walk upright. But the odor of the smoke becomes stronger and more distressing. I’m still following George. The path turns again and flattens more. We are winding deeper into the woods.
“You’re going to like Teeny Mae,” he says.
“Who?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not her real name but that’s what everyone calls her: Teeny Mae. You’ll like her. She’s the camp Grandmother and chaplain. She’s real cool.”
“The camp Grandmother? Is that some kind of title?” I ask.
“Yeah, yeah! She’s the camp leader, the highest ranking elder, you might say. What she decides pretty much goes. In some camps it’s a man who’s the highest elder and, in those cases, he’s known as the Grandfather. Some camps have Grandmothers; some have Grandfathers. We have Teeny Mae. She’s cool. She hardly has a tooth in her head, but she’s interesting as hell and intelligent too. No one pulls the wool over Teeny Mae’s eyes; that’s for sure.”
George continues describing Teeny Mae for me as we slowly climb the path.
“Yeah, one time there was this joker named Donald or Daryl something—I can’t remember now—who shows up at the camp. Anyway, this Daryl clown comes into camp, claiming he’s a Reverend, right? You know, a minister. But Granny—that’s what we call Teeny Mae—hears complaints about Daryl spending an awful lot of time on the women’s side of camp. The women don’t like him hanging around over there. So Granny, being the camp chaplain and all, strikes up a conversation with Daryl about the Bible, and right away she can tell he doesn’t know shit from a Shinola about the good book.
“So one night during devotions, Granny tells the whole camp about Daryl and builds him up: tells everyone how honored we are to have a man of the cloth among us, how it was a gift and blessing from God that he found his way to us—that sort of stuff. When she’s finished, she turns to Daryl and asks him, as part of our devotion that evening, to tell us the story of Jonah. His face turns three shades of red. You can see it in the firelight.”
George laughs.
“So Daryl hems and haws for a couple of minutes then says he would prefer to read the story to us because the Bible’s own account is so poetic and beautiful. And he would read it, he says, except that he recently gave his own Bible to a good person who needed it more than him, so he did not have one to read from. ‘Oh!’ said Granny, ‘what a decent man you are. But that’s no problem, my brother! Here! You can borrow mine,’ she says and she hands him her Bible. Daryl thumbs through the Bible for a couple of minutes before he gives up on that effort and begins telling the story ‘by heart’ of how Jonah built a giant boat to save the whole world from the flood.”
George nearly shouts the part about the giant boat and the flood and sniggers.
“What a doofus! At the end, Teeny Mae didn’t say a word about it being the story of Noah, not Jonah, that Daryl had told—and not very well—but everyone knew. She just turned to Daryl and said very sweetly, ‘Oh that’s a fine story. Thank you very much, Reverend. In fact, while you’re here, could we count on you for our Bible story every night? You tell stories so well.’ The next day, Daryl was gone before lunch. Granny is as sharp as a tack. You’re going to like her, Orange.”
“I’m sure I will,” I say.
Now, we begin to hear voices and music, and there’s a dim filtering of light ahead. The light is mixed with smoke. Some of the voices are children’s, playing hide-and-seek. Something to my left rushes out of the darkness toward us. At first I think it’s an animal, a dog perhaps, but it’s a child who says nothing, only darts ahead of us down the pathway.
There are tarps strung from trees sheltering small, domed tents and lines draped with stiff articles of clothing or rags. I can distinguish them only in half-light and silhouette. The voices rise. There are singers harmonizing, and guitars, a fiddle crying softly, a harmonica, and a jaw harp marking time. There are other voices in discussion: men’s voices rumbling low like distant thunder and women’s voices mingling with them like wind. There’s the thud and crack of someone splitting wood. Somewhere to my right, I hear women busy in newsy exchanges and laughter. Close by, a man and woman argue softly in their tent, her voice pleading, his indifferent, and a baby cries. We have reached the shore of Hades.
* * * *
Somehow, I had formed misguided expectations of this place. I thought it would be solemn, quiet, inactive. I thought death would be different. I thought it would be absent of life.
“I’m sure AA is over by now,” says George.
“AA?”
“Yeah, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“I know what AA is. I just didn’t think—”
“Not that I attend those,” interrupts George. “AA is always the first meeting after supper. Then there’s Elders’ Circle which anyone can attend. That usually takes a while. But after that the fun begins. Let’s see what’s up. I’ll introduce you around.”
“Of course,” I say and follow George into the light.
At the center of camp is a good sized clearing, its floor trampled to bare dirt. The clearing is roughly circular. The floor of the clearing is as smooth as tile, so smooth, in fact, that it looks as if it has been swept with a broom. Near the center is a campfire—not a large one but adequate and tidy, encircled with stones. Its base is a neat mound of glowing embers and piled on top are pieces of branches and lengths of lumber, crackling and popping sharply above the voices. A group of people—perhaps fifteen or twenty in all—are near the fire, some standing, others squatting, a few seated on lawn chairs and camp stools. At the edge of the clearing is another group, sitting under a tree bough, around a metal patio table. Beside the table, a kerosine lantern hangs, tied to another tree bough with a cord. The lantern fizzes and emits a clean light that paints rosewood shadows behind every object it touches. At the table, sit two elderly men and a collection of children and adolescents. They are playing poker using piles of plastic bottle caps as chips. Their faces appear ghoulish—half black, half bleached—in the light from the lantern. They stop, look at us briefly, a few smiling, others scowling, the rest with eyes warning against intrusion, their jaws unhinged, then they continue playing as if we were not there.
As I enter the light and we approach the fire, I am still following George but I can see the group plainly over George’s head because I am taller than my Napoleonic guide. Like cicadas upon some inaudible signal, they suddenly fall silent in unison. Their faces are toward the fire; their backs are to us. First their heads turn, then their torsos, silently, so that they can take in a full view of our approach. Then they part as if ready to swallow us, their arms loose at their sides. It feels like a scene from a Tale of Two Cities and looks like one of Van Gogh’s paintings of Potato Eaters.
“Who are you?” demands a tall, stringy fellow wearing a ball cap. He juts his chin toward me as if to point me out. His eyes are steel and fixed on me, but so are the others’.
“I’m George,” says George, “who are you?” The group laughs. “I think you need to keep that appointment with your optometrist, Rusty,” says George. He extends his hand and Rusty grabs it and jerks George off balance as he vigorously shakes George’s hand and clamps his other arm around George’s shoulders and lets out a kind of growl.
“Didn’t realize you’d miss me so much,” says George still in Rusty’s grip. “Was I gone that long?” More laughter!
“I know who you are, you little sonofabitch,” shouts Rusty.
Rusty’s face ruptures into a thousand fissures as he guffaws into George’s face, his mouth wide open as if ready to swallow George’s head, whole. The expression on Rusty’s face as he laughs and the wheezing sound he emits through his wide open mouth seem more akin to agony than amusement. He looks and sounds like a man just stabbed in the stomach.
“All right, Rusty, that’s enough!” says George. “If you want a better time than that, you’ll have to pay for it.” George wriggles free of Rusty’s grip. “And I’m not cheap!” The group again roars with laughter. Like a good comedian, George lets his audience settle, and he catches his breath first before proceeding.
“Everyone! This is my old-time buddy Orange—Harry Orange.”
“Harvey,” I correct and they snigger.
“Right!” continues George, “Like I was saying, we go back a long way. No, but seriously, Orange here is a good guy. He just lost his room downtown at the Mann Hotel, was it?”
He looks at me and grins. The group laughs, heartily. The Mann Hotel is, of course, where Marcus Purcell and some of Tulsa’s wealthiest residents live like sultans.
“No check that, I meant the Bermuda Hotel not the Mann. But anyway, he’s a camper for the first time.” A round of cheers go up. “They kicked him out today. So I told him not to worry. There’s a hell of a family just waiting to welcome him with open arms down here at the New Block Park Luxury Hotel and Suites!”
With that, George makes a sort of ta-da gesture with his hands toward me and several in the circle cheer and begin applauding.
“Welcome to the real world,” hollers someone over the cheers. Several people close in around me and offer their hands in friendship and in mock congratulations.
“Welcome home,” says one.
“Hope you like grits,” says another, “’cause you be eatin’ a lot of grits, now.”
“Nice to have you here, Mr. Orange,” says one woman politely.
The well-wishers are all smiles, hand shakes, and back-slaps, but there are others who keep their distance and are quiet. Just then a branch in the fire issues a loud report, like a rifle salute. I smell the sharp odor of smoke again. Finally I have landed. But something tells me that without a guide like George, I might not have found as easy an entrance into this homeland of the damned as I have tonight.
“Hello—My name Pete Bulchenko—Glad to meet you—I from Russia,” says a man extending a gray woolen glove for me to shake. Bulchenko runs these introductory sentences together as if they are one. I shake his hand which produces, for me, the same sensation as putting my hand in the jaws of a hydraulic vise.
“Glad to meet you,” I say.
Bulchenko looks like Father Christmas, except younger and gaunt around the eyes which are void of cheer, but with only a hint of gray streaking the chin of his great beard. All I can see of his face is his oily forehead and eyes, his ruddy round cheeks, his ruby bulbous nose, and the small lower lip indicating where his mouth is. The rest of his face is buried beneath a dense black blanket of beard which extends down to the top of his stomach. The hair on his head is as thick and dark as his beard and cascades in waves over his shoulders and onto his back. He’s wearing a dark stocking cap which perches atop his head.
“In my country—I from Russia, you know—I am engineer. That my work, when I come here, to US,” he continues.
“Very glad to meet you,” I repeat, somewhat distracted by his death grip on my hand. Finally he lets go.
“Say. You have cigarette?” He gestures with his hand as if smoking. “You know, cigarette? You have?”
“Ah—”
George suddenly reappears.
“Not now, Bulchenko, maybe later! I want Orange to meet Granny.”
“We have cigarette later?”
“Yeah, maybe later,” says George as he steps between us. “We’ll see.”
He grabs me by the elbow and pulls me forward. “Come on. She’ll want to meet you. You’re not official until you’ve met Teeny Mae.”
“See you later. Glad to meet you,” says Bulchenko over George’s head. I smile and nod. Bulchenko flashes me a thumbs up which reveals a hole in the thumb of his glove.
The group has congealed into a glob of unsanitary humanity through which George pushes ahead.
“Excuse us. Make way. Coming through,” says George as he shoulders his way between clusters of people engaged in conversation. It seems there are more of them now than before. More than once I hear the term “Tidy-Mart” spoken.
“They’ve got a hell of a nerve,” says one man, “if they think they can just horn in on us like that without a fight. That has always been our lot and I’ll be damned before I let them walk over us.”
The voices sound concerned, some angry.
“Hey Pearl, how you doing tonight?” says George to a thin Asian woman.
“Better. Felt better today, thank you George,” she says. Her voice is raspy.
“There you are, you little sonofabitch!”
It’s Rusty again. He slaps George on top of the shoulder and talks down on his head like a tall person talking into a microphone. Rusty has the voice of someone who has smoked two packs a day for thirty years.
“Hey George! Guess what I did tonight?”
“What?” George turns, looks at me, and rolls his eyes.
“I joined AA! I went and joined the goddamned AA. Can you believe it?”
Rusty laughs on George’s scalp. I can smell the Crab Apple wine on his breath from where I stand.
“That’s great, Rusty! Think it’ll help?”
“No! But what the hell, it couldn’t hurt. Right?”
“Guess not,” says George and pushes his way past Rusty.
Rusty and I make eye contact; he nods an acknowledgment and I return it.
In the center of the hubbub, at the nucleus of this active cell, there is an open space and calm. It is here we find Teeny Mae, Grandmother of the New Block Park camp.
Teeny Mae is a small, black woman, seated in a recliner-style, foldable camp chair that has a footrest. Like a child sitting on a sofa, her feet jut out in front of her and are propped up on the footrest, and she is bundled in a quilt from her neck to her ankles. A tattered pair of canvas deck shoes and her head, wrapped in a shawl, are all I can see of her.
One arm sprouts from under the quilt and she begins waving it over her head. There is a fat ski mitten on her hand. Someone directly behind me lets out a shrill whistle that causes several of us to jump in our shoes, and then the same man hollers out:
“Granny wants to talk! Listen up! The meeting ain’t over yet!”
A hush settles into the group—into the whole camp.
“Thank you, Lamar,” says Teeny Mae. “I don’t have much to say, but I did want to say my piece a little on this problem with the Tidy-Mart job before we turn loose and I turn in for the night.”
She pauses and it seems the Earth has become silent.
“I’ve done prayed about it—this Tidy-Mart affair. I’ve interceded before the Father. And Father has given me an answer. Bless his name, I knew he would. So with your permission, I want to talk a little about that.”
“Go ahead!” shouts someone behind me.
She bows her head momentarily, chuckles to herself, draws a breath, exhales, then begins.
Her voice is melodic, low, and moves like water. She speaks softly but her words have a force in them which penetrate the smoke and the popping of the fire; they ring clear through the cold air and darkness of this place. I feel solid standing here, not afraid, and unburdened for the first time in years which surprises me.
As she speaks, I understand instantly why the residents of New Block Park reverence her, listen to her, obey her decisions as law. But she is not Moses, not a lawgiver bearing commandments down from the mount. No! She is a poet, a muse perhaps, like Polyhymnia—the muse of sacred song and oratory. No matter what she says, how mundane the topic, it sounds like Truth. George did not describe her well enough; he only said she was cool and smart and that I would like her. I cannot say for sure what it is about her that is so appealing, so comforting, but cool as a description just doesn’t cut it.
Apparently, there is a grocery store called Tidy-Mart, the parking lot of which the residents of Teeny Mae’s camp have been allowed, for a couple of years now, to sweep and weed and generally maintain its appearance in exchange for pulled stock which the grocery manager would otherwise throw away.
I lean down toward George who cups his hand to my ear and, in a hoarse whisper, fills me in on the details. From what George says, another camp has recently begun sending residents to detail the same parking lot, thus causing tonight’s Tidy-Mart firestorm of oaths and threats of confrontation and “war” by the likes of Rusty, among others.
But Teeny Mae will not hear of it. Instead, she talks of love and sacrifice and admonishes her flock to “Remember Dear Baby Jesus’s way. Luke told us about it in chapter six,” she says. Now, her voice changes and becomes quiet, haunting. It acquires an intimate quality as if she is sitting alone in the cold and firelight of the camp, and speaks not to us but to herself or God because we all have become trees, like those around us. She looks up at the black sky, and quotes the scripture by heart:
“And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.”
She pauses for a long moment.
“That’s what precious Jesus said, children. I didn’t say it. He said it. But what he said is right. We are all children of God: us, them, everyone! And so if they be his children too, then that makes them our brothers and sisters—our kin. Hunger does not change kinship. In fact, hunger makes kinship stronger; they are more our kin because we share the same burden; we understand their suffering, and they understand ours. Would any of you deny your own brother or sister food if you saw they were starving? No! Oh Jesus, no! I know not one of you would want to see your brother or sister go hungry. You would rather deny yourself food so he or she might eat. Do I have a witness?”
“Amen!” shout several of the campers in unison.
“You would rather deny yourself, why? Because, my children, you are good people. You have good hearts, the best of any I know. So this question has already been settled: we share the parking lot with our sisters and brothers down at River Camp. We have enough tribulation already without a feud among kin. We’ll work this out. Don’t worry. We’ll have Grandfather Ross, from River Camp, up for a visit. Or maybe, we’ll have a camp meetin’ instead and have all our sisters and brothers up, and lay before them a great feast—of grits and cabbage, of course—but a feast of our best grits and cabbage! And work this little problem out. So, children, are we all right now?”
“Amen!” shout the campers, Rusty among them. “We’re all right,” shouts someone.
“Yes, we’re all right,” says Teeny Mae. “That’s all I had. So let’s rejoice.”
Without delay, the musicians strike up a reel or a jig or something of that sort and everyone erupts in boisterous conversation. Couples pair up and begin dancing to the music around the campfire. The younger ones bounce and whirl like tops. The mood is one of gayety and celebration. There is no lingering animosity, no grumbling about Teeny Mae’s decision, no further debate. We are caught up in a joy that seems irrational to me.
“Come on,” says George. “You can meet Granny, now.”
Copyright © 2023 by Dale Tucker All rights reserved.
