Home Fires by Margaret Maron

Author:Margaret Maron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, checked, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780892966554
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 1994-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

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

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