Madison Park by Eric L. Motley

Author:Eric L. Motley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

One of the greatest, yet most obvious, gifts the people of Madison Park gave me was transportation. Part of the ethos of Madison Park was that no one went alone to community events. With relatively few cars and drivers, everyone almost always took someone to church meetings, picnics, voting rallies, garden shows, backyard barbecues, weddings, birthday parties, and baby showers. Mrs. Olla, Madison Park’s wealthiest citizen, used to say that if you bought a small car, “it was a sign of selfishness; a way of looking out only for oneself and family.”

As customary as it was to ferry friends from place to place, it was as great a gift to me as anything else Madison Park bestowed on me. I’m certain that I would have been put at a disadvantage had the friends, neighbors, and friends of friends not been willing to take me to the interesting and educational activities that took place in Montgomery. As I got older and learned to drive, this was one investment I was able to repay. And the most immediate and costly repayment, in time and patience, was to drive Mama and her friends to funerals.

Funerals weren’t like our weddings. Instead of mailing individual wedding invitations, one was delivered by hand to the church secretary, who read it aloud during the announcements on Sunday, inviting all within earshot—and all attended. It was a sign of your family’s good standing in the community to have a full church on your wedding day. Yet when someone died, too often, folks were memorialized with the church sparsely filled. Mrs. Sara Pearl, one of my former tutors and piano teacher, would say, “It’s an awful thing to be all alone on your last day on earth, even if you’re lying in a casket.”

Mama and her good friends came to attach great importance to funerals. They’d wake up in the morning, call each other to assure themselves that they were all accounted for, eat breakfast, and then study the obituaries in the Montgomery Advertiser. There wasn’t one in Madison Park that they didn’t attend.

Of Mama’s friends, only Mrs. Bea Davis and Aunt Prince Ella drove, which made them the designated drivers for all church-related and community events, that is, until I got my driver’s license at sixteen (although Daddy taught me how to drive at thirteen by sitting in his lap and driving up and down abandoned dirt roads). I became the official chauffeur, and I took great delight in driving Aunt Prince Ella’s large, cream-colored Chrysler—it was one of the finest cars in Madison Park, and I’d admired it since I was little.

Aunt Prince Ella had moved me to the front seat years before so I could read road signs to her. Speeding down I-65 South to Greenville, Alabama, she’d call out, “Look, Motley, there’s a sign—a green sign coming up on your right. What does it say? Read it for me.”

My head poking out of the window, I’d scream back, “It says Greenville, 25 Miles!”

“Okay. Thank you, Motley, but here comes another sign.

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