More Church Folk by Michele Andrea Bowen

Author:Michele Andrea Bowen [BOWEN, MICHELE ANDREA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780446569576
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2010-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Cleotis was tired and frustrated. They were running into trouble, snags, and setbacks at every turn. Every time he felt he had made two steps of progress, something popped up, and he ended up taking four steps back past the first two steps. Frustrating. Nerve-racking.

If the frustration of this week was not enough, Cleotis now had to deal with the competition coming from Eddie Tate’s booth. The Tate campaign was packing church folk up in that booth with ice cream—ice cream. How in the world could ice cream compete with what was at their booth?

But Cleotis knew why. He’d sneaked and tried that ice cream. It was so good it would make you want to hop up and slap somebody. Plus, many of the delegates liked Rev. Tate and the folks on his campaign team. Unfortunately, a lot of folk had issues with Sonny Washington and Marcel Brown. And they preferred socializing at another campaign booth—unless, of course, they had enough of something good to counteract that.

This was going to be a long week. At least Cleotis hadn’t had to be worried with all of these preachers in a cramped-up campaign booth when they were in Richmond back in ’63. Heck, on some days he hadn’t had to be bothered with anybody. He could get lost in one of the rooms with the bodies in the funeral home, and be confident that nobody was going to follow him there.

But that was not the case this time. Cleotis hoped that they would get this operation right. Because right now he felt he was coming close to wasting his time. And after time in prison, time was very precious to Cleotis Clayton.

Every single time he got tangled up with Bishop Larsen Giles, Ernest Brown, Marcel Brown, and Sonny Washington, something funky went down. And Cleotis had said as much to his cousin, Glodean, when she complained that he was not supportive enough of her husband’s campaign.

Glodean was right, too. Cleotis wasn’t supportive enough because that would require something akin to caring about Sonny, this campaign, and Sonny’s being a bishop. And since Cleotis didn’t care about any of that, he wasn’t supportive enough of his cousin’s husband’s cause.

Glodean and Cleotis had fought like cats and dogs since they were little bitty things. And they still fought with each other many decades later. Glodean thought Cleotis was a spoiled ne’er-do-well. Cleotis thought his cousin was bratty and had an overinflated opinion of herself. Both were right in their assessments of each other.

Cleotis flushed the toilet and washed his hands. He had ignored the phone the first two times it rang off the hook. He had only been back in his hotel room for ten minutes. But it occurred to him that it might be something he needed to attend to—especially since the person wouldn’t stop calling him. It could be Big Dotsy with some good news about making more WP21. He snatched the phone up, and then rolled his eyes the moment Glodean’s voice came through the receiver.

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