Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West

Author:Catherine Adel West [Catherine Adel West]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2020-04-09T16:16:44+00:00

CHAPTER 9

JACKSON

FIVE DAYS BEFORE ALICE KING’S DEATH

These walls close in on me after church ends, when the Benediction is delivered, hands are shaken, hugs and parting words spoken. As the congregation slowly filters outside, I gather myself alone in an office once occupied by my grandfather, Andrew Morrison, and for a very brief time, my father, Thomas Potter. The books and shelves, framed pictures and degrees, I find it suffocating. Its history and expectation alone could be crushing. The unyielding guilt inside of my heart at my inability to stop it. I never wanted this office, this title Pastor.

I know the weight of it. I saw how it aged my father in the short time he stood behind the pulpit where I now plant my feet Sunday after Sunday.

Mom knew how to carefully navigate the city, its invisible rules, and somehow keep her dignity. I remember going with her once to the Chicago Theatre. The ticket taker was smiling, handing each ticket to each white patron, but flung it at Mom when it was our turn. She promptly turned around and left the tickets. She took us for ice cream instead.

Mom and Dad witnessed Chicago at it’s very worst, boiling with hate. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. Our hopes for self-sustaining pride or peaceful resolution bled out on the wood floors of the Audubon Ballroom and the concrete balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Civil rights leaders, a president and his brother were bloodied and murdered before television screens. America was on fire.

I asked Dad once, it happened to be the week before he died, why he did any of it. Why serve when it doesn’t make a difference, to congregants who’ll constantly let you down, who don’t see the burdens you bear on their behalf day in and day out? And, my dad, deep thought creasing his skin of burnt umber, answered, “God does it all the time for us, son. And I guess it’s about courage, too. The courage to love despite loss of any kind. If you can’t see anything good in yourself or the world right now, see that part. See courage. That will guide you like it guides me.”

Knocking on the door interrupts my thoughts. Alice King rushes past the threshold, a manila folder clutched in her hands. She normally waits for permission to enter. She normally waits for permission to do most everything.

“Pastor, I know I’m disturbing you and I greatly apologize, but it’s important. It’s Lebanon.”

“Yes?”

“You know, I’ve been doing the accounting for the church. Making sure everything is correct, orderly, honest.”

“You do a wonderful job, Alice. Couldn’t ask—”

“No. No I don’t.”

Alice sits down across from me, wringing her hands. “I’ve stolen, from the church, for Lebanon…so he could keep up payments for the bakery, to pay it off. The mortgage payment is due on Thursday.”

The folder now meekly lies on my desk, thick with papers, ones and zeroes, facts and figures, ripe with the possibility of sending Lebanon, and Alice, to jail for God knows how long.

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