Walking Into Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church

Another Sunday morning at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Piedmont, South Carolina, twenty minutes before ten o’clock and the musicians are already playing between Sunday school and church. They have the windows rattling. The sun, at forty-five degrees, reveals shafts of blinking dust through the clear top part of the windows. The bottom windows were frosted at the factory. Stained glass was for richer, more ritualistic churches in town.

                  

Our Black and Red 56 Plymouth sits among Fords, Chevys, Buicks and other Plymouths. It’s 1963, the early part, still Camelot. Grandpa just opened granny’s door and he’s helping her out of the car. We see them and then they see us. Granny was smiling, although getting out of the car was not easy at her size. She was not tall, not even five feet, but she tipped the scales way over two hundred pounds. As the years went by, she would get even bigger, until real late in life she would lose some and then her whole body would be covered with chicken-neck skin.

                 

Mama’s purse, the size of a small suitcase, had lifesavers and other mysteries, so I walked with her and whispered for one. She walked toward the church with us, digging. I could never help myself by running my hand down in mama’s purse. She always told me, “Never get in a woman’s purse.” My guess is it had something to do with feminine hygiene products.

                  

“What are you digging for Joyce?” Grandpa asked in his wry way.

                  

“Michael wants a lifesaver, and he decides to ask me right now as we are walking in to the church. He couldn’t have asked me when we were still in the car you know,” mama said, making me look bad to Grandpa for wanting a lifesaver.

                  

“Here, I have a pack right here in my pocket, and the lord knows it’s not nearly as big as that feed sack you’re carrying,” Grandpa said, holding out his lifesavers.

                  

Grandpa Spearman reached me a lifesaver with his tan-leathered hand. I didn’t wait for the usual, “What do you say”. I said thanks pretty loud. Grandpa patted me on the head. I’m certain I took both the candy and the pat for granted. If I could go back there now, I would reach up and grab his hand and dwell on how it was like a baseball glove. I might pretend like a fortune teller and read his palm, trying to figure how long he would be with us. It turns out he would be with us only about nine more years, an eternity to a child my age, but what I now know to be a blink of the eye.

                  
The song coming down the aisle, out through the vestibule and then to where we were on the outside of the blond wood double doors, was, The Eastern Gate. All the instruments the church had to throw at the music were involved, a banjo, three kinds of guitars, a piano, an organ, a harmonica, a tambourine and a set of drums. They held nothing back. They flaunted musical machines the way the Church of Christ avoided them. Sometimes during morning worship service, when the weather was warm and the windows raised, you could see people sitting in their cars on the side of the road with their windows rolled down, smoking cigarettes and listening to the old-time gospel music.

                  

Daddy had fallen in stride with Junior Bryant, Frankie Bryant’s daddy. Frankie was the one playing the piano we were walking in to. This would have been the same Junior Bryant that usually played the guitar and two harmonicas at the same time, one with his nose and one with his mouth. It was also the same man that would, twenty-five years later, expose himself to granny Spearman, in the choir loft of another church. Granny told me about it and almost cried, because she felt so sorry for Junior, who had obviously lost his mind. Junior Bryant was not in the band playing yet, because his wife was sick at home and he had come just for worship service.

                  

The screen door slapped together as Cathy reached out to get it. She was always the first one in the church. She wanted to get with her friends and sit. I suppose it would have killed her to have to sit with her family. They let her get away with sitting somewhere else, but they had to keep an eye on me, so I sat right between mama and daddy. Earl sat on the other side of mama, to keep us separate.

                  

Earl was a toddler in daddy’s arms. Brenda was behind Cathy, trying to get a knot out of her hair. Her face was all twisted up, partly from the sunshine, but partly from the fact that she had both hands behind her head trying to gouge a bobby pin out of her hair, so she could get her brush through the tangle.  Before we got to the front door of the church, she had the tangle out and the bobby pin back in. The brush was in one of her hands. She slipped it in her purse, right before walking into the vestibule. I was glad I was not a girl. They had to mess with their selves way too much, ever time you went anywhere. It never made sense to me. Girls were way prettier than boys, but they usually acted like they were ugly and worked at fixing their hair or face, and the guys who really were ugly, did nothing to look better.

                  

We found seats near the front of the church. Grandpa and Granny sat with me and Earl and mama and daddy. We had not got there in time to get a back seat, but daddy didn’t want a back seat anyway, the way most of the other church families did. Some people would just about fight you over the back few pews. Cathy and Brenda found separate seats in the back with their friends. I had friends, but I couldn’t sit with them. I had cut up too many times in church. Junior Bryant went on up to the stage behind the pulpit stand, picked up his electric guitar and just like that, the Eastern Gate got louder and better.

                  

Everybody was standing around, coming in, milling about, shaking hands, some entering from the back of the church where they had been in Sunday school, walking down off the stage through the musicians, probably a little embarrassed at having to walk in time to the music and therefore almost feeling like they were dancing - a sin. We usually were there for Sunday school too, but on this morning we had woke up in plenty of time but then after mama and daddy had a fuss, she had gone in the bedroom to pout. By the time she was done pouting and we all got dressed, it had been time for Sunday school to be about over. It was nice to finally be in the church, listening to Oak Grove’s band music, instead of mama and daddy arguing over whose fault it was we had missed Sunday school.