- Eulogy for Sister
Married a sometime preacher addicted to silk suits and the chickenfat attentions of christian women who wore unlined pink dresses and hats draped in black netting and were stingy in their smiles mostly reserved for weapons in fierce holy wars, the winners honored to the wretched eternal service of the God/men who seemed always so plentiful yet never sufficient for all the potato salad.
Cancer killed her the certificate said even though for Sister and her preacher-man cancer was no illness but a test of her character meaning she died for lack of faith in the healing hands of her God-man who promised he could petition the Master to save her life if she would but believe in him, and in Him, meaning she died of unbelief, and not of cancer, though she protested her faith shyly into my ear.
She did not want to be healed by doctors when she might conduct a miracle through the hands of her preacher/man, like the five babies she’d birthed she would birth herself a true God/man, a birthing not of her belly yet through the body, spoke to God on it, to be a conduit, to be agency for his uplifting, his coming closer to that higher power, prayed cancer into lightning rods, into the power of God, into the cruel hands of a man.
Maybe she blasphemed to think she would be God’s instrument. Maybe her prayers were not humility but a gross boldness. Maybe she failed to predict God’s heavenly moodiness.
She testified to her faith in healing, but asked me to sing at her funeral : His Eye is on the Sparrow (and I Know He Watches Me) tipping God off that Sister might not deserve the miracle that awaited only the truly faithful as he tuned in that one day and overheard the sparrow-like chirping whispers she blew into my secret ear though she should have known better—you can’t keep a secret from God, and I could not sing her to the grave anyway because it wasn’t protocol proper for mourning. I would get frowns. [End Page 622]
When I was seventeen I believed Sister could have chosen to keep the life she had. When I was thirty-five I believed she wanted to die. When I was a woman of a certain age I knew she prayed for a kind of power transforming. The life she had was not enough to live for, but to shame God and save a man’s soul, to birth a God out of your own death . . . ? so she reached out, she pulled down a lightening hammer and put it in the hands of the man who took her gifted tool of transforming love and sealed her in her coffin, then turned at her graveside to soak his sweaty grief in the bosom of a woman in unlined black dress and black straw hat draped in pink netting wearing nothing on her face but grateful tears.
Oh. sister got bold (didn’t she?) died. changed. (didn’t she?) changed dying (didn’t she, lord. oh, didn’t she . . . ?)
Opal Moore is an associate professor of English at Hollins College in Virginia. She has taught creative writing and literature at Radford University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Iowa, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz, Germany. Her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including African American Review, Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints (Nicholas Karolides, et al, eds.), Obsidian, Ancestral House (Charles H. Rowell, ed.), Black Issues in Higher Education, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Blurred Boundaries (Klaus Stemmed, ed.), American Voices and Callaloo. A native of Chicago, Ms. Moore lives in Roanoke, Virginia.