Sweet Everlasting

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they wanted for you, and maybe why they done some things you always thought was wrong. He said he didn't think he'd ever really seen his own daddy for the man he was till his own baby was born. I didn't say nothing. After a while Pete got tired, I reckon, and he went on to bed, and I did too. But I laid there a long time and couldn't sleep. I got up and went out on the porch and sat there. The family across the street was wide awake too. They had all the lights on and the windows open, and I could hear the television and them yellingover it. I heard a girl'svoice scream at somebody , "I wish you were dead." And then I heard a man's voice, 'Til teach you," and then the sound of scuffling, and a scraping, like furniture being moved, and then I couldn't stay out there no longer. I went back in the house and closed the door to my room, and I couldn't hear them from there, but by then it didn't matter. 20 That last summer there was a revival at our church, and they brought in this evangelist from over around Savannah somewhere , and all he wanted to preach on was race mixing and how the Bible said real clear it was wrong. He pulled out the old story of Noah and Ham and how God made the children of Ham the servants of everybody else for the rest of time. The story wasn't nothing new to me. I'd heard lots of folks tell it, including my daddy, explaining why there was a line between black and white you couldn't cross, but I always thought it was a mighty peculiar story. Noah goes and gets drunk and passes out, and then his son Ham wanders in and sees him layingthere without no clothes, and that's the reason he's supposed to have been i58 cursed, him and all his children and grandchildren and so on7 forever. I just never could imagine God being that touchy. And I had decided that a lot of them old verses—mostly the ones back near the beginning of the Bible—they didn't need to be paid too much attention to. Like where it says you ain't supposed to eat catfish, that kind of thing. It seemed to me the separation between black folks and white folks was just something natural, and I believe my daddy felt that way too, mostly. He'd tell the Bible version, but then he'd follow it up by pointing out how animals keep to their own kind—how you don't see sparrows and bluejays setting up house. Like I said before, Otis Cutts was my daddy's best friend, but you didn't see the two of them sitting down at the table together, or going to the same church, or sending their children to the same school. It wasn't natural, Daddy said. Said folks like Otis understood that too. There was a line. When that evangelist come to Red Oak, we only went to hear him the first night of the revival, even though it lasted all week and there was children from the church going all over, doing what they called pew-packing—trying to round up folks to sit in their pew. If they filled it up, they won a prize. Walking home that first night, I told Susan I wasn't going back. "I can't put up with that foolishness" is what I told her, and we just walked on and never did talk about what I meant. It wasn't all the talk about Ham and race mixing that I couldn't stand —I had my own ideas about that—but the waythe evangelist acted. I believed that folks get the call; that they don't just up and decide they want to be a preacher and then go to it. And it seemed to me that evangelist liked being up on the stage too much, and that he didn't have no business preaching. *59 It was almost like he was up there making fun of preachers too, the way he dressed and carried on, wearing that white suit with a red necktie and a big red handkerchief sticking out of...