Whew!
As I was working on the farm—with sweat dripping off my nose—I wondered, “Has it ever been this hot?”
And then I remembered.
Summer of 1957.
Baker County, Georgia.
Pilgrims Home Free Will Baptist Church.
But first, how did my great-grandparents’ church get that name?
My mother’s grandparents, Ezra and Susie McNeal, along with their children, rattled into Southwest Georgia in a mule-drawn wagon around 1910. They came east from Alabama because they had heard schools were better on this side of the Chattahoochee.
But as they rolled through the countryside, children ran alongside the clattering spectacle, shouting, “Are y’all gypsies?” Ten-year-old Essie McNeal, my grandmother, teared up and asked, “Mamma, are we gypsies?” Ma McNeal, in a soothing voice, said, “No, honey. We aren’t gypsies. We are pilgrims headed to ‘Jawja.’”
As soon as they got settled, the McNeals helped organize the Pilgrims Home Free Will Baptist Church. And that’s where I was sitting 45 years later, wedged between my grandmother (Nanny) and her baby brother, my Great-Uncle Bud, in what seemed like a puddle of perspiration.
The only heat relief was cardboard stapled on a stick with a picture of The Last Supper on one side and Bramblett Funeral Home’s ad on the other. I was flapping the gnat knocker so hard that Uncle Bud whispered, “Slow down, bubba, you are going to sling Jesus and His disciples off that fan.”
“But Uncle Bud, I am dying. My throat is parched.”
He offered me a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. I shook my head and mouthed, “Water. I need water.”
That’s when Uncle Bud pointed at the preacher’s pitcher of water on the side shelf of the pulpit. With a nudge, he said, “Go get you a drink.”
The congregation wasn’t even singing “Just as I Am,” but I hit the aisle.
When I looked back at Uncle Bud, he nodded, and I climbed up on the rostrum. When I tugged on Brother Cattret’s coattail, the preacher paused his fire-and-brimstone sermon in mid-sentence.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, sir, I sure would like some of your water.”
He poured me a glass.
And I said, “thank you.”
As I was gulping down the water, I got a glimpse of Nanny. She didn’t know what a laser beam was, but her white-hot stare made me sweat even more.
The ride home in the cab of her baby-blue Ford F-100 pickup was graveyard-quiet. When we turned off Hwy. 91, the truck coasted to the front-yard gate. As I grabbed for the door handle to escape, Nanny caught my arm.
“Don’t come in until you go out back and cut a switch from the peach tree.”
“Yes, ’um.”
I might add that Nanny could curl the bark on a chinaberry tree with her sharp tongue. Looking back, I guess the Lord gave her some sway, considering the burdens of a dead-too-soon husband and a cotton-bale-of-farm debt on her weary back.
Remember, this was 1957.
Nanny was a God-fearing, when-the-doors-open regular at Pilgrims Home. As loving as she could be, she was also a staunch believer in “spare the rod and spoil the child.”
When I handed her the switch, Nanny hoisted the flimsy peach branch toward Heaven and grabbed a handful of the back of my J.C. Penney’s T-shirt. Lifting me up, she thundered, “You can give your heart to Jesus, but your ‘a double s’ is mine!”
Oh, sweet Jesus.
If I could have gotten my hands on another glass of Brother Cattret’s ice water, I wouldn’t have drunk it.
I would have tried to sit in it.
