“Sure why not?”
They hopped out of either side of Mr. Ed and met in the back of the hearse. Ham threw open the back door. They both stared inside, then turned toward each other and began laughing. There was a mattress with a fitted sheet in the back of the hearse. A thick, neatly folded blanket sat in the middle of the mattress. Ham recognized it as one Uncle Carl had purchased on the Cherokee reservation years ago.
“Did you put this in here, Thomas Hamilton MacPherson? Pretty presumptuous of you!” Nora demanded, trying to feign an indignant tone.
“No, I promise I didn’t,” Ham said. “It must have been Uncle Carl.”
“What did your Uncle Carl think we were goin’ to do?”
“I’m sure it warn’t for us, Nora. You know, Uncle Carl’ll sleep off a drunk spell in his car. He probably put this back here for him next time that happens.” Ham tried to sound convincing, but he certainly wasn’t sure what Uncle Carl was thinking. He did remember his wink and his words, “Nora’s gonna love it.”
“Aren’t you just dying to try it out, Nora?”
Nora giggled and took Ham by the hand and led him onto on the mattress. They shut the door to the hearse. There wasn’t much vertical room, Ham thought. Nobody was expected to sit up in the back of a hearse. But he decided there was plenty of horizontal room, and the mattress was soft. He covered them with the blanket. The Staple Singers continued to sing. By the time they got to the seventh song on the tape, Ham and Nora had reached “home.” Ham had hit his head on the hearse’s ceiling more than once, but now they were lying close together, arms and legs entangled listening to the melodic instrumentals of “After Sex.”
“I love you, Nora.”
“I love you, too, Ham, but we shouldn’t of done that.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Of course not, but we can’t do that again til we’re married, okay Ham?”
“Okay, Nora.” The tape ended with “Chase.” Ham listened to Nora’s steady, rhythmic breathing, and his mind wandered. He thought about the warning his baseball coach gave the day before every game. “Don’t have sex, tonight, boys,” he said, “it’ll mess you up.” Since Ham wasn’t having sex, he didn’t pay much attention. What was it Coach Maynard said after that. You’ll lose your edge? You’ll lose your legs? Ham couldn’t remember. But Opening Day wasn’t until the following Friday, so he thought he surely would recover by then. He was scheduled to be the Opening Day starting pitcher.
Then he thought about Miss Turnage’s English class. She recently introduced the class to “Freudian psychoanalytic” ways of reading literature. Best Ham could make out, psychoanalytic readings were all about sex and death. Wonder what a psychoanalytic critic would make of him and Nora having sex in the back of a hearse? “That’s what literary critics would call ‘irony,’” he could hear Miss Turnage saying. Kinda like dying of a heart attack in a whorehouse, he mused.
They slept soundly for a couple of hours; to a casual observer they might have passed for corpses. At 3:00 a.m. they both awoke abruptly.
“We gotta go home, Ham.” They put their clothes on and got back into the front seat of Mr. Ed.
By now the Staple Singers’ eight track had looped back around back, and they began again singing seductively, “Let’s do it again.”
“Turn that off, Ham!”
“Sorry Nora.” Neither of them had been prepared for tonight; “good” Southern guys and gals seldom were.
Chapter 2
Ham slept through Sunday school. He didn’t drop Nora at home until 3:30 a.m. But he knew Nora would be at Sunday school and church because she loved to go. Ham dragged himself out of bed, showered, and ate a bowl of cereal. He could hear his father snoring in the master bedroom. His mother, Nina, had left with his younger siblings Diane and Michael Allen over an hour ago; she taught the elementary age girls’ Sunday school class every week. Ham walked outside toward the Studebaker and remembered it wouldn’t start. He thought about taking the hearse to church but knew his mother would be mortified. Looking at the hearse, however, reminded him that maybe he needed to do something with the now soiled fitted sheet in the back of the hearse. He thought about washing it but was afraid his mother would ask about it. So he just crumpled it up and threw it in the very back of the hearse and figured Uncle Carl would deal with it and not ask any questions. He got into the farm truck and drove to the Second Little Rock Baptist Church. Ham was a few minutes late for the service and slipped in on the back row next to JC where they always sat. JC MacPherson had been Ham’s best friend since they were eight years old. They were not related, so far as anyone knew, but folk called them the “MacPherson twins” nevertheless. Ham was white; JC was black.
The services on that Sunday were like most every other Sunday since Second Baptist Church and Little Rock Baptist Church had merged—blacks and whites worshipping together. The church had co-pastors: Brother Bob Sechrest, who had led the two congregations to merge a decade earlier, and Brother Matthew Zimmerman, a young African American preacher. During Brother Matthew’s prayer, Ham furtively scanned the congregation trying to locate Nora. She was with her family on the second row. Almost as though she felt his eyes on her, she glanced back over her shoulder, smiled shyly and gave a little wave. Ham smiled back and blew her a silent kiss, hoping nobody else’s eyes were open during the prayer. He would see her that afternoon; they needed to talk. The choir sang a rousing version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and it was time for the sermon.
That Sunday there was a guest preacher, a fellow named Martin England who had been a missionary to Burma and was, along with Brother Bob, another white minister who was active in the Civil Rights movement. In his introduction, Brother Bob said Rev. England was also good friends with Clarence Jordan, co-founder of Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, whom Brother Bob often spoke of. He told the congregation Rev. England had convinced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to buy a life insurance policy just weeks before he was assassinated, and that money had helped his family in a very difficult time. Dr. King had given his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to Martin England to make sure it was released to the public, which, of course, everyone knew it was. At that, some of the congregants said, “Well!” “Thank you Jesus!” “All right now!” Brother Bob ended by saying Rev. England was one of the most unassuming and humble persons he’d ever met, and he was honored to share the pulpit with him.
Rev. England stepped to the pulpit. He was a small man of medium build, black hair, and piercing black eyes. He thanked Brother Bob for the warm welcome, and said self-effacingly with regard to the Birmingham letter that he’d “just been in the right place at the right time.” He also said Brother Bob had been a good friend since they met during their time as Civil Rights activists.
“Your pastor was there for the Freedom Rides that Ella Baker organized in Raleigh, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. Blacks and whites rode Greyhound buses together to challenge segregation on the buses and in the bus stations. Brother Bob worked closely with Durham activist and attorney, Floyd McKissick, and he participated in the successful campaign against the segregationist policies of Howard Johnson restaurants. Your congregation is a beacon on a hill for so many of us in the South.”
Rev. England then read the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10, closed his Bible, and said, “That is the question today, brothers and sisters, ‘Who is my neighbor?’” Then he told this story:
