The Mothers(76)

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IN THE BEGINNING, there was the word, and the word brought about the end.

The news spread in only two days, thanks to Betty. She would later tell us that she had not meant to cause any harm. Yes, she had leaked personal, private information but that was only because she hadn’t realized it was so personal and private. She had just been going about her business one morning, unlocking the doors around the church, when she’d heard loud voices in the pastor’s office. Of course she’d gone to check on what was happening. Wasn’t that her duty? What if the pastor had needed help? Crazier things had happened. She’d read in USA Today about a minister in Tennessee who had been stabbed by a crazy congregant. And she’d seen a segment on 60 Minutes about a church in Cleveland that had been robbed by a few hoodlums who had suspiciously known exactly where the tithes were kept. When we asked what exactly she aimed to do if the pastor had, in fact, been held at knifepoint in his office, she had dismissed us with a wave and insisted we let her return to her story. So she had gone to investigate the loud voices, and when she’d drawn near, she had peeked around the corner through the crack in the pastor’s door and guess who she’d seen inside?

“Robert Turner,” she whispered across the bingo table. “Yellin’ and carryin’ on. He called Pastor an S.O.B.—can you believe it?”

Of course we couldn’t, which was why Betty looked so delighted to tell us. We could hardly imagine Robert even getting angry, let alone swearing at the pastor in his own office.

“For what?” Hattie asked.

“I don’t know,” Betty said, but her slow smile told us she had a good idea. “But his daughter was there and Robert kept saying ‘she was just a girl’ and the pastor said he was just helping the girl but Robert said she’s his child, it’s no one’s place to be helping her with nothin’.” She paused. “Y’all know what I think? I think there were a baby and now there ain’t one.”

We were disgusted but not shocked. You read about it in the papers every day, girls getting rid of their babies. Weren’t nothing new about it. When we were coming up, we all had a girlfriend or a cousin or a sister who had been sent off to live with an aunty when her shamed mother learned that she was in a family way. Some of our own mothers had taken these girls in and we’d peeped them changing through cracks in the door. We’d seen pregnant women before but pregnancy worn on a girl’s body was different, the globe of a belly hanging over cotton panties embroidered with tiny pink bows. For years, we’d flinched when boys touched us, afraid that even a hand on our thigh would invite that thing upon us. But if we had become sent-off girls, we would have borne it like they did, returning home mothers. The white girls ended up in trouble as often as us colored girls. But at least we had the decency to keep our troubles.

“Y’all think—”

“Of course.”

“Lord have mercy.”

“Y’all think Latrice know?”

“Is there anything around here she don’t know?”

The Turner girl and her unwanted baby. For days, we could think of nothing else, and although we’d promised to keep the secret amongst ourselves, the truth trickled out anyway. Later, we would blame each other even though we never determined who’d been the first one to run her mouth. Was it Betty, who’d loved the attention so much when she shared the story that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from giving a repeat performance to someone else? Or Hattie, maybe, who had shared a ride home with Sister Willis, a woman who couldn’t, as we all knew, hold water? Or maybe someone had just overheard us at bingo and the story had spawned from there. We were all guilty in a way, which meant that none of us were guilty and all of us were surprised that next Sunday, when Magdalena Price walked out of service right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon. The pastor glanced up, watching her go, and stuttered for a moment, like he’d lost his place. He was preaching on overcoming fear, a sermon that we’d heard him deliver dozens of times. What could he have said to offend her? Then that Wednesday, during midweek Bible study, we heard Third John tell Brother Winston that the pastor had paid Nadia Turner five thousand dollars to not have that baby, how else do you think she was able to go off to that big school? In Upper Room’s imaginings, the girl grew younger, the check larger, the pastor’s motives darker. He’d paid her to kill her child because he’d been afraid that the pregnancy would hurt his ministry or maybe he just didn’t want his kin mixing with Turner stock. Remember how crazy her mama was? Remember, as if any of us could ever forget.

Then the reporter came. A white boy fresh out of college, wearing melon-colored pants and a blond ponytail. We didn’t take him seriously at first, melon pants and all, until he told us that he’d heard that our pastor had paid off a pregnant girl, a minor too, and did we care to comment? He stood on our front steps in a wide stance, pen above his notepad, the way policemen always stand, a hand near their holster, as if to remind you they could take your life anytime they wanted. We told him we didn’t know nothing. He sighed, flipping that notepad shut.

“I figured wise women such as yourselves would want to know what your pastor’s been up to,” he said.

We wanted to chase him off those steps with a broom. Get! Get out our house! Who was he to poke around, turning up our rugs? Who was he to tell our stories? But he wrote it up anyway. One of the photographers had an aunty who went to Upper Room and was willing to talk. Some folks will say anything just to see their name in print. At that point, it didn’t much matter if his story was true. The earthquake came, the one we’d been expecting over the years. New members dried up. Old members stopped coming. Pastors around the city turned down invitations to visit and stopped inviting Pastor to their churches. Some days, Betty said, she sat in the pastor’s office with nothing to do, no schedule to fill, no appointments to make.