A few years earlier, the loss of that church’s holy spirit was gossiped about all over the Black community of South Central LA. The minister, a man named Kearn, Samuel Arthur Bethune Kearn, and his wife, Lillian Kearn, née Renquist, had overseen the church and its congregation for six years. The head deacon was Fallon Potts, from Mississippi somewhere. Fallon’s wife was named Beatrice. Beatrice was a beauty and very sensual, the kind of woman that men would brag they could not resist.
Reverend Kearn, it was said, had a powerful voice and a deep understanding of the Bible and other religious texts. He worked closely with Deacon Potts and therefore spent some time with his wife.
The years passed and everything seemed to be fine. That is, until the minister invited Reverend Gregory Simms to take his place while he and his wife took a well-deserved two-week holiday to Jordan, where they planned to float on the Red Sea.
During that time Reverend Simms gave a powerful sermon about fealty, monogamy, and fidelity in marriage. It must have been a potent sermon indeed, because Beatrice Potts felt the Spirit enter her, and it would not rest until she had confessed to the open congregation about her many years of sin with Reverend Kearn.
Fallon and Beatrice Potts met every day for ten days with the visiting minister. They prayed together and read the Bible together. Gregory Simms talked to them about forgiveness being the closest any mortal could come to godliness. Toward the end of these ministerial meetings, Fallon and Beatrice had renewed their marital vows and could be seen going everywhere, hand in hand.
The sin, the confession, and then the revelation of the words of the Lord seemed to prove that faith could overcome any human problem.
Everything had worked out so well that Deacon Potts volunteered to meet the Kearns’ flight back from the Middle East. He shot the minister right there at the gate and then turned the gun on himself.
The night before, Fallon Potts was at peace with going to meet Reverend Kearn. He planned to forgive the minister at the gate. But that night an evil thought crept its way into the deacon’s mind. Finally, he confronted Beatrice, asking her if their children were his or Kearn’s. Beatrice was absolutely sure about two out of three of the progeny.
SO MUCH SIN — that was the headline of the Los Angeles Sentinel, LA’s largest Black newspaper. The cheating wife and minister, the murder and suicide, marked the Church of the Savior with the sign of Cain.
The congregation drifted away, seeking places of worship that were free of sin. No other church wanted to take over the building. So the BFNE bought it for a song.
I called up the number of the new West Coast headquarters of the runaway slave social club.
“Hello?” a man with a boy’s voice answered.
“Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Ezekiel Rawlins and I’d like to come by and talk to a man named Santangelo Burris.”
“I’ve never heard that name before, sir,” the man-boy said. “But maybe our membership office would know who that is.”
“May I speak to someone in membership?”
“You can when they’re here,” he said. “But we’re closed right now. Daily hours are from eight a.m. till six p.m. And Mr. Lorn won’t be in his office till day after tomorrow. He only works three days a week.”
13
The sun had gone down, and a deep shadow settled across Los Angeles — a kind of darkness that only the desert sky or the heavens above the ocean many miles away from shore could approximate. Almost total blackness blanketed each moonless night of the city I called home.
It was time to drive southeast again, all the way to Compton once more. The drive was shorter, but that heavy curtain of night made the journey feel longer.
Mama Jo lived in one of the last bastions of wilderness out there. It was a large tract of land that was buggy and overrun by an acres-deep thicket of lively and durable bamboo. It was a dense cane forest that was nearly impassable unless you knew the secret paths that Jo had carved into it. The slender shoots of rattan were over eight feet tall, and they resisted all attempts at exploration with fibrous tenacity.
Mama Jo had set up a false wall of bamboo at an isolated border of this unrelenting grove. If you knew where to go, and Jo was willing to remove the camouflage screen, you might could slide your car into a secret cove she maintained back there, hidden from the world.
At that time Jo kept a trio of pet wolves that dissuaded those more intrepid explorers who wanted to investigate her wastelands. The whole area looked abandoned and wild, but one of Jo’s patients, a man she’d saved from a death the doctors promised was coming soon, had bought the collection of lots and signed them over to her.
I stopped at a gas station a few miles away from the hidden entrance and made me a call.
He answered after maybe a dozen rings, “Who is this?”
“It’s Easy. I’m ten minutes away from her.”
The man who answered hung up and I went back to my car. I’d never met the sentinel whose number I called. I didn’t know his name. All I knew was, if I dialed his number, he would somehow get a message to Jo, one of my oldest friends and mentors.
By the time I got to the bamboo scrim, it had been pulled away, revealing the car-wide path that went maybe thirty feet before coming to a clearing. I drove the route, parked, and by the time I got out of the car, she was there.
Mama Jo was tall, her skin the matte hue of finished wire-brushed onyx. She was dressed in a simple frock that was designed for hard work without denying femininity. Jo looked ageless but I knew that she was at least seventy years old. She was my height, had been even taller in her youth, and she was strong of mind and of sinew. Her face was handsome or beautiful, the ideal of any race, human or not.
“Easy,” she greeted, and she kissed me on the lips like a mother or a lover or an innocent child.
“You lookin’ good, Jo.”
She smiled and said, “You lookin’ for Jesus and them?”
“You got ’em out here?” I asked.
Nodding, she said, “In a little cabin out behind my place. I’ll show you.”
Leading down a footpath through the thick brush, she marched maybe twenty paces before the wolves joined us. They were gray wolves, about a hundred pounds apiece. When they neared me, my heartbeat increased. I don’t know if this was from excitement or fear. These were wild animals loyal to one another and to Mama Jo. If she had wanted to, she could have had them kill me right then.
We skirted Jo’s grass-covered hut and went in a direction that was unfamiliar to me. The center of Jo’s property was inhabited by huge oaks that hid the buildings she maintained.
The wolves left us and at last we came to an aluminum hut that I’d not seen before.
“They’re there,” Jo told me. “You know the way back to your car.”
“The wolves won’t mind me walking alone out here?”
“Not unless you mess wit’ ’em.”
I walked up to the door of the metal shelter and knocked.
“I’ll get it,” I heard a child shout. A child I knew well.
“No!” a woman cried.
But it was too late. The door swung open and little Essie looked up at me and smiled, saying, “Hi, Granddad.”
Hefting little Essie up in my arms, I walked into the odd-shaped room to see Jesus and Benita, the former with a pistol in his hand and his wife holding a silvery knife that had a five-inch double-edged blade.
“Hey,” I greeted. “How you all doin’?”
“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said on a relieved sigh.