Fifty people had arrived by seven-thirty. Every person brought food. There was potato salad and macaroni salad. There were sweet potatoes and fried chicken drumsticks. There were meat pies, meatballs, and glazed ribs. There was corn bread, Italian bread, and French bread. There was apple crumble, apple pie, and apple butter. People stood eating and laughing on the porch, the balcony, the front yard, and the sidewalk. Drivers slowed down to look. The people of Oakville had never seen Negroes partying. The food flowed on and on. The men were dressed in suits and ties, the women in dresses, fine gloves and hats, polished shoes, and shining buttons.
Rose gave Aberdeen one of Langston’s jackets. Aberdeen put it on gratefully. He wondered if Rose was with child. She was as slender as a woman could be, and her cheeks were angular and smooth. Even her fingers were long and slim. Her eyes were dancing acorns, alive as a child’s. Her skin was the color of well-creamed coffee. That was why his sister hated Rose so much, he knew. The woman was too fair for her own good. Rennie, who had spent years washing the floors of the wealthy, would naturally hate a black woman who looked almost white and would probably be beautiful until she died.
The Reverend thanked the guests for coming to his house — and for bringing their own food. They laughed, so he played that out a little more. Told them that they were going to have to take the leftovers back home with them or buy Rose a bigger ice box. That was very clever, Ab thought. He lets everyone know that they will survive on church members’ donations, but he doesn’t say it outright.
Aberdeen thought Rose and Langston formed the most striking couple he’d seen in years. Langston was not a tall man. Only about four inches taller than his wife. Five ten, and not an inch more. But upright. Proud. Strong.
“We heard about you having a hard time getting help in the hospital,” someone called out to Langston.
“Yes, but we did get help. We did get in the door, and we did see a doctor, and young Ken Coombs is now recovering there, as I understand it. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Coombs?”
“I thank you for that. You worked a miracle, Reverend,” she said. “That hospital don’t take colored folks.”
“It did today.”
“But it won’t tomorrow.”
“We’ll work on that when the time comes,” said Reverend Cane. “In the meantime, if your child has severe diarrhea, give him plenty of water with a small amount of sugar and salt mixed in. That’s what the doctor told me today.”
“A prayer,” Mrs. Coombs said. “Say a prayer for my boy.”
Fifty heads bowed in the living room. The men and women stood shoulder to shoulder. Langston asked the Heavenly Father to take care of the weak, and the ailing — Ken Coombs and all others — and restore to them the strength due all human beings. “We are here to help each other. Why else do we live? What else could be more noble and more gratifying than to extend a hand to one who needs it?” He followed that up with the Lord’s Prayer, and reassured everybody that he was not going to deliver a sermon to fifty people standing on their feet. “Bless you all.”
They ate and ate. Aberdeen wrapped up some tuna casserole, four chicken thighs, a platter of home fries, a bowl of kidney bean salad, and three servings of bread pudding, and gave it all to Rose. “Put this in your ice box. It will be tomorrow’s dinner.”
“Only if you’ll join us. Langston and I want to talk with you.”
“Can’t say no to that,” Ab said. He spent the rest of the evening playing with Mill. She climbed on his leg. She liked to put her feet on his feet and make him walk her along the ground. She liked to climb up on his back. She made him lie down, and then she lay on his back and told him to try to roll her off. “Have-a-Bean,” she called out as she played with him.
Langston came up to watch the two playing. “She sure loves that man.”
Rose squeezed his hand. “And I sure love this man.”
Two months later, Rose wrote to her parents. She told them about her pregnancy, about Mill, whose relations with Langston were improving, and about Aberdeen Williams, who was a jack-of-all-trades, church sexton, and babysitter all rolled into one. It turned out that Aberdeen had no place to live. He moved from one person’s house to another, and had been unable to find employment after losing his job at the local Marlatt and Armstrong tannery, which had dismissed a quarter of its workers a year earlier. The Canes had a spare room, and they received enough food from the members of the congregation to provide for an extra man. In exchange for room and board, Ab fixed up the parsonage, worked as church sexton, made many meals, ran errands, and took care of Mill.
“But the most fascinating development,” Rose wrote, “has been to witness the transformation of your son-in-law into a local leader. The congregation has grown in size from eighty-five to two hundred. Langston has jumped right into the community. He has taken a number of sick or elderly Negroes to the hospital. Already, some colored folks are going to the hospital on their own account — something none of them did before.
“Our only real conflict is about money. I hate living in someone else’s lodgings. Oakville’s Negro community considers this parsonage to be its home. We are merely the tenants and are to be eternally thankful for this house, which is one quarter the size of your home. I don’t know where we’ll put the little one when he comes along. Langston says we’ll find a way. I’m sure we will. I do love the man. You’d love him, too, Mother — if only he were a few shades less Negro, Catholic rather than Methodist, and of wealthier stock. By your own reckoning, Mother, these are his gravest defects, yet they are all accidents of birth. So please stop trying to get me to leave him. We are together as man and wife, and we shall remain so until the end. “Your loving daughter, Rose.”
Four months after their arrival in Oakville, Langston found a part-time job working in the ice sheds along Sixteen Mile Creek. Four days a week, from nine until two, he helped load blocks of ice onto the horse-drawn carts. After his first week on the job, he complained about his stiff back, sore knees, and aching wrists.
“Ice is hard on a man,” he groaned. “It’s cool in the mouth, lovely in punch, essential to every kitchen. But if you work with it, ice becomes ugly and ungiving. It is nothing but cold, hardened, soulless water. It will yield only to chisel and hammer. I could take out my.45 automatic and fire into a block of ice, and it would barely do any damage. And heavy — Lord Almighty, ice is the heaviest thing going. A fifty-pound block of ice has got to be the most ungodly object in the world.”
Rose said she hated to see Langston wearing himself out in the ice sheds, and that she was fed up with living in the A.M.E. parsonage. She said she had decided to accept her parents’ offer of ten thousand dollars to buy a house in Oakville. She planned to get a nice home on a treed street somewhere east of Sixteen Mile Creek. It would have windows that you could open and shut without the help of a crowbar. And she wanted an electric, ice-free refrigerator. And she was going to buy the house and the fridge before the baby arrived.
“Go ahead, love,” Langston said. “You were going to do it, anyway.”
“True, but it’s nice to have your consent.”
“Now I must ask your consent for something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I plan to enter studies for a master’s in theology at the University of Toronto in the fall. I’ve been working in that ice shed to raise tuition fees.”
“Quit that silly job. Your tuition fees can come out of the house money.”
Aberdeen Williams had never been happier. Rose, who was four months pregnant, was starting to feel uncomfortable. Ab was now called upon four or five times a week to make supper. When Rose cooked, she made sauces, pie shells, and meringues. Aberdeen, on the other hand, made feasts out of leftovers. He made wet hash once a week by frying diced potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and day-old meat loaf. He used tomatoes that gardeners gave him in exchange for fixing broken hinges. The tomatoes had enough juice in them to keep the hash simmering and wet. Aberdeen also made tea biscuits
and corn bread. He didn’t use measuring cups or spoons but dumped flour, baking powder, cornmeal, brown sugar, and cream straight into the mixing bowl. The bread always turned out well. Ab taught young Mill to cut with a knife, pour cream from the jug, and light the oven.
People called on Ab to put in new sinks, lay floors, shingle roofs, install shelves. They rarely paid him, but he didn’t mind. They gave him food, free rides in horse carts and cars, extra clothing, and ice cream. In the summer, he brought home quarts of strawberries every week from people desperate to give him something — anything but money — for his services.
A young, unmarried white woman by the name of Evelyn Morris asked Ab to get her garden in order. She lived with her mother in a small house on Florence Street, and she wanted the entire backyard converted into a vegetable garden. Ab spoke often of Evelyn to Rose. Evelyn had asked for a huge garden to be put in. He helped her install stakes for the green beans and tomatoes.
“Is Evelyn attractive?” Rose asked.
“Not like you.”
“I didn’t ask if she’s like me, silly. Do you like her?”
“She’s white, Rose.”
“I know that, you silly man.”
“I guess I like her. She makes the time go by.”
“Why don’t you invite her over for dinner?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I wouldn’t get bogged down in a lot of thinking, Ab. Men aren’t too good at that. Just do it.” “The Reverend is a thinker.”
“It’s his job to be a thinker. But when he was courting me, he didn’t stop to think. He just dove straight into trouble.”
Ab gave a long, slow laugh. “Good thing he did.”
In August, after Ab had been away from the house for several days, Rose caught up with him, and she asked where he had been.
“In rehearsals for the minstrel show. It raises money for charities. They need some Negroes because of all the Negro parts in the show. Some of the white people get dressed up as Negroes, you know, shoe polish and all that, but they like to have a few real ones, too. It’s a lot of fun. We do it every year. Last year, we raised $130.”
Langston joined them. “A minstrel show in Oakville?”
“We do one every year,” Ab said.
“And you’re taking part?” Langston asked.
“Want to join us?”
“I don’t care for minstrel shows.”
“You’d like this one,” Ab said. “Last year one man laughed so hard he fell off his chair and broke his arm.” “What made him laugh so hard?”
“Some part in which a gardener — this is a white man, dressed up as colored — can’t find his trowel. He can’t find it because he has planted it.”
“Would it have been funny if a colored gardener had dressed up as white, looking for his trowel?”
Ab chuckled. “I don’t think so. It was funny because this colored man couldn’t find it, and thought the trowel had human qualities, and had walked away from him. He was trying to talk to it, shout at it, telling it to come back. A white man, he wouldn’t do that.”
“But a black man would?”
“I see where you’re coming from,” Ab said. “You want me to say that a colored man wouldn’t really have done that either. And that’s true. But still, this scene cracked everybody up. You sort of had to be there.”
Ab continued attending his rehearsals. Occasionally, he teased Langston about it. “Sure you don’t want to come along now, Reverend?”
A week later, Langston engineered a minister’s swap. He would deliver a sermon at Knox Presbyterian Church, and the Presbyterian minister would speak at the A.M.E. Church.
Langston did not believe in fire-from-the-pulpit, revivalist sermons. He believed in the quiet exposition of irrefutable logic. He believed in appealing to the minds of his congregation, rather than reaching them through the lowest common denominator of gospel music and pulpit thumping. His was not a church in which people fainted dead away in the arms of Jesus. His was a style of sober, rational thought — but packaged in rhythm, cadence, and current references to keep his congregation awake. Jesus, he knew, entered not the hearts of sleeping men.
Knox Presbyterian Church was packed on the day of Langston’s guest sermon. The title of his sermon was advertised as “Modern Appliances, Ancient Souls.”
Langston began by observing how rapidly life was changing in the 1920s. “We have cars, and buses, and radios,” he said. “We have the advent of electric refrigerators, electric hair curlers, electric toasters, and electric ovens. Ladies and gentlemen, our entire homes are going electric. As a matter of fact, my wife has informed me that our own marriage will be short-circuited unless we have an electric refrigerator by the end of this month.”
Langston waited for the laughter to subside.
“No need to get into further details about this electricity business. Curling tongs, shaving gadgets, and on it goes. Someday, someone will surely find a way to electrify my toothbrush.”
More laughter.
“If Jesus were here today, he’d say, ‘Step back, ladies and gentlemen. Step back from your material preoccupation and ask yourselves what is key to the human experience.’
“We need not look far for answers, my friends. We need look no further than the Bible. Love thy neighbor. Sound familiar? Not thy neighbor’s wife” — again, Langston waited for the laughter to die down — “which is an entirely different thing, but thy neighbor.”
Langston looked around at the people in the pews.
“As you know, your neighbors include the brown-skinned brothers and sisters of Oakville.
“People — all people — have innate dignity. They are much more than, as Darwin tells us, the last in a long line of apes. Yes, I say, man has soul, intelligence, and dignity. So, the question must be asked: At what price do we erode that dignity?”
Move it along, Rev’rend, someone cried from the back. You’re picking up steam, so move right along.
Half of the congregation turned to see who had interrupted the guest minister. They saw the face of Renata Williams. Langston had pleaded with the members of his congregation to stay at their own church out of respect for the Presbyterian minister, but fifteen or so Negroes had ignored the request and slipped into the back of the Presbyterian church.
“Don’t you mind, folks,” Langston said. “That sister of mine wasn’t intending any disrespect. That’s our way, in the Negro churches. We invite response from the pews.”
I say, move it along, Rev’rend.
“I’m moving, sister, but I just can’t run as fast as you.”
Langston waited for the laughter to die down.
“Let me ask a question, my friends. Suppose someone wanted to make a mockery of your child in a school play. How would you react to that?”
I’d bust it up, Rennie shouted from the back.
“Exactly. You wouldn’t let it happen. You wouldn’t want any child of yours to be the subject of gratuitous indignities. But some of you will be helping to perpetuate such an indignity right here in Oakville.”
Not a person moved. The only sound Langston heard was that of a pencil scratching across paper.
“I understand that, in two weeks, members of the Oakville community — white and colored people — will put on a blackface minstrel show in the Gregory Theater. I understand that it’s a fund-raising event for charity. That it’s a showcase of singing and acting talent in our town — including the singing of our own Negro community.
“I understand all that. But I want you to understand something. It violates the dignity of the Negro people.”
Tell it, Rev’rend. Tell it like it is.
“We were brought over in slave ships. But we survived and we are here today. We have our families, and our churches, and we want, essentially, what all human beings seek. Food. Shelter. Comfort. Love. A sense of things higher.
“Having survived slavery, and Reconstruction, and lynching, some Negroes don’t care to see them
selves mocked in a minstrel show.
“Depicting Negroes as blackfaced clowns tripping over themselves in ignorance is an indignity to us. It has no place in a town that lent a helping hand to fugitive slaves just two generations ago. God gave us dignity, and we must not squander it. Let us pray.”
It turned out that a local reporter had been in church when Langston gave his guest sermon. The story ran the next day on the front page of the Oakville Standard, under the headline Negro Minister Denounces Minstrel Charity Show.
All week, Langston fielded visits — most of them angry — from the charity organizers, the mayor, the high school principal, and the editor of the Standard. The editor seemed angrier when he left than when he arrived. The next issue of the Standard condemned Langston as “an American interloper with no understanding of the people of Oakville.” The Standard demanded an apology. Langston refused. Someone threw a rock through the parsonage window. Langston refused to budge. The controversy brought colored people together. They agreed — with Aberdeen Williams now leading the charge — to withdraw from the production. Organizers killed the minstrel show two days before the event, but the debate raged on for weeks. One editorial sarcastically called for a ban on all public humor.
After the minstrel show was canceled, Aberdeen told Langston that he was ashamed he’d taken part in the show previously. “Don’t be ashamed,” Langston said. “You’ve done the right thing now.”
Aberdeen went to the Oakville library. He borrowed a book called Ancient African Kingdoms, and read about Kankan Musa, the emperor of Mali. He read about the vast routes for the transport and trade of salt and gold. Musa, apparently, had been able to muster an army of two hundred thousand men. He had traveled as far as Mecca.
Next, Aberdeen borrowed a book about Egypt. When he finished it, he asked Langston: “Did you know that black Africans built the pyramids? Nobody told me that in school. I never even thought of Egypt as being in Africa.”