Lift Every Voice

OK, so I told you I was going to the Greater Mt Zion AME Church last Sunday. I met their pastor at lunch earlier in the week and asked him when their service started. I thought it was so great that they didn’t start until 2 in the afternoon. What I didn’t know was that it was a special worship to celebrate Black History Month and that it would last three hours. And I was there for all three hours. A very special thank-you goes out to my bladder for being so cooperative.

What a worship! I may have to leave the Presbyterian Church and become black so I can join the African-American Methodist Episcopal Church. The original music leaders couldn’t make it. But the “substitute” music was so awesome I don’t think I could have survived anything more spirited. They started out with a couple of bass guitars and kept building; by the end, it included a sax and drum set along with the third and fourth guitar. We tapped, clapped, snapped, hooted and swayed. We Amened and Hallelujahed. We praised the Lord and gave thanks for just about everything there is on the face of the planet. I was limp afterwards.

The very first song in the service was the song I’ve dreamed of singing in such a gathering. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is called the “Anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.” It is a stirring piece and moves me every time I hear it. This Sunday their pianist was sick so they sang the song without any accompaniment, without a choir or a choir director. Not even somebody waving their arms keeping time. They didn’t need it. The folks at the Greater Mt Zion AME Church know the song. I like to sit at the front of the church whenever I can because the sound is so much better there. I stood there with my eyes closed and let the sound wash over me.

Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies;
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us;
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on, till victory is won.

The worship program had pictures of major figures in black history. Along with the ones I knew like Dr King, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, there was one man I had never heard of, Richard Allen, the founder of the AME church. He was a slave who saved $2,000 and bought his freedom in 1787, after the Revolutionary War. As a free man he entered the local Methodist church one day to worship and was turned away. Thus was formed the AME church.

At the end of the day’s address, it was only natural that the speaker held up the latest issue of Ebony magazine that had a picture of Barack Obama and the title “In Our Lifetime.” It was definitely a chill bump moment for me.

We ended with singing “We Shall Overcome.” The last time I sang this song it was a similar occasion, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first black graduate of Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. I felt seriously lacking that day and wondered what I had done to deserve the right to sing the song with the rest of the crowd. Sunday, I felt far less out of place.

I haven’t done all that much to change things in Mississippi but I have witnessed a great change. I’ve been told the KKK was active even until recently. But this storm was too big and too awful to worry about race now. Katrina didn’t ask any questions when she ran onshore, everyone got hit equally.

I’ve watched this town work together. I’ve watched them become friends. Nowadays, in Pearlington, when somebody asks if a person is black or white, it’s just for identification purposes, much like I would ask what color shirt someone had on. The local hero is a small and humble man who saved 27 lives that horrible day. James Peters is a hero not because of the color of his skin but because of the content of his character.

Giving People a New History

It’s taken a while for my week to settle down enough for my muse to visit. It has been a busy and hard week but I finally arrived at this glorious and peaceful Sunday morning. I sit with the best breakfast you can have: coffee and a box of Russell Stover dark chocolates. The chocolate is in honor of my church’s 12th annual Womens Retreat held this weekend, the first one I’ve ever missed. They have the most marvelous retreat which always includes a whole table of chocolate and snacks in addition to the two massage therapists they invite. Most of the important women in my life will be there this weekend and it’s nice to know they are praying for me.

One of my plans for my stay in Pearlington is to visit each of the churches in town. I think there are about six so that should be fairly easy. Today I’m going to the Greater Mt Zion AME church. And they don’t start until 2 in the afternoon. Much better than the First Methodist who surprised me with an 8am service that was over before I got there.

One of the many wonderful things about spending four months in a disaster recovery camp is the cool people you get to hang around with. Like going on a retreat with women I’ve known and loved for thirty years, this camp pre-selects the people I spend my time with. They are invariably an easy going and loving bunch of folks. They’re people with not only good intentions but a common sense approach. I would risk the estimate that over half of the volunteers we get now are repeat visitors to Katrina recovery. And most of them are returning to Pearlington because they love these people as much as I do. This makes it easy to slip into a comfortable routine and not waste a lot of time.

By the time the three groups left camp yesterday morning I knew I would miss them and hoped I’d see them all again. One angel had heard me say I wished for more flowers in camp and when I woke up yesterday morning we had pots of pansies all over the camp. One team bought me a bouquet of cut flowers. I think this was in apology for making fun of the way I talk, which, obviously I don’t think I do, but I’ll take the flowers anyway.

The crowning glory to our time together was Friday night when the two teams from Pennsylvania and New York (Georgia went home that morning) went out to dinner to celebrate the week. We travelled in a caravan of about four vehicles, which can be a laugh in itself. The first place we went was too crowded and had an hour’s wait so we got back on the road. Trying to get 24 people organized can be a process and it had taken longer than expected to gather and leave camp so we were starved by this time. Friendly grumblings went around and we settled on just about the first thing we saw that wasn’t a national fast food chain.

It was BB’s BBQ Stand. The “B” stands for the Brooks family. As a native Texan, I can be picky about my barbecue. This place had two of my three requirements for decent ‘que. Good barbecue should have: first, a pile of wood stacked outside and, second, the smell of smoke when you roll your window down. If there’s no wood, there’s no smoke and without smoke, it’s just a roast with fancy ketchup. This place didn’t have my third criteria: namely, that I don’t trust a barbecue restaurant that is too clean. Good barbecue usually creates a layer of smoke that has laquered the tables and chairs like fine varnish. This tells me they’ve been in business a long time and many others before me have trusted them with their hunger.

The restaurant has not achieved the smoke veneer simply because it was destroyed by the hurricane and only recently rebuilt. Once we got inside we found a family-owned business with two generations running the place. Oh, yeah, they had a history of good barbecue.

We were the only customers in the place and found out they were just about to close when our cars drove up and emptied our crowd but they welcomed us in. After a great meal we stayed to visit and hear their Katrina story. I never got their first names but the mother told of her preparations when she saw they would have to end up swimming for their lives. She made sure her adult sons all had leather belts on and divided them up, pairing the stronger swimmers with the ones who she knew would need help; “You go with him, you go with him. Hold on to each other’s belts and don’t let go.” She spoke of how they had been slowly rebuilding their business. The walls are bare right now but they want to decorate with pictures of their customers.

Every team, every week, ends up being my favorite. We had three different groups last week, working on about eight houses, all at different stages and with different challenges. The work ran the gamut from a simple and straight-forward drywall job to almost rebuilding a 105 year-old house that most people had recommended bulldozing.
But the house had been part of this young mother’s family history and she couldn’t give it up. So the Baptists came and worked one week and we worked on it last week. (Many times different groups will work on the same house. And it’s common for a single house to have had four or five groups rebuilding it by the time it’s finished.)

Pay Day was Thursday night again, Neighbor Night. Chloe sang for us, as has become our tradition. This time I had bought a Hannah Montana CD so I was ready with her music. She’s now gained enough command of her “stage” that she had us move tables around to give her more room.

The Pennsylvania team brought Phyllis with them-- a lady with vast camp cooking experience who could turn the most ordinary of ingredients into fine cuisine. And she pulled out all the stops for Neighbor Night. After dinner and introductions she asked for time to speak. She told how she had asked one of the homeowners what she missed most of the many things Katrina took away. Beverly said it was a quilt she had loved for years. What only God knew was Phyllis’ habit of always traveling with things to give away; coats, toys and, for this trip, a quilt.

As she started speaking about a quilting friend and some of the traditions among quilters, other women teared up. Phyllis’ friend died of breast cancer. And the tradition among quilters is that when one of them dies, the others take her quilting fabric and continue for her, thus insuring that the fabric never goes unused or discarded.

Phyllis said this friend had left behind a small box of fabric but it contained enough fabric to yield seven quilts so far and they still have fabric left. Even the men were in tears by this time. The friend who had died left behind a continuing ministry.

When Phyllis presented Beverly with the quilt she had packed before back in Pennslyvania not knowing what she would do with it, I realized it matched Beverly's house perfectly.

It reminded me of another family from a Baptist church in northern Mississippi who gave Miss Henrietta their antique bed frame that had been in the family for a couple of generations. There is no way we can give Katrina Survivors their past back. But sometimes we can give them things that come with their own special history. And, with the Brooks family, we’re building a new history to replace the old one.

Being Thank-filled

Beaven arrived Friday afternoon while we were putting up the big dormitory tent. When he called to say he was only 30 minutes outside Pearlington my reaction kind of startled me. I felt positively giddy. And I’m not a giddy-type person. You would think that after all these years (going on 39 now), the stars would have faded from our eyes. I was holding up one end of the tent and looked over to find him standing quietly to the side. I don’t remember it but Jan told me that I just let go of my part of the tent when I saw him and ran over to greet him.

He’s been here long enough to knock off more than a few things on my Honey Do List. He put up trim around the office windows and fixed the water pressure in my trailer. He’s figured out how to turn my laptop into a television receiver. He even cleaned out the trailer’s holding tank, a job no one was willing to tackle. I won’t go into details but we don’t have a good septic tank here in our camp and it was a work of improvisation. He was planning to branch out yesterday and go to a friend’s house to put in her icemaker but the weather turned bad.

We had a bad storm roll across the US yesterday afternoon that brought tornado warnings to our little chunk of paradise. Thank God we didn’t have volunteers or it would have been far more interesting than it was. We evacuated to the only large brick building in town, the gym of the former elementary school, which isn’t used as a school anymore since it was condemned after Hurricane Katrina. For a while I wondered about the logic behind taking shelter in a condemned building but I soon lost that thought because it turned into a mini-convention of various recovery programs who took shelter with us. We did a lot of bonding then watched a power line catch fire and throw out red, white and blue flames. This turned it into a sort of July 4th celebration until the rain finally overpowered the flames. The power went out but cell phones still worked so most business went on. The gym has enough windows that we could still see inside and the woman conducting an interview of a homeowner kept right on talking until they were finished. I had a chance to compare tool inventories with the Recovery Center. We traded offers to loan whatever tools the other needed. Believe it or not, they have even more hammers than we do.

The power never came back on but the rain slacked up enough that we came back to the camp. I read a few magazines and watched Beaven pace around muttering about generators. He and I usually have totally opposite reactions to things like loss of electrical power. Since I know nothing about electricity I sit back and make the best of the situation. My only concern last night was how soon I could declare the ice cream in enough jeopardy to invite the fire department to come over and eat it with me. Beaven, on the other hand, knows enough about power that he analyses the situation and figures out how to fix it. And here in our camp he had about five generators in the tool trailer with the 37 hammers. He was in hog heaven. But he held back and only started the one we needed to power up the trailer. Neither of us suggested using one of the generators to save the ice cream. I think in the back of our minds we were both willing to leave that at risk so our consumption of an entire freezer of ice cream would make sense. Just about the time I had calculated that we just might lose our frozen food, around 10 pm,the power came back on. And we were tired enough that we just went on to bed.

Almost as soon as Beaven got here Friday he realized he had packed wrong. He brought only long sleeved winter shirts, forgetting that this is Mississippi and it usually gets into the high 70’s in the afternoon even if it is February. Fortunately we keep an unending supply of blue PDA t-shirts in all sizes. So he was suited up in full PDA uniform almost immediately.

I really enjoy my wardrobe here. I wear the same thing every day. We have cases full of the blue PDA shirts in every size, so it’s not like I’m wearing the same exact shirt every day. I do wash them. But I don’t have to spend any time in the morning deciding what to wear. Blue shirt, blue jeans, period. When you get all the staff together, not only do we all have the same outfit on, the parking lot is full of the same trucks: white Chevrolet pickups. And in sequential license plate numbers. The accountant in me begs to line the trucks up in numerical order but I hold back. Only the staff finance manager would understand.

Sunday morning Beaven and I went into Waveland for a newspaper and some supplies. As we walked into the Wal-Mart wearing our PDA shirts the greeter handed us a basket and said, “Thank you for all you’re doing here.”

This was only the second time this has happened to me but I’ve heard stories of it happening to others all the time. It’s two and a half years after the storm and people are still coming to help and we’re still getting “thank yous”. Jan Rabe, who lives in Pearlington and works for PDA told me about the countless times it has happened to her. She says people will very quietly and very simply say “Thank You” as they pass her in the store. Nothing more; just “Thank You.” Wilf Wityshyn, another PDA staff member verifies this and says he’s even had people buy his dinner in restaurants. He’ll go to pay the tab and the waiter will tell him the couple three tables over already paid it when they left. (Wilf has also gotten out of speeding tickets this way. The cops will let him off by telling him to slow down because they don’t want to lose people like him.) There’s a sign down the road that says “Thank You Church Volunteers.”

This is just amazing to me. It reminds me of something Shirley Thompson told me a year ago when we first started working on her house. She said she had prayed for people like us to come when she saw what the hurricane had done to her town. She prayed, “Lord you know we can’t do this by ourselves, you’ve got to send some people to help us.” And we came.

I don’t think much about being an answer to someone’s prayer. I pray a lot about the things I and (the rest of the world) need but to suddenly find out I am myself an answer to someone else’s prayer is another thing altogether. It’s a very sobering feeling. Usually when you say that someone is “using” you, it has a negative meaning. But God is using me now in the very best way. Thanks be to God.

Hearing Voices

We didn’t have volunteers last week so I got caught up enough that I was able to spend some time cleaning out the tool trailer. Please note in case you come to a PDA camp any time soon: You do not need to bring work gloves. We have a zillion work gloves of every style and size. We have about 37 hammers. We also have about 76 plastic tool carriers designed to store the 76 tools but not a single tool is in these cases and I’m just about to throw them away but figure this is probably against the rules. So I just threw the cases in a pile in the back corner where they can’t get in anyone’s way. I know better than to change anyone’s habits. They’re never going to put the tools back in their cases. I like to pick my battles.

I continue to have animal encounters. I thought I was leaving the squirrels and mice and possums back home. But here in our camp we have raccoons now. The first night he broke into the dining tent and ate a box of Cheerios we didn’t know what kind of critter it was. But the second night he tore into a sack of lemonade mix then drug it toward the creek down a path between the tents that I now call Raccoon Highway. But the big mistake he made was spilling lemonade mix and leaving not only a trail but his footprints planted plainly in the mix. Perfect little raccoon prints. So we finally started listening to all the advice we were given to keep everything not only in plastic containers but the kind that have locking lids.

We get a real cross section of Presbyteriana here in camp. It’s no surprise that each group has their own special personality. I have to say that the group this week from Pittsford, New York has provided me more laughs than I’ve had in a long time.

First you need to remember that we’re in Mississippi here. Deep, rural Mississippi. The closest place-- well, the only place, in town to get a meal outside your own kitchen is the bar up on the highway. It’s called Turtle Landing and it’s a very laid back place where you can have a burger and a beer out on the landing and watch the wildlife. I hear you can feed the turtles and an occasional alligator from the dock. They don’t serve any of that fancy stuff like wine and the place is usually full of cigarette smoke. On nights like Sunday’s Super Bowl it was only natural that the Pittsford group wanted to visit Turtle Landing to watch the New York Giants play.

They came home with an explanation of a sign Turtle Landing has had outside for months now that proclaims Sundays are “Chicken Drop” night. All the times I passed the sign I just assumed this meant some kind of deep fried chicken meal they sold on Sundays. Oh, no. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Chicken Drop” is a game. I haven’t actually seen it played but the explanation was that they have an enclosed pen with a grid marked on the floor. Inside each square is a number. You pay for a number. At the prescribed moment they put the chicken into the pen while everyone sits and enjoys their beer watching it walk around inside the pen. If the chicken poops into the square you chose you win and get the prize money. I’m not sure if the bar keeps part of the pot or if the winner gets it all. But it set the church from Pittsford to thinking.

They decided it would make a dandy fund-raiser for mission trips to Mississippi. They started talking about how they could do this. I’m still not totally sure how serious they are about it but the conversation was the perfect way to unwind from the day.

First, they had to discuss if owning chickens was legal in Pittsford and how they could find one. And did this constitute cruelty to animals? No, they decided, since pooping is a perfectly healthy and normal thing for a chicken to do. Then, could they do this inside the church or outside? If outside, the dates for the Drop would have to wait until winter was passed. Nobody wanted the poor pooping chicken to have to walk around in the cold. Everyone was interested in how fast the chicken would produce a winner but no one knew much about the bowel habits of chickens. I suspect it takes a while and that the real goal of the game is drinking a lot of beer.

Then, where else could the conversation go after that but forming a committee? And, no name would do but the obvious: The Chicken Shit Committee. Each person at the table, including myself, decided we had served on this committee in the past and could probably chair one ourselves simply through our vast experience.

I enjoyed our laughter. It helped me when I remember the lady Shirley Thompson took me to meet yesterday. Shirley is an old friend I met over a year ago. I worked on her house two separate times; once hauling sheetrock and then finishing her bathroom. I installed Shirley’s toilet. Stuff like that bonds people.

But once Shirley got into her house she didn’t sit back and rest. She’s been a tireless advocate for the others in Pearlington who aren’t in a house yet. She calls herself their voice. She speaks up for the timid or frail ones who can’t speak up for themselves.

The lady Shirley took me to see is in her 70's. She’s living with her handicapped husband in a shed. There's no other way to describe it. It's a nice shed with windows and a bathroom but it's still what I would call a shed. It was built by a team of well-meaning folks right after the storm when there weren't even FEMA trailers yet. The trouble is that this lady is not pushy and apparently was fairly content to have a shed after surviving the storm by grabbing any wood she could find to float around on for eight hours. The husband kept hold of his walker with his teeth. Stuff like that I guess makes you grateful enough to live in a shed for over two years without complaining. Except that now they have rats in the house.

Their clothes are in piles all over the house because the shed doesn't have closets. There are piles and sacks of food in the kitchen because there are no shelves in the shed, either. So the rats have a welcome mat set out for them.

I’m not really an emotional person when I’m faced with tragedies like Katrina but when I visited yesterday it was all I could do to not cry. I've seen master bedrooms bigger than this shed that she's been living in for over two years with a husband who can’t walk, who she has to bathe (after taking more sacks of stuff out of the tub because there are no shelves in the bathroom either). Then there's the moldy wall where the shower has leaked through the wall.

And here's the kicker:She never applied for a FEMA trailer because she had this brand new shed when they came around offering trailers. She can't get a MEMA cottage (the Mississippi version of FEMA) without having had a FEMA trailer. She probably qualifies for lots of help but hasn't applied for anything. Life in rural Mississippi trained her to not ask for anything because she probably won't get it. In the meantime, she and her husband are living in this shed with no closets, no shelves, moldy walls, rats, and all their possessions in bags scattered around every inch of the place.

This lady needs a “voice” like Shirley Thompson or myself. This lady needs a house. Even the Chicken Shit committee knows that.