They hopped off their horses and walked into the sanctuary. They kept their hats on and did not wipe their feet, tracking dirt across the heart-pine floor. Pop George was so busy preaching, so caught up in the Spirit that he didn’t really hear the gasps of his congregation at first. When one of those Franklins pulled Pop George from his chair, his last strength sparked. He shouted to his flock to run, but several of the men ran toward the front of the church, including one named Holcomb Byrd James. Holcomb wanted to defy Pop George’s orders and save the elder from sure death. His chest was barreled, and he was not afraid, but the old man screamed at Holcomb to run for his life. Pop George kept shouting for everybody to get out of there, and finally, Holcomb not only corralled Venie and his own children, but Meema and her family, too. Everyone grabbed children and ran outside the church as the building caught fire.
Before she fainted, Meema would remember the smell of the bug juice, strong liquor made from corn. When she awoke, she was lying on the feather-stuffed bed in the front room of her cabin. Sheba, her daughter, was wiping her forehead with a water-soaked rag. She told her mother that Holcomb had carried her down the path from the church, and yes, Meema’s grandchildren were alive.
The congregation waited two days to return, and Meema came with them. They all dug several hours through the rubble, but not even a splinter of Pop George’s bones could be found.
On Sunday, the congregation held a homegoing for him next to the ruins of the church, though there wasn’t a body. The women wailed, and the men shook their distraught shoulders. The following Sunday, the congregation met again, but they could not even lift a prayer. It seemed faith would be lost, but Meema had tied a clean white rag around her head. She was familiar with earlier fires, how they could break the spirit, so she gave the grandbaby she’d been rocking over to Venie, as Sheba was holding the other grandbaby and was pregnant again besides.
When Meema recalled this day to her descendants, her story would alter. She always would say that she stepped forward and began to line out a Spiritual, but through the years, the song would change. Sometimes it was “I want Jesus to walk with me.” Other times, there were no words to Meema’s tune, just a humming, as the others in the congregation played instruments of foot, hand, and tongue. Yet when they asked Meema to lead them in a word, she felt her strength wane. She reached her hand out, seeking aid, and Holcomb Byrd James stepped forward and began a long, passionate prayer.
Holcomb was only a sharecropper, but he had a high standing in the congregation. For starters, Venie, the cook at Wood Place, was his wife. And she kept her eyes and ears open and reported important news of the white folks living in the large house where the Wood Place landlord resided, as the moods of their white employer greatly impacted Black folks living on his farm. Thus, the James family was greatly respected. And there was something else: before the Civil War, Holcomb had passed as a white man, when really he was the son of Cherokee Indians. He’d been the overseer on the Wood Place Plantation. But after the war, he’d become a sharecropper on the premises instead, relinquishing his position as overseer. He did this because he didn’t want to sneak around with Venie, who was the mother of his children. It was against the law for Blacks and whites to marry then, and it was against custom for a white man to live with a Black woman. A white man could rape a Black woman or pay her for sex and keep her a secret, but to live with her in an honorable way was not allowed, not in Georgia in the 1800s. But Holcomb wasn’t going to use Venie like that. He wanted to marry her. So he gave up his past privileges and lived the life of a colored dirt farmer. And that made the folks respect him even more. And love him, too.
After Holcomb’s long prayer, he told them to recall the difficult times that God’s other children had gone through, many years before: The Cherokee and the Creek, the original people who had lived on this land before it had been stolen. The slaves who had worked this earth with no hope of freedom. But some of these children had remained, and their children and so on. They were the members of the church’s congregation, and surely God traveled among them. By the end of that service, Holcomb would be appointed the new elder of the church.
On the next Sunday, Meema climbed up onto the bench that had been dragged next to the rubble. Throughout the week folks had been expressing fear that the Franklins might return and enact more terror, and these murmurs had gotten back to Meema. She stood there, holding the shotgun she’d brought.
“Ain’t nobody gone turn me from God,” she said. “They might can kill me, but ’fore they do, I’m gone take somebody wit me.”