An excerpt from my memoir, From Where I Stand, a story of love across race and time.
This post follows “I thought they would come for me.”
Sunday morning, December 14th, dawned clear and cold, stubbornly cheerful. Granddaddy was outside, smoking his pipe. He poked around with his cane in the weeds and ivy on the other side of the road. When he walked back to the house, he was holding something flat and round in his hand.
He had found the wad that comes off the front end of a heavy-duty shotgun shell, my dad said.
The gunman’s livid message was sprayed across the living room wall. Seventeen pellets of double-aught buckshot, the kind used for hunting large game, had crashed through the picture window and struck the white plasterboard. Black holes covered an area about three to four feet wide and three feet deep. Beginning roughly six inches above the back of the sofa, they went on up to the height of a person six feet tall.
If Steely had passed through the living room a few seconds later, the shot would have hit him dead center.
“That was a shot that was meant to kill,” my dad said.
Seven pellets hit with enough force to pierce the wall and come through it. One pellet embedded itself in the stone of the fireplace.
And around each black hole in the family room, the deacons’ cherished custom wood paneling splayed open.
“If all you wanted was to scare somebody,” Dad later said, “you could have fired into the window with birdshot. Which might have injured somebody, but probably wouldn’t kill ’em, unless it hit ’em exactly right.”
My mother added, “I thought they might throw rocks through the window, they might damage the cars. They might catch one of us, your daddy in particular, down the road somewhere, and corner him, and—” She shuddered. “And, you know, that could be dangerous. Those kinds of things I wouldn’t have put past them. But that they would shoot at children in my house, high school kids—it never occurred to me.
“That’s the one thing that— We may have—” She looked toward my father. “We would have canceled the party.”
“Yes,” Dad said, “that’s the one thing that would have stopped it.”
Mom turned back to me. “If we had known that there was anybody out there who was that evil in that community, we would have canceled the party. We wouldn’t have risked children’s lives.”
My family dressed like we always did on Sunday morning and went to Sunday School. Or so my mother said. I don’t remember any of it.
She went downstairs to teach her Women’s Sunday School class. MaMaw sat beside her. Before she began teaching the lesson she had prepared, she told the women about the shooting. There was a gasp. She reassured them that no one had been hurt. “But let’s go on with the lesson.”
Mrs. Choplin, the wife of one of the deacons, had something to say. “Well, we’re havin’ a party for my son at our house next week, but there won’t be any of them there.”
Mom looked squarely at her. “No, and whoever shot through our house made sure of that.”
My father went straight to his study to prepare for worship. The deacons filed in behind him and closed the door.
“We want you to resign.”
“I’m not going to resign,” Dad said. “If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to go on record as to why.”
“Well, we don’t want you to preach.”
“Well, you have a problem. Because your constitution says that you can’t call a special business meeting until after the worship service. Which means that until then, I am still your pastor. And as long as I am pastor, that is my pulpit, and I will preach.
“You don’t have to come hear it. But I’m gonna preach.”
I don’t remember heading for the sanctuary after Sunday School. But I do remember that, a few minutes before the service, in walked Marjie Boal, followed by John Steely and Warren Massenburg.
Warren was probably the first Black person ever to walk through those doors, my dad said.
“And the last,” Mom quipped.
We all sat together on one pew. The service began.
The sanctuary was packed. Over 100 people filled a space that usually held 30-40 people on Sunday mornings. Folks from all over the Harricans, most of whom were not members of the church, came to hear what my father would say. Every single one of the deacons was there.
When Dad stood up to preach, the church went quiet. He lay the 4×6 index cards on the pulpit and began:
Once again last night, in our own community,
the drama of man’s inhumanity to man was
acted out. Once again it was demonstrated
that hate cannot stand the presence of love.
For those who hate so vehemently do not seem to
understand what it means to love one’s neighbor.
They not only will not love their neighbor, but
they cannot tolerate those who do.
He talked about how violent talk triggers people. He described the shooter as a “person of little ego who probably felt like he might be able to be a hero if he did what he thought the community wanted done.
We shall answer before God for leaving
such hatred unchallenged. These men think
that with guns they can silence the
gospel of Christ—which is a gospel of love.
But they are wrong. They can frighten and kill
men who preach the gospel and who try to
live it out, but God will rouse up other
prophets in their place.
At one point Dad broke away from his written notes to sing a song that most everyone there knew by heart, a song we had all heard and sung since we were toddlers. His voice cracked with emotion:
Jesus loves the little children,
all the children of the world—
Red and yellow, black and white,
they are precious in his sight—
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
He paused until the last note had died away. Then he leaned over the pulpit, and, in a hoarse almost-whisper, he said, “When we taught that song to our children, did we mean it?”
He closed with words from the Book of Joshua:
In this time decisions must be made.
Choose this day whom you will serve.
As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.
Then he shut the Bible and stepped off the platform.
Following the worship service, my grandparents took Bryant back to the house. And my dad went, as always, to the front door to greet people as they walked out of the church.
He was shocked when Sandra Woodlief [the daughter of the chair of deacons and my friend] came straight to him.
“Laid her head against my chest and sobbed,” he said. “Then she turned and left without saying a word.”
He choked up. “I’ll never forget it.”
More than five decades later, I have the chance to tell Sandra how much her simple gesture meant to my father. She frowns, searching her memory.
“On our last Sunday at Ridgecrest.” I put it that way in an effort to be diplomatic.
She gives me a half-frozen smile. “I don’t remember doing that.”
She looks past me, shaking her head.
The special business meeting after the service was called to order by Mr. Woodlief. As pastor, Dad presided over the first order of business, the election of two new deacons. Then he sat down, and Mr. Woodlief took over.
Woodlief read aloud the deacons’ recommendation to dismiss my father as pastor and opened the floor for discussion.
When I interviewed my parents, they told the story like a tag team.
Dad: Mrs. B [one of Bryant's teachers and a member of
Ridgecrest] got up and said, "I want to know where
the deacons were last night--"
Mom: "At 9 o'clock--"
Dad: “At 9 o’clock.”
Mom: And Woodlief said, “We were killing hogs—
Dad: “Killing hogs up at Choplin’s.”
Mom: And she said, “At 9 o’clock at night?”
Mom gave me a pointed look, eyebrows raised. They paused to let the words sink in.
Dad: Yeah. And they let it ride.
Mom: Woodlief was running the meeting.
I cut in, “They were ‘killing hogs’?”
Dad: Yeah—which hog were they out to kill?
Mom: "Well, we were cleaning up," Woodlief said, and
hemmed and hawed—
Dad: But they were over at Choplin's.
Mom: Deciding what they were going to do on Sunday,
probably.
Huel Choplin, one of the deacons, was the husband of the woman in Mom’s Sunday School class, the one who pointed out that “none of them” would attend her son’s party.
The vote to dismiss my father was 27 to 11, with 20 abstentions.
Dad said, “I later learned that some of those people who didn’t vote— Their conscience wouldn’t let them vote to fire me, and they couldn’t vote to keep me. Because they said, ‘If you’d stayed, they would have killed you.’”
“In other words,” Mom said, “if Daddy won the vote, he’d never leave.”
“I wouldn’t leave, and they knew it.”
“And someone else would have gotten him.”
“Isolated like we were in that parsonage,” my father concluded, “we would have been in a dilemma. We’re probably very fortunate that they went ahead and fired me.”
One woman ran out of the business meeting, overcome with emotion. Granddaddy had returned from the house and stood out front chewing on the stem of his pipe.
“Mr. Shipp,” she said to him through tears, “there are some Christians in this church.”
Granddaddy snapped, “Well, they’re mighty few and far between.”
The deacons demanded that we move out of the parsonage as soon as possible.
holy discomfort: Love letters from a reluctant Christian 