a novel by Austin Clarke
EXCERPT
“FATHER-GOD,” SHE SAYS, now on her knees, with the rice grains and the grits still digging into the soft flesh of her knees, “I praying for BJ, my son. Help him.” And she recites the second last verse of a hymn:
“Your reign shall know no end,
And round Your pierced Feet
Fair flowers of Paradise extend
Their fragrance ever sweet.”
And she is ready to rise from the floor covered with the cold linoleum decorated in red and yellow and pink flowers, that she used to walk beside, and sometimes trample with her “pumps,” her word for Reeboks, in gutters back in the Island, flowers that now are so beautiful on the cold basement floor, printed in the linoleum. She thinks again, of going to church, on Sunday, three days away; and she begins an argument with herself. “Should I go to the Apostolicals?” And if you were not in the same room with her, you wouldn’t know that there is no one kneeling beside her; and that she is referring to The Apostolical Holiness Church of Spiritualism in Christ. She is an Assistant Deaconess there. For fifteen years, ten years after she came to this country, she has been attending revivals and prayer meetings, in the hectic, rhythmic, tambourine-beating small church, whose congregation is entirely West Indian; black; immigrants who worked in hospitals and banks and office buildings as cleaners and sweepers. These women and men dressed each Sunday as if they were going to weddings or five-o’clock morning services on Christmas Day, or Easter Sunday. And she watched them attending this small church, and saw the pride in their eyes and the joyfulness in their bodies, each Sunday she joined them in the small yard beside the small church. When she took Communion at the Cathedral, she had all the grounds and beds of flowers that grew on all four sides of the building to admire. There was no garden, and not even a wild plant in the gravel path of her other church.
As much as she tried, she could not get the Pastor to change “Apostolical” to “Apostolic” in the name of his church. He did not see the error when he painted the sign; but he told her, “I like how Apostolical sound. It sound Richer.”
Before the congregation bought the building, and turned it into a church, and gave it this “rich” new name, at a party one Sunday morning, like a christening back in the Island, with rum and champagne, curry chicken and baked pork, it was a small-scale slaughter-house which sold huge pieces of cow, and cow-tongue, cow-heel, and the testicles of oxen. These testicles were made into “mannish-water,” a delicious Jamaican delicacy; and pork, cut with skin and bone and fat, for better cooking and taste; and with the growing population of West Indians, in the neighbourhood surrounding it, goat belly and sheep belly. No, she could never get the Pastor to change the offending word, so, she and other members in the congregation, continued to call their place of worship, “the Apostolicals.”
“So, Sunday coming, the Apostolicals?” she asked herself, aloud. “Or, the Cathedral? And I have to speak with the Pastor about Jonah in the Belly of the Whale…”