How Race Is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart

Shared Prayers, Mixed Blessings KEVIN SACK DECATUR, GEORGIA Howard Pugh, head usher, is on patrol. May the good Lord have mercy on any child, or adult for that matter, who dares to tread across the lobby of the Assembly of God Tabernacle with so much as an open Coca-Cola in his hand. Because first he will get the look, the alert glare of a hunting dog catching its first scent of game. Then he will get the wag, the slightly palsied shake of the left index finger. And then the voice, serious as a heart attack and dripping with Pensacola pinesap: "Son, this is the Lord's house. And they just shampooed that carpet last week." It goes without saying that Howard Pugh knows what is going on in his lobby. So when Pugh, a white man with a bulbous pink nose, spots eighty-one-year-old Roy Denson slipping out of the sanctuary, he doesn't even have to ask. He just knows. He knows because he has seen Denson flee the 10:30 service time and again, and it is always when one of the choir's black soloists moves to center stage. This time it is Robert Lawson, a soulful tenor with a fondness for canary-yellow suits. As he begins to sing, the Pentecostal faithful gradually rise. First a few black members clap and sway. Then more join in. Finally, the white members are moved to stand, and before long the two thousand-seat sanctuary is washed over with harmony. Stretching their arms toward the heavens, the congregants weave a tapestry of pinks and tans and browns. But to Denson's ears, Lawson's improvisational riffs sound like so much screeching and hollering. And so he sits there seething, thinking about how he joined this church fifty-six years ago, how he followed it from downtown Atlanta to the suburbs, how he hung the Sheetrock with his own hands, and how the blacks are taking over and the whites are just letting it happen. He gets angrier and angrier, listening to these boisterous black folks desecrate his music, until he simply cannot bear it. "I ain't sitting there and listening to that," he mutters on his way out. "They're not going to take over my church." And there waiting for him is Howard Pugh, at sixty-five another white man of his generation, always with the same smart-alecky question. Never mind that Pugh and his wife, Janice, have themselves become uneasy about the direction of their church, that they have been quietly contemplating a walk of their own. "Now, Roy," Howard Pugh begins, stroking his seafarer's beard, "what are you going to do when you get to heaven? Walk out of there, too?" Back inside, the ecstatic singing has ended, the speaking in tongues has melted into a chorus of hypnotic whispers and the members of the Tabernacle have been invited to roam the sea-foam carpet, welcoming visitors and greeting one another. They embrace, the white people and the black people, with long, earnest hugs. Eletia Frasier, a Guyanese immigrant, kisses all who come her way, whether she knows them or not. Brad Jackson wraps his thick white arms around Eugene Glenn, a slender black man, and jerks him cleanly off the ground. Ruben Burch, a six-foot-seven black man whose blue usher's blazer is a tad short in the sleeves, saunters down the aisle with an irrepressible grin. During the Sunday fellowship, Burch makes a point of approaching older whites to gauge acceptance. Will they offer hugs, or merely handshakes? Will they linger, or recoil? Halfway down the aisle, he encounters Madge Mayo, the spry eighty-five-year-old widow of a pastor from the Tabernacle's segregated days. She stands four-foot-nine and keeps her luminescent white hair in a tight bun. There was a time when Mayo could never have imagined hugging a black man, and even now she is not sure she approves of the integration of her church. But she has been touched by the bigheartedness of the Tabernacle's black members. And like so many of the whites who have stayed, she reasons that all beLelyveld, Joseph is the author of 'How Race Is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart' with ISBN 9780805067408 and ISBN 080506740X.