Church Folk - Michele Andrea Bowen [61]
Here his wife was, standing in his living room, having a little talk with Jesus and waiting, literally, for God to straighten him out. The bodacious prayers and faith of Negro women were something. And it wouldn't surprise him one bit, if when they all were in heaven, the Lord would pull out some kind of scroll, and on it would be all of the prayers of Negro women since the day they got off the slave boats on up to this civil rights movement and beyond.
What were the men going to do, then?
"Lord," Theophilus prayed, "I know Essie's gotten the jump on me, coming to You over this one. But I need You to help me, Lord. This marriage bond is hard, sometimes almost too hard for me to understand without Your help."
Chapter Thirteen
MARCEL BROWN CLOSED HIS EYES AND LEANED his head forward, letting out a low moan as the soft, cool fingers of his church secretary, Precious Powers, massaged the aches out of his neck. The two of them had been working all morning, shifting money around and straightening up the books. They went through this ritual every month, the week before he met with his Finance Board. And it never failed that Precious, with her astute sense of numbers, found a way to keep his butt out of hot water. It was one of the things he liked about her—and there were very few women he truly liked. He loved his mother but he didn't like her. And he had a fondness for and admired the accomplishments of his fiancée, Saphronia Ann McComb. But he didn't like her. But Precious Powers? Now, her, he liked—and he needed her.
Precious finished massaging his neck and kissed the corner of his mouth. He reached up and, cupping his hand around the back of her head, pulled her closer to him. "Mmmmmmm, girl. Come on 'round this chair and put that big, fine tail of yours in my lap. We still have a few minutes."
Precious, a pretty cocoa-colored woman with large black eyes and a natural, soft blush in her cheeks, smiled and kissed him back. She sat down on Marcel's lap, straddling him, skirt up to her thighs, and placed her honeysuckle-scented arms around his neck. He licked her collarbone, tasting honeysuckle, and breathed in the enticing aroma.
"Ohhh, baby," he crooned.
That made Precious wrap her arms tighter around his neck and bury her head on his shoulder, to hide her silent tears. She was losing Marcel. She loved him, and she couldn't bear the thought of that tight-lipped woman becoming his wife. Marcel kept trying to tell her that being married to Saphronia wouldn't change anything between them. He assured her that she was the one he really wanted to marry, but couldn't because of his father and Bishop Giles. With his career just taking off, they insisted that if he married a woman who was once a stripper, it would mess up any chance he had of ever becoming a bishop. To rise in the church, he needed the right kind of wife—a wife like Saphronia.
"What about Mary Magdalene?" he once asked his father. Indeed, what about Jackie Giles, the Bishop's own wife, who had been a cocktail waitress when he met her? That was different, his father explained. He was already a bishop then, and everybody understood that he had married Jackie out of loneliness and grief, after facing the death of his first wife— a wife who had been the right kind of first lady.
Marcel knew his father's words were jive and hollow because he knew all about Jackie Giles. She wasn't even a decent woman. She had been jumping in and out of Marcel's bed, drawn by his pretty-boy looks, right up until her expensive honeymoon in Barbados with the Bishop and just three days after she got back. Much as she loved putting on first lady airs, Jackie was too young and frisky to stay satisfied with a dried-up old man like Lawson Giles. For Marcel, getting her under those sheets hadn't even been a challenge.
"It's time you took your sweet-smelling self back to work," he told Precious. "You know I'm waiting on Bishop Otis Caruthers."
He tried to nudge her off his lap, but Precious clung to him. "You better get used