Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [17]
In earlier days when my parents’ family was young, the building rattled with activity daily. Prior to 1960 it was the home of the grammar school for the “colored” children in the rural neighborhood. At one point two teachers taught as many as sixty schoolchildren at a time within its walls. Before my memory, on occasion on Saturday nights when musicals were not held in the church, there was a different kind of bustle in the building. That week’s farmwork completed, the members of the community dressed in close to their Sunday best and gathered at the “church house” for family movies. A man who traveled about with projector, film, and screen collected nickels from families and created a makeshift theater, thus compensating for the lack of entertainment available to rural blacks. My sisters Joyce and Doris recall watching the films The Wolf Man and Dracula in the church building and being afraid to walk the three miles home afterward. This was the 1950s. The family never went to the movie theater together, so it was not part of our experience. I saw my first movie in an actual theater in 1967 when my brother Ray took JoAnn and me to see Bonnie and Clyde.
On Wednesday night the school and social center became a place of worship as church deacons led parishioners in prayer meeting. Prayer meeting was my favorite church activity. I particularly enjoyed the traditional hymns as they were performed in the church. “I love the Lord, he heard my cry and pitied every moan,” Deacon Jesse Barnett (my friend Pocahontas’ father) would call out to the worshipers. “I love the Lord, he heard my cry,” they would sing in response, almost moaning the words. “Long as I live, when troubles rise, I’ll hasten to his throne,” again Deacon Barnett called. As the song went on, the imagery was so strong, coupled with the words and singing, that I would see Jesus “bowing his head and chasing my griefs away.” Perhaps childhood griefs were so limited that they vanished with ease.
On Friday night Lone Tree conducted business meetings. From appearances, the men mostly ran the church’s business, but the women of Lone Tree firmly yet diplomatically let their opinions be known. On Saturday night Lone Tree might offer a musical, bringing in choirs, soloists, and duos from Okmulgee and surrounding counties. My parents’ friends S. L. and Red Reagor were among the most interesting with their a cappella selection of jubilees—a lively syncopated form of gospel song that evoked images of happy times or deliverance. Due to their years together, the Reagors as a duo had mastered the form of singing like no other couple had and were known throughout the rural churches because of it. During service it was the tradition that the women sat on the right side of the church and the men sat on the left. Couples who came in together separated at the door and walked separately down the church’s two aisles to sit on one of the wooden pews. Young children sat with their mothers. When it came time for the Reagors to sing, they approached the front of the congregation from separate corners and returned separately when they concluded. It was our tradition and we never questioned or commented on it.
Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church was the center of the family spiritual and social life. The women of Lone Tree were my role models. Most were farmers and homemakers who came out of the fields to clean their homes and the church building. The lessons they taught, both religious and social, are the most valuable to me. They were not “feminists,” in the modern sense of the word. They worshiped in a service which prohibited women from preaching or leading. When women and men sat separately in church, it was most likely out of this denigration of women’s roles. Yet they were essential