The Coward that was Me

At first it was easy for me as a Minister’s wife to lead an ethical life. In the first place temptation was not often put in my path and the congregations we served were loving and supportive.

Faced with my first risk-involved situation I floundered badly. Do we ever really understand ourselves? I was shocked with my own lack of courage. This was not the person I had always thought I was. Being loved and accepted had become far more a bedrock foundation for me than I realized.

Our family moved for a year to New York City when my husband received a unique scholarship to Union Seminary for those pastors who had been in ministry over 10 years. It was a scholarship for a refreshing, renewing year of study. We knew there was a career risk involved here. The Methodist Church at that time was locked in a hierarchy system that promoted pastors according to a very structured regime. To step out of rank was unconventional at that time. David was threatened with demotion should he return to the Va. Conference. Yes, a place would be found for him but only after all the other appointments had been made and possibly back at minimum salary which at the time was $3,000 dollars a year. But that was not the risk that threatened me. I laughed at it. The opportunities far outweighed the consequences.

What I was not prepared for was the earth shifting impact of the experience. The year was 1966. My children went to school that year in Harlem, P.S. 125 where my son was president of his 4th grade class and my very blond daughter stood out dramatically from her 2nd grade classmates. It was a fun, growing year for all of us: jumping on subways, attending matinees and museums, being a paid SS teacher at Riverside church, even marching in a protest for civil rights and teaching for a week in a liberation school.

We did return to the Va. Conference the next year and found ourselves assigned to a church in a blue collar community that was writhing in racial hostility. Schools had just been integrated. Feelings were at a frothing pitch.

My son, from his previous year in N.Y., formed a friendship with a little African American boy and invited him over to play after school. This became a daily occurrence. That’s when the trouble began and when I realized my backbone was jelly.

My ordeal began with guttural, obscene phone-calls that always came as soon as my husband left for work in the morning. When I heard the shrill ring of the phone, my heart would begin pounding, my palms sweating. I couldn’t understand why no one seemed to harass my husband until years later on a trip to Africa I saw a herd of wildebeest stalked by hyenas. When the weakest wildebeest lagged behind then the hyenas attacked. I was the vulnerable one. Like hyenas, hard-eyed knots of neighbors gathered in groups on our lawn, silently watching my son and his friend. One woman spat out at me, “You are ruining our neighborhood. We have worked hard all our lives to buy our home. Now .the neighborhood is a slum. Who would live here?” The thin thread of white supremacy was an important part of their self esteem.

I crumbled quickly when I received an anonymous phone call with a veiled threat about knowing my childrens’ school bus schedule and if I didn’t stop I’d better watch them carefully .I called my son’s playmate into the living room and said “I think it would be better if you and Neel played at your house instead of here. Don‘t come here again!”

I am haunted by the innocent, hurt look in that little child’s eyes. I remember his muddy boots swinging back and forth as he silently accepted my edict. I dutifully took my son to his house every afternoon but it didn’t last long. Soon the friendship dissolved. In my guilt and shame I literally took to my bed and for one weekend was immobile with self-loathing. When I tried to get up I felt as if I was weighed down with a load of bricks. A mini-nervous breakdown, the doctor called it. Camus, in his famous short story, The Bridge, writes about a man longing to return to the bridge where he stood unmoving as a woman drowned. I too would return to my place of cowardice and shame and plead for a second chance.