Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes Read online

  Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes

  Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. —Unknown

  Donna Ball

  Sandra Chastain

  Debra Dixon

  Virginia Ellis

  Nancy Knight

  Deborah Smith

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the grandmas and grandpas, the mamas and daddies, the white-gloved Sunday School teachers and long-suffering aunties who made us who we are today. May our memories stand in tribute to the way of life you helped preserve.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  BelleBooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 67

  Smyrna, GA 30081

  [email protected]

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-935661-00-9

  Copyright © 2000 BelleBooks

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Design by Martha Shields

  Ebook layout and conversion: jimandzetta.com

  THE JESUS SHOES

  By Sandra Chastain

  No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

  — Eleanor Roosevelt

  The rituals of the summer of 1945 were observed even in the midst of a war about which I knew little.

  I was too young to understand the supper table talk about war, yet old enough to cherish the rhythm of summer: wading in the creek that ran through the big ditch, picking blackberries, churning ice cream and Vacation Bible School.

  For me, at age eight,Vacation Bible School started with a pair of new white patent-leather sandals with little silver buckles. Shoes were rationed and I, in my sublime ignorance, had no idea of the sacrifices my grandparents made to provide those sandals. No matter that my body was adorned with sun dresses made from chicken feed sacks; my patent-leather clad feet were on the Glory Road.

  On the second Monday morning in June, I headed for the Wadley Methodist Church. Walking alone was safe then, even for a child. Tires and gasoline were rationed so there was little traffic, and only one stop light in town. To save energy, that traffic light had been turned off, which didn’t matter because everyone knew to stop at the intersection, and we did. Everyone, that is, except for the convoys of army trucks that came through, carrying soldiers who waved at all of us. My grandmother always walked toward the highway and waved back. “Somebody, somewhere is doing that for one of our boys,” she’d say.

  But that morning, there were no convoys and no traffic and I was glad because I didn’t want to take to the side of the road where beggar lice might stick to my dress, or worse yet, dust might mar my shiny new shoes. The sun had already turned the blue-black asphalt into soft, bubbly patches and heat rose in waves that seemed to breathe. I concentrated on keeping my eyes on my shoes. I was used to the heat and an expert at curving my lower lip to blow the ever present swarm of gnats out of my line of vision. And nothing was going to stop my annual attendance at Vacation Bible School. Neither gnats nor tar bubbles were going to prevent me from reaching the church in my pristine white sandals.

  My best friend, Rachel, was waiting for me on the graveled parking area by the side of the church. After she spent some time admiring my shoes, we joined hands and skipped up the steps.

  Miss Bessie Newton met us at the door, wearing her usual starched print dress sprinkled around the collar with pink face powder that smelled of roses. Miss Bessie had what my grandmother called the biggest dinner table in town. Years later that I found out she was referring to the twin peaks of her anatomy and not the size of her furniture.

  If the top of Miss Bessie was oversized, the bottom of her didn’t match. Looking at her shoes that morning, I whispered to Rachel that her feet were no bigger than my size four. Behind her hand, Rachel confided solemnly that Miss Bessie hadn’t seen her feet since she was thirteen. I giggled on the way in and got frowned at by Miss Bessie.

  Once inside, Rachel and I were herded to the proper room where eight other children had already gathered. I knew six of them. We’d gone to school and church together all our lives.

  The other two were strangers, both boys.

  They’d just moved to Wadley, and they came to the church barefoot. Now there was nothing unusual about children going barefoot in the south; we all did. But never to church. That was considered disrespectful.

  Still, Miss Bessie welcomed them and assigned them to my class, which was called the Soldiers of the Cross. We learned the boys were Hansel and Willie Mosely who had come to stay with their great Aunt Louella.

  Rachel and I stared at the boys in amazement. Not only did they not wear shoes to church, a sure sign of their lack of breeding, but their feet were dirty. The younger one, in fact, hadn’t even been as careful with his feet as I had been with my shoes. He had tar between his toes and dirt caked on his bare heels. Both boys’ hair stuck up every which-a-way and it looked like Miss Louella, who was poor and couldn’t see very well, had given them a haircut with her rusty old push mower.

  We’d been taught to be kind to the poor, but to my certain knowledge, nobody had ever sanctioned dirty feet and choppy hair.

  Feeling the stern training of my grandmother and a nudge from Miss Bessie, I stepped forward and held out my hand. “I’m Sandra Anglin and I’m pleased to meet you.”

  They didn’t shake my hand. But I’d done my Christian duty.

  I had to remember that Christian duty again when we started to the auditorium for the opening session and one of the boys stepped square on my new white sandal with his dirty foot and left a long smear of black tar streaking one toe. I bent down and rubbed the underside of my sundress hem across the tar, only making it worse. Like a martyr, I stood looking at my pitiful, scarred shoe, my anger growing with every minute.

  I determined that he should be punished for his transgressions. An eye for an eye. But since he didn’t have any shoes to scar in return, I had to think of something else.

  After we’d been told the schedule and reminded that on Friday we would present a program in the church for the entire congregation, which would be followed by a picnic, we were sent to our first class.

  The Soldiers of the Cross met in the largest adult classroom because we were tall enough to sit in the adult chairs at the tables used by the regular Sunday School Classes. As always, we would study Scriptures and hear Bible stories for the first hour. The second hour was reserved for crafts, and I looked forward this summer session to my first year of spatter painting. I’d even brought an old toothbrush of my own to use.

  My older sister’s spatter painting was a work of art still tacked to the wall over my grandmother’s iron bed. She’d used white shoe polish, she said, carefully dipping her toothbrush into the polish and rubbing it over a piece of screen wire so that the spray of white spattered to outline the large leaf from an oak tree placed on a piece of red construction paper below. I was too young to even understand the complexities of her work, she’d assured me. For two years I’d considered how to outdo her and had finally chosen black polish sprinkled over two, five-pointed leaves from a sweet gum tree on pink paper. It would be a glorious creation, surpassing her puny effort totally.

  But to add insult to the injury already done to my new shoes, I learned that our curriculum had been changed. Toothbrushes and shoe polish were hard to come by so a new project had been devised for the Soldiers of the Cross. This year, we’d make shoes like Jesus wore.

  I objected, to no avail, and decided that this was another test of my C
hristian training. I’d waited two years for my turn to spatter paint and it was not to be.

  The change in curriculum suited the two new boys just fine. They thought Jesus Shoes were perfect, another of their quickly mounting transgressions. It was clear to me they knew nothing of tradition. Due primarily to my urging, the other children sided with me in somehow blaming them for the fact that we would not be doing spatter prints for the first time since anyone could remember.

  Hansel and Willie clung together for the next five days, and the rest of us tormented them at every opportunity. They wore the same shirts and shorts every day and their feet only got dirtier. Miss Bessie privately scolded us for our attitude toward two homeless children who were being cared for by an elderly woman who was poor and almost blind, but we were unheeding. As Soldiers of the Cross, we felt called to see that these boys be returned to wherever they’d come from. They clearly didn’t belong here.

  When simple shunning didn’t work, we accidentally knocked over their glue, gave them the dullest scissors, refused to share our supplies. Still, in spite of the sabotage attempts launched by my little band of followers, the Jesus Shoes project went forward.

  Each of us drew an outline of our feet on brown paper to be used as a pattern. Then from an assortment of fertilizer sacks and quilt scraps, we used our brown paper bag patterns to cut more soles. The cutting, with blunt-edged scissors, was a laborious process that took two days.

  Once we had the soles, we met our next challenge: punching the holes through which our ties would be strung. Ice picks and large nails worked best—until one earnest Soldier pounded the nail through the layers of soles and into the floor.

  The Mosley boys managed fine, but Miss Bessie finally had to find a male assistant to give us a hand until all the holes were punched. Then came the glue, made from flour, water and a bit of rosin collected from local pine trees. Matching our holes, we cemented the layers together to make thick soles.

  By Thursday, the shoes were complete and ready for the threading of the rope that would crisscross the bottom of the shoes and come across the wearer’s foot, then up the leg. After trying them on, it was my opinion that the reason all the apostles had such sad expressions in their pictures was because their feet hurt.

  Friday brought assembly and a presentation by the individual classes. Our class was to sing the song from which we acquired our name Onward Christian Soldiers. It was when we were lining up to go into the church that Miss Louella shuffled up the sidewalk to where Miss Bessie was standing. We all turned to stare.

  In a timid voice the boys’ aunt thanked Miss Bessie for looking after her nephews. Their mother had been killed in the same house fire that had destroyed most of their clothing and toys. Their father was missing in action in the South Pacific. It was hard, she said, but taking them in was the Christian thing for her to do.

  She said they’d come home every day talking about how kind the children had been and how much fun they’d had in Vacation Bible School. She particularly wanted to thank me.

  Every Christian Soldier in line heard her and turned their eyes on me. My heart hurt and my face burned. I couldn’t look at them. I ducked my head and saw the boys’ feet and my own, which were still adorned in the nearly new white patent leather sandals. I knew I had to make amends, but I couldn’t think how until Miss Bessie began lining us up to march into the sanctuary.

  I pulled the boys forward and gave Willie the cross I’d been assigned to carry. Then I knelt, removed my white sandals and left them on the steps when I took my place behind the boys, barefoot. One by one, the others took off their shoes, including Miss Bessie, who’d never gone barefoot in her life before. We marched on naked feet to the altar where we sat down and put on our Jesus shoes, then stood and sang our song, “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

  #

  Hansel and Willie lived with their aunt until she died and remained inseparable thereafter. They entered the army together and served in the Korean war, where both were killed in action. I never forgot them. My white patent leather sandals with the silver buckles and scarred toe are long gone, but I still have those Jesus shoes.

  NO MORE MICKEY MOUSE

  By Virginia Ellis

  It all started with a mouse.

  —Walt Disney

  My grandmother moved in with us when I was about five years old. We lived in an old farmhouse aways out in the country with indoor plumbing and well water, with electricity but only one serious gas heater and a bunch of quilts to keep us warm.

  I didn’t know it then, but I guess we were poor.

  My grandmother knew it, however. Even as young as I was, I got the impression that our grandmother thought she’d been destined for better things than living with her son’s working wife and her three wild-Indian children. To this day I don’t have the nerve to call her Grandma, that would be disrespectful. Her friends called her Miss Alma. I usually just said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  A fire and brimstone Baptist, Miss Alma never missed a Sunday service and never got dressed-up without wearing what looked like a corset, hose, and pumps with heels. Not to mention a hat.

  Dire circumstances must have brought her, along with her black and white Zenith TV and her caged canary, to our house—a place where we kids rarely wore shoes and chickens roamed the yard. I knew that my Grandpa had died years before and Grandmother had been living in her own house in the city. No one ever told me why she sold that house and moved to the sticks. But whatever the reason, I don’t believe it was a happy one.

  From the first day she arrived a new order took over our household. She would fix us breakfast, and we would eat it. Burnt toast along with burnt bacon. Burnt toast with guava jelly and burnt bacon. You get the picture. My grandmother couldn’t cook. We couldn’t beg for store bought cereal or unburnt toast. Miss Alma didn’t have a lot of patience for picky children. The axiom from the Bible, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” rang true in her heart. It rang true on my nether-end more than a few times, too.

  Another sort of order came in terms of television time. We were allowed to watch the Mickey Mouse Club in the afternoons as long as we didn’t bother Grandmother during her soap operas. Her stories she called them. If memory serves me, it was The Guiding Light she especially loved.

  Not bothering my grandmother was easy—much easier than the consequences of being a pest. Given our preference, my sister and I would far rather be outside building forts, trying to catch birds with a box and a stick, or climbing up into the old dilapidated barn to see the baby owls. We were also known for sneaking our dog upstairs into the attic so he could crash around like a bumper car as he chased rats. We didn’t do that when our grandmother was watching television, however, or we’d have never seen Mickey again.

  One of the things my grandmother could do was crochet. To this day I have not seen any crochet work I would say was any better than hers. Not long after settling in with us, Miss Alma organized some of the women in the church into a circle. They would quilt or crochet items to be auctioned off for charity. Every few weeks the circle would visit our house, and sometimes I would be still and quiet in order to be allowed to sit on the floor by Grandmother’s chair and watch them work.

  On one particular Wednesday afternoon the six ladies arrived as usual carrying their sewing bags and wearing aprons or pin cushions on their wrists. Two of them brought along Campbell Soup cans, which they set on the floor next to their chairs so they could raise them and spit. I once asked one of them why she did that, and instead of explaining the physical process of dipping snuff, she told me, “Because it’s impolite to spit in the sink.”

  Now, I believe I have already mentioned the rats in the attic. For the squeamish I suppose I could call them mice. But those of you who have ever lived in the country with farm animals in the vicinity know the kind of rats I’m talking about. Mickey Mouse might have them in size, but not by much.

  Well, on that Wednesday, th
e circle sat down and commenced to crochet. They were making a spectacular double bed cover out of crocheted squares that looked like pink spider webs. Each square had a three dimensional rose complete with petals and leaves in it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  Miss Alma was sitting a few feet from the wall near a lamp table, and I sat on the floor next to her. She’d let me use one of her crochet needles to knot up thread. I remember occasional conversation among them but the subject didn’t register. I was busy pretending to make some of the rose squares, confident mine would look as perfect as the others. Then Grandmother instructed me to get up and turn on the TV for her soap opera. I stopped my crocheting and did as I was told.

  The show was almost over when the rat appeared.

  My attention had drifted away from the Ivory Snow commercial on the TV, and I happened to look past my grandmother where I saw almost face to face, since he was on the end table, a rat the size of a Chihuahua. This estimation of size could have been due to the fact I’d never been nearly eyeball to eyeball to one. Before I could squeak out a warning, the rat leaped right onto my grandmother’s lap.

  You know how sometimes in stressful situations the actions around you shift into slow motion? That’s what happened as I watched the rat land. I expected Miss Alma to shout and shake the thing off her. But my grandmother, without dropping a stitch or making a sound, calmly backhanded the rat so hard it flew over my head and hit the wall behind me with a thud.

  I waited for everyone else to scream and run like sixty, like I wanted to do—and as I was sure the rat had done. But not a word was spoken. I saw one lady reach down and lift her soup can off the floor and set it on a table. The other woman soon followed suit with her can. Then The Guiding Light came back on and the incident passed like I’d imagined the whole thing.