Some of My Best Friends Are Black (50 page)

If you’re white and you go to a black church, you’ll be immediately
swept up in a warm, enthusiastic embrace. Lots of hearty handshakes. Lots of old black ladies in hats saying, “So
glad
you could join us today.” The black church has always enjoyed the opportunity to show off its Sunday best to outside visitors. But that’s exactly what you are when you’re here: a visitor. As friendly as people are, the longer you sit in that pew—and at a black church you will sit there for a
long
time—the more you come to realize that this isn’t meant for you. Because it isn’t. It’s the social, economic, political, and cultural hub of a separate black America. Its churchness cannot be divorced from its blackness.

As the black middle class spread out in search of suburbia, black churches followed the migration. Once established, they became centers of gravity, accelerating the move and concentrating it, eventually giving rise to the stupendously large black megachurch. From Dallas to Atlanta to Washington, D.C., black megachurches and their celebrity preachers are now the fastest growing segment of the faithful. They look like churches, these places, but they function more like independent city-states. With congregations that can range to upward of ten, fifteen, even thirty thousand members in size, they raise millions of dollars to build and maintain their own infrastructure, which can include everything from Bible schools to health clubs. Their extensive ministries offer the black community a full suite of social services, from ex-offender reentry programs to upper-tax-bracket financial planning. One black megachurch in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the fifteen-thousand-member Jericho City of Praise, owns a 125-acre campus that includes its own office park and a $35 million retirement complex.

It would seem that just about everyone has settled quite contentedly on opposite sides of the spiritual tracks. By the most widely cited statistic, 93 percent of all churches in America are racially homogenous. And if you ever stop to suggest that maybe those churches should do something about it, people just look at you like you’re crazy.

Down in Grand Coteau, Darrell Burleigh has been parish manager at St. Charles Borromeo for over thirty years now. Year after year, decade after decade, he’s sat at his desk and watched integration not happen. Eventually, like most of the country, he figured it never would. “After the last fight with Dave Andrus,” Burleigh says, “I said, ‘That’s it. It’ll never
happen.’ People were talking so bad about the priests you would have thought they were criminals. I said, ‘The only way we’ll ever integrate is the blacks will have to come over and say they
want
to join the main church, and that’s never gonna happen.’

“But Charles James, he would always say to me, he’d say, ‘Darrell, you’re gonna see. One of these days…’

“And I’d say, ‘It’ll never happen.’

“He’d say, ‘Ah, you don’t have no faith, you.’

“And I’d say, ‘Maybe I don’t. I might be in the wrong place, havin’ no faith at church.’

“So ever since it happened, he still reminds me whenever I see him. ‘What I told you?’ he says. ‘What I told you?’

“And I say, ‘You know, I’m big enough I can admit when I was wrong.’ So I said I was wrong. The only thing I’ve ever worked for was to see the church as one. It was what I’d always prayed for, but I never thought I would have seen it in my lifetime. And I tell you, it went off like a piece of cake.”

In the fall of 2003, David Andrus’s successor, Pastor No. 12, was transferred out, paving the way for Pastor No. 13, Tom Madden. Father Madden had been dispatched to St. Charles Borromeo as a temporary replacement from Grand Coteau’s Jesuit Spirituality Center just across the way. His assignment was meant to last only a few months—he was technically retired—but all the area priests had been allocated to other parishes. A continuing shortage compelled him to stay on.

That problem was compounded when St. Charles’s associate pastor took permanent leave due to illness, leaving Madden in charge of running the entire parish. It would have been a heavy workload for a young man in his prime; Madden was seventy-eight. Attempting to carry the whole mass schedule by himself, he suffered a fainting spell at the altar. Then he suffered another, landing him in the emergency room.

The cost of maintaining separate churches had been wearing on Grand Coteau for years, emotionally, financially, and in every other way. Now that burden had become manifest in the infirmities of its aging priest. “I got to talking with Father Madden about it,” Darrell Burleigh
says, “and he admitted he was just too old for it. So I said, ‘You know what we need to do? What we’ve always needed to do: bring that chapel over here. Play the age card. You’re too old, and you can’t do it.’

“He was a little leery, given what the other pastors had gone through. But I told him, ‘Tom, what can they do to you? You’re already retired.’”

Madden eventually came around. “I had no intention of making any changes when I arrived,” he explains. “It was never my goal to end the segregation, but I saw this as an opportunity to do so. So I solicited suggestions from the parishioners, black and white, and then proposed we move the seven-thirty chapel mass to the main church and cut the services down to two.” Everyone agreed. Given the realities of the situation, there wasn’t much choice. Besides, it was only temporary—or, at least, that’s what everyone was led to believe. For several months, as Madden ran the parish without an associate, he quietly dragged his feet in searching for another. “Maybe it was somewhat duplicitous,” he says, “but I felt if we got it in place, we might be able to continue with it, make it permanent. Then the whole problem of having a black church and a white church would be resolved.”

Stalling tactics would last only so long. Another priest would show up eventually, and the chapel would reopen like always. Fortunately for Madden, as Charles James had predicted, the Lord had decided to do things His way. The integration of the church would be helped along by an act of God. On October 3, 2002, Louisiana had been hit by Hurricane Lili. The storm inflicted some $790 million in damage on the state. In Grand Coteau, the roof of the chapel took the worst of it. Water damage was seeping in. This was on top of the major electrical and heating repairs the building had needed since Father Andrus’s time; they’d been put off by the leadership changes at the parish. If the chapel wasn’t fixed soon, it would be in no shape to weather the next hurricane season.

Madden faced the same problem Andrus had: spend thousands restoring the chapel, or use that same money to build something the parish sorely lacked. “If we converted it into an all-purpose building,” Madden says, “we could still use it as a chapel, but we could take out the pews and set up moveable walls for classrooms and such. Of course, the chapel had largely been built by the sweat equity of the black community;
losing it was very painful for them. But I figured if I did it and moved on, then I could take the blame with me and it wouldn’t be the problem of the successor. So that’s what we did.”

Madden went to the black parishioners to ask for their cooperation, but he also made it clear that, financially, there really wasn’t an option. A few complaints were raised, but “not even very many,” Madden says. The black congregation gave its blessing. On June 13, 2004, a brief announcement was placed in the church bulletin. The chapel would be closed and converted into classrooms, the seven-thirty mass would be held at the main church from now on, and… and that was it. Piece of cake. On the appointed day, the chapel renovations began. The black parishioners came to pack up the artwork and some keepsakes. They saved the woodwork, too. The handmade pews that their fathers and grandfathers had built were taken out, one by one, and carried off to find new purpose on patios and back porches.

Given the anger of the protest just two years before, it seems bizarre that the end would come so quietly. It’s almost a nonstory, an anticlimax. But if you take the long view, it’s easy to understand what happened here. David Knight and Charlie Thibodeaux took a sledgehammer to the problem for years and years and barely made a crack. But people kept after it, slowly chipping away. Warren Broussard sanded down the edges. Dave Andrus and Charles James took out a few chunks. Hurricane Lili gave it a good whack. And with decades of patience, diligence, dialogue, and compromise, the roots of Jim Crow had grown so weak that a seventy-eight-year-old man was able to knock the whole thing over with a feather. That is the Miracle of Grand Coteau.

Once the two congregations were joined, no one really knew what to expect. Among white parishioners, there remained a great deal of reluctance and indifference. In the black congregation, many of the age-old worries persisted. Not everyone felt as comfortable as Charles James, who’d been coming to the big church for some time. “There were still some people,” he says, “every chance they got they would talk about ‘our church’ and what it was like in ‘our church.’ And it got on my nerves really bad. I recall this one lady said to me, ‘Well, you know they’re not
going to let us do the things that we were doing in the chapel. They’re not going to let us do this, and they’re not going to let us do that…’

“I said, ‘What do you mean
let
you? This is your church, too. If you were doing them in the chapel, how can they not let you do them here? So those fears are your own. All we need to do is just keep doing what we were doing before.’”

The migration was not without compromise, but many of the chapel’s traditions made the move intact. Indeed, much of the accommodation had to come from the white side of the aisle. Since the parish had no Knights of Columbus chapter, the Knights of Peter Claver migrated to become the church’s principal service organization. Once the bastion of the anti-integration holdouts, the group has since taken on white members. In every pew, you’ll also find copies of
Lead Me, Guide Me: The African-American Catholic Hymnal
. The songbook’s Kente cloth cover sits right there beside Francesco Furini’s
Annunciation
, the fifteenth-century Italian Baroque painting on the seasonal missalette.

Lead Me, Guide Me
is there because the chapel’s gospel choir came directly over to the new seven-thirty mass, which left one white parishioner, Andre Douget, without a choir. A divorce attorney from Lafayette, Douget has attended mass at St. Charles Borromeo since about 1995. He and his wife have a weekend home nearby. Rather than commute back to the city for church every Sunday, they come here. Douget used to sing in the Sunday choir at the nine-thirty service, but when the churches merged, that mass got pushed an hour back, to ten thirty—too late for Douget, who, like many Cajuns, prefers to spend his Sundays in the kitchen. So he started going to the seven-thirty mass. But the gospel choir, Douget felt, wasn’t his to join. As a bespectacled, fortysomething white guy, he didn’t imagine he’d be a particularly good fit. “I’d sit up front and sing,” he says, “but only as part of the regular congregation.”

Eventually, some members of the choir heard him singing every week and asked him to join. Not surprisingly, one of those who approached Douget was Charles James. “Andre told me he felt some people might not appreciate it,” James says, “but I told him, ‘Just get your ass over there.’”

Douget was right, however: not every black member of the choir was on board with the idea. “It wasn’t tense,” James admits, “but some people
weren’t so open to it. But Andre is the kind of person that brings an open spirit and an open heart to the situation, and he’s educating
them
. He’s educating those people who may not be able to understand that it just doesn’t matter. It’s all foolishness. Andre’s a parishioner, period.”

It’s now been three years since Douget joined the choir. Whatever objections existed within the group have long disappeared. He’s been known to take a solo every now and then, and he’s even got a nickname. “They call me Creamy,” he says. “We’re way past the welcome stage. I’m just a member of the choir. We joke about it a lot.

“They laugh at me, too, for trying to get soul. I can read music, and so if it’s a quarter note I want to sing a quarter note. I always try to sing the songs the way they’re written in the book. They could throw the book away. They sing it the way they’ve been taught. Whenever a new song comes up in practice, if it’s not in the hymnal, I’m like, ‘Anybody got the words? Who has the words?’ Because they don’t pass along sheet music; it’s traditional music that’s been passed down generation to generation, and they all just know it.