Werks In Progress

Work In Progress

What happens when a gospel choir faces a terrorist incident?

“A RETELLING.”

“At least you dressed decent!  You steal that?”  There was a gasp.  A big one.  Chrysanthemum leapt to her feet.

“How could you?” Alicia Silverstone would have been proud.  

“Don't Clueless me!” Tazed snapped.  There was a bark of laughter from Esme. She stifled it with an effort, suspended in that strange time warp of unfolding argument where the moment for judicious intervention is rapidly dissipating.  The teacher in her watched it go impassively.  Dying also in the unfolding contretemps was the tiny tendril of guilt that had taken root in her mind regarding the reward of Clueless on company time for her classes with a collective GPA of 3.1 or better.

Chrysanthemum made to leave the choir stand.  Tazed took a single step forward.  She stilled, rage tears trembling in her killing glare as she gazed at him.  He noted the hardness of her brown irises; they were shield-like discs shooting rays of pure hatred straight at him.  Those slid off far more easily than 1500 volts.  He shrugged the same way he had as the cop advanced.  The choir collectively leaned away, a gesture so instinctive and cohesive that both Tor and Tazed snorted, breaking the tension.

“Stop stealing,” Tazed exhorted.  “Learn them songs.  I will put you in a specially personalized hell of my very own originalauthenticmaking if you do not.  Stop showboating and let's get down to bidness.  I just decided to grace y'all's pretentious-a--” he continued, “Con-vo-cay-shunnn.”  He knew it was the annual North Carolina Convocation of the Southeastern Baptist Convention. The First Act before the Big Show.

Chrys was in a tight rage. Trapped in the choir stand, she was unable to perform as she most certainly would have anywhere else. Tazed was the one person she actually loved. She gave no thought to the sin of theft. It was that he had called her out in front of everyone. She was wavering between a meltdown and a tantrum when Nee's butter-and-molasses-flavored chuckle reached her ears. It tamed her like a whip and a chair, and she sat down.  Tor, Tazed, Deac, and Daphne noted this seismic victory and filed it away for future reference.  Each had a different rationale.  Tor had been watching Nee avoid Chrysanthemum for months. He decided it was actually because the young man truly did not like her. He was ashamed at the relief he felt. She was no good.  Tazed thought, Umma use dat. Controlled her neatly.  That girl is no good.  Deac, he just prayed.  “Lawd, is the girl really no good?” he whispered aloud.  He hadn't meant to.  Those who heard pretended not.  Except Daphne.

“Chrysanthemum,” she heard herself command. Oh, no.

Chrys whipped around in the pew, a heat-seeking humilliation-displacement missile.  Taking on Aunt Daph would be bad, but she couldn't just leaver herself out here like this, all subdued and snickered at!

“If I catch you in a store making anything other than a purchase, you will rue the day.”  She really might not be any good, Daphne thought heavily.  Her red-tinted rage faded as quickly as it had flowered.

Chrysanthemum did not think. She pursed her lips and flicked her wrist at Daphne, flinging her hair into the faces of the three sopranos seated next to her as she returned to face forward.  The unflinching expression on Daphne's face was exponentially more intimidating than her son's scowl, as it turned out.  She was not out of the woods, however.  Diamonique rose to her feet, shaking her head slowly from side to side like a bull facing a matador. Her biscuit seemed to widen atop the pink and burgundy confection of box braids. Her nostrils flared ominously.  Too late, Chrys noticed. Her eyes widened with the fear of true cowardice. This again served to defuse matters.  Diamon made a single shout of laughter and sat down next to Daisy-Rose Wright. Miss Daisy-Rose considered Chrysanthemum a poor extension of herself, who was 72 and fab-u-lous.  She had grown up in similar trappings during an entirely different era, and she was grateful.  Still strong and strong-minded, Daisy-Rose had been prepared to watch Diamonique whip the girl's behind.  She rated it, and it would remain in-house.  The peace of God settled over her when Diamon sat down, however, and she accepted it.

Tor intervened.  “Chrysanthemum, straighten up and fly right. You have the talent and the beauty to be far more than the entitled church brat you've been  behaving lately--”

“What did you say?” sang Sylvia Morris.  Literally, sang it, leaning back like Aunt Esther poised to lay about her with that black patent-leather handbag .  She galumphed from the back of the church in high dudgeon.  It looked like matters were not settled after all.  Daphne looked around. Sylvia was advancing upon Tor like a harpy. The black sequined monstrosity that hung from her bony shoulders glittered ghoulishly.  It depicted an eagle feeding her chicks in the nest, and it was fugly.  There were several choking gasps of smothered mirth amid the altos around her to prove it.  She knew her son, however.  He was after some resolution, and he didn't care whose feelings he trampled upon to get it.  As she reached his seat, he stepped in front of her.  Blind with rage, Sylvia Morris bounced off his hard chest with some surprise.  She had not seen him, and he was a solid 210 pounds, at five-foot-nine inches tall.  Tazed was stocky but lean, a fact that his girlfriends kept a happy secret.  He kept his equilibrium issues at a minimum with a decent diet and a rigorous weightlifting regimen, so when Sylvia crashed into him, it was like running into a brick wall, just as he had reckoned.  Though she was his aunt, the carnality that was despoiling her looks rose up within her, sustaining rather than diverting her rage.  Sylvia knew she was responsible for her child's distasteful ways.  It was part of her plan to keep her malleable and proximate, so that Sylvia herself would never run out of drama and diversion.  She had been spoiling for a fight with Tor for a minute.  The tension she thought to put on him before the Convention was designed to keep her in control of things.  She couldn't let him plan complicated songs that she could have no hope of directing.  Her attire and her lack of training, talent, and skill warranted simple, familiar tunes that would cause her to be the focus, because everyone knew the music.  New stuff would challenge the audience, and put the spotlight on her myriad deficiencies as a choir director.  She couldn't have it.

“He said yo daughter's stealing, lying, lazy ways have got to stop,” Tazed growled menacingly.  Her black button eyes swung from Tor's face to his.  His jaw was set and his eyes were hard.  Her thoughts stumbled alarmingly.

“You've got nothing to do with this,” her voice was dry and cracked with a mix of rage and lust and genuine thirst.  She hated the sound of it—harsh and old and petty.

“To the contrary.” Tazed replied.  Nee laughed again.  Sylvia's eyes shot to him in the choir stand.  He was rared back and grinning a fraught, feral grin.  Looking as good as Tazed, and no kin to her.  This was not going well.

Chrys jumped to her feet again. It was all too much.  Her mama in that dress—drooling over Tazed and dazed and confused by Tor and Nehemiah—she lost all her collected thoughts of malice and flew into a five-alarm hissy fit.  “Y'all think you all can just sit here and attack me and my mama!  Ain't nunna y'all trogs got what we got or can do what we do!  If it wasn't for this church, you wouldn't have no standing, no class--” Chrysanthemum sputtered on a screech.

“Just a minute,” Daphne rose.  This was about to go all in.

“You don't know anything about anything, first of all.  You don't know your father has been paying for all the merch you stole.  You don't know that the store manager has got every one of your heists on her cell phone over at Ann Taylor.  You don't know that my boy has called off several girl gangs that wanna beat your butt....”  Daphne paused, breathing heavily.  Her caramel breasts were rising and falling with each deep, composing inhalation.  Her feet were planted in the stilettos and her fists were clenched tightly.  This was the Daphne who had risen up at Dysart the only time he slapped her, and he'd never do it again.  Chrysanthemum faced a life-altering choice if she kept screaming.  Daphne or Diamonique might very well hit her, right there in church.  She knew it.  She thought of Nee's laughter.  She hated it.  The struggle between fear and pique was a raging battle on her face, and Nee knew that if he laughed once more, the fight would turn upon him.  He was prepared to take it, but only for the greater good.  So he watched Chrys' face bend and stretch between fear and fury, biding his time as the choir rehearsal imploded in front of him.

Tazed stared at his mom admiringly.  Her intel was far better than his.  The fact that she knew that both SluttyMob and The Baes had it in for Flower was astonishing to him.  It had been the sole reason he chose to intervene.  Ann Taylor Chick had called him after the first or second time Flower had been in her shop boosting.  She owed him a favor for keeping The Baes out of her store.  At that point, he had planned to let Flower get caught and stay out of it.  Then Diamonique had texted him that the Mob was on FarceMedia saying they were gonna get his cuzzo for sleeping with one of their men.  Those chicks did not play.  After all that, the Baes' upper level (male) had let him know that Flower's amateur freelancing was impacting their operations, and they were willing to give him a chance to handle her before they did.  Flower was so street-stupid that she had no idea how close she was to dying every day.  He must do something, or live with the outcome.  Clearly, his mom had come to the same conclusion.  He knew her job caused her to have eyes and ears everywhere; what he had always suspected he now knew to be true: all her channels were not from 'legitimate' sources.  Flower must be in a bunch of trouble, if Daphne had been made aware.

“And who here is a troglodyte?” hissed Diamonique Atherton, popping up again and stunning them all.  She looked around with a lopsided grin. “I went to the same schools,” she said to no one, and plopped back into the pew.  Thirty eight people (excluding Chrys and her mama) mentally chalked one up for the girl.  Chrysanthemum sucked her front teeth and said nothing.  Daphne rolled her eyes.

“I was getting to that,” said she.  “I don't know who you think you are, or what your mamma raised, but if you ever speak that way in front of me again I will kill your shadow, hear me?”  A pause. “Do. You. Hear. Me. Girl?”

“Need help?” Asked Tor, Tazed and Nee in unison.

“Yes ma'am,” Chrysanthemum mumbled.

“I cannot hear you,” Tor snarled.

“That's enough!” Sylvia screeched. 

Everybody had forgotten her. That was not to be tolerated.

“No it isn't,” intoned Dr. Morris. He knew how to sneak into a scene as well as the young ones.  “I should have handled this long ago. I should have known better than to think I could keep anything from these two.”  He grimaced, an apology, really.  He stared from Daphne to Micah, his brown eyes burning like dark honey in his chiseled face, in terrible opposition to the defeated slump of his shoulders.  His hands sagged limply by his knees as he regarded them.  They had never seen him like this.  He had returned to his car at the mall and been overcome with regret and sorrow and apprehension.  He had some housecleaning to do.  It  must start at the top.  He had walked into the church through the parson's entrance to see his wife in that Joan Collins horror of a dress, his child acting out like Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween I,” and forty of his closest associates there to witness it all.  He may as well begin now.

David L reached over and wrapped his daughter's long hair over his forearm twice, in one smooth motion.  His uncles had been pimps on the streets of Charlotte North Carolina.  He had seen much growing up, and it made him a better preacher. He kept her decorously tipped as he frog-marched her to him from two pews back, her face twisted in a comic spasm of shocked outrage and pain and not a little fear.  Her feet were crossing and her knees were knocking and her arms were whirling in a neurological tangle until her instinct for avoiding complete humiliation kicked in and she made herself run to keep up with her father’s relentless reeling in of her person. His face was grim and blank.  Nee flung himself forward in the pew, silently shaking with the purest mirth God ever made. He was silent, absolutely so, but vibrating like a tuning fork.  There could be no doubt what act was upon him, but only Tor had seen him disappear.  There was no place for him to hide, so Tor balled his toes up in their after-six Vans to hide his catastrophic need to guffaw.  After the preacher had hustled the girl away by her hair, he laid his head upon the  piano keys, which chuffed a gentle reception.  There he spent two solid minutes doing something with the laughter that was threatening to stop his heart, as several in the choir stand finally gave in to their own quiet snickering.  Torrent straightened to let the howling, yelling, rolling on the floor laugh trickle down his face as a stream of tears for all to see, his hands now dangling limply between his thighs as he regarded them all through red-rimmed, puffy eyes.  He shrugged an elegant, eloquent shrug and just sat there, as the choir attempted to collect themselves.  Sylvia was outside the Pastor's Study with her arms folded.  The eagle on the dress looked more and more like a turkey buzzard every second.  She did not deign to knock, nor did she dare to enter.  So she stood, regarding the tips of her pointy patent pumps.  She could hear the muffled mirth in the choir stand, and she was burning with humiliation and not a little rage.  

That nigger! How dare he. She really thought this. In church.

“Chrysanthemum, things are going to change.”  David L had flung his daughter into the Naugahyde couch in his Pastor's Study like Ron O'Neal in SuperFly.  She was seated there now, with big doe eyes and trembling lower lip.  Her father was completely unmoved.  Everything was on the line because of his girl.  He had to take the hard line.  He was amazed at himself as he regarded her with new eyes.  Yes, she was beautiful.  Yes, she was talented.  It meant nothing, almost, because she was also selfish, calculating, and unutterably mean.

 “If you steal anything else, you will go to jail.”  If you triangulate anyone else; if you start any more shit—“  Chrys' eyes widened even further, which meant they were now starting out of her head.  She had never heard her father cuss. At all.  “Those people out there are the reason you have what you have today.  I never want to hear you speak to any of them that way again.”  

“But Daddy--” this was her opportunity.

The entire choir jumped.

“DO NOT SPEAK!” roared Dr. Morris.  The force of his voice shook the walls with power and authority.  They had all just been sitting there, canoodling events in their minds with the hope of regaining some sort of equilibrium, when his command to his daughter detonated like an explosion, causing his wife to startle most unbecomingly outside of the study door.  She was now even less inclined to go in.  She had only heard her husband raise his voice two or three times in her life.  Two of those times, a fight had ensued, and it had not been good for the other party.  If he was yelling at Chrysanthemum, surely she would not escape his wrath.  What to do?  Her mind buzzed in a frantic circle; she simply did not know.  David L heard his wife thinking.

“Git yourself in here,” he hissed through the door.  The L-shaped latch rattled in her bony hand as she turned it.  The sound calmed the pastor somewhat.  She was scared.  That satisfied him deeply.  Several things were rolling like a deep undertow in his mind.  He needed to re-establish his relationship with Jesus Christ.  He had been treating Him like his Dope Man, only hunting him down to satisfy his gospel fix on the regular, every Sunday.  Dr. Morris had been a weed smoker from the age of twelve.  Now that he was getting older, it mostly helped him sleep.  He never preached against it in the pulpit, or messed with his 402-friendly members.  You could be gay in the man's church—he only sought to help you establish that personal relationship.  After that, it was between you and Jesus.  These were things that kept his flock loyal and his pews full.  He would get up in the night to come see about you.  He was known to be a precise shot, so the gang boys gave him wide berth.  They could come to his church and not be preached at, or about, so they came, bringing, baby mammas, Mom Dukes, and once in a while, each other.  Those times changed lives, and he relished them.  They were becoming fewer and further between, so he felt a refreshing was due.

Sylvia slid into the room like a vulture walking sideways and pressed her back against the door like Susan Lucci in a very early episode of “All My Children”.  The dress bespoke of her feverish desire to be taken seriously as a prosperous Woman of God—in all the wrong ways.  It was now a picture of over-indulgent self-interest.  The sequins seemed to arrange themselves at will to coarsen and distort the eagle and her chicks.  One minute it was a buzzard, the next, a pterodactyl.  David L looked at his wife and shook his head, a burble of disgusted laughter tumbling from his lips as he surveyed her head-to-toe.

“Girl, burn that dress,” said he.  His daughter laid to the side like scythed wheat.  Her father could have been Tim Gunn.  She wanted to get up and gently remove the durn thing in surrender—leave Maman standing there in her expensive slip and hose.  So she did.

“You ain't got but one chile,” she said sweetly.  This made her father laugh genuinely.  Sure enough, his wife was now shivering silently in an $85 La Perla slip, $150 custom Warner's brassiere, and $45 Hanes pantyhose.  She looked a lot better, almost like the cheerleader who had singled him out for herself back in 1985, all shapely calves and round booty—flicking that skirt at him from the sidelines after a good gain on offense....Wait, where was he again?  At least there was still some desire in him for her.  That was good.  He filed it away.  There were matters at hand.