More Church Folk Read online

  Also by Michele Andrea Bowen

  CHURCH FOLK

  SECOND SUNDAY

  HOLY GHOST CORNER

  UP AT THE COLLEGE

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Michele Andrea Bowen

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: July 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56957-6

  Contents

  Also by Michele Andrea Bowen

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  An Abridged History of the Gospel United Church

  Episcopal Districts—Gospel United Church

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  This book is dedicated to my uncle James and my aunt Bessie, aka Bishop James D. Nelson, Sr., and Mother Bessie Nelson, Greater Bethlehem Temple Apostolic Church in Baltimore, Maryland

  Acknowledgments

  More Church Folk… Hallelujah!!!! I cannot believe I am writing the acknowledgments to this book. It’s been a long time coming. And you know I have to send some shout-outs for this book.

  First, to my Grand Central Publishing family: Karen Thomas, my editor, thank you for letting me be me in this book. And I am so glad that you said this is the book you wanted me to write. Latoya Smith, you are always so sweet and helpful and you laugh at my jokes. Tanisha Christie and Nick Small, you two always have my back. Linda Duggins, you’ve been there for me since Church Folk. Mr. Don Puckey. You have been blessing me with awesome covers for close to a decade. And to my copy editor, S. B. Kleinman, and the other folk who help me out at GCP.

  To my agent, Pamela Harty of the Knight Literary Agency. You are the best, and I am blessed to have you as my agent.

  My own church folk at St. Joseph’s AME Church in Durham, North Carolina. It’s true: St. Joseph’s really is a friendly church. Love to you all, and mad love to my pastor and first lady, Rev. Philip R. Cousin, Jr., and First Lady Angela McMillan Cousin. You all always have my back.

  To Ava and Ken Brownlee. It’s now a tradition. You guys have to be in the acknowledgments.

  My family: My girls—Laura and Janina. My mom, Minnie Bowen. My grandmother, DaDa. My aunt Brenda and uncle Twayne and their crew in KC, MO. My aunt Laura in the STL. My cousins—the B’More crew—Jonathan and Jason, I remember the first solo performances (God is good). And my cousins in STL, Memphis, Chicago, ATL, and down in Charleston, MS (Essie Lane Simmons’s hometown).

  My readers—THANK YOU FROM MY HEART—LOVE Y’ALL!!!!

  Thank You, Lord!!!! If I had 10,000 tongues, I couldn’t thank You enough. For You are good and worthy to be praised.

  “You thrill me, Lord, with all that You have done for me! I sing for joy because of what You have done.”

  Psalm 92:4 (NLT)

  Michele Andrea Bowen

  October 6, 2009

  An Abridged History of the Gospel United Church

  The Gospel United Church was established in 1817 at the Meeting Plantation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by Z. T. Meeting, a slave and ordained minister, with the help of a former slave, Hezekiah Meeting. Z. T. was a master carpenter who designed and built most of the buildings on the Meeting Plantation, as well as several houses for the friends of his owner, the Reverend Cornelius Meeting, an economist who specialized in agricultural commerce at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  Cornelius Meeting, who owned hundreds of acres of land in Orange County, North Carolina, along with several hundred slaves, was an ordained minister in the United Gospel Congregations of America. He was also one of the area’s top scholars on slavery, and had won accolades for a pamphlet he wrote and published, “Protecting the South’s Commodities: Teaching Slaves the Bible to Protect Your Properties and Investments.”

  Rev. Meeting discovered that when he told his slaves what he wanted them to know in the Bible, carefully editing out the most liberating qualities of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they found it more difficult to oppose chattel slavery, for fear of going against the Word of God and risking going to Hell when they died.

  Despite Rev. Meeting’s popularity, caused by fellow slaveholders’ excitement over this economic plan, his successes within the actual slave community were quite modest. Cornelius was discovering that his theory worked only if the slaves were converted, and then fed enough propaganda to steer them far enough away from the truth of the Word to accept this false doctrine being perpetrated by Master Cornelius. Plus, they had to be watched and carefully supervised during church meetings, to avoid one of those super-reverent, in-the-fields-praying slaves receiving a revelation from the Holy Ghost that ran contrary to the propaganda Cornelius was working overtime to get them to accept.

  So Rev. Meeting enlisted the help of Z. T., his most devoutly Christian and industrious servant on the plantation. Cornelius provided Z. T. with high-quality lumber supplies to build a new cabin, some extra yard space for a garden, a few fat hens, and a new set of clothes, before he told Z. T. that he would be responsible for increasing the number of born-again slaves on the plantation, as well as supervising their conversion process. This strategy proved effective and clever until a year later when Z. T., who didn’t believe anything Cornelius told him, finished teaching himself to read in secret, and then read the Bible for himself.

  Z. T. Meeting was a quiet, private, and extremely observant man. He accepted the call to serve as the slaves’ pastor with the dedication and enthusiasm his master had hoped for. He then set out to give the men, women, and children whose uncompensated labor made the Meeting Plantation a premier agricultural enterprise, the true Word of God, and not some false-prophet-spewed craziness that would put him second in line for a first-class train ticket to Hell. Z. T. surmised that Cornelius would be first in line, since he was white, wealthy, and a slaveholder, and the tickets would be distributed below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  While in the process of completing a second thorough reading of the Bible, Z. T. Meeting learned about the African Methodist Episcopal Church from a newly purchased slave who had lived outside of Baltimore, not too far from the Pennsylvania border. He was told that the AME Church was run by a colored man, Bishop Richard Allen. The slave also told Z. T. that he was in a position quite similar to the one Bishop Allen had been in when he started the AM
E Church. Z. T. had been bestowed full ordination by a bishop in the United Gospel Congregations of America, and if he followed in Bishop Allen’s footsteps, he could start his own denomination and serve as the first bishop.

  The new slave understood that Z. T. had been ordained by a bishop who was in the apostolic line of succession that began with the Apostle Peter, and was therefore able to establish a new denomination. As soon as Z. T. processed this groundbreaking information, he immediately went to his owner and told Cornelius that the best way to convert the slaves was to allow them to have their own “slave church.” Once Cornelius Meeting’s eyes finished lighting up at the thought of the accolades he hoped to receive from proving his theory correct, he agreed to contact the bishop presiding over his district, and arranged for Z. T. to be consecrated as the first official bishop of the newly established Gospel United Church.

  With the onset of their new denomination, the slaves on the Meeting Plantation increased their productivity by twenty-five percent, they seemed happier, and the need for floggings dropped by eighteen percent. Cornelius Meeting was in Heaven. And frankly, so were his servants, especially after Z. T. located Cornelius’s slave brother, Hezekiah, who was the mirror image of his white sibling.

  The slave, Hezekiah, had been banished, along with his mother, to the West Indies when he was twelve years old by Cornelius’s mother, who feared for her own son’s life with a slave boy running around looking just like him. She knew of the slave revolts that were kept secret. And she also understood just how easy it would be for the slave child to change places with her precious Cornelius, if the bondmen on her plantation ever took a notion to engage in an uprising. So she sent the boy and his mother away to the West Indies, making allowances for Hezekiah to run her family’s holdings there, as long as they promised never to return to North Carolina. Hezekiah’s mother, fearing for her own son’s life, agreed to this arrangement, while her son merely nodded, knowing that he was going back to North Carolina to settle some wrongs the first chance he got.

  Hezekiah’s chance came when he connected with freedmen in the fast-growing AME Church. Determined to learn more about this religion of freedmen, Hezekiah began to make secret runs to the United States to meet with the leaders of this great church. But meeting and praying and talking with folks in Philadelphia just wasn’t enough. Soon Hezekiah was going farther and farther south with each trip, until he found himself at one of the secret meetings for aspiring AMEs in a remote location in Orange County, North Carolina.

  Z. T. and Hezekiah Meeting met at that secret meeting on African Methodism. The very first time Z. T. laid eyes on Hezekiah, he was awed (and inspired) by the man’s carbon-copy resemblance to Cornelius. The two men became fast friends, prayer partners, and co-conspirators in a plot to adopt the tenets of African Methodism into Z. T.’s new denomination for the sons and daughters of Africa—freedmen and bondmen alike—in the Old North State. They also decided that it was high time to set some wrongs right on the Meeting Plantation.

  So they planned what would be the smoothest, cleverest, and most clandestine slave revolt in North Carolina. They sneaked Hezekiah onto the plantation, stole Cornelius’s clothes, and waited for the most opportune moment to introduce Cornelius to his own brother, right before they drugged him and put him on the first ship “back home to the West Indies.”

  Cornelius slept the entire trip in a very comfortable cabin. The crew was told that he was a well-respected businessman, who was also quite ill and determined to get back home. The crew was also informed that it was imperative that Brother Hezekiah be given his vials of medicine in his wine, to make sure he was able to sleep peacefully most of the way “home.”

  Cornelius was kept in a drugged state until they arrived, and several members of the crew delivered him to his “home” and “family.” Hezekiah’s mother recognized her son’s nemesis on sight, and immediately set out to make him as comfortable as possible. She knew that a comfortable bed, a pretty room with a view of the ocean, wine from the cold cellar in a crystal goblet, and fresh tropical fruit would be important when he woke up a colored man.

  As soon as Cornelius opened his eyes, felt the warm and fragrant tropical breeze bathing his face, and stared into the intent gaze of a woman he had not seen since he was twelve years old, he gasped for air, groped his chest, and died. Hezekiah’s mother said a quick prayer, shed huge crocodile tears, and then told everyone it was imperative that she journey back to the States to check on her nephew, Cornelius, now that her “beloved son” was dead.

  Bethany Meeting left the West Indies with much fanfare and amid many tears from those who worked for her. Never had any of her people ever met a “white landowner” with such compassion for, and understanding and acceptance of, slaves and colored people. She would be sorely missed by the two “whites” she left in charge of her lands.

  Many years ago Bethany Meeting had left Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a frightened slave woman, desperate to protect the life of her only child. She returned a wealthy white plantation mistress in whose presence her only nephew, “Rev. Cornelius Meeting,” delighted. At that point, the Meeting Plantation became the official birthplace of the Gospel United Church and one of the most clandestine and active stops on the Underground Railroad, as well as a secret military training post for slaves preparing to run away and work for the Union Army during the Civil War.

  “Cornelius Meeting” retired from his position at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill so that he could devote all his energy to building his plantation into a top-rate agricultural enterprise. He then withdrew from public life to do the work of the Lord on his own property. This strategy proved wise and prudent in the years to come because the Meeting Plantation was one of the few to survive the economic collapse that ensued at the close of the Civil War. Eventually the “owners” of the Meeting Plantation sold their vast holdings to the state of North Carolina for millions of dollars, made sound investments, got richer, and then relocated to Durham County to establish what would eventually become Evangeline T. Marshall University.

  Bishop Z. T. Meeting, Jr., became the first president of the church-based university, and then set out to build up his father’s church. He established a ministerial training school that was originally set up at the historic Fayetteville Street Gospel United Church, located several miles north of Evangeline T. Marshall University in Durham County. After several classes of ministers received full ordination, the aging Bishop Meeting moved the training school to the university and founded the Evangeline T. Marshall School of Divinity.

  Bishop Meeting commissioned this new crop of Gospel United Church ministers to set up churches outside of North Carolina. Soon the Gospel United Church became what Durham County’s The Colored Gazette Newspaper coined the fastest-growing colored denomination in America. With the growth came a need to consolidate the clusters of churches in the states, and then regions, each with a minister appointed to preside over the new districts by Bishop Meeting.

  As the denomination continued to grow, so did the need for more districts. This denomination grew so fast that it wasn’t long before the Gospel United Church had representation in every state, parts of the Caribbean, and four countries on the continent of Africa. This is the church that Rev. Theophilus Simmons and his best friend, Rev. Eddie Tate, would find themselves governing as the church entered the twilight years of the twentieth century, looking forward to what the new millennium would bring decades later.

  Episcopal Districts—Gospel United Church

  The Gospel United Church is a historically black denomination established in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1817. It has Episcopal districts covering all fifty states, the Caribbean, and four countries on the continent of Africa. The denomination is broken down into eighteen districts and two Episcopal offices. There are twenty-one bishops. Eighteen bishops administer the Episcopal districts, two are assigned to the Episcopal office positions, and one is elected by the body of delegates from across the denomina
tion to serve as the Chief Administrative Officer, or Senior Bishop, over all bishops and the entire Gospel United Church.

  Chief Administrative Officer/Senior Bishop, Percy Jennings*

  District One

  Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia

  Presiding Bishop, Will Dawson*

  District Two

  District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey

  Presiding Bishop, Zeebedee L. Carson, III**

  District Three

  Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts

  Presiding Bishop, Silas Jones***

  District Four

  Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine

  Presiding Bishop, Josiah Samuels***

  District Five

  Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee

  Presiding Bishop, Matthew James Robertson*

  District Six

  Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana

  Presiding Bishop, Richard D. Lewis*

  District Seven

  Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas

  Presiding Bishop, Jimmy Thekston***

  District Eight

  Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska

  Presiding Bishop, Murcheson James*

  District Nine

  Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa

  Presiding Bishop, Jerome H. Falls**

  District Ten

  California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington