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  He started for the door. Cleotis had reached his saturation point with these fools and couldn’t wait to get back home to Memphis, after he made a quick stopover in Durham, North Carolina. Hanging out with Dotsy Hamilton and Dotsy’s boy, Grady Grey, would be a welcome respite from dealing with these crazy preachers.

  Rico Sneed hopped up and followed Cleotis out of the suite at a careful distance. He could have stayed longer but was anxious to get to another destination. Cleotis knew exactly where Rico was going. And if he had cared an iota for this negro, he would have tried to stop him from going to watch that filth.

  Cleotis knew from Rico’s nervousness and secretiveness about where he was going that he had made an appointment to watch a movie in private. He also knew that Rico had to meet his contact at a precise time, or the deal was off. Cleotis couldn’t believe that a man with as much education as Rico Sneed, and his talent for computers, was setting himself up for complete disaster with this kind of addiction. He had witnessed the destruction of Otis Caruthers, and would never forget those telltale signs of this horrific obsession.

  One day Rico Sneed was going to wish he had taken the time to crack open a Bible rather than working overtime to live a lie and feigning respectability. One day he was going to cry out in desperation, and feel nothing but the cold, dark emptiness that came from cloaking yourself in secret degradation. One day Rico was going to be surrounded by people he wouldn’t even think worthy of a passing nod on the street, and be glad they were there simply because there was no one else.

  The day would come when he wouldn’t be able to sleep because the images he’d poured in his mind all these years wouldn’t let go. It was a vile existence. And as much as Cleotis could not stand Rico Sneed, he didn’t wish this problem on him.

  In the meantime they were stuck with Rico because he was the only person Cleotis knew with that level of computer skills who would work with them. There were other computer-trained black folk out there. Some were women who would slap the black off of them over this. And the rest were honest men who would shun using their skills for this kind of endeavor. But it was going to be hard to spend the months leading up to the Triennial Conference with so much contact with Rico Sneed.

  As soon as Cleotis and Rico were gone Bishop Giles pulled out a quarter, looked at Marcel and Sonny, and asked them to choose heads or tails. Marcel, who always liked to be first, called out heads, leaving a silent Sonny with tails. Bishop Giles flipped the coin up in the air, caught it, and then slapped it on his wrist. He stared intently at Sonny Washington and said, “You have four months to run for bishop.”

  He then turned toward Marcel and said, “And you have four days to get his campaign up and running.”

  “Bishop,” Sonny said, “I don’t want to be a bishop. I’m happy with my church in North Carolina.”

  “How could you possibly be happy living out in the middle of nowhere?” Larsen asked him.

  “Yeah,” Ernest said, laughing, “who in their right mind would want to live out in Bouquet Farina, North Carolina?”

  “It’s Fuquay-Varina,” Sonny said tightly. “And it’s a nice place to live, thank you.”

  What he wanted to say was that he couldn’t understand why anybody in his right mind would want to live up here in Detroit. At least he had land and trees and flowers and a very comfortable lifestyle at a modest cost. He wouldn’t want to live up here with all of this cold, all of this traffic, and folks all up on each other for more money than he was trying to make with WP21. He didn’t know why folks in big Northern cities like Detroit always felt that people living in small communities in states like North Carolina were missing something.

  Glodean kept telling him to quit trying to get Larsen Giles down to their estate on the outskirts of the community. She said, “Baby, you do realize that our home is a whole lot bigger and nicer than Bishop Giles’s house? You invite him to our home, and you are going to open the floodgates of Hell on yourself. Don’t do it, Sonny. There are lots of things I wish you wouldn’t do. But this is one thing you better not do, if you know what’s good for you.”

  At first he hadn’t wanted to give credence to what Glodean was telling him. But after eating a fancy, chef-catered lunch at Larsen Giles’s brand-new twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot home situated on one and a half acres of land, he thought it best to keep him away from his own six-thousand-square-foot spread, nestled on twelve acres of beautifully landscaped property.

  Larsen fingered the coin. He secretly wondered if Marcel and Sonny would really be able to pull off a successful campaign for bishop in so little time. They weren’t all that bright, and had to face off against Theophilus Simmons and Eddie Tate, who could take those two down in their sleep. But on the bright side, Marcel and Sonny didn’t ever fight fair. They would give those two goody-goodies a run for their money.

  ELEVEN

  With only three months to go before the Triennial Conference, Eddie Tate’s church, Mount Zion Gospel United Church in Chicago, Illinois, was hosting the Eighth Episcopal District’s Triennial Conference planning meeting. Several candidates had invited themselves to the meeting to announce their eleventh-hour candidacies for an Episcopal seat at the opening service. It was a long service with all those preachers stepping forward to give mini-sermons to convince folks that they were “the one” to become one of the two next bishops in the denomination.

  Some of the candidates were mild surprises. A few were expected, like the two preachers out of the Ninth District who always announced their candidacies at this stage in the game. They never got any further than galvanizing a small team of workers, who helped them to raise enough money to pay off bills, have extra money in their pockets, and live large until they ran for bishop again three years later.

  As soon as those two preachers showed up at the planning meeting and asked for permission to speak at a service, Theophilus told Eddie, “Those two negroes have the best fund-raising program I’ve ever seen—folks giving them money for days on end to do who knows what. I bet they take cash and all of the checks are written out directly to them.”

  All Eddie could do was laugh and pity the fools who greased their palms every three years, and then had the nerve to wonder why they never won an election for an Episcopal seat. A run for bishop could have so many twists and turns. And unfortunately it could be fertile ground for unscrupulous preachers to run some serious cons on church people.

  Now here was Sonny Washington, sitting on the first pew of Eddie’s church, waiting for an opportunity to announce that he, too, was running for bishop. Who knew that Sonny Washington would have bitten the bullet and decided to run, and that Marcel Brown would take a second-row seat and become his campaign manager?

  Eddie’s first inclination was to tell Sonny, “Heck no. You can’t tell folks you are running for bishop at my own church.” But he tempered himself and gave him some time in the pulpit, when he discovered that his crew was not the only group of people who weren’t going to be happy when Sonny made this announcement.

  Sonny did a smooth pimp-daddy walk up to the pulpit podium. He shook Eddie’s hand and smiled out at the congregation. His wife, Glodean Benson, blew him a kiss. She was looking good in a pink silk two-piece suit with a peplum jacket, pink patent leather sling-back pumps, and two-carat pink diamond studs in her ears. Glodean had cut her beautiful hair to a shoulder-length bob, and looked better than she had when she made that infamous walk down the aisle in Memphis twenty-something years ago.

  Eddie’s wife, Johnnie, who couldn’t stand Glodean Benson, eyed that sharp suit for a moment, and then leaned over and whispered to Essie, “Does that hussy have some kind of secret stuff she takes to stay so young? Makes you wonder if there is a picture locked up in a special room of her house, getting older and uglier by the minute.”

  Essie nodded. She’d never been able to make sense out of Glodean Benson Washington. The woman was absolutely beautiful. And Johnnie was right—she didn’t seem to age. Glodean was also very smart and a
good businesswoman. But was she crazy. She was married to Sonny Washington, and she helped him do a lot of dirt whenever making more money and acquiring more power and visibility were concerned.

  Sonny mumbled, “It’s on, baby” into the microphone, and then reached into the breast pocket of his hot pink three-piece suit with white chalk stripes in it, and pulled out a speech. His white shirt glistened against his rich brown complexion, and the suit, which was actually quite sharp, was set off by his hot pink, pale pink and black diamond-print silk tie, and pink gators with black trimming all around the shoe.

  “Yeah… yeah… amen,” Sonny said in his raspy voice that sounded as if he were the MC at one of those South Side Chicago clubs where the music was good, the liquor was good, the rib tips could make you hurt yourself, and the women were better.

  “I was just telling my baby, here”—he pointed down to Glodean, who blew him another kiss—“I was saying this morning, Mother.”

  He stopped and gave Glodean a long and sensuous stare before continuing.

  “You know, Eighth District, that Mother is the term we use for the wife of an esteemed member of the episcopacy. So if my baby is ‘Mother’ you know what I must be.”

  “Bishop,” Glodean called out as if on cue.

  Essie and Johnnie rolled their eyes at each other. It took considerable restraint for Essie to resist acting on her urge to stick her forefinger in her mouth and act as if she were about to throw up.

  “Kind of makes you wish for back in the day when you stuck that pinked-out heifer in her butt with a hat pin,” Johnnie said, and then reached up and pulled a long ruby-and-diamond hat pin out of the red silk hat with silk tulle layered around it that she was wearing. She put it in Essie’s hand.

  “Here girl, it’s on the house.”

  Essie started laughing.

  “Johnnie, girl, you are just as crazy.”

  Sonny Washington got comfortable in Eddie Tate’s pulpit. Never in a million years would he have ever thought he’d be standing in this spot. After the fiasco of 1963, Sonny was glad that he was still a licensed minister. Then, if that wasn’t enough, he was given a church in his home state of North Carolina, which Glodean had helped him build into the largest church in the area.

  And now here he was, getting ready to tell all of these negroes that he was the next bishop in Eddie Tate’s own church, and Bishop Murcheson James’s own district. At that moment Sonny felt it couldn’t get much better than that.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Solid,” when he saw his “ace boon coon” Marcel Brown giving him the black power sign. He raised his fist in solidarity with his ace. And when several of the folk from the Ninth Episcopal District—aka Marcel’s District—raised up some black power fists, too, Sonny said, “Ummm… umgowah… Sonny Washington’s got that soul power.”

  His supporters stood up and started chanting this slogan, which had a smooth R & B rhythm. They started swaying from side to side as if they were at the club, chanting:

  “Ummm… umgowah… Sonny Washington’s got that soul powah… Ummm… umgowah… Sonny Washington’s got that soul powah!”

  Theophilus glanced over at Eddie sitting on the other side of the pulpit podium and just shook his head. This was going to be a long campaign. He was glad that they had only twelve weeks left to go.

  When the chanting started to die down, Sonny stopped dancing from side to side and said, “Church, I don’t have much to say to you today, at this great planning meeting of the great Eighth Episcopal District. But… oooohhhhh, laaaawwwwddd. Umph, Jesus.”

  He stopped, looked up, pointed to the ceiling, said, “You the Man,” and then switched gears and started dancing as if he were shouting. When the organist got up and started playing the shouting music, Sonny started jumping up and down, and then ran out of the pulpit, did two laps around the sanctuary, and came back to the podium. He jumped up and down a few more seconds, and when the music stopped he started punching the air and moving his feet in a weak imitation of Muhammad Ali. He said, “I can’t stand the Devil, and I’m gone punch him out, Church.”

  He hit at the air some more.

  “So how can he stand there and not punch himself out?” Eddie whispered to Murcheson James.

  “Don’t know, since he is one of the biggest devils around. Sonny probably mails a Hallmark card to Hell every Father’s Day,” Bishop James answered and then reached out his palm for some skin from both Eddie and Theophilus.

  “So, Church,” Sonny was saying. “I am going to put the Devil in his place by running for bishop at the Triennial General Conference in Durham, North Carolina. I ask you for your support. My wife, Glodean, will be at the back of the church with pledge cards. We take cash, checks, and credit cards because my baby bought me one of those credit-card machines for my birthday. Didn’t you, baby?”

  Glodean stood up holding the “birthday present” high above her head. She said, “Yes, I did, Big Daddy.”

  Some folks stood and clapped, to let Eddie and Theophilus know that they supported Sonny Washington and were going to do their best to give the two of them pure-tee hell. Then a good number of folks sat there with their arms folded to let Sonny and Marcel know that they were going to have a fight on their hands. And then there was the surprise of the day when Bishop Willie Williams, who both Eddie and Theophilus assumed was in the Sonny Washington camp, got up and walked out, looking pissed and signaling for his entire constituency to follow suit.

  Bishop Williams had come to this meeting with the Eighth District to find out what his adversaries were up to, and to try to promote the pastor in the Tenth District he was hoping would fill an Episcopal seat. Just six months ago Sonny Washington and all of the folks in the Ninth District had pledged their support to whomever Willie Williams picked to run out of the Tenth. Now those two-timing, talking-out-of-the-sides-of-their-mouths preachers were about to pee on themselves over Sonny Washington’s running for bishop.

  Bishop Williams stormed out of the church before he lost complete control, found Sonny, and beat the daylights out of him.

  “Bishop,” one of the newest pastors in the Tenth District called out.

  “What!” Willie snapped. “What in the hell do you want?”

  “Nothing,” the man said.

  “No, don’t tell me nothing, preacher. You started this, now finish it.”

  When Bishop Williams had first called and invited this pastor to go to Chicago with him, he had been excited and full of pride. In fact, he had started thinking that he was better than the other preachers in their district because Bishop Williams had selected him over some others to be a part of his personal entourage. He had even started picking and choosing which preachers he would speak to, based on whom he saw Bishop Williams speaking to. Now he wished that he had remained in LA, living large and enjoying all the amenities of pastoring a wealthy West Coast church instead of wasting his time being forced to play flunky to Willie Williams, and having to deal with his moods and outbursts.

  “Bishop,” the preacher said carefully, “you think we need to pull the plug on our candidate and put all of our energy into Rev. Washington’s campaign?”

  Willie Williams could hardly believe what he was hearing. He got so mad the folks standing around him thought he was going to have a stroke. Willie grabbed that preacher by his collar and started punching the man all upside his head. The other preachers in his entourage rushed over and struggled to pull the bishop up off the brother.

  “If,” he said in between blows, “I… put… anything… behind… Sonny… Washington… I won’t know…”

  “Bishop, Bishop,” the men said. “Please stop, Bishop. You can’t beat him like this in Eddie Tate’s church.”

  Willie Williams was breathing hard and sweating, now more angry because he was messing up his new suit. He backed up off the preacher and took a moment to collect himself. Just as he started calming down, he heard Eddie Tate’s voice coming through the sound system.

  “And, after muc
h prayer and fasting and seeking the Lord’s guidance,” Eddie was saying, “I know the Lord has called me to make a bid for an Episcopal seat in Durham. I need your help, Church. I need it bad. We cannot continue to put the wrong people in these Episcopal seats. You keep electing the wrong kind of men for bishops in our denomination, and they will make Paul’s New Testament church in Corinth, the same one he is writing to in Corinthians, look like a nursery school for the children of the saints.”

  Bishop Williams had thought he’d heard the worst when Sonny Washington said he was running for bishop. But now Eddie Tate was in the race. He felt nauseated. If enough men like Eddie Tate got elected, it would mess up everything. It was bad enough battling with Percy Jennings and Murcheson James all the time. But with Eddie serving on the Board of Bishops he wouldn’t be able to get away with anything. There would be no more kickbacks from pastors of big churches in his district, no more under-the-table bonus checks from his district, no more all-expenses paid trips anywhere in the world courtesy of churches with pastors who wanted a favor, and on and on. It would be the end of life as he knew it, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  Willie Williams reached over and put an arm around the shoulders of the preacher whose butt he had just kicked. He dusted off the man’s suit, gave him a friendly slap on the cheek, and said, “Pastor, you raised a good point. We need to throw all that we have behind Rev. Sonny Washington. Because if there is one thing we can’t let happen, is to let that big red Eddie Tate become a bishop in the Gospel United Church.”

  The preacher finished wiping his bloodied nose with the fancy breast-pocket handkerchief he’d spent too much money on because it looked so good with his new suit. He was full of mixed emotions. He didn’t know whether to jump for joy that the bishop had praised him in front of the other preachers, or to cuss the bishop out for giving him that public beat-down.

  He smiled at his bishop and then grimaced when the cut on his swollen lip stung. He grabbed Willie Williams’s outstretched hand and said, “Bishop, it is a pleasure to be back on the team.”