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while I’m thinking of it, remind me again where Balm of Gilead Church is?”
    She hesitated, then finished hanging the last mug and closed the cupboard door. “Why you asking ’bout that place? You gonna politick there, too?”
    “It’s not the one next to Mrs. Avery, is it? Oh, wait, of course not. That’s Burning Heart of God. And besides, their preacher’s that mean old woman, isn’t she? Sister Wilson?”
    “Sister Williams. Miz Byantha Renfrow Williams and you don’t need to be bad-mouthing her just because she’s so Holiness.”
    “Why not?” I argued. “She bad-mouths everybody else and their religion. But Balm of Gilead. How come I can’t remember it?”
    “Maybe ’cause they used to call it just plain Gilead,” she said. “Remember Starling’s Crossroads? Used to be a gas station when I was real little?”
    That connected. Starling’s Crossroads is one of those insignificant backcountry crossings that got dead-ended when I-40 went through a few years back. It’d been dead before that though. That wood-framed store with its two lone gas pumps sat empty for several years until one of the black churches in Makely split wide open over something or other, and part of the congregation came up here and turned the little store into a chapel.
    “Starling’s Crossroads?” I handed Maidie another glass. “As in Charles Starling, the boy that was with A.K. when they messed up the Crocker graveyard?”
    “He might be some of that same bunch. But they ain’t owned nothing over there in fifteen, twenty years. How come you’re asking about Balm of Gilead?”
    “No real reason,” I said. “Their new preacher was in court today to speak up for a member’s grandson. I believe his name was Freeman? Seems real sharp.”
    Maidie made a humphing sound.
    “What?” I asked. When Maidie humphs, there’s usually a reason.
    “Preacher Ralph Freeman’s a sheep-stealer.”
    “Now who’s bad-mouthing?”
    “You asked me, didn’t you?”
    I was curious. “Whose flock?”
    “Whoever’s he can get.”
    “Surely not any of Mount Olive’s?”
    Just as I’d been born into Sweetwater Missionary Baptist a few miles south, Maidie’d been born into Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion a few miles north of us and she was fiercely loyal to it.
    “They’s been one or two drifted over,” she admitted. “Ever since they started arguing over getting us on the historical register.”
    “That still going on?”
    Maidie sighed and nodded.
    Sweetwater began as a modest turn-of-the-century wooden structure that’s been remodeled, enlarged and bricked over so many times that few people know (or care) about its earliest lines, but Mount Olive is an exquisite antebellum building that’s been lovingly tended in its original state.
    Outside, it’s a two-story, white clapboard box with a simple pitched roof of green wooden shingles. No stained glass here. The tall, one-over-one double-hung windows are rectangles of frosted glass with a beveled cross etched in the center. The only outside ornamentation is a course of hand-cut dentil molding up under the eaves and a large front door that is flanked by plain Doric pilasters and topped by a triangular pediment with more dentil molding. The overall effect is, and I quote, “a harmonious blending of naive Georgian with intimations of Greek Revival.”
    That’s not me talking. That’s an article the
Ledger
reprinted a few years back when Mount Olive celebrated its hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The county commissioners had hired someone from State University to do an architectural survey of the county during the Bicentennial back in 1975 and he’d gone nuts over Mount Olive. I remembered hearing Maidie tell Mother how he wanted to have it added to the National Register then and there, but conservatives in the church voted it down.
    Martin Luther King once observed that the most segregated hour in Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, but it wasn’t always that