The Black Mass of Brother Springer Read Online Free PDF

skull cap resembling an English barrister's wig with the curls clipped off. The face wore a solemn, dignified expression, and there was a quiet beauty to the sharp, well-defined bone structure, especially the high cheek bones. Except for the tell-tale flattened nose and the shiny blackness, the face could have belonged to a Justice of the Supreme Court. In his youth, this had been a very handsome man indeed. I was surprised that I thought so. This was the first Negro countenance I had ever studied at close range and it was somewhat of a surprise to see character so deeply etched in a black face. Up to that moment, I had thought that all Negroes looked pretty much alike.
           "That is the Right Reverend Cosmo Bird of Birmingham, Alabama," the Abbott said, "founder of the Church of God's Flock, and the man who started the monastery."
           "I don't believe I've ever seen such beauty in bone structure before," I said admiringly. "He could have been a movie star with a face like that."
           "Well, he started the church in Birmingham. He made a pile of dough in nigger property in Pratt City, and he put most of the geedus into the establishing of more churches. There are three in Birmingham, two in Mobile, one in Atlanta, one in Nashville, one in Tuscaloosa, and one in Jax. All of them are as poor as hell.
           "When he kicked off in 1936 he left the rest of his money to a fund to establish a monastery here in Orangeville. He already owned the property here through some real estate deal, and in 'thirty-six, this location was really isolated. An ideal spot for a monastery. That was before they put the main highway through, and long before anybody ever thought of a freeway seven miles away.
           "He was an idealist, you might say, and way ahead of his time so to speak. He believed that white men and Negroes could learn to love one another, and the balance of the monastery was to be one white man to every Negro. In 1936 that was easy. There was a depression, and a monastery was a good place to sit it out. There were six monks in the beginning, three white men and three Negroes. They pitched tents, cleared out the palmettos and the jungle, built the cabins, planted the orange grove and set the place up. It worked fine for the first two years. The first Abbott, a white man by the name of Terence Norton, kept a diary, and I read it when I took over in 1954. They had quite a struggle.
           "In 1939 the trust money began to run out, and along with the lack of money, the trustees up in Birmingham began to lose control. First there would be all niggers here and then there would be all white men. This kind of trouble flared up off and on until the war started. The monastery also got some national publicity during the war when all of the monks refused to be drafted. They were willing to go into the Army as chaplains, with a commissioned status, but they wouldn't go in as privates. Too bad. They all went to jail except for the one white man and one nigger who were both too old to be drafted anyway. Do you begin to see the picture?"
           "It doesn't sound much like a religious order."
           "The Church of God's Flock has never been formally recognized as a real religion by any of the organized Protestant combines, but still, when you count the chips, its religious enough. All of our churches preach the Bible, and what do any other churches preach? The teachings of the Bible. And the churches old Cosmo Bird established are all still going, even if they are poor. The big foul-up was the monastery. Orangeville, Florida is too far away from Birmingham to be controlled. Correspondence takes time, and there was never any regular inspection visit from the trustees or representatives. As a consequence, the Abbott in charge, whoever he happened to be, had a nice control of the dough on hand. Some of these earlier Abbotts absconded with the dough, others kept the monks on short rations,