The Swan House (16 page)

“My, that's good, isn't it?” Miss Abigail sang out.

Maybe it was my head throbbing so hard, or the tension from dealing with baby Jessie, or the shock of seeing Miss Abigail's house. Probably all of it combined. But I asked, “How can you live here, Miss Abigail? How can you live in this part of town?”

She didn't flinch. “This is my home, Mary Swan.”

“But why? Why would you do this when you had such a nice home?”

“This is where God called me. He called me to live among those with whom I work.”

“Oh.”

She broke into a prayer. “Lord Jesus, how we thank you for this new life. For Cassandra's decision for you. Protect that child. Give her courage to do what she must. Let her trust you. Amen.”

I had not closed my eyes right away because I didn't realize she was saying a prayer. After all, I'd never met anyone who would just start praying over a glass of iced tea. But her hands were clasped together and her eyes closed. When she said, “Amen,” I opened one eye to see what I should do next. She had unclasped her hands and was smiling at me.

“Do you understand what happened to Cassandra today?”

“No idea.”

“She made the decision to become a follower of Christ.”

“Oh. You mean a Christian?”

“Exactly.”

“Wasn't she already a Christian? Didn't she go to church?”

“Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, Mary Swan.”

I didn't argue, but I didn't agree.

“When you let God enter your life, things change. His Holy Spirit inhabits you, and He starts working in ways you could never do on your own.”

I wasn't following Miss Abigail and was feeling extremely uncomfortable, so I changed the subject to my previous topic.

“So why do you live here?”

“I told you. God called me here.”

“For what?”

“To help out. To love these people.”

I smiled. “I knew you'd say that.”

“It's the truth, Mary Swan.”

“Does anything ever get better, Miss Abigail? Do their lives ever get any easier? It must be so discouraging to live here and see how miserable they are.”

“I don't work here because it is easy or fun or comfortable, Mary Swan. I work here because it is good. Maybe the outside doesn't change. And sure, there are a thousand heartbreaks. But the inside is changing in some of them. They have hope. Carl has hope.” When she said his name, her face softened just as if she were his real mother.

“When I was about nine years old, I felt God calling me to be a missionary. I wanted more than anything in the world to go overseas and tell people about their need for Christ, about their need for His forgiveness and love. But when I got old enough to apply to be a missionary, I was refused. Bad eyes, bad heart. I was devastated. I knew God had called me.”

“How did you know?” I interrupted. “What do you mean He called you? Out loud?”

“No.” She smiled. “But I knew it was God nonetheless. There was a longing in my heart that He confirmed as His call when I'd read the Bible. It's hard to understand if you've never read the Bible, but sometimes a verse you're reading will just jump out and snatch your heart. And you'll say, ‘That's it! That's me!'

“One of those verses for me was in the book of James in the New Testament, at the end of the first chapter. It says, ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.' That verse and many others that speak of God's love for the poor made an impression on me early in my life. As I got older, I prayed a lot about the desire of my heart, and I talked to people I trusted. People who were sensitive to God's Spirit. Again and again over the years, He kept showing me that I was to be a missionary.”

This startled and intrigued me. How could she be so sure it was God calling her? But I didn't say a word.

“Then this letter arrived saying that although my health wouldn't permit me to go overseas, I could be a home missionary. I was thrilled. And then I got my assignment: the inner city of Detroit. Mary Swan, if you think this is depressing, you should see that place. Devil's den, for sure. I couldn't believe they'd send me there. After all, I was from Detroit. There was nothing exotic or exciting about working among the poor there. You see, Mary Swan, God was trying my heart. Asking me if I really wanted to follow Him, or if it was more that I wanted to go on a romantic adventure.”

My ears perked up at that.

“So I had to confess to the Lord my sin—”

“Your sin!” I was horrified. “Since when is it a sin to want to be a missionary!”

She chuckled. “Not a sin to be a missionary. My sin was wanting my way and pretending it was God's.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding as if I understood; but I didn't have a clue what she meant.

“Well, I ended up accepting the job in Detroit. And that's when I started seeing the humor of God. He placed me smack in the middle of twelve different nationalities. I was a foreign missionary after all!”

My head was throbbing again, and I didn't really understand, but I couldn't quit asking questions. “But why do you do this, and how?”

“Mary Swan, every morning when I wake up, I ask Jesus, ‘What do you want me to do today?'
Why
isn't the right question. Lots of things I can't explain. But I ask
what
and He always shows me what and then how.”

I looked at her skeptically. I was beginning to think that maybe Miss Abigail had a screw loose somewhere.

“For instance, take that refrigerator on the porch. Somebody brought it over yesterday. Looks like a mess, but it works. And today I find out that Cassandra's family needs a fridge. So on the same day as she sees that Jesus is her Savior, she's learning that He provides for all her needs too. Some people don't ever learn that because they never need to. They are too busy providing for themselves.” She stopped, saw how intently I was staring at her, and patted my hand.

“Jesus shows me what and how every day, and I leave all the whys to Him. I certainly don't have all the answers.”

“I could never do what you do.”

“On your own, no. Neither could I.”

“I don't mean that. I mean I would never in my life
want
to do what you do. Come down and help, sure. But live here? If you start ‘following God,' as you call it, is that what He asks?”

“He doesn't ask the same thing of all of us, Mary Swan.” She stopped talking, brushed several wisps of gray hair out of her face, and started again. “Well, yes, He does ask the same of us: love and obedience and total devotion. But how that plays out in each individual life is never the same. Why do you come along on Saturday mornings?”

I thought for a moment. “Because it makes me feel good to know I'm helping out. And then I can go back to my home and be comfortable.”

She laughed hard, a deep, delicious laughter that made you hope that whatever could make her laugh like that was contagious. “Mary Swan, you have just admitted to something that most adults won't touch with a ten-foot pole.”

“What?” I asked suspiciously.

“We help out so we'll feel better about ourselves, but we always like the knowledge that we can go back to our side of the tracks and be comfortable. Deep down, that's what we all do.”

“What's the matter with that?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But that's not what Jesus calls service.”

I liked talking to Miss Abigail. She seemed like someone I could trust with my hardest questions. But I couldn't trust her with my thoughts about Carl. Not yet anyway. After all, she was practically his mother. I couldn't admit to her that a lot of the reason I came to the church was to see Carl.

She glanced at her watch and said, “We'd best be on our way. We have a lot to do before I take you home this evening.”

We spent two hours driving around inner-city Atlanta. I saw winos sprawled out on park benches, prostitutes sitting in corner houses, abandoned shacks, garbage strewn around the parks, little children playing unsupervised. Every time Miss Abigail stopped the car and let down the back, men, women, and children crowded around it. She usually went inside a house to deal with some crisis, so I was left to hand out the clothes and food. It only took me a few minutes to figure out which bags held kids' clothes and which were for the women and the men. Sometimes a lady would come up and ask for something specific like a stroller or some diapers or, in a whisper, some sanitary pads. All I could do was mumble, “I'll tell Miss Abigail about it, and she'll see what she can do.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when the back of the Ford was finally empty. “Time to get you home, Mary Swan,” Miss Abigail said. “On the way back, I'll take you through the worst part of town.”

I wasn't ready for what she showed me.

“Here's the worst.” She stopped in front of a nondescript building on Peachtree Street, smack in the middle of downtown Atlanta, the part of downtown where the whites congregated. The building was twelve stories high. “The Cotton Corporation takes up the first three floors. Other businesses occupy the top floors. But in the middle are the offices of the Ku Klux Klan. That's where the ideas of white supremacy and hatred for blacks and Jews are bred and nourished. There and in a hundred other places like it across the city. You've gotten a glimpse of that, unfortunately.”

We had not talked about the run-in with the rednecks since the Saturday it happened. “Would they kill, Miss Abigail? Would those boys kill Carl?”

“Many have been killed because of hatred, Mary Swan. And many more because of indifference.” She paused. “Which is worse, Mary Swan? Hatred or indifference?”

I didn't answer her, but I had a feeling she was asking one of those rhetorical questions we talked about in English class.

“It's not pretty to realize what life is like for others. It's messy and heartbreaking. But it's real. The blacks of the inner city are real.”

So I said what I had been wondering for weeks. “And the people in Buckhead are fake?”

“No, nothing is all black or white.”

We laughed when she realized her pun, and I couldn't resist saying, “Nothing except for Buckhead is all white and the inner city is all black!”

She winked at me.

“So there are a bunch of religious hypocrites in my church, is that what you're saying? That's what my friend Rachel always says.”

“Not at all! It's not up to us to judge. Only God can see the heart.”

“You think it's better to go to church at Mt. Carmel than in Buck-head? Is that what you mean?”

“Absolutely not. That's not what I'm trying to say. We're not talking about
better
. God doesn't call us to
better
. He calls us to truth and obedience to Him, not to comparisons with others. That's man's religion. Comparing churches and good works and budgets. God is so much bigger and broader than we can possibly imagine. He calls us to serve Him wherever He has put us, be that Buckhead or Grant Park, Detroit or Africa. He knows what He's doing. He's got people all over this planet who love and serve Him. Rich folks and poor folks, middle class and clergy. If a person is liberated in his soul, he will have hope for a different future.

“Mary Swan, you just concentrate on what God's trying to do in your heart. That's all you need to do right now.”

By the time we got into the Buckhead section of town, it was late afternoon. I was almost embarrassed for her to see where I lived, but she drove up our long driveway as if it was right next door to her little house.

“Thank you for joining me today, Mary Swan.” She patted my hand. Then she asked, “Do you have a Bible at home?”

“Sure, somewhere.”

She looked at me with those sparkling eyes and said, “Examine everything by the truth, Mary Swan.” She was patting the Bible that sat beside her on the seat. “Don't just automatically believe everything you're taught. Examine it by the truth. You know what Jesus said, don't you?”

I shook my head, wishing I did know.

“He said, ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.' Gospel of John, chapter eight, verse thirty-two. You'll notice He didn't say the philosophies in Buckhead or Grant Park or at Georgia Tech will make you free. He said the truth. Jesus is truth. His word, this good book, is truth. Find out what it says, and you'll know what to do. The truth will set you free.”

But when I got inside, I didn't read that verse. I walked over to the bookshelf in my room and touched the spine of the white leather Bible I'd gotten for my confirmation. It sat in an appropriate place beside the leather-bound copies of
Oliver Twist
and
A Tale of Two Cities
.

I'd never once taken it down to read. And I wasn't about to do it now. Not yet. I didn't want the words from this book making me feel bad. I didn't want to think about God or Miss Abigail's work or anything else. All I wanted to do was to change into my swimsuit and dive into the fresh clean water of the pool behind my house.

Chapter 8

S
o the next Saturday, after we'd finished helping out at Mt. Carmel, and after we'd spent ten minutes convincing Ella Mae that we would be careful and arranging for Miss Abigail to pick us up later in the afternoon, Carl accompanied me to the High Museum of Art. Rachel was supposed to meet us there, but she had called early that morning and said she was as sick as a dog and couldn't come. Since Rachel wasn't the type to weasel her way out of an adventure, I believed her. But I felt a bit let down. I had so hoped that Rachel and Carl would meet.

It took twenty minutes for us to ride the bus from Capitol Avenue down to Peachtree and 16th Street, where the museum was. Of course when Carl and I sat next to each other, we got a few stares. Mostly blacks were on the bus, and a few white teenage boys, which made my stomach churn and my heart start doing a tap dance in my chest. They weren't the same boys, but their faces wore the same pompous sneer, and they talked among themselves and stared quite rudely at us. When we got off the bus, so did they. Carl kind of pushed me along, away from the boys. Unfortunately, they followed right behind us, making comments like “Now, ain't that cute—black and white together, just like an Oreo cookie!” But I had learned my lesson and didn't say a word or turn around.