Playing Hard To Get

“What are you doing?”

“My mama, a backwoods Mississippi girl, who picked cotton her whole life, raised fifteen children, and buried two husbands, prayed more than any person I’ve ever known,” Mother Wildren said. “And you know what? For all of her praying, I never once saw her on her knees. See, when you have fifteen children and a field of cotton so big you can’t see your way to the road, you don’t have time for rosary beads and Bibles and rules about how you can and should praise your God. For my mama, prayer came in the kitchen when she was cooking. Prayer came in the fields when she was picking. Prayer came at the living room table when she was teaching each one of her kids how to read because she knew we’d never get out of there if we didn’t. If we read a line from the Bible, she praised God right there. Jump and say hallelujah.” Mother Wildren looked at Troy sitting in front of her. “That’s how she prayed. That’s how she got saved and that’s how I got saved. And the only way you’re going to get there, the only way you’re going to hear the word the Lord has for you is to stop worrying about what other folks have to say about your relationship with your God and go to him alone. The veil is broken, child. You go alone and you lay your burdens down.”

Troy turned and looked at the altar.

“Just talk,” Mother Wildren urged her softly.

Troy sat back and breathed out, her chest easing into the back of the pew. She kept telling herself to relax and clear her mind but the more she thought this, the more she thought.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Talk,” Mother Wildren repeated.

And aloud right there, in the church for only two people and one God to hear, Troy prayed for her marriage, for her husband, for herself. She prayed for a clean heart. For clarity. For vision. For truth. For the courage to love even those who didn’t love her and worked against her. And she didn’t even know she was thinking that. It just came out. Just lifted itself out of her and then her eyes closed and without her noticing, Mother Wildren’s hand was gone. Tears fell from Troy’s eyes. She prayed for safety. For her church. For her family. For sins. For her past. For her future.

And then she was on her feet. Rocking in space. Her hands were above her head. Her eyes were closed as she stared into a blanket of blackness that erased her worry and eased her pain.

When Troy said all she could say and she was just standing there, wrapped up in her own arms, she opened her eyes and exhaled from the bottom of her gut. She wasn’t changed. She was changing. She was open.

“Amen,” she said. And she heard, not in a whisper, not in a thin or faint voice, as clear as if someone was standing right beside her, “I love you.”

“What?” Troy said, turning to Mother Wildren. “What did you say?”

Mother Wildren was sitting where Troy had left her, her mouth closed, holding a slip of paper in her hand.

“I didn’t say anything, child,” she said.

Troy didn’t look around the room again. She just knew then where the voice had come from. And while, just ten minutes earlier, the Troy who was holding the rosary and Bible might have felt tingles of fear up her spine at this idea, this changing Troy said again, “Amen.”

“Here,” Mother Wildren said, handing to Troy the paper she was holding. It was a check for $5.

“What’s this for?”

“So you can start paying back the church,” Mother Wildren said. “Now you’re five dollars closer.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I didn’t ask you what I had to do. I just did it,” she added. “When you were praying, I was writing. God put that on my heart.”

“Thank you,” Troy said, hugging her old foe.

“Now, let me tell you how to handle Ms. Myrtle,” Mother Wildren said. “You go and you talk to your husband. You take this to him and you have the first and last word where that’s concerned. That man loves you. There ain’t many men out there that are willing to put their wives first, above all others, and he did that for you. Didn’t matter what we said. And, you know, I think that’s why we respect him. Now, you go and put him first and that’ll put Myrtle in her place. Never let another woman tell your husband anything about you.”

“Will do,” Troy agreed.

“And as far as the bedroom is concerned—”

“No, you don’t have to. I—”

“No, First Lady,” Mother Wildren said, “I might be old, but I’m not broken yet.”

“Okay.”

“Now, you stop letting these old ideas run your bedroom. If your man wants to get freaky and he’s acting right, get freaky. Get your freak on!”

“Mother Wildren!” Troy blushed, holding her hand over her heart.

“The Lord wants you to be fruitful and he wants you to be happy,” she said. “What you and your husband do in the bedroom is between you two. Now, I want you to go downtown to West Fourth Street and see a man named Xavier. He works at the Pink—”