Suffer the Little Children
by Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 by Janice Daugharty
“Janice Daugharty is a born story-teller...,” Joyce Carol Oates
The wavering soprano of Dot Knight rises above the bright chiming of children’s voices, a song of Jesus that could be any song, any glad message about to burst forth from the new blue Buick and change—well, at least, dent—the little North Florida town of Jennings. It could be any town on this mid-summer mid-day that Dot has chosen to spread the gospel, except for the umpteen-dozen Hispanic migrant workers. Enough to fill up the entire Baptist church of Statenville, Georgia, across the state line, and then some. The trick is to get these people to the church’s revival, to convert the heathen, thereby elevating the status of one Dot Knight, Sunday school teacher supreme and dutiful disciple of the Lord.
Well, let’s just say she is trying.
The last two churches simply didn’t work out. First church, after she got saved, she had a run-in with the deacons because they let a woman known to have black blood join the church. Second church, she got into it with the preacher for expecting her to bus bad children in her new car from all over creation to vacation Bible school.
At the crossing in Jennings, she slows the Buick to a crawl, easy up the slope of the entrance to the Holiday Market, stops and the children start pouring out. Dot’s entire Sunday school class: David, Neida, Alda and Pat, and thirteen year-old Sister with a wormy-looking baby attached to one hip. Where Sister goes, the baby goes, and there really isn’t much Dot can do about that. She’s tried before, and where has it got her? To church number three.
Dot, with her summer white pocketbook hooked on one wrist, and her brown Bible clapped under the other arm, gets out of the car. “Just a cold drink apiece, hum,” she calls to the children and eyes the congregation of Hispanics along the red-brick store front. Boy-sized grown men, for the most part. Some are wandering in the strip of shadow from the eaves, others are leaning against the building, eating, drinking and talking. Smells of hot asphalt, raw diesel, and sweat taint the air. A smoky-dark man wearing brown loafers with the heels walked down is talking on the pay phone (Dot could probably interpret what he’s saying if she took out her Pocket Guide to Speaking Spanish). It’s so hot that everything looks warped.
Leading the way, Sister with the baby stops at the edge of shade, and Dot, trailing behind, can tell that her most dedicated student of the Word is priming up to invite these dirty, dangerous savages to revival. Dot has to stop her. She shoves ahead of the other children with a pink smile painted on her pale flat face. Too late. Sister is already speaking to a man by the door. “Our Sunday school class’s trying to fill up a pew for revival and...”
Dot steps in front of Sister—no time to check with her Pocket Guide to Speaking Spanish. “La migrar,” she shouts loud and clear, first thing that pops to mind, and hopes to the Lord that it’s an approximation of “never mind.” The man Sister was talking to dodges around Dot and the children, shouting, and the others lope in behind. The man talking on the phone drops the receiver and runs, leaves it dangling with rattling static like radio interference.
Dot and the children watch them go, watch the man on the phone shed his brown loafers with the walked-down heels halfway across the square of glistering blacktop.
“Now listen,” says Dot to Sister and the gang and holds out her Bible in both hands. “The Lord don’t expect us to put ourselves in danger, hum, he never asked us to mix with that kind.” “Jesus did,” says Sister and hoists the baby higher on her hip.
Dot clamps the Bible in her armpit again. “Women and children,” she says. “We’re just gone ask women and children.” She ushers the Sunday school gang toward the double glass doors of the Holiday Market. “We could’ve been shot, hum,” she says low, as if to Jesus alone who would see her way of thinking.