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ham, fried chicken and cinnamon sweet potato “sue-flay.” Miz Naideen and several other ladies stand sentry, using long palm fronds to wave the flock of greedy flies and wandering fingers away from the food platters.
    Miz Agnes shushes the crowd, holding up two plump hands, palms forward, for quiet. She turns to face us, raises a dramatic, sausage-shaped finger and calls “Attention!”
    Billy Roy and I straighten in front of the crowd.
    “Draw swords!” she cries.
    Ready.
    “John 12:12 and 13,” comes the call.
    Green section, red letters.
    “John 12:12 and 13. Charge!”
    I thumb and scan and step out in a flash, but Billy Roy is there, one plaid-shirted, Vitalis-shellacked hair ahead of me.
    “Billy Roy?”
    “John 12:12 and 13,” he says, and reads, “
On the next day,
much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus
was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth
to meet him, and cried, ‘Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that
cometh in the name of the Lord!’ ”
    As everyone applauds, I’m not mad at Billy Roy. I’m really not. But I could kick myself for not seeing
that
one coming, it being
Palm Sunday
and all.
    “You have to think ahead,” Daddy says. I should’ve known.
    Dinners eaten, dishes gathered, the ladies of the church having duly noted which pots and pans were picked clean and which weren’t, whose had gone first and whose hadn’t, Mother and Doto wave me over.
    “Reesa, please go round up the boys and see if Daddy’s ready to go,” Mother says, her fruit cocktail cake with rum long gone. Not even crumbs are left.
    The boys are bent over a hot game of Acorns, jacks played with sticks and nuts scavenged from the feet of the big oaks. I holler at them to finish up and find Mother.
    Daddy’s with the men gathered in the deep shade beside the sanctuary. As I walk up, one, a tall, paunchy citrus man named Ralph MacElvoy, is saying:
    “Luther and Marvin’ve picked my tangerines for years. Those boys’re damn fine pickers, ’scuse me, Reverend. Fast, too. How’s ol’ Luther takin’ it?” he asks, nodding in Daddy’s direction.
    “Hard as any
man
would who lost his only son,” Daddy says, his careful choice of words glinting in Ralph MacElvoy’s direction. My father can’t abide the Southern custom of calling a grown man a
boy.
    Mr. MacElvoy gives Daddy an odd, sharp look. His eyes narrow slightly, then slide hastily away from my father’s steely gaze. Daddy’s not a large man, but he has the presence of somebody much bigger.
    “I think this business up in Lake County’s made the Opalakee Klanners a little trigger happy,” Aldo Brass, one of the church deacons, says in his slow, thick Alabama drawl.
    I learned all about this Lake County business when I got my pre-Easter perm at Miz Lillian’s Beauty Parlor. Not that Miz Lillian told me directly, but it was all the other ladies talked about. The story started a year or so ago, when a white couple was driving home after dark and their car broke down on a back country road. Another car with four young Negroes stopped to help and offered them a ride to the gas station. The man didn’t want to leave the car, so the woman went for help.
    “Though what white woman in her right mind would get in a car with four Negroes, I want to know!” Miss Iris, Miz Lillian’s assistant, said, eyes wide in the large mirror that runs the length of the shop.
    “And what
husband
would let her!” Miz Lillian wondered, raising a perfectly penciled eyebrow.
    The woman didn’t come back, but the next morning, her husband found her talking to the man at the gas station. The woman and the man told her husband she’d been kidnapped. The day after that, she said those Negroes had
bothered
her.
    Southern ladies use the word “bother” to mean anything from an inappropriate glance to rape, which is, apparently,
a
fate worse than death
. The more serious the infraction, the further they drop their chins