Peaches on a Friday Afternoon

Peaches lay dead in her coffin. Mourners were drifting into the church, in a poor neighborhood in Winston-Salem, and approaching the corpse to pay their final respects. An organ was playing softly. About two hundred people had taken their seats, all except three or four of them black. It was quite warm, and some were fanning themselves with funeral fliers.

Peaches’s lips stretched across her face as though someone was tugging on her cheeks from behind. Her brown skin had taken on a shade of gray. She had died at age 50, of brain cancer. Surviving her were dozens of relatives.

The family arrived. Peaches’s daughter, looking more 15 than her 23 years, gripped the arm of her father. She hung her head low while her father stood upright, and together they moved down the aisle. As they approached Peaches, the sight of her face seemed to catch them by surprise. The daughter’s body crumpled and her father began to tremble. They took their seats abruptly in the front row.

In walked the preacher, a short man with a puffy face and wavy hair. Another man, taller and younger, appeared with a microphone. Swirling, synthetic-sounding orchestral music began to play over a speaker, and the singer lifted the mic to his mouth. But something was wrong: the track was not supposed to have vocals but did, and the recorded voice overpowered the man with the mic. He gestured madly to an assistant in the balcony. The music continued for another minute before the song was reset. As the singer prepared to sing, once again vocals came over the music. He pointed violently at the mic and glared into the balcony.

Peaches’s husband sat motionless, his eyes fixed on the singer. The song was started yet again, and the same thing happened a third time. The preacher, standing behind the center podium directly above the coffin, looked over to his left at the singer, both visibly distressed. The minutes seemed an eternity.

Finally the correct track was chosen and the singer began an ode on love. But hardly a minute into the song a technical glitch caused the speakers to pop, startling a few spectators. Peaches’s husband sat still, looking on impassively, his daughter’s face buried in his shoulder.

It was time for the sermon. The preacher had visited Peaches in the hospital, he said, and they’d talked about death. He said she’d told him she was ready to die. His voice was low and gruff, lingering with relish on the word “ready.” The front row of mourners, mostly women, began to jostle in their seats. Someone shrieked, and female church attendants, dressed in white like nurses, collected around her and began waving fans. The preacher’s words soon evolved into a lyrical chant, and he began to sway—leaning back to begin a phrase, then stepping forth to finish it with a pounding rhythm. The audience was coming alive, clapping, yelling. One woman fainted in the front row; several men carried her to a side room. Women were clustered together, some lying in their neighbors’ laps, and the funeral attendants turned their fans on those who seemed most overwhelmed. Some mourners held both hands aloft, with heads down, and swayed to the preacher’s rhythms. Now the preacher was crossing into new territory, his sermon a storming crescendo of grief and ecstasy and release. He was sweating profusely, his eyes wild with rapture, and the mourners below him quivered and wailed, instruments of grief before their master-conductor. The preacher announced that deliverance was on its way, and he said this with the loudest and most forceful voice he could muster.

The mourners breathed a sigh of relief as the sermon quieted down and the preacher asked the Lord to have mercy. Peaches’s daughter lay buried in the side of her father, who sat frozen and expressionless. Gradually the mourners began to file out, shaking the preacher's hand at the door.

I had been sitting beside my mother, whose cleaning lady, Iris, was Peaches’s sister-in-law. Iris had become a family-like presence in our lives, there for my mother when she broke both of her arms, there to remind her, at times of distress, that things would be alright, that the world didn’t need any crocodile tears. Iris had a distinctive, low-pitched southern drawl, and there was something about her that was calming, that made one want to trust her.

By chance, Iris soon fell ill with brain cancer herself. Within two years, it was her turn for deliverance.