Who's Her Mama?

It's been a beautiful week here at Lake Woebegone--actually, Lake Hartwell.  Even after a wreck that could have killed him (we've gone back and seen the tracks) Mike met me in a battered truck and led me back to Brown Mule Farm, very slowly, on ice.   Bruises don't get this man down.  The barn was decorated and candled, with fresh flowers, when we arrived back here on Monday night a week ago.  "I'm just so glad you're here," he said, smiling--after being turned 360 degrees and spun, knocked out, and bruised hard on both sides.

When we went to the eye specialist and he found out that he probably has glaucoma, he left hugging the nurse and joking, "Don't tell Linda any rules, Darlin', she'll make me do 'em." (Rules like nightly eye drops, for example.)

We've enjoyed some of the best Southern cooking in North Georgia-- beans, cabbage, cornbread, biscuits and ham, macaroni, barbecue pork, potatoes and all the foods we both grew up eating.  On Saturday, we went to Shirley's Sole Food in Toccoa--a little hole-in-the-wall buffet with fresh homemade food.  Shirley serves the locals, then at closing time, she feeds leftovers to the homeless people.  She's started two homeless shelters and she plays gospel music in her restaurant.

"I can tell you've been with black people a lot,"
Shirley told Mike

We love gospel music--the genuine black music that rocks little churches all over Georgia--and Shirley invited us to her church on Sunday to hear some good stomping and clapping singing.  I wrote down the name of the church: Greater Hope.  "When my mama was a girl, it used to be called Little Hope," she said. "But we changed it to Greater Hope."

The woman in the red hat is Big Mama.  (I noticed that all the younger women are called Sister--Sister Shirley, Sister Laverne, etc. and the older women are called Mama.)  Big Mama is a perky 90.

The little girl with the red beads in her braids is three--Elena's age.  After Sister Shirley's impromptu opening sermon ("I've got mine, y'all are on your own!")  and before the singing and preaching started, this little girl wanted to stand up and sing.  Flanked by six or seven of the sisters of the church, she took the microphone like a pro and sang, clapping along.

The sermon was about "being grounded" in the truth, even when "nobody don't like you and everybody's talking about you." At the end, he said, "That's the message, now you go out and be the message."

Throughout the service, I watched the little girl with the red beads  First, she snuggled up to one woman and I assumed that was her mama.  Then she got up and moved around the pews, sitting with one, then another, then another.  Everyone patted her and wiped her nose.  "Which one do you think is her mama?" I asked Mike. "I have no idea," he said.

A baby was similarly passed from one lap to another, even had her diapers changed by a church sister three rows up.  It made me think of the adage, "It takes a village to raise a child."  The children in Greater Hope play musical pews, moving around as they like, all the sisters and  mamas treating them like their babies.

Mike had tears in his eyes when he told me, "This takes me back sixty years."  As a boy in Memphis he went to stomping and clapping church with Laura, the family maid who was like a second Mama to him.  When we were recognized as visitors, he stood up and told the story of going to a church about half the size of Greater Hope with Laura.  As he talked, everyone was smiling and there were a few "Amen"s. "We love you and hope you'll come back and be with us again," the preacher said.

After church, we had delicious lunch at another soul food restaurant--Mama Lynn's in Lavonia.  Mama Lynn, the cook and owner, is also the preacher at a gospel church.  At four yesterday afternoon, they were having a big service--including a truck load of white church people who were "coming to praise God in an all-black church."

Mama Lynn's husband Ron and the waitress