Jeff Street Baptist Community at Liberty

Jeff. St. Baptist Community at Liberty

a poem by Mackenzie Berry

Joe sings the Blues like he’s calling

his children home / a rich oak deep velvet swoon

with enough cry to bend your knees and not collapse.

He said a sermon in his overalls and the church said

Amen. He took his coffee black until he met

Goatwalker cream and then he took two spoons.

We here, who make pews of folding chairs

and make the bread stretch around the block,

have called this meeting begun

by a reformed riverboat gambler

back when we called alcoholics drunkards

and later called in all the sleeping in the stockyards hay.

If I say too much, I might call the congregation awake,

all these rebel Southern Baptists who made it gay & misfit

and still call themselves, all these rich folks with empty pockets

and a leaky roof. What do you know of rising but what rose

down on Liberty St. the day God said let there be light and it poured.

I tell you, the Phoenix burned smiling for all we can make of ash.

The city comes for us flaming and eats itself to the marrow,

finds men sleeping in Sunday school rooms and rages,

spread Clarksdale out across the city and left an empty lot,

where half of us still sits waiting for the grand return.

When the Association expelled us from Jeff St.

for holding a woman pastor behind the pulpit

we took an old factory building and made it God

by the hand of an angel mechanic called Elmer,

and kept the name, too, but longer. Ate with the whole line

on 10 for 10 biscuits and eggs right next to Norma’s House

after the steel fist in a velvet glove woman called Mary

came and asked us what were we here for anyway.

I tell you, you haven’t seen a party til Easter at Jeff. St.

when we dance on confetti just to see the mess splayed

and Di sneaks us the best piece. Gather us in,

where the prayer drums an open forum

of children too wild-eyed to call God Mister.