She was my twenty-first client. An overall-clad toddler was attached to one hand, and a mini-cart was in the other. This young, slightly overweight black woman seemed ordinary enough as she requested a bag of groceries from our cooperative emergency food pantry (operated by forty churches). I was one of the afternoon volunteers entrusted with this sacred duty.
“Hello,” I offered without looking up from my work pad. “My name is Jim.”
Number twenty-one replied with a quiet, defeated “Viola.”
Unusual name, I thought. I once knew a Viola. Twenty-five years ago, in Arkansas, my family subcontracted most of our game cleaning to a thin, tobacco-chewing woman named Viola. For good luck, Viola had tied around her ankle a Mercury-head dime that I would have loved to add to my coin collection. And she would have given it to me if I’d asked. She was that sort of woman.
Viola’s claim to fame, though, was her gift: She could clean, dress, and fillet black bass faster than any person alive. Her hands moved like wild birds.
Her gift generally unappreciated, Viola lived in poverty. Her house was a plyboard shack, absent of indoor plumbing or electricity. She had never ridden in a car, never been ten miles from where she lived, and had no hope of doing either in her lifetime. She ate cornbread, mustard greens with a little lard, and great northern beans. She had never visited a dentist or a medical doctor, and she never would.
Viola had a shy granddaughter, whom she affectionately called her “grandbaby.” Every summer this child visited her grandmother, and for six days a week, she chopped Old Man Smith’s cotton. With expertise and enthusiasm unmatched anywhere in the South, the girl single-handedly massacred whole acres of crabgrass and Johnson grass that threatened the tender cotton. With her six-foot hoe, she effectively equalized the equation. Old Man Smith knew he owed his cotton-growing success to a wiry little chopper from Marianna, Arkansas, who happened to visit her fish-cleaning grandmother every summer.
On Sundays, while Viola decapitated bass, the child tugged at her braids and suspiciously stared at us.
After one particularly successful fishing trip to Possum Fork, the cotton chopper and I stood alone and enjoyed Viola’s performance. Soon the braided girl disappeared. Before the screenless back door closed, she returned with a pathetic, sickly beagle puppy. “His name’s Cornbread,” she proudly announced. “And my name is Viola, the same as my grandmammy’s.”
Cornbread immediately took to me. Even now, I can remember wondering how he could survive at all; my father’s prize beagles ate better than Cornbread’s mistress. Or so it seemed. How could she feed poor Cornbread? Of course Cornbread ate very little, usually only fish guts. His coat was shiny enough, but he obviously suffered from malnutrition. When I thought about my father’s spoiled puppies and Viola’s Cornbread, for the first time I felt guilty about having so much. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how.
By ginning time in the fall, Viola-the granddaughter-disappeared from my life.
“Viola. That’s V-i-o-l-a,” said the woman seated in front of me. “Do you have any ground meat today?”
I was lost in a remembered cotton field.
“Mommy, when can we go?” said her restless baby. My mind was racing.
“Viola, do you know who I am?” I asked anxiously.
She wisely ignored my question. But I knew this Viola had been there. The young mother sitting across the table was my cotton chopper. Number twenty-one was my old friend.
Suddenly I was embarrassed. She only wanted my crackers and pinto beans, but I desperately needed to give her so much more.
“Viola, this is Mr. Jim! Your grandmother cleaned my fish!”
She did not remember.
“Viola,” I urged, “remember your grandmammy? Cornbread? Cotton chopping? Remember? Remember!”
Viola stared at me with tired eyes consumed with the present and not inclined to contemplate the past, no matter how glorious. Finally, though, she closed her brown eyes, and, when she opened them again, I had my little, braided chopper with me again. Her eyes were suddenly bright and alive.
“Viola,” I laughed, “you were the greatest.”
“I was good, wasn’t I? I really was. So very, very good. None better.” The overall-clad toddler reached up and touched her mother’s face.
Our day was suddenly full of remembered joy, which is what any pastor hopes for, we who presume to shepherd God’s people. We hope for moments when we share something special with our folk, when we really understand how they feel, when we discover forgotten feelings and fears in ourselves and in them.
But the moment soon passed.
“They don’t need choppers down home anymore,” Viola said quietly. “And they sho’ don’t need choppers in Pittsburgh.”
Cornbread, grandmother Viola, and my father were dead. Possum Fork was permanently contaminated by a fifty-five gallon DDT drum thoughtlessly discarded by a farmer along its willowy banks. But gentle Viola, cotton chopper par excellence, sat across from me. Or, at least what remained of the Viola I knew.
Her life once consisted of ten hours of honest labor, a refreshing RC, and Necco Wafers. Now she was one more struggling urban mother who had not had a job or an RC in fifteen years. Once the Desha County Cotton Chopping Queen, she was now an unwed mother who would eat generic peanut butter and spaghetti sauce for the next two weeks.
“Can you slip me a few extra peanut butters?” she asked as she gathered her child in her arms and started to leave.
I was ambushed by a longing for things to be better. That afternoon at the food closet, it occurred to me that I was tired of merely watching these human dramas helplessly. I had known Viola much longer than I’d known anyone in my congregation, but each person has his or her own personal joy or tragedy, good or bad memory, that I am alternately blessed or cursed to enter. I am forced to give a jar of peanut butter or something. I am rarely able to do much to affect the outcome one way or another.
If each life is a play, I rarely see the beginning or the ending. I think I understand the plot, and then I meet an old friend on the streets of Pittsburgh and it seems that someone switched theaters. And I sit, limited, in the audience.
- Can't finish right now?
I wanted to be the script writer that afternoon. I wanted to rewrite Viola’s story, to erase her past hurts, to author a happy ending. But I am not the author. I am not God.
My life is written into certain people’s scripts-like Viola’s-but the responsibility for each person’s story rests ultimately with God, not me. My responsibility is actually very simple: I am called to be a pastor.
I can give her only a loaf of bread today. But in our touching-even for a moment-I am called to point out that the final chapter has not yet been written. She has a future in God. And this profession of faith is the only real and lasting hope for Viola, and for my congregation.
-James P. Stobaugh
Fourth Presbyterian Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.