Sample Chapter: “The Proposal”

The courtship that culminated in my proposing marriage to Jennie and prompted Lib Collette to make her wedding dress involved a Confederate statue.

The week after Christmas in 1983, I flew from Indianapolis, IN, to Richmond, VA, with a ring in my pocket, prepared to propose to Jennie. I missed my flight, had to wait for another connection, and arrived in Richmond at 11:00 p.m.

My initial plan was to suggest to Jennie on the forty-minute drive from Richmond to the village of Amelia where her parents lived in their retirement that we stop at the courthouse square and take a walk before going to the house so I could stretch a bit. I would then pop the question on bended knee in front of the courthouse where her grandfather had served as an esteemed attorney and judge. Given my missed flight, we did not pull into Amelia until after midnight, but I decided to press on with my plan nonetheless.

"How about a walk before we go to the house?" I asked.

"At a quarter after twelve? Are you kidding me?"

"No," I said, pretending to be nonchalant and with a ring burning a hole in my pocket. "I've been sitting in an airport for six hours and on a plane for another hour and a half. I want to stretch and get some fresh air."

She pulled into one of the diagonal parking places on the courthouse square. Needless to say, we had the place to ourselves.

We made a lap around the courthouse square and when we got back toward the car, I steered us toward the backside of the Confederate War Dead Memorial, knelt, and asked her to marry me.

She said, "Yes."

I told her family the next morning that I proposed at the rear end of the memorial for fear that the ghost of a Confederate soldier, hearing a Yankee stealing away a daughter of the South, would have filled my backside with gunpowder. So, I snuck behind– out of sight, out of mind– and did my bidding.

Even then, I knew Confederate statues evoke all kinds of emotions, many of them volatile and, if pressed, capable of violence.

Carthage had its own monuments to the Confederacy. The Smith County Courthouse, one block south of the church, was built at the end of Reconstruction in 1875. Northwest of the square is the City Cemetery, where confederate veterans are buried. A United Daughters of the Confederacy monument stands on the courthouse grounds. To the east of the square was the town's Reconstruction-era African American neighborhood, marked by historic African-American congregations and what was called Carthage Colored High School.

On Sundays when I arrived early, I took a walk down Main Street with the manuscript of my sermon in hand and committed it to memory as I circled the courthouse square and Carthage's antebellum, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow history.

Adjacent to the square is Braden Chapel United Methodist Church, a historic African American congregation. The Braden Chapel congregation made and sold carryout dinners every first Sunday of the month as a fundraiser for their ministries. On one of my first Sundays, Mr. Bill accompanied me to Braden Chapel.

"David Shirey," he said, "I want to introduce you to two of the finest people you'll ever meet, Mr. Roy Carter and his wife, Mrs. Robbie Key Carter. Not only are they among God's finest human beings, but I also count them as friends. What's more, Mrs. Carter makes the best fried pies in Smith County. I've ordered some to take home with us along with our Sunday dinners. My, my, have you got something to look forward to!"

At Mr. Bill's introduction, I met Mr. Roy and Ms. Robbie Key ("This is David Shirey, our pastor from Vanderbilt. He's a fine young man"). They welcomed me into their friendship. Thereafter, every first Sunday, I showed up at Braden Chapel at 12:15 p.m. with a check from Mr. Bill for three Sunday dinners, fried pies, and occasionally, a chocolate pie, another of Mrs. Carter's specialties.

After exchanging pleasantries with Mr. Roy and Ms. Robbie Key and being introduced by them to other members of their congregation ("This is Brother David Shirey, pastor at the Christian Church. He's a fine young man"), Roy would ask me what I preached on. As the meals and pies were being prepared, I'd give him a précis of my sermon. When laden with the goods, I'd thank the Carters and the cooks and head to Mr. Bill and Billie Ruth's for some of the best food I ever put in my mouth. Mr. Bill, a napkin tucked into his collar, would Ooh and Aah until he'd say, "Now for those fruit pies!" at which time Billie Ruth would feign exasperation at her beloved, saying, "Bill Read, you need one of Robbie Key's pies like you need a hole in the head." Whereupon Mr. Bill would chuckle, take a bite of that cinnamon and sugar-covered pastry, and break out in more Oohs and Aahs.

Recently, I looked through photographs from my ordination at Carthage. As I thumbed through them, I named aloud the people who made the trek to Smith County that day from points north, south, east, and west. Many are gone now. Many of the signatures on my ordination certificate are faded with time. I came to a photo I had not remembered: the Carters. They are side-by-side with Polly Alcorn in a pew. Mr. Roy is dressed to the nines in a dark suit and tie. Ms. Robbie Key wears a broad-rimmed bonnet with a white ribbon and a string of pearls around her neck. In another photo, Mr. Roy and I stand side-by-side, his right arm around my waist.

I went to my computer, typed "Roy Carter," "Braden Chapel" and "Carthage, TN" into the search engine, and pressed enter. It turned up an obituary that read:

Mrs. Robbie Key Garrett Carter entered into eternal rest and transferred to her heavenly home at 9:21 p.m. Thursday evening November 7, 2019. In Carthage in 1949, she was united in marriage to Stonewall Community native, the late Willie Roy Carter who transitioned to his heavenly home on July 18, 1994, at the age of 69. Her beloved husband and the father of their five children was a Smith County educator, occupational therapist at the Alvin C. York Medical Center in Murfreesboro, and also a longtime employee of the Citizens Bank in Carthage. Mrs. Carter professed her faith in Christ at a young age and became a faithful and dedicated member of the Braden United Methodist Church on the Square in Carthage. Her church family always looked forward to the fried fruit pies and chocolate pies she provided at church functions and which she often delivered with a warm smile to her friends in the Carthage Community.

Looking back over forty years, I recognize how ignorant I was of the injustice, bigotry, racism, and discrimination memorialized in brick and stone that I so casually walked around on those Sunday mornings at the Courthouse Square. Nor did I comprehend the menace aimed at such as the Carters in Jim Crow years by those who dedicated the monument behind which I knelt to propose nearly forty years ago.

In recent years, Jennie has gathered Black and white women to talk openly about racism. Thanks to the intrepid Black women who are part of the group, my wife, a daughter of Virginia, can see with new eyes what Faulkner called "the past that is not even past." Under their patient tutelage, she is being schooled in new ways of being white. In former Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X. Walker's clarion words, she proposes to "unlearn fear and hate."

That's my proposal, too, God help me because the monument to Mrs. Robbie Key Garrett Carter, those words etched in ink on her obituary, say her fried fruit pies and chocolate pies were "delivered with a warm smile to her friends in the Carthage Community." Her friends. That she and Mr. Roy befriended me, encouraged my ministry, served me Sunday dinner and delectable pastries for months on end, and came to my ordination, is a grace to which I owe a fervent repentance, repentance like unto that of the woman to whom I proposed and joined my life behind the monument four decades ago.