Download a digital copy (1.5 MB) - Open Door Community

According to custom the welcomed guests must leave the church property
early. The wandering fugitives pack their black plastic bags, then slide their cardboard
beds into their chest of drawers hidden amid vines and prickly holly
bushes. Sunday is a special day. Now they tramp toward various Sunday breakfasts
where the congregations celebrate resurrection with delicious scrambled
eggs and fat slices of bacon fried crisp—one of S. A.’s favorites.
Someone along the way heard him bounce backward. His hands slipped
along the edge: thud ... thud again. Officer Weaver will begin his Sunday sunrise
service soon—rounding up those who show themselves after the hideous
racket of hide-and-seek between the bushes and sanctuary. And then another
figured, too, as I would have, wouldn’t you—S. A. had scaled the dumpster wall
so often before. Like Levite and priest, she hurried on to church.
Heat hurts. Bears down hard: cooks, fries, broils, bakes, roasts, toasts,
poaches... Perchance he had a seizure. He often did. But it was the horrid heat
that murdered him. Indexed at 110 degrees by 2 p.m.; he was found at 3 p.m.
turned mostly black—the fateful color of us all.
II: 1985–1999
Saints and Martyrs ˜ 297
S. A. Williams was a quiet man. He traveled alone, though he had many
friends in the yard and along the streets. He was sixty-five years old at death, but
he seemed sixty-five when I met him during his fiftieth year. S. A. felt lots of
pain, as we all do. Resembling many of us who live in houses, or behind bushes,
and even in garbage cans, S. A. was an alcoholic who turned to drink to help
him hide his pain and to blow the candle out. More often than booze, he drank
coffee. He was always in line when the twenty-gallon 6 a.m. thermos, prepared
by Ira, was placed in our front yard. He smoked. Mostly rolled his own.
Bummed them if need be.
Oh! S. A. Williams was a stubborn man. He had a thousand seizures in our
front yard, on the driveway (his favorite 910 hangout), and in our shared bathroom.
Did he take Dilantin I know not. I doubt it. He writhed like a man in
the electric chair just after 2,300 justice-achieving jolts have established that
Jesus’ death means little (if anything) in Confederate-flag-flying Georgia. We
would, again and again and again, like a liturgy in worshipful fashion, call 911.
Bitten tongue swollen, eyes aglaze, and gloom covering our yard like mountain
mist, he would squirm until the Grady ambulance arrived. Never, not once, did
they refuse to come. Revived, but for the glare and stare far off into another yard
and another time, S. A. would refuse to go to the hospital. He refused treatment.
Every time. He never came to our Harriet Tubman free medical clinic. He simply
said “no.”