Saturday, June 6, 1998

A dying woman remembers the church down the road

By Ken Garfield / Knight Ridder Newspapers

HARRISBURG, N.C. -- Wood and Sue Christenbury had everything they ever wanted.

First off, of course, they had each other. It took Wood crashing a party in the Poplar Tent community of Cabarrus County in 1921 and then seven years of courting to win Sue's hand in marriage. Says he had to steal her from another boy. Once he did, there was 70 years of clear, sweet sailing.

The Christenburys had 500 acres on which they raised cotton most of their farming years. Bought in the Depression, the land off Christenbury Road now borders the $200 million Concord Mills mall rising off Interstate 85 just over the county line. Developers nipping at the Christenburys' heels see dollar signs when they see the property. All those evenings Sue and Wood rode out on their golf cart for one more look in the twilight? They just saw farm land.

The Christenburys had family -- five sons, three daughters, 18 grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren and not enough space in the photo album for all the Polaroids. They'd all congregate at Papaw and Mawmaw's house at Christmas, 70 of them, to open gifts and fill up on barbecue. Pawpaw -- that would be Wood -- killed a hog each holiday.

They had their church, of course, as you did back then in the country. The preacher at Mallard Creek Presbyterian could count on seeing Wood and Sue each Sunday morning, six rows back to his left. Sue sang soprano in the choir until she could no longer climb the stairs to the choir loft.

The church on Mallard Creek Church Road used to be filled with farm folks. In recent years, the country crowd began sharing it with young, professional families moving into subdivisions from New York and Cleveland and places like that. That was fine, though. Just meant more people devoted to Christ.

The church cemetery is where they buried Susie Brumley Christenbury. She was 92 when she died May 16 at University Hospital, where she had gone to spend her last two days because the pain from cancer had gotten so bad. Wood has a plot beside her, though he said he also has a final resting place reserved at Pleasant Grove A.M.E. Zion, the church a few hundred yards away from their brick home in the country.

Daughter Jenna Sue Taylor, 65, laughed at that little piece of news.

"How we gonna know where to put you?" she asked. "Eenie, meenie, miney moe?"

Wood laughed, too.

"That's if they cheat me up at Mallard Creek," he said.

The laughter ended when Wood began talking about the life he led with Sue. He'd sing old-timey Baptist hymns to her. She'd ask how he was doing, even after cancer left her wincing in pain in the last months of her life.

"You don't know, honey, how bad I miss her," Wood, 93, said softly Sunday morning from the kitchen.

"Was it a good life?"

"Best in the world."

In a life that gave them plenty of reasons to smile, Sue and Wood would light up at the strains of gospel coming from Pleasant Grove A.M.E. Zion.

The Pleasant Grove folks would bring Sue and Wood fish whenever they had a fish fry. She'd cook up sweet potatoes for lunch on her wood stove and bring them over to black folks who picked cotton on their farm. Hot biscuits, too.

She loved the little church cemetery, a few yards down a gentle hill from the concrete block building. She loved to walk over there -- or ride in a golf cart in her declining years -- and take a few moments to linger.

Two days before she died, she asked to be taken again to the black church and the graveyard. She was worried it might be washing away, since it sloped down. The day after she died, her love for that church was expressed in one final act -- in her obituary, she asked that memorials go to Mallard Creek Presbyterian or Pleasant Grove A.M.E. Zion.

The funeral home director said Sue's request is rare in this day and age. Most people designate their church or hospice or favorite charity. Not many choose to honor a congregation of another color.

But to Sue and Wood, Pleasant Grove wasn't so much a black church as it was the church just down the road. It wasn't so much black people who came to worship there as it was neighbors.

In the cities, said Mallard Creek pastor George Jacobs, folks form task forces to deal with the race problem.

In the universities, scholars analyze the implications of whites owning land on which blacks farmed.

On the road where the Christenburys raised a family and cotton, you shared sweet potatoes and fried fish in life. And in death, you asked to be remembered with a small gift to your friends next door.

Retired forklift operator Alfred Haynes stood outside Pleasant Grove A.M.E. Zion early Sunday morning, just him and the birds and the crumpled-up copy of the newspaper with Sue Christenbury's obituary. He was carrying it around with him on the seat of his old red pickup.

Haynes, 80, was friends with the Christenburys all his life. He paid his respects to the family at Sunday night visitation at Mallard Creek Presbyterian -- what a crowd! Sent them a peace lily, too.

"I'd be out here about every week," he said. "I knew their sons and daughters. It ain't like people don't know nobody. Anything they could do for you, they would."

Sunday preaching hadn't started yet, but Haynes was getting fired up early as talk turned to race.

"The people now, some of them see color," he said.

"What about Sue?"

Haynes shook his head no.

"She was a good Christian lady."

A few moments later, a few hundred yards away, Wood Christenbury, in his blue overalls, got up from the kitchen table and went into the sitting room where he and Sue spent so many good hours.

They'd sit in chairs, side by side, looking out at the birds flocking around the feeders in the backyard. She'd read her Bible and slip him Bugles, one of their favorite junk foods. He'd nibble Bugles with her, admiring the birds outside and the land where they lived their simple, contented life.

Sue's chair was covered in a red towel, her leather-bound Bible on the towel.

Wood said: "I don't want nobody to sit in that chair for a while."

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(Ken Garfield is the religion editor at The Charlotte Observer. Write to him at: The Charlotte Observer, 600 S. Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28232.)

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(c) 1998, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.).

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