Reevesville, Dorchester County, South Carolina
Reevesville has two hundred and one people in it. I know because the census sign says so, and because the woman at the post office will correct you if you say two hundred. The one matters. Somebody counted.
It is a town between two waters, Cattle Creek on one side and Polk Swamp on the other, with the Edisto not far off and the old rail line running through the middle like a seam. A farmer named Reeves sold cordwood to the first locomotives on that line, back when a steam engine was a thing people drove out to look at, and the town grew up around his woodpile. A survey once called it the garden spot of the earth. I used to think that meant the gardens.
And in the middle of all that, on the main road, there is a church that seats four hundred.
I want you to sit with that number. Two hundred and one people. Four hundred seats. The pews are old heart pine and they run wall to wall, and there is a balcony. A balcony. In a town where you can stand in the road and see both ends of it.
I asked the pastor about it once. He’s a careful man who drives in from Branchville on Sundays and does not say more than he has to.
“They built it big,” he said.
“For what?”
He thought about it. “For who was coming.”
I. The Garden Spot
I should tell you why I went.
My mother’s people are from Reevesville. Her aunt Delia raised her for three years after my grandmother took sick, in a house on the swamp side of town that’s a hunting camp now. Delia Rhame. She sang alto in the choir for fifty years and she was, by every account including her own, the best cook between here and Orangeburg. She died when I was eleven. I remember her hands, and the way she’d hum the harmony under a hymn so you could find your note, and I remember the funeral, because it was the first one I ever went to and I didn’t understand why they’d put her in the ground out behind the church instead of taking her home.
They buried her in the garden spot. That’s what the old folks call the churchyard. I didn’t put that together until this year.
Homecoming is the second Sunday in October, and I had heard a thing about Reevesville’s homecoming that I didn’t believe, and some part of me, the part that is still eleven, wanted it to be true. So I went.
II. Eleven Cars
I got there at a quarter to eleven and parked in the grass lot across from the church. There were ten cars in it already. I made eleven. I counted twice, because I was going to need the number later.
Then I went inside, and the church was full.
I’m going to be careful here, because this is the part people will want to argue with, and I want to give them nothing to hold.
Every pew was full. Not crowded. Full, the way a church is full when people have come dressed and sat down and settled their programs on their knees. The balcony was full. There were men standing along the back wall with their hats in their hands because the standing room was gone too.
I did the arithmetic in the doorway. Four hundred seats, give or take. Say fifty standing. Eleven cars.
I know what you’re thinking. Folks walked. It’s a small town. And some did. I saw the woman from the post office, and the family that runs the produce stand, and the old man who sits on the bench by the tracks and waves at the freight. I counted the faces I knew and got to thirty-one. That left a great many faces I didn’t.
They were not strange faces. That is what I want you to understand. Nobody was pale, nobody flickered, nobody wore a bonnet. They were ordinary Dorchester County faces, sunburned on the neck, in clothes that were clean but not new. A man two pews up had a Band-Aid on his thumb. A girl in the balcony was swinging her feet because they didn’t reach the floor.
The only thing wrong with them was that there were too many.
An usher found me a seat on the aisle, four rows from the back, next to a woman of about forty in a blue dress with a program folded in her lap. I sat. I looked down, because that’s what you do, and the program said Homecoming Sunday in the same typeface they use now, and under it, October 11, 1931.
I looked at her face. She smiled at me the way you smile at a visitor, kind and a little curious about which family I belonged to. Then she turned back to the front.
I did not get up. I want that on the record. I could have, and I didn’t.
III. The Fourth Verse
The old preacher spoke on the parable of the great supper, which is the one where a man throws a feast and the invited guests make excuses, so he sends his servants into the roads and the hedges to fill the house. I had never heard it preached as a threat before, but there was something in the way he said fill the house that made the heart pine creak.
Then we stood for the hymn.
Four hundred and fifty people sang, and I have been in big churches, and I have been in a cathedral in a city I won’t name, with an organ the size of a house, and I have never heard anything like it. It was not loud. It was deep, the way the swamp is deep, the way a well is deep when you drop a stone and wait. The windows hummed. The woman in the blue dress sang alto and knew every verse without the book.
And under the alto, somewhere up front in the choir, somebody was humming the harmony so the rest of us could find our note.
I knew that hum before I knew I knew it. My knees understood it first. I looked at the choir and I counted eleven women in the second row where there should have been six, and the fifth from the left had her hands folded exactly the way my mother folds hers, and she was looking straight at me, and she was not surprised to see me at all.
I did not sing the fourth verse. I don’t think I breathed through it.
IV. Dinner on the Grounds
After the benediction there was dinner on the grounds, and I counted again, because I’m stubborn, and because I needed to be doing something with my hands.
The table under the oaks had food enough for maybe sixty. Fried chicken, three kinds of beans, a pound cake somebody had taken real trouble over. Sixty people, I’d say, stood around it with plates. The eleven cars were still in the lot. The church behind us was dark and the doors were shut.
I found the pastor loading a plate and asked him, quietly, where everybody went.
He did not look up. “Home.”
“Which home?”
He put a biscuit on top of the beans and looked at me for the first time all day, and there was nothing unkind in it, only a tiredness that had been there a long while.
“They built it big for who was coming,” he said. “Nobody ever said they’d stop coming once they were dead.”
He ate a bite. Then, because I was still standing there: “I’m not from here. I’ve told the deacons that for nineteen years. I live in Branchville. I was born in Branchville.” He set the plate down. “Last October, when I walked up to the pulpit, there was a program on it. Same as the rest of them. It had my name on it. The date was a good ways off, but it was a date.” He picked the plate back up. “I keep coming because I’d like to know how they knew. That’s all. That’s the only reason.”
V. The Other Column
Here is what I was told that afternoon, in pieces, by people who did not all agree on the details but agreed on the shape.
Reevesville has always been small. It had two hundred and eighty-five people at its biggest, in 1950, and it has been shrinking since. But it has never had fewer than it has, if you understand me. A man who is born in Reevesville and buried in Reevesville stays on the roll. The town has been counting them for a hundred and fifty years, not out of superstition but out of manners. You don’t take a man’s name off the church list because he died. You just move him to the other column.
The census counts the first column. Two hundred and one.
The church was built for both.
And the rule runs the other way too. Nobody has ever been moved out of that churchyard, not once, not for a family plot in Charleston or a daughter in Atlanta, because the one time it was tried, in the fifties, the hearse got as far as Cattle Creek and the driver turned around and would not say why. And nobody born in Reevesville has ever managed to stay gone. They go to Columbia, to the Navy, to Texas. They come back to die. Most of them don’t know that’s what they came back for. They think they just wanted to see the gardens.
My mother lives in Summerville. Twenty-two miles. She has been talking lately about how pretty the swamp side of Reevesville is in the fall.
VI. The Deviled Egg
The woman at the post office walked me to my car. She is a plain, practical person, and she told me the last of it the way you’d tell someone where the good tomatoes are.
“They won’t take a plate,” she said. “Real particular about that. Dinner’s for us, they figure, and they’re mannerly. My grandmother’s one of them now and she still won’t touch a deviled egg, and she made that recipe.” She paused with her hand on my door. “Your aunt Delia was in the choir. Second row. I expect you saw.”
“I saw.”
“She asked after you last year.” The post office woman shrugged. “Said you’d come when you were ready. I told her you were a Rhame, you’d come when you were good and ready and not a minute before. She laughed.”
VII. Not on the Aisle
I drove back toward St. George with the windows down. The rail line ran beside me most of the way, the same line the Reeves woodpile once fed, and I thought about a farmer selling cordwood to an engine that would one day carry his town’s name on a station sign, and whether he’d have believed the church they’d build with the money.
Four hundred seats for two hundred and one people. I understand it now. It isn’t a church built too big for a small town.
It’s a church built exactly right for a town that never lets anyone leave.
I was born in St. George. I keep telling myself that. St. George, not Reevesville, and my name is not on any program there.
But my mother’s is. And Delia hummed the harmony for me today, the way she used to, so I could find my note. And I found it.
Next October I’m bringing a program from this year, and I’m going to sit in the second row, and I’m going to see what date is printed on the one my mother’s aunt has folded in her lap.
I am not going to sit on the aisle.
— Jackie
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