First it was Deacon Orlando Scott, the senior deacon at our family church. Deacon Scott was nice. Not too tall, but not too short. Not too heavy, but not too skinny. Not too light, but not too dark. Now that I think of it, he was pretty generic. And he smelled. It wasn’t a bad smell, just that old people smell. You know, the one when you walk into the church and it smells like mothballs mixed with Jean Naté. He had never been married, didn’t have any children, and devoted his life to organizing the finances of the church. He and my mother were the same age and seemed to share the same passions…church, chicken, and gossip. He had known my father well and, after his death, Deacon Scott’s frequent visits for consolation turned into even more frequent visits for her affection. They didn’t seem like they were in love, rather in heavy like. Soon they were married.

It was weird having a man other than my father living in our house. I think at times he even wore some of Daddy’s clothes. Not that they fit. No man ever could fit Daddy’s clothes, but somehow, I think having another man in his clothes helped my mother feel as if he were in some way still alive. My mother said she didn’t want her four daughters to grow up without a male figure in the house. So Deacon Scott served a purpose. Sleeping in separate full-size beds, I guess he served a purpose, however temporary.

Six months into the marriage, they divorced. We got a new church home and, six months later, a new replacement daddy.

Oliver Martin. Dark-skinned, big and burly, cuddly and warm, with a face more wrinkled than a pug. Oliver always sported a checkered hat and the aroma of cigar, which he tried to smoke in the house. I say “tried” because it didn’t take him long to figure out that smoking in the house wasn’t worth the week-long verbal lashing he would get from my mother. For the most part they got along well, and pretty soon a brand-new king-size bed replaced the two old full-size beds.

Oliver was a business owner. On Sundays, after we got home from church, he would preach about the benefits of being an entrepreneur and the trappings of owning your own business.

“Grapes always taste sweeter when you own the vine they came from,” he would proudly say, “and having a vine begins first with planting a seed.”

We would stay up for hours listening to him talk about the civil rights movement and how he used to march with Dr. King in all the big marches we read about during Black History Month. It really didn’t matter whether or not he was telling the truth. What mattered most to us was that the stories always ended with a supernatural climax.