Clyde’s seemed almost a classic Negro funeral. I wondered if others noted this. It worried me in ways that shame me now. If I was ready to admit my dad had been a living black man, then surely having him be just a newly dead one should’ve felt far easier. Right? Well, no. Really openly emotional, the music wasn’t one bit canned; it absolutely swung. It did not know how not to. Both aged lady keyboardists cried; neither woman could quite read her music thanks to running eyes, and so each played by heart. A piano plus an organ and two choirs, Child & Adult. Dad had served as superintendent of the Sunday school here. Everybody loved him. In secret, he’d passed out chewing gum to kids. A saint, he loaned men money and never mentioned repayment, and now he’d died and who would know? Praise God—from Whom all blessings …

Clyde’s coffin rested open. Mom had asked, would morticians please keep it closed, thanks. But we’d marched in last, the church just mobbed, and there Dad waited face-up. What could we do? Turn tail and run? Rush up and slam it?

I will spare myself and you the description of how much “Northern European” makeup, how much cake-icing-pink sludge, they’d spackled over that dear jalopy of a face. It was beyond Lon Chaney monster-movie, how white they’d tried to paint him, dead.

Dad had somehow urged his fellow Bible-givers to handcraft his burial. Maybe he hoped to spare my mom the chore. She would’ve sprung for Psalm 100 and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” period. No “graveside service,” no nothing. Everybody go home.

Mom’s lifelong stab at “class” got trounced without these rough men even knowing. Her brothers being present made it all the more embarrassing. Grace’s tribe had been a longtime dynasty of big-jawed, self-satisfied county-seat attorneys. In Castalia, North Carolina, to be “a Meadows” offered large exemptions, ones Mom had maybe traded on, then flaunted from the start.

For one thing, too many guys spoke. Six, then the class-ring salesman. Each man stood remembering Clyde aloud and at full blast. Mother’s hand tightened over mine at every painful instance of ungrammar. After forty double negatives, my right paw reddened then contracted and soon numbed.

Orations by Clyde’s fellow Bible-believers first seemed casual, soon impromptu, next disorganized, then collapsing toward the sloppy, sounding finally deranged. Others’ love of him seemed to dawn on them as they described it. The ring salesman now recalled a traffic accident that’d claimed his own beloved eldest child, an adolescent daughter. Mom, panicked, whispered to me, “And what has this to do with the price of tea in China?”