Free The Stones Cry Out by Sibella Giorello Page A

cotton jumpers sang and swayed while another woman preached the Word. The preacher woman was both tall and wide and her thick neck was disfigured by a softball-sized goiter. Raising her meaty arms, she praised God.
    The crowd cried, "Hallelujah!"
    Tambourines rattled.
    The electric organ took off, harmonizing with the cicadas.
    The woman told them God was ready to bless their lives. Bless them, bless them.
    "Glory, glory, glory!" cried the crowd.
    I turned to look into my mother’s eyes. They still held yesterday's distance, as if her sight was directed inward. Around us people were pressing forward, dancing to the organ, praising the Lord, and shaking the tambourines. I leaned into her ear but had to yell to be heard. "Do you want me to stay with you?"
    She glanced at the woman on the stage, then back at me. "Where will you be?"
    I pointed to the seats above the dancing crowd. They were theatre chairs, donated by some movie house whose owner was miraculously healed one summer. The brown chairs lined the natural amphitheater protected by the tent. Beyond that the fields held the small dormitories that sheltered the seekers. Squeezing my arm before letting go, my mother wiggled to the front of the perspiring crowd.
    I walked up the hillside and took a seat at the far end, out of the way. Several rows below, some ailing visitors perched in their chairs, waiting for the call to “lay hands.” Lined up together beside wheelchairs and oxygen tanks, they reminded me of maimed birds waiting on a sagging wire.
    Farther down, in the middle of the crowd, my mother had raised both arms, and the silver bracelets ricocheted shine into the tabernacle. Her fingertips stroked the air, a blind woman trying to read the invisible face of God.
    Sometimes I wondered what David Harmon would say about this place, about his wife coming here for services. When they married, we joined his family’s Episcopal parish, St. John’s Church. Redolent with southern gentility and charm, the Harmon family had attended St. John’s since the 1700s. Back then, colonial Harmons helped raise the original rafters. There was a family pew, where we sat every Sunday, every high holy day, and for weddings and funerals of Richmond’s elite.
    But when my dad died, we stopped going. My mother seemed to lose interest in seeing the people there, and I realized that after someone dies the most painful place on earth was the place where you worshipped with them. Sitting in that historic box pew, my dad's absence felt so acute that the hymns seemed to howl through my heart. I finally decided to take a break from Sunday services. But the break had continued without visible end, while my mother stumbled upon this unbound place of spiritual hope flourishing in the Virginia countryside like gathered wildflowers.
    My first reaction to this place was fear: fear of people who spoke in tongues. Fear of men yelling about God’s power. And a strange fear of women so devoted to God they had submerged their personality. But I also enjoyed the service. They seemed to quiet the voices clamoring inside my mother’s mind, and the impromptu singing buoyed her spirit. This wasn't the place I'd choose for her, but I had witnessed the solace she discovered. Here she could sing and dance and shout for glory among people who didn't care which pew she belonged to, or whose people got to America first, or whether she was baking a roast for the church dinner. These people yearned for one thing and one thing only. A pure relationship with that part of the Trinity so often neglected in organized worship: The Holy Spirit.
    And I was a coward about it. Slouching in my seat like a truant attending a matinee, I watched the goitered preacher woman. Tilting back her head, she exposed her physical defect with such courage that I couldn't look away. The tumor looked like a doorknob in her neck. She told God she loved Him. That she knew He could heal her. It was His glory, she said, stepping down from the