Read Online White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.
    The people seated on the plank
benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at
their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn
rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in
the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of
dissent in their eyes.
    Flower looked directly into
Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as
though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long
prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in
unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.
    After the service Jubal
Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He
stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his
hat, then lowered his hand.
    "You seemed to have great
interest in the homily," he said.
    "St. Paul wrote down that
slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked.              
          /
    "He's telling us to put our
faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through
those who know more about the world than a simple servant such as
myself," he
replied, bowing slightly.
    "How come we cain't learn from
the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"
    "I guess I'm not really
qualified to talk about that," he said.
    "I guess you ain't," she said.
    She turned and walked down the
dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair
blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back. 
    BUT all the way home
she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the
congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one
another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture
itself a white man's fraud?
    She warmed a tin cup of coffee
and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of
fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like
dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness
she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the
cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.
    God wanted her to be a slave
and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?
    She looked through her front
door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry
for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a
hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.
    Flower walked across the
backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back
door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the
dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.
    It took her less than five
minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's
letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the
passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians
should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as
the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with
goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."
    And a bit farther on: "For we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places."
    She closed the cover on the
book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense
of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as
yet quite understand.
    Before sunset she walked
downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny.
She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse
operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the
trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars
rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now
and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out