Plug up your ears!

Quit listening to those lies straight out that demon's mouth.  Practice discernment, child!  It is not where you are from, it is where you are going.

"I'm from right 'round Lumberton." ; my grandfather would say.  " I come up here from Robeson county following Pap, my daddy.  He was tenant farming for Old mistah Lem.  We wuz puttin' in 'bacca ... my daddy reached fa a limb to beat me.  I said;" Old man you ain't gon' beat me no mo! ... I wuz twenty one years old ...  still working fah my daddy, still letting him take eva' cent I earned."

I would sit around my grandfather for hours just listening to his stories.  Using my vivid imagination to see the beautiful landscapes, hear all the great adventures.  I loved how he told me that I was just like his grandmother.  "Naw, she didn't take no gruff off nobody.  Ah tiny luddle thang lak you, granddawthur.  She was a free issue, bought hur own freedom ... sho did!"

I heard many stories growing up in Wade, North Carolina with my granddaddy.  The best one, I know and experienced.  It had to be around the Christmas of 1959.  It seems this old cracker named Cleo *Mo took a notion to blow up our church, Wesley A.M.E. Zion Chapel.  It sat right there on highway 301, in between Godwin and Dunn.

Well this old white man didn't have a lot of fondness for black folks it seems.  I don't know why.  He was rich and owned and farmed a lot of land.  He even owned a "filling station" and grocery store.  He was known for working n****** for nothing, making himself richer everyday.

Well I guess all that money, land and being white didn't make him happy enough. They say he loved to drink as in "get sloppy drunk".  Well on this very cold frigid night the devil told him and that old Indian he hung out with to drive down the road and take some dynamite and blow our church up.  Things definitely didn't go the way they planned.  It seems his pickup truck was just full to the brim with dynamite.

Cleo *Mo and the old Indian were as drunk as skunks, driving up and down the road at midnight causing havoc.  They say Cleo lit the fuse on the bundle of dynamite and handed it off to that old Indian to throw into Wesley.  When the Indian went to throw it, the dynamite hit the glass window and fell on the floor of the truck.  The old Indian forgot that all the windows were rolled up because it was so cold.  They didn't have push buttons on windows like the do now.  They say that old Indian fumbled in the dark for the bundle of dynamite but it must have rolled under the seat or something because he couldn't find it.  Well, he didn't find it it time.

That old pickup truck, Cleo *Mo, and the old Indian blew clear to smitter-rens!  Broke out all the front windows in Wesley.  It was such a great explosion, it blew out windows for miles around.

They never had to bury Cleo *Mo and that old Indian.  There was nothing left! I remember sifting through the bomb site.  I was a little girl walking through the ashes picking up pieces of  leather and melted metal.

 I was pretty happy that day.  The nerve of those two idiots, trying to blow up my granddaddy's church.  We all laughed and said in unison; "GOD sits high, but He looks low."

Praise the LORD!

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