My Son-In-Law Had Me Removed As Sunday School Teacher After 38 Years Because I “Taught The Old Way.” On Homecoming Sunday, The Visiting Preacher Held Up A Worn Bible And Asked If I Was Still Here

The letter came on a Thursday in August, in a long white envelope with the church’s return address printed in the corner. Mount Gilead Baptist Church, Route 2, Cordele, Georgia.

I thought it was the newsletter. I opened it standing at the mailbox at the end of my drive with the heat coming up off the red clay road like an oven door, and I read it twice before I understood it.

Dear Mrs. Tolliver,

On behalf of the Board of Deacons, we want to thank you for your many years of faithful service to the children of Mount Gilead. As part of our new Next Generation Initiative, beginning September 7, the Junior Class will transition to a modern video-based curriculum led by Josh and Kaylee Barnett. We are grateful for your understanding as we move forward together.

In Christ,

Brandon Pruett, Chairman

That was it. No phone call. No knock on the door. Thirty-eight years of Sunday mornings in Room 4, and it ended in a form letter with my son-in-law’s signature at the bottom.

I folded it back up along its creases and put it in my apron pocket. Then I went inside and sat down at the kitchen table, and I didn’t get up until the light went orange in the window over the sink and the whippoorwills started.

Room 4

My name is Ruth Ann Tolliver. I’m seventy-two years old. I have been a member of Mount Gilead Baptist Church since I was baptized in Gum Creek at the age of nine, in a white dress my mother made out of a flour sack.

I started teaching the Junior Class, which is the fourth, fifth and sixth graders, in the spring of 1975. I was twenty-one and newly married to Harold, who drove a truck for a peanut company out of Dawson and could sing bass so low it rattled the hymnals. I stepped out of the classroom twice over the years, once for six years when my mother was failing and once for seven when Harold’s heart gave out by inches. Add up all the rest, and it comes to thirty-eight.

Room 4 is at the end of the education hall, past the water fountain that’s run warm since the Carter administration. It has a window that looks out on the cemetery and the pecan trees. It has nine little wooden chairs, a flannel board on an easel, and a coffee can of peppermints I keep filled out of my own pocket.

I taught the way I was taught. We said a memory verse every week, King James, and if you said it perfect you got a peppermint and a gold star on the chart. We did the flannel board for Bible stories, Moses and Daniel and Zacchaeus up in his little sycamore tree. We prayed out loud for each other, by name. And at the end of every class I stood at the door and put my hand on every child’s head as they went out and said, “God isn’t finished with you yet.”

The children used to roll their eyes at that. Then they’d grow up and come back with their own children and say it to me first, before I could.

Brandon

My daughter Leanne married Brandon Pruett in 2004. She was twenty-four. He was twenty-seven, a big, square-jawed, ambitious young man from Tifton who sold crop insurance and wore a pressed shirt to the Piggly Wiggly.

He was never unkind to me. I want that understood. He shook my hand every Sunday. He fixed my gutters after the storm in 2017 without being asked. When Harold was dying, Brandon drove him to dialysis in Albany three mornings a week for a whole spring.

But Brandon was a man who liked things efficient. He’d built his insurance agency from one desk in a strip mall to three offices across South Georgia, and he looked at everything like it was a spreadsheet that needed fixing.

In January, the deacons elected him chairman. He was forty-nine. He was the youngest chairman Mount Gilead had ever had.

“We’re going to turn this ship around, Miss Ruth Ann,” he told me in the parking lot after the vote. He called me Miss Ruth Ann, like the children did, even though I’m his mother-in-law. I never minded. “We’re down to seventy-one in the pews on a good Sunday. We used to run two-twenty. If we don’t get young families in here, we close our doors in ten years. I’ve seen the numbers.”

“The Lord doesn’t keep spreadsheets, Brandon.”

He laughed and put his arm around my shoulders. “Well, the Southern Baptist Convention does.”

I laughed too. I didn’t know yet that he was already looking at Room 4.

The Old Way

In April, he sat in on my class.

He didn’t tell me he was coming. He just appeared in the doorway at a quarter to ten with a cup of coffee from the fellowship hall and folded himself onto one of the little wooden chairs in the back, his knees up near his chin.

I had seven children that morning. We were doing Joseph and his coat of many colors on the flannel board. Little Maci Brewer said her memory verse perfect, Psalm 119:105, Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path, and got her peppermint. Then Hunter Gay recited his and got stuck on “path,” and I helped him, and he got his peppermint too, because Hunter has trouble reading and tries harder than anybody.

At the end, I stood at the door and put my hand on every head.

Brandon waited until they’d all run down the hall.

“Miss Ruth Ann, can I be honest?”

“You usually are.”

“Flannel board. King James. Gold stars on a chart.” He shook his head, smiling a little, like he was talking to a child himself. “These kids have iPads. They watch YouTube. Half of them can’t understand ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ You’re teaching the old way, and the old way isn’t working. Look at our numbers.”

“Those seven children were here this morning,” I said. “Every one of them.”

“Seven,” he said. “Out of a county of twenty-three thousand people.”

He meant well. I knew he meant well. That’s the hardest kind of hurt there is, the kind somebody gives you while they mean well.

The Television

The Barnetts are a lovely young couple. Josh is a youth pastor in training at a school in Tallahassee. Kaylee has a laugh you can hear from the parking lot. They did not ask for my class, and they were embarrassed about it. Kaylee hugged me in the ladies’ room the first Sunday in September and said, “Miss Ruth Ann, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know they hadn’t asked you.”

“It’s not your doing, honey.”

The Next Generation Initiative cost the church eleven thousand dollars. I know because the treasurer, Dolores Griner, told me in a whisper at Bible study. Brandon bought a curriculum from a company in Nashville that came with DVDs and a website and a sixty-five-inch television that he mounted on the wall of Room 4 himself, right where the flannel board used to stand.

He put the flannel board in the storage closet off the fellowship hall, behind the Christmas pageant costumes. He put my coffee can of peppermints on a shelf in the church office.

I didn’t go to Room 4 that first Sunday. I couldn’t. I sat in the sanctuary during Sunday school hour, by myself, in the back pew under the window, which is the pew nobody sits in because the air conditioner drips on it.

Through the wall, I could hear the television. Bright, loud music. A cartoon lion talking about making good choices.

My daughter found me there.

“Mama, why are you sitting back here?”

“Air conditioner’s dripping on my good pew,” I said.

Leanne looked at me a long time. She has her daddy’s eyes, Harold’s eyes, the color of creek water. She knew I was lying. She sat down next to me and didn’t say anything, and when the drip from the air conditioner hit my shoulder, she moved her hymnal to catch it.

“I told him not to send a letter,” she said finally. “I told him to come talk to you.”

“Well,” I said. “He didn’t.”

The Children Who Grew Up

I stayed in the back pew through September.

People noticed. That’s the thing about a church of seventy-one people. Wade Hendrix, who I taught in 1979 and who now runs the feed store on Highway 41, stopped me in the parking lot.

“Miss Ruth Ann, my grandbaby says the TV lion doesn’t know anybody’s name.”

“Well, he’s a lion, Wade.”

“He says Miss Ruth Ann used to pray for him by name. Out loud. He says nobody prays for him out loud anymore.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I patted his arm and got in my Buick.

At night, I’d sit at the kitchen table with the old class rolls. I’ve kept every one, in a plastic tub in the hall closet, on that green ledger paper with the holes punched down the side. Thirty-eight years of names in my handwriting. I’d run my finger down the columns. Some of those children were grandparents now. Some were in the cemetery out my old classroom window. Some I’d lost track of entirely, the way you do. Families moved for work, to Macon, to Atlanta, to Jacksonville, and took their children with them, and you never knew how the story came out.

There was one name in the 1975 roll I always stopped on. I’d been stopping on it for fifty years.

I’d say a little prayer for that one, every time. Then I’d turn the page.

Homecoming

Mount Gilead was founded in 1876. That made this October our one hundred and fiftieth Homecoming, and Brandon was determined it was going to be the biggest one in the history of the church.

He had banners printed. He had a photographer coming from the Cordele Dispatch. He rented two white tents for dinner on the grounds and had the cemetery mowed twice. And he had booked, as the visiting preacher, a man named Dr. Marcus Hollis, the senior pastor of a church in suburban Atlanta that runs four thousand people on a Sunday and has its services on television.

“Turns out he lived out here as a boy,” Brandon told everybody at the September business meeting, pleased as anything. “Dolores found his family on an old membership roll. His mother worked at the peanut plant in the seventies. I called his office, and he said yes on the first call. Said he’d been waiting fifty years for somebody to ask.”

I was sitting in the back. I went very still.

“Hollis,” I said, but quietly, and nobody heard me.

There are lots of Hollises in South Georgia. And Dr. Marcus Hollis of Atlanta, with his television services and four thousand people, would not remember a Sunday school teacher from a little white church off Route 2 he’d attended for three years when he was a child. I told myself that all the way home.

I told myself that every night for a month.

The Visiting Preacher

Homecoming Sunday was the second Sunday of October, clear and cool, with the pecans starting to drop on the tents.

The sanctuary was full for the first time in eleven years. People drove in from three states. There were folding chairs down the side aisles and out into the vestibule. Brandon was in the front pew in a navy suit with a red tie, beaming, with Leanne beside him and my grandson Caleb, who is sixteen, slouched on the end.

I sat in the back pew under the window. The air conditioner was off for once, because it was October. I had my Bible in my lap, the same one I’d carried since 1974, so worn at the spine I keep it together with a rubber band.

Dr. Hollis came out with our pastor, Brother Gene, and sat in the big carved chair behind the pulpit during the hymns. He was a lean man in his late fifties, in a dark gray suit, with close-cropped gray hair and a short gray beard and reading glasses folded in his breast pocket. He sang every word of “When We All Get to Heaven” without looking at the hymnal.

I couldn’t stop looking at his hands. I don’t know why.

When Brother Gene introduced him, he stood up, walked to the pulpit, set his sermon notes on it, and then he didn’t look at them. He reached under the pulpit and brought out a small, black, cracked-leather Bible. The cover was coming off. There was duct tape on the spine, old and gray and peeling.

He held it up, high, over his head, the way you’d hold up a child for somebody to see.

“Before I preach,” he said, “I need to find somebody. Is Mrs. Ruth Ann Tolliver still here?”

The Worn Bible

Nobody moved for a second.

Then, all across that full sanctuary, heads began to turn. I heard Leanne say, “Mama,” from the front pew, not loud.

My hand went up. I don’t remember deciding to raise it. It just went up, there in the back row, shaking like a leaf.

Dr. Hollis saw it. He put his other hand flat on the pulpit like he needed it to stay standing.

“Fifty-one years ago,” he said, “I was eight years old and I sat in Room 4 at the end of that hall. My daddy was in the state prison in Reidsville. My mama worked the night line at the peanut plant and slept all day. Nobody walked me to church. I walked myself, two miles down Route 2, because somebody told me there were cookies.”

People laughed a little. He smiled, but his eyes were wet.

“One Sunday in June of 1975, I stole three dollars out of the offering plate. I was hungry. I put it in my sock. And when class was over, Mrs. Tolliver stood at the door with her hand out, the way she did, to put it on every head. When she got to me, she bent down and said, very quietly, so nobody else heard, ‘Marcus, you stay a minute.'”

I remembered. Lord help me, I remembered every second of it.

“I thought she was going to call the sheriff. I thought she was going to call my mama at work. Instead she sat me down in one of those little chairs and asked me what I’d had to eat that day. And when I told her nothing, she went to the fellowship hall and came back with a plate of fried chicken from the after-church dinner, and she sat with me while I ate it. And then she reached in her pocketbook and pulled out this.”

He held the Bible up again.

“She’d bought it that week at the Christian bookstore in Albany. I found out years later it cost her six dollars and fifty cents, which was a week’s worth of groceries for a truck driver’s wife in 1975. She opened it to the front page and handed me a pen and said, ‘Write your name in it, so you’ll know it’s yours.’ And I did. Then she took the pen back and wrote something underneath.”

He opened the front cover and turned it toward the congregation, as if they could read it from the pews. They couldn’t, but I didn’t need them to. I knew what it said.

MARCUS HOLLIS, in a little boy’s crooked capital letters. And underneath, in blue ink, in my handwriting:

God isn’t finished with you yet. — Miss Ruth Ann, June 1975.

“We moved to Atlanta when I was eleven,” he said. “I got in trouble. Real trouble. I was locked up at seventeen in a youth facility in Augusta. And the only thing I had in that cell that was mine was this Bible, because it had my name in it. I read it front to back in there, three times. And every time I opened it, there she was on the first page, telling me something I didn’t believe.”

He closed it gently and set it down on the pulpit.

“I have been preaching for thirty-one years. I have preached on television. I have preached in Kenya and in Brazil. And I have never once stood in a pulpit without this Bible on it. I said yes to coming here today for one reason only. I wanted to tell her she was right.”

Standing

What happened next, I’ve had trouble describing even to myself.

Dr. Hollis looked out at all of us and said, “I’d like to ask something. If Mrs. Tolliver ever taught you in that room at the end of the hall, would you stand up?”

Wade Hendrix stood up first, from the third pew. Then Dolores Griner, the treasurer. Then a whole row of the Gay family. Then the Brewers. Then a woman I hadn’t seen since 1988, who’d driven in from Valdosta, holding a little girl’s hand.

They kept standing. All over the sanctuary, grown men in farm caps and women in church hats and young mothers and old deacons, up and down the side aisles, out in the folding chairs in the vestibule. Some of them were crying. Some of them were holding up their own old Bibles. Maci Brewer, who is nine, stood up on her pew so she could see, and her mother didn’t make her get down.

In the front pew, Leanne stood. She was in my class from 1989 to 1991.

Then my grandson Caleb stood up next to her, unfolding all six feet of himself. I taught him, too.

That left Brandon sitting in the front row by himself in his navy suit, looking around at a whole church on its feet.

I couldn’t see his face from where I was. I only saw him turn and look over his shoulder, past all those standing people, all the way back to the last pew under the window, where I was sitting with my hand still up in the air like I’d forgotten to put it down.

The Fellowship Hall

Brandon found me after the service, out back of the fellowship hall by the dumpster, where I’d gone to get some air and get myself put back together before dinner on the grounds.

He had his tie loosened. He stood there with his hands in his pockets like a teenager.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “About Dr. Hollis. I swear to you, Miss Ruth Ann. I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t, son.”

He looked down at the gravel for a long time.

“You want to know why I did it? The real reason?” His voice was rough. “My daddy fixed transmissions in Tifton and said church was for weak people. I never went once as a boy. Not once. I walked into Mount Gilead at twenty-seven because Leanne asked me to, and I sat in a pew with people who knew every word to every hymn, and every verse by heart, and I didn’t know any of it. I still don’t. I have to look up the books of the Bible on my phone.”

I didn’t say anything. I let him go on.

“When I watched you in that classroom in April, with the flannel board and the verses and all the kids knowing exactly what to do, I felt like that boy again. Like I was on the outside of something. I figured if I put a TV in there, it’d be fair. Everybody’d be starting from the same place.” He swallowed. “Nobody ever put their hand on my head and said God wasn’t finished with me. I guess I thought that was just something that happened to other people.”

I reached up. He’s six foot three, and I’m five foot one, so he had to bend.

I put my hand on his head.

“God isn’t finished with you yet, Brandon,” I said.

He stood there bent over with my hand on his hair behind a church dumpster, and the chairman of the Board of Deacons of Mount Gilead Baptist Church cried like a little boy.

Dinner on the Grounds

Dinner on the grounds went until almost four.

There was fried chicken and butter beans and squash casserole and three kinds of potato salad and more pound cake than any church has ever needed. Dr. Hollis sat next to me at a folding table under the pecan trees with a paper plate on his knee and his old Bible on the table between us, and people kept coming up two and three at a time to tell him which year they’d been in Room 4.

“You prayed for me by name,” a man I taught in 1990 told me, standing at the end of our table with his plate. “When my brother was over there in the Gulf War. Every Sunday. I still remember the way you said it.”

“Your brother came home,” I said.

“He did. He’s here. He’s in the potato salad line.”

Dr. Hollis laughed so hard he had to set his tea down.

Late in the afternoon, when the tents were coming down, he took my hand across the table. His hands were the hands of a man who’d done a lot of work in his life, but I could still see the boy’s in them, the one who put three dollars in his sock.

“I tried to find you,” he said. “Twice. In the nineties. I called the church office and nobody knew who I meant. I figured you’d moved, or passed.”

“I was right here,” I said. “I was in Room 4 the whole time.”

“I know that now,” he said.

Room 4 Again

Brandon called a special meeting of the deacons the following Wednesday night. It took eleven minutes. Leanne told me afterward the vote was unanimous and that Wade Hendrix seconded the motion before Brandon finished making it.

The Barnetts asked if they could stay on and help. I said I’d be glad of it. Kaylee is wonderful with the little ones, and Josh can fix the projector.

The television is still on the wall of Room 4. Brandon offered to take it down, and I said no. We use it now and then. When Dr. Hollis’s church put his Homecoming sermon online, Josh played it for the Junior Class, and I’ve never seen nine children sit so still. Hunter Gay asked if that was really his Sunday school room in the video, and when I said yes, he turned all the way around in his chair to look at it, like he was seeing it for the first time.

The flannel board came back out of the storage closet. Somebody had dusted it before I got there, and the peppermint can was sitting on the windowsill, full to the top. I never did find out who.

I asked Brandon who filled it. He said he couldn’t imagine.

The Pen

The first Sunday in November, there were eleven children in Room 4. Two of them were new, a brother and sister whose family had moved to Cordele from Ohio and seen the Homecoming picture in the Dispatch.

And in the back, on one of the little wooden chairs with his knees up by his chin, sat my son-in-law.

He’d asked me on Saturday, on the phone, very quietly, if it would be all right. I said there was always room.

We did Zacchaeus on the flannel board, the little man who climbed the sycamore tree because he couldn’t see over the crowd. Brandon watched the whole thing without looking at his phone once. When it came time for memory verses, he held up his hand like the children did, and said Psalm 119:105 all the way through, slow, and got stuck on “path,” and Hunter Gay helped him.

At the end of class, after I’d put my hand on every head and the children had run off down the hall toward the warm water fountain, I went to my pocketbook and took out a small box from the Christian bookstore in Albany.

It was a black leather Bible. It cost a good deal more than six dollars and fifty cents these days.

I opened it to the front page, the blank one, and set it on his knee, and handed him my pen.

“Write your name in it,” I said. “So you’ll know it’s yours.”

He sat there in that little chair for a long moment, holding the pen. Then he bent his head over the page, and outside the window the pecan leaves came down on the cemetery, and Brandon Pruett, forty-nine years old, wrote his name in careful capital letters, one at a time, like a boy.

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