The Raccoon in Church

Did I ever tell you about the time a raccoon tried to walk right through the doors of Hopewell Baptist Church and attend Sunday services? No?

Well the whole affair ended in violence. It was horrible. Pull up a seat on the porch here and I’ll tell you all about it.

To fully imagine this scene, one must first get acquainted with the main character and antagonist, Granny. Granny was the oldest of four girls born before the Great Depression to hardworking farmers scratching out a living in rural South Carolina. Raised “hard-shell” Primitive Baptist, she never smoked, drank, or chewed tobacco products and she certainly didn’t believe in wearing makeup even on a Saturday night, much less on a holy Sabbath morning to Hopewell First Baptist Church.

Then one ill-fated Sunday morning, my Aunt Judy Gail, her youngest daughter, who had recently discovered that she had developed boobs and a keen interest in boys who liked to stare at them, announced that she was going to wear makeup to church.

Judy Gail didn’t so much announce it as she emerged from her bedroom about 15 minutes before the opening hymns wearing her Sunday finest, with her new boobs pushed up and out as far as they could legally go without violating health and sanitation codes at Sunday dinner-on-the-grounds, her blonde hair coated up with half a can of hairspray in a trashy tease, and so much ruby-red lipstick and black eye makeup that she looked like a genetic cross between a cheap Dolly Parton impersonator and a raccoon with chapped lips.

“Oh, no ma’am, you’re not!” said Granny, matter-of-factly.

“Yes, ma’am, I am!” stated her daughter, even more matter-of-factly.

Cousin Perry, who lived next door across a cow pasture and a corn field, with no trees to block sight or sound, remembers most of that morning clearly. As he and the other cousins were loading up into the bed of the family truck to depart for church, he recalls hearing a squalling sound, faint at first, but rapidly growing louder and more intense, punctuated by a series of “swooshing” noises, like one achieves when you swing a peach-limb “switch” through the air fast enough to break the speed-of-sound barrier.

He peered across the field separating Aunt Dottie’s house from Granny’s place and witnessed what he later described as a raccoon with tousled blond hair, smeared makeup and a torn white dress screaming and breaking corn toward his house, Granny chasing right after it with an alarmingly large peach limb, quoting Leviticus 19:29, “Do not profane your daughter by making her a harlot!”

Perry said later that Granny and Judy Gail broke so much corn tearing across that field that Uncle Quillie didn’t even have to crank the John Deere combine when harvest time rolled around. The men just got out there and picked it up by hand. But Cousin Perry tends to exaggerate sometimes and can’t be relied upon as a star witness.

Granny caught that runaway raccoon, too, about fifteen feet short of Aunt Dottie’s porch, where it had apparently been seeking salvation. Driven by righteous indignation and anger, Granny could really sprint for a big woman, even while wearing a Sunday dress and church shoes, and reliable witnesses say she cleared six strands of barb wire in a single leap and never wrinkled her dress.

The rest happened so fast that Perry couldn’t catch it all, or maybe the trauma of the ordeal was mercifully blocked from his memory, or perhaps Aunt Dottie threw all the children in the truck and made them cover their eyes with their King James Bibles. But he does remember that the DeWitt family was unusually late for services that day, and Judy Gail, who never sat down during the entire service, sang all the hymns while standing up in a back corner with a pained, wincing look on her freshly scrubbed face.

It’s been more than forty years since this transpired, so I wonder if Aunt Judy Gail remembers that eventful day. I started to ask her about it when I ran into her at Hopewell Baptist the other Sunday.

But then I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a drop of makeup.

Dear readers: Any time you force a kid to put on clean, fancy clothes and sit still for an hour while a boring preacher drones on and on, there is potential for capital punishment. Have you ever received a “whipping” in church, right before church, or right after church services? Comment and tell me about it.

Author’s note: This column was originally published in “Saying Grace Over Edible Underwear” (2016).