So I wore my squeezing shoes again.
Mama said I could get a lot out of the meeting if I'd only listen to what was going on. I tried listening, but I didn't get a thing. I found out, though, that at the night services, when Brother Milligan finally got through preaching and stepped down in front of the pulpit and said, "The doors of this church are now open," it didn't mean we could all walk out the door and go home! It meant the time had come for the bad sinners to go to the mourners' bench with their heads hanging down. Everybody else would stand up and sing the song about "Poor sinner, harden not your heart … and close thine eyes against the Light." We'd sing it over and over for them—four or five times.
Some nights half a dozen would go up the aisle and shake the preacher's hand. He'd ask them if they believed in Jesus and wanted to be baptized and join the church, and each one would nod his head. They would then sit down on the bench, and everybody except me would be glad and happy.
While we sang another song, the grownups who already belonged to the church would line up and shake hands with the sinners. That, the preacher said, was "giving the right hand of Christian fellowship."
Other nights nobody would even look toward the mourners' bench, no matter how loud the preacher called them to come or how long we sang. Those nights we got to go home early, and that made me glad and happy.
Every night I got sleepy. The last night of meeting, I tried to get Mama to let me go lie down on the quilts where all the babies were sleeping, but she said I was much too big to be sprawled out on the floor by the side of the pulpit.
Yet, the very next minute, when I told her I wanted to go sit on the mourners' bench so I could get baptized in the swimming hole down at Rocky Head Creek, she said I was too little for that.
I decided I'd never be the right size at the right time.
Summer dragged on and on. One morning in late August, a very good thing happened to me. Grandma Ming made a new flour-sack Dolly Dimple for me. She was pretty—the grandest doll ever stuffed with cotton, Grandpa Thad told me.
When I ran home to show her to Mama, I thought she would meet me out on the front porch and say, "Ah, Bandershanks, what's your new dolly's name?" Then, I was going to say, "Sookie Sue!"