I sat in a church pew handcrafted 200 years ago by African slaves, wishing that my husband were with me.

My solo vacation in Savannah, Georgia had been going well thus far.  I hadn’t missed anyone for the 24 hours I’d been in town.  I had been practicing the art of self-indulgence and was on my way to mastering it.  But within the first few minutes of my tour of the First African Baptist Church, I thought to myself, “Andre ought to be here.”

We were sitting in the Fellowship Hall beneath the main sanctuary of the church.  Our tour guide was pointing out the ventilation holes in the floor, which hid the 4 foot high crawl space underneath us that had been used to hide up to 200 slaves at a time in the days of the Underground Railroad.

“They managed to get food and water through the holes to the people below,” our guide, Johnny, was saying.  ”The pattern of the holes is an ancient African symbol of…” I don’t remember what the pattern meant.  I was overwhelmed by history and missing my spouse.

I was also overwhelmed by Johnny.  He was a neat, 22-year-old grad student, a member of the church who had been giving tours for eight years.  Johnny couldn’t be stumped.  ”When were the chairs on the pulpit covered with velvet?”  ”1901.”  But Johnny’s particular talent lay in his ability to handle eight of the most obnoxious Southern white people I had ever experienced.

Which is the other reason I was wishing Andre were with me.  I may have been mastering the art of self-indulgence, but Johnny and Andre are both masters of the art of Suffering Insensitive White People, a skill that is seemingly honed by black men growing up in the South.  My husband has demonstrated this on more than one occasion, particularly when dealing with my family, whom he has described several times as “good white folk.”

“Andre, you must come meet [family friends] the Gotwalds.  They can’t believe my daughter married a black man.”

“Andre, you’d love  Santa Fe.  You’d be the only black person there.”

These are examples from last year’s Christmas visit home, where Andre nodded and smiled, and I covered my face in embarrassment.  ”Mom, you can’t trot Andre out like he’s your black show pony!” I cried.  Andre was nonplussed.  He was happy to have married into a family that was loud and proud about his presence, as opposed to shocked and horrified.

Likewise, Johnny seemed to be pleased that these Eight Obnoxious White People were interested in his church, even if their questions were tactless and condescending.  ”Are these pews insured?”  asked one man upon learning their $20,000 price tag.  I doubted he had asked the same question at the Gordon-Lowe House.  ”How’s your choir?” shouted a 72-year-old white woman in spangled shants.  (Shants= shorts+pants.) “They have great choirs,” she informed the rest of us, as if she didn’t know that referring to an entire race of people in the third person when a member of said race was present was unacceptable behavior.

Johnny seemed to understand that their intentions were good, even if the execution fell short.  ”If the church is producing young men like you, it must be doing something right,” said one octogenarian.  Johnny took this compliment graciously, and the woman was right.  Until she followed it up with, “Keeps ‘em out of trouble.”  As if it were first nature for black men to be populating city jails, if it weren’t for the civilizing influence of Jesus Christ.

Overall I was amazed by the First African Baptist Church.  I was floored by the history:  the property was purchased by slaves for $1,500 in the early 1800s.  Where did slaves get $1,500?  Turns out slaves worked day jobs if their masters approved it, digging ditches and such, making small but significant wages.  Possibly you’ve heard that slaves could buy their freedom?  In the years prior to the Civil War, those slaves pooled their pathetic wages not to buy their freedom, but instead to purchase a church of their own and, some years later, to rebuild it when the original wooden structure began to break down.  They worked on it at night because during the day they were, well, enslaved.  (We can rest assured these people got into heaven.)    In 1860 the church was consecrated, and in 1863 Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation.  The congregation must have felt the declaration to be a direct result of the steadfastness of their faith.  Meanwhile, white people never suspected that the church on the corner was harboring escaped slaves.  The church never even bothered to cover up the ventilation holes in the floor.

“You mean it never occurred to them that the church might be a stop on the Underground Railroad?”  I asked.  ”Or did they not conceive of an Underground Railroad in the first place?”

Johnny smiled.  ”They knew about the Underground Railroad.  They just never suspected the church.  If they suspected it, you wouldn’t be touring it right now.  It would’ve been burned down, no question.”  Damn.

At this point, Dunking Booth felt the need to educate me.  Dunking Booth was an older man from South Carolina who kept making the same joke about dunking booths.  ”Where’s the dunking booth?” he crowed as the tour began.  I had no idea what he was talking about, but Johnny tried to set him straight.  ”We used to have baptisms in the Savannah River,” he explained.  ”But now we have a baptismal pool upstairs.”

“I know it’s here somewhere!” Dunking Booth cried, oblivious.

Once Johnny answered my question, Dunking Booth went on to illuminate further.  ”The Underground Railroad had a stop every five to eight miles,”  he said to me.  ”They had to travel by night and could only get so far in a day.”

“No shit, Dunking Booth,” I wanted to say.  ”My mother’s house is across the street from one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad.  You know why?  Because it’s on Lake Erie.  Which borders Canada.  And I spent my childhood in the Ohio town where Sherman was born.  So you don’t need to school me on the Civil War.  Why don’t you shut up and let Johnny give the tour?”  Jerk.

But I didn’t.  While in the South I am polite.  But I was being tested.  I had to bite my tongue again when halfway through the tour Spangleshants asked, “Is this church Baptist?”

“Spangleshants!”  I wanted to shout.  ”Do you know even know what day it is?”  The church was locked, you see.  The only reason we could get inside is because we had specifically signed up to take a tour.  A tour of the First African Baptist Church.  Where did she think she was, St. Pat’s?

“Yes.”  Johnny replied calmly.  This perturbed Dunking Booth.

“Southern Baptist?”

“No, sir.  We’re part of the Greater  Missionary Convention.”

“AMC?”

“No.”  Once again I had no idea what they were talking about.  But Johnny took it in stride.  He took it all in stride.  Forty-five minutes, three dunking booth jokes and a ton of history later, Johnny let loose with a zinger.

“If you’re here on Sunday, you’re all welcome to come worship with us.  Bring as many guests as you like.”

This concept of radical welcome– that is, welcoming everybody into the church, regardless of race, etc– is one of Christianity’s founding principles, and one with which modern Christianity struggles the most.  Jesus preached that everybody should be welcome into God’s House, but I must admit that if I had a church, I may not want certain people in it because certain people are a pain in the ass.  But there was Johnny, inviting us to come worship with him and his congregation.  Maybe this is just how he wraps up his tours, but I couldn’t help but admire him for doing what the church ultimately wants us to do:  accept each other in our ignorance and inconsistencies, and join together in our search to better understand God and each other.