Gratitude, Schweppe 
by B Johnston 
August 2, 2007

For several years, when my children and my marriage were young, we attended the United Methodist Church in Darien, Connecticut. Earl Sanford was a dynamic minister. His sermons were uplifting and challenged us to think about how we could more fully live what we believed. Lots of good stuff came out of that church...lots of service...lots of music and joy. It was as fair a community of faith as I have known. And back then, 30 years ago, it was fair skinned, as well. Darien has a reputation for being ironclad white Protestant. If you're a movie fan, Gentleman's Agreement, a Gregory Peck movie about anti-Semitism, was set in the town and part of The Stepford Wives was actually filmed there at the Goodwives Shopping Center. 

Crossing from New York on the interstate, your first glimpse of Connecticut is a charming landscape - a small museum in a quaint looking house perches on a hilltop and below a cluster of sailboats bob at their moorings in the bay. It's not Portofino, but it's been there. In this land of Gatsby, of Weejuns and prep schools and tennis whites, the United Methodists were lucky enough to enjoy the participation of Schweppe Malbon...a mysterious and charming African American man who drove each week from a neighboring town to worship there. On our first visit to the church, Schweppe stood at the open door and grinned us up the steps as if this was our long anticipated homecoming. He was so happy I thought somehow he'd mistaken us for five other reluctant, dressed up white people he'd been missing. 

My husband and I were each raised in a non-worshiping household, although in his I believe there was some amount of tolerance for the idea of religion. I'm pretty sure he had been baptized and each of his sisters had enjoyed a church wedding. In my own family, "church people" were on a level with revenuers and door to door salesmen... a class of folk who were not to be trusted. While my father was polite and could ease away without causing insult, my mother, confronted by a person with obvious religious tendencies, couldn't suppress her gypsy heritage. She stopped short of spitting three times at their feet, but you could tell she was ready. To this day, no one can telegraph a wordless curse as vividly as my mom. 

With that kind of history, new to town and feeling wildly out of place, we began at the Methodist church in an attempt to normalize our children's lives; to demonstrate to their teachers and to the greater community that we were like them, at least in the way of folks who get up of a Sunday morning and travel down the road to get talked at. We weren't expecting much so we came home stunned, that first day, at how good it had felt. We had to go back several times before we began to trust that it was going to feel that way just about every time. Our children delighted in the Sunday school. We hung around after services and talked with our new friends. We began participating in church activities during the week. We became one of them. And we grinned back at Schweppe Malbon with genuine delight, every worship day. I came to anticipate what he would say to me, holding my hands and looking into my soul, "You know, Beverly, Beauty has a Duty...so what are you going to do?" It is only in retrospect that I understand how profoundly he was challenging me and more importantly, how he was fulfilling his Duty by his attendance in this most foreign land. Schweppe, in his perfectly tailored suit and starched white shirt, paid meticulous attention to the details of how he presented himself, understanding the seriousness of his lonely charge to represent for all of us The Other...the Unknown...the One Who is Different. He may have been a teacher or a mechanic the other 6 days of the week, but on Sundays, he was avatar...come to earth in all his power to shine a light on how we were meant to live, in brotherhood and joy.

copyright © 2007 B Johnston

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