From the Ashes

Ammie Murray noticed the car out of the corner of her eye. There was something odd about it.

The car was an aging maroon Pontiac. It was parked on a narrow side road that led off into a swamp along the Congaree River. People used those rutty old roads to go fishing. The odd thing was that the car was full, at a dead stop and facing out.

That made her uneasy, but she drove on, at 30 mph or so, over the sand and the washouts that covered Old State Road. All at once, the Pontiac, roaring up at 60 mph, rammed the rear of her little pale gray Mercury Topaz. Her head snapped backward, then whipped forward. Pain shot from the top of her neck to the middle of her shoulders. The Topaz skidded and bucked. She grabbed the wheel so hard her hands hurt.

“Oh, my God!” she said. She yanked her car out of its sidelong pitch and pushed the accelerator to the floor. Ammie was in her 50s, a grandmother. She was 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds, if she had lunch. She looked down the road. No one was in sight. She glanced at the rearview mirror. There, relentless as a locomotive, came the faded maroon Pontiac.

In the front seat were two men. Three sat in back. From what she could see, there was not a youngster among them. The driver’s face was large and ruddy. It was covered with two or three days of stubble. His hair was stringy, and his head was bald on top. He wore a blue and green checked shirt, open at the neck. His chest was dark with hair. He stared at her. His eyes were narrow and angry. She could see his lips moving. He was saying through his teeth, “Let’s get the bitch.”

She felt her hands sweat against the wheel. They made it slippery. She gripped it tighter. Her engine built to a high whine. She felt the Topaz surge ahead. Then the Pontiac hit her again. She was pulling away, so this time the blow was not as hard. Her speed, however, made the Topaz more difficult to handle. It tried to skid, but she held it on the road. “Thank you, Lord,” she muttered. “Thank you.”

It had not rained in weeks, and the dust boiled, but she could still see the grill on the Pontiac. Sixty. Seventy. Trees flew by. Sometimes they touched overhead, like a canopy. Water oaks. Dogwoods. Pines. Muscadine vines. Johnson grass. Cattails. Seventy-five. Eighty. Her car shook. “My God,” she said to herself, “I didn’t know this car could go so fast.” She shot across the culvert at Toms Branch. Her foot was flat on the floor, but the Pontiac stayed right behind her. The road felt loose. She was going too fast.

“Oh, God,” she realized, “there won’t be anybody at the church.” Ammie, as in Sammy, headed a group of African Americans and whites rebuilding a tiny black church: St. John Baptist, near Columbia, S.C., out in a patch of countryside called Dixiana. St. John had been wrecked once and destroyed twice. Some people could not abide that it was being resurrected yet again, this time by her group of blacks and whites. Ammie is white. Blacks with whites: That was what the men in the Pontiac hated.

Ammie was early. She had told others on the committee to meet her there. St. John was only 100 yards farther, at a right turn in the road. If she drove straight into the churchyard, she would be trapped with the five men, alone in a secluded glen. But if she took the turn and stayed ahead of the Pontiac, she might make it one mile more to Interstate 26 and safety. No matter how fast she was driving, or how risky the road, she had to turn right. Perhaps it was instinct, or a miracle: She drove straight ahead instead, headlong into the glen.

The Pontiac tore in behind her. Parked beside the church and out of sight were a pickup and a sedan. They belonged to a deacon and a member of her committee. They had gotten there first after all. She was not alone. The Pontiac wheeled, skidded out of the churchyard and headed for the interstate. Ammie Murray had no idea who the men were, but she knew that if they ever caught her, they would kill her.

The British Were Coming

The South had to rise again, but that was only once. Would that God might have been so kind to St. John Baptist Church.

St. John was devastated the first time in 1781.

The British did it.

The church had its beginnings in a congregation founded by the Rev. Christianus Theus, a Calvinist from Switzerland who had come to the Carolinas in 1735.

Four years later, he began ministering to more than 800 Swiss and German colonists who had settled near the fork of the Broad and Congaree rivers, in a part of South Carolina known as Saxe-Gotha. In 1741, he started building churches. St. John went up no later than 1765, at a clearing in the pines. Theus named it St. John Helvetic Reformed Church.

Christian Theus was proud to be a colonial patriot. His sons bore arms in the Revolutionary War, and he furnished rations to colonial troops.

In 1781, soldiers in service of His Majesty George III got even. They burned St. John Church to the ground.

Some in the congregation owned African slaves, who had been worshiping faithfully in the St. John gallery. But now, the white members of the church, who had horses and buggies, decided not to rebuild. Instead, they rode away every Sunday to other churches throughout Saxe-Gotha, and the blacks were stuck.

Forbidden to read or write or speak their native languages, or even to meet without a white overseer, they could have no church of their own, and they had nowhere to go. So, in a quiet spot especially heavy with pines and cypress and oaks, a few hundred yards from the ashes of their old church and away from the prying eyes of their masters, they climbed the trees and tied branches together to create a cover.

There, under a brush arbor, they sang and prayed and gave praise to the Lord. They worshiped in that way for decades, until the Civil War. As the bloodshed approached, the tiny slave congregation stuck together and sang signals to runaways: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” maybe, if it was safe to head north, or “Go Down, Moses,” perhaps, if it was not.

By now Saxe-Gotha had become Dixiana, a scattering of farms southwest of Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. With the war and the burning of Columbia in prospect, a slave owner suffering conscience let the St. John congregation build a small structure for worship: a praise house, perhaps, but not an outright church.

A blue granite stone, placed much later at the corner of a successor building, shows 1857 as the date of such an early construction. Some local historians, however, think the date is off. They say it should be 1867, after the Civil War, when a praise house for blacks would have been legal.

Regardless, the war soon freed the members of St. John, and they finally were able to build a proper house of worship. They cut pine boards and chose a spot in a glen not far from the trees that had offered their branches for the brush arbor. It was next to an ancient Cherokee trading trail that had been widened into a dirt throughway called Old State Road, which ran past the swamp along the flowing water of the Congaree and over a stream named for a man called Tom.

In the clear, shallow eddies of Toms Branch, the St. John congregation dipped in baptism its new and eager Christians.

Then Came the Deluge

Many years passed.

St. John was devastated the second time in the 1920s.

This time a tornado did it.

Some say it was a flood, but most people agree that it was both: a storm with colossal wind and a deluge worthy of Noah. The storm hit on April 30, 1924. Like a hand from the sky, it engulfed the church, then picked it up and threw part of it into the Congaree and the rest across the river and into the next county. Nobody was inside, but several people nearby were killed.

When members of the congregation dared to venture out of their shelters, all they could find of their church was a single pine board. It lay in the glen like a promise from God. But they had no money. So the church members fashioned another brush arbor. This time they installed benches: pews without backs. “The people were spirit-filled,” writes a longhand historian, “and the preaching was fiery and evangelical.”

Then, with their first new assets, “five dollars and other goods and valuable considerations,” the congregation bought the glen, “containing one acre, more or less,” according to a deed dated Nov. 24, 1924. The church members began to rebuild.

Under the guidance of a pastor whose name is known only as the Rev. S. Glass, they felled some of the biggest pine trees, ones at least 2 feet in diameter. They sawed them into pieces 3 feet long. They put one piece under each corner of their building, and others beneath each side, and still more under the middle. These pine blocks held the entire structure 3 feet off the ground. The church was just a shoe box, but it was precious, and no deluge that any of them could imagine would swamp it again.

The building was wooden. It had pine board walls. It had a pine board ceiling. It had a pine board roof with a straight gable. To cover the roof, the congregation used barnyard tin. They handcrafted two rows of pine board pews. Apart from the roof, the only thing that they did not mint of pine was the chimney. It was brick, and it drew smoke from a pot-bellied stove.

Somewhere in all of this lumber, they nailed into place the single pine board that God had spared from the storm.

Evil Wrought by Hatred

Six decades went by.

St. John was devastated the third time in 1985.

This time hate did it.

The congregation had grown some. By now the grandchildren of slaves were burying their kin in the churchyard.

Years ago, sap had dried in the walls and floor and ceiling of St. John Church. A new pastor, the Rev. Lionel Ashford, could see that it had turned to tinder and was no longer safe. In 1957, with pity for a building that had served its people well, he took down the wooden structure. A bit farther back in the glen, he built a new church out of masonry blocks.

It too was plain, but it had a fancier entrance. Two steps led up to a small open vestibule, which enclosed two maple front doors. With wood from the old church, including the pine board that God had left behind, Ashford built the roof and a 3-foot belfry, which he installed on top of the vestibule. This church also had a plank floor. The chimney, though, was brick, and nearly everything else was made of cinder blocks.

He exchanged the pine pews from the old church for new ones: still handmade but maple this time. He stored two of the old pews as keepsakes. To the left of the maple pews stood a new iron stove, and two of the 10 windows were stained glass.

Willie Simmons, now 60, was a young man at the time. Part of his family reached back to slavery and to the early brush arbors. His grandfather took him to St. John when he was 8, and he formally joined the church in his 20s. He became a crane operator at a steel plant outside Columbia, and he hoisted hundreds of cars a day into a crusher that reduced them to scrap metal. In his spare time, Willie constructed a cinder-block Sunday school building next to the church on one side and a baptismal pool on the other. He whitewashed both of them.

Rosa Bell Eleazer, now 65, was still young then too. Born not far from the church, she had been a shy little girl with deep brown eyes who grew up planting okra in the swamp and picking peas and butter beans and sweet potatoes. As a young woman, she picked cotton: 180 pounds every day for a penny a pound, row after row, stooping and picking and dragging her sack. On Sundays, when she heard the bell ring at St. John, it made her feel secure. When she reached her early 40s, Rosa Bell decided to join the church. She was baptized in Toms Branch.

After Willie Simmons built the baptismal pool in the 1970s, members of the congregation hauled water from Toms Branch to fill it. But there was a well next to the church, and finally the church members saved enough money to buy a hand pump, then an electric pump. When the baptismal pool was full, the water was clean and clear and cool. People came from miles around and even from other churches to be baptized. Rosa Bell loved her church, and she loved the Lord so dearly that she was baptized again.

Despite its popularity, St. John was just a quiet country Baptist church that welcomed everyone. Dixiana, however, was changing. It was still a rural area in Lexington County, but it was 20 minutes from Columbia, and the capital was growing. By 1960, the whole South had begun to change. At Orangeburg, only 33 miles away, black students marched to an early sit-in of the civil rights movement. Police hosed them down, choked them with tear gas and arrested 388 of them. Lexington County itself was turning into one of Columbia’s mostly white exurbs. Its population would more than double in 20 years, with blacks increasing by only a tiny fraction, scattered within its boundaries.

All of these changes crept up on St. John like a cat on velvet. The growth in Lexington County brought prosperity and development. In 1962, Carolina Eastman, a chemical firm, purchased 2,300 acres near the church. To please the company, South Carolina dead-ended Old State Road just to the south of the churchyard. The authorities turned all traffic onto Old Pine Plain Road just to the north of it. That left St. John Baptist Church isolated.

Because she lived close by, Rosa Bell was among the first to sense the difference. Every now and then, deep in the night, when there was no good reason, the church bell would ring. She saw the lights flash on long after the church members had gone home. Rosa Bell’s eyes grew large with fright. Somebody was going into the church, but not to pray.

Changing the road and secluding St. John in a dead-end pocket had offered people a way to park almost without notice in the churchyard. Some of them were climbing the front steps, entering the vestibule, pulling the bell rope and going inside.

For the first time, the members of St. John padlocked its doors. But vandals broke the lock. They built fires in the stove and picnicked in the pews with food, sodas and beer. They tore pages out of Bibles and hymnals. They scrawled pictures on the walls: a school bus, a stick man under an umbrella and the letters KKK.

In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., and killed four black girls. But nobody at St. John thought the Klan was responsible for its troubles. Youngsters were to blame, the congregation figured; the Klan would have been far more professional. The church installed tough, double locks. But vandals broke down the doors. They upended pews, knocked over a washbasin and tried to set the end of the bell rope on fire. They dragged a dead tree down the aisle and took the pastor’s chair.

They rode motorcycles through the cemetery. They stole the bell. They threw stones through every window. Sheriff’s deputies wrote reports but caught no one. Willie Simmons had become a deacon by now, and he tried to keep the church repaired. He bought used window panes, roofing tin, sheets of plywood, rolls of wire and a new bell. Friends helped him install it. One Sunday, when it was against the law, a deputy helped him buy two six-packs of Red Bull malt liquor to thank them.

The people of St. John did not lose heart. An elderly deacon, Roscoe Sulton, saved his money to buy a new piano. He gave it to the church. The piano was a spinet. It was beautifully varnished, and it sounded like an angel’s harp. The ladies of the church held a bake sale and went to Tapp’s, the finest department store in Columbia, to buy a deep red communion cloth of the best material they could find. Maybe their church was becoming a patchwork of plywood, and maybe the wire on the windows made it look like a prison, but they would do what they could to offer respect to the Lord.

Fitfully, through a police riot that killed three students and injured 28 at Orangeburg in 1968 and the beginnings of school desegregation in Lexington County in the 1970s, the vandalism at St. John went on. Finally, in the early 1980s, shooting started. Every now and then a bullet whined over the yard and spattered into the top of a big oak tree next to the church. Some of the congregation thought the bullets were straying from hunters down at the Congaree. “Target practice,” one member said. “A ricochet.”

But one Sunday, during services, a bullet smacked into a church wall. Not long afterward, the congregation found bullet holes in the front doors. Then they found bullet holes in the pews. And then one shot grazed a corner of the new piano and buried itself in a front wall. It looked to Willie like a .22-caliber long-rifle.

Although several members left the church, others, like Rosa Bell Eleazer, Willie Simmons and Roscoe Sulton, stayed on. Willie, however, started carrying a pistol and a rifle in his pickup.

Roscoe Sulton, bent with grief, walked quietly around the churchyard and cried.

At Christmastime in 1984, Deacon Sulton died. He was 84 and not well. Some people said he had a broken heart.

The Disturbing Sound of Fear

A week later, on the morning after New Year’s Day, Ammie Murray arrived at her office in the Columbia suburb of Cayce. The office was shared by the laborers and the ironworkers unions. Ammie was business manager for the laborers and office manager for the ironworkers.

Barbara Simmons, 40, her assistant, was already at work; Ammie smelled freshly brewed coffee. But Barbara, who was Willie Simmons’ wife, was nowhere in sight. Ammie had hired her 10 years before and knew her well. When Barbara’s youngest son, Michael, was born and the hospital nursery limited visitors to family, Ammie proudly lied her way in by telling the nurses that this little black baby was her grandson.

Barbara was a large, cheerful woman with a shy smile and huge earrings. She had told Ammie about St. John, but nothing about the vandalism or the terror. She and other church members kept what Barbara called a silent tongue. A mixture of humility and righteous pride would not let any of them complain. Besides, they were scared.

“Barbara, are you here?” Ammie called.

Barbara murmured. She did not sound right. Ammie put down her briefcase and walked up a short hallway. Barbara was sitting at a conference table. She had a file of union papers in front of her, but she was not working on them. She did not look up.

“Barbara, what’s wrong?”

Her brown eyes filled with tears.

“Is Mikey all right?”

Barbara nodded, then lowered her head.

“Barbara, what’s wrong? Something bad is really wrong. What’s wrong?”

Barbara Simmons could not bring herself to describe it. She said something about someone hurting St. John real bad this time. She also said something about a grave.

“How do I get to St. John?” Ammie asked.

Barbara told her. Ammie thought ahead: She could not leave until 5 p.m., but Barbara got off work at noon. “Could you meet me down there after work and let me see? Would you do that?”

Barbara agreed.

When Ammie pulled up at the church in her little gray Topaz, she found Barbara, her teenage daughter, Robin, and little Mikey waiting. They were in Barbara’s car, disinclined to get out or to venture any closer.

A light on a nearby power pole had been shot out, and every window in the church was broken. Vandals had slashed KKK across the double front doors in letters 6 inches tall. On an outside wall, they had painted a swastika.

They had shot into trees on both sides of the church and splintered the limbs of the stately old oak standing next to it. They had shot into the stucco ceiling of the vestibule and littered the ground with empty bullet casings. They had broken into the pump house and used a masonry block to smash the electric pump. They had strewn beer cans and liquor bottles across the front yard.

They had broken the front door locks. Ammie braced herself and stepped inside. The vandals had chopped apart a water cooler. They had overturned several pews and shot at several of them--maybe with a rifle, but if they had used a pistol, it must have been at least a .38; some bullets lodged in the wood, but others pierced the pews and splintered the maple where they had come out. Brass casings rolled underfoot. Ammie had never seen so many: Some were shiny and new, others dark and old. These people, she thought, must have shot every bullet they owned.

Lying among the shell casings were empty Old Milwaukee beer cans and whiskey bottles--not Jack Daniel’s, but a cheap brand Ammie did not recognize. More bottles and cans were scattered in and under the pews. A threadbare red carpet was stained with spilled beer. The vandals had ripped apart the congregation’s big Bible and most of its hymnals, page by page. They had jerked light fixtures from the ceiling, broken bulbs and left bare wires dangling overhead. They had stolen a sound system, on which the church still owed a payment or two.

They had smashed the iron stove. With an ax, they had chopped up three mahogany-and-leather pastor chairs near the pulpit. They had hacked apart the piano that Deacon Sulton had sacrificed to buy. It was so splintered that Ammie could hardly tell it was an upright. The vandals had opened it, axed through the piano wires inside and crushed each of the tiny hammers.

Ammie saw bullet holes in the pulpit. She saw condoms on the floor in front of it, used. Nearby she saw a crucifix. It was made of a deep, dark wood, and the figure of Christ was painted in gold. Ammie gasped. Someone had wrenched the crucifix from the front of the pulpit, cut off Christ’s arms, left both of them hanging from the nails in his hands, then flung the crucifix onto the carpet.

She rushed outside. A few feet away, the door to the Sunday school building had been kicked off a hinge. All of its windows were broken. Here was where the women of the church stored their sacred new communion cloth. Someone had taken it out of safekeeping, spread it on the floor and defecated on it.

All at once, Ammie Murray grew nauseated. She felt the burning sting of tears. She could not let Barbara or the children see; they were upset enough.

“Barbara,” she began, “can you and Robin and Mikey--”

She could not speak.

She tried again. “Can y’all wait for me in the front and let me just walk back in here in the cemetery a little bit?”

The cemetery, as it turned out, was even more upsetting. The tombstones of the slaves, their children and their grandchildren had been toppled. Some were shattered. Others were gone.

Ammie saw tire tracks. They ended at Deacon Sulton’s grave. She gasped again. Someone had parked a heavy truck on top of it, spun a wheel down into the freshly dug topsoil and exposed a corner of the concrete vault containing the deacon’s casket. She could see the rough, gray edges of the vault jutting up through the dark brown dirt.

Ammie Murray does not cry easily. Back and forth, then back and forth again, she walked through the graveyard, among still more beer cans and the remains of a floral arrangement torn blossom from blossom. But now she began to sob.

She could not help herself: She walked to the edge of the cemetery and vomited.

After a minute, she turned. Tears were spilling down her cheeks. The tears were hot. They were tears of anger.

She found Barbara and her children in front of the church, inside their car.

“Barbara, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, “but I’m damn well going to do something! Try not to be any more upset. We’ll talk either tonight or tomorrow. Just let me have some time to think about this.”

Ammie Murray stepped into her little gray car. She skidded its wheels and side-slid out of the churchyard.

A Quiet Woman Called to the Task

Ammie is soft-spoken, dainty, elegant. She is not the type of person who would ever kick a wastebasket or pound her fist. But now she ran through her front door and slammed it hard. She reached for the telephone.

She dialed the Rev. Robert F. Sims, her pastor, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, one of the oldest and largest in the state. He listened while she raged. People were taking chances with their lives, going to St. John! How could something like this happen only minutes from the state Capitol?

“So,” Sims replied, knowing her well, “what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know, damn it!”

“OK, what’s first?”

“Priorities. We’ve got to keep the rain out. They’re going to worship there, and there’s no windows left in the place. And the doors--no doors!”

“Well, do you know some people who might want to help?”

Ammie Murray did not need a Montgomery or a Selma to sensitize her against racism. Her grandfather’s family had owned slaves, and he grew up with their children. A black youngster named Buddy became one of his closest friends--for life.

Buddy had a standing invitation for breakfast. Her grandfather cooked eggs and meat, sometimes a squirrel or a rabbit. His children and his grandchildren, including Ammie, knew better than to show the slightest disrespect. They knew better than to get out of bed until after Buddy and her grandfather had eaten their breakfasts and talked.

After a friend persuaded Ammie to go to work for the unions, the Lexington County community got to know her well and called on her often. She had just finished two years on the county grand jury. In addition, she had helped to create an arbitration program for juvenile offenders, she was an official in the state Democratic Party and she served on several civic groups. Yes, she knew some people who might want to help.

No, this was not something she could walk away from. Yes, it was something she had to do. Her first thought was to raise money for immediate repairs.

She stayed on the telephone for hours. She won promises of funds and help from friends in the Democratic Party and from officials and plain folks of all kinds: the prosecutor; the head of the state criminal justice academy; his wife, who had been a fellow grand juror; a well-known lawyer; a bank officer; the director of a program for crime victims.

She called Barbara Simmons. “Do you think,” she asked gently, “the congregation would let us help?”

Barbara said yes.

“When is your next service?” She would go and explain what she had in mind.

She telephoned James R. Metts, the Lexington County sheriff. He was out of town, so she spoke to an assistant. The deputies who had investigated the desecration at St. John were fine officers, she said, but they were not the sheriff’s best detectives. After two years on the grand jury, she knew who the best were: James E. Harris, a black officer they called “Stick,” because he had been a skinny kid who now weighed 215 pounds, and Derrell S. Yarborough, a white officer they called “the Bulldog,” because he was one.

“I don’t give a damn!” she said. “I want Stick Harris, or I want Derrell Yarborough!” She kept at it until the sheriff’s assistant relented.

“Who the hell is Ammie Murray?” Yarborough asked.

“You’re going to find out,” the assistant replied.

She made one more call. It was to Jerry Bellune, 48, editor of the Dispatch-News, a weekly newspaper in Lexington, the county seat, and the only paper in the state to even mention the desecration. The Dispatch-News had printed a story on Page 1, but it was only four paragraphs long. It contained no more information than what was available in the sheriff’s office incident report.

Bellune answered the phone.

“Jerry Bellune,” Ammie said, “I’m so mad that I could just spit fire!”

“What’s the problem?”

“You’re the only one that ran a story about them vandalizing that church,” she replied. “I have been down there, and I have seen it, and I want you to come on down there with me.”

“I’m ready whenever you are.”

“How about next Sunday?”

The congregation at St. John had dwindled to a handful, and its members were frightened. When Jerry Bellune saw the ruin, it shook him too. He had been a newspaperman for 30 years. He had written about race riots, interviewed presidents, covered the Pentagon and gone to the Middle East. He had seen a lot, but this was an outrage.

He wrote another, much longer story about everything that had happened at St. John, and he published pictures. Then he wrote an editorial. What is going on in Lexington County? he asked. This is mortifying, even sacrilegious. It is high time, he demanded, that people around here grow up and start treating each other like human beings!

Ammie Murray built her group of St. John supporters into the Save St. John Baptist Church Committee. It was 60 members strong. The members ranged from the sheriff, the chairman of the county council and several political officials to a wide array of businesspeople, a number of ministers and a rabbi. They decided to refurbish the church from its foundation to its shingles.

The members of St. John had not asked for help; they never would. But the committee gave Rosa Bell Eleazer new courage. She had been deeply saddened by the desecration. Now, though, in spite of her advancing age, she brought a broom and helped to sweep up the broken glass. She was one of 70 people from the congregation and the community who came to the church on the Saturday after the committee put out its first call for volunteer workers. Soon the number grew to 125. Cars and trucks parked for hundreds of yards along Old State Road.

Ammie headed the committee and served as quartermaster. On a typical weekend, her list of things to come up with included “one crane, one scissors lift, one 10-foot ladder, one 12-foot ladder, a power source and port-a-johns.” She also handled cash donations. One of her favorites came from a retired carpenter. He mailed in a check for $10. Then he telephoned.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I made a little donation to the church the other day. I don’t have much, just got my Social Security.”

“Oh, you have no idea--that $10, we desperately needed that,” Ammie replied. “It will help a great deal, and it means so much that you cared.”

“Well,” the man went on, “can I just be honest with you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I don’t know if the KKK did that awful thing to that church, but I can’t stand something like that making good people afraid, and I want to help.”

“Well, your donation was wonderful.”

“I’m too old,” he said, with hardly a pause, “and I’ve got arthritis real bad, and I can’t do much.”

“We could use your advice.”

“Well, I have been thinking about this. You know, I had me three Poland China hogs, and it’s the best kind of hogs, and they didn’t eat no slop. Now I done sold two of my hogs, but I’ve got one more named Red.”

“Red?”

“I got to thinking that if the members of St. John would like to have Red, I’ll give him to ‘em, and they can eat him or sell him, but he would be theirs to have.”

Ammie Murray sweet-talked the local animal control department into dispatching a truck for Red. He weighed 625 pounds. It took four men to load him.

A butcher bought Red, and the retired carpenter’s contribution soared to $350.

Workers scrubbed and drilled and hammered and sawed. They sanded, and they painted. They insulated. They roofed. They Sheetrocked and tiled and plumbed. They installed new lights and sprayed for termites. They tore out 2-by-6s and 2-by-8s and 2-by-10s that spanned the floors, and they nailed down 3/4-inch tongue-and-groove pressed boards. They covered them with a new silver-gray carpet, bought by the county councilman with his chairman’s pay. They built a new pump house. They put in new windows, bulletproof this time. They cut grass, trimmed trees and hauled away trash. Ammie painted the baptismal pool white as lilies.

The community reacted to the desecration at St. John Baptist Church with such shock, embarrassment and fury that someone proposed protecting the church with a moat. Jerry Bellune wrote half-seriously about stocking the moat with alligators. Restoring the church, Bellune noticed, was pulling the county together racially and politically like nothing he had ever seen. Take the committee: Both blacks and whites were working together hard and well. Take Ammie and Jerry Bellune: She was liberal, he was conservative, and nobody dared to say a bad word about either one of them in the other’s presence.

Bulldog Yarborough arrested four people. All were white. It was no comfort that they were from Lexington County. One was underage; she was sent to juvenile court. The others were young men, each of them only 18. They had harmed St. John because it seemed like fun and because the church was as helpless as a puppy. Sociologists call such offenses thrill-hate crimes; a thrill is what the offenders seek, and they find it at the expense of the vulnerable. The young men apologized, and the congregation forgave them. But when they came to the church on a Saturday to help with the rebuilding, one of them could not mask his racism. Ammie Murray saw that he spent far more time talking than working. She asked other workers what he was saying.

“ ‘This is a nigger church,’ ” they said he told them. “ ‘What are you down here helping these niggers for?’ ”

Ammie shoved the young man out into the middle of the church driveway. As a union manager, she had dealt with a drunk or two. She grabbed him by the shirt. “Now you listen to me, you no good son of a bitch,” she said. “You turn your ass around, and you start walking, and don’t you ever set foot down here again!”

Nevertheless, when the young men pleaded guilty, the congregation asked Judge Anthony Harris to be lenient.

“There’s more joy,” said Deacon Wallace Smith, “from one sinner repenting . . . “

The maximum sentence, Judge Harris said, was five years in prison. “If it were not for the good hearts of these people whose church you tore up,” he declared, “I’d send you to the penitentiary right now.”

Instead, he gave them probation and ordered them to make restitution totaling $1,000.

Vicious Threats Turn Deadly

At Easter, the work on St. John Church was still not done, so Pastor John Shephard preached a sunrise service outside, under the green pines and the budding oaks in the glen.

There, before him, stood a cross, as tall as a man, constructed especially for the service. Afterward, church members moved the cross into the cemetery and erected it to bless the dead. But that spring of 1985, as they planned for their first baptism in months, the destruction began anew.

One day, a worker noticed a bullet scratch on a replacement pane of glass. “Well, it bounced off,” Ammie said to herself. “At least the bulletproofing works.” Not long afterward, someone uprooted the Easter cross from the cemetery and slammed its oaken beam into another window. This time the pane cracked.

Then someone broke the lock on the new front doors. Workmen replaced it. Someone broke the new lock. Then someone shot out the power-pole light. Workmen put up another one. Someone shot out the new light. Then someone stole an air conditioner, and then someone took a soda can filled with gasoline up onto the roof and scorched the belfry and burned the bell rope.

Twice, maybe three times, when Lorenza “Matt” Mathews, 66, assistant director of building services at the criminal justice academy, was working at the church, four men rode by in a truck. Matt is black. The men were white. They shouted slurs at him.

The slurs sounded very much like some telephone calls that Ammie was starting to receive. “Is this that nigger-lovin’ bitch?”

“Is this that nigger-lovin’ bitch down there at that nigger church that loves to associate with niggers ‘stead of white people? God damn you. You’d better get away from that damn church. Nigger-lovin’ bitches don’t last long in this part of the country.”

Ammie and her husband were separated. He lived at a house they had near a lake. She lived by herself on three acres off a dead-end gravel lane. The telephone callers were always men, and they knew that she was alone. “Ain’t that husband of yours up there at the lake?”

Sometimes the calls would come when her grandchildren were with her. The men would hear Scotty talking and Shannon, the baby, cooing in a playpen.

“You love that grandbaby, don’t you, that little grandboy? You sure would miss them two grand-young’ns.”

She stopped letting the grandchildren come to visit. The reason was easy to disguise. Because of her separation, her daughter and son-in-law often asked her to spend weekends with them. Without saying exactly why, she started visiting Scotty and Shannon at their own home.

Spring turned to summer. Longer days meant even more rebuilding at the church, and the phone calls stepped up. But Ammie hated fright, so she refused to be scared. Now the calls came a dozen at a time. She would hang up, and the men would phone right back. It might be the same man, or another one. It was as if they had gotten together for a few beers, passed around her number and decided to have some fun.

“Nigger-lovin’ bitch,” each man said, slowly. They said it again and again. “Nigger-lovin’ bitch. You just love them niggers.”

“You know what happens to nigger lovers?”

She began to hear their voices in her sleep. Then the voices grew into the grotesque figures of men, who appeared in nightmares. She awoke shaking. She climbed out of bed and paced around in her house, cussing at the men and what they were saying.

Finally, it drove her to her knees. But still she refused to be frightened. On the floor by her bed, she put both arms on the blankets and her head on her arms. She knelt for so long that her knees hurt. “God,” she said, quietly, “help me. What can I do? Show me what to do.”

Winter came, but the calls did not stop. Now, with the arrival of 1986 and the restoration of St. John in sight, the men began talking about Ammie’s dogs. “You love them there dogs, don’t you?” they asked. “Ain’t that white one named Maxie? And that brown one, ain’t that brown one named Honey Bear? They sure do bark a lot. You like them there dogs?”

“That’s a dead-end street you live on, lady. You’d surely miss them there dogs.”

Max and Honey Bear had been born of a stray terrier. Both were in the same litter, but they had different sires. Max looked like a poodle down the street. He had fuzzy, white hair. Honey Bear resembled a collie, also from down the street. Her back and shoulders were brown, but her legs, feet and chest were white. The dogs were devoted to each other and to Ammie. Whenever she pulled up, they ran to meet her at the end of her dirt driveway. Honey Bear always got to the mailbox first and barked. It was a high bark. Ammie recognized it instantly.

One day it rained. The dogs were not at the mailbox. When Ammie turned into the driveway, she saw them. Honey Bear was sprawled in the dirt, and Max was lying across her. Ammie stopped. She hurried out of the car and looked. Honey Bear’s head had been cleaved. At her left eye, cheek and forehead, Ammie saw crushed bone. It looked as if someone had struck her with the back of a single-bladed ax. The little collie’s face was matted with blood.

Ammie fell to the ground. Maxie was not hurt, but he whimpered and cried. Ammie tried to pull him off his sister. The rain fell on all three of them. She held Max. She tried to hold herself.

The rain would not stop. Ammie and Max huddled in the driveway. They cried together.

Still in a pink blouse, black skirt and high-heeled, patent-leather shoes she had worn that day to a trade meeting, she found a plastic bag and a cardboard box. She walked over to the tool shed and got a shovel.

Maxie sat at Honey Bear’s grave in the rain. He wailed. Ammie took him into the house. She dried him, wrapped him in a towel, put on a warm robe and held him.

That night, neither of them slept. Max lay with his head on her left arm. He whined quietly.

Ammie listened to the rain. In her mind, she saw Honey Bear’s head. She kept telling herself that it had been a car.

The truth, however, began to creep up on her. She had seen animals that were hit by cars. All were damaged far worse than Honey Bear. Besides, people drove slowly along her dead-end road.

Max, as well, in his heartbreaking way, tried to deny what had happened. He pretended to be Honey Bear. Now when Ammie came home, he ran to Honey Bear’s old spot at the mailbox. With remarkable success, he began barking high, in the same way she had.

Then, two weeks to the day after Honey Bear died, Ammie came home and Max was not at his self-appointed post.

She turned down the driveway. Fearfully, she looked.

Max lay alone in the dirt.

Ammie braked to a stop and stepped out.

Instantly, she knew that he was dead. She could not see his head, but she knew it had been hit with the back of an ax. She knew the ax had smashed his left eye, cheek and forehead.

She knew she had to flee.

Slowly, she walked to the bloody white bundle on the ground. On her knees, she picked it up. The blood was matted. Maxie was cold and stiff.

Ammie began to cry. In the dirt, holding her dog in her arms, she wept and wept.

Once more, she did not bother to change. In a bright green pantsuit and dress shoes, she dug another hole in the woods behind her house, and she buried Maxie next to Honey Bear.

That night the phone rang.

“I told you that you was going to miss them there dogs. I sure am sorry. I sure am sorry about them there dogs. I know you’re gonna miss them there dogs.”

Finally, the truth overwhelmed her. It must have taken two men, she thought: one to hold each of the dogs and the other to swing the ax.

One blow each time.

Ammie lay on her bed. She could not sleep. She got up. She cried a lot. “How am I going to get out of here?” she asked herself. How could she ever afford to move? Where to?

She debated for a day.

Stick Harris and Bulldog Yarborough told her to leave her dead-end road as soon as possible and find a safer place to live, maybe in town. Neither was given to alarm; Stick had been a cop too long for that, and Bulldog had a flinty, natural courage, casehardened on the job. Bulldog said: “Get the hell out.”

Ammie’s brother-in-law, who called her by the initials of her first two names, Ammie Jean, said: “A.J., what in the hell are you thinking? You’re going to get your crazy self killed.”

In the midst of her soul-searching, she went to a baby shower for another grandson. The hostess was a niece who had married a real estate agent. He told her about a two-bedroom house in Cayce, not far from her office. The house was near a police station.

She bought it and moved. She relocated her office into the house, as well, and she had several months of peace.

Then one night, while she was at a union meeting, or during the early morning while she slept with the radio on to ward off nightmares, she had a visitor.

She awoke to find the glass shattered in her office door. A Cayce police officer helped her remove some of the bigger shards. One cut her hand. The cut took 26 stitches. Later, on the floor in a far corner of the room, she found what had done the damage. It had been crushed into a lump, but it looked like a bullet.

Ammie asked the policeman to come back. “My God,” he said, “that’s a .357 Magnum.”

Iniquities Bring an Integration

It was during that summer of 1985, at the peak of the telephone calls but before Ammie’s callers killed her dogs, that the five men in the maroon Pontiac rammed her Mercury Topaz on Old State Road. She knew the men were dangerous. But when they fled, she could see they were cowards too, and for a week, she tried to put the encounter out of her mind.

Then, however, came a second scare. This time the victim was Barbara Simmons. She was crossing railroad tracks not far from the church when she noticed a car behind her driven by a white man. He was alone. As he neared, she accelerated. He drove right up to her bumper. Barbara sped up again. On her left was a field of corn. She gave her Ford more gas, but the man stayed right behind her.

She turned left and skidded across the road and up an embankment and drove straight into the cornfield. She was so frightened that she flattened the accelerator and held it down for 300 yards--almost to the middle furrow. The man in the white car was caught unaware. He plunged straight ahead on down the road. Barbara lay flat on her front seat and hid until she was sure that he had disappeared.

This time members of the Save St. John Committee interrupted a news conference about progress in their work at the church to tell reporters what had just happened. Like all of Ammie’s tormentors, this man was never caught. But telling the community about such outrages helped to build even greater support. Months later, when the counting was done, the committee had raised $11,000 in cash and $50,000 in building materials and furnishings for St. John Baptist Church. Two thousand people had worked on the church at one time or another.

Each weekend, Ammie Murray marveled at what she saw. State legislators and the county councilman and the chief of the criminal justice academy and the sheriff himself, representing various religions and political persuasions, worked in their shirt sleeves, elbow to elbow with union laborers who had driven 100 miles to be there, and Boy Scouts who were doing good deeds, and young offenders who were working off court time, and everyday kids who had heard that the church needed carpenters or electricians and brought their dads because that was what they did for a living.

She saw things that would have been unheard of little more than two decades earlier in the South. She watched a black man work hard at common labor, in spite of his arthritis. She was surprised to learn that this man doing dirty, back-breaking work was a school principal. She watched a white man work next to him, weekend after weekend, in a hat flaunting the Confederate flag. Then she noticed that the white man was growing fonder and fonder of the black man and of the entire black congregation. One day the Confederate flag was gone.

Readers asked Jerry Bellune why he kept writing stories about the Save St. John Committee. “Racism isn’t dead,” he replied, in an editorial. “But in modern South Carolina, whites and blacks can come together to help each other. That’s an important development, we think. It’s a story worth telling. That’s why”

By the end of January 1986, the church was almost finished. That Feb. 11, Ammie and the committee turned over to the congregation a check for $1,400 in donations that were left over. The workers put up a small fence in front of St. John, installed a small wooden bench next to the front door and planted some roses.

The crowning touch came from Matt Mathews, the building services boss from the criminal justice academy, who was a retired Army command sergeant major. He had served two tours in Vietnam, and he had brought back some teakwood, which he treasured. He fashioned it into a cross and hung it above the pulpit.

The committee did not disband. It would finish work on the Sunday school building and keep up with the vandalism. Its members also pledged that, God forbid, if help were needed again, as Ammie said, “we will be available.”

Judgment Day for 2 Vandals

Nine years went by.

God did not forbid.

St. John was devastated for the fourth time in 1995.

Hate did it this time too.

Ammie Murray had been attending services now and then, mostly to see how things were. But the little black church in the glen also offered a kind of peace that she could not find anywhere else. She liked to walk in the cemetery and then back through the pines and the maples and the water oaks. Afterward, she always felt easier about everything.

For Willie Simmons, as well, St. John afforded solace. He went there to pray when his son Jonathan was arrested for murder, convicted and finally sentenced to life in prison, and when Willie’s marriage to Barbara broke up amid a swirl of accusations during the trial about sex abuse and child beating, all of which he and others in the family denied.

Vandalism at St. John, however, which had resumed with the shot that ricocheted off the bullet-proof window, escalated over time, and a cruel inverse proportion took hold: As the church building and its people healed from the desecration, this new damage grew apace. It increased somewhat in 1986, and then it mounted faster in the 1990s until Willie Simmons and a few remaining volunteers from the committee had to work hard to keep up with repairs.

The congregation found “Satan” and “devil” scrawled in yellow on St. John’s newly painted walls. Vandals draped a pair of bloody panties over a tombstone and dislodged a granite marker inscribed to “Mother.” They dug into a grave. They killed three possums and lined them up under a church sign. They chopped apart several chickens and dumped feathers, necks, legs and assorted bones into the baptismal pool. They carved a swastika and the words “Satan loves 666” into the sand in the church driveway.

Myths grew that St. John and its cemetery were haunted and that it was a satanic church. These were scare stories, Matt Mathews said, like a lot of others that thrived out in the countryside, tales that were far more frightening after the 10th telling than during the first, about the old man, for instance, who was murdered down by the big tree and whose spirit still crossed the road every midnight, cursing and moaning, and how people could see him if they went down there and hid and maybe had a little drink to keep their courage up.

Sheriff Metts realized that St. John was acquiring notoriety. The church and its people were becoming targets not only for hard-core racists of the kind who threatened Ammie and Barbara but also for thrill-hate criminals like the ones who desecrated the church and for youngsters simply seeking a bit of excitement. St. John was turning into an attraction, a place to visit on a dare. Metts ordered a regular patrol check. Then he asked a deputy who lived in the area to keep a special eye on it. Finally he increased the patrols. In addition, some deputies began driving by the church on their own whenever they happened to be in the neighborhood.

But damage from vandalism rose once more into the thousands of dollars. Arrests increased as well. They numbered more than 200 between 1986 and 1994. Most of the culprits were young. Half were men, and half were women, by the deputies’ estimates, and between 5% and 10% were black. Charges ranged from misdemeanor trespassing to grave tampering and burglary, which landed some of the vandals in prison for up to 10 years. The church members forgave all of them, but judges would no longer go easy on anyone.

Fall, especially Halloween, was worst. Every year, Stick Harris, who had been promoted to captain, organized a Halloween stakeout at the church. It was volunteer duty; none of the officers got any pay. But Stick always had more volunteers than he needed, white and black deputies alike. Some asked a year ahead of time if they could be included. Stick figured that the vandalism at St. John touched two of the three things that made cops the angriest: harm to kids, old folks or churches.

From the volunteers, Stick picked a dozen of the best and most experienced. A day or two before Halloween, they met at the sheriff’s office and arranged radio codes, chase cars, jail vans, rain gear, jackets bearing the sheriff’s logo and assigned hiding places, both inside and outside the church. Then, starting on Halloween Eve, the officers assembled and slipped into position.

Bulldog Yarborough took a gut disliking to grave robbers. So it turned out that, during one stakeout, he had a special pleasure: He came upon two of them at once. Both were white. They happened to be from Texas. They were hard at work.

The men were near an oak tree, spading dirt out of a newly mounded grave. The entire cemetery had the damp smell of freshly dug earth. Neither of them noticed when Bulldog walked up quietly behind them.

Slowly he drew his aging .357 Magnum. He had a choice of smaller and handier pistols, but he loved this one. He called it, with affection, his hog.

Bulldog reckoned out loud as to how the two men ought to keep right on digging so they could make the hole deeper. “That looks a little shallow,” he said, “for the both of you.”

The men gave a start. They saw the Dog and his hog, and they thought he meant it. They started digging faster.

Finally, Bulldog stopped them.

As they awaited trial, one declared: “If I ever get my time in and get out, I’m going back to Texas and never leaving.”

Now that the worst of her danger was over, Ammie Murray told her family some of what she had been through--not in a long, detailed conversation but a little bit at a time. Her children and grandchildren shook their heads. Her mother scolded her gently. “Ammie Jean,” she said, “you know you’ve got to be careful.”

The community recognized that what Ammie had done was extraordinary. The Save St. John Committee won an award from the governor. Not long afterward, a niece nominated Ammie for the Jefferson Award, a national honor for outstanding public service. Ammie won, and she was pleased, but the accolades made her blush.

She was busy as ever. She had been appointed and then elected to the Lexington County school board. She retired from her job with the unions and became the school board chairwoman. On Aug. 16, 1995, she left home at 7 a.m. for a breakfast meeting.

She returned at 10 a.m. and listened to her telephone messages. One was from her mother. “Ammie Jean! Ammie Jean! I just now heard that St. John is on fire!”

Ammie grabbed her purse and drove as fast as she could. As she neared the glen, she saw smoke. Her legs began to tremble, and she had trouble controlling the accelerator. She turned onto Old State Road. She saw pickups, cars and firetrucks. She pulled up behind a patrol car.

Sitting in the driver’s seat was Paul Willie Davis, a sheriff’s sergeant who had been at St. John a number of times to help rebuild it and to check on its safety. He was African American, and he was a linebacker of a man. Paul Willie got out, and so did Ammie. She shook so much that she could hardly stand. She held onto the side of her car. He walked over. Taller by at least 8 inches, he wrapped her in his arms, and she held onto him, and she sobbed and sobbed. Probably not since he was 4 years old had Paul Willie cried, but now when Ammie looked up, tears ran down his face.

The church had been burning since before sunup. She saw Willie Simmons and his sister, Patricia Lowman, who was the associate pastor, and Rosa Bell Eleazer. They had gathered as close to the fire as they could. Ammie saw flames and fire fighters and investigators from the sheriff’s office and the State Law Enforcement Division and a yellow tape that warned, “Crime scene. Do not cross.” Her nose and her throat were raw with the stench of burning. It hurt her to breathe, and she could taste wet ashes. She heard Rosa Bell and the others crying, and Deacon Simmons trying to tell them that the Lord would always provide. It was nearing noon, and the sun was high and hot, and she felt heat from the flames, but her arms and her legs were covered with chill bumps.

Inside she was angry and sad, as if somebody she loved had just been killed. It was only a building, but she thought she could hear it crying in the wind, a low sighing and wailing. She remembered all the work and all the people who had done it. She stared at the embers, and she saw hundreds of faces. She was bereft, and she hurt. Because she was not tall, she had a habit of scurrying, but now when she went to Willie and to Rosa Bell and the others, she walked slowly, one step at a time. Over the noise of the fire crews and the deputies and the men from the state, she tried to console them.

They stood, shaking their heads, holding each other. She felt empty. “At times,” she told them, “when the worst happens, later we can see that it was for the best, that something good came of it.” But she asked herself: Was that really true? Then she asked herself: Could she do what she had done all over again? Could she endure everything once more?

Willie Simmons thought about the pine board that God had spared from the storm, and how the Rev. Glass had nailed it into the wooden church, and how the Rev. Ashford had nailed it into the roof of the cinder-block church, and how it was burning in front of him.

He thought about the old pine pews that had been saved as heirlooms from the wooden church, and how one had been stored all these years in the Sunday school, and how the building and everything in it were gone.

Matt Mathews thought about the cross on the pulpit, the one he had fashioned out of the teakwood from Vietnam.

In the end, the only things left of St. John Baptist Church were the cinder-block vestibule, the cinder-block arch over the front door, the two cinder-block front steps, the cornerstone and the bell.

In all her sorrow, Rosa Bell’s lasting thought was: “That little church has had it rough. Oooh, had it rough.”

Another Step Toward Healing

That night, Ammie Murray could not sleep. She lay quietly, doubting herself. Could she do it?

Would she?

Shortly before daybreak, she decided. She had made a commitment: She would be there for them whenever they needed her. She meant it.

She telephoned every member of the Save St. John Committee and several others who she thought might like to join. Then she called a news conference: Fund-raising for a new St. John Baptist Church would start immediately. On the coming Saturday, she announced, volunteers would begin work by clearing away the ashes of the old church. Anyone who wanted to help was welcome.

The turnout was large, and donations began. Oak pews. An organ. One hundred engraved Bibles from a Greek Orthodox fireman in Harlem. Money from Protestants, from Catholics, from Jews, from Buddhists at the Sagaponack Zendo on Long Island, from the National Council of Churches, from a real estate developer, from the head of a black-owned bank and from plain folks who gave $1, $2, $5, $10.

Nine months after St. John burned, sheriff’s deputies arrested three teenage boys, all of them white. One, charged with burglary and arson, demanded a trial, expected this summer. The other two, charged as accessories, agreed to plead guilty.

The burning of St. John and other black churches prompted news stories in 1995 about a wave of racially motivated arsons in the South. The three teenagers denied being racist, but investigators said the three told them that they wanted some fun, so they went to St. John to have it.

Two months ago, Ammie Murray, now 65, and her committee got a visit from Al Hoelscher, a Texas contractor, who had heard about St. John and said he would build a new church at no cost for labor. They had nearly $90,000 in donations for materials.

It was not enough to finish the work, but it was enough to begin and to pray for the rest.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.

Editor’s Note: The Times has expanded on its traditional Saturday Column One with Saturday Journal, a weekly feature highlighting the art of storytelling.