Even in Baptist churches, ushers keep smelling salts on the ready for the new widow confronted at the wake by the other grieving widow and her stair-step kids. The bakeries have since closed down, but sometimes we still see the women, resplendent in white, trailing six humble paces behind their mutual husband. Whatever it was, it involved four wives for each husband.
Some people said it was a cult, others called it a cultural movement. In Atlanta, we remember one sect of the back-to-Africa movement that used to run bakeries in the West End. When most people think of bigamy, if they think of it at all, they imagine some primitive practice taking place on the pages of National Geographic. His other daughter, Chaurisse, the one who grew up in the house with him, she calls him Daddy, even now. The point is that James’s marriage was never hidden from us. I love my mother, but we tend to see things a little bit differently. I said that maybe it means there was a kind of trust between them. Mother said she knew that something wasn’t right between a man and a woman when the gift was a blade. In 1968, she was working at the gift-wrap counter at Davison’s downtown when my father asked her to wrap the carving knife he had bought his wife for their wedding anniversary. He was already married ten years when he first clamped eyes on my mother. My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.
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