Leon Hale The Houston Post
Subject: CHARLEY LAMB & EVANS CHAPEL -- Thursday -- 02-27-1964
Warmth Is Left in World; Found in House by the Road
You don’t very often find the door of a country church locked.I’ve gone into a lot of them, and walked around in the gloom and sat down in a pew and listened to the silence a while.
Not a one of the country people who have seen me do this has ever come around to ask what I was doing there, or even seemed to notice me,
I think the absence of a lock on the door of a church adds a lot to the place, though I’m not sure how to describe it
THE OTHER AFTERNOON I was driving around in the Evans Chapel community of Leon County, looking for the home of Rev. Jefferson Norris.
The Evans Chapel Methodist Church is a white frame building that stands by a curve in Farm Road 977.
There’s a cemetery out behind the church that looks almost like it’s been swept with a broom, and a sign on the gate says, “Directory in church by front door.”
The directory is a few sheets of paper tacked to the wall and it shows who is buried where in the cemetery.
WITHOUT KNOWING WHY I stood there and turned the pages and studied the names, and thought about how most all those people sat in that church on many Sundays, and gave their money to build it, and worked to support it, and now it stands there by the side of the road and offers an open door to any man that wants to come in, day or night.
It’s a clean well-kept church, with a place for a small choir back of the pulpit and a narrow stairway in the back leading up to the Sunday School rooms.
There to the right of the pulpit was the record board, showing how many had been in Sunday School last Sunday and how much the collection amounted to.
The silence in an empty church is the heaviest of all silences. It swishes in the ears, and makes a man imagine he can hear his ahand wave in the atmosphere.
I DROVE BACK UP THE road about half a mile and stopped at a house by the road to ask where Rev. Norris lives.
An elderly man named Charley Lamb came out on the porch and shook my hand and asked me in. I’d never met him and he’d never met me, but he pulled me in by the fire to meet Mrs. Lamb and gave me the choice seat and we talked for half an hour.
The Lambs are members of the Evans Chapel church, and Lamb himself taught long ago in a one-teacher school that stood just across the road from the church.
“I can remember sitting in that school with a first grader on my knee, teaching him to read,” Lamb said, “and watching out of the corner of my eye while a big boy in 10th grade worked his geometry on the board.”
“HE TAUGHT ALL THE way from the first grade up to what would have been the 11th, and all at the same time,” Mrs. Lamb said.
Lamb said it was hard to tell how high a grade he taught, since teaching has changed so much since those days.
Mrs. Lamb told how she went to school at Evans Chapel and got taught by the man she was to marry. She told about her 10 children, and where each one of them lived, and how three of her sons made preachers and another was studying to be one. And they were all raised right there in that house, and now they’re all gone out on their own.
Lamb told about the time he came courting to that house, long years ago when another family lived there, and how he parked his buggy under the mulberry trees out front, and how the ripe berries fell into the buggy seat and he sat down in them and ruined his new suit.
WE TALKED ABOUT THE weather, and how things have changed in the country, and how big Houston is, and when I got up to leave Lamb gave me the directions on how to find Rev. Norris’ house.
When I got to the gate he came out on the porch again to tell me about a fork in the road he’d neglected to mention, and said I was to keep left at the fork and go through the gate.
There is warmth left in this world, all right. It’s a good thing to dwell on that now and then, to know there are people who meet a stranger, and invite him in, and visit with him, and care about him, and help him a little, and send him away knowing they’ll never see him again.