Snitch: After Dinner Conversation, #40

By Charles Williams

Synopsis - A New Orleans pastor does redevelopment work after a hurricane, but it forced to make more and more compromises to his vision.

After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions.

Podcast discussions of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Apr 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393332862

Book preview

Snitch

After Dinner Conversation Series

So I have been allotted months of futility, and nights of misery have been assigned. Job 7:3

JANUARY, 2007—NEW ORLEANS

The Reverend Clarence Washington, senior pastor for nearly forty years at Gethsemane Baptist Church, shifted his three-hundred-pound frame in the swivel chair and tossed the stack of unpaid bills into a wire basket on his desk. Behind on just about everything, he thought. That hurricane sure did a number on us. He could pay the smaller bills but would have to continue to beg and wheedle for time on the bigger ones.  He and his wife, known as the church prophet, would both have to continue taking just half of the salaries they’d received before the hurricane sent much of his congregation to live in places like Baton Rouge and Houston.

He stood and stared out the second-floor window just as he had, amazed and distressed, on that last weekend of August, 2005, when Katrina’s precisely aimed blow flooded all the low-lying areas of the City.  He had prayed fervently then and God had finally answered his prayers, but only after the waters had stayed for weeks wreaking destruction throughout his beleaguered neighborhood, Bacauptown.  In many ways, the seemingly interminable aftermath of the storm was proving worse than the hurricane itself.  When would things finally start to get better?

Often in more recent months, he had gained strength and taken pleasure from imagining the block across the street with a beautiful new building filled with apartments and businesses that would bring renewed life in place of the devastation.  Just gazing out the window would bring him hope and, yes, feelings of civic pride that New Orleans’ revival could begin right there with the plan he’d conceived.  But not today.  Today he felt only discouragement and could detect only the sad reality left behind by Katrina—the blocks of weed-grown lots, the stench from the remains of the two-story pile of discarded refrigerators, the shotgun houses and small cottages dislodged from their foundations that had been in poor condition even before the hurricane.  All this poverty and rot and desperation just a few blocks from St. Charles Avenue. It’s not right . . . never has been.

Clarence turned his gaze to the bookshelf by the window, full of autographed photos from mayors and other Louisiana politicians over several decades. The one from the current mayor, received not long before the hurricane, was signed with the words, To Clarence. Blessed are the peacemakers!  Your friend, Hypolite Juneau. The mayor, a long-time acquaintance and sometimes political ally, had given it to him at the opening of a now-vacant recreation center that was designed to keep the neighborhood youth off the streets. He could see the neglected center and its basketball courts in the distance, its windows broken and its crumbled parking lot now edged by five-foot willow