Belief. Another form of pretense. Another mask put on for the ball.

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

You'd have thought they were going to electrocute God, the way everybody was excited and running around in Decatur on the morning of Mr. Cobb's execution. They didn't think he'd done so much wrong, killing that Dolly Anderson girl, she wasn't nothing but a little fresh something anyway. Black preachers are forever doing wrong, and are forever being pardoned by their people, since it is thought that preachers have some kind of special mandate from God to be less restrained than even Roman Catholic priests, and everybody knows how they are, wearing dresses and everything. This mandate for libertinism among black preachers is thought to express itself in his enthusiasm for fried chicken, free pussy and chocolate cake, in that order of edibility.

In the neighborhood of free pussy, the black preacher is especially fortunate, since devoted sisters of the church have long ago convinced themselves that to fuck their preacher is one and the same with fucking their God, which they consider the insanest and sweetest kind of love. Some of the more practical church sisters began preparing shoe boxes full of fried chicken and chocolate cake to send to Mr. Cobb, they guessed he'd have to go to Redemption without any pussy, they certainly couldn't fit that into a shoe box. Although some of the more faithful sisters, who would never, never admit this to each other, did dip their fingers between their legs from time to time and then rubbed their fingers—they called the damp stickiness there love juice—on the chicken and the cake. If Mr. Cobb was as big a pussy hound as people said, he'd recognize the flavor of love juice and know that somebody somewhere still loved him.