Chapter 2: This Little Light of Mine

Their Holiness faith wasn’t what John Wesley rode across Georgia preaching. It had been stripped of grace, swollen with fear, and stretched into something the man never meant. Wesley had written, “By salvation I mean not barely… deliverance from hell, but a present deliverance from sin”—but in Odell’s church, deliverance meant control. It wasn’t the warmhearted faith of Aldersgate but a clenched-teeth religion that mistook shame for sanctification.

You didn’t grow into their Holiness by love. You proved it through silence, suffering, and sweating through three layers of polyester in July. No jewelry, not even wedding rings—only a wristwatch, because it kept you punctual for the Lord. Ties were prideful. French, even. Women wore long skirts, longer sleeves, and hair in buns tight enough to yank the gossip out of their scalps. Joy came in the form of shouting in the Spirit, tarrying at the altar, and living just holy enough not to be smote. The Holy Ghost was less a comforter and more a corrections officer.

Years later, Odell would shake her head and say, “John Wesley rode his horse 75 miles from here, and apparently nobody bothered to listen. Somehow we turned his hope for glory into spiritual boot camp. I wish I could go back in time, hand him an iced tea, and say, ‘Reverend Wesley, that got out of hand fast.’”

Her mother enforced the rules like an angel on probation. No R-rated movies. No dancing unless it was in the Spirit. No cussing unless it was at Satan or the school principal. But she wore coral lipstick and strutted through Belk’s like she’d been consecrated for retail. She’d amen modesty on Sunday and buy red patent stilettos on Monday. For her children, though, it was Goodwill only—“blessings in disguise,” she called them, usually two sizes too big or still carrying somebody else’s past.

Odell learned to stay quiet during the ramp-ups. One day Mama would be slathering Crisco on biscuits and rewriting hymns for fun:

Blessed insurance,

Premiums are mine,

I sell protection,

For those left behind…

The next, she was dragging the washing machine into the front yard and daring God to smite her. Sometimes she lit dishcloths on fire. Once, it was the whole living room. Other times, she crawled into the attic and screamed I don’t want to live until her voice gave out or the paramedics came. And somehow, Odell still did her homework. She was a good student—difficult, too. Sometimes they said it like that was a choice.

Just after Odell started high school, her mother hadn’t slept in a month or eaten in two. She was running on coffee, holy dread, and the belief that if she stayed busy enough, darkness couldn’t catch her.

One day, she decided Odell needed deliverance.

All clipped prayers and righteous fury, she frog-marched her daughter to the shed. She tied her to the makeshift communion table she’d built from scavenged pine and conviction. Her hands shook, but her voice was steady as she gathered relics from the past—Odell’s ribbon from the state fair. Books. Her middle school science trophy. A stuffed animal. Some sticks from the yard. A rotting peach crate.

Lighter fluid.

A match.

This little light of mine…

I’m gonna let it shine…

One scratch. A quiet whoosh. And everything Odell loved turned to ash.

Her mother stood over the flames, mouth slack, eyes glazed—like she’d tasted something divine. Then she turned, walked into the house, packed three Dollar General bags, and didn’t come back for a month.

Imogene was on her way to check on a church shut-in when she saw the smoke curling behind the Ambrose treeline. She didn’t bother with the driveway—just cut across the pasture, crushing kudzu and relics alike.

Smoke surged out like accusation. Inside: Odell. Slumped. Gagging. Tied at the wrists with clothesline. Flames licking the corners of the communion table.

Imogene didn’t flinch. She grabbed a dull pocketknife more used to pill bottles than salvation, cut the ropes, hauled Odell into the dirt, and beat out the hem of her dress.

Her father, for his part, was the eye of the storm. Soft-spoken, calloused, steady. He died of a heart attack when Odell was seventeen—right in the middle of humming through a hymn he’d planned to teach the youth choir that Sunday.He was the only deacon in the church who listened more than he talked. He was fond of saying “I’m not so sure about that” instead of “You’re wrong.” It wasn’t indecision—it was invitation.

He welcomed doubt the way other men welcomed certainty, and his Bible bore the gentle scars of honest wrestling—creases, notes in the margins, a ribbon marking Romans like it was a love letter. His Sunday school lessons didn’t thunder; they meandered gently through scripture, pausing to ask what you thought before saying what he did.

He wrote songs on a beat-up acoustic guitar. His chord progressions echoed Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ache and John Lee Hooker’s growl. In the worst of it, Odell would curl beneath the piano bench, tucked behind his tapping boots, and let the music stitch her back together.

She remembered one night when she was eleven—just her and her daddy on the sunken couch in the den, the Braves on low volume, the old ceiling fan clicking overhead like a metronome trying to keep time. She didn’t know where her mother was, and she’d learned not to ask. Between them sat a half-gallon of peach ice cream—maybe butter pecan—and two long-handled spoons stabbed in like surrender flags.

“Life’s like the Braves,” he said, nodding at the screen. “All the talent in the world, not a whole lot of wins.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Snakebit,” he said. “Good folks, bad luck. You show up anyway.”

Her grandmother, Sister Wilma Henrietta, was the only woman anybody could remember who’d ever been called a preacher in their denomination—not officially, of course, but often and with feeling. She didn’t stand behind pulpits. That was a man’s domain. The sin wasn’t pride—it was instructing men.

But Sister Wilma found her loopholes and took them straight to heaven.

She rolled into tent meetings like royalty—shoulders squared, tambourine slung under one arm, Bible clutched like a scepter—and the evangelist would always ask:

“Sister Wilma, would you bring us a testimony?”

Everyone knew what that meant: You can’t preach, but please save this service from theological collapse.

She did. Her “testimonies” were sermons with better outfits.

Her Bible was soft and wide at the spine, marked only with verses about grace and mercy. No hellfire. No underlined curses. “The rest of them got that covered,” she told Odell once. “I’m just here to remind folks they’re already loved.”

And if her Bible was her sword, her tambourine was a nuclear bomb. She played it with abandon—sharp, righteous, always on the two and four. She once got so caught up in the Spirit that she stood on a pew, shouted through the entire book of Ephesians, and fell backward into the aisle—cracked her head open clean. Eight stitches.

She came back the next Sunday, tambourine in hand, and said:

“If you get the Holy Ghost, don’t fall down and crack your head.

He’ll catch your soul, but He won’t always catch your skull.”

Her radio program, The Grace Hour with Sister Wilma, aired Sundays at 6:30 a.m. on WJHL-AM 1240.

“Beloved,” she’d begin, “if no one told you this week—God’s not mad at you. He’s just waiting for you to stop being mad at yourself.”

Odell loved to hear her talk about “What does it profit a man…” That was her cornerstone.

“What does it profit a man,” she’d ask, “to gain the whole wide world… and lose his very soul?”

Then she’d testify:

Ain’t no use in stealing—what you’re stealing won’t get you good with God.

Ain’t no use working yourself to death, because that money can’t buy Jesus.

Do what you need to survive—but spend the time you’ve got left over praising the Lord.

That’s the only profit I’ve ever seen worth keeping.

“Boys,” she’d say say in a lower voice, “I wouldn’t take nothing—no nothing—for my journey now.”

The drummer would be on back stage, hitting two and four like his rent depended on it. The guitarist would strap on his cracked electric and jump in like it was judgment day.

And Sister Wilma would take them home:

Though the devil tempts me and he tries to turn me around—

He’s offered everything that’s got a name—

All the wealth I want and worldly fame—

If I could still, I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now!

She died with her lipstick on and her slippers by the door. No drama. Just a sigh, and the words she said the night to Odell the night before:

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

Odell didn’t cry. Not until two weeks later, when she found the tambourine wrapped in lace, tucked inside the cedar chest.

The wood was smooth, the head long gone, the bells slightly uneven. Three cracks ran across the frame—each one patched with brass and a prayer. Her grandfather had fixed it. Like he knew even sacred things splinter sometimes.

She turned it over in her hands. Not to play. Just to remember.

She didn’t hear angels. The sky didn’t split.

But she whispered:

“I wouldn’t take nothing…”