When Maxine Met Jeremy

As nosy, gossiping guests blocked the serving line, I barely noticed when he approached me. I was busy attempting to grab a piece of cornbread and a chicken leg or two. Not giving him the time of day, I tried to reach around him to get the plumpest chicken leg in the batch. Famished and weak, my blood glucose level had dropped dangerously low. Finally pushing past the others to the delectable Southern-style barbecue, I began piling my plate high. Moving along the buffet table, he was the only thing standing between me and a full stomach.

“Hi,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Jeremy.”

His words did not register as I put more chicken on my plate and walked around him for an additional piece of cornbread. My manners went out the door as I continued to overfill my plate, moving through the crowded, slow-moving serving line.

He tried again to get my attention. “And you are?”

As I started shoving food in my mouth, I suddenly noticed he was trying to talk to me. Our eyes met as I finally focused my attention on who had approached me in the scorching Mississippi heat. It took a moment for me to recognize him. I’d known Jeremy in high school, or at least, I’d known of him. But here and now, for the first time, I saw Jeremy in a different light. Wow, check out those biceps. Cornbread crumbs fell from my mouth while I took in his rippling arm muscles and beautiful bone structure. There was no denying that the pimple-faced nerd from high school had blossomed since I’d last seen him.

After high school, I had left town to attend college. As a result, I had not seen Jeremy since then. Jeremy was the pastor’s son and everyone in town knew him. He was what you’d call locally famous. Sometimes during our school years, I would steal a quick glimpse below his waistline to see if there was any sign of a large bulge. But Jeremy was mostly invisible to me, just like all the other young bumpy-faced men in town who were aspiring to be whatever their families wished them to be.

Although Jeremy was a little awkward in high school, I did find him fairly handsome underneath it all. Other than awkwardness and intellect, Jeremy and I did not have much in common. Furthermore, I was not looking for a committed relationship at the time. I was a headstrong, youthful college sophomore who had big dreams of exploring the world after completing medical school.

It’s funny how life turns out sometimes, how your dreams can change so dramatically. With all the twist and turns, you never know what path or road it will take you on. I wonder from time to time how life would have been if not for that fateful day in the early 2000s at the annual Saintsville Missionary Baptist Church picnic. It was at this very picnic where Jeremy and I began our story together.

“Maxine,” I finally answered, shaking his hand. A tingle ran along my palm as he held mine in his. Embarrassed by how much food I had taken in my low-sugar state, I tried to put some back.

Jeremy laughed and said, “Come on, let’s find some seats.”

He was a tall, slender, medium-complexed man whose attractiveness was undeniable. We continued our conversation over our meals and I found myself wanting to get to know him better. Sitting in his presence, I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Maybe it was because I could feel his passion as he shared his dreams of taking over as pastor when his father retired. Maybe it was because he showed support for mine. Whatever it was, I knew this was the beginning of something beautiful.

***

Jeremy Shaw was town royalty compared to my upbringings. Being that he was the town pastor’s only son, everybody expected he would be next in line for the ministry. He took this to heart and had already earned the respect of his future congregation. At an early age, he developed significant traits every minister should own if they were interested in the ministry business. Jeremy was empathetic, loving, and merciful to those who knew him. He was faithful to his family and the community, which held the Shaws in high esteem. Not only was his father the resident pastor, but his mother—a well-educated teacher—had worked many years in the local school district. His family was the embodiment of success, which was the extreme opposite of mine.

My family was poor. Although my father did not have a prestigious job, he was a proud, hardworking utility worker who provided for us, for which we were most grateful. But my parents found it difficult to care for the family, living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet. I watched my father labor for breadcrumbs his entire life and never prosper beyond the small shack of a house we lived in, which we rented from someone else.

My parents were also poorly educated, having dropped out of high school when Mom became pregnant at age sixteen with my oldest sister. This caused them to have zero interest in us kids getting a proper education. If Mom and Dad had their way, they would have pressured us to drop out of school and find jobs to help with the family’s living expenses. Lucky for us, our grandparents encouraged us to stay in school and graduate. They wanted a better life for us, since they themselves had lived a long life full of struggles.

After the first child came, more children followed. Within seven years, Mom and Dad became the proud parents of six children. I was the third, and by far the most ambitious and outgoing—I planned to become the first doctor in the family. I never aspired to follow in my mother’s and older sisters’ footsteps of becoming a stay-at-home mom and wife.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with their lifestyles for them. In fact, they’re the most powerful women in the Davenport family and I admired them for the sacrifices they made. But for myself, I dreamed of a different life from the women who raised me. I wanted independence and self-sufficiency. Me, if I worked hard, I visualized one day being able to reap the benefits of my hard labor. At least, that was my plan until the annual picnic that year.

***

If it were not for my meddling aunt and mother, Jeremy and I would have remained two curious spirits who continued to bypass each other. They were the ones who got the fast snowball rolling on our relationship. When they saw us chatting, they locked eyes on Jeremy, and the rest became history.

“You know,” my overbearing aunt said, “Jeremy will be a fine pastor one day.” She walked beside me as I made my way to a vacant table after dumping my paper plate and utensils in the garbage. “His family is well respected. He’ll make a good husband one day. You’d never have to work again,” she added as I moved past her, blocking out the rubbish spewing from her mouth.

In my silence, my mother cut in and pushed harder. “It's time for you to settle down and have children, Maxine. Forget school. A woman’s place is in the home beside her man. You know, I did not love your father at first. But I recognized that he was hardworking and a good provider. We started having babies young. Y’all turned out okay.”

I became puzzled about what century I was living in. Yeah, Dad is such a loving man. That’s why he beats your ass, I thought to myself, hiding an eyeroll. The hell with women’s lib—let’s stay in the Dark Ages, I guess.

Nowadays, women did not have to marry men and become a baby-making factory to confirm their self-worth. We had minds of our own and established careers for ourselves. But these concepts were unheard of to my mother and aunt. It never occurred to them times were different, things could change. They were raised in a generation where it was necessary to marry and obey men for survival. I listened to the two women as they erased decades of progress of women’s rights, all the while hiding the fact that I was looking around the picnic to see where Jeremy had gone.

You must understand how relationships are in small country towns if you want to understand how Jeremy became my chosen one. In small-town Saintsville, relationships were traditional, or old-school, as young people like myself would say. When Jeremy and I met, both the young and old generations in Saintsville still believed in old traditions and superstitions. In those days, women catered to their husbands and kept their mouths shut. Men often left their listening and communication skills at the front door after work. Even if a woman could think for herself, it did not matter, because at home, men were the thinkers for the entire family.

As far as sexual needs, women were too shy to admit they had any. The women in my family considered a discussion about sex to be offensive. They spoke in code or acted as if they were playing a game of Jeopardy or charades when trying to educate us about sex, if they even spoke of it at all. All a man demanded a woman to do in those days was “shut up and open up,” if you know what I mean. Jeremy’s parents raised him to follow the ways of old, traditional relationships. His family was old money, and money was what my family thirsted for the most. Regardless of how I felt about it, I couldn’t deny that he was the perfect match for me. 

At that time, it was still an age when men did the honorable thing and asked the woman’s father for permission to date or marry. If a couple dated, it was under the assumption marriage was in the future. In those days, a couple could date for several years and never see each other in the nude. Most older people still believed in the notion of courtship to find genuine love, which meant couples were married before having sex. Sex before marriage was equivalent to a death sentence, depending on how conservative the family was. The older generation believed when you abstained from sex before marriage, you fell in love with the heart rather than the flesh.

Both Jeremy’s and my family were firm believers in the power of courtship. Jeremy epitomized every characteristic my family valued most in relationships. By the time the picnic came to a close, Jeremy had practically been force-fed my cell number, happily provided by my mom along with an urgency to use it.

Shortly afterward, he approached my father for permission to ask me on a date. I was hesitant at first. Although he had my interest, I was fighting everything inside me to turn out just like my mom, aunt, and sisters before me. But after constant persuasion from my family combined with Jeremy’s unrelenting pursuit, I agreed.