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My office was on the Twelfth Floor of a building at the corner of 16th and K Streets in
Washington
. Just below my office window was the back of a building housing a church called the Washington African Young & Old church. I had never been to that church, but I had read, in the Washington Post, stories of the charismatic Pentecostalism of their members. I kept my eyes on that church just in case I ever needed deliverance from my perennial wayo ways.
It was from that vantage height of my office that, one Sunday in the spring of 2006, at exactly 11:45 a.m., I looked out toward the back of the church building. I saw something that probably I should never have seen. I saw a small lady in a white robe and white headgear lean out of the church window and drop a suitcase into the hands of a man outside the window. She leaned back into the church and shut the window as the man beat a quick retreat hugging the suitcase.
As the man retreated into the alley, I distinctly noted that he walked with a limp, as his left leg was apparently shorter than the right one. At the back of his head was a crop of hair that had gone totally white. I quickly forgot the man, the lady, and the briefcase and went about my business. As I write this story, I truly cannot recall why I went to the office on that bright Sunday morning in the first place.
Six months later, a client walked into my office, a lady of about 65 years of age.
She introduced herself as Sister Wilma Angelina Yvonne Osinigwe. In her hand, she was carrying a bundle of court papers. Before she sat down, she asked me to pray with her. Now, the idea of adults muttering some platitudes, wishes, requests, and praises, which is generally called praying, had always been difficult for me to understand. Nevertheless, I went along with her request and prayed with her. I must confess that the praying did something to me, although I don’t know what it is.
But, since I am being honest here, let me tell you now why I went along with that praying session: I saw dollars, lots of dollars because whenever an elderly lady comes into a law office clutching some court documents, and brandishing a sad face, a good lawyer smells money. I smelled money. I was already thinking of how much to quote her as my legal fees before she told me her story and gave me the court papers.
It was while I was reading the documents that I began to sweat. For the first time, I noticed that the lady in front of me was small and wore a white robe and a white headgear. I kept looking from the documents to her face and from her face to my office window and through the window to the window of the church below my building. She was clearly puzzled by the movement of my eyes, which made me sweat even more.
I read the court documents that she gave me. The Washington African Young & Old church, of which she was a senior treasurer, had filed a lawsuit against her for Two Hundred Thousand Dollars. She was the last person, the suit alleged, to handle the suitcase in which the collections were stored. The money represented five years of collections and donations and was earmarked for a new church building in the West African nation of
Ghana
. The money was to have been deposited into a bank account by Sister Osinigwe the day before the suitcase disappeared from the church’s safe.
Two Hundred Thousand Dollars! That was all I could think of. Two Hundred Thousand Dollars! My wayo mind and greed began to work overtime. Two Hundred Thousand Dollars! I kept rustling through the documents and grimacing; then I would shake my head periodically to indicate to Sister Osinigwe how hopeless her defense appeared while, in fact, my mind was working hard in a wayo direction and struggling with my conscience about how I could get some of that Two Hundred Thousand Dollars.
Finally, my wayo instinct fully kicked in, pushing my conscience aside. Suddenly, I did not see her as a small, elderly, religious, woman anymore. She was a thief; and as a wayo man myself I hated when amateur thieves invaded my territory, especially small old ladies. My wayo base instinct immediately told me what to do: take the money from her and keep it for myself for, after all, she had no better claim to it than me. Is a thief who steals from another thief still a thief?
"Obviously, you are looking for a lawyer to defend you against the lawsuit?" I asked her, very casually.
She told me that she had no money to pay for legal representation. She was looking for free legal representation. God, she said, would reward me in bountiful ways if I took her case without charge. She repeated several times that she had no money. Indeed, looking at her face, she appeared to have been deprived of a good meal for a long time. But I wasn't fooled. I was sure that she was the thief, period. And now she wanted to hide the money and steal my services for free too.
"Well, Sister," I said, "this type of case takes at least two years of court filings and appearances before it gets to trial. The financial and professional burden on a lawyer is enormous. But, Sister, this is your lucky day. Because of the injustice to which the church has subjected you with this baseless, frivolous, defamatory, harassing, malicious, and deceptive lawsuit, I will offer my services to you for free so long as we win."
Her face brightened as her eyes filled with teary moisture. She stood to shake my hands while she released a flurry of religious blessings for my salvation.
After she sat back into her seat, I looked her straight in the eyes and said: "Sister, the standard retainer contract you will sign with me will specify that I will represent you for free so long as we win the case. If, for any reason, we lose the case and you are found liable for stealing the money, my office will be entitled to legal fees from you. My fees will then be calculated at Three Hundred Dollars per hour or, in the alternative, the entire amount that is the subject of the litigation, whichever is less. Is that clear?" She answered that she understood.
For purposes of clarity, I repeated the terms of the contract: “if we lose the case and you are found liable, you will pay me my legal fee at the rate of $300 per hour for the total number of hours that I spend on your case or Two Hundred Thousand Dollars, whichever is less. Is that clear?”
Once again, she assured me that she would sign the retainer contract as I proposed because, as God was her witness, she was innocent and would win the case. I told her to come back in five days to sign all the legal papers including the retainer agreement.
As she walked out, I could not believe my luck. The Two Hundred Thousand Dollars was as good as mine. I would be stupid to win the case; besides, even if calculated at $300 per hour, my legal fees would easily surpass Two Hundred Thousand Dollars within one year.
Six months into the case, and numerous court-filings later, I began to attend Sunday services at the Washington African Young & Old church, more to keep an eye on my investment than to worship. Every Sunday, for five months, I saw a blind man and a cripple in a wheelchair, who always sat by the entrance to the gate of the church building, begging for money. People threw money at them as they went through the gate to the church. It appeared that churchgoers had become familiar with them that they were greeted by names. Once in a while, I gave them a dollar each.
In the sixth month of my attendance, precisely my twenty-first trip to the church, the presiding pastor, whom they called the Holy One, suddenly sent four men to go outside and bring the blind man and the cripple into the church. He announced that the spirit of the miracle of deliverance had just overcome him as the cripple and the blind man were brought before him.
I saw the Holy One place his right hand on the blind man’s face. I saw him slap the blind man’s face several times while, simultaneously, ordering Satan, Lucifer, goblins and filthy demons to leave the man’s body immediately. He warned the evil forces that the man’s body was the
temple
of
God
that must not be desecrated by filth. He instructed the evil forces to return into the abyss of eternal darkness where they belonged. At this time, even I, an incurably cynical wayo dude, was beginning to like the Holy One.
Then he turned to the cripple, took control of his wheelchair and, in one of the loudest baritones that I have ever heard, invoked divine catastrophe on the malicious and malevolent spirits holding down the man’s legs. As he barked at the evil spirits, he spun the wheelchair around so fast that the man almost fell out of it. You could hear half-suppressed cries of relief from the congregation as the wheelchair finally came to rest while the cripple was still sitting in it.
With sweat falling from his face like rain, the Holy One shook and shivered as he spoke; the tempo of his voice was alternately sonorous, cracking, rising, falling, and interspersed with frequent refrains of “in the name of Jesus”. I watched the Holy One dance through the isles between the seats all the way to the back of the church while engaged in the invocation of ‘the blood of Jesus’, ‘the God of Abraham’, ‘the God of Isaac’, ‘the healing powers of Christ’, and, in short, so genuinely consumed in his improvisations that every man and woman in the church was either clapping, dancing, crying, or simply repeating his ritualistic battle cries.
For almost one hour, the congregation was enraptured in this stirring prelude to what everyone now expected: a miracle or two. Oh yes, you could feel the expectation of miracles in the air; you could see the expectation of miracles in the eyes of the women; there was something spiritual that had just descended into the midst of us. We could feel the miracle coming. And the Holy One did not disappoint us:
“Today”, the Holy One intoned, as he surveyed the laity, “is the day that all of you, children of the Most High, will remember for the rest of your lives. Can I hear an ‘Amen’?” The ‘Amen’ that followed among the believers was earthshakingly long and loud.
Everyone watched, silently, as he, in a high-pitched but still audible voice, commanded the cripple to rise from his wheelchair. Nothing happened. He raised his voice slightly. Still the cripple did not move. He raised his voice again and again until he was practically screaming. Still nothing. Then he motioned the believers to join him in shouting “Rise, rise, rise, rise, rise....” Suddenly, the cripple’s legs slowly moved to the left and to the right and then began shaking uncontrollably as the man, apparently spurred on by the crowd, actually began to rise, first unsteadily, holding on to the wheelchair, then more firmly, stood on his legs, and raised his hands to the heavens and started dancing. There was momentary confusion in the air as the miracle intoxicated us all.
Without missing a beat, the Holy One turned to the blind man: “Your own case is easy because your faith is stronger. The demons standing between your eyes and the beauty of God’s creations have been banished to the depths of hell. Now get up and walk to the back of the church.” Sure enough, the man got up and, crying and praising God, walked, unassisted, to the back, shaking hands with awe-stricken and teary-eyed church congregation. Some women actually began to weep, overcome by the Holy Spirit.
Finally, while the church organist played an old spiritual, the Holy One put his right hand up, his eyes closed, and his head lowered, and asked: “There is a female member of this church suffering from false persecution in the hands of our church. You know who it is. Someone here is under legal bondage. She is fighting the demons of false witnesses in the court of law. I say to her ‘come up now and be delivered from the cloak of your tormentors’. Come up now because the Lord tells me that you are innocent. Come up, come up, come up…”
People began to cry and clap as my client, Sister Wilma Angelina Yvonne Osinigwe, slowly walked from the back of the church towards the Holy One. She was sobbing and wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. Now I was certain that I had misjudged this innocent woman. I wanted very badly to go up and ask for her forgiveness. But the Holy One made her promise, in front of the congregation, that she had forgiven the church for filing the lawsuit against her. He told her, in front of the congregation, that he had been assured by the Lord that the church would withdraw the lawsuit first thing Monday morning. She wept very loudly, apparently from joy, as she returned to her seat.
I sat through the end of the service in a daze, confused but at the same time peacefully elated. I waited for the crowd that had trooped to the Holy One to receive his blessings to dwindle. The service had ended but I still sat there waiting. I, too, wanted to seek the blessing of the Holy One.
While I waited, the Holy One took off his hat and walked away into the inner sanctuary of the church. Instantly I recognized him: I had noticed that he walked with a limp but the crop of white hair at the back of his head was what did it for me. This was the same man into whose hands a small lady from the church window had dropped a suitcase that spring day that I looked out of my office window. I ran out of the church as it dawned on me that I had just sat through a sham for the past two hours, my heart pounding.
Sure enough, the next day, Monday morning, I received a telephone call from Sister Wilma Angelina Yvonne Osinigwe to inform me that the church had dismissed the lawsuit against her. She said that she did not need my services any more. “By the way”, she warned me “don’t ever try to take advantage of your client again with a dishonest retainer contract. It was cheaper for me to rent actors as a blind man and a cripple. You lose.” I could hear her laughing as she hung up.
I have never been so embarrassed in my life. If the Wuruwuru Advanced Youth Organization, in which I am a life member, ever finds out that I was outsmarted by a small old lady …
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Posted by Robot| 13.01.2008 02:33