RULER AND SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOK

A RULER, A SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOK A ruler and a Sunday School book were our late Uncle Emmett Love's emblems, symbols, stock in trade. Uncle Emmett Love Coleman was our father's younger brother, who went to trade school in Mississippi, who built a house at age 16, who became a licensed bricklayer and stonemason of note in St. Louis from the 1950s-2000s. He was an artist with his trial, a magician with his creative artistic imagination in construction and homebuilding. At age 4 or 5, I walked about in a big house on Big Bend Boulevard in Meacham Park, Kirkwood, Missouri, that he and other skilled workers, including Daddy, were repairing and rehabilitating prior to moving his family from Electric Street, where they resided down the street from us. A bit of plaster nearly splashed in my face, as I was watching one of the Ward brothers plaster the ceiling. He told me to "get back out of the way", lest I be hurt, accidentally injured! I have never forgot plaster's near-miss! My brother Harold recently recalled Uncle Love to mind, in a phone call. Harold reflected upon our uncle's ruler and Sunday School book, that he carried around with him as he traveled. His being a brick and stone mason explains the ruler. The Sunday School book was from church. For like all our Coleman clan, Uncle Love loved the Lord! Uncle Love was a vested member of the Olive Chapel AME Church. A stained glass window bearing his name is still in the church. He was a delegate to the AME Church's 1984 General Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, that I briefly attended just in time to receive a "Discipline" that was distributed freely to delegates. I was not a delegate, but at Uncle Love's behest, I went down to the gathering of colored folks in KC to witness the wonder of it all, and to see our beloved Uncle Love! So. I got a Discipline too in their mass distribution, being colored myself! Ten years later, I would be first a member, then a preacher then an ordained itinerant elder at Brooks Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, myself, after joining Allen Chapel KCMO, under Rev. Alvin L. Smith; then being assigned to the Butler, Missouri, 1871 facility by then Presiding Elder, W. Bartallettte Finney, in September 1995. But whenever I was in St. Louis, I especially enjoyed attending Uncle Love's Sunday School class at Olive Chapel AME Church in Kirkwood, Missouri. It was taught by the late Harold Whitfield, Esq., an older black attorney, who may have been the first such in St. Louis County, a testament in itself to a lowly status. Though in my 40s-50s by this time, I was still viewed as a pup by these elders. But a bright and active pup! In a way, then, Uncle Love's ruler and Sunday School book led me straight into the AME Church from a period of religious uncertainty as what followed my fellowship in the St. Matthews CME Church, also in Meacham Park, Missouri, our family Church, where Daddy and Mama raised all of us; where also Mama's named is etched in its cornerstone. More broadly, then, having some command of the technical and the spiritual is a winning family ticket! Get you a ruler and Sunday School book! You will see! wonders, when you put them to their naturally intended uses!