Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1961, and Doris Yates is in the church sanctuary, wondering if the Rapture will really come that night as she has been told. Doris thinks about the world outside, which she sees on the televisions on sale in Stutz’s Fine Appliances and Televisions, where people fighting for civil rights are being attacked at lunch counters. Doris’s mother, Bernice, was supposed to clean the church, but Doris is cleaning instead. Bernice cleans for the Bermans, a Jewish family, and they won’t let her drive her car because it’s too loud, so Bernice must walk an extra mile and wait for Doris’s father, Edgar, to pick her up. Doris wants to take part in the current protests and even tried to call the NAACP to find out if she was old enough to join. However, Reverend Sykes at the church told her that “saints didn’t go to marches” because they would be a distraction from God (236).

The service that night lasts until one o’clock in the morning, as the participants wait and expect the Rapture to occur. The date had been predicted by the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, although they first believed it was a day in 1955 and chalked it up to miscalculation when the date came and went.