The Chocolate Gospels
James Seawel
Some mothers yip and yowl to caution their children that snaccidents will ruin their dinner. Such yapping rarely occurred in our home. Mom knew her two sons as well as she knew her recipe for homemade fudge, so she intuitively knew that we wouldn’t have skipped our evening meal if Willy Wonka himself had jumped out of the television set and hand-fed us Scrumdiddlyumptiouses until the dinner bell rang. She is, after all, the same woman who has been known to say the heck with the conventional norms of dinner before dessert. Many a Mississippi mud pie has been consumed by my mother long before some harried chef had even begun the preparation of her prime rib and sweet potato.
At school, the desk in her office always contained the usual suspects: red ink pens, pocket change for the Coke machine, confiscated love notes, just-in-case personal items for girls, and enough banned books to have gotten her fired if she hadn’t been sleeping with the superintendent. But among her treasures and contraband lay hidden serious stashes of chocolate. These goodies often helped her persuade colleagues to postpone their richly deserved nervous breakdowns. Treats were also used to bless any student she felt might need a pick-me-up, especially if she knew their parents to be misguided souls who forbade sweets, thinking they were from Lucifer.
People like to talk about what’s wrong with public education in America today, and preachers and partisans may swear that they, and only they, know for sure, but they need to quit with the hot air and have some hot cocoa and hear the real truth: public schools have actually seen worse days. Tradition once was that students brought their teachers fruit to wish them well. Granny Smith and all her little green apples be damned, Susan Seawel’s discerning students brought her bookoos of chocolate instead. From kindergartner-made no-bakes to Godiva from graduating seniors, Mrs. Seawel gratefully received every delectable morsel from her adoring students. To saint Susan, chocolate is her primary love language.
Like many a schoolteacher in the rural South, Mom’s teaching didn’t conclude on Friday with the 3:00 dismissal bell. She also got snookered into teaching Sunday school. The rule of thumb that serves fundamentalist deacons well in selecting the best Bible teachers for children is to find the woman who appears to be so busy she doesn’t know whether to wind her butt or scratch her watch, and present her with the “opportunity to be a blessing.”
After reveling in the opportunity to tell the brave deacon that his wife could get off her sanctified butt and do something every once in a while besides watch soaps and spread gossip, she would then accept the position and leave the poor speechless man in the dust. She loved every minute of it—hair-lipping authority and teaching Sunday school. To her church classrooms, along with her beaming smile and sharp wit, she unfailingly dragged a spilling-over-the-top bag of supplies so huge that Delta would’ve never allowed it as a carry-on. In her tote were supplies enough for a wise man (or woman, she’d insist!) to build his house upon a rock—construction paper, glitter, glue, crayons, multicolored pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, smiley-face stickers, Jesus-loves-me pencils, and anybody’s guess what else.
Anybody’s guess being, primarily, assorted sweets. Because Jesus loves chocolate. Why else would the Bible say every good thing is a gift from God? After all, the Word does say to greet one another with a holy kiss—the Lord no doubt had those of the Hershey’s variety in mind. I mean, you can’t have people smooching all over Sunday school. We were Campbellites, not Unitarians. Sure, we ate our share of brownies, but they didn’t have cannabis in them.
Being a Church of Christ preacher’s wife must have been heck for an adventurous woman with an irreverent sense of humor. As good-hearted and as sweet as pie as the lovely woman has always been, one would have to stretch the truth a little to give her A-plusses for conduct. My poor grandmother toiled on several years after her expiration date, mostly in an attempt to finally get her blue-eyed Susan to, for the love of God, act right! Grandma passed having checked all other items off her bucket list, leaving this one, and her love for all things chocolate, for the Lord.
Being a fundamentalist preacher’s wife in the Bible Belt South meant certain entertainments—drinking, dancing, and cussing—were off-limits, but I damn sure promise you this: Mom would have drank with the Catholics and danced with the Methodists if the elders had forbidden Moose Tracks ice cream. If they had outlawed devil’s food cake, they would have had a rocky road for sure, as she no doubt would have begun a revolution or at least formed her own denomination.
Mom herself will tell you that she’s not always been a saint. Yes, she has dabbled in the dark arts—namely, 70 percent cacao. But she knew that anything beyond Dove dark chocolate approached sacrilege in the eyes of a child. She kept a few pieces of dark chocolate around for herself in the event her sons or students ate her out of Toll House and home, but her taste is pure and her heart is golden. You can judge a woman’s character by the amount of chocolate she keeps on hand. Susan Seawel is bound for glory.
To this day, if you dare look in her purse, you’ll find a few pieces of chocolate. Of course, this should come as no surprise, as any purse she has ever carried has been little more than a portable junk drawer of arbitrary clues of her life, the most useless of which naturally rise to the top and obscure the essentials. Some dreaded day after the singing of some a cappella hymns, letting the church ladies hug our necks, and shaking the hands of the pallbearers at our family plot in the Palestine Cemetery, some poor soul will have the arduous task of sorting out Mom’s purse. By the time that unfortunate someone reaches the bottom, if the Lord hasn’t come back in the meantime, they will likely find a badly mangled, melted, and re-solidified lump encased in a plastic wrapper declaring the Chocolate Gospel truth: Snickers Satisfies.
The author (right) and his family celebrating his mother’s 70th birthday, and for whom this piece was written.
James Seawel’s essays have been featured in Arkana, bioStories, The Bitter Southerner, DASH Literary Journal, Salvation South, Tales from the South, and Umbrella Factory Magazine. He was nominated by Arkana for Best of the Net in 2021, and his editorials frequently appear in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Currently he travels with the U.S. Military as a civilian counselor. James grew up in the Ozark foothills, absorbing the stories of his family and community.