It’s 7:30 p.m. on Monday night, the day after Easter, and the rough parking lot of Lockwood Skating Palace is packed with cars, their recent occupants lined up a good 20 feet outside the roller rink’s doorway. A steady stream of buses and minivans pause in the drive to disgorge dozens of smartly uniformed kids — epaulets, ascots and white gloves at the top end; matching tees and skirts and slacks at the median — arranging themselves for inspection. They appear to range from six to 20 years of age, making the single-file formations look like the graph of a public opinion poll in profile.
These are drill teams and youth groups associated with local black church congregations, and though many of them will sooner or later strap on a well-worn set of wheels, they’re not here to skate. Tonight, and once a month, is Gospel Night at the Lockwood Skating Palace. The drill teams are here to perform a half-time show/talent contest/testimonial of faith on the roller rink floor, and nearly all of them will go home with trophies.
Inside, the roller rink looks like something designed when people were shorter. The low ceiling turns the building into a shallow drum, and even when nobody appears to be talking, the room rumbles. To the right, a concession stand serves pink lemonade and chili cheese fries, and flat orange booths border a bank of video games. To the left, the wall is divided into cubbyholes already half-filled with sneakers, and two overworked young men deliver a selection of beat-to-hell skates to a clamor of little hands. The skating floor itself looks like it was unloaded from a truck and dropped there on the carpet. It’s not a large rink, and the line of off-center columns down the middle and slap-able rafters make it borderline claustrophobic. The wooden floor is ringed with a padded waist-high rail, just the right altitude for kiddie skaters to stop themselves by rolling full speed under the bar and hooking it with their arms, like tiny inverse aircraft carrier landings. All around the perimeter of the rink, little legs shoot out into the air like petals around a sunflower.
Behind a half-wall of Plexiglas in the far corner, Jo Ann L. Chase-Jones makes up last minute schedules on a clipboard pad. Chase-Jones is a local promoter of gospel concerts, and the promoter responsible for Gospel Night at Lockwood. The idea behind Gospel Night, which Chase-Jones says has been up and running for seven years, is the one you might expect from a church-affiliated promoter in a violence-plagued area: keep the kids off the streets, give them something social and competitive and community-positive to anchor their young feet against the temptations of crime culture and easy violence.
“If we don’t do something to keep these kids off the streets, we’re going to lose a lot more of them,” she says with a visionary zeal. “You’ve got to keep ’em motivated, and you’ve got to keep them excited.”
Hard to say how well it works, but the 500 or so kids here tonight sure aren’t elsewhere, and they’re quite obviously not bored. A painted sign on the back wall warns that “Fighters will be put out” — a warning that in this environment seems ridiculously unnecessary.
Chase-Jones takes the mike and asks the skaters to clear the floor for the performance. At least that’s what it looks like she says, because the floor clears, even though it’s impossible to tell, since the P.A. overpowers the room like a sonic boom through a shredded paper speaker.
At the left side of the rink, the first of two Mt. Calvary Baptist Church drill teams have congregated, wearing military-style black berets and uniforms with gold piping and scarves, white gloves and belts. This first team is called the Babyrettes, and they’re short. A teenage team leader marches them out onto the rink floor, where they step in formation, slapping hands on thighs and snapping forearms at attention, twirling and kicking and barking things like “Ten-Hut: Jesus!” in high, laughing voices. At one point, the line turns 90 degrees to the left, except for two little girls who turn the same distance the other way. The team leader cracks a grin and turns them around by their embarrassed shoulders. When the Babyrettes finish, the dense crowd packed around the railing cheers like a war has been won.
The Mt. Calvary Young Adults are next, and they’re even tighter, and funkier, in their routines. The response is deafening. Mt. Calvary will take home a trophy as tonight’s host church.
Geraldine Foreman directs the Mt. Calvary drill teams for pastor Maurice A. Johnston, and her Christian Soldiers, as she calls them, are “40 strong.” They’ve been marching for three years, last month they won the attendance trophy at Lockwood, and they’re one of 40 drill teams under the umbrella of the Gulf Coast Drill Team Association and performing regularly in front of congregations and church congresses around the state. In June, they’ll travel to Phoenix to perform for the National Baptist Sunday School Congress. The drill teams, says Foreman, are the church’s tool “to teach discipline, bible verses and meaning, and sacred songs.”
“This,” she tells me, pointing proudly to her troops, “is a marching presentation to the Lord.” As are the teams that follow. The Mission Baptist Church troupe marches left-right-left in matching purple T-shirts, and they’ll go home with the attendance trophy for raising the most voices. Mount Pisgah Baptist Church looks like a mini-navy with its white and blue military uniforms and precision maneuvers, and their banner announces them as “God’s Drill Team.” The tall, serious-looking boy booming marching orders from the back of the column later tells me that this is his two-year anniversary with the team, but his first time here at Lockwood. He’ll share a third-place performance trophy with his troops.
Next up is the Gloryland Missionary Baptist Church’s Flamboyant Steppers Drill Team, in shirts proclaiming “Prayer Is the Key.” Jackie Cooper directs the Flamboyant Steppers, and she’s a little nervous. Her team has been together for just under a year of Friday afternoon practices, and this is its first appearance at Lockwood. “I tell the kids not to worry, some of these teams have been practicing for years. I tell them to wait till we’ve been together a while.” The Flamboyant Steppers turn out to be one of the sassiest, most entertaining teams of the night, and the kids grasp their second-place performance trophy — as tall as some of the Steppers holding it — with as much triumph as any NBA champion, shrieking like banshees and almost drowning out the Rock of Salvation Holiness Church team’s impressive first-place victory party.
Once the trophies have been distributed — six in all — the congregation hits the floor again, skating clockwise and counterclockwise, ducking and weaving through the crowded pack or running in sock feet laterally across the floor, crashing in piled-up collisions that are obviously as much or more a part of the fun than the wobbly wheeled skating itself.
Gospel booms out over the P.A., and the music’s repetitive choruses fit the circular flow on the floor like one of Mt. Calvary’s white gloves. You glide around the room, hearing the shouts of praise in your head, and it almost makes sense: Skating for Jesus.
It certainly makes sense to the kids who come here to compete and testify and socialize. They skate till closing time, trade their wheeled boots back for sneakers, and crowd out the door into the parking lot again, where Jo Ann L. Chase-Jones confers with pastors and drill team directors about next month’s Gospel Night, and one particular little girl clutches her team’s trophy. When asked if she’s had a good time, she just beams.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 1995.