The side door to the church opens just as Shawn A. Cosby, the best-selling crime novelist known as S. A. Cosby, finishes describing his current main character’s sexual kink.
One of the church trustees, a model of the kind of female efficiency that has powered Black churches like this one since emancipation, bustles in. This is Emmaus Baptist, Cosby’s home congregation in Mathews, Virginia, nestled between two roads not far from the Tidewater cities of Williamsburg and Gloucester, where Cosby now resides. Inside, the Cosby name is everywhere. Just minutes before, Cosby’s fingers had traced a simple pencil drawing in a back room behind the pulpit. The illustration, by his niece, depicts the church’s family tree, which overlaps with his own. The names of the founding fathers, who organized the church a few years after the end of the Civil War, top the lattice of angular branches. Cosby’s great-great-grandfather Gabriel, a once-enslaved carpenter, built this house of worship.
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