by Jacqueline J. Holness | via After the Alter Call
Wow, the season opener for OWN’s Greenleaf was more explosive than the season finale ( click on this link to read the recap) with all of the family secrets revealed in this episode!
Well, let’s get into this Greenleaf recap cuz babay, it’s a lot to break down…
Burn Baby, Burn…
Like a good novel, the show starts off with an explosive beginning. The police show up at the Greenleaf estate and announce that the Bishop is under investigation for allegedly burning his first church building down years ago and manslaughter since someone died in the fire! Mac shows up at the same time as the police to gloat in front of the Greenleaf family who are stunned silent except for Gigi aka Grace. Grace follows her uncle as he is about to leave following the police’s announcement that Bishop needs a lawyer and cannot leave town. When she confronts him about his revelation as he is the one who revealed the Bishop’s sin to the police, he replies that he was “forced to pull less holy strings” since Bishop wouldn’t spring him from jail. He then tells her he has more hot secrets where that came from, secrets so hot that he can “walk away with nothing on his back but hot wind.” Yes, hunty…if he’s going down as a sexual offender, he’s burning down the Greenleafs with him!
I Been Drankin’…
Meanwhile, Oprah, I mean Mavis McCready, sister -in-law of Bishop Greenleaf, been drankin’ chile…(So, it’s hard to watch to Oprah in this state because I know I’m looking at the Queen of Talk aka the boss at OWN)…Well, now that she is no longer a club owner (thanks to her brother Mac….Wayment, I just realized that the names of the McCready family all start with M…Mac McCready, Mae (aka Lady Mae) McCready Greenleaf and Mavis McCready…M is for molestation, perhaps? More on that later…) she’s taken to the bottle. She wakes up with a big ole bottle of likka on her night stand…She’s also taken up with a young lover who comes in to the bedroom wearing some black briefs and a guitar hanging from his neck! It’s on a Sunday as she tells her boy toy, “Lonzo, get your behind (that’s not the word she uses though but I’m not cussing here) to church.” Bwwaaa, she sending her man to church like she’s his mama…and maybe she is…even though she will not be in anybody’s sanctuary for Sunday morning services…
Give Until It Hurts…
Pastor Grace is in the pulpit trying to get folk in the congregation to pledge money to support the church as a Fall Revival is coming up. But even Grace cannot get the flock to part with their funds so pledges are down by 40 percent! Lady Mae confronts her arch enemy, I mean her daughter, about her lackadaisical sermons as Grace must be the problem. But Grace tells her the truth and says it’s been three months since the police brought a case against Bishop and he hasn’t said a word about it yet to the congregation. That is the reason that the pledges are down. As usual, instead of receiving the truth, Lady Mae says to her daughter, “Your terrible pride is going to destroy us all.” What is she talking about? Would you continue to give to a church in which the pastor or bishop was brought up on charges but didn’t address the charges in front of the congregation?
Lady Mae does speak to her husband privately about the charges while she is getting ready for breakfast in the bathroom. She tells the Bishop, who walks in as she is applying her lipstick, that she cannot stop thinking about Darryl, the caretaker of the church who died in the fire. Bishop replies, “He wasn’t supposed to be there.” The two are a united front though because in front of the family at breakfast when Lady Mae sees Jacob reading a newspaper, she asks him if there is any “fresh libel” in it and says people love to see the “high brought low.” Also at breakfast, Bishop declares that he will preach again from the book of Ezra, a book about Jerusalem’s restoration and the building of the second temple following Babylonian exile. Chile…
Living Single…
Charity Greenleaf Satterlee meets with Carlton, the gay choir director at Calvary Fellowship World Ministries and his partner Kyle (Just Kidding! That’s the actor T.C. Carson’s name when he was on “Living Single,” one of my fave shows from the ’90s). Sadly, she tells them that her labor will be induced after she lost one of the twins she is carrying. She lost the baby due to the stress of discovering that her husband is gay or bisexual. Although she is still married to Kevin Satterlee, it’s clear she could end up living single this season as their marriage is still strained. After her meeting with Nigel and his partner, she meets with Jabari Johnson, a handsome record producer who is interested in producing Charity’s album. He tells her, “it sounds like you went through something. ” So could Jabari be Charity’s new man in the future?
Interrupting their meeting, Kevin says he wants to speak with his wife alone. He pleads with her to come to one of his meetings. She tells him she is skeptical about him attempting to “pray the gay away.” Obviously, he is attending meetings for a gay conversion therapy program.
To read the rest of the recap for “A House Divided,” click HERE!!!
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