“We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Maudie would yell back, “Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they’ll hear you at the post office.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
“It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.”
—W. T. Ellis
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
Thanksgiving 2020
Thanksgiving is “My Holiday,” that is to say, it is the holiday that offers me the happy opportunity of entertaining my lovely family for our annual, ridiculously fattening, but oh-so-satisfying dinner. That Memphis family consists of my son, my sister’s children, and their families, and usually a friend or two, and I look forward every year to having them gathered in my home. Like so many others this year, however, each of our individual units is celebrating in our separate abodes to maintain some semblance of Covid safety. I’m so disappointed not to observe the holiday as usual, and I sincerely hope this abnormal circumstance doesn’t set a precedent.
At our gathering last year, one of my great-nephews interviewed each of us on-camera to talk about that, for which we were thankful. Not wanting to be too “gooey” in front of whoever was to view this recorded declaration of thankfulness, I offered some flippant response, pretty sure that anything worth being thankful for had already been presented. Ah, the difference a year makes.
What are you thankful for, Aunt Deborah? Well, where to begin, Brooks?
Who could possibly have imagined last Thanksgiving what lay ahead of us? Who could have dreamed that what we would be thankful for this year would be that so far, all of our family has been untouched by an often deadly flu that has ravaged the world?
My appreciation for nurses has long been well-known to people in my orbit. I’ve watched them in awe as they arrive at six a.m. for a shift that begins at seven a.m. And, after working like Trojans all day long, observing them leaving for home at eight or eight-thirty p.m. after a shift that should have ended at seven p.m. That was during a time before Covid-19 sent overwhelming numbers of infected patients into their care. I always suspected they were under-compensated for their hard work, but now I think they should get hazard pay for risking their lives every single day while working even more ungodly hours. My admiration for them and my gratitude toward them has grown exponentially in the last nine months.
My respect and gratitude for anyone involved in the healthcare industry, for that matter, has quadrupled during this pandemic. Doctors, nurses, technicians, therapists, administrators, clerical staff, transportation workers, food services, janitorial staff, pharmacy, information technology, electricians, plumbers, HVAC experts all put their lives at risk every day and risk infecting their own families to keep hospitals running and to try to heal the sick.
Being thankful for the produce men and women at the grocery store or the other stockers and checkers would never have occurred to me before this pandemic. Along with the people who work in pharmacies and other necessary businesses, they are literally the frontline workers right now. I’m not going in many stores of any kind—except for quick in-and-out trips—but my appreciation for the staff is renewed every time I do. I would seriously love to hug the young men and women who bring my groceries to the car when I do grocery pick-ups, but my humble gratuity will have to suffice. They’re efficient and cheerful, and I appreciate the service so much, but, no doubt, they’d much rather have the tip than a grateful hug from “a little ole elderly lady.”
Anybody involved in the public sales force right now is potentially exposed every day to Covid-19 so that I can procure those items that I deem necessary to live my comfortable life of semi-hibernation. And speaking of hibernating, I am forever grateful for the ability to continue to work at home and receive a paycheck for doing so while so many people around me have lost their jobs throughout 2020.
Selfishly, I’m grateful that I don’t have children of any age who are missing a full-time, on-campus educational experience right now. But on the other hand, I’m eternally thankful for the dedicated educators who have worked diligently to ensure quality learning in an impossibly stressful situation. Many of them have stretched their own brains and creativity to the limit to provide a comprehensive education for students who are learning partially or entirely from home. Some notable charitable organizations have stepped up to the plate to help overcome the financial burden of learning from home. I’m thankful that there are generous people in the world who care enough to fill those needs. Because of an overwhelming monetary gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Memphis City Schools a while back, for example, children who didn’t have laptops and online capabilities can receive an equivalent learning experience during this demanding period.
I’m even a little grateful for the ridiculously stressful political upheaval that’s raged on during the entirety of the pandemic. It’s kept me in constant contact with like-minded folks, which has prevented an already reclusive personality, such as myself, from becoming a complete hermit. An occasional trip to La Michoacana Ice Cream and Paletas, where my friend Judy and I share our indulgences and visit from our respective vehicles’ safety, has helped me maintain some semblance of sanity. Actually, I have plenty of like-minded and not-so-like-minded people in my life whose presence, from a relatively safe distance and long-distance, has made this whole bizarre nine months bearable. I’m thankful for that gift.
It’s Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, 2020, and I’m sad not to be with my family and friends for our traditional gathering, but I’m so relieved that, so far, we are all healthy and have the hope of next year’s dinner. Don’t get any big ideas about asking me then to provide an on-camera answer to what I’m thankful for, though, Brooks. This year was easy.
Deborah Fagan Carpenter, November 2020
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”
― William Faulkner
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
Thanksgivings in The Time of Covid
Patsy R. Brumfield, the Thanksgiving meal inheritor
by Patsy R. Brumfield
The Southfacin’ Cook
My mother, the late, great Betty Dial Brumfield, loved Thanksgiving, probably more than any other holiday.
She’d start menu-planning months ahead and may very well have set her dining room table a week ahead.
Perhaps it was the sure knowledge that all her family was to gather around and enjoy the food she prepared with love. Perhaps it was washing her good china, made during the post-WWII time when the U.S. occupied Japan, or polishing her Buttercup sterling silver flatware, and using the linen tablecloths, which our usual workaday, children-a-day, lives made impossible.
Betty Brumfield, 1981 with first grandchild, Will Bardwell, in her front porch swing in McComb, MS
But the worst happened on Halloween Sunday, 1999 — just weeks away from the big holiday magic: She suffered some kind of fatal attack, in church of all places. And she left us all bereft of what to do with ourselves, our hearts broken.
She also left me, her first-born and the one daughter who claimed to know how to cook, with three weeks to figure out the proper way, Mother’s way, to observe Thanksgiving. Oh, sure, I had her recipes, but anybody who really knows how to cook knows that’s just the half of it.
Frankly, we muddled through. No one complained about the turkey’s being too dry or the dressing not quite what it should be. The gravy, one of my mother’s specialties, was not too bad, and thank goodness, her special congealed cranberrry-apple-pecan salad actually turned out properly although my sister and I are the only ones who really love it.
Across the 20 years, I’ve learned a lot and I’m a much better cook because I’ve worked at it. So as we approach this family holiday, I am teary-eyed still – making plans for the changing times.
The experts say Thanksgiving and Christmas 2020 should not be the same. Covid-19 is just hoping for a big ole get-together with lots of possibilities for germs and other troubles. It’s also flu season, and everybody’s been urged to get their flu vaccine. I got mine, you can bet on it. The Cook cannot be sick, the holidays’ first law.
Thanksgiving has evolved since it came to wrest on my shoulders.
Thanks to cooking guru Alton Brown, I now know the superiority of a brined turkey. He’s also given me a better, fresher recipe for green-bean casserole (sans that soupy glop). We’ll have healthier roasted vegetables like onions, mushrooms, sweet potatoes and winter squash, although I’ll cheat slightly with Sweet Potato Queens pecan-topped casserole.
The most difficult dish took me about 5–6 years to get “right”: the dressing, which I came to realize is a pudding and must be a very wet consistency before baking. These days, I make it ahead of time, half-bake it and then finish it off on the holiday to avoid being late for serving a hungry crowd.
Sister Schubert’s rolls, home-made cranberry sauce and green salad, plus at least one “tube” of that jellied stuff some folks demand, will make it to a great-aunt’s sideboard. And dessert likely will be some flavor of pies, most certainly one key-lime in honor of my mother’s being a bit of a Parrot Head.
Covid-19 will not be invited. My sister’s family has had it. My brother’s family has enjoyed their holidays in far North Mississippi since I moved from Tupelo to Jackson in 2013. My daughter’s family, with a toddler and an infant, will celebrate in place from Brazil since flying twice across a month’s time makes no sense with concerns about exposure.
And so, my son’s family with two youngsters will be my only guests.
A reasonable Thanksgiving for just we five. But we will certainly need an extra turkey breast for left-over sandwiches. I once got in a lot of trouble for not ensuring an extra supply for this purpose. I learned!
Regardless of the changes necessitated by this awful virus, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be cooking like crazy, like Betty Brumfield, even setting the table but not like her, with the very best disposable dinnerware I can acquire.
The 6-year-old and the 2-year-old will try to destroy the holiday decorations, I’m sure. But I’ll get over it.
The cranberry-apple-pecan salad will be all mine. It’s OK this time when nobody likes it but me.
I framed my mother’s handwritten Thanksgiving menu, listing all the delights for which she loved to plan. The best part was her note about desserts: “Ambrosia? Nobody likes it anyway.”
Correct. And Happy Thanksgiving everybody. There’s still plenty to be thankful for.
HOMEMADE CRANBERRY SAUCE
Cranberry chutney instead of jellied “glop” in a can!
Looking for a better option than Cranberry Sauce out of a can? I’ve got it, adapted from a great recipe by Magnolia’s own Sally Johnson. My daughter Margaret thoroughly dislikes the canned stuff, so I’m so happy to have a homemade alternative. It’s my go-to now!
INGREDIENTS
2 cups sugar
½ cup cider vinegar
1 ¼ cups finely chopped fresh onions
½ cup raisins or currants
½ teaspoon allspice
Pinch of salt
1 ½ tablespoons finely grated ginger root (peel, freeze it first)
2 packages fresh cranberries
Wash and cull cranberries for softies. In a large sauce pan, combine sugar, vinegar, onions, raisins, allspice and ginger root. Cook uncovered on medium-high until sugar dissolves and bubbles (about 5 minutes). Add cranberries and cook on medium heat, stirring often, for 10 minutes or until all the berries have popped. * Add salt. Allow to cool about 10 minutes, then pour into 2, 8-ounce jars and seal. Refrigerate (or freeze in plastic bags).
This makes a “smidge” more than the two jars. Try the “smidge” on your breakfast toast.
NOTE: Sally recommends adding walnuts, pecans or almonds. If you like, add ½ cup after the berries pop. Her idea: Spoon sauce over a block of cream cheese to serve with crackers. Can’t say I disagree.
BETTY’S CRANBERRY SALAD
(I double this for a crowd)
2 cups whole cranberries
½ cup pecan meats, chopped
1 medium apple, chopped finely
1 package gelatin
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup boiling water
¼ cup cold water
Wash cranberries and toss the ones that don’t look good. Grind them with water in blender, then drain them in a fine colander.
In a medium sauce pan, cook the ground cranberries in boiling water about 10 minutes. Add sugar and cook another 5 minutes. Be careful to lower the heat slightly because the hot, sugared juice can pop on you. Add apples and pecans. Stir.
Soften gelatin in the cold water, then add to cranberry mixture. Mix thoroughly then pour into a small casserole dish (I use a round Pyrex dish). Let it set, chill in the refrigerator and then serve as is or with homemade mayonnaise all on a lettuce leaf.
HOMEMADE MAYONNAISE
(Modern style, using an immersion blender)
1 egg, room temperature
2 teaspoons mustard
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
¼ teaspoon paprika
1 cup vegetable oil
In a tall container (I use a Mason jar), add everything but the egg. Mix loosely with a fork.
Add the egg and place the blender into the jar atop the egg and other ingredients.
Whisk with blender, around/up and down, just a few seconds to 1 minute. That should emulsify everything. Taste and adjust for salt.
Serve in a bowl alongside the cranberry salad.
NOTE: Get ready to make more of this mayo because a turkey sandwich demands it. BTW, I also spread cranberry sauce on my left-over turkey sandwiches.
NOTE 2: It’s slightly possible the mayo won’t emulsify. It’s happened to me a few times. Just throw it away, get a clean jar, wash the immersion blender and start over. That’s cooking for ya!
NOTE 3: Patsy’s recipes for brining a turkey, Southern cornbread dressing and other culinary delights can be found on PorchScene.com.
Photos and “turkey art” by Patsy R. Brumfield
You can’t do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.
—Katy Mixon
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
To honor our veterans on this Veteran’s Day 2020, we are grateful to have a firsthand glimpse of what serving in a war zone is really like via Randall O’Brien, our resident veteran.
Happy Veteran’s Day to all of the praiseworthy men and women who serve in our armed forces.
Life or Death in Vietnam
by
J. Randall O’Brien
After a year of army training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Polk, Louisiana, Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Polk, again, I step off the plane March 4, 1971, onto Vietnamese soil. We land in Bien Hoa, then bus seven miles to Long Binh, America’s largest military installation in Vietnam. We grunts are given a one-week last chance crash course in combat and survival tactics, then move out to our assigned units.
101st Airborne Division troops await my arrival in Quang Tri Province below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which encompasses the South and North Vietnamese borders. Within my first week with my new unit, I view 50 or so black body bags containing KIA American soldiers being loaded on a plane for their journey home, take sniper fire while pulling guard duty at night, and receive a Dear John letter from my girlfriend back home. Yes, war really is hell.
Our company relocates to “the boonies.” One blazing hot day, with temperatures high enough to melt our crayons, we are sitting around our day defensive perimeter under open skies, shirts off like we are on the beach. Some of the guys are writing letters home, or re-reading old ones. Others are snoozing, or tanning—God-only-knows why. A few men are cleaning their weapons. Two or three, here and there, are huddled smoking and talking about girls back home.
I look up and spot an unsuspecting Viet Cong fighter in black pajama-like dress, pointed straw hat, sandals, and AK-47, leisurely strolling our way. Our eyes collide! He freezes! Panics! Turns and sprints back in the direction from which he has come.
“Henson! Henson! Pieface! Grab your radio! Let’s go!”
Private Pieface Henson and I pursue the enemy.
“Radio Lt. Rumcik! Tell him we’ve got contact. In pursuit. Will communicate!”
Through the jungle we pursue the Viet Cong. Ten, fifteen minutes into the chase, we crest and descend a small hill to find ourselves staring at wide-open acres of rice paddies in lowlands leading to a distant village. Stooped men, women, and children work hoeing rice. They freeze, looking up frightened into the rifle barrels of two threatening American dogfaces. We count 19 of them. The men dressed exactly as the Viet Cong fighter may be his comrades. The armed enemy may be among them, incognito, AK-47 lying beneath the water. Don’t know.
“What are we going to do?” Pieface asks nervously.
“HANDS UP!” I scream, motioning! “IN THE AIR! HIGH UP!”
Hoes drop. Arms rise high. Faces drip fear.
“Hand me the phone.” “Red Baron 5, Come in. Come in, Red Baron, 5! Red Top, here. Come in, over!”
“Red Baron 5, here. Come in, Red Top. Over.”
“Got 19 Vietnamese captured. Chopping rice. Can’t tell, friend or foe. Village across the way. Do you read? Over.”
“Copy, Red Top, loud and clear. Your call. Take no prisoners. Do you read? Read back. Over.”
“Roger. My call. Take no prisoners. Wilco. Over.”
“Copy, Red Top. Out.”
Now what? The call is mine. Our platoon can’t transport 19 prisoners with us through the jungles. We can’t let them go; they may be Viet Cong guerillas by night, or the Viet Cong soldier may be one of them. With our camp position known, the VC could attack us tonight, or mortar us, perhaps killing some, many, most, or all of us. On the other hand, if we kill the 19, many or all of them may be mere civilians. What do we do? Their lives or ours?
We kill them all.
Just kidding.
This is what we do.
“Pieface, when I give the signal, start firing. We’re gonna fire over their heads, in front of ‘em, anywhere but at ‘em, you understand? Don’t you dare shoot a single one of ‘em, or I’ll have you court martialed, you hear me?”
“I hear ya.”
“We’re gonna scare ‘em outta their minds; get ‘em outta here. When I count to three, go crazy! Start screaming, firing. You ready?”
“Ready.”
“One, two, three, GO!”
“RAT-A-TAT-TAT! RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT! RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT, POP-POP=POP, POP-POP-POP-POP, POP-POP-POP-POP! DiDi MAO! DIDI MAO! (Get out of here!) RAT-A-TAT-TAT, RAT-A-TAT-TAT, POP-POP-POP!”
The petrified Vietnamese sprint through the rice paddies to the distant village—men, women, and children, who often serve as fighters, too, never stopping, nor looking back, until they reach their grass huts, a horizon away.
We return to our defensive perimeter, report to the Lieutenant, and move our camp for the night. Everyone lives.
At least for one more night.
Dr. J. Randall O’Brien is the President Emeritus of Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Previously the executive vice president, provost, professor of religion and visiting law professor at Baylor University, the McComb, Mississippi native is a graduate of Yale Divinity School, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Mississippi College. He has also held appointments as a Research Scholar at Yale, and Fellow at Oxford.
Other Porchscene articles by Dr. O’Brien include:
http://porchscene.com/2017/10/17/a-bronze-star-for-brenda/
http://porchscene.com/2017/09/26/dark-rains-gonna-fall/
http://porchscene.com/2017/08/22/3rd-civil-war/
Photo courtesy Dr. J. Randall O’Brien
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.
—Harper Lee
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
“There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.”
—Ernest Gaines
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
Pilgrim in a Racist Land
By J. Randall O’Brien,
Professor and Chair Department of Religion
Baylor University, Waco, TX
2000
The story did not begin with me. And long after I am gone, the story will journey on into the ages. But the caravan did come by here. And I climbed aboard.
Ohhh, dat Gospel train’s a comin’
I hear dat whistle blowin’
Yassuh, dat Gospel train’s a comin’
Gonna ride it t’glory.
The Gospel was the hope of African-Americans in the segregated South when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Mississippi. They looked forward to the day when that “Gospel Train” would spring their sweet escape from a racist “hell on earth” and land them in the celestial bliss of a peaceful, just, eternal heaven. Some of us Whites dreamed too.
I reckon all who climb aboard God’s Freedom Train understand that the train departs from Egypt always and journeys long through the wilderness before arriving in the Promised Land. Six years after my birth in 1949, the United States Supreme Court handed down an historic decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case on Monday May 17, 1954, ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, Thomas P. Brady (Circuit Court Judge of the 14th District of Mississippi) published a book entitled Black Monday, in which he wrote, “The Negro purposes to breed up his inferior intellect and whiten his skin and ‘blow out the light’ in the White man’s brain and muddy his skin.” Continuing his tirade the racist Judge hissed,
“You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him, and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy. Likewise the social, economic, and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach.”
In 1963, Judge Brady was awarded a seat on the bench of the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Within two months of the Brown v. Board of Education decision the White Citizen’s Council (which came to be known as “the white collar Klan,” or “the reading and writing Klan”) was formed on July 11, 1954, in Indianola, Mississippi. Two years later the Mississippi Legislature established The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to maintain segregation. How vividly I recall the “Freedom Rides” undertaken by Black and White activists in 1961, who dared to travel on Trailways and Greyhound buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana for the sole purpose of testing federal integration laws in bus stations throughout the South. I was eleven years old when the “Freedom Riders” or “Friction Riders” as they were called in the Jackson, Mississippi press, were severely beaten in Jackson and in my hometown of McComb, Mississippi.
The first direct action for integration in Mississippi by Mississippians occurred in my hometown on August 26, 1961, when two local young African-American men, Elmer Hayes and Hollis Watkins, sat-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. For their trouble they were harassed, arrested, and jailed for 30 days. Four days later, another sit-in took place at the bus station in McComb. Two African-American high school students, Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis, were jailed for 28 days. Soon thereafter, on October 4, 120 African-American high school students, including Brenda Travis, marched through the streets of McComb to the steps of City Hall. The teen-age Miss Travis was sent away to Reform School for one year.
On September 30, 1962, riots broke out at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith became the first African-American student to enroll at the school. Two persons were killed in the melee and 60 U.S. Marshals were injured. Less than one year later, on June 11, 1963, NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was murdered in the driveway of his home in Jackson, shot in the back with a high-powered rifle fired by Byron de la Beckwith of the White Citizen’s Council. The long, hot summer of 1964 lay just around the corner.
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 was a well-coordinated civil rights campaign, which brought to the State hundreds of college student volunteers and other civil rights activists from the North and California to work for racial equality. More than 200 volunteers came to Mississippi on June 20 to establish Freedom Voter Registration, Freedom Schools, and Freedom Medical and Legal Clinics. By June 21 three of the civil rights workers had disappeared. The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were found August 4 outside Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Civil rights workers and Mississippi African-Americans suffered horribly in the long, hot summer of 1964. Included in the litany of evils suffered by the innocent were 1,000 arrests, 80 beatings, 35 shootings, 35 church bombings, 30 home bombings, and 6 murders. The list may not even be complete since it includes only crimes that were reported!
My hometown of McComb, located in Pike County in Southwest Mississippi, became known internationally in 1964 as “The Dynamite Capitol of the World” for its 20 acts of violence and 16 bombings of churches and homes in defiance of civil rights advances. Is it any wonder Martin Luther King, Jr. described to United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy the evil in McComb as a “Reign of Terror?”
Shame covered the city like dirty smog. Our churches fell silent; our preachers developed laryngitis. The body of Christ looked nothing at all like Jesus. No tables of racism were overturned in the temple. No ministerial anger cried out against bigotry, hatred, or murder. Along with the Finance Committee, Fellowship Committee, and Youth Committee my home church formed a “Nigger” Committee, composed of the biggest and meanest men in the church, who met each Sunday on the steps of the church with one job and only one job: while the pastor stood in the pulpit preaching about a God who loved everyone, a certain race of people must NEVER, EVER get through that door! Where had all the prophets gone?
In the early 1960s fewer than 2% of Mississippi’s African-American population were registered to vote. Some counties did not have a single registered African-American voter! Yet White supremacy and segregation, twin Southern traditions proudly inherited by each new generation through paternal bloodlines and ingested through mother’s milk, were being threatened. “Ohhh, dat Gospel train’s a comin’; I hear dat whistle blowin’.”
The moment a Southerner surrenders his life to Christ for a lifetime of Christian ministry a crisis strikes. In the area of race relations shall he follow a course of continuation or compensation? Shall he follow Christ or culture? Will there be a transfer of allegiance? Whom shall one now seek to please, earthly father or heavenly Father? Shall the minister follow society or Scripture? Which will it be: family or faith? The choice is hard. Religion would be much easier if ethics were not involved.
Kay and I concluded there was no choice after all. Either Christ was Lord or He wasn’t. Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, expresses our own dilemma and decision:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both
and be one traveler, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;
I then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim,
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this one day with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.
“The Road Taken” led us to minister in the ghettos of New Orleans in the 1970s while I was in seminary. Soon we had joined an African-American Church in the inner city as its only two white members. In time Kay was asked to serve as Sunday School Superintendent and I was invited to serve as Associate Pastor. Our families tried hard to understand our calling to minister in this setting, and I believe they were successful in doing so. Their love and support blessed us.
When my ordination was scheduled in Kay’s home church in the Mississippi Delta, the church fellowship and our families seemed pleased. When we revealed, however, that we wanted our Pastor, the Reverend Andrew W. Gilmore of Christian Love Missionary Baptist Church in New Orleans to preach my ordination sermon, celebration turned into chaos. A “Negro” preach in the pulpit of an all-white Mississippi Delta church? In the very town in which the White Citizen’s Council was formed? And wouldn’t other “Negroes” want to make the trip from New Orleans as well?
Although my ordination in Roundaway Baptist Church in Sunflower County, Mississippi created no small crisis, we remain very proud of the way in which the Deacons and the church membership responded to the collision of segregation and Scripture. When Kay’s father, a deacon in the church, delivered a passionate appeal to the church on behalf of right, the church followed the leadership of the Holy Spirit beautifully. The ordination service provided a glimpse of God’s True Church where all believers are one in Christ Jesus.
We could not have known what awaited us in our first pastorate on the Mississippi-Louisiana State Line. Rather than reveal the name of the church I prefer the pseudonym “Southern Baptist Church.” Moreover all names are fictitious except in cases where a person lines up on the side of right. I am proud to make known the identities of the faithful.
“Are you going to Homecoming this weekend?” I asked Doug Taylor one Tuesday afternoon in October of 1979, as we walked across the campus of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Doug and I had graduated from Mississippi College, he in 1978 and I in 1975. “I’d love to, but I don’t have a car,” he lamented. “Hey, that’s no problem,” I said. “Kay and I are going and you are more than welcome to ride with us.”
“For real?” he asked. “Absolutely!” I said. And so the drama began innocently enough.
Kay and I planned to drive from New Orleans to Clinton, Mississippi, Friday afternoon, attend homecoming festivities at the college Saturday, then motor Saturday night to the church field where I served as Pastor. Sunday we would worship morning and evening, then return to New Orleans late Sunday night. We never even thought about the obvious. Then it hit me! “Hun,” I said, “I never once thought about this, but Doug is black and Southern Baptist Church is white. We’ve got a problem.”
“I never thought about it either,” she said, “what are we going to do?” “Well, maybe this is what God wants, even though we didn’t think about what we were doing,” I mused. “Let’s talk to Doug, explain the situation, pray about it for a couple of days, and see what we think we should do,” I suggested.
“Doug, I’ve got to explain something to you,” I began. With that I told him that a black person had never, ever been in the church, not even to cook or clean, and that the church sat in the heart of Klan territory, but that the invitation was still on the table. We agreed to pray. Thursday evening the three of us met in our home to finalize our plans according to God’s guidance through prayer. One by one we reported that our sense was “All Systems Go!” We had not intentionally plotted to integrate Southern Baptist Church. Despite our naivete, or maybe because of it, we felt providentially chosen by God for this historical act. If it is possible for fear and peace to coexist, those two polar neighbors seemed to find a home in our hearts.
Sunday morning arrived. Doug, Kay, and I, along with Eric Holleyman, our Associate Pastor for Music and Youth, prayed together at the parsonage then drove to the church. Word traveled fast. As soon as Sunday worship concluded, Sammy Wilson ran up to me and exploded, “Ed Earl wants to see you right now! He said to tell you to get your *^%#! over to his house the minute church is out!”
Ed Earl was a church member who attended church every leap year. I suspected he was a Klansman, but I had no way of knowing. In order to present the false impression that I was not frightened, I ate Sunday lunch first rather than rush right over. Eric insisted on going with me. When we arrived at Ed Earl’s, Jimmie Lou met us at the door and ushered us into the room where Ed Earl sat waiting. Jimmie Lou excused herself, closing the door behind her. Ed Earl said nothing for the longest. Then he began.
“Got a little visit this mornin’,” he said. “The boys came by, tearin’ into my driveway in their pick-up trucks, slingin’ gravel everywhere, blowin’ their horns, slammin’ on brakes, throwin’ rocks, and hollerin’—‘Ed Earl, git out here quick!’ Well, I went outside and said, ‘What’re you boys up to?’ They said, ‘Git in the truck, Ed Earl!’ I said, ‘Where you boys goin’?’ They said, ‘Git in the *%^# truck, Ed Earl! We’re goin’ to git us a nigger ’n a preacher!’
Then they told me it was you! I was so mad I could *%^#! But I told ‘em, ‘I’m gonna have to ask you boys to turn around and go back home.’ ‘What!’ they said. ‘You heard me boys. Lemme handle this one; I owe that preacher one; he’s taken up a lot o’ time with my boy, huntin’, playin’ ball. But I tell you what I’m gonna do. If it ever happens again, you won’t be pickin’ me up. I’ll be pickin’ you up! Now go on home. I’ll take care of this one.”
Ed Earl paused as he spoke—eyes watering, face beet red—then he looked me square in the eye, voice quivering, and threatened, “If it ever happens again . . . .”
Ed Earl never finished his sentence. He didn’t have to. I understood. My life was being threatened. “Ed Earl,” I managed meekly, “what are you asking me to do? To stand in that pulpit and preach about a God who loves everybody, but put a sign in front of the church saying ‘No Negroes Allowed?’ I can’t do that, Ed Earl. You’ve gotta decide what you’ve gotta do; I’ve gotta do what God tells me to do.” Ed Earl stared daggers through me. I felt I was peering into the face of death.
“It better not happen again!” he warned. “Does tonight count?” I asked. “Because I can’t tell a man who wants to worship God that he can’t come in the church. I’m not going to do that, Ed Earl.”
That evening before Doug, Kay, Eric, and I went to church we prayed, placing ourselves and the witness of that day in God’s hands. The evening crowd nearly filled the sanctuary, which was unusual. Standing before the congregation I reminded the worshipers that we had the right to choose the color of carpet for the church, but not the color of skin of worshipers. God had already decided that.
The less I said that night and the more God said the better things would go, I felt. Two biblical texts stuck in my mind: Joshua 24:15, which reads, “Choose you this day whom you will serve . . . , but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” and 1 John 4:20 which warns, “If some one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.”
Standing floor level in front of the Lord’s Supper Table, upon which rested a suitcase-size Pulpit Bible, I turned, took the massive Bible, held it before the people, and charged, “Let us choose this day whom we will serve, Christ or culture. But let us be truthful. Let us have a Bible that we will live by. If you choose culture over Christ this day then I want you to come tear out this page that says we are to love one another, wad it up, and throw it away. If you choose to please your earthly father instead of your heavenly Father then come rip out this page that reads, ‘If some one says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar.’ Let’s tear out and throw away all these pages we don’t want in our Bible. Let’s not be hypocrites. Let’s make a Bible we will live by.”
The sanctuary fell silent. “On the other hand,” I continued, “if this day you choose Christ over culture, I want you to come up here, take this pulpit Bible from me, and seal your commitment by reading from this Book before God and this assembly. Choose you this day!”
With the charge complete, I sealed my own commitment to the Lordship of Jesus Christ by reading from 1 John 4:7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Eric Holleyman walked forward, took the Bible from me, faced the congregation and began reading where I had stopped: “By this the love of God was manifested in us . . . .” He read until Kay marched down the aisle, received the huge Book from Eric, and read, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Doug Taylor followed Kay. What a sight to behold it was! A black man holding the pulpit Bible of Southern Baptist Church in 1979! “And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also,” this child of God read.
Revival broke out! ‘Miss’ Elsie Smith, one of our oldest widows, waddled forward and whispered in my ear, “Hun, I can’t read; would you read for me?” Together we held the Bible as I read for her. Others came. Soon almost everyone had publicly declared their intentions to live according to God’s will rather than man’s ways.
Leon Johnson was the exception. Leon sat frozen on the back pew, a mask of hatred glued to his face. He rushed out into the night.
After everyone had left for the night, Kay, Doug, Eric, and I turned out the lights, locked up the church, and headed out the door. Before walking out into the dark southern night, not knowing what or who might be awaiting us, we prayed.
Relief! Crickets, not Klan, greeted us as we opened the door. We drove to the parsonage to change into casual clothes for the drive back to New Orleans. As we prepared to leave the parsonage, fear gripped us. Who would be waiting outside in the dark? We prayed together, then opened the door. Nothing! Praise the Lord, no one was there! Driving down the deserted country roads which carried us toward I-55 miles away, our pulse quickened each time headlights hit our rear view mirror. Not until we drove into the bright lights of New Orleans did we feel safe.
When Eric, Kay, and I returned to the church field the next weekend we were shocked! Southern Baptist Church was a ghost town! The Klan had reached the members during the week. Almost no one dared attend church! Kenny Joe Cobb, the leading tither in the church, said he’d never give another nickel as long as I was pastor of the church. Elmer Newton, the oldest deacon in the church swore he’d never darken the door of the church as long as I was there. Despite our best efforts to shepherd the flock, visit the church families, preach the Word, love the unlovely, visit the sick, the widows, and those confined to nursing homes, and pray, pray, pray, nothing worked. Our days at Southern Baptist Church were numbered.
After doing everything we could to re-build the fellowship, unsuccessfully, I resigned as Pastor of Southern Baptist Church. Six months of painful struggle came to an end. Kay and I simply felt that if the church were ever going to have a chance to heal and grow again, we needed to go. The loving thing for us to do was to leave.
I am told the first question the Pastor Search Committee asked each new pastoral candidate was, “What do you think of niggers in the church?”
And so it was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
But this is a new millennium.
Isn’t it?
Updated Friday, March 25, 2005
Dr. J. Randall O’Brien is the recently retired President of Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Previously the executive vice president, provost, professor of religion and visiting law professor at Baylor University, the McComb, Mississippi native is a graduate of Yale Divinity School, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Mississippi College. He has also held appointments as a Research Scholar at Yale, and Fellow at Oxford.
Other Porchscene articles by Dr. O’Brien include:
http://porchscene.com/2017/10/17/a-bronze-star-for-brenda/
http://porchscene.com/2017/09/26/dark-rains-gonna-fall/ http://porchscene.com/2017/08/22/3rd-civil-war/
Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter
