Hard Trials, Great Tribulations: A Black Preacher’S Pilgrimage from Poverty and Segregation to the 21St Century

By James V. Lyles

James Lyles has written an absorbing memoir of his life, beginning as an impoverished child in Depression-era Arkansas and eventually becoming a highly educated and well-traveled religious leader of a major Protestant denomination.

His story spans the most important era of African American advancement in the post-slavery period. He was an eyewitness as well as a participant in that half-century of the black liberation struggle...

Growing up in rural Arkansas in the midst of the Great Depression, he describes an early life reminiscent of Erskine Caldwells Tobacco Road of the 1930s and 40s. The account could serve as a documented history of African American life during that time. His narrative is written also against the backdrop of some of the most memorable civil rights incidents, such as the Little Rock High School integration riots and the killing of Emmett Till. Also, he relates in telling detail the little-reported story of the racial integration of Perkins School of Theology on the campus of Southern Methodist Universityan event in which he was a participant.

As an ordained clergyman, his adventures and misadventures, took him to small towns, large cities, college campuses, the armed forces, a foreign mission bureaucracy, and the continent of Africa, all of which he relates with remarkable candor.

Jim Lyless exciting memoir illustrates how many splendored a life of faith can be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499032437

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by James V. Lyles.

All rights reserved. This material may not be photocopied or reproduced in any way without written permission of the author. For reprint permission, write to the Rev. James V. Lyles at [e-mail] or to Jean Caffey Lyles at [e-mail].

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/14/2014

Permission to use the cover photo granted by Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, SMU

Cover photo: First five black graduates of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology; from left,

Jim Hawkins, John Elliott, Negail Riley, Cecil Williams, and James Lyles.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Cornish R. Rogers

Preface by Jean Caffey Lyles

Introduction

Felix And Laura

My Father, The Preacher

Fred At Age Fifteen

When Fred Shot Holsey

Elusive Gold

Bemore Johnson And Camp No. 1

A Family Tragedy

A Baby Brother

Days Of Our Lives

Cotton Farming

Dora And Doughbelly

Fire And Storm And Peril

Hog-Killing Day

Glorious Food

It’s All In The Seasoning

Tea Cakes

Culture, Church, And Crime

Nealie Bell

Going To Town

Cora Lee

Joe Louis On The Radio

Radio Days

Ancestors

Roy Lee Joins The Navy

Pearl Harbor And The War

The Bully

The Munitions Plant

Uncle Ben’s Café

‘Change My Name’

Going To Annual Conference

Teachers

The World Of Work

Called To Preach

Living On Tobacco Road

Going To Philander

Professors

Becoming An Alpha

Cooling The Burning Sands

Kicked Out

Daisy Bates

Becoming A Deacon

Kicked Out—Again

Kicked Out Again—Almost

My Nigerian Roommate

Making History At Perkins

Two Great Pastors

Faith Of A Mustard Seed

‘Uncle Earl’

A Ministry In Memphis

Change Is Gonna Come

Ernest Withers

Leaving Memphis

My Brothers

Air Force Blues

John Dodds

The Apple Of My Eye

My Year In Korea

Wintering In Maine

Ministry At Morristown

The Day Jfk Died

Harry Denman

Traveling Evangelist

Renewing The Church

‘Fifth City’

A Tent-Making Ministry

Breaking A Taboo

The Southfield Year

Cathedral In The Ghetto

Ambitious Ministries

Discovering Art

‘Tap The Plate’

The Alderman And The Street Gang

Church On Fire

Theology In The Inner City

Blessed Family Happiness

The Death Of Alvin Moore

Journey To Liberia

A Death In The Family

Manhattan Transfer

The Call Of California

The Africa Desk

Africa Headaches

A Mission Cut Short

Fired!

The Ghost In The Parsonage

Justice In The San Fernando Valley

Hospital Chaplain

Church On A Hill

An Interval Of Joy

Taking Irma Home

Fresh Pain

Preaching To White Folk

Healing From Grief

Jim The Barber

An Impartial Witness

Living Alone

The Last Episode

Timeline

About the Author

This book is for Marquis, and for Jean

Through many dangers, toils and snares,

I have already come;

Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.

—John Newton, Amazing Grace, 1779

FOREWORD

J ames Lyles has written an absorbing memoir of his life, beginning as an impoverished child in Depression-era Arkansas and eventually becoming a highly educated and well-traveled religious leader of a major Protestant denomination.

His story spans the most important era of African American advancement in the post-slavery period. He was an eyewitness as well as a participant in that half-century of the black liberation struggle.

Written in a clean and spare style, his narrative marches single file across the pages in clear, complete sentences.

As a memoirist, he is not bound by autobiographical completeness but only by an honest retelling of events that mattered to him. And what mattered to him is well worth telling.

Growing up in rural Arkansas in the midst of the Great Depression, he describes an early life reminiscent of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road of the 1930s and ’40s. The account could serve as a documented history of African American life during that time. His narrative is written also against the backdrop of some of the most memorable civil rights incidents, such as the Little Rock High School integration riots and the killing of Emmett Till. Also, he relates in telling detail the little-reported story of the racial integration of Perkins School of Theology on the campus of Southern Methodist University—an event in which he was a participant.

The life he recalls, however, is not consumed solely by the struggle for civil rights but also relates the everyday, simple joys of life. One such joy was his love of good food; he describes lovingly how he was taught to convert simple foodstuffs into mouthwatering cuisine.

As an ordained clergyman, his adventures and misadventures took him to small towns, large cities, college campuses, the armed forces, a foreign mission bureaucracy, and the continent of Africa, all of which he relates with remarkable candor.

His narrative evinces no personal rancor against an oppressive system or any sense of being a victim. He describes his successes as matter-of-factly as his setbacks, of which some were admittedly self-inflicted. His ill-fortune in marriage, for instance—one wife died at a shockingly early age—is told with compassion and restraint.

Readers will marvel at his resourcefulness in securing work outside the local church pastorate: for example, as insurance salesman, community organizer, foreign mission bureaucrat, house-cleaning entrepreneur, hospital chaplain, notary public—and even barber!

Jim Lyles’s exciting memoir illustrates how many-splendored a life of faith can be.

CORNISH R. ROGERS

Arcadia, California

Professor emeritus, Claremont School of Theology

PREFACE

T his book began at a dining-room table. It originated in a black pastor’s stories of growing up in rural Southwest Arkansas in a time of racial segregation. Having traveled far—geographically, socially, intellectually, economically—from the remote cotton fields of his boyhood years, James Lyles told these stories to family and friends at the dinner table or in late-evening conversations over a bottle of Chardonnay with pepper cheese and Triscuits.

The world described in these early memories is that of black families sharecropping on cotton farms during the Depression, their lives circumscribed by the venomous racism of the South that prevailed in an era before Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the other gains of the civil rights movement.

These vivid recollections seemed too compelling not to be set down on paper. They deserved a wider audience; they seemed worthy of preservation in a form available to readers who never knew the vanished world of a rural black Methodist family struggling through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar years.

The story that first caused a listener to insist You should write all this down centered on the author’s uncle Nelson presiding over hog-killing day, the annual ritual when neighboring families would butcher enough hogs to provide meat sufficient to last the winter. The telling was accompanied by gestures and sound effects as Uncle Nelson wielded an ax and an assortment of well-sharpened knives, aided by his acolytes, who were tasked with quickly pulling the hair off each hog after it was immersed in scalding water.

Another dinner-table story—which showed up more than once as a sermon illustration—recalled the author’s first effort at age eight to plow the furrows of a cotton field behind one or the other of his family’s two strong-willed and incorrigible mules, Dora and Doughbelly.

Once such stories were spoken into a tape recorder or keyboarded on a laptop computer, transcribed, printed out, rethought, revised, and printed out again, other incidents came to mind. Eventually the memoir grew to include stories of ancestors, parents, brothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, mentors, and friends; not only childhood but also youth, college and seminary years, military service, love, marriage and parenthood, faith and ministry.

Needless to say, childhood memories are easiest to tell. As one reaches the years of maturity, caution intrudes. The possible reactions of subjects who are still alive must be considered. One must avoid committing not only slander, libel, and defamation, but also malice, meanness, and betrayal, telling the bald truth too bluntly. Some anecdotes must be left on the cutting-room floor; some vivid incidents must reluctantly be allowed to pass into history unrecorded to protect the reputations of the usual suspects.

The author’s arduous work of recalling, writing, rewriting, organizing, revising, and soliciting critiques from trusted readers has taken almost five years. The earliest surviving computer file, the first draft of a chapter, is dated 9/20/09.

During this time I was enlisted—willingly so—in the privileged task of assisting in transcribing, copyediting, formatting, and proofreading the manuscript.

I believe readers will find James V. Lyles’s memoir to be the highly readable and edifying narrative of a man of faith living in interesting times.

JEAN CAFFEY LYLES

Oak Park, Illinois

June 2014

INTRODUCTION

T he American story is one of overcoming obstacles. Hard Trials, Great Tribulations: A Black Preacher’s Journey from Poverty and Segregation to the 21st Century is the story of a black boy of the old South born a year before the 1929 stock market crash, born in a small twin city called Texarkana, which represented a convergence of the cultures of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. With the clouds of Depression gathering and the winds of uncertainty blowing, my family early on sought the security of farm life to ensure food on our table and a roof over our heads. For the first fourteen years of my life, I lived the life of a serf, in service to the plantation owner, our livelihood tied to the land. The plantation owner owned everything except our souls. He provided the land we cultivated, the house we lived in, the mules that pulled the plow. He provided for our welfare until settlement time once a year when we received our share of the proceeds of the cotton crop. We were living in poverty, but we did not know it. We thought it was just the way life was.

In the midst of this humiliating beginning, there was a flame of hope. My father was always able to find a weekly issue of the Pittsburgh Courier. He would tuck it inside his coat and bring it home, where he would read to my brothers and me about the positive exploits of black people. Although we were tied to the land around Clear Lake, Paup’s Spur, and Homer, in Southwest Arkansas, the news items in the Pittsburgh Courier allowed me to imagine sailing the ocean, flying the air, riding the train, and driving from coast to coast. I could see the faces of people, multigenerational families of all ages and conditions whose hues exceeded the colors of the rainbow. With the Pittsburgh Courier, I was taught to read aloud. Aside from this black-owned newspaper, the Holy Bible was the only reading material in our home.

Early on, I came across this verse, and I have used it for inspiration and sustained hope:

If you try to do a thing,

Do it with determined will,

He who wants to reach the top

First must climb the hill.

My goal was to reach the top. My challenge, my aspiration was to climb and conquer the hill. I graduated at the foot of my high-school class. But I graduated at the head of my college class with distinction in the fields of philosophy, religion, and psychology. I was determined not to let anything block my way. I transcended my academic limitations and eventually earned two doctorates.

Between the covers of this book are trials and tribulations, dangers and doubts, life-and-death events. Determined, I went from the cotton fields of Arkansas to an executive post on the Africa desk of a major Protestant denomination’s mission agency. I was fortunate to play a significant part in breaking down the barriers of racism, segregation, and discrimination as one of the first five black men to graduate from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. I traveled and worked on the continent of Africa and, in times of crisis and coup, liaised with the U.S. State Department’s Africa Desk for the safety of missionary personnel.

I was determined not to quit until the job was done.

I am greatly indebted to three scholarly friends who read the manuscript in process and offered helpful comments, corrections, criticisms, and suggestions for shaping the material. They are the Rev. Cornish R. Rogers of Arcadia, California; the Rev. Dr. Lance Herrick of Brown Deer, Wisconsin; and Dr. David L. Caffey of Clovis, New Mexico.

Warm thanks go also to my first cousin Charlesetta Lyles Thompson of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who read portions of the manuscript and made helpful corrections of fact about our family history.

Much gratitude is due also to Jean Caffey Lyles of Oak Park, Illinois, for her skillful editing, manuscript preparation, encouragement, and unsolicited advice.

FELIX AND LAURA

M y father, Felix Lyles, was born in Farmersville, Louisiana, in 1892 to Frank and Frances Lyles, who owned the land they farmed. He grew up in a large family of five boys and five girls—from oldest to youngest, Fred, Felix, Ben, Louise, Freda, Roland, Harriet, Fayola, Erseline, and Finis. Early on, as the family story goes, both Felix and his father sued work—that is, manual labor—and won the case. Neither, for the rest of his life, was known for hard work.

In the late nineteenth century in Louisiana, it was tough for black people. As in other parts of the South, they were the victims of the federal government’s failed Reconstruction effort. After the Civil War, blacks had been promised forty acres and a mule. They got neither. They were left to fend for themselves but had few resources with which to fend.

To be successful, a farmer needed a banker and access to interim federal assistance to plant, cultivate, harvest, and market his farm products. The successful farmers—white farmers—had this support; black farmers did not and consequently were less successful. My grandfather’s farm was basically a failed enterprise.

My father married at an early age. He lost his first wife and their four children—two girls and two boys—to the scourge of smallpox. He too came down with smallpox, and it almost killed him. The death of his family was a terrible blow. Having failed at farming and having lost his wife and children, he left Farmersville in a state of grief, heading north.

He stopped at the little community of Kiblah, Arkansas, thirty-two miles south of Texarkana. Why Kiblah? I have no idea. Farmersville did have at least one main road going through the village. Kiblah had nothing of the sort. If you asked a Kiblah resident where the Judsons lived, he would tell you, Go up to the Williams house and turn left and go down to the Nelsons’ barn, and that’s Nelson Road. Turn left, and there’s the church, and the Judsons live just beyond that. The roads were named after the original black families who had first built on a given plot. If you didn’t know that background, you’d get lost. That’s the way you got around.

Kiblah was a community of land-owning produce farmers. The Stuckeys, the Smiths, the Abrahams, the Jameses, the Nelsons proudly tilled the soil and reaped the fruits of their labors.

Felix Lyles was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)—though his maternal grandfather had been one of the organizing pastors of the first black Baptist convention in Louisiana. There was no AME church in Kiblah, so he became CME—Colored Methodist Episcopal (renamed Christian Methodist Episcopal in 1954).

Prior to the failure of Reconstruction, colored people and white people belonged to the same local churches, though colored folk were relegated to the balconies. White people didn’t want to receive Holy Communion with them. The leading black Methodist pastors of Jackson, Tennessee, traveled to Nashville to McKendree Methodist Church and requested that the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, facilitate the organization of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as an exclusively black communion—and of course, this is what the white southerners wanted also. In addition, a great many black people in the South who had been members of the northern Methodist Episcopal Church became members of the CME Church.

When my father came to Kiblah, the community had three churches—two Baptist and one CME. My mother’s parents had helped organize Kiblah’s CME congregation. The Stuckey clan had migrated to Kiblah from North Carolina. Kiblah was a black community where blacks controlled the land, schools, and churches.

Laura Stuckey, born in 1896, was the fifth of nine children. Her mother, Winnie, died at age thirty-two of influenza when Laura was eleven, and she was raised by her older sister, Roberta, who was eighteen when their mother died. The nine Stuckey children, in order from oldest to youngest, were Clayton, Absalom, Roberta, Ardentry, Nathaniel, Laura, Nelson, Champion (called Big Man), and Claudine. Laura’s father, also named Nelson, had a hard time adjusting to the death of his wife, and the household fell apart. He often left the children alone, without adequate food. He would leave home and return days later, saying he had attended a church meeting, though rumors suggested he was off seeing some woman. My mother often spoke of the disruption the death of her own mother caused. But her sister Roberta did a good job of holding the family together and instilling values in her siblings.

My mother finished ninth grade—not bad for her time. She could have become a teacher of the first three grades of elementary school. As a teenager, she taught Sunday school to young children. I once asked her why she didn’t take the high-school correspondence course advertised in the Pittsburgh Courier. She voiced a lack of motivation and confidence. That, and a period of poor health, relegated her to managing the family and home and doing field work.

In Kiblah, Felix Lyles met and fell in love with Laura Stuckey in 1917. They were married in 1918. My father was a handsome dude—dark, with a degree of Choctaw blood as well. Laura was a pretty girl—lighter than he was, hair down her back—and she was part Cherokee. During slavery, masters often took advantage of female slaves, so like many black people, both had some degree of white blood. At that time Felix was twenty-six years old and Laura was twenty-two. Although both my parents’ families had owned the land on which they lived and farmed, Felix and Laura were destined to be mostly landless, sharecropping farmers.

Felix also felt a call to the ministry and became a CME preacher, though he had no specialized education for it, having left school after third grade. It was commonly believed that if you were called to preach, God would tell you what to say. I don’t think God knew about this.

My brother Fred was born in 1919, and eighteen months later, Ben was born. Fred was named Fred Holsey for Bishop Holsey, a beloved leader of the CME Church; Ben was named for Benjamin Franklin, and for his Uncle Ben. My parents began farming in Kiblah, but the land was more suited to truck farming than to cotton or corn, and they fell on hard times. They needed some assistance until he could find other work.

Felix took his young bride and the two babies back home to his mama and papa in Louisiana. They moved into his parents’ home in Farmersville and lived there until they could reorganize their finances and get on their feet. My mother always told us that Felix’s family, especially his sisters, did not accept her. And she never forgave them. Never. In my childhood, the prospect of taking a family trip to Farmersville to visit my father’s family and to see our first cousins just never came up in conversation. My mother would not have agreed to such a visit. Apparently, my father quietly kept up a correspondence with his mother but didn’t talk about it, since he was well aware of my mother’s feelings. If there is one thing that would cause my mother to go to purgatory, it would be her refusal to forgive Felix’s mother and his sisters for the way they treated her while she lived with them. Texarkana was less than two hundred miles from Farmersville, but not once did the whole family go visit my father’s people.

I saw my paternal grandmother once; later I met three of my father’s sisters and two of his brothers—Ben, who ran a café on Desiard Street in Monroe, and Finis, an army officer. Later, however, in my high school years, my father was briefly appointed to serve a church in Louisiana; and Laura and Felix again resided for a few months at his mother’s home.

But that first time, when my mother and father left his family home in Farmersville, they came back to Section 20, one of the tracts of farmland adjacent to Kiblah. There my brother Roy Lee was born. After a while they moved to Texarkana, and my father earned money cleaning yards and digging holes and worked with my uncle doing gardening and landscaping.

My father didn’t like having to get up and go to work every day. Mama got pregnant again with Felix Jr., who was called Junior. Then they decided to go back to Section 20. And that’s where Junior was born. They farmed and managed to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The children were still too young for school, so the family could move often without doing harm to them.

They stayed there a while and then decided to move back to Texarkana. My father had a job with the Texas & Pacific Railroad—a good opportunity. By this time, my mother was pregnant with me. At this time they lived on the Texas side of the state line. If you go to Texarkana, Texas, and see where Texarkana College is—back then, there were row houses there—that’s where I was born, at home. The midwife came. Lela Moffley, Bob Abraham’s sister, was a midwife—and allegedly an abortionist too. She lost quite a few women; sometimes they would hemorrhage to death. But she came and delivered me. I was born at 6:30 p.m., July 4, 1928. The midwife charged only five dollars; a doctor would have charged twenty-five dollars, which my father could not afford to pay. It was perhaps not the best time to be born. The Great Depression arrived a year and four months later, with the stock market crash in late October 1929.

As the fifth child, I occupied no distinctive place in the family hierarchy. My mother said I was a good baby. What she meant was that after bath and breakfast, it was back to bed and to sleep. I was born with an extra little finger on each hand. My father cut these vestigial sixth fingers off and put them in alcohol. I saw them once, and I don’t know what happened to them. I wish I did. Even today, the scars are faintly visible.

And then—would you believe?—my mother got pregnant again. My father got tired of going to work at the Texas & Pacific, working in the train yard, fixing the tracks—although it was a well-paying job. He made about ten dollars a day, and in 1928 that was good money. Do you know—they picked up and moved back to Section 20! That’s where Raymond was born in 1930. They stayed in Section 20 until he was about fifteen months old.

Then we moved again, to the Bryant farm near Highway 67, twelve miles north of Texarkana. The farm was between Clear Lake and Paup’s Spur, Arkansas. My father became the farm supervisor for Mr. James Bryant and Mr. Carl Sandberg. These two white men owned the farm together. Shortly before that, my uncle Absalom and my aunt Teresa had moved onto the Jamison plantation, where all the sharecroppers were related to each other. We would have moved to the Jamison plantation too, but my father thought that too many relatives living in one place created a recipe for confusion and conflict.

I remember Mr. Sandberg’s wife from when I was five years old. The Sandbergs were Jewish. Sometimes Mrs. Sandberg would come out to the farm alone. One day, she and my mother were talking—they weren’t paying me any attention—and Mrs. Sandberg opened up her blouse and showed my mother the mastectomy scar where the surgeon had removed her breast. I remember that vividly. She survived breast cancer in 1933.

Francis, the last child, was born in 1933. We lived on the Bryant farm, and the only things we had were a roof over our heads and food on the table. We had very little money.

On the Bryant plantation, the white kids were bused to school. The black kids had to walk—winter or summer—to the colored school in Paup’s Spur. White kids went to school September through May. The school session for black kids was less than nine months and was scheduled around the cotton planting, cultivation, and harvest. When I was working in the fields, I was paid fifty cents for ten hours’ work. The white boys were paid a dollar for eight hours’ work. I worked five and a half days. The white boys worked five days.

MY FATHER, THE PREACHER

A lthough as sharecroppers we were dependent on the plantation owner, my father was respected by him. That does not say much, but it does suggest how others were treated. He may have received better treatment because he was a preacher. Preachers were mediators between the oppressed and the oppressor, with most solutions favoring the oppressor.

This arrangement, for some, smacks of Uncle Tomism. But we must remember that Tomism at that time meant survival. It was, in many cases, a matter of life or death. The system of justice offered blacks no assurance that they would be treated fairly. Serving as mediator between the serfs and the plantation owner was the responsibility of the preacher. He stood between the sharecroppers and the owner, and the owner was the thin white line between these workers and the criminal justice system. If you keep yourself out of the grave, I will keep you out of the penitentiary, Mr. Anderson told his sharecroppers.

For what it’s worth, my father did what was expected of him, and he was able to mediate the issues to the satisfaction of all involved. What this means is that the sheriff would not come onto a plantation to arrest a farmhand without getting the plantation owner to sign off. If the crime was against a white person, the plantation owner would always permit the arrest. If it was black-on-black crime, the matter was negotiable. My father was respected as a leader by both whites and blacks.

Although my father and hard labor did not get along, he was an agent of reconciliation. He was a good and decent person. His conduct and lifestyle were above reproach. At no time was he held up to criticism for moral or ethical misconduct.

On the Bryant plantation, my father was the supervising farmer, and he was good at that job. He received his instructions from Mr. Bryant and passed them on to the sharecroppers. The farm was productive. The farmers got good settlements, and Mr. Bryant made a tidy profit.

My father had little formal education, but he was very intelligent. He was a good communicator and a gifted storyteller. His ability to tell vivid stories with action won the hearts of the children at his church. He could think on his feet, and he often conveyed a truth with the simplicity of a story. He had the ability to make it plain for people of limited education. He always approached serious matters with a sense of humor, and his best thinking occurred when he was calm and relaxed. This gave him a leg up as he mediated cases between blacks and blacks, and between whites and blacks.

We never lived in the communities where my father was appointed by the bishop to serve as pastor. Over the years, he served congregations in many little towns in Southwest Arkansas—Kiblah, Stamps, Nashville, Tollette, Mineral Springs, Noxaby, Washington, and others. He would farm Tuesday through Friday. Saturday morning he would rise early, dress, and go into town. After he had taken care of family matters, he would make himself available to the people for counseling and the burying of babies.

The infant mortality rate was high, mainly because of impure water and teenage births. The young boys and girls, like the birds and the bees, would get together, and more than one young girl was left pregnant and unmarried. These kids were too young to become good parents. In some cases, the girl would have the baby, give the child her own father’s last name, and the grandparents would claim the grandchild as their own child and allow their young daughter to grow to adulthood without the burden of parenting. The young mother and her child were like siblings.

Late Saturday, Daddy would make his way to his church. He would stay overnight with a church family. At that time, motels and hotels did not accommodate black people. He would visit the sick, counsel the troubled, and instruct the immature. The people lived miles apart, and Sunday worship was the time and place where they got to see one another. When they gathered on Sunday, it was a meeting of joys and concerns, of death and dying, of sickness and health, of affirmation and humiliation—of the way life was.

The people would be waiting for my father. Most of them did not have a radio, a telephone, or the ability to read a newspaper. Their sources of news were the preacher and the teacher. On Sunday the preacher was in the pulpit, and the teacher was in the Sunday school.

Daddy was in Mineral Springs the night Tebow, the son of a faithful parishioner, was shot. My father had arrived and finished dinner. From the front door came a scream and the sound of crying. Sister Maybelle, who was at the door, had just heard that her son Tebow had been shot. His condition was unknown. He had been taken to the nearest hospital, thirty miles away. Sister Maybelle needed help. My father took her hand, sat her down, and asked her what had happened. What was the problem?

My son was seeing a girl from the Clark farm, she said. Boys from the Clark farm did not look kindly upon courtship between Bryant farm boys and Clark farm girls. Sharp words were exchanged, and Nathan, Mr. George’s son, shot Tebow. Not until the next day would they know whether he was dead or alive. They had no telephone to make contact and no car to drive to the hospital. It would be a long night. My father was there for Sister Maybelle the whole time.

The next morning, word came. Tebow’s condition was serious but not life-threatening. Sister Maybelle wept for joy, and my father prayed. It was now time for him to get ready for Sunday morning worship and preaching, without the benefit of a good night’s sleep.

FRED AT AGE FIFTEEN

I n 1933 my oldest brother, Fred, was fifteen years old. He often came into conflict with my father. The environment we lived in was violent. The time and place and people were loose morally and ethically. It was not a question of who got pregnant out of wedlock—it was who didn’t get pregnant out of wedlock. Virgins were like needles in haystacks, hard to find.

One Sunday night, Fred went out. He didn’t come home, as promised, by ten o’clock. He wasn’t there at twelve, and he wasn’t there at one. Everybody was awake, waiting for Fred to come home. My mother and father were walking the floor. My father said, Let him go for what he’s worth. And my mother said, That’s all right, but he’s my boy. When Fred finally sashayed up at three o’clock that morning, my parents asked where he had been. He insisted that some white boys had kept him from coming home—a cock-and-bull story. He was sleepy and tired. They were so damn glad to see him that they just let him go to sleep.

But when he awakened, my mother was on his case, and everybody else was involved, because our four-bedroom home was small, and you could hear her. After letting Fred sleep for a couple of hours, she got him up and read him the riot act. He wanted to argue back, but my father was there, and he said, Don’t you talk back to your mother. She was saying she had raised him to tell the truth and she knew that white boys had not captured him and kept him from coming home—and that, in fact, he had been out with Justine.

Fred was fifteen and Justine was seventeen—and she was a beautiful girl. She was also as fast as Secretariat. Tommy Lollis, the only black person in the community who had a car, was arranging for Fred and Justine to get married. And my mother and father were fighting that. They maintained that he was too young. But he had been having sex with Justine.

As it turned out, he was not the only one having sex with Justine—eventually, he contracted gonorrhea. He knew where he got it—and that ended that relationship. He needed a cure. At first they tried raw eggs, and that didn’t work. I don’t know why raw eggs were supposed to be a treatment for gonorrhea. The more egg-laced milkshakes Fred drank, the worse he got. When he urinated, it hurt. My father took him to the doctor, Dr. Jamison, who took Fred’s thing, put it on an anvil, and hit it with a rubber mallet—chooo!—and all that mucus, pus, came out. The doctor gave him a regimen of sulfa drugs, and he recovered.

In 1936 my father got the idea that he needed a car. Why? We don’t know. But he got it. It was a Chevrolet—a 1932 model, I think. It was black—was there any other color? And this car just added fuel to the conflict between my father and Fred.

Fred learned to drive my father’s car. His friend Buddy Boy taught him to drive. This just tore up our family, because every weekend that fifteen-year-old boy wanted that car. And what business did a fifteen-year-old have with a car at that time?—no seat belts, no driver’s license, nothing. Daddy never learned to drive. He was always dependent on Fred to transport him. Ben and, eventually, Roy and Junior learned to drive. I didn’t learn until I was in seminary.

Once Fred got his license, his relationship with my father was even rockier. Earlier, my mother had taken sick. She suffered from periodontal disease, and it’s a wonder that we didn’t lose her. Her teeth were bad. It cost two dollars to go to the dentist, but we didn’t have it. So my father pulled Fred out of school to stay with my mother. She was sick for about three years. And when she got well, Fred’s head was at some other place. He didn’t want to go back to school. He was Ben’s oldest brother, so Ben decided that if Fred wasn’t going to go to school, he wasn’t either. So he dropped out too.

I am sure that those boys later wished my parents had stood up to them and insisted that they stay in school and graduate from high school. They paid dearly for not having an education.

WHEN FRED SHOT HOLSEY

I t was a beautiful fall day. My oldest brother, Fred, was fifteen going on twenty-five. He and his friends—Jake, Jack, Holsey, and Manuel—decided they wanted to go hunting. My father was not at home. My mother didn’t want them to go, but she gave her consent, and off they went.

About an hour later, one of the boys came running and screaming at the top of his voice. Come quick! Fred has shot Holsey. My mother raced out of the house toward the woods as fast as she could, with all the children following close on her heels. Mr. Nixon, our neighbor, hitched up his wagon and followed. We didn’t know what to expect.

When we reached the hunting party, Holsey was on the ground. Fred was standing there with his shotgun broken down. He was scared. Holsey had lost a lot of blood and was in great pain. He had been shot in the knee. The boys had trapped a squirrel in the bush and were trying to flush him out. Holsey stood in front of the squirrel and Fred behind the squirrel. When Fred pulled the trigger, he missed the squirrel and hit Holsey. It was an entirely preventable accident, had they been