On the Road Riding the Big Dog
Further reflections from my Journey through the New South
It was a strange sensation cruising through Georgia early in the morning on the day the eagle files, reversing General Sherman’s route from Atlanta to the sea, while listening to a conversation about lynching on “Democracy Now!,” hosted by Amy Goodman on Pacifica Radio. It was recorded from an earlier show and I was listening on my Walkman as NYU Sociologist Troy Duster, and Princeton historian Nell Painter discussed the history of lynching in the US. The discussion had been occasioned by the apology issued by the United States Senate atoning for the failure of that body to pass a federal anti-lynching law during a century in which black Americans were publicly crucified for the slightest offense to the prerogatives of white power, real or imagined.
As both of these scholars pointed out, the real significance of the formal apology from the Senate was that it acknowledged a period when crimes against black humanity were either codified in law, or tacitly accepted in custom. And both of them believed that Senate’s acknowledgement of this practice provided and opportunity to commence a national dialogue about the consequences of America’s racial caste system on the status of whites and blacks in America today. A conversation that is long overdue, because we cannot progress beyond where we are in race relations until this question has been honestly examined.
Riding through sleepy little Georgia towns like Hinesville and Richmond Hill on my way from the lovely coastal city of Brunswick, where I had said goodbye to my senior daughter Sandra and boarded a 6:30 am bus for the seven hour ride to Atlanta, I experienced many scenes that conjured up images of the old south I remembered from the bad old days when “white supremacy” was the unambiguous governing philosophy of the south, and its institutional arrangements were rigorously enforced by ritual murder. In order to service the small towns that used to be whistle stops back in the golden age of passenger trains, the big dog prowled the back roads, affording me a glimpse of what’s left of the old south that is enshrined in memory and legend, and preserved in history and literature.
As I looked at the thick woods whose trees were draped with gray Spanish moss, the open fields with occasional flocks of grazing cows, the grand houses and humble abodes announcing the inhabitant’s station in society, I was reminded what life was like for black folk during most of this state’s history, the centuries old injustices that white Americans are trying their best to forget or deny. In the cinema of my mind I could envision gangs of black folks in tattered rags toiling from first light to deep dusk, wresting earth’s bounty from the red clay soil. And I could imagine the whips, and chains, and rapes, and all the forms of coercion and violence that were a normal part of the life of African Americans in a society where they were defined as three quarters of a man at the birth of the nation. And some seventy years later, in 1857, the Supreme Court would announce in the Dred Scott Decision: “The Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect!”
A Land Watered with African Blood, Sweat and Tears
Slave labor tilling these fields was the economic foundation of the south
The countless crimes against the humanity of African people are a subject that now embarrasses America’s claims as a land that has always stood for freedom and justice, a claim that the US elite has used to justify their invasion of countries like Iraq. Thus African Americans are implored to forgive and forget. But to ask a victim to forget and forgive a crime that the perpetrator has never admitted committing, nor formally apologized for, or attempted to redress, is an outrage against the very notion of justice. I however would argue, like Frederick Douglass almost a hundred and fifty years ago, “Now is not the time for the gentle shower but the whirlwind!”
Thus rather than forget the bloody history of Georgia which, like Surinam, began as a prison colony where the dregs of British society were settled, we need to remember this history. One of the most pleasurable ways of doing this is turn to the writings of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois in his 1903 revelations of our spiritual strivings in The Souls of Black Folk, and Jean Toomer’s path breaking Harlem Renaissance novel Cane. It would be quite enlightening to compare the portraits they painted of rural and urban life in the peach state with life in the region today.
While there remains little of the poetic beauty in Georgia’s countryside that Toomer portrays in Blood Burning Moon, the tendency towards the worship of dollars that DuBois saw developing and warns against in his essay On the Wings of Atalanta, has fully come to pass. Atlanta is the ultimate consumer society, where vulgar materialism runs amuck and most people’s dreams rarely extend beyond the next trinket they wish to acquire. And, in one of the many perversions of Jesus Christ’s teachings that has been the hall mark of Christianity in the American South; they justify their lust for material things – a kind of modern idolatry – with biblical references. It is called “The Prosperity gospel.” Here the connections are clear between the values of Protestantism and capitalism that the great German sociologist, Max Weber, described in his classic text Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic. And, of paramount importance to us today, as historians of the holocaust have shown: It was also evangelical protestants – much like those who put Bush in the White House – that was the backbone of the Nazi movement in Germany that put Hitler in power.
The city of Savanna, which was famed for its wealth and cultural life in Ante-Bellum times, offers a revealing look at life in a contemporary southern city. Perhaps the most impressive symbol of progress and modernity is the magnificent suspension bridge that spans the bay. Like the famous Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, this bridge is a work of art. And although I advance this as a suspicion only, I’d bet the family jewels that the structural engineer who designed it was inspired by Colonel Robeling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, who sought not simply to solve the problem of spanning a roadway across the Hudson Bay, but to create “a work of art in steel.” But since the triumph of the cost accountants, those calculator totin philistines who dictate the aesthetics of large structures by ruthlessly controlling its cost – as if a price can be placed upon beauty – art has been abandoned in favor of economics.
But not so in Savanna; here esthetics was not sacrificed to the imperatives of cost accounting. This bridge, like the Brooklyn Bridge, is not only a work of art but the also state of the art in design engineering. Unlike the Brooklyn Bridge, or the more functional and efficiently constructed George Washington and Verrazano bridges, the cables do not run all the way to the piers on each side of the bay, instead they rise like the steeple of a grand temple to human ingenuity cast in stainless steel, towering over the landscape like a modern Colossus of Rhodes. However, when this imposing edifice is viewed from certain perspectives it reveals a harrowing portrait of the stratification of life in Savanna.
A Tale of Two Cities
In Black Savanna
The opulence and progress symbolized by the bridge sharply contrasts with the unemployed and impoverished young men, who are mostly black, who dwell in public projects – government subsidized hovels – and the homeless shelter near the bus station. When I peeped them hovering around the river banks I thought of Katrina’s victims and reflected on the fact that should a massive hurricane smash into Savanna they would fare no better. These dramatic cleavages in wealth and opportunity are, alas, the true face of the New South. They no longer lynch young black men down here; they simply starve them into crime or homelessness if they belong to the working class. But for the well educated bourgeois blacks, the sweet smell of the bitch goddess of success is everywhere. Hence Afro-Americans live in a schizoid Dickensian era: “The Best of Times and the worst of times.”
The Homeless Shelter Across From Bus Station
A place of refuge for the down and out
Let me hasten to add that I mention this fact only as a statement of reality; it is not intended as an indictment of the success of the newly minted black middle class. For most of these people have arrived at their station in life through hard work and serious study, which required personal discipline and the ability to defer gratification – the ability to forego the party now so that they can later party for life. Thus, unlike the progeny of the plutocrats, they didn’t inheriet wealth and thus deserve what they have acquired. If I have any serious criticism of this new black bourgeoisie, it is that far too many of them spend far too little time strategizing and struggling to plan and implement policies and programs that would uplift those left behind and cast upon the scrapheap of society by the impersonal forces of unregulated free market capitalism. Too many of them have gleefully joined the orgy of vulgar materialism that is the hall mark of the ultimate consumer society.
Yet for Dr. Dubois, who first called for the creation of a highly educated black middle class in his 1903 essay “Of the Talented Tenth”- which was written while he lived in Atlanta – this kind of leadership was their reason for being. And he made this abundantly clear a half century later in his 1958 book In Battle for Peace, written a year after Dr. E. Franklin Frazier published his revealing book Black Bourgeoisie. Yet I hasten to add, in spite of the shortcomings of many members of the new Afro-American middle class, the fact remains that it is from the “Talented Tenth,” which has grown into the “Talented Third,” that that most of the positive ideas and actions that are presently guiding black Americans to higher around and greater aspirations come from this class.
Furthermore, the disparagement of their success – which they achieved against tremendous odds in a society where, despite the civil rights laws passed in the 1960’s, institutional racism lives on in custom if not in law – is to risk celebrating failure the way some of us radicals did in the sixties. This misguided strategy led to what I now recognize as the romance of the lumpen element, most notably by the Black Panthers, an ideology that has now come back to plague us in Gangta rap. These ideas were clearly at the root of the antisocial bravado that led to the demise of Tupuc Shakur, a gifted artist who could not adjust to his success and thus was destroyed in a tragedy of his own making. Tupac’s story reminds me of the tale of a six foot man who drowned in three feet of water; all he had to do was recognize the reality of his situation and stand up!
However, while celebrating their achievements, we must also be wary of how the success of the black bourgeoisie is often employed to camouflage the true condition of the black working class by right-wing apologists for the glaring inequities in contemporary American society. And down in Georgia, such apologists come in all colors, just check out Uncle Clarence Thomas, who hails from a little country town in these parts.
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When I inquired about the state of race relations in Brunswick Georgia, my daughter Sandra – a smart and godly woman – simply told me that the white folks were a lot nicer than they used to be but it was still hard for young black men to land good paying blue collar jobs at the mills. She said the white women in Brunswick were crazy about black men but white men were not happy to have them as competitors – in the marketplace or the bedroom. In fact, my grandson Kelvin, Sandra’s only child, who is the same age as my son Samori – his uncle- is experiencing problems that arise directly from this racial competition.
Married to a southern white woman and working with her as a team in managing a motel situated on a notorious vice ridden strip in Brunswick, where he is known as “Big Kel,” Kelvin is acutely aware of the residual cultural and institutional racism in the “new south.” Unable to even imagine what my generation endured under the southern caste system, most of what bugs him would have been considered light-weight action in my day, Kelvin is well aware that everything ain’t kosher down here in the “dirty south,” dispite what appears to be monumental changes in race relations since I left the south four decades ago. In fact, he is so aware of the residual racism and closet neo- Nazi white supremacist that he has written some brilliant comic skits based on such characters.
The young black working class males I met while moving around town with him were quite candid in discussing their desperate economic plight. One young man in his early twenties told me how he went out daily in a futile effort to find employment at a living wage, supporting himself by cutting hair in his apartment – an illegal activity without a license. Although I think the arguments of right-wing economists, like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, that the solution to the problems of the unemployed and underemployed is to scrap all government regulation of private enterprise are ludicrous, I think it equally absurd that this young man could have problems with the law for providing a constructive service that people want. Another twenty-something male, who was struggling to make ends meet laboring in a fast food joint, discerned in the course of our conversation that I was not religious, picked up his Bible and announced with heart rending passion, “Yo Old School, this is the only thing that’s keeping a lotta dudes I know from going off and hurtin somebody; cause it’s rough tryna make it out here.”
The Illusion of tranquility in Brunswick Georgia
These pristine streets disguise the perculating race and class conflicts
And so does these elegant Victorians
A blast from the past conjuring up a genteel life
Although he was a friendly young man who appeared to be of fine character, he had been forced by economic necessity to become a vendor of wisdom weed – another economic crime. And because I believe the anti-marijuana laws represent the “Tyranny of the majority” that Alexis de Touqville warned us about as a danger to democracy – as well as my commitment to supporting local entrepreneurs, especially when they offer high quality merchandise at fair prices, I patronized the young entrepreneur’s parlor in the spirit of defending democracy and promoting community enterprise. As I sat and sampled his wares, mellow as a cello, the door was suddenly kicked in and we were confronted with a masked robber wielding a Glock!
Although he was talking loud gangsta talk and ordering us around while holding the Roscoe in that sideways style that has been popularized in New Jack flicks and gangsta rap videos, it was clear that he was as scared as we were. Since I was no stranger to gun totin desperadoes – having lived on the edge of Washington Heights during the Crack wars of the 80’s – I maintained my cool. Furthermore, aside from my training in the use of weapons by the Strategic Air Command, including knife fighting – and I had my razor on me – I’ve been steeled in the fires of struggle and trained for trouble! So when it became clear to me that murder was not on the gunman’s mind, that he only intended to fleece my host of his weed and coin, I really chilled out and considered the irony of a New York sharpie getting taken off by a Georgia boy in a one horse town. I would have never lived it down.
All of this, however, brings us back to the central point that Professor Troy Duster was making. As one of the authors of the critically important study White Washing Race, Prof. Duster is concerned with how racial discrimination operates today, after the collapse of the legal racial caste system. And he argues that the prison /industrial complex is used as a major form of socio/political controls which limits Afro-American competition with whites for the economic goods of this affluent society. When one considers that a prison record restricts the ex-con’s access to the job market and often denies them the right to vote, the veracity of Dusters argument is undeniable. When we observe the problems that young black men with clean records are having finding gainful employment – studies show that white men with criminal records routinely fare better – one does not have to be a seer in order to imagine what they will face when seeking honest employment. And this, needless to say, is the main reason why prisons have had a revolving door for so many young black males.
Down here in the south on can also clearly see how economic hardship –along with a hyper-patriotic mindset born of a bizarre mixture of guns, God and football – leads young black and white males into the military services, where they wind up in places like Iraq fighting the imperialist wars of the plutocrats. Even as I write, the story of Sergeant Ricky Stanley is featured on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Titled “A Soldiers Fear and Faith,” it tells us how this humble family man from the small hamlet of Dublin Georgia struggles to make sense of the war in Iraq where his National Guard unit was dispatched. I was just in Dublin the day before, and I can imagine what the horrors of life must be like in Iraq when I read how badly he yearns to return to this boring Hick town, which Sgt. Stanley makes sound like paradise.
Although he had a job working in a factory, like many week end soldiers Stanley probably joined the National Guard to defend the homeland and make a few extra dollars on the side. And like almost everybody down here in Georgia he believes God is watching over him in spite of the fact that he is part of an invading army, stationed in a desert thousands of miles from home, in constant danger of being blown to bits over a criminal policy concocted by lying scoundrels! For to my mind “Dirty Dick” Chaney, George II, Carl Rove, “Scooter” Libby, Condoslezza and the rest of the Bushmen look just like what I’d imagine the devil and his minions would look like in twenty-first century America.
Yet Sgt. Stanley doesn’t even suspect that the Devil may have had a hand in what looks to me like a god-forsaken position that he now finds himself in. Instead he recounts an incident where he was very nearly killed by a circle of bombs rigged by the insurgents, and concludes “Only by the grace of God are we alive. Even though we’ve got .50 caliber machine guns, I’ll take God and his word any day.” His response was typical of the type of fundamentalist Christian that I have repeatedly encountered all over the south. Perhaps nothing demonstrates his faith that God is personally watching over him more than his mantra before going out on a combat mission: “Oh Lord, dispatch your angels to watch over me tonight.”
From all indications, Sergeant Stanley doesn’t have a clue why he is in Iraq, and although he complains about being sent out on so many dangerous missions when other soldiers are not even being trained to undertake such missions, he does not appear to believe that his race has anything to do with it. However when I showed a friend a picture of Stanley leading a prayer meeting in Iraq, he thought it was being held in a black church down here in Georgia. That’s how segregated black and white Christians are when they pray, even when they face death together on a daily basis!
Yet, like all of America’s wars since Korea, black youths make up a disproportionate percentage of infantry forces, which is the most dangerous place to be in a war. That’s why so many of our young people are returning home from the hellish experience of combat broken of body and spirit…if they return at all. Hence there is a bitter irony in the fact that the Christian revivalist movement sweeping the nation – in which beaucoup black folks are stalwart Christian soldiers – is a major reason why Bush is in the White House wreaking havoc on the black community and the Third World.
The other-worldly, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific approach encouraged by this fundamentalist dogma is a large part of the reason why the electorate, Boobus Americanus, is so shamefully ignorant of the facts they need to know in order to make intelligent decisions about whom to put in power. Hence Thomas Jefferson’s admonition that the claims of religionist should be subjected to the rigorous test of reason remains good advice not taken. And his prediction that an ignorant electorate will elect the worst people to office has come true. No one bears more guilt for this tragic state of affairs than the Evangelical Christians of the “dirty South!”
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Playthell Benjamin
Atlanta Georgia
Summer 2007
Come Sunday In Brunswick Georgia
Posted in Theater, Travels in the New South with tags Black Church, Brunswick Georgia, playthell's commentary on December 16, 2009 by playthellA Church For The High and Mighty!
I had only arrived a little over twenty four hours ago; slipping into town with the rising sun, 7: o-clock on Saturday morning, when the sleepy little town of Brunswick Georgia was fast asleep. My senior daughter Sandra met me at the bus stop and at my request we drove down to the waterfront to watch the shrimping trawlers steaming out into the Atlantic Ocean, “the biggety blue,” as the old salty dogs I once sailed out of the port of Philadelphia with called the ocean seas. I looked around and suspected the sea food would be good…and I was right.
Although Brunswick lacks the sheer beauty of St. Augustine Florida, in some ways it reminded me of the nation’s oldest city, which lies perched on the Atlantic coast just 108 miles due south. It was not only the white washed wooden trawlers, or docks made of faded gray weather beaten wood, that evoked memories of my boyhood home; the gray Spanish moss that drapes the many live oak trees filled me with bitter/sweet nostalgia. And the quiet ambience of the city compelled me to reflect upon the virtues of small town southern life. After all, the best things about my own character were forged in one.
The religious passions I had encountered elsewhere in the south were also percolating in Brunswick, and it didn’t take long to recognize that the battle against Satan was in full force. The spirit of the lord seemed to be everywhere, infecting the believers with a sublime joy. I first noticed it in the farmers market, where those hawking their wares were certain that the lord had personally blessed them with the bounty of the land. This was true even among those farmers who seemed threadbare and quietly desperate. Perhaps they felt that, like Job, the lord was simply testing their faith with hard times.
But one cheery lady, another white haired alabaster Georgia peach, seemed especially animated by the spirit of Christ as she related a yarn about how she was moved by the spirit of Christian charity to give a homeless man a jar of her famous fig preserves and a home made biscuit. Everyone repeatedly thanked the lord for the beautiful morning, and for sparing them to see it. They acknowledged each other as Christian solders – especially my daughter and the cheery Ms. Figgie – and they testified that the works of the Lord are good and righteous in all their manifestations. I had hardly been in town an hour before I was engulfed in a gale of religious passion, and it was only Saturday; Sunday would be a different story.
We spent the rest of Saturday filling each other in with stories about family and friends and preparing a feast of fresh vegetables, rice, potato salad, cornbread, real lemonade and a variety of freshly caught sea foods. My grandson Kelvin “Big Kel” Whitfield and his wife Lisa – whom I was meeting for the first time – also came over and brought some of their friends to meet me. It was an interesting mix of personalities. The young folk were bold, optimistic, and infatuated with various brands of folly. My daughter’s friends, on the other hand, were mostly middle-aged, man-less but saved women who claimed to be done with the foolishness of this world and were storing up blessings for the hereafter by doing the lord’s work here on earth 24/7. As they would often reiterate, theirs was a purpose driven life, and their purpose was to serve Jesus Christ and praise his name with every waking hour. Yet the careful way they decorated themselves, and the sunshine smiles they beamed at the eligible brethren, betrayed a lingering interest in the opposite sex.
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Come Sunday things started bustling around the house early as the Christian soldiers arose with the sun, carefully laying out their uniforms so as to pass inspection with the lord. This was the day that the pious saved souls lived for. This was the day that they visited their father’s house and sanctified their souls in the body of Christ. None was more dedicated to this ritual than Sandra. That’s why I had turned down an opportunity to travel into New Orleans with the Dillon family, one of the city’s most influential clans, as they returned to assess the damage the wind and floods of Katrina had done to their homes. It was a reporter’s dream, but I had promised Sandra that I would be in Brunswick to attend church with her; so I cut out from Baton Rouge and headed for southeastern Georgia. And on Sunday morning I groomed and decorated myself to the height of good fashion and escorted my daughter to the New Covenant Church.
It didn’t take long to discover the high regard with which my senior daughter is held by the members of her congregation. She was admired as much for her artistic abilities as her tireless work in behalf of the church. I would later be shown several bill boards for theatrical productions she had presented under the auspices of the church. She had served as writer, director, choreographer, and designer of the sets and costumes. I knew that by some mysterious alchemy she had managed to touch the sacred fire and become a poet, but I didn’t know that she had also become a multi-talented thespian. And she is lauded for her talents in spite of the fact that she has no formal training in any of these arts. Sandra is a true autodidact. Upon reflection I began to recognize that, like the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach, she has found her muse, audience and patron in the church. And that’s about as convincing evidence of God’s grace as I have yet seen.
From Africa to America: A musical Pageant
A historical Odyssey into the African Diaspora
A Swirl of Colors and movement!
Real Black Magic!
Written, Choreographed, Costumed and Directed by Sandra
There are many impressive churches in Georgia, grand edifices with steeples that reach for the skies, but Sandra’s church was modest, though well decorated; a church where humble working people could feel at home. Yet in spite of its unpretentious architecture, I’m convinced that if the spirit of God was anywhere in Georgia on that Sunday morning, she was in that little church in Brunswick. You could hear in the music, which was divine. In this holy sanctuary the worshippers were bathed in the word of the lord as it poured from the mouths of passionate preachers, and the word would rejuvenate them and make them feel brand new, cleansed of the sins of this world. In church, everybody was bedecked in their finest garments, and it was hard to tell some of the saved sisters who shouted out to God from the painted Jezebels and shameless hussies who were shaking their pulcritudinous “Afri-cans” in the juke joints on Saturday night past. Some said that’s because they were the same crowd!
Since I was a stranger in town I had no way of telling who’s who, but if they were anything like most other church people I know it’s the same crowd alright. I surmised this from the first hand reports I have received from professional church musicians – most of whom are versatile musical artists who play in a variety of venues – who assure me that they get more action on church gigs than playing the cabarets. This may sound strange to many readers, especially true Christian soldiers, but there are some fairly obvious reasons why the church choir has often been a cauldron of sexual licentiousness and myriad debaucheries.
First of all, as the most perceptive people who study the mating game and religious ecstasy well know, passion is a class of phenomena; and those who are capable of experiencing it in one of life’s arenas are capable of feeling it in others. To make a short story shorter: Passion is passion whether religious or sexual. When we add to this emotionally combustible atmosphere all the lonely people who go to church in search of fellowship of some kind, we have the perfect atmosphere for mortal sins of the flesh such as fornication and adultery.
The Reverend Doctor Michael Eric Dyson has written candidly about the lust and licentiousness that flourish in the black protestant church, and the prolific scholar/priest the Reverend Doctor Andrew Greeley, has pulled the covers back and revealed the tempestuous sexual passions – homosexual and heterosexual – among all levels of the priesthood in his insightful and once shocking novel, The Cardinal Sins. The powerful novel Elmer Gantry, which was made into the classic movie starring Burt Lancaster and the luscious Shirley Jones that set my youthful erotic imagination spinning out of control, also provides an insightful look into religiously inspired sexual passions. And what’s more it has long been rumored, and can now be backed up with first hand testimony provided to researchers that the church choir is often a passion pit of homosexual assignations.
In fact, a black gay sociologist based in Atlanta recently showed me a study that he is presently working on that will soon make these suppressed homo-erotic narratives public, exposing the hypocritical anti-homosexual stance of most churches. One long time church singer told me “If it weren’t for gay men there would be no music in these churches.” Having sung in the church since she was a young lass, over forty years now, the singer knows whereof she speaks. Hence it makes good sense for gay men to cruise the church choirs in search of deep inner fulfillment. In spite of the preacher’s admonitions against it, or the proscriptions against buggery in the bible, the church choir remains a prime cruising ground for love starved homosexual males and females in search of forbidden fruit. The situation is such that it prompted one devoted deacon to remark to this writer: “All the troubles in the church start in the choir!”
God’s Eunuchs or Priestly Pervs?
The rape of children is a recurring sin among the “celebate” priesrhood
Nowhere has the blatant hypocrisy toward homosexuality been more egregious than in the Catholic Church. Here, where all sexual activity by devotees of the religious orders –priests and nuns alike – is deemed a sin, forbidden fruit is especially attractive. Its human nature and no amount of pious preachment can alter it. After all, was it not Adam’s inability to resist the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden that brought the downfall of man from a state of grace? Thus when all of those closet perverts who join the Catholic priesthood, desperately attempting to avoid confronting the demons conjured up by their refusal to deal with their lust for forbidden pleasures, are placed in close unsupervised activities with innocent youngsters who are programmed to trust them, the rape of children is increasingly the result.
All this has left an indelible blot upon the character of the Roman Catholic Church and the honor of Pope John Paul II, the late Bishop of Rome, a good friar under whose reign the mass rape of Children occurred while he looked askance in an unholy charade designed to preserve the earthly reputation of the Church, thus failing to exercise his responsibility as chief steward of that church and keeper of the faith. For this the Pope, now beatified and bound for sainthood, would have had to satisfy the commands of a higher power, not serve the petty politics of the church!
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Compared to such mortal sins against the word committed by the Catholic hierarchy, a few painted and daringly attired Jezebels in the Pews seeking absolution in my daughters church – even if on a temporary basis – was a welcome sight. It was easy to tell who among us felt in the need of prayer, because at the invitation of Pastor Albert Armstrong – offered with arms outstretched majestically – the congregants flocked down to the well in front of the pulpit to repent their sins and seek God’s forgiveness and blessings through prayer.
As I watched them I couldn’t help wondering how they imagined God would weigh their sins – their failures of the flesh and petty avarice – Vs. George Bush’s fleecing of the poor to further enrich the rich, or the slaughter of innocents for example. And worse still, his unrepentant blasphemy! I also wondered if they thought having impure sexual thoughts, or lusting after their neighbor’s spouse, was a graver sin than paying taxes to a government that enables the Bushmen to commit mass murder against weak and unoffending peoples, and to witness these crimes against humanity – the most perfect of God’s creations whom she cast in her own dusky image – without protest.
In spite of a burning desire to interrogate them, I never got to ask them these questions because they didn’t think in such terms. For them morality was personal, these are the sort of people who were more alarmed about Clinton screwing around with Monica Lewinsky in an ante-room in the White House, than George Bush screwing us all from the Oval Office. The truth, as near as I could tell, is that most Christians who are devoted to other-worldly concerns don’t even pay any attention to the news; which, to my mind, is a real sacrilege.
Dr Martin Luther King
A Modern Prophet
Unfortunately, the Christian revivalism presently sweeping the south is not the prophetic Christianity of Dr. Martin Luther King, or his longtime comrade in the struggle Dr. Joseph Lowery, who told me in Atlanta a few days after I attended New Covenant Church, that he continues to see participation in the struggle against injustice here and now as the best way to serve the will of God. But since the fundamentalists are certain that this sinful world is doomed to destruction by fire come Judgment Day, and many believe that we are clearly living in the last days – they can see it in the signs of the times – the truly righteous are spending all of their time getting ready to meet their maker. And that means, first and foremost, “getting right with the lord,” which leaves them precious little time for contemplating the troubles of this world.
On this Sunday morning the sermon, which they referred to as “Praising the Word,” was delivered by Rev. Catherine Armstrong, the wife in the joint pastorate of New Covenant. She wore her hair in a short “au natural” style, and was both bright and articulate as she delivered a straight forward message on the need for people to stand up and make a stab at achieving their dreams while seeking the lord’s help through prayer. She was both erudite and funny, as she lifted the spirits of the congregants with her sermon. Like the old time preachers in James Weldon Johnson’s epic poems God’s Trombones, this preacher was a poet, “with all the devices of eloquence at her command.” And she was preaching in just the sort of church the great novelist and folklorist Zora Neal Hurston had in mind when she said a preacher “must be a poet in order to survive in a Negro pulpit.”
Zora the Word Sorcerer!
As I sat and listened to this soul stirring sister I was reminded that it was the unschooled divines to whom these praises were addressed, Johnson in his poems and Hurston in her wonderful novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, both written within a couple of hundred miles from each other in the same part of Florida where I grew up. So by the end of my visit to this little Georgia church with the mighty spirit, after I had joined the congregation in physically driving the devil out of New Covenant’s sanctuary and witnessed my daughter raise her voice in sacred song, waving her hands above her head in time with the music, channeling the holy spirit on sound waves to the soul, I too, unrepentant infidel that I am, felt uplifted by the spirit of their sermons and the spiritual power of their songs.
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Playthell Benjamin
Harlem, New York
December 15, 2009