with their lot.
And so it was for me, as a child in the Depression, with that same practical innocence. So long as I was surrounded only with what I knew, that's what life had to offer and I took it. As a noticeably
THE JUDGES 193
pretty child, and later on, a striking girl, I had my own small way in the world. My father, Bud Wharton, was an eye doctor. We lived on the outskirts of Jackson proper, in a scrubby settlement called Pearl. Dad saw patients in the back room of the house, which had metal cabinets for his nested lenses that tinkled like glass wind chimes when you opened and shut the drawers. Up front, we ran a store. We had to, because in hard times everyone's eyes get better or at least good enough. In the store we sold fresh produce my cousins brought in from their truck farm, and also dry goods and a little ammunition. We squeaked by. We all lived upstairs. At one time there were eleven altogether, cousins from Noxubee County, uncles who came and went with the picking season, and my old Aunt Tess. She was a mother to me if I needed one. What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace." And that was more or less what we all believed in.
I don't think Dad ever forgave me, later on, for becoming a Free Will Baptist. He failed to see why anyone would need more bluster and testimony about God's Plan than what he found, for example, within the fine-veined world of an eyeball. That, and a good chicken dinner on Sundays. Dad drank and cursed some but not in any way that mattered. He taught me to cook, and otherwise let me run wild with my cousins. On the outskirts of Pearl lay a wilderness. There we discovered pitcher-plant bogs where we'd hike up our dresses, sink on our knees in the rich black muck, and stare car-nivory right in the lips, feeding spiders to the pitcher plants. This was what I worshiped and adored as a child: miracles of a passionate nature. Later on, we discovered kissing boys.Then tent revivals.
It was some combination of all those things that ran me up against Nathan Price. I was seventeen, bursting utterly with happiness. Arm in arm we girls marched forward in our thin cotton dresses with all eyes upon us. Tossing our hair, down the aisle we went between the rows of folding chairs borrowed from the funeral home, right straight to the front of the crowded tent for the Lord's roll call. We threw ourselves at Jesus with our unsaved bosoms heav-
194
ing. We had already given a chance to all the other red-necked hooligans in Pearl by then, and were looking for someone who better deserved us. Well, why not Jesus? We were only in it for the short run anyhow?we assumed He would be gone by the end of the week, the same as all others.
But when the tent folded up, I found I had Nathan Price in my life instead, a handsome young red-haired preacher who fell upon my unclaimed soul like a dog on a bone. He was more sure of himself than I'd thought it possible for a young man to be, but I resisted him. His seriousness dismayed me. He could be jolly with old ladies in crepe de chine dresses, patting their hunched backs, but with me he could not let go the subject of heaven except to relieve it occasionally with his thoughts on hell.
Our courtship crept up on me, mainly because I didn't recognize that's what it was. I thought he was just bound and determined to save me. He'd park himself on our dusty front-porch steps, fold his suit jacket neatly on the glider, roll up his sleeves, and read to me from the Psalms and Deuteronomy while I shelled beans. How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain? The words were mysterious and beautiful, so I let him stay. My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear "Christ almighty in the crap-house!" at any dress with too many buttons. Now here was one from whose mouth came, The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times; and He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Oh, I wanted those green pastures. I could taste the pale green sweetness of the blade of wheat, stripped and sucked between my teeth. I wanted to lie down with those words and rise up speaking a new language. So I let him stay.
As a young and ambitious revival preacher, his circuit was supposed to divide him equally between Rankin, Simpson, and Copiah counties, but I'll tell you what: more souls got saved in Pearl that summer'than the Lord probably knew what to do with. Nathan hardly missed a Sunday chicken dinner at our house. Aunt Tess finally said, "You're a-feeding him anyways, child, why not go on and marry him if that's what he's after."
THE JUDGES 195
I suppose I'll never know if that was what he was after. But when I told him Aunt Tess was more or less needing an answer, before committing more chickens to the project, the idea of marriage suited him well enough so that he owned it as his. I hardly had time to think about my own answer?why, it was taken to be a foregone conclusion. And even if anyone had been waiting for my opinion, I wouldn't have known how to form one. I'd never known any married person up close. What did I know of matrimony? From where I stood, it looked like a world of flattering attention, and what's more, a chance to cross the county line.
We married in September and spent our honeymoon picking cotton for the war effort. In '39 and '40 there had been such talk of war, the boys were getting called up just to make a show of being ready for anything, I suppose. But Nathan had always been exempted, as an indispensible worker?not for the Lord, but for King Cotton. He did farm labor between revivals, and in the autumn of '41 it was our first enterprise as newlyweds to bend our backs together in the dusty fields. When the rough cotton pokes were filled, our hands clawed raw and our hair and shoulders tufted with white, we believed we'd done our part. Never did we dream that shortly the bombs would fall on a faraway harbor whose name struck a chill across our own small, landlocked Pearl.
By the end of that infamous week, half the men in all this world were pledged to a single war, Nathan included. He was drafted. At Fort Sill, his captain made note of Nathan's faith and vouched that he'd serve as a hospital cleric or chaplain, decently removed from enemy lines. I let out my breath: now I could truly say I loved the Lord! But then, without any explanation, Nathan found himself in Paris, Texas, training for the infantry. I was allowed to spend two weeks with him there on the wind-swept plain, mostly waiting in the strange vacancy of a cold apartment, trying to compose cordial things to say to the other wives. What flotsam and jetsam we were, women of all accents and prospects washed up there boiling grits or pasta, whatever we knew as comfort, united by our effort not to think about our husbands' hands learning to cradle a gun. At night I
196
cradled his head on my lap and read him the Scriptures: The Lord is my rock and my fortress . . . the horn of my salvation ... so shall I be saved from mine enemies.When he left, I went home to Pearl.
He wasn't even gone three months. He was trucked, shipped, and shuttled on the Asiatic Fleet, and finally encamped under palm trees on the Philippine shore, to make his stand for General MacArthur. His company fought their way into Luzon, facing nothing worse than mosquitoes and jungle to begin with, but on their second night were roused from sleep by artillery. Nathan was struck in the head with a shell fragment. He ran for cover, dazed, and spent the night in a bamboo pig shed. He had suffered a concussion but gradually regained consciousness through the dawn and staggered about half-blinded into the open, with no more sense of direction than an insect rushing at flame. By pure luck, just before nightfall, he was spotted on the beach and picked up by a PT boat. From a hospital bunker in Corregidor Island he wrote me a cheerful V-mail letter about his salvation by the grace of God and a Jap hog manger. He couldn't tell his location, of course, but promised me he was miraculously mostly intact, and coming home soon!
That was the last I would ever hear from the man I'd married? one who could laugh (even about sleeping in a manger), call me his "honey lamb," and trust in the miracle of good fortune. I can still picture the young soldier who wrote that letter while propped up in bed, smiling through his eyepatch and bandages, showing the nurses a photo of his pretty bride with Delta cotton poking out of her hair. Enjoy
ing, as it turned out, the last happy hours of his life. He hadn't yet learned what happened to the rest of his company. In a few days the news would begin to reach Corregidor. Through the tunnels of that island fortress came wind of a. horror too great to speak aloud?a whispered litany that would take years to be fully disclosed to the world, and especially to me. It would permanently curl one soldier's heart like a piece of hard shoe leather.
When the shelling began that night, as Nathan was hit and stumbled unseen through the darkness into a pig shed, the company received orders to move quickly to the Bataan Peninsula, where
THE JUDGES 197
they could hide in the jungle, regroup, then march back to retake Manila. It was an error of a commander's overconfidence, small in history, large in the lives of those men. They were trapped on the peninsula, starving and terrified, and finally rounded up at bayonet point to be marched north through tepid rice paddies and blazing heat, marched through exhaustion and sickness and beyond it, marched from their feet to their hands and knees, emaciated, hallucinating from thirst and racked with malaria, toward a prison camp which few of them ever reached, and fewer survived. Nathan's company died, to the man, on the Death March from Bataan.
Private Price was evacuated from Corregidor just a few weeks before MacArthur himself abandoned that post, with his famous promise to return. But he would not be back, so far as those boys in Bataan were concerned, and neither would the soldier boy I'd married. He came home with a crescent-shaped scar on his temple, seriously weakened vision in his left eye, and a suspicion of his own cowardice from which he could never recover. His first words to me were to speak of how fiercely he felt the eye of God upon him. He pulled away from my kiss and my teasing touch, demanding, "Can't you understand the Lord is watching us?"
I still tried to tell him we were lucky. I believed the war had made only the smallest possible dent in our plans. Nathan was changed, I could see, but he only seemed more devout, and it was hard to name the ruin in that. At last I'd get to cross the state lines I'd dreamed of, traveling as a minister's wife.
Lord have mercy, that I did?Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. We crossed lines in sand drawn through palmetto scrub, lines down the middle of highways, soup-kitchen lines, lines of worry, souls lined up awaiting the burning tongue of salvation. Nathan aimed to scorch a path as wide as Sherman's.With no money and no time to settle, we moved to a different ramshackle rental cottage or board-inghouse every season until I was so pregnant with Rachel that our nomad state seemed disreputable. One night we simply chose Bethlehem, Georgia, off a map. By good luck or Providence our station wagon made it that far, and Bethlehem turned out to be an open
198
market for Evangelical Baptists. I tried to laugh about it, for here we were: man and swollen wife and no more room at the inn.
Nathan did not laugh at that hopeful comparison. In fact, it brought his hand down against me for the first time. I recall that I was sitting on the edge of a chair in our still-unpacked kitchen, holding my huge body together with both hands as we listened to the radio. A man had been reading a long war story, as they did then: a firsthand account of a prison camp and a dreadful march, where exhausted men struggled hopelessly, fell behind, and perished in brief orange bursts of pistol fire in the darkness. I was only half listening, until Nathan brought me to attention.
"Not a one of those men will ever see a son born to carry on his name. And you dare to gloat before Christ himself about your undeserved blessing."
Until that night I'd never known the details of where Nathan had been, nor the full measure of what he was still escaping.
He was profoundly embarrassed by my pregnancies. To his way of thinking they were unearned blessings, and furthermore each one drew God's attention anew to my having a vagina and his having a penis and the fact we'd laid them near enough together to conceive a child. But, God knows, it was never so casual as that. Nathan was made feverish by sex, and trembled afterward, praying aloud and blaming me for my wantonness. If his guilt made him a tyrant before men, it made him like a child before his God. Not a helpless or pleading child, but a petulant one, the type of tough boy who's known too little love and is quick to blame others for his mistakes. The type who grows up determined to show them all what he can do. He meant personally to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan, I think, and all other paths ever walked by the blight of mankind.
And where was I, the girl or woman called Orleanna, as we traveled those roads and crossed the lines again and again? Swallowed by Nathan's mission, body and soul. Occupied as if by a foreign power. I still appeared to be myself from the outside, I'm sure, just as he still looked like the same boy who'd gone off to war. But now
THE JUDGES 199
every cell of me was married to Nathan's plan. His magnificent will. This is how conquest occurs: one plan is always larger than the other. I tried hard to do what I believed a wife ought, things like washing white shirts and black socks separately in rooming-house sinks. Making meal after meal of fried corn mush. The towns where we preached were stripped bare of young men, -with it still being wartime, and this fanned the fires of Nathan's private torture. When he looked out over those soldierless congregations, he must have seen ghosts, marching north. For my part, I merely watched young, deprived female bosoms panting before my handsome husband, soldier of the Lord. (I longed to shout: Go ahead and try him, girls, I am too tired!) Or else I was home waiting for him, drinking four glasses of water before he arrived so I could watch him eat whatever there was without my stomach growling. When I was carrying the twins I had such desperate cravings I sometimes went out at night on my hands and knees and secretly ate dirt from the garden. Three babies in less than two lonely years I had. I cannot believe any woman on earth has ever made more babies out of less coition. Three babies were too much, and I sensed it deep in my body. When the third one was born she could not turn her head to the side or even properly suckle.That was Adah. I'd cried for days when I learned I was carrying twins, and now I lay awake nights -wondering whether my despair had poisoned her. Already Nathan's obsession with guilt and God's reproof was infecting me. Adah was what God sent me, either as punishment or reward. The world has its opinion on that, and I have mine. The doctors gave her little hope, though one of the nurses was kind. She told me formula was the very best thing, a modern miracle, but we couldn't afford it for two. So I ended up suckling greedy Leah at my breast and giving Adah the expensive bottles, both at the same time; with twins you learn how to do everything backhanded. Not only twins, mind you, but also a tow-headed toddler, whose skin seemed too thin, for she wailed at the slightest discomfort. Rachel screamed every single time she wet her diaper, and set the other two off like alarm bells. She also screamed excessively over teething. Adah howled from
200
frustration, and Leah cried over nightmares. For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night.There it is. And you wonder why I didn't rise up and revolt against Nathan? I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet, that's why. I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.
Nathan believed one thing above all else: that the Lord notices righteousness, and rewards it. My husband would accept no other possibility. So if we suffered in our little house on the peanut plain of Bethlehem, it vas proof that one of us had committed a failure of virtue. I understood the failure to be mine. Nathan resented my attractiveness, as if slender hips and large blue eyes were things I'd selected intentionally to draw attention to myself. The eyes of God were watching, he gave me to know. If I stood still for a moment in the backyard between hanging up sheets to notice the damp grass tingling under my bare feet, His eyes observed my idleness. God heard whenever I let slip one of my father's curse words, and He watched me take my bath, daring me to enjoy the warm water. I could scarcely blow my nose without feeling watched. As if to compensate for all this watchi
ng, Nathan habitually overlooked me. If I complained about our life, he would chew his dinner while looking tactfully away, as one might ignore a child who has deliberately broken her dolls and then whines she has nothing to play with. To save my sanity, I learned to pad around hardship in soft slippers and try to remark on its good points.
If there was still some part of a beautiful heathen girl in me, a girl drawn to admiration like a moth to moonlight, and if her heart still pounded on Georgia nights when the peeper frogs called out from roadside ditches, she was too dumbfounded to speak up for herself. Once or twice while Nathan was away on a revival I may have locked the doors and breathed into my own mouth in the mirror, putting on red lipstick to do the housework. But rarely. I encountered my own spirit less and less. By the time Ruth May was born, we'd moved into the parsonage on Hale Street and Nathan was in full possession of the country once known as OrleannaWharton. I accepted
THE JUDGES 201
the Lord as my personal Saviour, for He finally brought me a Maytag washer. I rested in this peace and called it happiness. Because in those days, you see, that's how a life like mine was known.
It took me a long time to understand the awful price I'd paid, and that even God has to admit the worth of freedom. How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain? By then, I was lodged in the heart of darkness, so thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage I could hardly see any other way to stand. Like Methuselah I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found, like Methuselah, I had no wings.
This is why, little beast. I'd lost my wings. Don't ask me how I gained them back?the story is too unbearable. I trusted too long in false reassurances, believing as we all want to do when men speak of the national interest, that it's also ours. In the end, my lot was cast with the Congo. Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.
The Things We Didn't Know KILANGA, SEPTEMBER 1960
I
Leak
rOR THE SECOND TIME, we flew from Leopoldville over the jungle and down into that tiny cleared spot that was called Kilanga. This time it was just Father and me in the airplane, plus Mr.Axelroot, and twenty pounds of dry goods and canned whole prunes the Underdowns couldn't take with them when they fled the Congo. But this second bumpy touchdown didn't have the same impact as our first arrival. Instead of excitement, I felt a throb of dread. Not a single soul was standing at the edge of the field to greet us?no villagers, not even Mother or my sisters. This much is for sure, nobody was pounding on drums or stewing up a goat for us. As Father and I crossed the lonely field and made for our house I couldn't help but think about that earlier night and the welcome feast, all the tastes and sounds of it. How strange and paltry it seemed at the time, and now, looking back, what an abundance of good protein had been sacrificed in our honor. A shameful abundance, really. My stomach growled. I silendy pledged to the Lord that I would express true gratitude for such a feast, if ever one should happen again. Rachel's opinion of goat meat notwithstanding, we could sure use a good old feast, because how else were we going to eat now? You can only get so far in this life on canned whole prunes.