He had been to the convention. He said: “I cannot analyze why I came out with a near-clinical state of depression. I never was a steeple pastor—I walked away from that thirty years ago—but the Baptist notion historically is a glorious one. This little band of left-wingers, truly radicals, they believed in separation of church and state. No one believes in that any more. They would not go to war; they would not take an oath or serve on juries; they would not baptize their babies; they practiced community of goods. None of this holds good today.
“Moderates and fundamentalists—neither party is historically Baptist. They claim to believe the Bible literally. No one believes the Bible literally. Ask the man who tells you he does, ‘Shall we start dismantling the penitentiary?’
“I never know if the true Baptist notion ever made it across the Atlantic Ocean. The frontier spirit, the culture, so dominated the religion that what you had was a civil religion, a cultural religion, a melding into one.”
I said, “But it served the people well.”
“It did indeed. But it betrayed the faith.”
Will Campbell had a special idea of the faith. “Religion should not be credal. The great church of Christ came into being by ignoring the life of Christ. What I heard in Saint Louis—what depressed me—was doctrine, doctrine, and its defense. I heard little about discipleship. The churches offer a theology of certainty. And that worries me. Jeremiah said, ‘It is not good to be too sure of God.’ And even Christ, when he was about to be crucified, cried in great agony, and the agony comes over in the translation, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ No great religion can give all the answers to everything. Jesus didn’t tell people what to think. He didn’t prescribe a confession of faith. Christ offered no creed or special theology.”
He seemed to be saying that faith was something that had to be constantly looked for and struggled towards. When I put that to him, he said it was fair. But Will Campbell’s ideas were difficult; and I wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t being polite.
It occurred to me afterwards that only a very devout man, and someone raised within the Southern Baptist church, could ask so much of people. His setting—the forty-acre farm, the log-cabin study where he met visitors—represented something about the man. He gave one an idea of the power of the frontier preacher, and the strength of the old faith.
But it wasn’t only for this that Will Campbell was famous and almost, as someone said, a Southern monument. He was famous for the political positions to which he had been led by his faith. He had done brave things in the civil-rights movement. But he hadn’t stopped there. Religion and a wish to come to terms with Southern history had taken him beyond the black cause to the cause of the rednecks, the haters of the blacks. He had seen both these Southern groups as tragic. And something like a religious conversion (within his already fervent faith) had led him to offer spiritual succor to members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The conversion had come about like this. A mocker had asked one day what the Christian message was. Will Campbell had said that the message was: “We are all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” (It was a version of the illumination he had had at Yale—“God cares about the suffering of his people”—that had taken him beyond the rigidities of his upbringing and had led him to the civil-rights movement.) Some time later a Klansman shot and killed one of Will Campbell’s friends. The mocker then asked Will Campbell, who was full of grief and raging about rednecks and Kluxers and crackers, “Which bastard does God love the most?” The bastard who had been killed, or the bastard who had done the killing and was alive? Will Campbell had no doubt about the answer: he had a mission to the living Klansman as well.
The story of the conversion is told in Will Campbell’s autobiography, Brother to a Dragonfly. Things are not always clear in that book. The main narrative is broken into by many little stories and is at times too fragmented. But it seems that with that conversion there came to Will Campbell a fuller and special comprehension of Southern history.
The poor whites, many of them descendants of indentured servants, and to that extent sharing an ancestry of servitude with the blacks, were of no account in the South until the Civil War. Then, because they were needed to fight that war, they were evangelized and given their cause; and afterwards, as rednecks and Klansmen, still poor, still victims, they were held responsible and derided for what was really the racism of the entire society.
The Klan religion, of piety and hate, derived from that war, Will Campbell compares to Old Testament Judaism. And he finds a resemblance to the 137th Psalm (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem”) in a “spirited” Klan song like:
You niggers listen now,
I’m gonna tell you how
To keep from getting tortured
When the Klan is on the prowl.
Stay at home at night,
Lock your doors up tight.
Don’t go outside or you will find
Them crosses a-burning bright.
And he explains the resemblance to “If I forget you, O Jerusalem” by means of this paraphrase or transposition: “If I forget you, O Atlanta, Vicksburg, Oxford, Donelson, remember, O Lord, against the Yankees the night they drove old Dixie down! When Sherman said, ‘Raze it, raze it, burn it down to the ground!’ Happy shall he be who takes your little Yankee babies and slams them against Stone Mountain.”
Will Campbell didn’t talk about the Klan when we met. He gave me a copy of an article he had written, “The World of the Redneck,” which outlined his views and gave the text and analysis of the Klan song. He didn’t refer me to his book, Brother to a Dragonfly; that I turned to on my own. We talked of religion and the Southern Baptist convention; and the “liberal wilderness” he said he had walked in for many years. We talked, above all, of the immense Southern past, which—though born in 1924—he carried in himself, and which his setting—a log cabin at the back of his house on his farm—appeared to pay tribute to.
He was from Mississippi. “I was a fourth-generation Mississippian. My family homesteaded in Mississippi about 1790, I’m thinking. In the frontier, Mississippi was a territory. It was part of the Louisiana Purchase. A territory, not a state. And citizens from states like Georgia could migrate there and stake a claim to a section of land if they intended to live there. The land belonged to the federal government. Pretty soon it was cotton. The whole economy in Mississippi was cotton for a long time. Six hundred and forty acres of land—that’s a lot of land for a family. But say a family had ten children. You divided that. Sixty acres. Still, in the nineteenth century a family could make a living on that. But divide it again—that’s how the families separated and scattered.”
Will Campbell was chewing tobacco while he spoke. It was something he was known for; and from time to time he spat into a spittoon. I had never actually seen anyone use a spittoon. In various places in the South I had seen big billboard advertisements for Granger Select chewing tobacco: “Meet Up with a Cleaner Chew.” The Granger slogan had been puzzling until someone had told me it was really redneck language, “meet up with” meaning “get to know,” “become friendly with.” I asked to see Will Campbell’s tobacco. It was Beech Nut, licorice-flavored: “Balanced and Better, Softer and Moister.” In its pliable foil pouch, it was aromatic and tempting.
“My family was a family of landowners in Georgia. One of the boys got in a fight with a friend in a barbershop and killed him. And the judge said to the father, ‘Your only chance is to move to one of the territories.’ So they packed up, the whole family, and moved with wagons until they got to this particular area in southwest Mississippi. They might have had a mind of going on further west. But in the morning, when they were starting to move on, they heard a rooster crow. So they knew there were some other settlers there. They went and talked to these people—if the Indians were hostile, and what the land was like, and what the winters were like, and what they grew. And to me the most interesting thing is that where they settled was precisely like where they had come f
rom. If you close your eyes and then open them again you wouldn’t know you had left Georgia.
“By the time my parents were grown there was no room for us on the land. My family was rooted there, in that rural community, which made it illogical for some people to say—when I began to work for the civil-rights movement, as a troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches: some people said it was troublemaker—that Mr. Lee Campbell’s son, who is all mixed up in that nigger mess, is an outsider. Which in a sense made it more dangerous. I’m not trying to romanticize this—it didn’t take much to make you a radical in those days. The only thing worse than an outsider is a traitor, and I was seen as a traitor—to the Campbell-Webb-Parker-McMillan family. My grandmother’s family were Webbs. It was the Webb family who came and homesteaded there.
“My grandmother, on the trek from Georgia to the Mississippi territory, remembered—when money ran out—seeing her father identify himself to a settler in Alabama as a Mason. They gave the secret Masonic grip, the secret Masonic passwords; and the settler gave some money. Ten dollars. Worth perhaps a thousand dollars today. My grandmother remembered that all her life.”
It was a beautiful and touching picture. I said so to Will Campbell.
He said: “This oral tradition had an effect on the tenacity with which they hung on to all the old ways of doing things—and this meant segregation, among other things. ‘Will, you weren’t raised this way.’ Which again makes you a traitor. To them segregation was a Christian way. God created races. And I couldn’t explain to them that it wasn’t God who created races. But God created people, and some of them would go to the Northern countries and lose the pigmentation of the skin, and some would go to the hot countries and develop the heavy pigmentation. To them God created white people—and Adam and Eve were white. And when he put the curse on Ham, the curse was to be black. But they were and are deeply religious people, and it was important to have a religious sanction for everything.
“Let me say something which appears to negate what I’ve been saying. When I’ve been saying ‘they’ I am referring to the community at large. My immediate family had no vested interest in a segregated society, because they were not slaveholders. They were yeoman farmers. The further historical truth is that ‘my people’ also came to this country as indentured servants. An awful lot of the yeoman farmers came as indentured servants. And later we had black slaves.
“I’m not denying that I had, and grew up with, racial prejudices. It wasn’t something you discussed—black people didn’t marry or date white people. They worked with them on farms. In the fields there was equality. We were even playmates. When we were small we played with black children. But at a certain point you knew that they were black—the time you started school. You accepted that.”
He said he had written a song about that. He took the guitar that was near and began to sing. I wasn’t prepared for this. It took me by surprise; and the effect of the singing and the guitar, filling the small cabin, was hypnotic. I surrendered to the emotion of the singer and his absorption in his song.
The song was long, a ballad, with much recitative. It was about a black boy and a white boy growing up together on a farm in the South, until they were separated according to the racial customs of the place. The black boy’s father worked for the white boy’s family. The black family lived in the smokehouse; the white family lived in the main house, which was not much bigger. When the Depression came the black worker was laid off, and he and his family went to Memphis. Then the white family lost the farm and they too had to go to Memphis. There one day the white boy, now a man, met the black boy, also a man, and they became friends again.
Parts of the song were true, Will Campbell said; and parts were made up. His family didn’t lose their farm; and they didn’t migrate to Memphis. So what was sentimental about the song, what made it a fable, gave it a moral, was the made-up part.
“The male members of my family were not bigots. Prejudiced, but not bigots. I remember one day in Campbelltown—all the Campbells lived in one place, within a mile of one another—and this thing happened. An elderly black man, John Walker—he lived in the neighborhood; he had recently been released from the state penitentiary for stealing some corn from his landlord—he came walking down the dirt road. And we were playing in the ‘stomp.’ Not the lawn. There would be the house, the yard, the picket fence; and beyond the picket fence would be a grassy area, like a meadow, and that was called the ‘stomp.’ It wasn’t where crops were planted, or even pasture; it was more like a playground. Inside the yard there would be no grass. That would be swept down with a dogwood broom. If you had grass in your yard that was a trashy thing to do. And we were in the stomp, and this black man walked down the dirt road, and we taunted him: ‘Hi, nigger! Hi, nigger!’ To which he never responded. The local mores would not permit him to respond to white children.
“And afterwards my grandfather called us all round him. And he was sitting there on this tree stump. He called us all ‘hon.’ And he said, ‘Hon, there’s not any niggers in the world.’ And we said, ‘Yes, Grandpa. John Walker is a nigger.’ We could still see him disappearing down the dusty road. And he said, ‘No, all the niggers are dead. Now there’s only colored people.’ And that was his way of explaining to us that the Civil War was over.”
(In Brother to a Dragonfly there was another version of that story. The corn John Walker had stolen was “a sack of roasting ear corn.” And he hadn’t been to jail for stealing the corn. He had been beaten by some men, and he had told about the beating in a humorous way—which had partly encouraged the taunting from the younger boys. “Yessuh. Dey got me nekked as a jaybird. Took a gin belt to me. Whipped me till I almost shat.” The story Will Campbell had told me in his cabin—with the black man silent and enduring—was more in line with contemporary sensibility. The version in the book, with the black man making a joke about the beating, and perhaps also about the theft, felt truer.)
Will Campbell said: “My grandfather was a man only with a second-grade education. He could write his name and I suppose could read. But his use of the language! I always hoped that the preacher would call on him to lead us in prayer. We were Baptists. I remember the old man concluding one prayer, ‘And when at last we kneel to drink from the bitter spring of life …’ And by that, ‘the bitter spring of life,’ he meant death.…
“So these were and are the dominant influences in the life of rural white Southerners—this sense of place, coming out of displacement, indentured servants, migrations, and the finding of this sense of place in the farms, the homesteads, the community. And this sense of place became sacred.
“There was a threat to that sense of place by the racial changes that were taking place. And it was a threat. To know suddenly that things you thought were stationary and would last forever would never again be the same.
“And I used to try to explain to my colleagues—non-Southerners in the movement—that, when white people said that to desegregate the schools was to wreck the schools as they knew them, they were saying something that was fact. I used to use the example of Abraham and Isaac. People would say to me, ‘You are asking me to sacrifice my children on the altar of integration built by the Supreme Court.’ And my response was, and is, ‘I’m only asking you to be faithful to the God you profess. As a Christian there is God beyond the idols we have built: place, community, public education—which indeed we may be sacrificing. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child. We put our child on the altar of integration, we put the sticks of justice beneath. But the child was not sacrificed—by Abraham. Finally the child was saved.’ ”
Will Campbell said, “Maybe that analogy breaks down. But it held for me at the time.”
He began to talk about his civil-rights work; and it was possible to detect the ways of thought that would later lead him, as a churchman, to resist being used politically.
He said: “Our cue wasn’t the Supreme Court decision of May 1954. Our cue was far more basic. Supreme Court
justices change. It’s already changed in our day. The motto of the liberal movement was law and order. But by the time Mr. Nixon and others discovered Middle America, the term ‘law and order’ became synonymous with ‘nigger.’ And then it was the other side that was saying, ‘We must have law and order.’ So that Martin Luther King, Jr. and others were seen as troublemakers, and consequently a threat to law and order.”
He talked of the paradoxes and ambiguities of the success of the movement.
“I think that, the way I grew up, my chances of becoming free and open-minded about race were much greater than when my children grew up. Because when I was a child there were assumptions made that were never discussed. You didn’t discuss whether black people would serve on juries or go to school with us or live with us. But every child born after May 1954 has heard black people discussed pejoratively. So now you have a generation of people who are full of hatred and in a position of being able to implement that.
“I do think it is extremely dangerous, because you can never again have the kind of nonviolent resistance that you saw under the leadership of Dr. King and others.”
In the old days, he said, if you saw five thousand blacks marching around a courthouse, and you asked them why they were marching, they would say they were marching because they weren’t being registered as voters. If you saw black people demonstrating at a lunch counter, they would tell you it was because they weren’t allowed to eat at lunch counters. There was no trouble at all about the cause then.
“Today, how would a nonviolent, passive resistance work? The issues are not as clear. Today, if you saw five thousand blacks marching, the only thing they can say is, ‘We are marching around the courthouse because we are still niggers to you.’
“I remember a song that was sung in our taverns: ‘Move Them Niggers North.’
Move them niggers north.
Move them niggers north.