Amen, Reveren’ Bliss. We were owned and faced with the awe-inspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern so that in the darkness we’d know where we were. Oh, God hasn’t been easy with us because He always plans for the loooong haul. He’s looking far ahead and this time He wants a well-tested people to work his will. He wants some sharp-eyed, quick-minded, generous-hearted people to give names to the things of this world and to its values. He’s tired of untempered tools and half-blind masons! Therefore, He’s going to keep on testing us against the rocks and in the fires. He’s going to heat us ‘til we almost melt and then He’s going to plunge us into the ice-cold water. And each time we come out we’ll be blue and as tough as cold-blue steel! Ah yes! He means for us to be a new kind of human. Maybe we won’t be that people but we’ll be a part of that people, we’ll be an element in them, amen! He wants us limber as willow switches and he wants us tough as whit leather, so that when we have to bend, we can bend and snap back into place. He’s going to throw bolts of lightning to blast us so that we’ll have good footwork and lightning-fast minds. He’ll drive us hither and yon around this land and make us run the gauntlet of hard times and tribulations, misunderstanding and abuse. And some will pity you and some will despise you. And some will try to use you and change you. And some will deny you and try to deal you out of the game. And sometimes you’ll feel so bad that you’ll wish you could die. But it’s all the pressure of God. He’s giving you a will and He wants you to use it. He’s giving you brains and He wants you to train them lean and hard so that you can overcome all the obstacles. Educate your minds! Make do with what you have so as to get what you need! Learn to look at what you see and not what somebody tells you is true. Pay lip service to Caesar if you have to, but put your trust in God. Because nobody has a patent on truth or a copyright on the best way to live and serve Almighty God. Learn from what we’ve lived. Remember that when the labor’s back-breaking and the boss man’s mean our singing can lift us up. That it can strengthen us and make his meanness but the flyspeck of irritation of any empty man. Roll with the blow like ole Jack Johnson. Dance on out of his way like Williams and Walker. Keep to the rhythm and you’ll keep to life. God’s time is long: And all short-haul horses shall be like horses on a merry-go-round. Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won’t get weary. Keep to the rhythm and you won’t get lost. We’re handicapped, amen! Because the Lord wants us strong! We started out with nothing but the Word—just like the others but they’ve forgot it…. We worked and stood up under hard times and tribulations. We learned patience and to understand Job. Of all the animals, man’s the only one not born knowing almost everything he’ll ever know. It takes him longer than an elephant to grow up because God didn’t mean him to leap to any conclusions, for God Himself is in the very process of things. We learned that all blessings come mixed with sorrow and all hardships have a streak of laughter. Life is a streak-a-lean—a streak-a-fat. Ha, yes! We learned to bounce back and to disregard the prizes of fools. And we must keep on learning. Let them have their fun. Even let them eat hummingbirds’ wings and tell you it’s too good for you. Grits and greens don’t turn to ashes in anybody’s mouth…. How about it, Rev. Eatmore? Amen?
Amen!
Let everybody say amen. Grits and greens are humble but they make you strong and when the right folks get together to share them they can taste like ambrosia. So draw, so let us draw on our own wells of strength.
Ah yes, so we were reborn, Rev. Bliss. They still had us harnessed, we were still laboring in the fields, but we had a secret and we had a new rhythm….
So tell us about this rhythm, Reveren’ Hickman.
They had us bound but we had our kind of time, Rev. Bliss. They were on a merry-go-round that they couldn’t control but we learned to beat time from the seasons. We learned to make this land and this light and darkness and this weather and their labor fit us like a suit of new underwear. With our new rhythm, amen, but we weren’t free and they still kept dividing us. There’s many a thousand gone down the river. Mama sold from papa and chillen sold from both. Beaten and abused and without shoes. But we had the Word, now, Rev. Bliss, along with the rhythm. They couldn’t divide us now. Because anywhere they dragged us we throbbed in time together. If we got a chance to sing, we sang the same song. If we got a chance to dance, we beat back hard times and tribulations with a clap of our hands and the beat of our feet, and it was the same dance. Oh, they come out here sometimes to laugh at our way of praising God. They can laugh but they can’t deny us. They can curse and kill us but they can’t destroy us all. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption. They laugh but we know who we are and where we are, but they keep on coming in their millions and they don’t know and can’t get together.
But tell us, how do we know who we are, Daddy Hickman?
We know where we are by the way we walk. We know where we are by the way we talk. We know where we are by the way we sing. We know where we are by the way we dance. We know where we are by the way we praise the Lord on high. We know where we are because we hear a different tune in our minds and in our hearts. We know who we are because when we make the beat of our rhythm to shape our day the whole land says amen! It smiles, Rev. Bliss, and it moves to our time! Don’t be ashamed, my brothers! Don’t be cowed. Don’t throw what you have away! Continue! Remember! Believe! Trust the inner beat that tells us who we are. Trust God and trust life and trust this land that is you! Never mind the laughers, the scoffers, they come around because they can’t help themselves. They can deny you but not your sense of life. They hate you because whenever they look into a mirror they fill up with bitter gall. So forget them and most of all don’t deny yourselves. They’re tied by the short hair to a runaway merry-go-round. They make life a business of struggle and fret, fret and struggle. See who you can hate: See what you can get. But you just keep on inching along like an old inchworm. If you put one and one and one together soon they’ll make a million too. There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free! Yes! But keep to the rhythm, just keep to the rhythm and keep to the way. Man’s plans are but a joke to God. Let those who will despise you, but remember deep down inside yourself that the life we have to lead is but a preparation for other things, it’s a discipline, Reveren’ Bliss, sisters and brothers; a discipline through which we may see that which the others are too self-blinded to see. Time will come round when we’ll have to be their eyes; time will swing and turn back around. I tell you,
time shall swing and spiral back around….
No, the Senator thought, No more of it! NO!
“Yes, Bliss; Juneteenth,” he could hear Hickman saying. “And it was a great occasion. There had been a good cotton crop and a little money was circulating among us. Folks from all over were in the mood for prayer and celebration. There must’ve been five thousand folks out there that week—not counting the real young chillen and the babies. Folks came all the way from Atlanta, Montgomery, Columbus, Charleston, and Birmingham, just to be there and hear the Word. Horse teams and mule teams and spans of oxen were standing under the grove of trees around the clearing, and the wagon beds were loaded down with hay and feed for the animals and with quilts for the folks who had come in from the far sections, so they could sleep right there. All those wagons made it look as though everybody in the whole section was waiting for the Word to move on over across Jordan. Or maybe migrate West, as some later did. The feel of those days has gone out of the air now, Bliss. And the shape of our minds is different from then, because time has moved on. Then we were closer to the faceless days, but we had faith. Yes, and ignorant as we knew we were, we had more self-respect. We didn’t have much but we squeezed life harder and there was a warm glow all around. No, and we hadn’t started imitating white folks who in turn were imitating their di
storted and low-rated ideas of us. I’m talking now about how it felt when we were together and looking up the mountain where we had to climb….
“But you remember how it was, Bliss: In the daytime hot under the tent with the rows of benches and folding chairs; and the ladies in their summer dresses and their fans whipping up a breeze in time to the preaching and the singing. And the choirs and the old tried and tested workers in the vineyard dressed in their white uniforms. That’s right. All the solid substance of our way of doing things, of our sense of life. Everything ordered and in its place and everything and everybody a part of the ceremony and the evocation. Barrels of ice water and cold lemonade with the cakes of ice in them sitting out under the cool of the trees, and all those yellow cases of soda pop stacked off to one side. Yeah, and at night those coal-oil flares and the lanterns lighting things up like one of those county fairs.
“And the feasting part, you must remember that, Bliss. There was all those ladies turning out fried fish and fried chicken and Mr. Double-Jointed Jackson, the barbecue king, who had come out from Atlanta and was sweating like a Georgia politician on Election Day—excuse me, Bliss—supervising sixteen cooks and presiding over the barbecue pits all by hisself. Think about it for a second, Bliss; it’ll come back to you, because even if you look at it simply from the point of eating it was truly a great occasion.”
Hickman laughed, shaking his white head, then pushing back in his chair he held up his great left hand, the fingers spread and bending supple as he counted with his right index finger.
“Lord, we et up fifteen hundred loaves of sandwich bread; five hundred pounds of catfish and snapper; fifteen gallons of hot sauce, Mr. Double-Jointed Jackson’s formula; nine hundred pounds of barbecue ribs; eighty-five hams, direct from Virginia; fifty pounds of potato salad; and a whole big cabbage patch of cole slaw. Yes, and enough frying-size chicken to feed the multitude! And let’s not mention the butter beans—naw! And don’t talk about the fresh young roasting ears and the watermelons. Neither the fried pies, chocolate cakes, and homemade ice cream. Lord, but that was a great occasion. A great occasion. Bliss, how after knowing such times as those you could take off for where you went is too much for me to truly understand. At least not to go there and stay. And don’t go taking me simpleminded either. I’m not just talking about the eating. I mean the communion, the coming together—of which the eating was only a part; an outward manifestation of which it was only a symbol, like the Blood is signified by the wine, and the Flesh by the bread…. Ah yes, boy, we filled their bellies, but we were really there to fill their souls and give them reassurance—and we filled them.
“We moved ‘em!
“We preached Jesus on the cross and in the ground. We preached Him in Jerusalem and walking around Atlanta, Georgia. We preached Him, Bliss, to open up heaven and raise up hell. We preached Him ‘til the Word worked in the crowd like a flash of lightning and a dose of salts. Amen! Bliss, we preached and you were with us through it all. You were there, boy. You….”
The Senator lay listening, feeling the pain rise to him again as he tried to surrender himself to the mellow evocation of the voice become so resonant now with pleasure and affirmation. For the moment his powers to resist were weak, as though the word daddy in his mouth had opened a fresh flood of memory. Perhaps if he entered into the spell he could escape, could scramble the images that now were rising in his mind, could melt them down….
“Think back, Bliss,” Hickman was saying, “Seven preachers in black broadcloth suits and Stacy Adams shoes working full-time to bring them the Word of God. Starting with sunrise services, all kneeling in the dark down on the black earth, bending there on our knees and praying the sun right up out of the ground and into the sky there in the green dawn. Then preaching the clock around; sun up and sun down—from kin to cant. What I mean is seven powerful men; men who had the true feeling and the power to drive it home. Men who had the know-how of the human heart!
“What? Who? Seven grade-A-number-one, first-class preachers. Big men. Sitting up there on the platform, big-souled and big-voiced; all worked up by the occasion and inspiring one another as well as the congregation. Seven great preachers, not to mention Eatmore and you, Bliss.
“And lots of unbelievers were there too; there just to hear those big Negroes preach. Ha! Some of them thought they came out there to hear a preaching contest—which was all right because when the good ones at anything get together there is just naturally going to be a battle. Men who love the Word are concerned with the way they preach it, that’s how the glory comes shining through…. Oh, but we caught our share of those who thought we were nothing but entertainers. Reveren’ Eubanks got aroused there one evening and started to preaching up under some sinner women’s clothes and brought ‘em in like fish in a net. One got so filled up with the Spirit she started testifying to some things so outrageous that I had to grab my trombone and drown her out. HA! HA! HA! Why, she’d have taught them more sin in trying to be saved than they’d have blundered into in a whole year of hot Novembers. Don’t smile, Bliss; it’s not really funny and you have to save your strength. Sho, I myself preached fifteen into the fold—big gold earrings, blood-red stockings, short skirts, patent-leather shoes and all. Preached them right out of the back of the crowd and down front to the mourners’ bench. Fifteen Magdalenes, Bliss. ‘Fancy who’s in fancy clothes.’ Yes, indeed. Brought them down humbled with hanging heads and streaming eyes and the paint on their faces running all red and pink with tears….
“But what could they do, Bliss? We were playing for keeps; we had seven of the most powerful preachers you could find anywhere; we had the best individual singers in the nation; we had the best choirs from all over the southeastern division—and look who else we had: Singing Williams was there, remember him? And Laura Minnie Smith, who could battle Bessie note for note and tone for tone, and on top of that was singing the Word of God. Fess Mackaway was there playing the piano most of the time and conducting the assembled choirs like the master he was. Young Tom Dorsey had come down all the way from Chicago to sit in—even then flirting around with God. Whitby’s Heavenly Harmonizers were there, singing the Word in a way that made everything from animals to birds and the flowers of the fields to L & N railroad trains sing in the sound and give thanks to God. There, Bliss, were four Negroes who could make everything of this earth burst into song. They played on Jew’s harps, hair combs, zu-zus, washtubs—anything. They blowed Joshua on sorghum jugs. And harmony? Shucks, it ain’t never been writ down!
“So what could the poor sinners do? In fact, what could anybody do? Bliss, let me tell you: Ole Eatmore, God bless his memory, Ole Rev Eatmore unlimbered some homiletic there one evening that had the hair standing up on my head—and I was already a seasoned preacher! Why, I sat there listening to that Negro making pictures rise up out of the Word and he lifted me plumb up out of my chair! Bliss, I’ve heard you cutting some fancy didoes on the radio, but son, Eatmore was romping and rampaging and walking through Jerusalem just like John! Oh, but wasn’t he romping! Maybe you were too young to get it all, but that night that mister was ten thousand misters and his voice was pure gold. And it wasn’t exactly what he was saying, but how he was saying. That Negro was always a master, but that evening he was an inspired master. Bliss, he was a super-master!”
Hickman chuckled, studying the Senator’s face; thinking, This won’t hurt him, not this part and the smile in it might catch him and help him….
“And did he set me a hard row to hoe, Bliss, when it came my turn I was so moved I could hardly make words. He had us up so high, Bliss, that it called for pure song. I just took off and led them in Let Us Break Bread Together ‘til I could get myself under control and relieve the strain a bit. I taught you that song, Bliss. It was the very first. It’s a song of fellowship, so simple and yet so deep and powerful because in it the lion and the lamb lie down together. Out there in Oklahoma, where they sometimes had the nerve and weren’t ashamed to be helped, I brought many
a poor white sinner to God with that song…. Well, as I stood there singing I looked out there into all those faces shining there in the dark and in the light, and I asked the Lord, ‘Master, what does it all mean beyond a glad noise for Juneteenth Day? What does freedom, what does emancipation mean?’ And the Lord said to me through all that sound, ‘Hickman, the Word has found its flesh and there’s salvation in the Word.’ ‘But, Master,’ I said, ‘back there in the night there’s those mean little towns, and on beyond the towns there’s the city, with police power and big buildings and factories and the courts and the National Guard; and newspapers and telephones and telegraphs and all those folks who act like they’ve never heard of your Word. All that while we here are so small and weak….’ And the Master said, ‘Still here the Word has found flesh and the complex has been confounded by the simple, and here is the better part. Hickman,’ He said, ‘Rise up on the Word and ride. All time is mine.’ Then He spoke to me low, in the idiom: He said, ‘You just be ready when the deal goes down. And have your people ready. Just be prepared. Now get up there and ride!’ And Bliss, I threw back my head and rode! It was like a riddle or a joke, but if so, it was the Lord’s joke and I was playing it straight. And maybe that’s what a preacher really is, he’s the Lord’s own straight man.
“Anyway, Bliss, that night, coming after Eatmore and Pompey and Revern’ Brazelton—yes, and that little Negro Murray, who had been to a seminary up North and could preach the pure Greek and the original He-brew and could still make all our uneducated folks swing along with him; who could make them understand and follow him—and not showing off, just needing all those languages to give him room to move around in. Besides, he knew that ofttimes the meaning of the Word is in the way you make it sound. No, now don’t interrupt me, save yourself. I know that you know these secrets; you have hurt us enough with them…. But as I was saying, what’s more important, Revern’ Murray’s education didn’t get him separated from the folks. Yeah, and who used to sit there in his chair bent forward like a boxer waiting for the bell, with his fists doubled up and his arms on his knees. Then when it came his turn to preach, he’d shoot forward like he was going to leap right out there into the congregation and start giving the Devil some upper-cuts. Lord, what a little rough mister! One night he grabbed a disbelieving bully who had come out to break up the meeting, and threw him bodily out into the dark; tossed him fifteen feet or more into the mule-pissed mud. Then he came on back to the pulpit and preached like Peter….”