Singing in a Strange Land Read online

  Without words then to express his thoughts, eleven-year-old Clarence returned to the cotton and, on Sundays, to the choir. But his journey had begun; his imagination was already elsewhere.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ATTEMPTING HIS IMAGINATION

  Clarence would forever be inspired by the longing to be other than the sum of the limitations prescribed for a black youth in the Delta, but how that longing might shape his life remained obscure in the late 1920s. Education, one traditional path to self-definition and fulfillment in American life, was profoundly limited. In Cleveland, he did attend class in an actual school building, as opposed to the well of a church sanctuary. He particularly remembered a teacher who had attended Mississippi’s Jackson College, a rarity when most black public school teachers had but a few years of grade-school education themselves. Yet Clarence experienced school as an institution that actually sought to cripple his potential, directly and indirectly. The purpose of the black schools he attended, the adult Clarence thought, was “to keep the blacks backwards.” Along with the ill-prepared teachers, the low salaries, and the almost nonexistent supplies was the truncated school term. Black students in the Cleveland area “didn’t go to school until after the crops were finished, maybe the 1st of December. And of course you had to come out when farming time started again, in the middle of March.” Beyond that were the everyday slights. Black kids walked to school, but white kids rode the school bus, and after a rainstorm, “some of the bigoted drivers . . . would deliberately hit those water puddles to splash water on the blacks.” Joining in, the white students on the buses called out “derogatory names like ‘nigger, nigger, coon, coon’ at the black kids.”1

  One moment in Clarence’s boyhood is particularly revealing. When he was about eleven years old, roughly the same age when that inchoate longing triggered by the automobiles on Highway 61 first took remembered form, Clarence’s teacher required that he give a speech at an evening school program before parents, community members, and fellow students. He “didn’t perform well,” he recalled, and expected punishment when he got home. Even decades later, a determined mother’s exasperation tinged Rachel Franklin’s recollection: “I had done taken time and learned it [the speech] to him and told him just how I wanted him to stand on the stage and how I wanted him to speak up so people could hear him.” But Clarence was almost inaudible from the stage. Once home, Rachel demanded that her son change into his pajamas immediately so as to receive a paddling. Clarence lagged and delayed, “because he know what was going to happen, you know.”2

  It is likely that, for this eleven-year-old, the prospect of speaking before an adult audience for the first time simply scared him. But the racial atmosphere he lived with daily affected him as well, poised as he was on the edge of proclaiming a conscious sense of self. Fear of another kind, of not meeting his mother’s expectations, may also have constrained his vocal cords. Yet Rachel’s tough love had a profound effect. As Franklin noted three decades later, “I’ve been speaking ever since then! And I mean speaking where folk could hear me.” Frightened and defeated that evening in Cleveland, he was on the cusp of a transforming moment.3

  St. Peter’s Rock Missionary Baptist Church was one of three black Baptist churches in Cleveland during the late 1920s. Founded in 1898, the result of a schism within St. Paul’s Missionary Baptist Church, the members of St. Peter’s Rock erected a modest building in north Cleveland. The congregation was both small and poor, and completely illiterate. As a result, according to a church history, “a sinner man, Mr. Felix Murray,” who could read and write, served as secretary “and worked faithfully at his duty.” In 1926, the congregation, under the leadership of Reverend H. Hampton, constructed a compact new building in south Cleveland, at 302 Ruby Street, at a cost of approximately $3,500. Yet another split rent the congregation almost immediately, and Reverend Hampton, carrying a healthy portion of the congregation with him, founded New St. Phillip Baptist Church down the block. For almost two years, St. Peter’s Rock lacked all but an occasional visiting minister. Meanwhile St. Paul’s, Cleveland’s original Afro-Baptist church, grew during these years under the leadership of Reverend J. W. Gayden.4

  Early in 1928, Reverend John H. Anderson came to St. Peter’s Rock as minister. Anderson lived in Shelby, Mississippi, some fifteen miles north on Highway 61, and the Cleveland church was one of four that he ministered to each month. Anderson was both a skillful administrator and a powerful preacher. The congregation of the handsome wooden church soon grew to include nearly five hundred members, the great majority of them tenants and sharecroppers from the surrounding cotton plantations. A piano was added early in his term—an innovation for Baptists—and a variety of committees established to aid the needy, restructure the choirs, and organize separate Sunday school instruction.

  The fourth Sunday of the month found Anderson in the pulpit of the Cleveland church. Services usually lasted all day and into the evening. An afternoon meal, served by the churchwomen, provided the needed nourishment and a welcome opportunity for socializing. The program for the other three Sundays of the month varied. On one, the congregation visited a different church. On another, the congregation held Sunday school at St. Peter’s, assisted at times by a visiting minister. On the third Sunday, the week preceding Anderson’s arrival, they held a testimonial. Led by a deacon, the congregation opened the service with song and then congregants broke into prayer, some chanting with a rhythmic intensity. Personal testimonies followed. Worshipers bore witness to their faith in God, their fidelity to the church, and in confessing their frailties, to the continued power their conversion experience held in their lives. The emotional force of these services and the intimate thoughts and feelings shared in these testimonies bound church members one to another in profound fashion. Through these communal testimonies, members experienced God as a liberator in this world as in the next: their God had provided them with the strength and courage to sustain in spite of obstacles. He was stern and demanded much, but he was also a God of forgiveness. Their faith in his grace redeemed them time and again. Testifying to this faith forcefully asserted the Almighty’s interest in each believer, and that carried with it a sense of personal worth and recognition, of being somebody, that transcended for the moment the ugly realities beyond the church doors.5

  In August 1929, J. H. Anderson began the yearly revival at St. Peter’s Rock. A two-week affair held during the lull just before the cotton harvest, it was a major event in the community. Henry Franklin, who did not share his wife’s religious enthusiasm, would not have attended, but many adults did and brought their children as well. The first week consisted of a prolonged prayer meeting under the direction of Reverend Anderson and the more senior deacons. The following week, “preaching week,” had Anderson, with no help from other ministers this particular year, preaching daily. He was a powerful, effective speaker, and as his words touched his audience, those considering conversion would move to the front of the church, to the mourner’s bench directly beneath the pulpit, where they awaited the movement of the Spirit to lead them to rebirth in Jesus. There a person could languish, waiting for the call to be saved, as night after night Anderson pressed his message home. Those who experienced conversion, who declared themselves touched by divine grace, moved from the bench into the choir stand, facing the congregation from behind the pulpit. There the deacons prepared these prospective church members and the minister examined them, and from that perch the converts continued their revival participation until the baptismal service at the end of the month.6

  Clarence was there that August for both weeks of the revival. As Anderson preached, Clarence “felt moved. I felt inspired.” As he testified in a 1950s sermon, “One Thursday morning, in 1929, I stepped in for myself.” He approached the mourner’s bench where church members who were already saved engulfed kneeling candidates with their prayers. And when Anderson issued the invitation following his sermon, “I simply got up and went to the altar.” After satisfactorily answerin
g questions about the validity of his conversion and the depth of his belief in God, Anderson accepted Clarence as a baptismal candidate for the service scheduled for the following week.7

  On the fourth Sunday of August 1929, Clarence Franklin, Cleo Myles, and approximately twelve to fifteen other converts, many of them youths also, met at the church at 9:00 A.M. Dressed in white robes and white caps, they mounted a flatbed truck for the eight- to ten-mile drive east to the banks of the Sunflower River. Lining the banks as they arrived, their festive-colored clothing radiant against the sloping green limbs of the cypress trees that hovered over the river’s gentle currents, the congregation of St. Peter’s Rock greeted the berobed baptismal class with a hymn. Reverend Anderson offered a brief instruction, stressing the validity and necessity of the central tenet of the Baptist faith, “the tradition of [adult] baptism” itself. Then Anderson and two deacons entered the river, and one by one, the newly converted followed. As the minister intoned the words of baptism, “I baptize you, sister [or brother] so-and-so, in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Ghost,” he and one of the deacons would “dip ’em in the water.” As the just saved emerged from the river into the morning sunlight, reborn and revived in their Lord, the assembled church greeted them with another hymn. When all had felt the waters flow over them, the by now quite wet new members changed into dry clothes, and the entire congregation returned to Cleveland, where “we were fellowshipped into the church” during the regular service. Young Clarence, who in his fervor had left his dry clothes back at St. Peter’s earlier that morning, rode back soaked on the flatbed truck, the wind plastering his wet robe against his body.8

  In the years to come, many of those converted would recall an overwhelming emotion. “I felt light and like something lifted up off of me,” the Delta bluesman Honeyboy Edwards remembered. “You never have that but one time. Once you got it, that’s something because God don’t give you nothing and take it back.” But in contrast, Franklin thought his conversion experience “was more or less typical. . . . It wasn’t anything unusual or spectacular.” So, too, with the baptismal service, where no overwhelming emotion punctuated his memory. It was not that such feelings embarrassed Franklin or that he had not felt the importance of the moment. Rather, his seemingly flat response is actually a key to understanding the very depth of the religious faith he embraced in 1929.9

  Theologically, Franklin had understood his sinful, human nature that night on the mourner’s bench and thus the need for conversion; but he never saw himself as a sinner bereft of hope. God might be stern and punishment eternal for persistent sinners, “but I never felt really condemned by God,” he explained. “I never felt that God had something against me. It seemed to me that God had provided all of these things for me, including his love, and now it was my time to respond.” Even after discounting memory’s tricks over half a century, it remains evident that this young teenager had grown significantly within the church community since his initial public-speaking failure. His conversion flowed from his emerging sense of worth framed in church and at home, and there were no startling revelations. “Nothing that was sudden: suddenly I understood about the whole thing. No,” he later insisted, “I guess the cultivation of that acceptance of the Lord was my continuous participation in the services of the church.” Here, in the collective embrace of both family and congregation, was the transforming potential of the black religious tradition, where belief in a God as concerned with this world as with the next provided individuals and communities with an alternative to the demeaning images that surrounded them. The folk story told of a slave preacher addressing the central Christian mystery of Christ’s death on Calvary, repeated with variations across generations throughout the black South, signaled the journey Clarence had begun. As the preacher finished the depiction of the pain, the blood, the deep sorrow of Christ’s mother and disciples, he paused, “his eyes scrutinizing every face in the congregation, and then he would tell them, ‘You are not niggers! You are not slaves! You are God’s children!’”10

  Less than a decade following Clarence’s baptismal service, the young Martin Luther King Jr., later a close friend, also experienced conversion in tones that Clarence would easily have recognized. There was no sudden moment of revelation, King wrote in an essay when he was twenty-one, no gathering emotional crisis. He, too, had grown up in the church, and his conversion flowed seemingly effortlessly from the weave of his life. But for both men, for all the remembered lack of drama, their religious conversion and the faith that blossomed from it would largely define their adult engagement with the world around them.11

  Clarence’s conversion came at a moment of transition, even ambiguity, in his life. Neither man nor boy, he nonetheless felt that he was at the “age of accountability” personally and in relation to his church community. Indeed, acceptance of that responsibility in part motivated his conversion. Yet neither he nor his parents considered him an adult. “So far as I was concerned, and so far as they were concerned, I was still a child,” he remembered. At the same time, his conversion marked him apart from his father. He “admired” and “loved” Henry Franklin but clearly sought a separate identity “so far as his non-churching going” behavior was concerned. That his biological father had left a decade before complicated these feelings even further. Also, Clarence had started “thinking about girls.” While conversion certainly did not diminish that interest, it did channel it in certain ways within the church community. As Cleo Myles recalled, there was a strict moral code expected. At the time of their baptism, she explained, “If you joined the church [and] you went to meeting, you know, dancing was a sin, at that time.” How the born-again Clarence navigated these conflicting pressures within and beyond the church community in these years remains unclear. How he would navigate them during the decades to come would be one of the great complications in Clarence Franklin’s life.12

  Then, too, of course, there was the racial atmosphere. Some years before his conversion, Clarence’s friendship with “one or two” young white friends ended sharply. In an experience common among southern black youth, Clarence discovered one day that his friends’ parents had noticed an unacceptable conversational parity: Clarence was calling his friends by their first names. The parents, Clarence remembered, “would begin telling you to call them ‘Mr. Jesse,’ call her ‘Miss Ann.’” Clarence’s response to calling his erstwhile friends by a title? “Did it. I did it. And others did it.” Not surprisingly, his white friends’ attitudes quickly changed as well. Reflecting as an adult on why he was not “shocked” by the experience, Franklin explained that if from that moment in childhood when “things begin to dawn on you, you’re being instructed by your own parents about what the situation is between blacks and whites, and where your place is, as opposed to where his place is . . . [then] when you grow up with that it doesn’t shock you.” That may well be true but would not therefore negate the presence of a deeper hurt and anger at so dismissive a rejection for being who you were. In Atlanta a few years later, for example, following an identical experience with a white friend, young Martin Luther King Jr. vowed to hate all white people. This anger lasted for years, despite his parents’ efforts to encourage in their son a Christian duty to love. Young King’s transformation would not come until college.13

  As he lived with that experience, Clarence at times might have felt that hatred too, as he did the consequent anger over the silence that was survival’s price. The reasons seemed unending. In the year of his conversion, a large mob of local whites in Bolivar County lynched Charley Shepard, a black resident, in the classic ceremonial ritual that served to solidify the bonds among whites of all social groups in the Delta. After seven hours of public torture, a fire finally consumed Shepard’s still-breathing body.14

  How Clarence absorbed this horror remains unknown, for he never talked publicly about such emotions. In Mississippi, less than a decade after the Shepard lynching, B. B. King, then thirteen years old, passed the hanging body of anot
her black man lynched “for touching” a white girl. “Deep inside,” the man whose voice and music would touch a nation reflected, “I’m hurt, sad and mad. But I stay silent. . . . My anger is a secret that stays away from the light of day because the square is bright with the smiles of white people passing by as they view the dead man on display. I feel disgust and disgrace and rage and every emotion that makes me cry without tears and scream without sound.”15

  The weight of such silence could psychically maim an individual, and some African Americans suffered that fate. But black Mississippians possessed rich resources for creating lives of meaning and purpose despite such horrors. Some found expression and affirmation in the culture of the blues, giving voice in song to ideas that, if said in a public speech, would have brought swift retribution from Delta whites. They also, as Clarence did, looked to the gospel. Following Shepard’s murder, he was even more active in the choir. He attended prayer meetings on certain weeknights, as he did testimonial meetings on the third Sunday of the month, although he affirmed that he “didn’t do too much testifying.” In many Afro-Baptist communities, one or two older church members were assigned to the newly converted, to instruct them in “how to raise a hymn, to pray in public, and to lead a prayer meeting.” Between prayer meetings, testimonials, and regular services, Clarence both found the needed tutelage and grew to embrace his new responsibilities. That communal enveloping, framed by faith, provided Clarence and many others with the psychic strength to develop as complete human beings. In the process, he discovered a powerful new timbre to a voice that had only recently been timorous.16

  Roebuck Pops Staples, a Delta native and adult friend of Clarence Franklin’s, would later sing of the Mississippi of his youth: “Far back as I can remember / Either had to plow or hoe.” That, too, was Clarence’s world. As was common among Delta blacks, his life was hard and unrelenting, and it became even harder in the 1930s. A national economic depression devastated an already impoverished black workforce, and the possibility of owning the land one worked all but disappeared for African Americans. As the white Delta planter and diarist, Harry Ball, wrote at the time, “The negroes are starving. They throng about us daily, begging for work and food.”17