Coast to Coast (9 page)

T
he most primitive white people in all America, infinitely nearer the trees than any rural ancient in England, are the mountaineers of Kentucky and Tennessee, a peasantry of the hills which has never totally accepted authority, and which manages to remain a shuttered society tucked away in remote country corners. These folks still consider taxation a wicked alien imposition, distil their own moonshine whisky in defiance of local prohibition laws, and sometimes speak an archaic Scots-Elizabethan dialect; their raggety children run barefoot about their cabins on the hillsides, and often and again there comes news that one horny mountaineer has disintegrated another with a blast from his shotgun. When I was staying on Lookout Mountain, on the border between Georgia and Tennessee, I saw a good deal of these people, for many of them live quite close to the luxurious suburb that has been built on top of the mountain; and you could scarcely escape experiencing, in one way or another, the extraordinary earthy force of their religion, a force that pervades the whole of the South, but is to be found in its most curious forms among these simple and conservative countrymen.

One evening my wife and I were driving down a road on the outskirts of Chattanooga when we saw, pitched beside the pavement, a dirty marquee; from it there came strains of music, played on a tinny piano and a guitar, with accompanying desultory snatches of women’s voices. We stopped at once and went inside. At the end of the tent, on stage, so to speak, a very fat woman was lying on the ground quivering and shaking, sometimes tremulously, like a jelly, sometimes with sharp stabs of impulsive movement. Her dress was pulled up above her fleshy knees, sweat was on her forehead, a black hat was lying crumpled beside her, and she was breathing noisily. Two other women, wearing expressions of fanatical intensity, were supporting her head, and standing above them, waving his arms like a Paganini, prancing here and there crazily, now and then pushing back his streaming hair with dirty-nailed fingers, was a young man holding a guitar. In the background a little black girl, aged about ten, was banging a hymn-tune on an upright piano, and a small group of negro women, respectably dressed, looking a trifle bored, and sometimes pausing to exchange gossip or look out of the tent flap, was half-heartedly singing some unlikely words.

Occasionally the young man would strum a few chords on his guitar and join in, his voice rasping and penetrative, and soon the prostrate woman, with heavings and convulsions and agonized writhing, tried to gasp a few words herself, rather as the dying man at the end of one of Poe’s more terrifying stories wheezed a last phrase before dissolving into pulp. The two attendant women were galvanized. Seizing the patient (if that is the right word) by the front of her dress, they yanked her into a sitting position, and hissed urgent instructions into her ear. She was still jerking incessantly, sometimes falling sideways, to be pushed upright again, sometimes caught in mid-air as she fell backwards. “Take him in!” said the attendants. “Take in the Lord Jesus ! Roll it! Roll Him in! Take Him in! Oh Jesus! The glory of it! Rolling, rolling, rolling! Glory, glory, glory! Jesus, Jesus! Take Him in, oh! glory Jesus! Rolling, rolling, rolling!” Round and round danced the demoniac guitarist. On and on went the hymn, balefully; clang, clang sounded the old piano. The woman on the floor threw her body, as if in some hellish trance, into even more violent convulsions. “Take Him in! oh, rolling rolling rolling! Glory!”

There were rows of chairs in the body of the tent, and a few people were sitting in them silently, not together, but dotted about in the shadows. In front of me a middle-aged man was supporting a woman who was still jerking spasmodically from some earlier experience. A mother, gazing blankly and open-mouthed at the spectacle, had with her two children, a small girl who sat on her chair sucking her thumb, and a boy who had reached that stage of squirming sordidity peculiar to children nearing exhaustion. A stout, sensible-looking man near the entrance to the tent told me that we were witnessing a session of Holy Rollers, a sect (he thought, he was not sure) affiliated to the Church of God. This strange church is indigenous to the South. It began as a group of fundamentalists who broke away from the existing nonconformist churches because they were losing the uninhibited emotionalism of the frontier times, and becoming more formal in their modes of worship. In Tennessee there are innumerable such dissident sects, calling themselves Pentecostal Churches, or Holiness Chapels, or a host of other grandiose titles; but the chief ones banded together to become the
Church of God. It flourished, and achieved (relatively speaking) some intellectual maturity, founding a theological college at Cleveland, Tennessee. Though it had no ordained clergy, and believed in some odd manifestations of the Divine purpose, it acquired a status of local dignity. But alas! there were differences within the hierarchy, and before long there was a sprout of smaller, dissenting Churches of God; the Church of God (Tomlinson); the (Original) Church of God; and the Church of God With Signs Following After.

The one whose ceremonies we were watching expounded the sacred significance of “the jerks”—the convulsions, voluntary and induced, which racked the woman on the floor. She evidently suffered from some disease, and believed that if the spirit entered into her (manifesting itself in jumps, jerks, falling, rolling, the wringing of hands and gibberish) it would be cured. “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost,” says the Acts of the Apostles of the day of Pentecost, “and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” The followers of “the old religion”, as these strange cults are familiarly called, believe that some of their number have acquired the understanding of unknown languages; and sure enough, as the hours passed, there crept into the insistent cries of the attendant women some words without meaning. Soon it was pouring out in floods from their mouths, a wild flow of words, like Romany or Lear; and occasionally even the patient herself, jerking and jumping, managed to croak from her constricted throat a few totally unintelligible syllables. (“These men are full of new wine,” said the mocking doubters of Jerusalem.) When we left the marquee she was still unhealed. The guitarist still whirled about her; the piano still tinnily clanged; the choristers, their great brown and white eyes rolling around the tent, still whined their listless hymn; the little boy still crawled slimily over the chairs, on and off his mother’s lap; and the poor convulsed patient, all her draperies loose by now, was still urged to “Let Him in, sister! Glory, glory, roll it, roll it!” by the demon women at her side.

Some of the mountain religions are even more strikingly close to the grass-roots of Christianity. I remember standing in the garden of a gentle Southerner who has built his house on the sheer side of Lookout Mountain, where it runs away down to Georgia and Alabama. We were waiting for the sun to set, for he has a theory that if you look at Jupiter backwards, through a mirror, you can see her moons with the naked eye. The view was splendid. Below us, in the valley, the highroad ran southwards to Atlanta; beyond it rose another range of hills, and another, wooded and kindly, with a little clearing here and there and a
white farmhouse, or a cabin with its smallholding; and to our left the great rib of Lookout Mountain stretched into the distance. We stood on the precipitous edge of the garden, hoping to see a fox or a badger in the woods below, and my host said: “Ah have lived in this region all mah life, but ah can never accustom myself to the idea that some of mah neighbours are snake-worshippers.”

He was exaggerating a little, I learnt on pressing inquiries (a gift for stretching the facts being one of the more endearing southern failings) but not too much. Not very far away, at the hamlet of Grasshopper, Tennessee, there had originated a sect which based its beliefs upon the last verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark: “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Believing these words to be an injunction as well as a prophecy, members of the Church of God With Signs Following After make a practice of handling rattesnakes during their services. Often they are bitten, sometimes fatally, but though the custom is now illegal in Tennessee, it persists widely and more or less openly. Now and again there is a news item about a particularly severe case of biting; occasionally some faded holy man appears in court; but in general it is tacitly accepted as “something that happens on the mountain”. I was directed to a church, secluded among the woods, where I was told I could see this thing (the element of the circus about it, I must admit, drawing me more magnetically than any theological implications); but the place was deserted when I reached it, and a farmer sitting on the porch of a nearby shack only murmured incoherently when I asked him for advice. Such esoteric rites, though, were never far away from life on Lookout Mountain; I remember one elderly carpenter, himself an elder or preacher, prophet or evangelist, I forget which, remarking to me quite casually as he did some sandpapering: “I was brought up with the jerks, and the talking with tongues, but I don’t hold with the serpents.”

Even the more orthodox worshippers of the Bible Belt sometimes express their devotion strangely. I spent one Easter Day in the region of Chattanooga, and wandered about during its sunny morning observing the celebrations. For many weeks people had been preparing for Easter in one way or another. The garages were full of cars being washed (for it is a matter of social prestige to drive a shining car to Easter Communion). The shops were full of excited women; the telephones were always engaged, it being a season of invitations; from every store window
there glared the stony glass eyes of the Easter Bunny, the American secular symbol of the festival.

Noisy evangelism dominated the radio programmes, but there was still time for a few such songs as “I was riding to Chapel on Easter Morning … when I saw the cutest Easter parade”. When I visited the cable office to send a telegram, I was nicely asked if I would care to send an Easter Bunnygram instead; several suitable messages were suggested, a typical one being: “The Easter Bunny is on his way—So be a good little boy (girl) every day.” The city of Chattanooga was alive with activity from earliest morning. At sunrise there was a mass evangelical meeting, attended by a brigade of clerics, the Governor of Tennessee, and trumpeters who greeted the sunrise with a fanfare. By mid-morning the streets were thronged with churchgoers of many denominations. Bright convertibles hurried through the sunshine, father driving in a grey suit with a carnation buttonhole, mother clutching her picture hat, Sis in a very flouncy party dress, junior being scolded for leaning out of the car. Negro families were as bright as peacocks in smiles and fripperies, and innumerable small boys of some unidentified youth group marched about the place in white ducks and blue tunics. Sitting in a car outside the courthouse I saw a young negro, looking extremely worried, listening to a threatening sermon (all hell-fire and penitence) on the radio. Almost everybody seemed to be going to church, leaving only a few faithless, in grubby shirts or flowered housecoats, reading the Sunday papers on the porches of their homes.

I drove out of the town towards the Georgia border, and before long stopped at a small white wooden Baptist church on a ridge. It was a sunny day, and the door of the church was open. Outside a few boys were playing about in the dust with sticks; through the door I glimpsed a pastiche of open-necked shirts and head-scarves, baggy trousers and garish cotton frocks from country stores. A very slow and tuneless hymn was being sung. A few members of the congregation stirred as I put my head diffidently around the doorpost; I caught the eye of a red-haired girl of sluggish aspect, still mouthing the words of the hymn as she stared, but so unaccountably enthralled by my arrival that the voice faded from her throat. She nudged her husband, who whispered to an old man holding a large hymn-book to the level of his eyes, who turned around with a great clattering of feet and wheezing; and presently a space was cleared for me on a bench near the back of the church. The congregation was constantly in motion. There were many young mothers with children, and whenever a baby began to cry it was carried out of the church; so that before long, out in the sunny road, there
were numbers of women strolling up and down, dressed in their fineries, crooning to their babies. Now and again a couple of men went out for a breath of fresh air, or some latecomer pushed his way in with heavily whispered greetings and some muted badinage. The church was hot and airless.

The order of service was complicated. A number of elderly men with grave faces took it in turn to read lessons or deliver impassioned impromptu sermons. They were called to these duties by a man who was evidently the pastor; he was fat and perspiring, dressed in a grey double-breasted suit with a garish tie, and holding perpetually under his arm a book which, by its binding and deportment, could only be of utter sanctity. He stood expansively in the middle of a raised platform at the end of the church, ushering elder after elder to the rostrum with reverent gestures. Sometimes he made an appeal for some worthy cause (“Can you sit and see, brethren and sisters, sit and see these little ones suffer? Think again, my friends, think again, dear brethren, and deliver unto us some trifle, some poor offering, some widow’s mite for the Society for the Protection of Orphans of the Storm”). Sometimes he threatened those who did not regularly attend church, and on these occasions I sometimes thought the dread fire of his eye landed directly on me. “There may be some among you, my friends, I make no accusations, I say unto no one ‘Thou art fit for hell-fire’, but I say again, brethren, there may be among you, here among us today, here in this sacred edifice, among these hearts lifted unto the Lord, some sinner, some poor wicked sinner, who does not come each Sabbath Day unto this edifice to offer praise and thanksgiving with us. If there be such, my friends, I say unto him ‘Brother, the sun doth not shine so hotly—nor the winds blow so cruelly—nor the ice freeze so cold—as the everlasting torments which thou art storing up for thyself in the everlasting awful halls of perpetual damnation!’”