The Emancipation of Robert Sadler (25 page)

“Sunday's our big meal of the week,” the pastor's wife explained, passing the biscuits. “It's always nice to gather at the table and enjoy the Lord's bounty on His day, isn't that right, children?”

Three yellow-haired children said uh-huh.

That night I sang and played their piano and we carried on long after the service ordinarily ended. They took up a love offering for me, and I counted over one hundred dollars. I praised the Lord all the way to Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania.

The little girl was shocked to see me.

“But wasn't it you sent me a letter astin me to come pray for your daddy?”

“Yessir, but I just never dreamed you'd actually show up!”

“Well. Here I be. The Lord sent me.”

She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. “I was afraid you wouldn't come, Brother Bob, but here you are!” I spent two days with her father, and he refused to see his need for God in his life. The girl's mother invited some friends to the house, and we held meetings in their home in the evenings. I played my portable organ and sang. At the meetings four and five people came to the Lord each night. All except the father. He sat slumped half asleep against the wall.

I left Sinking Spring wondering exactly why God sent me there when the man I had gone to see wasn't helped at all. I stopped the car and settled it with the Lord. I gave the situation completely to Him. “I don't want Sadler's way, Lord, I want
your
way.”

———

In 1955, about the time Dr. King led the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie got a good job as a housekeeper for a family named Pickings in Bucyrus. Mr. Pickings owned a company that made copper kettles. Shortly after Jackie began working for them, Mr. Pickings asked me to work for him too. We moved into the big house next door to his where his brother Wilfred was living. Our job was to care for both houses, the grounds, and Wilfred.

Wilfred was not right in his mind. He had been an opera singer, and some said he had studied too hard and it hurt his brain. He acted like he was fighting demons.

Mr. Pickings hadn't been able to keep any help in that house because of Wilfred. He scared everybody away. We were the only ones who lasted. In time, we came to love Wilfred. He was an elderly man, big, tall, and fierce when he was angry.

He didn't frighten us. He obeyed us as a child would his parents. I could tell him, “Wilfred, eat your carrots!” and he would obediently eat his carrots. When he was making too much noise, I would sternly tell him, “That's enough of that, Wilfred!” and he would be quiet.

Wilfred obeyed Jackie pretty well, and his mind seemed to improve after we moved into the house so I felt at peace when I had to travel, leaving Jackie in charge. The Lord blessed her with wisdom and strength to take over.

———

In 1956 an incident occurred which was to have a lasting effect on my ministry. Jackie and I went to a meeting in Marion, Ohio, and there was a man from Seattle speaking and ministering the word of the Lord in prophecy. The spirit of discernment was working in him that night in tremendous power. The Lord was so near and sweet. I was sitting at the piano when suddenly the man pointed to me and said, “Come up here, brother. There is something you have need of, and the Lord wants to give it to you tonight.”

Feeling a little weak, I went to the front of the church. “Open your hands,” the man told me. I did as he said. He laid his hands on mine, and suddenly I opened my mouth and began to speak in a new language. It felt wonderful—not that there was any tingle or great surge of power in my vocal cords. I just opened my mouth and spoke in some language I never heard before.

I learned that what I experienced had been promised by Jesus to all believers in Acts chapter 1, where He said, “Wait for the promise of the Father . . . for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” I had read that Scripture many times before, but never
really
knew what it meant. If the disciples needed this special power, then I surely did.

I began experiencing the other gifts of the Holy Spirit. Discernment, for example. I seemed to know instinctively what a person needed. And the gift of wisdom—supernatural knowing. All feelings of self-doubt and God-doubt were gone from me. The Lord spoke to me in dreams and visions. I was on a new journey with Him.

I longed for Jackie to find this same beautiful closeness with the Lord. It was as though I had gone from the hem of His robe right into His arms.

It was four long years later that Jackie received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, too.

“Oh Robert, why did I wait so long to open my heart to this deeper walk with God?” she lamented. “Why have I always been such a skeptic?”

“Jackie, honey, God loves skeptics.”

In the autumn of 1956 the Lord spoke to me in a vision. I had just bought a new portable organ—I hadn't even taken it out of the box yet. The Lord told me to go to Marion, Ohio. In the vision I saw a beer garden in front of me, and I saw me playing the organ. A white Christian couple we knew named Toni and Mike were with me. After I saw the vision, I immediately went to the telephone and called Mike. “Can you and your wife come with me to Marion now?” They were at our door in less than an hour.

We arrived in Marion, Ohio, and found the beer garden that I had seen in my vision. We parked the car and I took my new organ out of the box and set it up on the sidewalk in front of the beer garden. We began to sing right there, and it wasn't long before the people began to gather around us.

We were playing, singing, and telling the people about the Lord and His love for them when a young woman burst out of the beer garden and stomped over to where we were. “You're making a lot of racket!” she shouted at me. “What are you, religious freaks?”

I smiled at her and reached for her hand. Shaking it, I said, “How do you do? I'm Robert and these are my friends Toni and Mike.” She stared at me and said nothing. “Do you have a favorite hymn?” I asked her.

Her face crumpled. “Ohhh . . .”

I began playing “The Old Rugged Cross.”

“How did
you
know I like that song?”

She gave her heart to Jesus that day on the street in front of a dozen or so of her friends from the beer garden. “I've needed God in my life,” she cried. “I tried church and I tried reading the Bible, but I never knew I could get born again with God living
inside
me. I just didn't know!”

Others gave their hearts to the Lord that day, too. I preached quiet, simple messages about the love of God. We passed out some literature, and then when it was time to go, everyone had left except the young woman. “I'm an alcoholic,” she confessed. “What shall I do?”

Toni and Mike offered to take her home with them to live. She was stunned and took them up on the offer. She stopped drinking and was delivered from alcoholism and eventually returned to Marion and got a good secretarial job at the Marion Steam Shovel Company. Today she is married, has a family, and teaches Sunday school. Jesus gave her a new life that afternoon in front of the beer garden.

———

People gave us boxes of used clothing and canned food, used toys, shoes, and small household items to take to needy families on my trips.

I packed up the car in November of 1956 with all the boxes that had piled up in our front room, kissed Jackie good-bye, and left for South Carolina.

“Lord,” I prayed, “you show me where you want me to go. You show me.”

I got into Clinton, South Carolina, around suppertime. I stopped at a restaurant and was looking out of the window when I saw a group of workers coming in across the field from picking cotton. My heart raced at the sight of them. It reminded me of my childhood on the Beal Plantation. I put my fork down, wiped off my mouth, and hurried outside to meet them.

The eyes of one of the women met mine, and her face froze. She looked oddly familiar. Suddenly the woman screamed and threw her hands in the air.

“Robert!” she screamed. “Robert Sadler!”

I stared at her. Then in a rush I recognized her. “Tennessee!” I hollered, my hands in the air. “Lord A'mighty! Tennessee!”

We threw ourselves into each other's arms, laughing and crying. O Lord, Lord! “How'd you recognize me, Tennessee?”

“I been astin the Lord what ever happened to that chile in the Big House, that poor lil ole chile called Robert Sadler, and Lord a'mighty, here you be!”

I couldn't look at her enough, drink in her face. It was Tennessee all right. Older, but still beautiful. We talked and shouted and cried at the same time. I was afraid to ask about John Henry. “John Henry! Is he—?”

“He's in the store! That's our restaurant,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We own that little store there.”

“But I was just in there eatin supper!”

“It's John Henry be doin the cookin!”

I stayed with Tennessee and John Henry for a couple of days and even picked cotton with them. She introduced me to her children. Big strong sons, one light, one dark, both married and with babies of their own.

“Tennessee,” I teased, “you was one mean girl, yessuh, you was a
mean
one.”

Tennessee laughed. “You callin me mean? What about that Mary Webb? Now
she
be mean!”

We laughed. “She surely seem like she had no heart nohow.”

“But what about you, Tennessee?” I said, chuckling.

“Wal, I
had
to be mean, Robert. Them white devils woulda kilt me. But Jesus took the meanness outa me. I don't hate Sam Beal, I don't hate any of 'em. I feel sorry for em. I am happy and free in my heart—free and clear, praise God!”

“The way I sees it,” John Henry said over a spicy gumbo soup, “is the Lord have carried us this far, the Lord gonna carry us through to the end.”

They lived in a small wooden house behind the store, which John Henry had built himself. Though grey sprinkled through their hair and some extra weight was on their bodies, they were still filled with fire and drive. They had suffered more than many Negroes, and their love had survived the worst. What thrilled me the most was that they loved Jesus.

“You'd think old man Beal would drive me to the devil, but he drive me straight to Jesus, Robert. I jes knowed it had to be Jesus watching over us and helping us escape that place.”

John Henry told me his mama, Ceily, had passed on to be with the Lord just the year before. At the mention of her name, I could see her face so clearly before me that I could have reached out and touched it. I remembered that day in her cabin in the slave quarter when I asked Jesus into my heart. “John Henry,” I said, “your mama done took me through many a fearsome storm. . . .”

“She never forgot yoll, Robert. She often spoke of ye and prayed for ye, too.”

“I never forgot her, either,” I said. “She brought me to Jesus.”

John Henry told me that many of Beal's slaves lived in the vicinity, and we went to visit some of them. Many I didn't know by name, but they knew me. They remembered me as the dumb little old house boy. They didn't speak of my turning Mitt and Waxy over to the lash, and they didn't talk about those who died in the quarter. I visited their houses with their chairs and beds and bedspreads and dishes and china cabinets and radios and pictures on the wall, their refrigerators and stoves and embroidered towels and food in the cupboards and I became so overwhelmed I couldn't help crying.

“Yoll go ahead and weep, Robert, them's tears of joy.”

“Thas right,” John Henry said. “When one black man weeps for joy, we all sing hallelujah!”

Soon we were laughing. And crying.

We remembered the dirt floor shanties and what we came from, our lives that we didn't share with others, with outsiders. We were ashamed.

“John Henry, where did Harriet settle at after she got off the plantation?”

“Harriet? She done live in Anderson till she passed about ten years ago. Her chillren still livin there. And Mary Webb, she be livin in Anderson. You oughter go see her! She still the same mean ole thing!”

Mary Webb in Anderson? I wondered if she'd throw something at me if I went to visit her. I chuckled to myself. I was surprised at the tender feeling I suddenly felt for her and I hoped she would never witness the sorry mess her kitchen became at the Beal house.

The reunion with Tennessee and John Henry and the others was like heaven. We were free and living in the world, and God had heard our prayers. When we had sung our songs in the clearing by the woods on the plantation—
“Swing low, sweet chariot, comin for to carry me home”
—we were singing about freedom. One of the old slaves now living in an apartment with an air-conditioner in the window told me, “Robert, you was nothin but a lil ole dumb chile and you never knowd nothing about the Underground Railroad, about white folks up north carin for the Negroes, and we never told you nothin. You was Massuh's pet chile.”

Pet chile. He left out the word
puppy
. But even as he said those words, I felt an old familiar jab in the belly, the everlasting pain from wanting so much to believe Master Beal cared for me.

I could have stayed with John Henry and Tennessee in their pleasant little home indefinitely, but the Lord told me it was time to be moving on to Anderson. I left some boxes of clothing for them to distribute and was on my way.

I got to Anderson tired and wanting to sleep. Margie hugged me and kissed me til I thought I'd bruise. “I been missin yoll,” she cried.

“Me, too, girl.”

“Set yourself down and I'll put on the coffee.”

I never got the coffee because I fell dead asleep on her sofa and didn't wake up until the next morning. It was the Lord who woke me up. I sat up on the sofa looking around and trying to remember how I got here when the Lord told me to put on my shoes and drive to Railroad Street. “Yessuh,” I said.

I drove to Railroad Street, got out of the car, and began walking, not knowing where the Lord wanted me to go. All at once a woman across the road pointed at me and hollered, “Preacher! Preacher!”

I thought maybe she knew me from one of my street meetings and I waved back. At once she came hightailing it across the road. She was a short, heavy colored lady wearing a shawl and carrying a Bible. Puffing and out of breath, without barely saying hello, she explained all excited that she had seen me in a dream she had the night before.

“Me? You saw me?”

“It was you!” In the dream I had prayed for her, and after I prayed, she was healed.

“Do you need a healing, sister?” I asked.

She told me that she had been suffering with a sore on her head, and it was getting worse.

“I'm on my way to a prayer meeting on Railroad Street. Will you come?” she asked. We got into my car and drove to a wooden shanty where a group of women had gathered for prayer. The sister with the sore on her head took off her hat and wig and showed me the sore, big and festering. I prayed for her and commanded the infection to leave her.

Three days later I saw the woman, and she told me that it was healing and closing over. I saw her again in seven days, and it was completely healed. She came to Margie's house, knocked on the door, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “This is for you, Preacher. God sent you here so I could be healed. I been savin this, and I want you to have it.”

A few weeks later, the Lord had me drive to Lowndesville, South Carolina, to hold some meetings. We met in the home of a woman named Myra, whose father was unable to walk and in a wheelchair. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and told me to tell the man to get out of his chair. I could feel the anointing of the Lord in the room. The man sat staring at me, not moving. I got up and walked over to him. “In the name of the Lord Jesus, get up and walk,” I told him. He rose from the wheelchair and walked across the room. Then he turned around and walked back again.

Everybody in the room started whooping and praising the Lord. When the old man rested, he got up and tried it again. He didn't need any help, didn't need a stick to hold him up, either.

The next day he was still walking. He went up and down in the yard and on the road. His daughter said she couldn't get him to sit down. “He's so glad to be walking, I can't keep him down!”

The Lord Jesus never offers us anything bad. He hears us and he heals us and helps us through life with goodness and love on our side. The old man's sons and daughters gave their hearts to Jesus when they saw what had happened to their father. Then his grandchildren gave their hearts to the Lord, too. I saw over a dozen people come to the Lord because of the miracle God did in that man.