It must have been a mule

Roy Kerridge

-Flown in Cleveland, Tennessee, at the L./Church of God convention, preacher after Southern preacher shouted, sang, prayed and prophesied. By the time my stay in the Bible Belt was over, I felt I had en- joyed a rare peep into the soul of the white Southerner, and liked what I saw. The very first sermon I heard was an attack on Dar- win, and although this high standard was not always maintained, nearly every preacher had something to say.

'Oh my friends, I was at a little church meeting once, when the folks was all pray- ing, talking in tongues an' ever'thang, and one of the sisters gets into a mood.

"I see God!" she cries.

"Well, what's He like then?" one o' the congregation inquires, kind of interested, y'know.

"He's got long ears! An' a long face! An' big eyes!"

'Straight away someone sings out, "It must have been a mule! 'Cause God don't look like that." ' The vast auditorium rang with applause, and the preacher warmed to his work, every now and then returning to his theme and crying out, 'It must have been a mule!'

Until the coming of the motor car and tarmacked road, mules must have been very useful in the Appalachians. Clearly they have left a deep impression on all who knew them and many who didn't. Another speaker quoted the Church founder, A. J. Tomlinson, who likened the Church of God to a mule that fell down a well and was taken for dead. The bereaved farmer shovelled earth on top of the unfortunate animal, but instead of being buried alive the mule shook off each load and climbed up on it, rising higher and higher until soon it was grazing safely on solid ground. So would the Church of God overcome its critics, given time.

Outside in secular Cleveland, old farmers from the hills of Cherokee County sat in the

'Shopping Mall' and told stories to each other, with many pauses, while their wives bought the week's supplies. The original centre of Cleveland seemed to have dwindl- ed away to nothing, its pavements deserted, as everybody did their shopping along the roads outside, from low garage-like buildings with enormous parking spaces. Farmers and others seemed to have grown more peasant-like, not less, for instead of their going to town, the town, in the form of shops, had moved to the country. Even the Mall was too metropolitan for some farmers, and as soon as their wives were ready they ran back to their `pick-up trucks' with wild shouts of 'I'm gettin' the heck outa this town!'

To me, however, the Mall seemed a delightful place to spend a lazy day. If emp- ty, it would have resembled one of the shiny new shopping precincts that disfigure so many of our ancient towns. However, I never saw it empty, since air-conditioning had made it a mecca for heat-struck Southerners, who walked up and down greeting one another ('How ya perkin', Un- cle John?' Rela-tivvily well, sir!') or play- ing music on the stage provided, or sitting. on the edge of the stage and talking about mules.

Big men with wrinkled faces and blue dungarees would sit staring forward silent- ly, huge hands on their knees, until an ac- quaintance came along and sat nearby. After 20 minutes or so, one of the two would say, 'Way back yonder in 1955 when we had that dry spell. . .' and begin a monologue that would last until the wife appeared.

'Hey, Nat, got any mule jokes?' a young man called out on one occasion.

Nat hadn't, but trotted out a hoary col- lection of mountain chestnuts with great simplicity. I never heard a swear word or saw a 'teenage-cultist' all the time I was in Cleveland. Nor did I hear any jargon, sure- ly unusual for America. All was innocence, as the punch-lines to various jokes testified.

' "I'm driving?" he says, "I thought you were driving!" 'I thought I saw him, and he thought he saw me, and when we got nearer, it was neither of us.'

Ignorant of the outside world they may have been, but in a way this was their good fortune. All knew their Bible, King James version, which together with an outdoor life seemed all that they needed to know. White Southerners are blessed with no interest in ecology, psychoanalysis, the women's movement or any movement they can't shoot down and bake in a pie. To me they represent the Hope of America. Against this background of kindly philistinisrn, great writers have emerged, while Califor- nia or New York have yet to produce a Mark Twain, an Erskine Caldwell or a Chandler-Harris. Or, for that matter, a Richard Wright, or a Frederick Douglas, for negro authors who hated the South were yet its children, and wrote better than anyone in the East European-influenced North.

Tall, gangling negroes in jeans, evidently farm workers, also sat around in different parts of the Mall, looking rather stunned at the big city. Some riffled among cheap blues records by B. B. King, on sale in cellophone packs, while others clapped hands to the hillbilly music played by local groups on the stage. This music, outwardly cheerful, showed something of the dark undercurrent of the Southern soul. Typical musicians and fans were young married couples, all pink cheeks, blond hair, smiles and teeth. Yet the lyrics they warbled to a toe-tapping beat owed much to Scottish morbidity or the fatalism of pioneer days.

As opposed to blues singers, who are always waking up this morning, country musicians are always going somewhere, whether up on the mountain to drag the devil down (wrestle with sin) or down to celebration river to lay this dead man in his water grave (be baptised).

'You can take me to the graveyard, lay my body down,' one trio of guitar-pickers proposed blithely. One of the strangest songs 1 heard was the macabre 'Conversa- tion with Death', which borrowed many verses from 18th-century tombstones I had seen in English country churchyards. Other

lines went as follows: .

'0 Death, look how you're treating me. You've closed my eyes so I can't see.' 'I'll lock your jaw so you can't talk, I'll fix your feet, so you can't walk.' 'Too late, too late, my friends farewell. I know my soul will burn in Hell.'

I n our yellow school bus, the party of

English West Indians I had set out with, led by the intrepid Pastor McCalla, explored the American South. Up in the mountains of North Carolina, set among thick forests of loblolly pines with spreading boughs, White oak trees, Southern beech, ash, birch and maple, we found wooden plank cabins Where fat, genial smallholders waved to us from their porches, where they sat in rock- ing chairs. I was as suprised to see them as I would have been to see Chinamen with Pigtails in modern Peking. Once we stopped at one of the roadside stalls where hillbilly farmers sold their produce from ramshackle shanty-stores: great orange pumpkins, bar- rels of peaches and `Sourwood Mountain Honey' in jars, complete with combs. Tree frogs dropped from the maple leaves into Puddles, like tropical leeches, and brilliant blue jays flashed their plumage among the trees. The dove-shooting season was just Over, and long-tailed mourning doves with Pink-washttd breasts sat on telegraph wires. A little skinny Irish-looking woman with freckled hands and a doughty, earnest ex- pression served us, while her huge laconic husband leaned on a vine-twined fence sPeaking. A square 'corn patch' had been hacked from the forest, and rows of golden xuaize stood five feet high, flittered over by large blue and black butterflies.

Other stalls, further along the road, sold tame animals that had been trapped nearby, !polecats and wildcat kittens', which in England we would call skunks and lynx cubs. Early settlers tended to call new-world animals by old-world names. 'Turkey shoots' were advertised, as turkeys are game birds in Appalachia, and notices pro- claimed that hunting dogs and (wait for it) mules were for hire. I was told of bear- hunting clubs, where the beasts were track- ed on foot, tackled by hounds, shot and then cut up on the spot. Old values of 'game for the pot' prevailed, and most white Southerners hunted deer, one lady declaring venison to be healthier than beef, as it had `no chemicals'. When I told her of safari parks in Britain, she imagined lions were let loose for sportsmen to shoot, On 'Labor Day', when no one worked, tobacco-spitting contests and catch-the- greasy-pig competitions were held. Our coach travelled south, to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, a town where beautiful Southern houses, each one a mansion, stood around • a village green. Some of these houses were of stone, and probably not unlike the slave- owners' dwellings that had been razed to the ground during the Civil War. Memorials to decimated regiments stood by the roadside against grassy banks and lux- urious driveways. The vernacular architec- ture of the South must be one of the glories of America, and suburbia in Cleveland, Fort Oglethorpe and elsewhere is a pleasure to explore. Nearly all the houses are of planks, some in Gothic styles, others in English Georgian, but all with porches and rocking chairs. Obviously the ideal is the plantation owner's mansion, with marble columns and mint juleps. There is no division between the hillbilly and the rich man, for the farmer's cabin, with its porch and wooden posts supporting a shingle roof, is a hum- ble, home-made version of Colonel Beauregard's verandah. Few flowers bloom in Southern gardens, but instead baskets of ferns hang over the porches, looking delightfully cool.

On the green at Fort Oglethorpe, yet another country music group, the Gentry Family, sang high sweet harmonies and urg- ed everyone to go to church on Sunday. Three dollars bought a hot picnic lunch on a tray, and one dollar locked the person of your choice in a model jail from whence it would cost him two dollars to get out.

Looking very dark among the friendly white crowds, the West Indians spread out and begun to enjoy themselves. From a stage, an announcer greeted 'our visitors from England' and then began drawing numbers from a hat for the cake walk.

'What's a cake walk?' asked a tall young man in our party, and a friendly cake- walker showed him the ropes. To a shuffl- ing rhythm from a loudspeaker, people walk round and round a giant ludo-board painted on the ground, every square having a number. When the music stops, so do you, and the judge pulls a number out of a hat. If you are lucky, you are handed an enormous chocolate cake by a woman who stands in the middle of the ring. Then you leave, smacking your lips, and the music begins again.

On a hill above our Holiday Inn stood a lorry drivers' cafe, or 'truck stop' as the Americans term such places. I walked up to it along the verge of the forest, where giant butterflies, red, gold and black, settled on leaves broader and more jungly-looking than those of beech or oak in England. In- side the cafe I met with stony looks and was served without comment.

'My name's written on the tail of my shirt, I'm a Tennessee hustler and I don't have to work,' sang the juke box.

I left a copy of the English rock newspaper, New Musical Express, behind as a parting gift. This was a mistake, for when I returned that evening I was barred by the lean, tough-looking girl assistant, who stood in the doorway regarding me through narrowed eyes. Walking along the road was a suspicious act in itself, I

discovered, while the NME, with its letters page dotted with obscenities, put the lid on it. I tried to explain that I only read it as a barometer of our times, but the girl wasn't interested.

'You caint come in with that sack!' she declared, pointing at my plastic bag. 'What are you, a hitch-hiker?' Sack indeed! Too affronted for words, I walked away.

As a climax to the week of preaching in Cleveland's Tavernacle, the town's leading citizens, the mayor, the owner of the in- surance company and the head of the mer- chant bank, all arrived to do honour to the head of the Church of God of Prophecy.

This was Bishop Tomlinson, son of the original founder. All addressed our worthy leader, a venerable old man, as 'Bishop' in friendly tones, and the Church was praised for its high moral standards.

A postman in a big peaked cap struggled to the rostrum with an enormous letter, about four feet square.

`Why, here's the mailman!' said the mayor. 'What have you got for me?'

'It's a letter from Bishop Tomlinson, but I'm a bit embarrassed as there's 20 cents to pay on it.'

'I knew the Church of God was cutting down on its costs, but that's ridiculous!'

Inside was a giant card, `Good luck, Mayor Dethero.'

When the banker's turn came, he began with a homily on the beneficial effects of Christianity and then handed the Bishop a pencil.

'D'ye remember, Bishop, how in the 1930s you sold 30,000 pencils for a church?' 'I sure do, Mr Mayor,' 'Well, here's a pencil for ye, and now I'm gonna ask for it back. I'm an Indian giver, I think they call it, No, wait, I'm gonna buy that there pencil offen you, Bishop, for ten thousand dollars, and here's my cheque!'

To thunderous applause, the Bishop took the cheque, which was made out to the Church. The banker looked around, beam- ing.

'I feel like dancing like David before the presence of the Lord!' the Bishop exclaim- ed. And so he did, uttering war whoops as he ran from one end of the stage to the other, hopping up and down and waving the cheque triumphantly in the air.