That Old Time Religion

Give me that old time religion.

Give me that old time religion.

Give me that old time religion.

That’s good enough for me.

So say some of the lyrics to a hymn one can still hear sung in the churches down here. “That old time religion” is still alive and well in the South.  They don’t call this region the “Bible Belt” for nothing and since my return I once again have seen how true that moniker really is.

Prior to moving to Colorado, I lived in North Carolina and Alabama for twelve years.  I was raised in a home where religion had a place.  I attended church every Sunday even though my parents didn’t.  Nevertheless, they wanted their children to go and believe in the things preached from the pulpit.  Religion was important to me into adulthood but it may well have had its greatest meaning during my years in Alabama and the first five or so in Colorado.

Religion is a leading force in Southern life and culture.  That is certainly not true where I lived in Boulder, Colorado.  Yes, there are churches, synagogues, temples and other religious meeting places in Boulder; and there are many believers of different faiths living there.  I knew those who professed Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and other beliefs.  But it was clear that for many people religion wasn’t the driving force in their lives.  In fact, the only place in Colorado where that would not have been true was the city of Colorado Springs where fundamentalist-style religion has a stronghold.  By contrast, Boulder is the polar opposite of the Springs in just about every aspect of life.  Far from being conventionally religious, many Boulderites could be classified more as secular humanists.

In the South religion is more than a personal matter.  It is a potent political force whose power and strength cannot be ignored.  The Civil Rights movement was born in this region’s churches where preachers used language that was simultaneously fiery and eloquent to inspire their congregations to active resistance against racism and segregation.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher as are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  And ministers today are still held in very high esteem.  Birmingham has named streets and buildings for them in recognition of the role they have played in the city’s history.

Sunday morning is the time when religion’s power is the most visible.  Preachers take to radio and television to spread their messages.  I had completely forgotten how they dominate the scene in that way.  But I found out my first Sunday back when every local television station in Birmingham broadcast some kind of church service or preacher’s sermon.  It was likewise on the radio where many local stations followed suit.  Then there are the radio and television networks whose entire content is nothing but fundamentalist Christian religion and thinking, producing programming that is listened to or watched by legions of people.

Religion also plays a big role in building personal social networks.  It is quite common when meeting new people to be asked what church you attend.  People not only attend church faithfully, they are very often deeply involved in them to an extent I hardly ever saw in Colorado.  Many are lay ministers—my brother John is one—or they take part in the various outreach programs their church will have that are directed toward youth, tending to the elderly, political involvement or other things.  Churches also stage social events, gatherings, picnics and other meetings to strengthen personal ties within the flock.  They are prominent in charity work too, running food banks, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and even medical clinics providing primary health care for the indigent. 

Church choirs are a very important part in the life of the congregation as well.  Good singers are encouraged to be choir members.  My sister-in-law sings at her church, even performing solo as I witnessed on a recent Sunday.  These choirs are mother lodes of outstanding talent, too.  Opera singer Leontyne Price sang in her Mississippi church’s choir.  Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson did likewise for her church and so did the late Whitney Houston.  Talent scouts often attend services looking for new people whose abilities are then culled for careers in the entertainment industry.

Church is the institution many will join when looking for a spouse, a job or a better life situation for themselves.  The connections formed through knowing congregation members are unequaled.  I’ve already been told by family members that I will be introduced or mentioned to different church people they know when I begin looking for work next summer.  I won’t have to be a member of the congregation to be helped by the church either.  It was enough that I knew a congregation member to be eligible for assistance.

Perhaps the sign I saw that was the most important indicator of the power of old time religion was church buildings themselves.  Yes, Birmingham does have some very impressive houses of worship.  Quite a few are splendid architectural masterpieces, but that’s not what I mean.  It is the sheer number of churches which exist in the city that is overwhelming to me.  A walk around my neighborhood made me acutely aware of this.

There are not one, not two, but seven churches with active congregations within walking distance of my house.  By walking distance I mean buildings you can reach in less than twenty minutes.  Some of these churches are close to a century in age now, but they still stand with their steeples framed against the Alabama sky.  These churches represent different Christian denominations.  I have seen Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches during my walks.  And that’s not counting the congregations that don’t have a building of their own in which to worship but instead meet in private homes or commercial spaces.

If there are seven churches within walking distance of my house, I can only imagine how many there are in the entire city.  Some are the so-called “mega-churches” which boast thousands of members.  Others are much more modest in size with perhaps a couple  hundred in the fold.  But whether they are large or small, the churches here have influence and control that dwarf anything I saw when I lived in Boulder.  Old time religion maintains a high profile everywhere and will always do so.

I am not a regular church-goer anymore.  I have gone to one service since I came back and that was at the church John’s family attends because he was preaching a sermon that particular Sunday, so it was very important that I attend to show my love and support for him.  Formal religion does not appeal to or attract me nowadays, but I am intrigued by the way so many hold it in such high regard, and how it influences numerous aspects of their lives.

“You’re down South now,” John said with a laugh recently when I remarked on the religious cast to various features of life in Alabama.  Indeed I am.  It’s not just old times that aren’t forgotten in Dixie.  Old time religion hasn’t been either and understanding that will enable me to coexist peacefully.

The Invaders

There have been many battles and wars fought on southern soil since the first humans arrived millennia ago.  Some of those conflicts have been celebrated in song and story and conjure up all kinds of martial imagery.  The names associated with them still ring down through history:  Francis Marion, who was called the “Swamp Fox”, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant and, of course, Robert E. Lee.  Then there are the battlefields:  Horseshoe Bend, Tuscaloosa, Manassas, New Orleans and Shiloh, just to name a few.

But long after the shouts, yells and screams from those and many other unremembered conflicts fell silent, other foes arrived and began their campaigns of conquest.  The war against them continues to this day and every Southerner is aware of its cost and toll on life, limb and property.  What’s remarkable about these battles is that they are being fought silently, for the most part, and receive little publicity.  But despite the lack of attention, the stakes are high as old tactics are refined and new ones introduced to combat the enemy.

I had been back in Alabama for only a day when I had my first encounter with this aggressive adversary.  Walking along the street, I espied a familiar sight on the cracks of the sidewalk.  A small mound of reddish-brown soil stood silently and innocently at my feet.  The mound had been raised by the top biological scourge of the South: the fire ant.  I lightly brushed my foot against it disturbing the mound ever so slightly.  The instantaneous reaction from the ants was neither passive nor mild.  They seemed to boil out of the nest, even emerging from entrances on the opposite side of the disturbance and rushed with a hell-bent fury to discover and attack the intruder.  Having had plenty of experience with these animals before, I didn’t hesitate but swiftly moved on and so escaped their wrath.

Fire ants are an invasive species from South America.  They arrived with a banana shipment that was unloaded in the port city of Mobile, Alabama around 1920.  Finding themselves in a completely new area and not facing the biological checks that controlled them in their home territory, they swiftly spread throughout the South.  They live underground like most ants, but the nest is marked by mounds of soil that can be up to a foot/30 cm high.

Their aggression is legendary.  They attack in swarms, first biting their victim and then stinging it repeatedly.  The burning sensation and swollen tissue arising from the assault gave them the name of fire ants.  They attack at the slightest provocation and no animal is safe.  They sting cattle and horses that blunder onto their colonies; climb trees to attack birds’ nests and kill nestlings; colonize both meadows and cultivated fields imperiling wildlife and farm workers alike.  They’ve even been known to invade houses and stake claims to computer stations, drawn to them by their heat.

All out war prevails against these red enemies.  No quarter is asked or given.  Property owners constantly scan their land for the sign of any mound that appears.  When one does, people have various ways of dealing with the ants.  Some lay down poison for them or spray some insecticide they will get from a store or perhaps the county agent.  But many take an even more aggressive approach to ridding themselves of these insects.

I remember one fellow giving me a blow-by-blow account of how he turned back the invaders who had settled on his property.  He had to deal with not just one but several colonies.  His weapons were a common sprinkler pot such as one uses to water flowers, several old blankets, matches and lots of gasoline.

“What I did, Raymond,” he told me with a great deal of relish, “was to go out early one morning with my sons and our equipment.  We filled the sprinkler with the gasoline and then lightly showered the mound with the stuff.  We chose early morning to do this because the ants aren’t as active since it’s cool.  Using the flower sprinkler to apply the gasoline doesn’t trigger their attack mode because it falls on the mound as lightly as rain does.  We thoroughly wet the mound and the ground around it, and then threw a lighted match on it.

“The mound went up in flames.  Many ants rushed out to escape only to be consumed by the fire.  The fire didn’t burn long and once it burned out we applied a second dousing of gasoline.  Then we covered the mound with a blanket to try to force the fumes underground.  In that way we smothered them, as the fumes flowed through the different tunnels, eventually killing the queen.  With her death, the whole colony collapsed.

“We weighed the blanket’s corners down with stones or bricks we had brought and then went to the next mound and repeated the procedure.  I absolutely hate fire ants and I have no mercy on them whenever I see their mounds on my property.  Fortunately, that hasn’t happened often, but when it does then I’m prepared to go to war.”

“When did you check back on the nests?” I asked him.

“Oh, we waited a couple of days or so.  When we went back we lifted off the blankets, stirred the mounds with a stick and saw what happened.  No more ants came out:  the mounds were completely lifeless.  Then just to make sure, we hit them with a shovel and scattered the dirt as far as the shovel would throw it.”

Extreme measures?  Maybe.  But if you’ve never had to deal with fire ants, you just don’t understand how vicious and dangerous they can be.  I didn’t blame this man for his actions.  Since I’ve returned to Birmingham, you can bet I’ve kept a sharp lookout for them.  I’ve been especially watchful for mounds that aren’t on my mother’s property, looking out for the smaller ones that will crop up on sidewalk cracks and partitions.  I haven’t seen one yet, but if I do then the gasoline and matches are coming out.

I have heard that an entomologist in Texas has been experimenting with imported tropical flies that particularly prey on fire ants.  His experiments enjoyed modest success against them in south Texas and the hope is that these flies will establish themselves well enough to begin to act as a natural biological check on their propagation.  It is too late to eradicate this invader from southern fields, forests, farms, meadows and yards.  But if a natural remedy can check their continued spread, then we’ll all be able to breathe (and picnic) a little bit easier.  So while the old human battlefields no longer reverberate with the sounds of conflict, this ninety-year war against fire ants shows no sign of ending.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned that by reason of the growth in international commerce, the ants have now appeared in Australia and China, arriving there via trading vessels.  I hope those lands have better success in controlling them than we have.  As for me, my enlistment in the war against fire ants will likely get me into action soon enough, and I’m ready to ‘fight fire with fire.’

All In the Family

It is a well-worn truism that blood is thicker than water.  Family ties and roots have always been important to me even through all my years of living in Colorado.  My friends knew a lot about my family because I talked about relatives often.  Occasionally, I went back to Alabama and Georgia to visit them and once, when I graduated from the University of Colorado, one of my brothers came to Boulder and attended the graduation exercises.

For all that it wasn’t until I moved back to Birmingham that I realized just how quick and close my family ties were and how there was still room to grow closer.  As I have related elsewhere, much had happened during my thirty-plus years away.  Three of my siblings had become parents themselves.  Other relatives were now grandparents, great-grandparents, and in two cases great-great-grandparents.  I was meeting not just familiar cousins, but also cousins I had never really known.  Then there were cousins who were removed by different degrees.  That was particularly true on my mother’s side of the family.

Time has brought forth new relatives, matured more, and taken away others.  Only one of my uncles is still alive, 98 year old Uncle Vincent.  Aunt Doris will turn 93 this year.  Both of them are sadly suffering from dementia and no longer recognize or remember many family members.  My long absence had blotted any memories they had of me from their minds, and when we got the two of them together recently they didn’t know each other.

Then there is the sad case of Aunt Juanita.  I got out to the nursing home she stays in last week to see her at last.  She has been there for a few years, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw even though I had been warned about what to expect.  The place she stays in is well managed and clean with a competent staff.  But Aunt Juanita herself is in very bad shape.

She turned 88 on Sunday and I, along with a couple of cousins and Aunt Doris, went by to wish her a happy birthday.  The woman I saw wasting away in a bed was not the one I remember seeing some years ago.  She was completely unaware of our presence; did not even look at any of us but only stared at the ceiling.  She is alive, but is certainly no longer living.  She is malingering, with no joy of life left, no reasons to take an interest in anything even her own well-being.

As bad as Aunt Doris’ dementia is, at least she’s physically active and alert even though not in complete possession of her faculties.  The same can be said of Uncle Vincent and I had to wonder if the fact that both are still living in their own homes was a determining factor in their cases.  When I told my mother of Aunt Juanita’s condition, she said that she did not want to leave her own home of forty years unless there was absolutely no other way of caring for her.  I want to comply with that wish.

But it hasn’t all been sad news.  I am reconnecting with a lot of kinfolk now and I am taking advantage of technology to add more meaning to our meetings.  Right before I left Colorado, a friend gave me a digital pocket camera as a parting gift and I have been using it a great deal since my return.  Every time I get together with family, the camera comes out and pictures are taken.  I have decided to create a photo album of my relatives so that my nieces and nephews in particular can know who their kin are.

So the camera was busy last week during visits to cousins north of Birmingham I couldn’t ever remember seeing before.  They, on the other hand, remembered me as an infant and toddler.  In working things out I realized these people are my second cousins.  Our grandmothers were sisters and while I have clear and vivid memories of my grandmother, my cousins could not say the same of theirs.  When we got together, we talked some about our great-grandparents.  It turns out none of us knew much, but what little we talked about was all new information for Yours Truly.

When one of these cousins dropped by for a visit a few days ago, I introduced my niece to her saying, “This is Wanda, who is your second cousin once-removed.”  While I know those words meant nothing to my niece, what I wanted her to understand more than anything else was that our family is extensive, that there are third and even fourth cousins in the family tree and we will do well to get to know them.

In keeping with that need, I’m making plans to spend time with these relatives.  One of them loves to cook and I promised that I would return soon so we could make some delicious meals together.  This cousin is also a grandfather making his descendants second cousins once- and twice-removed.  I’ve yet to meet them but I am hopeful I will do so before too long.  I was also told of more family living in the cities of Warrior and Jasper, both also north of Birmingham, whom I should make every effort to see.

As for my father’s family, it was much larger than my mother’s and I’ve yet to see all of my first cousins who still live in Birmingham.  I ran into two of them while walking around the neighborhood, cousins who are now in their seventies and have gray and white hair.  One of them, upon seeing me, broke into a big smile and when we talked recalled that the last time we had really spoken to each other had been way back in 1969.  The other, his brother, said he hadn’t spoken to me since I had moved to Colorado back in 1981.  The camera came out, and the appropriate photos were taken.

My mother’s sister is here on a month-long visit and I’m learning a great deal from her.  I’m trying to find out more about my maternal grandfather who died in 1973.  His name was Henry Hall and he was a very secretive man who told me nothing of his own immediate family and said very little to others about them.  He had fought in World War I but he never discussed his experiences in the trenches in France with me.  And it was only during a talk among family members last week that I learned he had been wounded in action.  Had that happened today he would have been decorated.  But back then, nearly one hundred years past, the achievements, sacrifices and bravery of black American soldiers was routinely ignored. 

I often wondered how, after seeing and experiencing all he had in Europe, Henry could have returned to the Jim Crow South and put up with its deep-seated racism.  When I raised that question, nobody could give a satisfactory answer.  And as to tracking down Henry’s other family members, that is going to be a very difficult task.  Nobody knows who they were and what children they had.  Despite the lack of information, I’ve been told that there are resources which might be able to help in the search for these missing branches of the family tree.

My return to the South has made me aware of the rich family heritage I have.  The stories I’ve been hearing have only whetted my appetite to learn more and it will be interesting to see what I will eventually learn.  At the same time, I also realize that my experience along this line is hardly unusual.  There are few families that don’t have missing pages and big gaps in their histories.  People seem to shy away from the subject and much that should be remembered gets lost as an older generation passes away without leaving any records behind.

I don’t want that to happen in my family.  The newest generation should know something more about us than a list of names—if they even know that.  I want to start with still photographs, but will eventually add video recordings so that these people will come to life for my nieces and nephews as well as any children they may have in the future.

It is ironic that it took a reluctant return to Alabama to realize this.  But now that I have, I want to do as good a job as possible.  That is why in addition to photographs and video recordings, I plan to keep journals written in my own hand to hand down to the newest generation as well.  That will be one way of keeping this “all in the family” and I want to recommend to others that they think about doing likewise.

Gone With the Wind

April is now over and Alabama can breathe a sigh of relief.  April 2011 was a most violent month as spring storms brought disaster to many communities in this state.  Spring in the South is perhaps its most beautiful season with all kinds of blooms and blossoms festooning their colors throughout the landscape.  This spring was no different and now—a few weeks earlier than normal—the stately magnolia trees are opening their flowers and wafting delightful fragrances in the air.

Last year was the same flower-wise.  The weather, however, was another story.  Severe thunderstorms moved across Alabama and many of them spawned the South’s greatest weather scourge: tornadoes.  These storms unleash winds and cause death and destruction that have to be seen to be believed.  Wednesday, 27 April saw them let loose a fury that had not been seen here in nearly forty years.

On that day 62 tornadoes touched down in various places.  Twenty-nine of them rampaged through central Alabama alone.  Birmingham’s suburbs and the college town of Tuscaloosa were very hard hit.  Entire neighborhoods were destroyed as winds in excess of 200 mph/320 kph tore through them.  More than 250 people died as the twisters did their deadly dances across their communities, including the one my brother John lives in with his family.  They had a narrow escape.

“We heard it coming, Raymond,” John told me later.  “It roared like a freight train.  Fortunately for us, it didn’t touch down in the neighborhood.  Instead, it stayed up in the air and passed over the house.  It dropped all kinds of debris on my property and the neighbors’ land as well.  But it didn’t stay in the air.  The funnel finally touched down 2½ miles (4 km) away in Pleasant Grove where it killed ten people.  Had that happened here, I don’t know if we would have survived even though we took shelter in the basement.”

A year has passed since that dreadful day and Alabama is still picking up the pieces.  April and May are the months that see the most tornadoes but here in the South the storms can strike in any month of the year.  They are part of a larger weather pattern.  No other country on Earth has as many tornadoes as the United States where more than a thousand occur each year.  The plains states east of the Rockies are frequent targets, particularly Kansas (remember the twister that opens the movie The Wizard of Oz?) and Oklahoma.  But the South feels their force as well.

When cold, dry air born in the Rockies meets warm, moist air that flows out of the Gulf of Mexico, you have a recipe for big trouble.  The results frequently are thunderstorms, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.  When conditions are favorable for violent weather, the National Weather Service will put an area under a severe thunderstorm or tornado watch.  If the storms actually appear the watch is upgraded to a warning.  That gives residents time to take cover.  A watch can last for several hours and is broadcast on radio and television so that residents can prepare for the worst.  But even with improved forecasting and warning tools, people still die in these horrific storms.

Last week, my sister-in-law drove me through one of the areas that was ravaged by last year’s tornadoes.  We went to Pratt City.  Now I hadn’t been there for many years and really had few memories of what the area had looked like before.  Nevertheless, I was still amazed by what I saw.

Like much of Alabama, this community is heavily wooded with forest and thick groves of trees.  We saw the place where the twister had touched down and not a single tree had been left standing.  All of them had been uprooted and destroyed.  We passed a church that had not yet been rebuilt.  It looked like a bomb had hit it.  Some buildings had been replaced but much of the damage remained.  If it looked this bad last week, I could only imagine what it looked like last year in the days immediately following the catastrophe.

When I moved back to Alabama, I wondered about the weather.  I had forgotten what it was like to live in a place with abundant rainfall.  My former home in Boulder, Colorado sees 18 inches/460 mm of precipitation a year.  By contrast, Birmingham gets some 54 inches/1,380 mm a year.  I have already witnessed severe thunderstorm activity since I returned.  You know the storm is going to be very bad when the cloud cover gets so thick that the street lamps turn on in midafternoon.  The rain comes down in buckets, not a “Presbyterian gulley washer, but a real Baptist downpour” as we say in the South.  Such a storm can last for hours.  The one I saw dissipated in less than thirty minutes.

I was bracing for tornadoes, but this April gave everyone a very welcome and pleasant surprise.  For the first time since 2004, April was tornado-free in Alabama, hence the aforementioned sigh of relief.  After last year’s devastations, nobody complained.  Of course, we still have May to get through.  Tornadoes are common then as well so we’ll have to wait and see how this month shapes up.  It has started off on a warm note but that isn’t remarkable.

There’s also hurricane season which will begin on 1 June.  You can be sure that every tropical depression that forms off the African coast and then heads for the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico will be given a close and anxious look.  Birmingham is too far inland to take a direct hit, but that doesn’t mean a Gulf coast storm can’t give us fierce weather and its associated headaches.  Hurricanes are also tornado spawners and can send high winds and heavy rains to places many miles from their landfalls.  I saw that back in September 1979 when Hurricane Frederick struck the port city of Mobile and sent very bad weather to us some 250 miles/400 km away; and I might see something like it again when the season gets underway this year.

Despite all this I’ve chosen not to worry about severe weather because there’s really nothing I can do about it anyway.  It is a fact of life here and so it isn’t something to consciously dwell on all the time.  When watches and warnings are issued, I’ll take the appropriate measures.  I’ll either go down into the basement or seek cover in a closet or interior room of the house.  As horrible and terrifying as tornadoes are, they don’t stay in any one area long.  They are constantly on the move so a few minutes is the length of time of the greatest danger.

Spring in Dixie means azalea, dogwood and magnolia blossoms, the world famous Kentucky Derby horse race, the start of baseball season, different festivals and other outdoor activities and…wild weather.  Yet Southerners think that White Easters and blizzards in April and May—common enough in the Rockies—are weather aberrations to be avoided at all costs.  Compared to those, violent weather in this part of the country is considered normal.  Having experienced extreme weather in both the Rockies and the South, I suppose my experiences have prepared me to face anything.  This year’s weather may well test that perspective.