He was an odd figure, dressed in a preacher’s collar, but with knee-high boots made od suede like Indians wore and a wide brimmed hat that looked like he’d gotten it from a theater’s costume room. He wore a pendant with a cross and a circle hanging from it and carried a briefcase with frayed corners that showed glimpses of what was inside; mostly magazines and newspapers, tabloids with colorful sensational headlines. He had an interesting face that would have been handsome, but for the costume that pegged him immediately as insane.
He preached on street corners in the late afternoon as workers came out of office buildings headed for trolleys and buses. He knew if he preached near the stops that folks would have to listen while they waited for the next bus or streetcar, they couldn’t avoid him by walking away. He carried a shallow plate in his briefcase that he’d pass around and accept donations with a preacher’s dignity, saying quietly, “for the shelter,” as if he were raising money for a shelter for the homeless. In fact he was raising money for his own night’s lodging, usually in a shelter of some kind, and a little extra for some wine to warm his bones. On those occasions he collected more than he needed for the night’s drink and lodging, he’d give it away to the men he found there, drunk as he would be by then; drink helping them all to find hope and piety. He could afford to be generous, knowing that what he didn’t give away could be easily stolen from him.
Once, he’d gotten the idea of saving his cash for a bus ticket to Florida, being too old and sick now to tolerate the cold winds and snow of Charleston, West Virginia, but the first night he fell asleep with cash on him, he awoke to find it gone--and to think he’d denied himself his usual bottle of wine before bed in the interest of getting to Florida that much sooner. So he learned yet another lesson just when he thought he couldn’t learn anymore, not from God or life.
Some on the street called him John the Baptist, because of a story he told of the second coming, saving a young girl that was pregnant with the son of God, a miracle, he said, and cried and cried, while those who had stayed in the alleys, bars and shelter to listen laughed and called him crazy. “Oh yes, that’s what they all said, said I was crazy, said the child was the child of the devil, abandoned me and said I was crazy.” And he’d just cry himself to asleep those nights. The first time he got drunk and told his story, he was new on the streets of downtown Charleston and was run off by the men who had taken over the alleys and doorways after dark. But he stuck and soon he was an old-timer and tolerated, even respected for his consistency. He had other stories too, got lost often in the landscape of too many memories and too many places, towns and hollers throughout the state and the ocean, too, for John had traveled in his day as far as the ocean to the east and the gulf coast to the southwest. He’d done his share of wandering in the world, and in his mind, too.
Now was wartime and all the news was about Pearl Harbor, a place John, or JB, as his nickname had been shortened to, had never heard of. And the streets were full of men in uniform, which reminded him of his younger days, and sometimes he thought he was a young man again, and when the soldiers talked about going to France, he remembered that other war, not that long ago. Not enough years have gone by, thought JB, for there to be another war. It must be the first one, and he must be re-living those days because he was dying, and sure indeed, John Banks was dying, day by day, night by night, bottle by bottle and pain by pain as he thought about the days gone by. “I think,” he told a young soldier, “I think we are born and we start in to dying right then and there, right from the first day of our lives, we are dying, day by day.” The soldier didn’t listen to that; it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Pray for me old man,” he asked and gave JB a handful of greenbacks. JB gave them back, or tried to.
“Too much money,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you old man,” said the soldier. “Oh, but you’ll learn young man, when you try to help people, you just end up hurting them more. Understand?”
“No. I don’t understand that. What’s the matter with you? You act like a preacher out here. I’ve heard you, calling the people to Christ. Don’t you believe in helping people? I’m going off to war to help my country, don’t you believe in that?”
“Don’t know about war, son. Don’t know what to tell you about war. I guess you got to go. They put you in jail anyway if you don’t. But if you’ll go inside this here bar where it’s warm and buy me a drink, I’ll tell you about a lesson I learned about helping people.”
“Why do you need to get warm? It isn’t cold now. What’s the matter with you?”
“Son, I get so cold in the winter, I never do warm up. Even the littlest breeze reminds my bones of the chill buried deep inside them. I got to bake my bones in Florida some day to really get warm. I bin to the ocean up in Virginia and I bin to Florida--both sides of it, the ocean and the gulf--and all around the gulf coast from Florida to Texas, and if you weren’t going off to war, I’d tell you all about it, maybe let you buy me a bus ticket and we could ride and talk and have a few beers, us two, but you are going, maybe even tonight, I don’t know, you haven’t told me, but if you got a minute or two, I can tell you about this one thing, this lesson I learned about helping folks.”
The soldier, no more than 18 or 19 years old, looked at his watch and said he had a couple of hours actually and might as well get him a bite if they had some soup, or maybe the turkey special, as he looked up and read the card in the window, and the two men went inside in the dark, narrow bar with a few booths, and they took a booth so the kid could eat his turkey special and JB told him about one of the lessons he’d learned.
“A Negro family moved into our county when I was about twelve years old. I’d never seen Negroes before but from a distance, not to know them, you know what I mean? Anyway, my daddy, he told me to stay away from them, but when I asked why, he couldn’t give me a good answer, and I was at that age I wanted reasons for everything, like there could be reasons for everything. Something else I learned was there are not reasons for most human behavior. Well, anyway, I got to be friendly with the boy in the family that was about my age, and I think my daddy knew but didn’t pay attention, he just waiting, you know, for something to happen so he could say, ‘I told you so,’ something like that.
“That first harvest for them, things didn’t go well. Seems some animals got into their crops and ate up most of what they’d planted for cash, and they was looking at a harsh winter with no money, and I wanted to help them some way. Only way I could think of to help the family was to give them some of our food that my aunt had canned. She had hundreds of canned vegetables and meats in the root cellar, and I didn’t think she’d miss it if we were careful to take some cans from the back rows, some from here, some from there, not leave any big holes, you understand. That boy, I’ll never forget his name, Ruben was his name, and Ruben, he didn’t want to do this, but I could see his brothers and sisters and Ruben himself were hungry most of the time, all skinny and looking hungry, so I kept at him. ‘She’ll never miss it,’ I told him.
“Old Andrew, who helped Daddy on the farm, saw us stealing the food one night, and I prayed he wouldn’t say nothing. I knew Andrew had a soft spot for me because he’d been in love with my ma, so the rumor went. He probably wouldn’t have said nothing, but my auntie did miss those cans. I think she musta counted them every day, like a miser with his money. And she raised such a fuss that my daddy had to do something to keep her quiet. I didn’t know what to do, because if I confessed, they’d want the cans back and they’d wonder why I’d be stealing from my own house, you know, so I kept quiet and hoped Andrew wouldn’t talk, but he did. Told me later he had to, or they’d have thought it was him. What Andrew said wasn’t the whole truth, though. He said he saw the nigger boy stealing the food and he didn’t mention me at all. So my daddy went and got that boy and brought him back to our farm, did it while the parents were out cutting and gathering wood for the winter. He said to me, ‘See what you done? Playing with a
nigger, and now he knows where everything is that has value and he can steal whatever he wants. But I’m going to teach him a lesson so he won’t never come back here again.’ Well, here is where the hard lesson comes in. You see, I was afeared of my daddy, but I knew I had to do the right thing in the eyes of the Lord, so I up and confessed that it was my idea and that Ruben would never have done it, but for me telling him over and over, and I was thinking as I said it that I would bear my punishment like a man, not utter a sound. But my daddy only said that I didn’t know what I was talking about and me already twelve and begun to preaching Sundays, and I argued with him. But he told Andrew to take me outa there and Andrew grabbed me and hauled me away, kicking and screaming like a baby. I thought Andrew had lied to protect me and I resented him for that because I didn’t need his protection. But it wasn’t me he was protecting. He was protecting the way things were, protecting my daddy from getting even angrier than he was because he knew my daddy needed to believe that we were better than the Negroes, and that his son was better than the Negro boy. I was trying to explain things to Andrew whilst he was dragging me away, and he wasn’t listening, because he knew it didn’t matter anyway, and I kept thinking if I screamed it louder he’d hear the truth, but he shushed me and then he said the thing that made me forgive him and forgive God and keep on preaching a while even after that first hard lesson. He said, ‘As long as you keep on screaming, your daddy will keep on whipping the poor nigger boy and he ain’t screaming at all.’ And he turned me around to see, and I shut my mouth then, and my daddy did stop whipping him, but it was too late. Ruben dropped to the ground like a rag doll with all its stuffing taken out, and my daddy just up and left him there. Andrew let go of me and went to wash and bandage that boy’s cuts and my daddy didn’t go near them, and Andrew, not knowing what else to do for him, gave the boy a drink of whiskey to dull the pain and get him on his feet and out of the way. That’s what happened, and I realized that it was me my daddy was teaching the lesson to. So you see, sometimes you want to help folks and just end up hurting them instead, and that is the way of it. I learned then all we can do is beg the Lord to have mercy on us and don’t even try to understand, because this world don’t make no sense to just a man.”
The soldier had finished eating and looked at his watch, thinking that the old man was done, but JB shook his head as if it were heavy with wisdom and asked for another beer and a shot of scotch, if he didn’t mind and went right on talking.
“I wasn’t done learning, though, cause then I commenced to begging for a miracle instead of just mercy. I still wanted too much. It was my birthright, so to speak. You see, my poor ma should’ve died with me still in her belly, but she hung on just long enough to give birth to me, and my auntie and my daddy called me a miraculous child, and I just figured I was entitled to another miracle, just one, something that I could do myself. I always heard voices, and I was sure one of them must have been God speaking to me, and that was why I started in to preaching when I was just a child, maybe eleven, almost twelve, just before the Negro family moved into the county. I never practiced what I would say, but just let the voice of God guide me, and sure enough, something always came up and people would get all excited, more excited listening to me than the older preachers who came through the county, and next thing you knew, I was traveling myself, all over the state and then all over the south. I didn’t worry about how I would live because I had faith that God would provide, and he always did. The people would fight among themselves over who would have me to dinner and give me a bed to sleep in, and they gave me money when they had next to nothing themselves, and some tried to give me the food from their gardens they’d put up, and I had a hard time refusing, but I hated to take those canned goods, remembering what happened to Ruben, so I would take them and then give them away the next place I stopped. I had a wagon and a good horse and that’s how I traveled, and many’s the night I slept in the wagon by some river and I loved that, I loved the outdoors and sleeping outdoors when it was a clear night, and I could just open my eyes and see the stars filling up the sky. I loved that more than anything else about my life, and it was a prayer that I didn’t have to speak, a silent, unspoken, almost unthought prayer just looking at those stars, the work of the Lord and loving it.
“It was when I was sleeping in my wagon by a river that the miracle happened, and even though it all went bad after a time, it was a glorious few months for me back then. It was 1928 in the springtime. I remember, because I had just been home to celebrate my 28th birthday with my old auntie and my daddy, who couldn’t see, or talk, or hear at all by then. It was a sin my taking pleasure in that but I did, talking so sweetly to him in a loud voice and describing all the things he could no longer see and he couldn’t tell me to be quiet or how he felt, just like when I was coming up and he never wanted to hear what I had to say. I’d learned to take vengeance gently, but it was a sin just the same.
“So I had gone home and was starting out again on my travels and enjoying the crisp early spring weather, and I see this body floating down river, dead as a doornail, and I don’t even think, but wade right in there, fighting the current (I was strong back then) and saved the girl. It was a girl. I carried her dead body out of the river and prayed over her, and she come back to life, kinda rolls to the side and throws up all this water and some mud and coughs some and then lays back down and goes to sleep, but she was alive, I could feel her breathing. She had a cut on her neck, too, like someone had tried to cut her throat. Who’d do such a thing to a lovely young girl like that? Makes you wonder. But the river water was so cold it hadn’t bled much and was already healing over. I searched in the wagon and found some disinfectant to put on it and that’s all I ever did about that cut. She always had a scar there, but not that you’d notice when her hair hung down. It was a miracle, and I thanked God, but there was more to come, because God told me to believe what that girl said, for she came to speak the truth to me, and I would tell the truth to all the people who would listen. So I watched her while she slept and I noticed when she moved to curl up on her side that she was big with child, and when she woke up, I asked her who the father was, and she was all scared and could hardly speak, but she said, ‘I ain’t been with no one,’ and then it hit me what God had been telling me. This humble girl was going to give birth to the Christ child all over again…this was it, the second coming we all been waiting for, and I believed it with all my heart. It still could be true. One thing I’ve learned is that if we don’t acknowledge the miracles in our lives, they happen anyway and just get buried, as if they were nothing special with all the rest of our history. God knows how many miracles we’ve missed. Know what I mean, son?”
But the soldier had to go and the place was closing up for the night. JB looked so forlorn that he couldn’t talk all night to the young man that the soldier and the owner both felt sorry for him and both gave him a few bucks, not knowing what else they could do for him, and he was too drunk by then to refuse and put the money in his briefcase with his plate and his Bible and the tabloids he liked to read in the morning with his coffee. “Guess I’ll save this for a bus ticket to Florida,” he said and stumbled up the street to the shelter.
The young man jogged home, hoping his mother would still be up, because he had to leave so early in the morning. Years later, she would always be thankful that she did get up before dawn to cook her son some eggs and watch him eat her food one last time, because it was not his destiny to return from the war. “Hey, Ma, you know that funny looking old man who sometimes preaches on the street corners, the one with the hat? I met him last night and he told me some stories about his life. Weird guy, and the funniest thing: he’s only 42 years old.”
“I don’t believe it. That man looks to be 65 at least. That kind of life, I guess it ages folks. Poor man. I hope you gave him something.”
“Sure, Ma, I did. You know, he said something interesting. He said Christ came back
to earth in 1928, but no one noticed, or maybe something bad happened, I don’t know, he didn’t say, because it was closing time and we had to leave.”
“There are too man crazies out there. I don’t know whether to be afraid of them or afraid for them.”
“Oh, Ma, this guy is harmless.”
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