Now here I was, a middle-aged man, a doubtful, not-so-good Catholic spending his birthday alone in a one-horse town in a foreign country, a place people go to only because three children a century ago made the fantastical claim that the mother of God appeared to them and gave them messages for mankind. I was not there looking for God, or Mary; I was there looking for Tee.
At first I was put off by the scene. On the long car ride to Fátima, I had looked forward to having a private moment on this spiritually hallowed ground. Instead, I had to spend my birthday with well over a hundred thousand strangers. But seeing the love in their eyes for the Blessed Mother changed me. To be present for the mass, and to know exactly what was being said at all times even though I didn’t speak a word of Portuguese—it made me think of Tee, and how much she loved the Blessed Mother and her faith.
It was as if I could hear her voice saying, Look around you, Wendell—we are not alone. My eyes encompassed the plaza, and everywhere I looked, I saw the love of children for a mother. Like me, they made a pilgrimage to this place out of love for her, and what God had done for them through her. They were strong in faith—that much was clear—and I was not. But my faithful mother, she shared the strong faith of those people, and she had borne me to this place as surely as I had carried her to her bed on the night she died.
The doors of the great basilica opened. The statue of Our Lady came down the basilica steps atop a golden platform covered with flowers and riding on the shoulders of eight men. This Virgin is veiled in white and has her hands folded in prayer. The statue is as tall as a young girl—taller if you count the crown on her head, inside of which Pope John Paul II placed the assassin’s bullet doctors removed from his body. The pope, now a saint, credited Our Lady of Fátima with saving his life. Riding through St. Peter’s Square in his open car in 1981, John Paul saw someone in the crowd holding a Fátima image. He inclined to see it better at the instant the would-be killer fired his pistol. Had John Paul not leaned in for a closer look at Our Lady, the bullet would have killed him.
And then, something magical happened. As the statue was carried into the crowd, all those people took handkerchiefs out of their pockets and waved in salute to the passing Queen of Heaven. It was New Orleans, on the other side of the ocean. It was the world’s largest second line! I sobbed openly, because I knew that this moment was the reason I had been summoned to this faraway place. As the statue of the Blessed Mother passed by me, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: Now I was finally, and truly, saying good-bye to Tee.
Because organizing my mother’s funeral fell to me, I had never been able to be quiet in church, in solitude, and pray for the soul of my mother. When we arrived at the church for Tee’s service, there were people there already who thought that I needed to be held and comforted, and who surrounded me with that love and attention. In truth, I needed to be alone with her soul.
Here it was a year later, and I had to cross a continent and an ocean to spiritually say good-bye. It happened in a foreign Catholic country that looked like my piece of the world here in New Orleans: a vast throng of people giving my mother, so to speak, a second-line farewell. I was allowed to be alone with my mother in the midst of all those people, in the midst of their pure devotion, floating on a sea of love, entirely alone and entirely together.
I felt my mother’s presence so strongly in me, and around me. She was telling me to keep the faith. I believe, Tee. Help me in my unbelief. It was a sublime moment, a moment of revelation, when faith was stronger than doubt, and I saw religion and art, mother and son, the individual and the collective, bleed into one, saturated and sustained by love.
Art made that insight possible. There was an actor in my class at Juilliard, Kevin Dwyer from San Francisco. When he found out that I was a Catholic, he was astonished; a black Catholic from the South is a novelty to many people. “Man, that’s why I became an actor: because of the Catholic Church,” he said. “Think about it: the procession, the ceremony, the pageantry. It’s so beautiful, and those rituals bind us together and teach us who we are and what to do.”
I had never thought about it like that, but he was right. In fact, Catholicism is why I became an actor as well. It wasn’t the mass, though; it was a Passion Play, a reenactment of the last days of Jesus. As a Catholic child, I knew the facts of the narrative well, but its truth and power didn’t come alive in my imagination until I saw and heard actors telling the story onstage and did my part when it was done in church.
On that day in Fátima, I saw the beauty and the power of art and religion, how it can work like nothing else to enlighten, to unite, and to change your life and the lives of others. I had seen art do that before in many instances, not least in our Waiting for Godot performance in New Orleans. But now I saw it in a new and intensely personal way.
Art and religion are both ways of knowing, pathways to and channels of the transcendent truths of our existence. Art makes abstract truths—Love, Justice, Selflessness, and so on—concrete and accessible to all. Religion teaches us that these abstractions truly exist, that they are not simply ideas in somebody’s head. Religion needs art—ritual, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry—to communicate its truths to the people.
Art needs religion—that is, a confident belief that there is a realm of truth and spirit existing beyond what we can see, and that can be known. Art that does not speak to our hopes, dreams, and experiences, art that does not help us find ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning, art that does not establish communion—communion between individuals and their communities, and communion between humanity and the realm of ideals, of God—is dead.
Pope Benedict XVI once said that the greatest arguments the Catholic Church has for itself are not books of theology or collections of sermons. No, the Church’s greatest treasures for demonstrating the truth of its claims are the saints it has produced and the art it has birthed. Why? Because to see goodness or beauty made incarnate makes it real in a uniquely powerful way.
She may never be canonized by the Church, but my mother was a saint. I am an artist, and God channeled that gift in large part through the love and encouragement of my faithful mother, who no doubt prayed countless rosaries for me. Could it be that Tee and I were both on a pilgrimage up the same mountain, on different but parallel paths, moved forward by the power of love? Religion and art, at their very best, are the tangible manifestations of love. When they combine and express themselves in the culture of a people, a light appears in the darkness, and we find the faith and the hope we need to continue the journey, together.
On that day in Fátima, I saw that Tee had given me everything I needed to go on, and had been giving it to me all along. She had filled me up with everything she had been given, as she herself had been filled by Mamo and Papo and the culture of College Point. Now that she had given all she had to give, she was free to go on.
And so, at last, was I. At this time, at this place, all mankind is us. I had spoken that line from Godot while standing at that crossroads of humanity in the Lower Ninth Ward. Now it rang in my heart again, in Fátima, called out of myself by the beauty and force of the collective ritual. That’s what Tee revealed to me. And it leads to the next line from the play: Let us do something.
What a moment of passage that was for me. It was a catharsis, a purification of my soul. Mine was just a face in the crowd that day on the plaza at Fátima, but if you could have seen what was in my heart, it would have been a beacon of light and love. Riding out of the hills back to Lisbon, I felt a renewed sense of meaning in my art and purpose in my life. Let us do something. I left Portugal reborn, free to be the actor, the activist, and the man that I was supposed to be.
“Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song,” says Bynum, the seer in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. “Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life.”
Like Herald Loomis, the character I played, I had forgotten my song. Now I had remembered it, had reconnected with truth, with authenticity, with universality, and with love, and came back from rambling dancing to a joyful tune.
I did not become a regular churchgoer, or at least I have not yet. Unlike my mother, I struggle with the doctrines. In that, I am more like my father. In my childhood, when we would drive out West as a family, Daddy would gaze at the mountains and say, “Man, I can’t understand how someone can look at that and not believe in God.” That was the extent of my father’s theological understanding, and for him, it was enough to give him a relationship to the divine.
For Daddy, the landscape is an icon, a window into eternity. Art does that for me. I believe that Daddy, Tee, and I are singing the same song, in three-part harmony, and it is a song of love, praise, and unity.
In a 1997 speech to the National Black Theater Festival, August Wilson spoke of how in the Diaspora, Africans met the unspeakable adversity of their life as slaves in a strange land without losing their spirit.
Undaunted, and within the scope of the larger world that lay beyond their doorstep, they had begun to build a culture, to set down rules, and to urge a manner of being that corresponded to their temperament and sensibilities. Life was to be lived in all its timbre and horrifics, with zest and purpose. To live hard is still to live, and it was this life, worthy of the highest of possibilities, that was to be cultivated and celebrated. And it was this culture that I learned in Pittsburgh in my mother’s house.
It was this culture that the African fought valiantly, at great cost, to preserve. He fought to preserve it not because it was fashioned out of pain and suffering but because he stood solidly on these shores as a testament to the resilience of his spirit and the nobility of his ideas. And it was this culture that I carried with me when I went searching for a way to dedicate my life.
Amen and amen. I learned this culture in Pontchartrain Park, by way of College Point. I learned this culture in the house of my father and mother. It gave me a past, and it gave me a future. All of it is a priceless gift, a treasure hard won by generations who rose out of centuries of slavery and degradation, and who must have thought they could not go on . . . but went on anyway, on that great pilgrimage of life, second-lining away from the grave where our oppressor wanted to bury our humanity and our hope.
The Bible tells us to “walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time.” New Orleans tells us no, don’t walk—pull out your handkerchief, raise high your parasol, and dance. Dance with joy, but dance with purpose. All of us must do something with the gift of wisdom handed down from the ancestors, with the legacy of fortitude and resilience, and through the transcendence of our art. We must change our lives, and change the lives of our communities. You don’t learn to live in love and truth and to walk in wisdom, mercy, and justice for yourself alone.
You must make your life into an icon, a work of art through which all these good things flow and make themselves known to others. In this way, we are all called to be artists, the creators of our own lives. Many times we do not have it in our power to stave off catastrophe. There are no soliloquies and no songs that would have turned the hurricane away from my city. But we do have it in our power to control our own response to these catastrophes, and through our will, not only to endure in the face of trial, but to prevail.
That’s what the southern novelist William Faulkner once prophesied that man would do: prevail. It is, he said in his 1950 Nobel acceptance speech, the duty of the artist to help humanity by making art that speaks to the soul “capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
“It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past,” Faulkner said. “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Faulkner was a man of the American South of the twentieth century, but he spoke that day to a global audience, about what is universal in all times and all places. All great artists do; all those who aspire to artistic greatness must. Nobody knows like the African American how art and culture can help a people endure and prevail, and can redeem the time. It has been my blessing to be the heir to a great culture and its artistic tradition. It is and always will be my duty to use the days God has measured out for me to share that blessing with the whole wide world.
As Louis Armstrong, the greatest artist New Orleans ever produced, famously sang, “I know I’m not wrong, and this feeling’s gettin’ stronger.” Yes, indeed. Strong men gittin’ stronger, every day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This was a personal journey. A journey filled with fear, uncertainty, joy, and fond memories. But there is one person who cleared the path and was steadfast as we ventured forward. That was Rod Dreher. We came together from disparate walks of life but found common ground in love of family, faith, and that sometimes elusive place called home. His wisdom, creativity, and now his friendship will be eternally cherished.
I owe a great debt to all the members of my family who shared their time and personal memories without reservation. Especially my father, Amos, who has become my best friend these past years in the absence of my mother, Tee. If I could be half the man he is, I would be among giants.
I want to acknowledge all the people of Pontchartrain Park, past and present, who fought for, and continue to fight for, the ability to live a full and expressive life in the comfort of a loving community.
Last, I want to thank New Orleans, that northernmost Caribbean city, the last bohemia, which instilled in me a truthful culture that identifies my membership in that most beloved tribe that thrives in the Crescent City.
—Wendell Pierce
When I agreed to meet Wendell Pierce for lunch one summer day in New Orleans, to talk about collaborating on this book, I was skeptical. We come from very different cultural and political backgrounds. What we discovered over that long lunch was that we shared more than we realized. Both of us are from south Louisiana, and both of us left home to pursue the creative life. Tragedy struck in the middle of the journey of both our lives, and through it we discovered that our dear old state, sunlit despite its vices, meant more to us than we previously imagined. When Wendell told me some of the stories of his family that day, I understood that the task of telling those stories was a sacred mission. Driving home across Lake Pontchartrain, I prayed that Wendell would not choose me as his collaborator, because I did not want to be responsible for helping him do justice to this history. But he did choose me, and in so doing, opened up a world of faith and family, toil and triumph, that I had never known. Getting to know the Pierce and Edwards families, both in person and through the stories told in this book, and gaining a much deeper appreciation of the African American experience changed my heart profoundly. I hope it has made me a better man. I am grateful beyond telling to Wendell for taking a chance on a white boy from the Feliciana hills, and to his family—especially Uncle L.C.—for the graces that have come to me through their lives and their love for one another. I thank my agent, Gary Morris, and Wendell’s agent, Laura Nolan, for having the inspired idea to pair two wandering sons of south Louisiana whose paths would otherwise not have crossed. And I thank Tee for her intercession, which I believe guided both her son and his friend on this pilgrimage.
—Rod Dreher
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