Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Taking me over to the Episcopal church was something I suspect my mother in later years came to regret. I fell for the Book of Common Prayer right off the bat. I liked hearing those well-phrased brief supplications instead of having to fidget through wearisome petitions thought up on the spot. One prayer especially that my mother praised was said each time we attended. Speaking of the Lord God, a phrase went: “… whose service is perfect freedom …” My mother would remark on this on the drive home. “It seems a paradox,” she would say, “that service can be freedom. But if you think of it, it’s true.” This remains with me, and having long since joined up with that church, I say it often and think of her words each time I do.

  In the back of the Episcopal church were benches for Negroes, and some at times attended. I found this remarkable from the first. “They” were never in our church at all, except that we had a Negro janitor to clean it. I don’t know when I first questioned this and was told in an offhand way, “Oh, they have their own churches.” But I was born questioning everything. I think I said that we might at least have benches. “They wouldn’t come,” I was told. “Not many of them are Presbyterians anyway.” I suppose I may have said, “Why not?” and was finally told to hush. I was told to hush about any number of subjects I thought were discussable, but had to learn were not.

  The above exchange from my childhood, when my curiosity met a gentle correction, in no respect resembled the kind of heated dialogue that would savagely spring up and gigantically bloom years later. Then, even an unspoken thought would be heard as loud as a gunshot, and a rage would foam, with no regret or second thought, up to the very chancel, engulfing the Bible as well if the Good Book dared to stand in the way.

  But more of that later. In my early years, I could easily be argued down and would even accept whatever I was bidden to, because deep down I believed that God was in his heaven and our two families belonged to all that was good on this earth.

  Every summer in Carrollton we had the tabernacle meeting.

  The tabernacle was an open-air structure across Big Sand Creek. It had a wooden platform wide enough to hold a piano and benches for a choir, grouped on either side of a lectern. The denominations took turns inviting some silver-tongued preacher, or, if not a great orator, at least someone who could revive the flagging Christian spirits of the entire community. Revive meant revival. We all naturally had to attend, though I squirmed out of it whenever I had the slightest chance.

  The meeting was always held in August. The crops were laid by then and whole families could come in to listen. The Baptists and Methodists were the ones who took to all this; they were ready for it. The Presbyterians did their best. We “brought in” the sort of democratic, easygoing divine who went down well with people in general; and the Episcopalians also cooperated, in a low-key, superior way.

  But the real firestorm “reviving” was right up the Baptist/ Methodist alley. The meetings may have started out low-key, but they rose up and began to walk about the third or fourth day and by the first week’s end were fully charged and running strong. I don’t recall any seizures or speaking with tongues or healing sessions, but I remember the rhythm of impassioned shouting from the platform, and repeated calls for coming forward to “give your life to Christ while time remains.”

  “While time remains” had a dual meaning: (1) life might end between one breath and the next and the unrepentant pass, right off the bat, into torment; or (2) Judgment Day might arrive, when Jesus would come to take over all worldly affairs. Jesus could do this at any given moment. It could happen next week, next year, tomorrow morning. It could happen tonight. There was a threat in everything. The message was Watch out!

  Once, the Presbyterians engaged a real revival preacher, who went around doing nothing else, a pro. His name was Howard Williams. To our family’s extreme good fortune, he came to hold the meeting the summer we had all planned a trip to the Ozarks.

  Everyone in the McCain branch of the family was in on this vacation, one way or another. We had rented a house in Branson, Missouri. It was said to be cool there. Heat in Mississippi was so terrible in July and August that all the indoor strategies ever devised could scarcely do more than lower it by five or six degrees. Mountains in those pre-air-conditioning days seemed about the only answer, New England and Canada being too remote to consider.

  My aunt Katie Lou was sent ahead by train with my brother to open up the house. The rest of us followed some days later: my grandfather, Uncle Joe and Aunt Esther, Annie, the cook from Teoc, my mother, and me. Annie had to ride in a different car, but we saw her at station stops. We were joined at various times that summer by different McCain relatives, went daily to a lake to swim and row a boat, took drives into the Ozarks, and felt that the weather was not as cool as advertised.

  My father was back at home seeing to b’iness. It was during that period that the Howard Williams revival meeting shook Carrollton, Mississippi, to its very foundations. Nothing like it had happened before or would again. The stories were many.

  For one thing, Mr. Williams was “charismatic,” a term that was not used then. What we might have noted was that he was sexy and that the women who got worked up about that meeting were not altogether thinking of religion. He also, it seems, had a first-rate singer to lead the choir and congregation.

  They came in pairs, these annual visitors, singers being only slightly less important than preachers. Whole choirs were formed—women’s for the mornings, mixed for the evenings, children’s for special numbers. The best singers from all the congregations joined in. The songs had to be the old ones everybody knew. To hear them in the night from home, where I frequently stayed, was to feel the whole night had become filled to the brim with their message.

  Blood! It overflowed the music, drenched the clouds above, flowed in the creek that lay between our property and the tabernacle; it was not to be confined to veins, where it belonged.

  In our church we periodically, four times a year, drank wine or (after Prohibition took firmer hold) grape juice from tiny crystal communion glasses held in hardwood trays and passed around by the elders. At Grace Episcopal Church, you went up to kneel at a railing and took a sip of the real thing from a silver cup. But these polite formalities, relating to blood, were minor little dribbles compared to revival-meeting blood that came booming through the songs like the Mississippi River at flood crest.

  There is power, power, wonder-working power

  In the blood of the lamb …

  There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins

  And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains…

  Just as I am without one plea

  Except thy blood was shed for me …

  Mr. Williams, we were told on our return, would dress in a snow-white suit. In those hot, expectant nights, he would wait in back of the audience, out in the darkness, while the singer and choir worked the crowd. While the last verse was being fervently sung, he would come dashing in, run down the sawdust aisle, and leap to the podium.

  Before the two weeks were over, many in town had wept and repented in public. They had openly confessed their sins. Those who managed to keep a cool-enough distance would remember having heard an earful. Suspicions were confirmed; whispered scandal declared out loud.

  The tide swept on till the very day of departure, when a crowd gathered at the station to bid a tearful farewell. Still singing mightily, they thrust wads of money into hands and pockets of minister and singer. The train was held up for nearly an hour— one more prayer, one more song. More and more dollars changed hands.

  I always wondered how they felt when the train actually chuffed away and gradually dwindled from sight around a distant curve. No secrets left and not much money either.

  We missed it all, praise the Lord, being in Branson, Missouri.

  9

  THE OLD LADIES

  ONE afternoon, when I was a little girl, my mother and I walked up to see old Mrs. Sco
tt.

  It was quite a way to go, from our house at the far eastern end of the rambling old Mississippi hill town, up through town and beyond to the west, up to the old Scott place. We reached the town square by climbing a slope up to the level of the school, then winding up beyond the school building and the Somerville house to the McBride house on the corner, then turning left, straight on to the courthouse square. Past the Merrill store and the old Stansbury place another climbing road took us up along a string of spaced-out houses. All were different, set far apart along the right-hand side of a concrete walk.

  As house followed house followed house, it seemed the town was holding on, lingering, tenacious. There on the left stood the standpipe, a Tower of Pisa without leaning, soaring up above trees, both landmark and necessity. It held the town water supply, and was placed at this high point of terrain so that water, pumped up each day from the powerhouse down near the creek, could run downhill to supply the thirsty faucets of every household. Finally there was the turnoff lane to the old Scott place, the last before the town let go.

  The house gave only a glimpse of itself to anyone passing, for it was set back from the road and reached by a lane flanked in shrubs and trees.

  The Scott place was said to be the oldest house in Carrollton. It was once a stagecoach stop, I was told, on the road down to Jackson, Vicksburg, and Natchez. I remember a large rambling weathered house with a big porch running round about it from front to side, giving entrance by a side door. Ethel Vinette Wallace, Mrs. Scott’s granddaughter, welcomed us. She had thick, dark hair.

  We entered a large room with a fireplace. I saw a chair by a window and an ancient face all but lost in the setting of afghans, quilts, and throws. I held my mother’s hand as she led me forward. “It’s Mrs. Scott, Elizabeth. You must say hello.” A tiny old hand reached out to touch me. It ran along my arm. “So this is Elizabeth.” The face smiled. A small voice came up out of the pile of coverings. I remember it as a happy voice, brimming with a deep affection that didn’t need to be stated. I sat down when I was told. I never said anything unless spoken to.

  During the visit my mother’s eyes would fill with tears. She was full of love for this old lady and the family, one prime reason being that they were Presbyterians. They were not only Scotts but also (by descent) Scots. Old Mrs. Scott’s daughter had married a McEachern (pronounced McCahan). Mr. McEachern had built a house next door. It was phenomenal for its roof, which slanted down from a dizzy height at something as near the perpendicular as you could get and still slant. It was said that Mr. McEachern had wanted it that way to let rain pour down so rapidly it had no chance to leak.

  I was happy walking home in the late afternoon beside my mother. The way back was downhill and easy. Mimi (as we called her) liked to walk and went along briskly, always in her dark coat with the rich silver fox collar, her worn leather handbag in one hand, my own hand in the other.

  I was delighted when these visits to old ladies were over. I could talk, I could chatter. I didn’t mind that Mimi laughed at me. I could skip and pick up whatever caught my attention. I could ramble on and off the walk. The sidewalks were marked all over town by hoofprints because cows had got out before the cement was dry and had wandered around in the night.

  Clouds overhead were like marvelous long scarves of deep pink. We were favored with glorious sunsets over our town. They seemed spread out above the whole county and made the sky seem bigger than any that ever was.

  That day I was wearing a pair of brown kid gloves with a small button at the wrist. I can still recall the thin leathery texture of them, like a second skin, and how, when we reached home and I took them off, my mother noticed that my nails needed to be trimmed and did so, with tiny curved scissors. I recall this because my nail-biting started later for what now seems a good enough reason.

  Money.

  We were always worried about it, as my father had to work very hard to get it, to keep it or use it well, and so the talk ran to it, and it brought its usual freight-train load of anxiety along with it. In my father’s talk, just as in that of my mother’s family, men were said to “amount to something” or to be “worth something,” but he invariably meant work and its cash reward.

  My mother’s idea of reward, however, lay in doing the right thing. She had a real love of this notion of life and of the people included in it. Outside her own family—home, children, and kin—she kept herself going on the thought of the loving approval of those friends her own mother had held dear.

  Another old lady remains involved in my early memories, though there was never the need to visit her, as she was there all the time, right next door. Her name was Miss Henrietta—a real “Miss,” for she never married. She lived with her brother, Mr. Dave Welch, in a one-story antebellum house that had been left her by her aunt, a certain Miss Baugh. Miss Baugh had beautiful furnishings, many of which eventually came to us, given out of gratitude.

  Miss Henrietta, like many people in Carrollton, had a “place,” this being not a productive Delta farm but a little property up in the hills, about two or three miles from town. Whether she rented this farm or not, I never knew, for though she was all but impoverished herself, she was always giving things away. An entire family named the Littletons lived out on the property. There were any number of Littleton children, and Miss Henrietta used always to be carrying them anything she had to spare by way of clothing or food. My aunt once gave her a warm sweater as a Christmas gift, but said, “Just tell me which one of the Littletons you want to have it, and I’ll give it to them.”

  Miss Henrietta was a small lady who bundled herself in an old coat in winter. A belt wrapped around her, midway down the coat at something no one could call a waistline, made her look like a little walking bale of cotton. Each day she would go trudging off up the hill to go to town, where she had a small store just half a block downhill from the courthouse square. I was always welcome to come into this store and sit perched on the counter talking to Miss Henrietta, who would give me a peppermint out of the glass-front display case.

  To increase her income from practically nothing to a pittance, my father got her appointed agent for an insurance company. He would go up and spend a number of hours with her each month, to get her books straight, for I think she had no idea how to keep them properly. She kept house, after her fashion, with her brother. They were our only neighbors. The house, with its long concrete walk, broken by steps in pairs and threes, sloping down to the front gate, and flanked by cedars, had a lovely pillared porch and triangular podium above the broad front steps.

  During the Civil War, a ship named Star of the West had been sunk by Confederates on the Tallahatchie River near Fort Pemberton to block passage of the Yankee forces who were moving on Vicksburg. A large pier-glass mirror framed in ornate gold leaf had been among the things salvaged and had somehow found its way into that house. It stood leaning in the hallway, prominent from the moment one entered. I would see myself coming in, first thing, and when wearing a frock, could see if my petticoat showed.

  The Welches, sister and brother, were always happy to see me. They liked having children around, first my brother, seven years older than I, and soon to be sent off to an academy, then myself, always ready to have someone to trail around with and talk to.

  Mr. Dave had spent time in Guatemala, where, it was said, he had had mining interests. Though he almost never spoke of his time in that distant place, he kept woven baskets that had to have come from there, and large prints of native men chopping what looked to be sugarcane, native women carrying baskets loaded with tropical fruits on their heads. He had wicked-looking curved knives racked up on the wall of that back room.

  In the parlor, however, all was ornate, with antique mahogany, cherry, and walnut furniture. There was a framed black-and-white picture I remember of horses in a field, frightened before a storm. Black clouds were rolling, lightning streaked the sky. The horses’ heads were flung up, their eyes and nostrils wide, manes streaming in the wind.
I thought it must be of Scotland because there were mountains in the background and what looked to be open ground with low bushes—heather, perhaps. I liked hearing names of things in far-off places.

  Mr. Dave raised prize tomatoes, grew watermelons, made hot tamales he would bring across to the fence in autumn. They were wrapped in corn shucks and warm to touch, pleasantly spicy to eat. He also had two Airedale dogs, named Pet and Beauty, and kept a tall horse, blind in one eye, called Ole Dick. His saddle was a modified Western one, with two girths, and to have me with him, he made stirrups from the cinching straps of the second, so I could ride behind the cantle, holding on to him if he went fast. We would go through town and out to the Littleton place. He was a small man with a tubby stomach and white hair. He rode very straight, very proudly.

  One spring afternoon we turned from the main road and followed a path to a stream. It was running clear and shallow over a bed of flat stones, colored orange, brown, white, and gray. Mr. Dave dismounted and helped me down. He left Ole Dick with bridle hooked to the saddle horn. He sat down in the cool willow shade and took off his hat. It was summer. I took off my shoes and waded in the blissful water. The stones were smooth. We did not talk about anything. The horse cropped grass. The water murmured.

  Mr. Dave usually spent his days doing work around the garden while Miss Henrietta was uptown minding the store.

  Back in those days no one thought so much about driving everywhere. From earliest times I can remember we always had a car, but often we walked to town or to visits, and many people walked all the time. They did not think of it as anything to complain of. Mrs. Elizabeth Glenn was one lady I never knew well (she was not in our church), but she was remarkably present in our town, as she walked in such an exemplary way, her back straight, her head high, the way Mr. Dave rode. How not to find this an example? (“Stand up straight,” they told me. “Look at Miss Elizabeth Glenn.”)