Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  Only twenty-eight in 1943, C. L. Franklin had come a long way rather quickly in the estimation of both fellow preachers and his parishioners. The once-rural newcomer now sported sharply tailored, respectable suits, drove a stylish new car, and carried himself with confidence. His reputation as a preacher of power and substance announced him before he even entered the pulpit, and invitations from near and far landed on his desk in the pastor’s small office. He relished the attention, the recognition, the self-confirmation, as William Holmes Borders put it in a widely reproduced January 1943 sermon, that “I Am Somebody.” The power that came with such recognition, a heady mix of the sensual and the prophetic in one proclaimed as designated by God to teach and lead, could prove difficult to restrain. And, at times, for C. L. Franklin, it was.57

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE EAGLE STIRRETH

  Nat D. Williams taught history at Booker T. Washington High, promoted blues music on Beale Street, and wrote a column for the Memphis World. He had seen a lot in Memphis, but this was the biggest funeral “ever held in the history of this city.” On June 28, 1943, some “four or five thousand persons (chiefly colored)” had crowded the sanctuary and overflowed onto the surrounding streets around Holiness Temple in South Memphis, the preeminent church of the fast-growing black Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God In Christ. The noon services honored a black Baptist minister, not a member of COGIC, as the group was popularly called, but the larger building had been chosen in anticipation of the crowds. In the place of Pentecostal bishop C. H. Mason, C. L. Franklin entered the pulpit to deliver the main eulogy.1

  The day marked a major turn in C. L.’s life, the first of two over the next few years that signaled the arrival of a mature preacher with credible aspirations for national prominence. Reverend M. J. Jenkins, renowned as a “spectacular, flamboyant preacher” and leader of Memphis’s Greater White Stone Baptist Church, had died of acute appendicitis the week before in Buffalo, New York, where he also led Friendship Baptist Church. Although the distance between the cities was great, the arrangement itself was not unprecedented, as the circuit-riding experience throughout the rural South suggested. (B. J. Perkins simultaneously led churches in Memphis and Cleveland, Ohio, and Benjamin Hooks would commute between Memphis and Detroit for more than two decades. Indeed, Jenkins himself led two Memphis churches before accepting the Buffalo pastorate.) Jenkins had led both churches since November 1940, alternating his time between them in two- or three-week cycles. Nat Williams had seen many a southern preacher regard such successful exposure to a northern congregation “as an escape, as an opportunity to leave the environment which nourished him and gave him his training, and as a chance to express himself in a so-called larger sphere.” But Jenkins “found it comparatively easy to bridge the gap between the Northern and Southern outlook. No doubt he found that most Northern Negroes are still dyed-in-the-wool Southerners under the skin.”2

  Friendship Baptist held the first funeral on Friday, June 25, with B. J. Perkins delivering the eulogy. The body arrived in Memphis Saturday night, lying in state at Greater White Stone Church Sunday afternoon and evening, as thousands paid their respects. The next day Reverend W. E. Mack, president of the local Baptist Ministers Conference, presented an assistant pastor from Friendship who acknowledged the large number of Buffalo parishioners present, and then Perkins, for a short address. Then Mack introduced the principal speaker.3

  Franklin took his text from the opening of the Book of Joshua, where the Lord anticipated Joshua’s coronation as Moses’ successor and Israel’s leader. “Moses my servant is dead,” C. L. began, citing the biblical verse. “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.”4

  The verse he selected remains rich with possible meaning. Within the context of the Afro-Baptist tradition, the biblical citation opening the sermon had a structural significance that could not have escaped C. L.’s or the mourners’ attention. The sacred function of such a reading focused the congregation on the broad topic to come, but even more important, it announced (and the congregation’s response actively confirmed) the preacher’s claim of a divine legitimacy for the words that would follow. Jenkins was one of the experienced ministers who had mentored him when C. L. came up from Mississippi to preach in the city. Friendship’s parishioners knew of this relationship and had themselves appreciated C. L.’s talents, for Jenkins had invited Franklin to preach a very successful ten-day revival at the Buffalo church the year before. The biblical verse C. L. selected suggested more than mourning. It suggested a new anointing: the leader is dead and Yahweh has appointed the successor. With so many Buffalo parishioners in attendance, the command to the successor to “arise, go over this Jordan, thou” into the promised land was Franklin’s subtle way to indicate his availability should Friendship Baptist extend its call for a new leader. It was also a signal to Memphis.5

  There was no immediate call to the pulpit at Friendship Baptist following C. L.’s eulogy; even if considered, the timing would have been inappropriate. But C. L.’s preaching performance again evidenced a prowess impressive for one still not thirty. Weekly, New Salem now strained its narrowed confines when he took the pulpit, and his visits to other churches for guest sermons or week-long revivals only enhanced his reputation. But perhaps the strongest indication of C. L.’s growing preaching presence, in a city filled with well-regarded Baptist preachers, was the young minister’s audacious insistence from early in his Memphis ministry that he once a year preach a particular sermon, “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.” This sermon, along with a few others based on the Book of Ezekiel and Psalm 137, occupied the very apex of the Afro-Baptist preaching canon. Through a century-old folk memory, congregations knew the sermon’s dramatic history and held those who attempted it to an exacting standard. Most ministers, if they preached this demanding sermon at all, waited until they had prayed long and deeply over it, until they had garnered the experience needed to explore its meaning for their time, and until they had command of the verbal and musical skills essential to an effective, emotive presentation. C. L., from age twenty-six on, preached that sermon, New Salem’s Ernest Donelson explained. When it “became known that he was going to preach that,” the crowds came in even greater numbers than usual.6

  The earliest report of an Afro-Baptist minister preaching “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” predates Franklin’s Memphis ministry by almost a century. On January 10, 1846, Sir Charles Lyell, a British traveler, attended services at the First African Church in Savannah, Georgia. The lone white among six hundred black worshipers, Lyell listened as the congregation first offered a hymn, which was then “followed by prayers, not read, but delivered without notes by a Negro of pure African blood . . . with a fine sonorous voice.” Rev. Andrew Marshall, the congregation’s elected leader, “concluded by addressing them a sermon, also without notes, in good style.” Impressed, Lyell recorded the structure of the sermon. Marshall spoke of the human frailty of even a pious man and thus the need for God’s grace, comparing the relationship between God and humanity “to an eagle teaching her newly fledged offspring to fly by carrying it up high into the air, then dropping it, and, if she sees it falling to the earth, darting with the speed of lightning to save it before it reaches the ground.” In addition to living a moral life, Marshall “told them that they were to look to a future state of rewards and punishments in which God would deal impartially with ‘the poor and the rich, the black man and the white.’”7

  As tantalizingly brief as Lyell’s account is, it reveals nonetheless central aspects of an Afro-Baptist preaching tradition that would inform C. L.’s sermons a century later. First is the centrality of song: the service began with a communal hymn, and the preacher’s words themselves, delivered in that “fine sonorous voice” were “animated,” that is, sung or delivered in a rhythmic pattern. Neither the prayers nor the sermon, moreover, were written down. Reflecting the widespread illiteracy
inflicted on southern blacks, the ensuing black oral culture prized improvisation, storytelling, and verbal facility in song, sermon, and speech. This did not therefore mean that these sermons were delivered spontaneously—there was a great deal of careful preparation—but it did mean that the religious service itself, song, prayer, and sermon, constituted a collective moment where all could participate. This call-and-response pattern usually framed the sermon, with parishioners reaching out verbally to the preacher, exhorting him with their vocal improvisations. In the process, worshipers were more than witnesses to a sacred ritual, for jointly, with their preacher, they created the setting where they experienced their God.

  Even in the snippets Lyell recorded, the intimate play between the sacred and the secular was evident. The trust in God, and the reliance on God’s grace to save humans prone to sin, were familiar signposts in the Christian search for rebirth and redemption. But to assume this sermon concerned only the afterlife was to miss its core complexity. As the final sentences of Lyell’s description indicated, this was a sermon of liberation, a sermon that spoke of a spiritual transcendence with a decidedly worldly analogue. What Frederick Douglass said of slave spirituals reflected many a sermon as well: “Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”8

  As with his eulogy for M. J. Jenkins, no detailed printed reports remain of C. L.’s rendition of “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” during these Memphis years. He did record a live performance of the sermon a decade later, however, which is as close to Franklin’s themes and his overall approach in Memphis as is possible.9 Franklin, following a path well worn in the Afro-Baptist preaching tradition, took his text from Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible. Moses, told of his pending death and the succession of Joshua, listens as Yahweh foretells of Israel’s violation of the covenant and orders Moses to “write ye this song for you, and teach it to the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel.” It is from the middle of this song, as Moses recounts Jacob’s salvation by God—Jacob, too, had wandered into idolatry—that C. L., following tradition, took his text:

  As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings; / So the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him.10

  “The eagle,” he began, was a symbol of God, of his “care . . . and concern for his people.” History itself, he explained in a conversational tone, was but “one big nest” God stirs “to make man better and to help us achieve world brotherhood.” This stirring might cause great pain, he explained slowly, as children cried and some adults shouted out the “Amens,” “O Lords,” and “All rights” of encouragement. C. L. taught that cataclysmic events such as the Civil War revealed through the pain a larger purpose, for that struggle was “merely the promptings of Providence [the last syllable here elongated three beats for emphasis] to lash men to a point of being brotherly to all men.” Daily tribulations carried great positive power: God stirred our individual “nests” in order to “discipline us, help us know ourselves, and help us to love one another, and to help us hasten on the realization of the kingdom of God.” Pain was not simply random, cruel, or spiteful, a just desert for sinful humanity; nor was it a justification for alienation, as some blues men and women occasionally suggested. Rather, while pain itself was a universal experience, inherent in the human condition, C. L. preached it had a purpose—it was redemptive. God worked in history, through human beings, and the stirring, at times painful, of “the various nests of circumstances surrounding us” had as their ultimate purpose to activate his people in this world as well as in their preparation for the next.

  Still narrating, in a storytelling mode, C. L. returned to the image of the eagle. The eagle was regal, kingly, he declared, “for God is the king.” Deftly, C. L. drew this heavenly metaphor to earth: “For you see, these little kings that we know, they’ve got to have a king over them. They’ve got to account to somebody for the deeds done in their bodies.” And the eagle is strong, swooping down to lift up a lamb with just its claws to “fly away to yonder’s cliff and devour it.” So, too, “our God is strong,” a fortress to hide behind when pursued, “a citadel of protection and redemption,” “a leaning [again the word stretched out, made animate by Franklin’s enunciation] post” for all since the time of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. As the congregation’s response quickened, spurred by the notion of their shared experience with these great biblical figures, C. L. noted God’s swiftness in responding to the believer, revisiting the biblical tale of Daniel in the lion’s den. “And Daniel rung him on the way to the lion’s den,” and by the time he arrived, an angel dispatched by God “had changed the nature of lions and made them lay down and act like lambs.” With enormous fervor, calling out “my, my, my,” and “O Lord,” the audience embraced the connection: this strong and regal God would respond, and quickly, as he did to Daniel, even to as poor and unremarkable a group as they were. Finally, C. L. proclaimed, the eagle

  has extraordinary sight. Extraordinary sight. Somewhere it is said that he can rise to a lofty height in the air and look in the distance and see a storm hours away. That’s extraordinary sight. And sometimes he can stand and gaze right in the sun because he has extraordinary sight. I want to tell you my God has extraordinary sight. He can see every ditch that you have dug for me and guide me around them. God has extraordinary sight. He can look behind that smile on your face and see the frown in your heart. God has extraordinary sight.

  As he reached the word, “frown,” he drew it out over three syllables in a tremolo, his deep voice fluttering with emphasis, piercing, as God’s messenger, the secrets in individual souls, and the response grew yet more intense. Amid the cries and exclamations of “preach on,” “preach heavy,” “oh yeah,” preacher and parishioners prepared each other for the climactic experience each knew they awaited.

  But at that moment Franklin lowered the emotional level slightly, as there was another teaching point he wanted to make. He described how the eagle built the nest, at first softening its surface with down for the eaglets. As they grow, the eagle removed that down, exposing her older offspring to harsher material and a less comfortable nest, and thus propelled them out into the world: “I believe that God has to do that for us sometime,” for, as Moses’s song prophesied, such interventions recalled the wayward back to faith.

  It was at this juncture that C. L. shifted gears. In place of that conversational tone, a musical expressiveness emerged to carry the message forward, as C. L. whooped, or chanted, the remainder of the sermon. He sang in key, modulating his voice from near-falsetto to guttural rasp, creating a rhythmic cadence both with his words and in the interplay created by his voice, the audience’s response, and the occasional percussive beat of his hand hitting the pulpit.

  “It is said,” his rich baritone announced, evoking both biblical and folkloric authority, that a poultry farmer discovered one day “a strange looking bird” in a brood of chickens. The bird grew larger and exhibited decidedly different habits from the chickens, until finally a visitor who knew eagles explained to the farmer what he, in fact, had. The mysterious visitor instructed the farmer to build a cage for, as the eagle got older, “he’s going to get tired / of the ground.” The farmer did so, and then had to build another, and yet another cage, as the eagle’s wing span grew to twelve feet and “he began to get restless / in the cage.” One day, when a flock of eagles flew over the farm, this eagle heard their voices and reacted sharply:

  though he’d never been around eagles,

  there was something about that voice

  that he heard

  that moved

  down in him

  and made him

  dissatisfied.

  Disturbed by the eagle’s evident sadness at hearing the other eagles, the farmer opened the cage and set the eagle free. In stages, C. L. preached, th
e eagle walked hesitantly and tested his wings; circled about a little longer and then flew about the barnyard; and then “He wiggled up a little higher / and flew in yonder’s tree.” Finally, he wiggled even higher into the mountains.

  There was little repetition of phrases, with the important exception of select words and short phrases between the sung stanzas of this sermon. Those words—“and,” “O Lord,” “why,” and “yes he did”—were resting stops for C. L., where he might frame the image for the following lines. But they were also words his voice transformed into emotive signals, announcing that the moment of spiritual elevation was close by. What made C. L. such an extraordinary preacher was that even as he brought the congregation to this peak, he continued to address contemporary issues. As the caged eagle had been touched by the flock above, so too might individuals constrained by segregation find within community self-identity, group cohesiveness, and, ultimately, freedom.11

  As C. L. brought the sermon to its highest emotional peak, he drew out yet another level of meaning. “One of these days, / one of these days,” he repeated, signaling with the repetition the significance of this moment,