Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  and smiled a bit,

  then calmly helped yourself to it.

  —Ruth Bell Graham1

  It was early fall 1940, and maples flamed in red and gold on the Wheaton College campus. The October sun burned obliquely from a clean blue sky, and the air was tart. Billy Graham was slouched in an orange pickup truck, hot light spilling through the windshield and over his trousers. His sleeves were pushed to his elbows, and long slender legs ended sharply in a pair of scuffed brogans.

  Beside him, Johnny Streater squinted in the white glare, fingers loosely curled around the wheel, head slightly tilted, as the two young men chatted. Streater, a senior, was a twenty-five-year-old Floridian with short-cropped curly brown hair and dark mischievous eyes. Four years earlier he had bought the truck and built up the metal flatbed with wooden plank siding. He had painted WHEATON COLLEGE STUDENT TRUCKING SERVICE in large blue letters on the doors.

  Billy was a twenty-one-year-old North Carolinian with a distinctive voice and a passion to save souls. Already an ordained Baptist minister, he had graduated from Florida Bible Institute in Tampa, where he had practiced preaching to cypress stumps, working hard to sand southern cadences smooth like rough old wood. By now, it was a challenge to guess where he was from. He had arrived at Wheaton the month before, chagrined to find he was once again a lowly freshman.

  There was a poignant boyishness about young Billy Graham, a well-mannered decency that drew people, and before Streater had thought twice about it, he offered him a whopping fifty cents an hour to help haul furniture, luggage, and other belongings for the students and local residents. Billy was six feet two inches of raw-boned scaffolding topped by a mane of wavy, dark blond hair. He had perpetually dark circles under his eyes, his face a striking concentration of strong features that seemed to have been forged or chiseled. His brow was high and intelligent, nose and jaw strong. His deep-set eyes were remarkably piercing and as blue as a Siamese cat’s. Wheaton classmates called him “Preacher,” for he’d already had plenty of experience holding revival services and proclaiming the Good News from street corners and barroom doorways.

  Billy had forsaken his Presbyterian heritage, not in response to urges of heart but to deacons who threatened to cancel revival services he was holding at a small Baptist church in Florida unless he agreed to be immersed. Without struggle or fanfare, he was baptized in a nearby lake. Though he sometimes doubted his call to the ministry and his effectiveness, he never questioned his insatiable desire to reach lost souls. It was an obsession, and time after time he would find himself pacing in front of a crowd, preaching from the supple black leather Bible gripped in his left hand.

  William Franklin Graham Jr. was born November 7, 1918, on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, North Carolina. False news reports declared that World War I had ended at eleven o’clock that morning. Four days later the war did indeed end, and Billy Frank, as his family called him, began his boyhood on a two-hundred-acre tract in the piedmont where days began hours before dawn and ended soon after dark. His world was earthy and unchanging, punctuated by the pleasant sounds of warm milk drumming pails and bottles thick with cream clattering in the delivery truck bumping along loamy red dirt roads.

  Nature was cyclical, moving from life to death, from death to life, stirring in the thaw of March and waning in October. By late June, the lemony perfume of magnolias and the fragrance of apple blossoms were gone, and jaded nature got hot and slow. Fat sunflowers and orange day lilies swayed from spindly stems along roadsides, and steamy and monotonous summers droned on like lethargic beetles by day and rude cicadas at night. Winters were endless raw hours rarely culminating in the enchantment of snow, and trees were dead silhouettes against bleak fields.

  Perennially, there was the rapacious kudzu that transformed majestic oaks and pines into leafy dinosaurs reared on massive hindquarters, waiting to devour little boys who wandered too far from their fragrant kitchens or fusty barns. The cadence of Billy Frank’s world was constant. Men were born on the land and died there, just as their fathers before them. There seemed to be no question that Billy Frank would maintain the rhythm and become a farmer like the five generations of Graham men before him.

  It is believed that Billy Graham came from a brave, hearty stock. His early forebears include “Sir John with the Bright Sword” Graham of Kilbride, Scotland, noted for his courage, and John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, notorious for his persecution of the Scottish Covenanters during the reign of Charles II. With more certainty it can be said that Billy Graham’s direct ancestors emigrated from Ireland in 1772 and settled on a thousand acres along the Catawba River at the North and South Carolina line.

  His grandfather William Crook Graham, born in the fall of 1840, was an opinionated Democrat with a temper and a fierce loyalty to the Confederacy. After he died in his armchair in 1910, he was lauded as the “bravest Confederate in Mecklenburg,” a suspect accolade in light of his company muster roll, which indicated that he was absent without leave on at least two occasions. Inspired by patriotism or bounty bonds, Private Graham served for the duration of the Civil War in the Sixth Regiment of the South Carolina volunteers. He suffered typhoid fever and a grievous leg wound and was eventually taken captive by an enemy troop. Like his ancestors, he was devoted to the land, and after the war he returned to his farm in the Sharon township. In 1870 he married Mollie McCall and they raised eleven children in a log house on the center of their property. Their ninth child, born in June 1888, was named William Franklin.

  As a young man Frank Graham was a solid six foot two and handsome. He was fond of fat cigars and fine clothing, and was a raconteur known throughout the county for jokes and colorful yarns. Though he lacked formal education, he was considered one of the shrewdest horse traders in the piedmont, his handshake as binding as a signed contract. He was kind, dutiful, and frugal, his religion rooted in works rather than grace until 1906, when he attended a revival at a local Methodist church. For nine evenings he attended services and spent the late-night rides home in his horse-drawn wagon unraveling what the evangelist had woven into his brain. On the tenth night, no amount of tugging or picking would eradicate the message. As the steadily clopping hooves carried him back to the farm, Frank realized he had been converted.

  Four years later, when he was twenty-two, he drove his sporty buggy to Lakewood Park, west of Charlotte, where couples drifted in rowboats and took languid strolls on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. Not long after he’d tethered his horse he noticed a slender young woman with fine strong features and pinned-up dark blond hair. Her name was Morrow Coffey and she was eighteen. She eyed him obliquely, and not for the first time. She had seen him riding through the county and had wanted to meet him for quite a while. Before the Saturday evening ended, the two had been introduced. The gentleman who had accompanied Morrow to the park found himself alone, and Frank treated Morrow to her first roller-coaster ride and drove her home.

  Morrow had grown up just outside Charlotte, her forebears having settled in the Carolinas at the end of the eighteenth century. Her father was Benjamin Morrow Coffey, a dark, sharp-featured man who in his youth, as Morrow recalled the legend, had penetrating brown eyes that could look right through a person. When he was nineteen, he enlisted in the Eleventh Regiment of the Confederate Army, and on an early March morning he left home. Slipping him a New Testament and kissing him farewell, his mother stood at the edge of the yard, watching his easy stride as he receded into the horizon.

  Throughout the war Benjamin carried the small leather-bound book in his breast pocket, and his last vision of his mother watching him leave home for war hung in his mind like an icon. On July 1, 1863, the opening day of the Battle of Gettysburg, he fell near a rill along Seminary Ridge, a bullet lodged below his left knee. As he lay upon the blood-soaked earth, smoke and flames around him, a shell burst nearby and blinded his right eye. After a four-hour wait, he was carried from the field, loaded into a dray with other wounded, and carried to a hospital.
He woke up later from a whiskey-induced sleep and discovered his sawed-off leg in a tub beside his bed. In early 1864 Benjamin Morrow Coffey returned to his home and married his childhood sweetheart, Lucinda Robinson. He began farming with a wooden leg and a mule.

  When his third daughter was born, he abandoned his hope of having a son and named the girl Morrow, after himself. She grew up in the thousand-member Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, and by the time she met Frank Graham, she was a conservative, no-nonsense believer. She set the tone for their lives together on their wedding night in 1916 when she unpacked her Bible before all else and began what would become their family tradition of daily devotions. It was her mission to cure her card-playing, cigar-smoking husband of his worldliness.

  The Grahams lived in a two-story, white clapboard house, with a sloping porch, on a patch of dirt where an IBM building now stands in one of Charlotte’s prime business districts. Their first child, a daughter, died shortly after birth. Billy Frank was born a year later, followed by two sisters and a brother. Morrow was determined to raise her children in a Christian atmosphere, but in the early years the Graham home, like the Coffeys’, was more church-oriented than it was spiritual. The Graham faith, like their affections, was inhibited. Young Billy Frank’s faith was a ritual of moral regulations, blessings at mealtimes, and church on Sunday morning.

  As a boy, he crackled with nervous energy like a long, thin wire. He chewed his fingernails and had a mild stutter. Billy Frank was impetuously magnanimous, with a proclivity for exaggeration and lavishing both friend and foe with kind words and generous favors. The athletic arena was the one place where he could vent the electrical storm within, and each day he unleashed it on the basketball court or baseball field.

  “When we were teenagers, we didn’t know what ‘hyper’ meant,” his brother, Melvin, recalled. “When I think back, he was probably hyper.”

  Billy Frank’s mother often said in exasperation that she wanted the doctor to give him something to calm him down.

  When Billy Frank was ten, his family moved into a sturdy brick house on a barren rise not far from the place of his birth. By age twelve, he was head and shoulders taller than other boys and thin as a reed at a hundred and sixty pounds. He had corn-colored hair and wide blue eyes, and an intensity that often caused people to think there was something unusual, if not important, about him. When he wasn’t working on the farm or playing baseball, he was riding with pretty girls around the county in a friend’s convertible.

  Depending on whom Billy was interested in—and he dated a different girl “about every week,” claimed his sister Catherine—it was common to see him holding a young lady’s hand in the sunshine, her hair whipping in the wind. In fact, he was rather much the local heartbreaker. As Catherine later recalled, “He was just so good-looking, and the girls were just crazy about him.”

  Young Billy Frank was not spiritual in the least. God was like a flower pressed between the pages of a book, to be briefly sentimentalized when chanced upon in the A.R.P. Presbyterian church he attended each Sunday. Academics, like his religion, were largely ignored, and conveniently there was little time to study. Each morning he and Melvin rose at 2:30 to begin chores, a schedule so habitual that Melvin would momentarily blink awake at that hour for the rest of his days. Tumbling out of the house into an indistinct world of shadows and silence, the two brothers would amble along a narrow path, cutting through the alfalfa field and finally reaching the barn. The boys delivered their quota of milk to Uncle Clyde Graham, who lived across the road and owned a bottling machine. Milk was poured into glass bottles, fitted with cardboard stoppers, and stamped GRAHAM BROTHERS DAIRY.

  After a rigorous scrubbing and a hearty breakfast, Billy Frank went to school. He was not an exemplary student and one of his teachers visited his mother to tell her so. Perhaps in an effort to frighten Morrow Graham into motion, the teacher paused on her way out to declare, “Billy Frank will never amount to a thing.”

  In the spring of 1934, when Billy Frank was fifteen, a revival was held seven miles from his house. Lawyers, doctors, farmers, the wealthy and the poor, turned out in droves. They bumped along rutted roads in trucks and glided from fine city dwellings in shiny sedans, while Billy stayed in the cool solitude of his red brick home, ignoring what he judged to be a raw-lumber tabernacle full of emotionalism.

  Mordecai Ham had been preaching at the revival for three weeks, having been brought to Charlotte by Albert Sidney Johnson, the prominent minister of the First Presbyterian Church. The fiery Baptist minister had gotten such a drubbing in the newspapers that Billy Frank’s own church had refused to acknowledge Ham’s existence. One afternoon one of Frank Graham’s assistants, Albert McMakin, announced he would attend that evening’s service and urged Billy Frank to go along. To please him, Billy Frank agreed. Bathed and already perspiring in the warm night air, they climbed into McMakin’s car and roared to the tabernacle.

  It was jammed. Wives wearing dark linen and voile and straw hats sat beside dapper businessmen, while women in blousy cotton dresses sat primly next to farmer husbands stiff in shiny Sunday suits. Faces were tanned like belting leather, white in a band across the brow from the shade of hats, and flesh glowed from soapy scrubs that could not reach slivered moons of dirt beneath broad, furrowed nails. The airless atmosphere was heavy with moist heat and toilet water, and young Billy Frank shrank into the back and peered over slicked-down hair and hats. Ham was intelligent and articulate, and unabashed in his hatred of sin. Billy listened with fascination, and from that moment on he couldn’t stay away.

  Night after night Mordecai Ham warned about hell, fornication, and liquor, his eyes snapping, bone-white hair falling across his wet brow. Unnerved and convicted, Billy ducked and dodged whenever the preacher’s accusing finger seemed pointed his way. Then one night the fear slid from him and the minister’s voice became strange, distant, as though the voice of God were speaking directly to Billy Frank Graham. A yearning stirred deep within, filling him irresistibly, and in a way he did not completely understand. Sawdust shifted beneath his shoes as he walked forward to surrender himself.

  Revivals came and went like the seasons. For some of the local folk, equilibrium was restored a week after the tent had been folded and the evangelist had moved on to another town. For others, their walk to the altar changed them. Though superficially Billy Frank was the same young man his friends had always known, inside his soul was embattled, waged in a struggle he could not ignore. To him, God was a force to be tangled with. How much simpler had God been that-great-something-out-there looking down on him. Instead, God was a powerful and persistent presence. For the next eighteen months, Billy Frank was torn between Christ and worldliness. When the weather was warm, he would lope through the woods behind his house, jumping over two deep gullies, headed for a creek. He would sit on a boulder in the sun, spending uninterrupted hours reading the Bible and praying, as he mulled over what to do with his newfound faith.

  In the fall of 1936, he left home for the mountains of Cleveland, Tennessee, where his parents had enrolled him in the recently founded Bob Jones College. Billy would last one semester. After the open, sunny world of the farm, Bob Jones College impressed him as a windowless, dark room where the emphasis was on sin, on “thou shalt nots,” and on the eradication of worldliness. Griping was forbidden. Signs posted in the barrack-style dormitories warned students they had better mind their attitudes as well as their tongues. Athletic competitions with other colleges were nonexistent. Holding hands and kissing were felonious. Billy’s spirit withered, and a tenacious bout with the flu robbed him of his strength.

  In early January, Billy sat in Dr. Bob Jones’s office, nervously informing the formidable man that he was leaving. Jones flayed the young man for his lack of Christian integrity, for his blighted character. With the urgency Jones so often employed when promising the faceless unbelievers an eternal scorching hell, he promised Billy a lifetime of failure. Billy had sidestepped the aura of God’s wi
ll because he had darted from the shadow of Bob Jones. At the tender age of eighteen, Billy was lost.

  The following February, Billy transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, and, buoyed by the sunshine and cheery atmosphere, he thrived. He began preaching in empty buildings or in a nearby swamp where no one could hear him attempt to banish the remnants of his southern accent and a nervous stutter. He preached anywhere he was invited, practicing each sermon as many as twenty-five times before feeling confident enough to deliver it. He condemned sin and warned of damnation, possessing a power that from the beginning was mesmerizing. Local reporters strayed into his services, making such observations as “Young Graham does not mince words when he tells church members that they are headed for the same hell as the bootlegger and racketeer unless they get right and live right.”2

  Posted around Tampa were his homemade handbills: “Have you heard the young man with a burning message?”3

  His first year at Florida Bible Institute, he fell in love with an attractive, dark-haired young woman whose name, many years later, was rarely mentioned.4 In 1938, Billy asked the woman to marry him. She accepted, only to reject him the following year because she was in love with someone else. It was a sharp blow, and Billy begged God to change what had happened, to somehow reverse the inclinations of her heart or of his. But prayer, he discovered, was not a wish book filled with slick promises of happiness and plenty. He supposed it might be possible that God did not always give him what he wanted because He’d rather give him what he should have. In his greatest hour of dejection, Billy gave what was left of himself to all that he conceived of God.

  He graduated in 1940 and left Tampa with a new earnestness about his Christian call. He promised himself he would never kiss a woman again until he knew she was the one, as he put it, who was to be his wife. He would ignore women in general, as much as he could, and focus his energy on his work and on his preaching. His resolution lasted about as long as it took for Johnny Streater to tell Billy all about a striking young woman named Ruth Bell.