Part 7

All of the Protestant congregations of Farmington chipped in to pay the $600 demanded by Brother McConnell for his week’s work for the Lord. This was a goodly fee, but it was not considered exorbitant, as Brother McConnell was a professional devil-chaser with a national reputation, and it was felt that he, if anyone, could put Farmington on the right side of the heavenly ledger. There was considerable rivalry among our good people as to who should entertain the evangelist and pay for his fried chicken and other delicacies, and I do not recall who finally drew the plum. But the family whose bed and board he graced was considered very fortunate; it had practically assured itself of ultimate salvation, since the emissaries of the Devil would not dare to invade such a sanctuary of God.

Brother McConnell was an extraordinarily agile man. Throughout his service, and particularly after the collection had been taken up and found to be good, he bounded back and forth about the pulpit, chasing the Devil hither and yon, shaking his hair from his eyes, sweating at every pore and roaring charges about dens of evil that I, for one, was never able to find in Farmington, although I headed several exploring parties. He dealt largely in that sort of goods; to him, and to most of the other preachers that I recall, morality and goodness were nothing but chastity, and they never let an opportunity pass to insinuate that the finest men in our town whiled away their idle hours with scarlet women. Their insinuations, of course, had no basis in fact; to my knowledge there was but one professional scarlet woman in town, and there simply was not time. However, there were, to be sure, amateurs.

The church was crowded on the night I was told that Jesus had taken possession of my soul. I sat about the middle of the center section with my elder brother, a phlegmatic boy who was also converted but who would never talk much about it, while across the aisle were my sister and my younger brother. Every few moments the evangelist would stop shouting and sink back into his chair, gasping, wiping his brow and breaking into sobs as he bowed his head in a prayer that came in a throaty mumble from his lips. Here and there throughout the house was an echoing gasp and a strangled sob, utterances of tortured and frightened souls about to be swirled into a great wave of religious frenzy. And standing in the aisle and about the pulpit were Brothers and Sisters, experienced revival workers, eager retrievers for the Lord, their faces flushed with emotion and their eagle eyes roving the congregation in quest of just such persons.

The instant the evangelist sat down, his band leader popped up like a trained seal, and from the band and the augmented choir poured the lilting measures of a hymn.

Oh, that will be Glory for me! Glory for me, Yes, glory for me! When by His grace I shall look on His face, That will be glory, Yes, glory for me!

The first hymn was usually something of this sort, a tune with a swing to it, to get the congregation swaying in rhythm, and to attract the uncertain sinners lounging about the door and looking in, unable to decide whether or not to enter. Usually they came in after hearing “Glory” and a song or two like “Bringing in the Sheaves” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” Later the choir swung into the doleful songs like “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The emotional appeal was terrific; after the first hymn or two the audience joined, bellowing the words with fanatical fervor. Murmurs began to arise as the evangelist alternately talked and prayed, and then suddenly the music stopped, the preacher shut off his talk and for an instant there was a silence. It was theatrical hokum, but effective as always. Then Brother McConnell leaped and lunged to the front of the pulpit, his eyes glaring and his hair streaming down before his eyes. He flung his arms wide.

“Come to Jesus!” he shouted. “Brothers! Sisters! Come to Jesus!”

He stood there trembling, imploring the sinners to abandon their hellish lives, and the choir boomed into song:

Lives there a friend like the lowly Jesus? No, not one! No, not one!

All over the church now there were cries of ecstatic agony as the victims writhed in emotional torture, and after a little while people began jumping to their feet and shouting:

“Glory! Glory to God! Hallelujah!”

The noise was deafening. People were shouting in every part of the audience, they were weeping and moaning. One old woman jumped to her feet, climbed onto her seat and began to yell:

“I see Jesus! I see Jesus! I see Jesus!”

She repeated it over and over again, “I see Jesus!” and finally she collapsed into her seat, mumbling and weeping. The evangelist took up the cry. He roared back and forth across the pulpit, shaking his hands above his head, calling on God to damn the sinners. His whole body quivered and he screamed at the top of his voice:

“Jesus is in this house! Come to Jesus! Give your heart to God!”

And above the roar of his voice and the rumble of the seething congregation rose the music. It ebbed and flowed, it beat against the rafters and rebounded from the floor, always that regular beat of a hymn, like tom-toms in the jungles of Hayti. Many of the choir members sang hysterically, their voices rising on the high notes into veritable shrieks, but there was no change in the steady thunder of the organ or the wail of the violin, and there was no escaping the emotional effect of the song:

“Bringing in the sheaves, Bringing in the sheaves, We shall come rejoicing, Bringing in the sheaves.”

Then there was testimony. Old skinflints who had devoted their lives to cheating their neighbors, old women whose gossiping and backbiting were the talk of the town, hopped into the aisles and told how, at some previous meeting, God had entered their hearts and made them pure and holy. Their voices rose to shrieks; they grew red in the face from the fervor of their shouts, and one old man who had only that day cheated half a dozen men in a real-estate deal stood in the aisle with his hands raised toward Heaven and wept bitterly over the sins of the world. Tears streamed down their faces, and many who had only a few hours before dumped sand in the sugar groaned loudly in sympathetic torment, and shouted “Amen, Brother! Amen!”

By this time Brother McConnell’s collar hung limp about his neck, but his passion for the Lord was unchecked. He stopped the testimony when it appeared that everybody in the church wanted to say something; there was another hymn and he began calling for converts. He shouted that we were all wicked sinners and must come to Jesus.

“All who want to go to Heaven stand up!”

Naturally, everybody stood up. He told them to sit down; they obeyed, for he held them in the hollow of his hand.

“All Christians stand up!”

Everybody stood up except my sister, and as I think things over after the lapse of years I know that was what first caused me to suspect that she was, and is, a remarkably intelligent woman. She said afterward that she resented Brother McConnell’s holier-than-thou attitude, and thought he was an old windbag. She could not swallow his repeated assertion that he was a representative of God, and that the Lord had sent him to gather Farmington into the fold. She had, better than anyone else there, control over her emotions; she could not be stampeded. But for several years thereafter she was the target of a great deal of missionary zeal; even the Catholics tried their hands with her after it had become obvious that she would not subscribe to the beliefs of the Methodists, but all of it was unsuccessful. They could not feaze her even when they pointed her out as “that Asbury girl who wouldn’t say she was a Christian.”

Half the men and women in the church were sobbing while the band played, the choir sang its dismal tunes and Brother McConnell swayed back and forth in the pulpit and pleaded with them to get right with God and confess their sins.

“Oh, Brothers, come to Jesus!” he cried. “Let God enter your heart this night! Give your heart to Jesus!”

At the beginning of the moaning and groaning the Brothers and Sisters who were to act as procurers for the Lord scattered over the church, and as the services went on they picked out the ones who seemed to be most upset emotionally and therefore ripest for glory. They hung over these poor creatures, sniveling down their necks, exulting in their misery, exhorting them to march down the aisle and see God. These Brothers and Sisters, of course, had been converted many years before and were O.K. with the Lord.

“Oh, Brother!” they pleaded. “Come to glory! Give your heart to Jesus! Jesus died that you might be saved! He died on the cross for you! Brother, come to Jesus!”

And so on _ad nauseam_, with their continual repetition of Jesus and glory, glory and Jesus. There was no attempt at sensible argument, no effort to show the prospective converts that the Christian religion was better than the Mohammedan religion or the religion of Zoroaster; there was nothing but a continual hammering at emotional weaknesses. And finally the bewildered brains of the victims sagged under the strain and they stumbled into the aisles and were hauled and shoved and pushed down to the mourners’ bench, and presumably into the presence of God as embodied in His earthly representative, Brother Lincoln McConnell.

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I was fair game for them. There was hardly anybody in the church who did not know how emotional and how excitable I was, and how music affected me. Why, I used to be thrilled over the way I myself played the violin, and have been known to hang entranced over a tune of my own composition! Even before the services began I saw that many of the Brothers and Sisters had spotted me and were only waiting the proper moment to pounce upon me, and when the call for converts came as many of them as could get near me pleaded and begged and cajoled; they scrambled and almost fought in their eagerness to ensnare such a prime morsel for the Lord. They could have worked no more furiously if God had been keeping the score. They screeched at me that now was the time to see Jesus, that God was waiting impatiently for me to be converted.

Some of them even threatened. They painted horrible pictures of Hell; they told me that unless I went down the aisle and confessed my sins and asked God to forgive me I would sizzle and burn and scorch forevermore. One old woman, her face working with fanatical fury, screamed at me that I was holding up the salvation of my whole family; that my father and my mother and my sisters and brothers would not go to Heaven unless I professed religion; she shouted that Satan was waiting outside the church to lead me into the depths of Hell and light a fire under my immortal soul. The whole crew pushed and tugged and hauled at me; one Brother got hold of my arm and tried to drag me into the aisle, yelling “Come to Jesus! Jesus is calling for you!”

And up on the platform Brother McConnell was rampaging to and fro, working himself into a frenzy, shouting that “Jesus wants you!” and above the roar of the Christian workers and the moans of the victims rose the wailing whine of a violin played off key, the thunder of the organ and the emotion-filled voices of the choir.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee!”

By this time I was crying; I did not want to go to Hell, and I was horribly afraid of the Devil, and I was not old enough to realize what was being done to me. Yet something kept telling me that I should not do this thing; that it was all a mockery and a fraud. I know now, and I knew soon after that night, that the music was what was the matter with me, not religion. I did not see Jesus, and I never have. It was that slow music; that doleful, wailing chant of the hymns. I couldn’t withstand it. I never could. In the army I used to go to all of the funerals because I got such a terrific kick out of the funeral march and the sliding tramp of troops marching at half-step.

But I was doomed. It was in the cards that my self-respect was to be stripped from me and that I was to be emotionally butchered to make a religious holiday. They dragged and hauled at me until I was in the aisle, and then they got behind me and urged me forward. One old woman leaped ahead of us and performed a war dance that would have done credit to a frenzied worshiper of Voodoo. And as she pranced and cavorted she screamed:

“A bad boy is coming to Jesus!”

Others were going down too, shepherded by the hard-working Brothers and Sisters, and as they reached the bench Brother McConnell reached forward and grabbed their hands. For each one he shouted “Praise the Lord! Another sinner come to Jesus!” and then he gave the sinner an expert shove that catapulted him into the hands of a waiting Brother who immediately knelt with him and prayed. The team work was magnificent. I tried to hang back, but the band began playing again. The thunderous cadences of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” pealed from the organ, and I couldn’t stand it. I was being torn to pieces emotionally, and I staggered and stumbled down the aisle, sobbing, hardly able to stand. They thought it was religion, and the Brothers and Sisters who were pushing and shoving me shouted ecstatically that God had me; it was obvious that I was suffering, and suffering has always been accepted as a true sign of holiness.

But it was not God and it was not religion. It was the music. Behind me came my brother, sedately, as he always did things. He went calmly to join the godly; for him there was no pushing and no pulling; when he saw me being dragged into the aisle he simply got to his feet and followed. I have always suspected that he went along merely to take care of me; frequently he did that. He was continually fighting my battles, and if he did not like the nicknames that the other boys fastened onto me, he protested so fiercely that the name was transferred to his shoulders. They tried to call me “Cat” for some obscure reason when I was a boy, and my brother did not like it; and to this day he is “Cat” Asbury in Farmington.

Brother McConnell grabbed my hand and shook it clammily when I reached the mourners’ bench, and I was shoved into a seat. Immediately a Brother plopped down beside me, an old man whom I had known all my life, and who I knew perfectly well was an old skinflint and a hypocrite, a Sunday Christian. He put his arm around my shoulders and began to pray, crying down my neck and shouting that another soul had been saved, calling on the Lord to witness the good work that he was doing. I half expected him to say: “Give me credit, God; give me credit!” And all the time I was wishing to God that the band would stop playing; my nerves were being shattered by the constant and steady beat of the hymns, and the penetrating wail of the violin and the thunder of the organ.

And at last it did stop. There was silence in the church, except that here and there someone was writhing and moaning. But the shouting had ceased. Brother McConnell had his benches full, all of his workers had each a convert to work upon, and he decided to call it a day and save whatever sinners remained in the congregation for another night. So printed cards were passed around, which we were to sign, indicating the church we would join. Then the evangelist said for all of us who had been baptized to sit down. My brother and I sat down.

With no music to upset me I began to think, and the more I thought, the angrier I got. I was ashamed; I boiled with fury and I wanted to smash the Brothers and Sisters in their smug faces. But I was just a boy and I was afraid. It was at this point that my younger brother came down the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey!” he said. “Mary said to stand up; you haven’t been baptized!”

“You tell her,” I said, “to go to hell!”

Luckily none of the Brothers and Sisters heard me, so I escaped special prayers. I signed my card, agreeing to become a member of the Southern Methodist church, and soon afterward I was released. My sister and my two brothers went home, but I sneaked away and went down to the Post Office, where I found another boy whose influence with a bartender was sufficient to get us a drink. I went with him to a saloon not far from the old Grand Leader building, and there I had my first drink, a gin rickey, and when the bartender would not sell me another I gave a Negro cart-driver a half-dollar and he bought me a bottle of squirrel whisky which I consumed in the vacant lot behind the Odd Fellows’ Hall. I got gloriously drunk, and about three o’clock in the morning I staggered home and up the stairs to the room which I shared with my brother. I awakened him, trying to undress, and he asked:

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Hell’s fire, Emmett!” I replied. “I’ve got religion.”

I went to the preacher’s house the next day so Brother Jenkins could sprinkle holy water upon my head and mumble a prayer, and later, having thus been baptized, I joined the church, but I joined with my tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart. I have never seen anything in any church since that would impel me to remove either my tongue or the sneer. And when I admitted publicly that I had been converted and was now a good and faithful servant of the Methodist God, I said to myself: “Over the left.” That was our way of saying: “I am like hell!”

NOTES ON A SAINTED RELATIVE

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I went downtown the next morning after I had become a certified one hundred per cent. convert, and was met by swarms of Brothers and Sisters who overwhelmed me with congratulations, and regaled me with tales of their own experiences when they saw God, and of the temptations that the Devil would now prepare for me. It seemed that I was not yet safe; I had, so far as they knew, accepted God and was one of His chosen children, although not a Jew, but He would still permit Satan to have his way with me upon occasion. I was instructed to walk humbly and with downcast eyes, not daring to look up lest I be led into sin. The Brothers, gloating the while, seemed especially anxious that the handsome young virgins of the town should not induce me to tread the scarlet paths of wickedness; the Sisters were more concerned with the Drink Demon, and the evils of playing cards and dancing. One Sister stopped me in front of Morris Brothers’ store and, beating time with her hand, lifted her voice in song:

“Yield not to temptation, For yielding is sin.”

And so on.

Nearly all of them seemed to be obsessed by the conviction that at last I had done something to justify my ancestry; that Bishop Asbury had looked down from the Heavenly Mansions upon Brother McConnell’s revival meeting and had approved the manner in which my conversion had been brought about.

“The Bishop is proud of you to-day, Herbie,” said one devout Brother who sold shoddy clothing at high prices. “Last night was a great night for God and the Bishop.”

I did not ask him how he knew that Bishop Asbury was proud of me, nor did I inquire into the source of his information that the conversion, by force, of a fourteen-year-old boy was a great thing for God. I merely said: “Yes, sir,” and went my way. But it went on day after day; everybody in town, it seemed, had a word to say about the pride that now swelled the heart of the Bishop as he went about among the virgins of Heaven and lolled on a cloud strumming his golden harp and producing platinum and diamond music. I got very tired of it, and finally, to one old Sister who had apparently thought of nothing else for a week, I said:

“Oh, to hell with the Bishop!”

What blasphemy! She gasped and hurried away, and long before I reached home she had telephoned and told my mother that I had blasphemed and cried out against God. Naturally, my mother was worried; she thought from the tale told to her that I had gone up and down the streets of the town shouting defiance of God and yelling open praise of the Devil and all his works. But I told her the whole story, and she listened without comment, and when I had finished all she said was this:

“Well, don’t say ‘hell’ to them.”

I think that was the last I ever heard from my mother about religion, and from my father I heard even less. Once my mother asked me to read the Bible, and although of course I had already done so, I read it again. I read it twice, from the first absurdity of Genesis to the final fairy tale of Revelation. But I found nothing in it that caused me to believe that it was an inspired work, and nothing that proved, to me, the correctness of the pretensions so freely made by the Sisters and Brothers and the Preachers that they, and they alone, were the representatives and accredited agents of Jesus Christ on earth. And the sermons that I heard thereafter--the Preachers selected single verses from the Bible and constructed elaborate harangues around them--struck me more forcibly than ever as the trashiest sort of poppycock and balderdash. I was no longer afraid of the Hell that they pictured with such avidity, and I no longer thrilled to their tales of the magnificence of Heaven, although of course to a growing boy the presence of so many virgin angels, all apparently willing and available, was interesting. But none of them preached the religion of Christ; they preached hatred and revenge. They held out slight hope of reward; instead they were prophets of torture, promising eternal punishment for petty crimes.

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