By Jimmy Ewing
Not every man feels the call of the Lord on his life, but late one night at the tender age of seven, my maternal grandfather did. He later said that God spoke to him during “a dark night of the soul” as he wrestled with his salvation.
I am pretty sure he lied about that, though. How many dark nights of anything does a 7-year-old have? I also happen to know that “dark night of the soul” is just the kind of thing he would say to “embellish,” a fine art which he later explained to me, with context and certain complex exegesis based on commentary from the Greek philosophers, was not the same thing as “lying.”
The next morning, he made his way down the paved streets of Macon, Georgia. He paused at stoplights with the cars and trucks and waited patiently for crossing pedestrians, who were surprised to see a 7-year-old riding a small pony bareback in traffic. I know this part was true because my grandmother, who never learned the fine art of embellishment and was given to developing her own exegesis based on fact, confirmed it.
He eventually arrived at First Baptist Church downtown, tied the pony to the handrail at the side entrance (the days of hitching posts were long past), and marched into the preacher’s office to demand a meeting, his bare feet leaving small, dusty footprints on the plush, blood-red carpet.
Soul Searching
“I want to join your church,” he said, affecting a tone somewhat deeper than was natural and peering over the rim of the minister’s large mahogany desk on his tiptoes.
“Son, does your mamma know where you’re at? How did you get here, anyway?” the pastor replied, gazing down over his spectacles to receive the blocky, towheaded form’s serious stare from underneath his military flat top popular at the time.
“I rode my pony,” Granddad said. “Now, are you going to let me join this church, or do I have to go on down to the Methodists?” he followed, as serious as the banknote on the new Fellowship Hall.
“This is a lifetime commitment. Mighty large undertaking for one so young,” the man said solemnly.
Baptists, God bless them, will usually try to talk you out of it. Half of them regret the decision to join the church when they find out the Lutherans can still drink.
“Yessir. I understand that. I only want to join my church family.”
They arrived at a reasonable accommodation likely to secure his future entrance into paradise, then the good pastor accompanied him home, following the pony at a crawl in his sedan.
That is the earliest story I know of my grandfather, who was my friend.
I realize now, some 90 years later, and more than 20 years since he passed, that Granddad’s main ambition in life was to escape the loneliness he felt so acutely as the small-town only child of aging parents who had reason to believe they were unable to conceive. His father, having had the mumps at a young age, expected to remain childless. He was wrong about that, but they were happy.
Granddad later banished the invisible specter of loneliness by fathering six children of his own (no twins), adopting three more at various times, and ultimately allowing my grandmother’s aging Down syndrome-afflicted sister, Elinor, to live with them in the big, rambling brick house on Pierce Avenue that was their home. Elinor lived to be nearly 60, which was ancient for Down syndrome folks at the time, especially given the severity of her case. An unexplained miracle to some, a curse of constant care to the less enlightened, but to our family, she was proof that bountiful joy may pervade and preserve the lives of even the simplest of creatures.
Have Gun, Will Travel
Macon is worth knowing about if you want to understand my people. Centrally located in the state, the town and its citizens are close enough to Atlanta’s big-city money, society, and fancy private school education to know about it but far enough away, both physically and philosophically, not to care.
Macon people largely concern themselves with Macon people and not with non-Macon people. It is that simple. My dad (not from Macon) says his in-laws all have gills that couldn’t breathe non-Macon air. If they got clear of the city limits, they’d fall right out and die—and he was mainly correct. My mother was the only one of her generation to move away, but even she didn’t get far. Atlanta was an easy 90 miles or so from my grandparents’ back door, and I made many trips to visit them and to hunt and fish with my uncles and cousins.
My horizons widened when an enterprising young man, recognizing rural Georgia’s need for better access to Atlanta’s international airport, established a van transportation system that served the small cities around the growing metropolis by delivering passengers to Hartsfield International Airport, Delta’s burgeoning hub. My mother would drive me to the airport, a short 15 minutes from our home, seat me comfortably in a van full of weary travelers, and then, to the disquieted amazement of all, hand me a camouflage backpack and my deer rifle.
“Lawd! I is seen everythin’ now,” the driver exclaimed the first time we met. I observed an uncomfortable shuffling of feet and a certain widening of the eyes among the predominantly black passengers, but no objections were raised, and Mom waved gaily as we pulled away—14 black faces and me perched on the middle seat with a cased Winchester settled under my down-at-the-heel LL Bean rubber boots.
Granddad always picked me up north of Macon in front of the Shoney’s by the interstate, where the van let us out. He would find me sitting on the curb with my Winchester .243 lying bare across my knees, pack by my side, and a few concerned onlookers peering out of the restaurant windows.
“Why’d you take your rifle out of the case?” he asked, the first time he picked me up.
“I figured nobody would try to kidnap a 10-year-old with a loaded rifle.”
“Loaded, too, eh?” he said, raising his eyebrows a little and starting to grin.
“Yep.”
“Huh. Good thinking.”
We were on an adventure.
