1
On my father’s side, according to my family belief, I am related
to Cotton Mather; on my mother’s side to Roger Williams. My
great-great-uncle was Francis Asbury, the first Bishop of the Methodist
Church to be ordained in America; his elder half-brother was my
great-great-grandfather, Thomas Asbury, who, disowned by his father
for various sins, ran away from the family cottage in England and
went to sea. Later he kidnapped Susan Jennings and married her, and
then settled in Virginia and so escaped the fate of the Bishop, who
doubtless went to the Methodist Heaven.
My great-grandfather was the Rev. Daniel Asbury of Fairfax County, Va.,
an early pillar of Methodism and one of the great organizers of the
Church in the South. When a young man he went to North Carolina, and
in 1791 founded, in Lincoln County, the first Methodist church west of
the Catawba River. Later he was a Presiding Elder and labored valiantly
for the Wesleyan God. When but a boy he was captured by the Indians and
kept a prisoner for several years, and is said to have converted the
entire tribe to Christianity. Throughout his whole life Sunday was his
great day--he was born on Sunday, converted on Sunday, captured by the
Indians on Sunday, released on Sunday, reached home on Sunday, was
ordained as a minister on Sunday, and on a Sunday married Nancy Morris
in Brunswick County, Va. His first child was born on Sunday and he died
on Sunday.
My grandfather was the Rev. William Asbury of North Carolina, a local
preacher who, for some reason that I have never known, quit raising
souls to Heaven and moved over into Mississippi, where he had equally
poor success raising coons and cotton. He married Susan Lester Marks,
member of an equally religious family. Several of his seven sons were
Methodist preachers, and my father, too, would have assumed the cloth
had not the Civil War come along. He enlisted in the Confederate Army
and became an officer of infantry, and infantrymen do not make good
preachers. At the close of the War he studied Civil Engineering and
then moved to Missouri, and settled in Farmington, where I was born.
He was county Surveyor of my home county of St. Francois for more
than thirty years, and City Clerk of Farmington for twenty years. The
exigencies of local politics compelled him to attend services and take
an active part in church work, but I have no recollection of him as a
religious man, although he imposed religion upon his home and impressed
upon his family the necessity of Christian salvation.
I first suspected that he might not be as religious as reported when I
whacked him across the shins with a broomstick as he sat in the yard
one day nursing his rheumatism. He did not turn the other shin. This
was not long after we had moved from the cottage across the street
from the Masonic and Catholic cemeteries to our new house on the other
side of the town, near the mansions of our first families, the Webers
and the Cayces. Curiously enough, these graveyards were side by side,
although their occupants presumably went to different Heavens. There
was a high fence between them, and it was not easy to dispose of the
border-line burial plots; the Protestants felt that a few Catholic
demons might be able to crawl through or under the fence, and the
Catholics did not wish to have their mortal remains so close to those
of such benighted heathen as the Methodists and the Presbyterians.
My mother’s people, the Prichards and the Blues, came originally from
North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, and were for the most part
devout Baptists, believing that in immersion alone was true salvation.
The strength of their religious convictions may be seen in the fact
that many of them never forgave my mother for marrying a Methodist
and transferring her letter to my father’s Church, forsaking the
austerities of her family faith. They considered the Methodists too
liberal! The true Baptist of those days was in a constant emotional
upheaval; his religion was a canker that ate deeper and deeper, and he
was able to find no relief; the more religious he became, the more
miserable he was. On the other hand, the Methodist enjoyed terrific and
periodical emotional explosions, and thereafter was generally able to
live for a few days in comparative calm. But the Baptist was wrapped
in gloom from the moment of his conversion until he was called home to
Jesus.
When my mother’s forbears came up from the South they settled within
a radius of twenty miles of Farmington, many of them in the vicinity
of Hazel Run and French Village. They were farmers, with a sprinkling
of small storekeepers, preachers and country doctors. My mother’s
father, Joseph Prichard, was a farmer, but he was very religious and
was renowned throughout the countryside around French Village for his
exploits as a faith healer; he could cure toothache, remove warts and
stop the flow of blood. His method was merely to say: “It will be gone
by the time you get home,” and generally it was. He frequently removed
warts from my own hands; at least they vanished within a reasonable
time after he had looked at them and pronounced his incantations, and I
regarded him with awe.
There was a tradition in our family that my grandfather boasted Indian
blood in his veins, and although I do not think it was true, at the
time it gave me great pride and satisfaction; it invested me with
authority at such times as we played Indian and Wild West games. He
made a two-year trip overland to California during the 1849 gold rush,
without conspicuous success, and brought back with him the musket with
which we were given to understand he had slain innumerable Indians. Two
or three times a year his children and his grandchildren, a vast horde
all told, held family reunions at his French Village farm, and the big
moment of the day came in the afternoon when all of the grandchildren
trooped into the woods behind the barn to watch Grandpa kill a
squirrel. We stood in a half-circle, almost overcome by awe, while my
grandfather loaded his gun with great care, pouring the correct amount
of powder from his powder horn and dumping the bullets from his pouch
into the palm of his hand, where he counted them carefully. And then he
killed the squirrel, while we stood behind him and marveled. He never
failed; he was an excellent rifle shot; in his ninety-first year, three
years before he died, he knocked a squirrel from a tree as easily as
Davy Crockett could have done it.
As a young man in Georgia and later in Missouri my grandfather Prichard
was famous as a leader of Baptist sing-songs. His favorite hymn was
“The Prodigal Son,” which he was wont to bellow with fanatical fervor
as he sat bolt upright in an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair and
directed the singing with a stick. He sang from an old hymn book which
had been in his family for many years, a curious volume with the music
printed in square notes. Many of the hymns expressed sentiments that
to-day, even in religious circles, would be considered obscene. I
recall one that said: “Oh, sinners! My bowels do move with desire!”
I was constantly under the influence of my mother’s people, who did
what they could to overcome the pernicious influence of the Methodists;
they prevailed upon me to visit them and attend their revivals and
other religious meetings, and otherwise attempted to oversee and assure
my eventual salvation. Some of my father’s people, too, had come up
from the South, from Virginia and North Carolina and Mississippi, and
had settled around Farmington. Many of them were excessively pious,
although it is my recollection that they did not carry their love of
God and man into the conduct of their temporal affairs; religion was
not permitted to interfere with business. Between them and my mother’s
people there was a constant, although not open, fight for my soul, and
the souls of my sister and brothers. The bout appears to have been a
draw.
2
We were a musical family. My elder brother and I played the harmonica,
or French harp, as we called it then, and my sister performed capably
upon the organ, the guitar and the mandolin. She was particularly
adept upon the guitar, and enjoyed an enviable reputation for the way
she whanged out the fandango pieces and the tune descriptive of the
Battle of Sebastopol, which requires much banging and thumping and
difficult fingering. My father was a fiddler. He did not know one note
from another, but he could tuck his fiddle under his chin, tap the
floor with his foot and play with great spirit such tunes as “Fisher’s
Hornpipe,” “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Turkey in the Straw” and “The
Arkansas Traveler.” But his muse was dumb if he could not pat his foot.
I could also beat a snare drum passably, and later I learned to play
the violin, the cornet and the alto horn, so that we had quite a family
orchestra, and our house was frequently filled with music. Anyhow we
played these instruments.
But not on Sunday. Our Preacher assured us that music on Sunday, except
in church, was sinful and an affront to the Heavenly Father, and on
Saturday night, after a final orgy of melody, my mother gathered up
the guitars and mandolins, the fiddles, the drums and the harmonicas
and all of the other musical instruments, even the jew’s-harp, and
put them under lock and key until Monday morning. We could not even
play a comb on Sunday, although on rare occasions, usually when the
Preacher was there and gave permission and absolution from sinful
consequences, I was permitted to bring out my big harmonica, from
which I could produce the sonorous tones of an organ, and play church
hymns such as “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” But I was
forbidden to play “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Mocking Bird” with
variations. The latter was my favorite tune, because by jiggling my
hand over the harmonica I could produce a very effective trill which I
fondly believed was as beautiful as the singing of a canary, but if I
launched into such a tune on Sunday I had debauched the Sabbath, and my
harmonica was taken from me. And frequently I myself was taken into the
woodshed and taught a proper respect for the Lord’s Day.
Under no circumstances could we play the fiddle in our house on
Sunday, because of all music, that which came from the fiddle was the
most sinful. It was the Devil’s instrument. No fiddling on Sunday had
been a cardinal rule of my father’s family since Colonial days in
Virginia, and later in Mississippi and in North Carolina my grandmother
had compelled her Negro slaves to put up their musical instruments
from Saturday night to Monday morning. Eventually I took lessons
from the music teacher in Farmington and learned to call the fiddle
a violin, and as I grew older I played when I pleased, although not
very successfully. But so long as the instrument remained a fiddle it
was played in our house on Sunday on only one occasion. And then the
performance was a neighborhood scandal, and only the fact that the
instrument had been played by a Preacher saved us from getting into
trouble with God and His representatives in Farmington.
This tweaking of the heavenly nose occurred during a District
Conference, when the visiting preachers were parceled out among the
faithful of the local Methodist church. Two came to us, one a young
man filled with good works and a constant, fretful worry over the
low estate of the human race, and the other an old man who had been
a wicked sinner in his time and who had never been able to resist an
occasional temptation to have a good time. He was a Virginian and an
accomplished fiddler, but he could play nothing but dance music, which
the darkies had taught him. The first Sunday they were at our house my
father admitted that we had a fiddle, and the old Preacher demanded
that it be brought out for him to perform upon. My father and mother
were in terror all afternoon for fear that the neighbors would hear
the wailing of the fiddle, although they prevailed upon the old man to
use a mute and the music could hardly be heard outside the room. We
were particularly afraid that a devout Sister, who lived next door to
us and whose principal occupation was going to church, might hear it;
if she had it would have been nothing short of a catastrophe, for the
tale would have been all over town before nightfall. So we closed the
windows and the doors, muted the fiddle and put the old Preacher in
the parlor, where he fiddled until he had sinned enough. But even then
several people passing along the street heard it, and I do not think
that we ever quite lived it down. We could convince no one that the
fiddle had been played by a Man of God. Everyone knew better; Men of
God did not do such things.
3
Every Wednesday night we attended prayer meeting, and on Sundays we
went to Sunday school and twice to church. And on Sunday afternoon,
and on week days, there were the sessions of the various church
organizations. We had grace before meat in our home, and when the
Preacher came to dinner he delivered long-winded prayers on the
universal theme of “gimme.” We did not have that emotional orgy called
family prayer, but I did not escape it; I encountered it in many
Farmington homes and in the houses of almost all of my relatives.
It was particularly oppressive in the home of an oppressively devout
kinsman whom I called uncle. He was not actually my uncle; he was
related to my father by marriage, and I do not believe there was any
blood kinship, but I thought of him as uncle, and he had a certain
measure of authority over me, so that to a considerable extent I
was under his control and subject to his influence until I became
intelligent enough to have an occasional thought of my own.
My uncle was an extraordinarily pious man, an official of our church
and of our Sunday school, and a leader in every movement designed
to entice the sinner from his wicked ways and lead him to the true
religion of the Wesleyans. He was intent upon salvation for everyone,
and let no opportunity pass to serve the Lord. He frowned upon
laughter, and although he had a very charming family, there was little
joy in his home; a laugh seemed to make him uncomfortable and start a
train of dismal religious thought, and I gathered the impression that
all mirth was a direct and studied affront to God.
Every night after dinner, or supper, as we called it then, his living
room was given over to family prayer. I frequently spent the night with
his youngest son, my chum for many years, and was compelled to attend
with the others and absorb my nightly dose of religion, and listen to
a solemn account of the fearful things that God would do to us if we
strayed from the path of righteousness. There was no laughter, and
there were no jokes; the whole atmosphere of the house turned gray
and gloomily oppressive when my uncle rose from his seat, glanced
sorrowfully at his family, and announced:
“We will now have prayers.”
He turned and with bowed head passed into the living room. We sat at
the supper table for a moment in silence, myself seeing goblins and
fearsome avenging creatures of God leering at me from every shaded
corner of the room, and my mind racing madly over the day’s activities
to discover what I had done that required an alibi. In a few moments
my aunt arose and went slowly into the other room, and then one by one
the others. We marched solemnly, with downcast eyes; we might have
been going to a funeral. Indeed, it seems to me now that we must in
truth have been going to a funeral; here was a fine house built for the
warmth of human happiness, turned into a forbidding mausoleum by the
mere mention of God.
In the living room Uncle awaited us, standing beside the small table
on which, always, there was nothing but the Family Bible. He waited
in silence until we had taken our places, and then he laid reverent
hands upon the Book and began fumbling with the pages, glancing sharply
over his spectacles to make sure that everyone was undergoing some
sort of emotional upheaval, and looking particularly for some sign of
revolt from his son and myself. I doubt if he ever knew it, but when I
attended family prayer in his house I did not think of revolt. I was in
an agony of fright; I felt as if something was crushing me, and that
something was my uncle’s God, an avenging monster ready to devour me
for my sins. God was in the house and I was afraid.
The most uncomfortable chairs in the house were used for family prayer,
and we perched upon their edges, afraid to sink back and relax, because
we had been told many times that discomfort and righteousness were
well-nigh synonymous. God would have been scandalized and indignant
had we made ourselves comfortable to listen to His Word. And then my
uncle read from the Bible. He read without joy; he held in his hand
the Book which in his eyes was the sole hope of humanity, the Book
that contained the glad news that for all mankind there was salvation,
but he read it as if it were a sentence of death, slowly and solemnly,
dwelling with horrible clarity upon those phrases that promised
punishment. The Bible seemed to have no effect upon him but to make him
gloomy and miserable.
At the conclusion of his reading, he slowly closed the Bible and placed
it upon the table. He then stood for a moment in profound thought,
his chin resting upon his breast. I assumed that he was overcome by
contemplation of the sins of a wicked world. Those of us who were young
began about this time to itch with that devilish itch which invariably
afflicts a youngster when there is a penalty for scratching. We itched
and itched, but we were afraid to scratch because God was in the room,
and we knew as well as we knew anything that He would punish us if we
moved. And finally my uncle stared at the ceiling and said:
“Let us pray.”
With almost the precision of automata we knelt by our chairs, our knees
grinding into the hard carpet, while my uncle’s voice soared in a
sonorous appeal to the Lord to give us some of this and some of that,
to bless us and make us prosperous, and, in effect, to hell with such
infidels as Jews, Catholics and Presbyterians. And then he rose slowly
to his feet and passed from the room, without speaking. We followed,
and scattered about our various affairs, but it was a long time before
we could shake off the effects of the religious debauch and play with
any zest. And nearly always I awoke some hours later in the throes of
a nightmare, pursued by fiends and demons shrieking that I was to be
boiled and fried and cooked in the fires of Hell.
Every night year after year this sort of thing went on in houses all
over Farmington, and for that matter all over the United States. It
would be interesting to know how many hours were wasted in the course
of a year by such senseless appeals to the Heavenly Father, by this
constant reiteration of “gimme, gimme, gimme.”
4
Many of my relatives on my mother’s side attended Colony Church,
about three miles from Farmington. This was a hard-shell Baptist
congregation, the members of which took their religion with the utmost
seriousness and were constantly on the lookout for sin to rear its
reptile head. If it did they assailed it with glad cries. There was
no organ in this church; indeed, for many years none of the Baptist
churches in and about Farmington would permit any sort of music at
their services, holding that music was an invention of the Devil
designed to entice Christians from respectful contemplation of the
mercies and graces of the Lord, and that no devout Christian could hear
music and still keep his mind on God and his heart true to the faith.
Their attitude toward the organ was exactly that of the good Sister of
whom Will Carleton sang in his Farm ballads:
I’ve been a Sister good and true
For five and thirty year;
I’ve done what seemed my part to do,
And prayed my duty clear.
But death will stop my voice, I know,
For he is on my track;
And some day I to church will go,
And nevermore come back.
And when the folks get up to sing,
Whene’er that time shall be--
I do not want no patent thing,
A-squealin’ over me.
In later years, of course, the Baptists became almost civilized and
most of their churches bought organs; in some there were even pianos.
But in few of the churches of the Farmington countryside, in my
early youth, was there more fervent religion on tap than at Colony
Church. There were frequent revivals, and many basket dinners, when
the farm women brought huge quantities of food to the church early
in the morning, and all day long the congregation gave itself up to
an orgy of eating and saving souls. At most of these revivals there
were foot-washings; they were usually announced at the morning service
for the afternoon, and then there was a great scurrying home or to
the nearest creek, or crick, as it was generally called, where the
feet were washed vigorously with soap and made presentable for public
exposure in the aisles and around the pulpit of the church.
One of the most famous of the Colony Church foot-washings, one that
is still talked about when the good Brothers and Sisters get together
in that neighborhood, ended the enmity of a widow, Sister Letts, and
a lawyer whose name I do not recall. For years there had been great
bitterness between them, and although the congregation had prayed for
them and had exhorted them to forgive, the Lord had not entered their
hearts, and so they continued to treasure their hate. But at length, on
a Sunday morning during a revival, the preacher announced that there
would be a foot-washing that afternoon, and the Brother rose and spoke:
“I have opened my heart to God,” he said, “and He has instructed me to
forgive Sister Letts. This afternoon I shall wash her feet.”
There was a murmur of enthusiasm all over the church, and one
leather-lunged Brother popped to his feet and shouted: “Amen, Brother!
Glory to God!” And then Sister Letts bounced to her feet and cried that
she, too, praised the Lord and would wash the feet of the Brother.
That afternoon the church was crowded. Almost every family of the
countryside was on hand to see God end this bitter quarrel which had
come so near to disrupting the congregation. The service proceeded as
usual, opening with some such catchy hymn as “Bringing in the Sheaves,”
and then through the sermon to the slow, solemn songs like “How Firm a
Foundation” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Then came the foot-washing,
when the Brothers and Sisters proved their humility and showed that
when it came right down to brass tacks they were no better than Jesus
Christ. It was felt that the legal Brother and Sister Letts should
have the honor thus to show off first before God, and so for a little
while no one moved when the Preacher announced that the time had come,
and that basins of water and towels would be provided.
But at length the Brother got to his feet and marched stiffly down the
aisle to the pulpit, where he procured a pan and a towel. With these
in hand he paraded back up the aisle toward the last row, where Sister
Letts rocked back and forth and murmured in ecstasy:
“Praise the Lord, Brother! Praise the Lord!”
Moving slowly to a chorus of amens and unintelligible mumblings of
piety, the Brother was some distance up the aisle when Sister Letts
started to meet him. Halfway between the back door and the pulpit they
stopped, facing each other. And then a new difficulty arose. They had
by now thoroughly given themselves to God and were suffused with a
wonderful glow of self-appreciation at this proof of their humility,
but each wanted to prove it first. Each appeared to feel that the one
who first washed a foot would receive the greater amount of kudos from
the Lord.
So they began to argue, and the heat of the discussion spread all over
the congregation, and here and there Brothers and Sisters became so
upset by the spirit that they jumped to their feet and began shouting
loudly, bouncing up and down and flinging their arms about. My sister,
a small child, was practically overcome by curiosity, and added to the
excitement by leaning too far from her seat and falling into the aisle,
so eager was she to see the ceremony. She was promptly spanked and put
back in place by my Aunt Ophelia, and several devout persons near her
intimated strongly that she was a sinful, blasphemous little wretch.
It seemed for a time that there would be a deadlock, as neither Sister
Letts nor the Brother was willing to give in. So the congregation sang
a hymn while they stood staring at each other, and then the Preacher
prayed to the Lord to make a decision as to who should wash whose feet
first. And apparently God said Eeney Meeney Miney Mo and picked Sister
Letts to be It, for the Brother suddenly surrendered and sat in a
chair which had been pushed into the aisle for him. He bared his foot,
and Sister Letts dropped to her knees and poked it into the basin of
water. I do not know if the Brother wriggled his toes. Having laved
him, Sister Letts plied her towel vigorously to a groaning chorus of
“Amen!” that arose from all parts of the church, and then she sat in
the chair and removed her shoe and stocking and the Brother performed
the ceremony. The congregation, everyone filled to the bursting point
with emotion, then stood and sang quaveringly “How Firm a Foundation.”
Sister Letts and the Brother returned to their seats. It was generally
agreed that by washing each other’s feet they had practically assured
themselves choice seats in Heaven.
5
I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety, for I was a highly
emotional and excitable boy. I wept when I heard slow music, I shivered
with fear over the ghost stories and the frightful tales of Hell that
were told to me with such regularity, and it was usually I who saw the
spooks when we played or hunted for bumblebees among the tombs of the
Masonic cemetery. There is no telling what I might have seen had I ever
been able to summon sufficient courage to enter the Catholic cemetery
at night. I did go as far as just inside the gate once, and immediately
there arose in front of me an apparition that to my mind could be
nothing less than the Devil himself. And this was not surprising, for I
well knew that the Catholics were worshipers of a false God, and it was
quite likely that their graveyard was the abode of evil spirits.
Because of my temperament, which impelled me to believe everything
I was told, and because from time to time I had shown indications
of being a bad boy if restraint were not exercised, I received more
religious instruction than my sister or my brothers. Again, there was
the matter of ancestry. Our family connections, especially my father’s
people, were very proud of our relationship to the Bishop and our
direct descent from the Rev. Daniel Asbury, and they settled on me to
carry on the family tradition. There was much talk of sending me to a
theological school, and I appeared to be destined for the Church, so
that I was always waiting for the call to preach, though conscious of a
vague hope that it would be delayed.
But I had no idea that I should escape such a fate, for I accepted as a
basic fact of life that in every generation at least one Asbury should
be a Methodist preacher. Wherever I went I encountered the assumption
that I was to succeed the Bishop and the Presiding Elder, and become a
Methodist Messiah howling in the wilderness of sin and shoving souls
into the heavenly hoppers with both hands. Everyone seemed to take it
for granted, and when I talked to a stranger he invariably said:
“Well, well! So your name is Asbury?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Kin to the Bishop?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well! I suppose you will be a preacher, too?”
“Yes, sir. I guess so.”
If the person to whom I talked was himself a Preacher, or a Brother, he
would smile gently, pat my head with a moist palm and say: “God bless
you, my boy,” and pad on down the street. I can recall but one person
who did not make some such senseless remark. He was a hardware drummer
from St. Louis, a fat, waggish person in flashy raiment, doubtless a
sinner, who stopped me as I marched proudly past Doss’s barber shop
carrying a string of fish, one of which was as large a bass as was
ever taken out of the St. Francis River. He tried to buy the big fish,
and when I refused to sell he asked me my name and the inevitable
conversation followed. But when I said to him: “Yes, sir, I guess so,”
he wrinkled his nose and said: “Don’t be a damned fool, kid.”
I felt a sudden rush of affection for this outspoken person, although I
shuddered at the thought of what would happen to him if a Preacher or
a Brother heard him using profanity and told God about it. I proffered
him one of my string, a fine crappie, which he accepted gratefully
and on which he feasted later at the St. Francis Hotel. Later in the
evening I met him as he swung blithely through the doors of Perringer’s
Saloon, and he jovially invited me in to have a glass of beer. I
thought he must be crazy; I would no more have entered a saloon then
than I would have committed mayhem upon the Preacher. In later life, of
course, I did enter saloons, but have never been able to bring myself
to bite a preacher, although at times I have been sorely tempted. But
it was a long time before I understood what the drummer meant when he
said, as we parted:
“Well, look out, kid, and don’t let them put that Bishop stuff over on
you.”