1
It is clear, then, that not only was my ancestral background religious,
but that I lived in an atmosphere heavy with religious feeling.
Religion and the Church dominated the whole of my early life. Among all
of my relatives I do not recall one whose home was not oppressed, and
whose life was not made miserable and fretful, by the terrible fear of
a relentless God whose principal occupation seemed to be snooping about
searching for someone to punish. Religion was poured down my throat
in doses that strangled me and made me sick of soul. There was simply
too much of it. God was fed to me morning, noon and night, and He did
not taste good; I was hounded from pillar to post by a pack of baying,
sanctimonious hypocrites beseeching me to get right with Jesus, and to
read and believe that collection of Hebrew fairy tales called the Bible.
I came finally to think of God as I did of castor oil, and the flavor
that He left in my mouth was just as frightful. He and His religion
were personified by the dour-faced men and women who went sliding
about the town; rubbing their hands together, scraping the skin from
their souls but not from their palms. They were irritatingly gentle,
and they sighed soulfully and mouthed platitudes with enormous gusto;
they called each other Brother and Sister and poked their messy,
prying fingers into every bit of fun that anybody tried to have;
they fed their little shriveled souls with scandal and smeared dirt
over everything that was amusing. They regarded all young men as
professional seducers, and for the greater glory of God ruined the
reputations of young girls who went buggy-riding and seemed to enjoy
it--and nothing can be so completely and irrevocably ruined as the
reputation of a young girl in a small town.
But despite the feelings of disgust and revolt which the labors of
these servants of the Lord evoked in me, I did not definitely align
myself on the side of the non-believers and the sinners until after I
had been “converted.” I began on that night to hate the Church and its
religion, and all of its prying, messy hypocrisy and sanctimony. And
especially I hated the preachers and the Brothers and Sisters. I still
do; they give me a pain in the neck. I felt that I had been betrayed; I
knew that the spirit of God was not working in me, but I was told that
it was and dared to deny it. I was told that I must “get right with
the Lord,” whatever that may be. I felt that the Brothers and Sisters
and the evangelist had taken an unfair advantage of my emotions; there
was a band at the revival, and under the influence of music I will do
anything. It compelled me to do something that I did not want to do; it
humiliated me in my own eyes, and nothing that has ever happened to me
since has made me so miserable and ashamed.
I had reached the ripe old age of fourteen or fifteen when the hand of
the Lord, operating through the agency of Brother McConnell and a horde
of wailing Brothers and Sisters with religious fervor breaking out upon
them like boils, reached out and plucked me from the burning. But it
was not their fault that I had not been converted earlier; they had
tried often enough. One of my earliest recollections is of a Preacher
asking me why I did not profess religion and join the Church, and why
I had not given my heart to God, as he called it. I was occasionally
singled out at protracted meetings and at revivals and made the object
of special prayers, but until Brother McConnell came with his improved
technique and circus methods I had always held out.
2
My own church, of course, was the Southern Methodist, but the revival
meeting at which I was converted was a union gathering in the Northern
Methodist edifice, which was about a block from Braun’s saloon and
an even shorter distance from the county jail. We called it the Rock
church because it was constructed largely of granite blocks. Its
members were considered good enough people in their way, but they were
hardly among the socially elect, for many of them lived south of the
Post Office among the Catholics and the Lutherans, and in some circles
it was suspected that they held, at times, intercourse with the Devil.
Nevertheless, they were Methodists and Christians and first-class
politicians, and by this time they have probably assumed control of the
town.
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.
3
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!”