APPEARANCE, MANNERS, HABITS.
The Rev. Dr. Walker stands five feet seven inches in his stockings.
He weighs 160 pounds. He has a peculiar stoop in his shoulders, not
from age, but from a constitutional pliancy of his back-bone, aided by
his early habit of incessant reading. In walking, he has a peculiar
swaying or swinging gait. Seen from behind, he looks, as he walks with
head depressed, bended back, and swaying gait, like an old man. But
the expression of his face is singularly and engagingly youthful. A
smile plays ever on his countenance. The pleasant, youngish looking
face is in marked contrast with his head, which is prematurely gray.
Sometimes in referring to his gray hairs, Dr. Walker says that they
cannot be signs of hard work or trouble, because he was told by his
mother that he had a number of gray hairs in his head in his infancy.
His skin is very dark, but there are many very much darker men among
the colored people. He never would be taken for a great man, judging
from his appearance. Not a large man in stature, without a commanding
appearance, he never would be looked at for the second time when
one passes him on the street and never would be taken for one of
the world’s most famous preachers in any large gathering with other
distinguished men. It is when he begins to speak that the latent powers
of the man are at once apparent to the close student of human nature
and the practiced observer of men. When seated, he is like a sea at
rest, calm and undisturbed; when on his feet, he is like the sea in
action, or like some dictator suddenly sent from another world to
correct the faults and foibles of this world.
In manner he is still, to some extent, a rustic. His world-wide
travel, his acquaintance with some of the greatest and best of earth
and his life in the metropolis of America, have not been able to make
much impression upon him. He is an unassimilated man. Great, indeed,
are the assimilating powers of the large cities. A youth will go to New
York or Boston, awkward, ill-dressed, bashful, and capable of being
surprised. After only a few years’ absence, he returns to his country
home a changed being; his clothes, his accent, his affectations, and
his manners are “City-made.” His friends do not recognize him at first
sight. They do not quite understand his language when he speaks. All
his ways are changed. He is another man. It is so with most, but
not with all. Some men there are--very few, yet some--who resist
effectually or, one might say, unconsciously, and to the last, the
assimilating influence of the large cities. They are the oddities, the
stared-at, the men of whom anecdotes are told. There is one thing,
though, which can be said of them which cannot be said of the other
class; there is no affection about them--they do not put on. Everywhere
and all the time, Dr. Walker keeps to his Southern training and his
Southern style. “I am not a society man,” he often says, “and you
cannot expect me to be up on etiquette and decorum, and all those fool
things.” When asked to do the honors at some wedding feast, or sit down
and enjoy a sumptuous repast in courses, he has been heard to say, “I
am not used to that kind of thing, and I cannot get above my raising.”
But it must not be thought that because it is admitted that he is
still a rustic in some things that he is at all boorish, unmannered or
impolite. No man enjoys the society of people, the intercourse of men,
the mutual exchange and interchange of ideas and opinions more than he
does, and he would not be likely to mistake finger-bowl for drinking
purposes. But his politeness is the politeness of tact and good common
sense rather than the politeness of the books and of so-called high
society.
* * * * *
In some respects he is exceedingly frank: in others, no man is more
reserved. He likes company and likes to talk about the things which
interest him most, and there are thousands of living mortals who will
testify that they have never found any man in general conversation more
interesting or more entertaining than he. In Georgia, where people
are always very democratic in their ways, for hours and hours great
crowds of men, old and young, have considered it a privilege and an
honor to be permitted to stand in some barber shop or drug store or
grocery store and listen to Dr. Walker talk. It is very difficult for
him to go one square in his home town without being stopped by somebody
who really has no other motive than just to hear him talk. When one
succeeds in detaining him for a little while, that is usually the
signal for others to join the number, and by this process it is not
long before Dr. Walker has been intercepted and made to talk. Such a
thing would disturb and annoy an ordinary man. But when he is asked if
it does not tire him to be worried out by people who merely want to
take up his time in talking, he says: “It pleases them, and it doesn’t
hurt me.” He loves a joke--not likes, but loves--and tells a comic
story with great glee. His cheerfulness is habitual, and probably he
never knew two consecutive hours of melancholy in his life.
He possesses one of the most remarkable memories for names and faces
that God has ever given to any man. At one time his membership in
Augusta consisted of more than 1,200 persons, and he knew them all by
name, and could call their names as soon as he saw them anywhere and at
anytime. In Augusta, with a population of 15,000 colored people, more
or less, he knows more than half of them by name. The same is true of
the people in the country districts in and around Augusta where he has
been. He knows the leading men and women in religious, political, and
educational circles throughout the state and nation, and can call their
names without a moment’s hesitation, tell where they are, and what
they are doing; in many instances, he knows about their past, about
their family connections, about any difficulties they may have had. Of
course, this wonderful power of memory must of necessity stand him in
good stead in his sermon preparation, in his delivery of sermons, and
in his literary work; but it is little short of wonderful how one man
could, in the first place, know so much about so many people, and, in
the second place, how, if he did know, he could remember it all, even
to the smallest detail.
Though humble, meek, modest almost to the point of shyness, there
is nothing of obsequiousness about him. It is not his way to bow and
scrape and cater to any man, while at the same time he has a becoming
respect for the deeds of men and never fails to praise a fellow-mortal
for the good that he does. But he hates hypocrisy, he hates cringing.
He has never found it necessary to go out of the way to speak with
any of the great men of the world with whom he has come in contact or
who have attended his meetings in various places from time to time.
Sometimes, when he has been told that Mr. So-and-So (a person of some
influence) is in the audience, he has replied, “Give him my number,
please: if he desires to call, I shall be glad to see him.”
He is not what may be called a bookish preacher--that is to say, his
sermons do not smell of the lamb. His sermons are, nevertheless, always
carefully prepared beforehand, but it is a preparation of prayer, Bible
reading and meditation. He goes to the pulpit from his knees, and has
often been heard to say, “I know what I am going to say before I come
into the pulpit; I know the hymns I am going to sing, the chapter
that I am going to read, and I know where the text is to be found.”
His favorite source of information outside of the Bible is the daily
newspaper. He always reads with an eye single to the use he can make
of the news in his preaching or in his public addresses. In this
way, he keeps abreast of the times, and frequently has well-matured
opinions on important matters, and many times has spoken of them in
public before some other ministers have heard of them. When he enters
the pulpit, free from the narrowness that must come to the man who
uses only his Bible commentary, he seems to feel himself under divine
compulsion to deliver a message of transcendent importance to dying
men; there is an air about him of a soldier who has a divine commission
to fight a great battle for humanity. He speaks directly to the heart,
in language all hearts can understand. Humor and pathos, pleading and
scorn, impassioned exhortation and cutting sarcasm, all are used in his
discourses with tremendous effect.
That he is a man of unpretentious habits and winning manners is
evidenced by the great love manifested toward him by the children in
the city of Augusta, where he lived so long. Even the children know him
and call him by name, and it is an honor without dissimulation, and a
tribute without sinister motives that the little children pay when they
run in great crowds at sight of the affable preacher, crying as they
run, “Howdy, Brer Walker?” “Howdy, Brer Walker?” Many times Dr. Walker
will stop and talk with them, ask after their mothers and fathers, and
also about their schooling; often he will tell them a little story, and
then invite them to church and Sunday school the following Sunday.