The Last Blues Preacher

Reverend Clay Evans, Black Lives, and the Faith that Woke the Nation

Zach Mills

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781506428178
  9781506428178
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506446554
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Born in 1925 into a life of sharecropping in Brownsville, Tennessee, Clay Evans was desperate to escape life working for the descendants of plantation owners. At night, he listened to jazz musicians like Cab Calloway and Guy Lombardo on the radio and imagined one day singing on a secular stage. But a greater calling drew Evans into ministry, and he soon stood upon a unique stage as one of America's most famous gospel singers, civil rights heroes, and the godfather of Chicago's black preachers. From this stage Clay sought to rescue his family from poverty and inspire a city and a nation to see, hear, and witness the dignity and value of black lives.

Zach Mills's lively and powerful biography, The Last Blues Preacher, brings the life and work of Reverend Evans into our time and examines how current national conversations on race, religion, politics, and popular culture can and should inform contemporary activism.

I

Beginnings

1

Who Me?

Rev. Clay Evans will never read a word of this story. Not one word. He would; he just can’t. His eyesight isn’t what it used to be. It’s a hard truth, a difficult reality. But Reverend Evans won’t ever read his story on these published pages. No matter. He knows the story pretty well. After all, it’s his story. Actually, Reverend Evans’s life has been more like an exciting adventure, filled with tragedies and joys, friends and enemies, villains and heroes, victories and defeats. And now this adventure is retold for you, in hopes that it will impart some important lessons. Lessons, Reverend Evans would say, to inspire you to be the best version of yourself. Lessons to challenge you to extend greater measures of openness, generosity, and mercy to those you encounter—yes even, and especially, your enemies! Lessons, he’d say, to inspire you to show greater humility—yes, definitely to those with whom you disagree! Lessons to reconcile you with others and yourself. That’s always been Reverend Evans’s hope for this project. “If this book doesn’t help encourage someone else, if it doesn’t inspire them, give them hope, or draw them closer to God,” he’d often say to me, “then there’s no point writing it.” So here is Rev. Clay Evans’s great adventure in life and ministry, shared now with you for the sake of the better world you can create if you’re open enough, loving enough, courageous enough, and humble enough to learn the lessons within these pages.

During his fifty years as a senior pastor, Rev. Clay Evans comforted thousands of souls. However, the only way to tell Evans’s story properly is to begin with the very first soul his ministry ever touched. It’s earlier than one might think, earlier than even he remembers. The first time Clay Evans eased the agony of a burdened soul went something like this:

DECEMBER 1927—It was December 23, 1927. In Haywood County on a rural farm in Brownsville, Tennessee, a shy two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Clay scurried across the shabby floor of a sharecropping family’s small kitchen. His mother, Estanauly, looked lovingly on. She pondered, “What a strange child!” She knew it. Her husband Henry and the rest of the family knew it. Even all the neighbors knew it. Clay’s third birthday was just sixth months away, and he hadn’t spoken a single word. Not one. Instead, he communicated nonverbally—through body language, facial expressions, and smiles and frowns. Or he used an assortment of noises, like groaning or grunting. But he never spoke words. He couldn’t. Clay Evans was a sickly child. Everyone knew it. “My mother was very burdened about that,” he recalled. “She prayed and prayed and prayed that I would talk.” To ease the weight of such a terrible burden, his mother often looked heavenward for strength. Writing about the intensity of Estanauly’s struggle raising a son with health problems, author Dorothy June Rose declared, “Clay had been the supreme test of her faith. A sickly baby, he taxed her energy and often kept her in anxious vigil through long and sleepless nights.”^[1] There were moments when Estanauly and Henry Evans faced the painful possibility that their son might never speak.

One autumn day several months earlier, Estanauly had sat on the porch steps of the Evanses’ home in Brownsville with her two friends, Ellie and Pearl. Estanauly, then a thirty-one-year-old mother of four who was sixth months pregnant with her fifth child, watched Ellie and Pearl’s children play a game of hide-and-go-seek while little Clay sat silently. Ellie and Pearl looked at Clay. Then they looked at Estanauly with concerned eyes. Finally, Pearl gathered the courage to break the silence:

“Whatcha goin to do ’bout that baby of yours there, Estanauly?” Pearl asked. “Over two years old now and just sits there quiet as a little field mouse.”

Ellie also chimed in. “Do you suppose he’s ever goin’ to talk, Estanauly?” she asked.^[2]

Estanauly gazed fondly at Clay. Refusing to hide her uncertainty, she replied simply, “I don’t know.” Doubt filled her eyes, but only for a moment. Still gazing at her happy baby boy, Estanauly beamed brightly. It was the hopeful smile of a woman of faith who believed God could, somehow, do the impossible. Encouraged by this hope, she turned back to her friends, more certain this time, and responded:

“All I know, he’s in the good Lord’s hands. He was a hard time borning and sick more than well his whole first year. Henry ’n I was sure we’d lose him many a night. But the good Lord brought him through, and brought him through for a purpose. If the Lord give us a dumb baby, well He give him to us for a reason. And if the Lord wants Clay to talk, well, He’ll just have to make that happen, too. Ain’t nothin goes on He’s not in charge of. And that’s just good enough for me.”^[3]

In the meantime, family members adjusted. They learned to decipher Clay’s many nonverbal cues. Estanauly continued to pray for her mute son’s deliverance. So many nights she prayed. And so many mornings little Clay woke up still quiet as a field mouse. But then, two days before Christmas in 1927, her prayers were answered. Estanauly was sitting with friends at the Evanses’ kitchen table, watching Clay scurry silently about. Though the Evans family had very little money, Estanauly was determined to give her children at least one homemade gift for Christmas. She had ripped the seams out of her blue skirt, the prettiest garment she owned, and made a dress for her daughter, Gladys. Estanauly’s friends scolded her for ruining her skirt. But Estanauly beamed with pride. “And besides,” she said, justifying her sacrifice to her friends, “there was enough left over to make this little stuffed dog for Clay.” Right then, little Clay looked up at his mother, wide-eyed with anticipation, and interjected, “Who? Me?” The words came so clearly, so unexpectedly. Estanauly’s heart raced. God had answered her prayers!

When Evans retold the story of the time he had overcome his struggle to speak, he evoked the biblical character Moses. Moses, Evans testified, also had struggled with speech. The third and fourth chapters of the Old Testament book of Exodus narrate God calling Moses to free the Israelites from the oppressive rule of a pharaoh who was holding them as slaves in Egypt. Because of anxieties about his own limitations as a leader, Moses responded to God by saying, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11, NRSV). Evans has always interpreted Moses’s struggle in Exodus through the lens of his own struggle with speech. There, in Moses’s story, Evans found an encouraging similarity. “Moses also said, ‘Who? Me?’” Evans concluded proudly.

Evans credited his mother’s regular prayer life with his emancipation from muteness: “She really prayed that her son would be able to talk . . . my mother was a real saint.” When she heard her son finally speak words, Estanauly dropped to her knees. She wrapped Clay in her arms. Tears streamed down both cheeks. “Thank you, Lord,” she whispered. “Thank you for letting this child of mine talk. Now please, I pray, give me the wisdom to guide him so his voice is ever raised in your service.”^[4]

Born on June 23, 1925, just over fifty miles northeast of Memphis in Brownsville, Tennessee, Clay Evans was the fourth of nine children. His parents, Henry and Estanauly Evans, were natives of Brownsville, located in Haywood County, in the Delta Region of western Tennessee. In that county, where the Hatchie River runs straight through Brownsville, farming ruled supreme. In 1923, the fertile soil in Haywood County yielded a high level of crop diversification, with cotton, corn, fruit, grass, and livestock being the county’s most important agricultural products.^[5]

During the early 1920s, sharecroppers provided a plentiful supply of cheap labor in the region. Henry and Estanauly had both come from sharecropping families. Like countless African American southerners, Henry and Estanauly spent their childhoods enslaved in what scholar Jennifer Searcy refers to as the “endless cycle of financial rigging orchestrated by white landowners” achieved through the sharecropping system.^[6] Within this system, financial stability became virtually impossible for African American southerners.^[7] And certainly the threat of racial violence always hung in the atmosphere to discourage people from daring to challenge white-imposed social, economic, and legal restrictions. The logic was simple, as one former plantation owner explained: “Teach the Negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws.”^[8] Plantation owners passed down this culturally transmitted disease from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Like his grandparents and parents before him, Clay Evans spent his childhood in this terrifying and unjust crucible of racial violence and oppression.

Most African American sharecropping families in Brownsville, Tennessee, during the early 1920s lived in housing on their employers’ properties. The Evans family lived in a small, aging shack-like structure. Uninsulated wooden walls rested underneath a tin roof riddled with holes. Legions of gaps between the roof and the walls accented the ceiling. At night Evans often gazed out at the sky through these openings. “I looked up at night, and I could see the stars.” During stormy weather, each gap, hole, and crack allowed tiny rivers of water to pour into the house. “Many times, we had to move the bed at night when it was raining,” Evans recalled, chuckling. The battered linoleum floor resembled the roof. Small spaces in the floor revealed the family’s chicken coop underneath the house.

Despite the structural imperfections of their house, the Evans family took much pride in presenting it in as dignified a manner as possible. The neatness of the always-swept porch, the shine of uncurtained windows, and artful placement of marigolds and day lilies along the home’s unpaved walk, author Dorothy June Rose states, gave the Evans home “an air of dignity that even the blatant signs of abject poverty could not squelch.” This quiet dignity reflected not only the physical appearance of the house but also the inner strength of the family residing within the home. Neighbors felt something special about the Evans family. Many in Brownsville’s black sharecropping community often shared their personal joys and pains with Henry and Estanauly. Since many who labored in the fields passed by the Evanses’ home each day, it became a natural meeting place. Here men would meet their wives and children and enjoy a leisurely walk home to a meal already waiting. Rose stated, “And yet, even if it had not been so convenient, the cheerful greeting, the quiet encouragement always to be found in the Evans’ home, would have made it a focal point in any setting.”^[9]

The Evanses’ home had a small fireplace. However, its size did not diminish its importance. “In the wintertime, you’d make the fire at night, but you brought in a lot of wood in the evening to put on the fire until you go to bed. And you’d make it so that it wouldn’t go all the way out. And in the morning, you’d stir up the ashes, and that kind of warmed the house.” The family couldn’t afford proper insulation or wallpaper. Instead, family members pasted newspapers on the walls to block cold winds from entering uninvited. “That’s how poor we were,” Evans explained. Family meals were cooked on a wood stove. “Those were really hard times.” For baths, water was heated on the stove and then poured into a single bathtub. “Sometimes two or three people bathed in the same tub, not just in the same tub but in the same water,” Evans recalled. “But when they got down to the second or third baths, there wasn’t nothing but mud. We’ve come a long way.”

Sleeping arrangements became particularly challenging as Evans and his nine brothers and sisters grew older. At bedtime, he and his siblings all crammed as many as they could into the same bed. “We slept three and four in the bed, two at the head and two at the feet.” Those who didn’t make it into the bed on a given night slept on the floor. Looking back on those experiences, Evans’s brother Pharis said those cramped conditions strengthened the bonds between siblings:

We had to be close to each other. We had no choice. I slept in the same bed that my brother Clay slept in and my brother Joe slept in the same bed. Sometimes there were more than two that slept in that bed. There are things that we had to do to be close to each other. And because of that when we left Brownsville we carried it with us. It was my brother Joe that took my sister Lou Della in when we got to Chicago. It was our brother Clay that opened the door and took me in.^[10]

The Evans home had neither electricity nor running water. On the way home from school, the Evans children often stopped to pump water from a nearby well. “And sometimes that was infested with frogs,” Evans remembered. His sister Lou Della also recalled those difficult days. “You know how to appreciate things now,” she said. “Stuff you didn’t have, now you have. It was hard. . . . We didn’t have anything. We used each other’s clothes. If they had some food left, you’d get their food, what they had left.” It was a difficult life. Recalling those childhood days was painful for Evans and his siblings. “It has been a struggle the whole way,” Lou Della recalled.

Usually only one black sharecropping family worked per white farm in Brownsville. White farmers required the children to begin working the fields as soon as they turned ten. Mothers were often forced to take their newborn infants with them into the fields each day. Estanauly held her younger children while she worked. When necessary, her older children relieved her and watched their younger siblings. “That’s how women back then could have a dozen children. . . . They’d make the oldest take care of the little ones,” Evans said. Henry and Estanauly taught their children to take care of each other. “So my older sister, she was like my mamma, ’cause she had to take care of me,” Evans explained. His memories of those times are of grueling and relentless labor. Evans’s chores were endless. He helped harvest corn, cotton, and peas. He fed hogs, milked cows, pulled cotton, dug trenches. “You get up with the sun, and you work until the sun goes down.” Being a sickly child, Clay found the toil of sharecropping especially difficult. In fact, some of his younger siblings were better able to handle the rigors of farm labor. “I was looked down upon,” Evans recalled.

The sharecropper’s life was painfully monotonous. The Evans family arose each day before sunrise, usually shortly after 4:00 a.m. They ate breakfast. Then they walked to the fields to work. The backbreaking labor was unceasing. The sun was unrelenting. The Evans family labored nonstop except for brief rests during dinner and supper. The women got even ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Beginnings
• Launching the Ship
• On Open Seas
• Docking the Ship