The Ground Has Shifted

The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America

Walter Earl Fluker

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479823888
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A powerful insight into the historical and cultural roles of the black church, the dilemmas it faces, and the roadmap for an ethical path forward. Honorable Mention, Theology and Religious Studies PROSE Award If we are in a post-racial era, then what is the future of the Black Church? If the U.S. will at some time in the future be free from discrimination and prejudices that are based on race how will that affect the church’s very identity?
In The Ground Has Shifted, Walter Earl Fluker passionately and thoroughly discusses the historical and current role of the black church and argues that the older race-based language and metaphors of religious discourse have outlived their utility. He offers instead a larger, global vision for the black church that focuses on young black men and other disenfranchised groups who have been left behind in a world of globalized capital. Lyrically written with an emphasis on the dynamic and fluid movement of life itself, Fluker argues that the church must find new ways to use race as an emancipatory instrument if it is to remain central in black life, and he points the way for a new generation of church leaders, scholars and activists to reclaim the black church’s historical identity and to turn to the task of infusing character, civility, and a sense of community among its congregants.

Part I

Memory

Remembering Our Story

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

—William Faulkner, Light in August

1

From Frogbottom to a Bucket of Blood

I was born in 1951 in Vaiden, Mississippi, a small town about ten miles from Winona, Mississippi. Winona is about 190 miles northeast of a small town in Louisiana that bears my paternal family’s surname. Although Fluker is German, the convoluted history of Africans, Native Americans, Spanish, French, German, and English who were part of the settlement of this area runs through my veins and spills over into the waters of the great Mississippi.1 Our section of Vaiden was known affectionately as Frogbottom, a name that could have come from either the croaking of the frogs or the groaning of the black residents, whose existence was often lower than that of the frogs. Winona is the town where Fannie Lou Hamer, Annelle Ponder, and fourteen-year-old June Johnson were jailed and beaten mercilessly after attending a voters’ registration campaign sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the summer of 1963. Hamer suffered permanent kidney damage and loss of sight in her left eye from the beatings. Two black male inmates were forced, while white officers looked on, to pummel her with a blackjack until they were exhausted. “I had been beat ’til I was real hard, just hard like a piece of wood or somethin’,” Hamer would later say. “A person don’t know what can happen to they body if they beat with something like I was beat with.”2

About thirty miles down the road from Vaiden is Kosciusko, the birthplace of Oprah Winfrey. The first time I met Ms. Winfrey and shared that I was born in Vaiden, she asked, “How did you get out?” I told her that Daddy left Frogbottom in 1956. He felt like a piece of wood or somethin’. Mr. Joe Hand, his boss-man, used to “make our figgers turn somersets” at the end of the cotton-picking season.3 My two oldest sisters, Rosetta and Helen, left first. Working in the cotton fields, daily they would hear the City of New Orleans train coming through Winona to collect passengers who were leaving for points north in search of the Promised Land.4 Rosetta and Helen would prop themselves on their hoes in the middle of the hot fields and swear, “Lord, I’m going to ride that train one of these days!” They eventually left with new husbands, Curtis and Eddie, who had made the journey to Chicago and, like saviors, returned for them.

My father, Clinton, followed. He later sent for my mother, Zettie; my older brother, Clinton; my sister Beatrice; and me. Another sister, Ceonia, had died a few years before from a rheumatic heart. There were four other children who had died before I was born, most at birth. My uncle and namesake used to say to me, “Boy, your daddy and mama seen a hard time, a hard time.”

Daddy sent for Mama, Clinton, Bea, and me after locating several piecemeal jobs as a brick cleaner, car wash attendant, and dishwasher. He didn’t have the skills necessary to compete in a city like Chicago—social skills, professional skills, and survival skills. His was a journey to a “new world” nearly five hundred years after Columbus sailed, but he simply was not prepared for what he discovered in a compassionless urban society. In fact, I am convinced he never really left Mississippi. He traded Frogbottom for a Bucket of Blood.

In the Northern Diaspora, Mama and Daddy missed “home.”5 In a strange, almost ironic twist, Frogbottom became a mythical abode of innocence, a means of return to sanity, a remembering that offered a basis for hope in an alien urban context to which my parents never truly adjusted. Mama found “home” in the church. It was a little storefront located between a barbershop and two houses on Forty-Third Street, infamously known as the “Bucket of Blood” because of the vicious knife fights and shootings in the area. A pool hall and Princess’s Restaurant were located farther down the street. Across the street were a rib joint and a tavern. The church was a sanctuary and social center that protected my youth from madness like an old package used to transport fragile cargo to safe quarters. The building originally served as a church, then an animal hospital, and was later refashioned to accommodate black saints: mostly women, mostly migrants from Mississippi.6 I, too, found a home in dat’ rock, as the old spiritual goes—in fact, the church saved me.

My Mama took me to church. Every Sunday she would dress up in her white usher’s uniform with a black handkerchief delicately placed over a badge that read, “Centennial M. B. Church.” I never knew why the founders chose the name “Centennial,” but my best guess is that the church is still less than a hundred years old. Black storefront churches are known for their quixotic names, misplaced metaphors echoing the journey from downsouth to upsouth—names with sounds often more prominent than their signification. I’ve always felt that these sounds represent the primordial search for black identity in the midst of the dissonant sirens of late modernity, where literacy is the agency for salvation. I have heard those sounds many times and in many places, like the time I saw a woman shout across the bar in a blues joint to a saxophone bellowing, “I can’t stop loving you”; or whenever I hear Sam Cooke’s melancholy hymn of hope, “I was born by the river in a little tent / Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since / It’s been a long, a long time coming / but I know a change gone come.” But the best were the sounds streaming every Sunday morning from that little storefront church challenging all the cultural caricatures of blackness and protecting us from the wiles of the many devils that sought access to our souls; sounds like the choir singing, “Oh, it’s a highway to heaven / None can walk up there / but the pure in heart. / Oh, it’s a highway to heaven / I’m walking up the King’s Highway!”

I remember how Sylvia Thornton’s petite body with its elfin features rocked back and forth as her tiny feet hardly touched the pedals while she crouched over the Hammond organ, getting all fired up and playing like it was Judgment Day. We were as clean as the board of health in our double-toned light and dark blue robes, with all of us in the choir belting out the lines as Sylvia, in her chic, elegant outfits, brought a style to the moment that convinced me that God meant for everything we wore to be as beautiful as whatever they were wearing in heaven. “Christ walks beside us, angels to guide us / Walking up the King’s Highway!” We did not want to be outdone by the angels while we were walking up the King’s Highway! Heaven was a place for styling, laughing, and playing! No sad faces—just pure joy and light!

We needed Christ to walk beside us! Forty-Third Street was a highway to heaven or hell—it all depended on with whom you were walking. Once I was walking with a high school classmate, a block down the street from the church, when Thunder, the leader of the Black Stone Four Corners Rangers, threatened my friend’s life if he ever repeated to the authorities details about an assassination that he had witnessed. Or the time on the highway when Richard, the itinerant preacher, whose right arm and leg were lost in a prankish teenage accident while playing on the “L” tracks, met me in one of my frequent states of inebriation and laid his remaining hand on my head in prayer for my future. I remember best the last stanza of the song, “If you’re not walking, start while I’m talking / Walking up the King’s Highway!”

My memory is a chamber of sounds—black sounds, rich with life, pregnant with hope and possibility rallying against the damning, depressing nihilistic dirge of machine culture and progress Western-style; the rhapsodic rhythm of congo and bongo drums on hot summer nights in the Chicago of my youth calling upon ancient spirits for deliverance from cultural asylums and redlined urban concentration camps; sounds of young black boys “doo-wopping” to the tunes of the Temptations: “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day / and when it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May”; sounds like the pistol shot that left a bullet in Romero’s neck; sounds like the late-night heavy breathing “up on the roof,” rushing and pushing hard, shooting babies that would never know their fathers; sounds of broken windows from home runs off Tony Kelley’s bat in the vacant lot across the street from Mrs. Grant’s house; sounds like the “epistemologically opposed and existentially tense”7 moaning I heard on late Saturday night and early Sunday morning at the Centennial Missionary Baptist Church, sounds of lament and rejoicing; gospel choirs and the musical wizardry of the Reverend Hosie Robinson reaching his sermonic climax in the sensual cadence and incantations of horns blowing kisses—In the beginning was the Sound and the Sound was with God and God was the Sound—“Somebody, say ‘Amen!’”

Mama was the proudest person alive as she greeted the congregants with an extended arm and a swift turn and escorted them to their seats. Those simple movements—the extended arm and swift turn—were what Milan Kundera called “gestures of immortality.”8 I was my mother’s caretaker. This was not my duty alone. I was privileged to share this responsibility with other family members, but since I was the youngest sibling, during my brother Clinton’s military tour of duty in Vietnam, the weight of my mother’s daytime care fell to my sister Bea and me. Mama’s epilepsy and fiery temperament did not make this task easy. The seizures would leave her confused and with loss of memory. She would forget where she was and often not recognize us for some time. In public places, we learned to protect and comfort her while onlookers stared. Under guarded breath, they called her “crazy.”

I really don’t know much about my mother’s childhood except that her father was an abusive man, prone to fits of rage. He died the year before my birth. My grandmother, whom we affectionately called Maugh, was the backbone of the family of four boys and four girls. She was a medicine woman upon whom the community relied for healing and counsel. She was born with a veil over her face, which meant that she could see. Maugh was strong, rugged, and free. She rode a horse well into old age. The white folks called her a “crazy nigger,” but she wasn’t crazy—she was fearless!

My mother inherited Maugh’s fearlessness. I remember once when I was eleven years old, Mr. B. C., who lived in the basement apartment in the building where we rented the first-floor, four-room flat, got into an argument with my mother. My mother and I were home alone. In a drunken stupor, he came upstairs, broke the window of our apartment door with a pistol and pointed it in my mother’s face. I was crying and pleading with Mr. B. C. not to shoot my mother. My mother stood there in defiance and told him, “You can shoot me, B. C., but you can’t eat me.” Madness.

Early I witnessed the tragic violence that dogs the footsteps of the oppressed: gangs, crimes, drugs, murder—it was all there. Society had already written a nighttime script for the young black men and women of my neighborhood. But my little Mama knew something about the other side of madness—she possessed a subversive quality of hope. Constantly in poor health, functionally illiterate, misplaced in a hostile urban environment, Mama still found a place called “hope.” Every Tuesday evening, no matter what activity demanded my youthful attention, Mama required that I go to prayer meeting at our little storefront church on Forty-Third Street. It was there that I would witness the source of this “hope.” During testimony time, Mama would rise and give her testimony. “I just rose to tell my determination,” she began her memorized litany. “My determination is for heaven. Sometimes it’s hard living in this place. Trials are on every hand. Raising children is hard, but I keep on keeping on, ’cause I know that the Lord is able to keep them from falling. I’ve put my children in the hands of the Lord. Sometimes I want to give up, but I can’t. ’Cause this joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me and the world can’t take it away.”

O dear mother of mine! How did she know that sometimes when daybreak would seem a million nighttimes away, when I could not see my way for the tears in my eyes, when lonely nights would come way down in the valley where I couldn’t hear nobody pray, that her words would find a place in my heart that rings even now: “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me and the world can’t take it away!”

Once I saw my mother in a vision, seated at a campfire and wrapped in animal skins, and around her were other elders making preparation for ritual cleansing. She rose from a crouched posture with a staff in her hand and walked to the huge pot in the midst of the fire. I shall never forget the regal beauty and rustic elegance with which she rose—like a goddess, ancient and holy. She uttered incantations and began to spit into the flame. As she spat, I felt the roar of the flames in my belly, burning my deep inward parts. I screamed with the voice of a soul possessed, receiving a deep inner healing. I knew instantly that she was making preparation for my becoming—a foretaste of the future that I could not see, a baptism in the Fire that prophesies in many languages to many nations. “See,” she says, “I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”9 She is like the refiner’s fire.

* * *

My father was a handsome, gentle man who rested in a place that I sometimes call “peace by a waterfall.” But long after he left Mississippi for the Promised Land, the ghosts of Mississippi haunted my father. Those ha’nts, as he called them, were ever present, working sometimes for evil and sometimes for good. Hoodoo was real strong in those parts of the country where he grew up, and people still practice this invisible religion alongside their Christian beliefs.10 A family story that I heard from my father was about the time he was poisoned close to death and he went to a conjure doctor. The conjure man placed a dime in his mouth and the dime turned greenish black, which was a sign that he had been poisoned. The roots worker gave him a potion and he was healed in several days. It took me a while to realize just how powerfully my father’s beliefs in ghosts and ha’nts impacted my own journey into the world of shape-shifting spirits and taught me to observe their different guises, animating mundane things and returning to the silence of memory in old songs.

My best times with Daddy were those kitchen moments before the others rose, watching him bake biscuits.11 Daddy made the best biscuits. Not those store‑bought, spongy Pillsbury doughcakes, but big, thick, Mississippi, hand‑sized, mouthwatering, long‑lasting, Heavy D biscuits that sat awkwardly on the side of the plate to save space for the sausage, eggs, and Alaga (Alabama‑Georgia) syrup. Even as a small child I had a sixth sense for great cuisine, but I saved the seventh for Daddy.

Sometimes he would sing a song while brewing his coffee in one of the small tin pots. He said he first heard it from a white woman evangelist in the Delta.

Me and the Devil had a tussle, but I won.

Me and the Devil had a tussle, but I won.

I hate the Devil, he hates me.

Me and the Devil cannot agree.

Me and the Devil had a tussle, but I won.

Daddy struggled with many devils...