As we settled into the relaxed social mood of the area, we were almost taken for local. In picking up a hitchhiker, we would invite him to “hop on in,” without actually mimicking a southern accent. The hitchhiker would assume that if we were not from the neighborhood, at least we were from the next county over.
At one point while driving around, I felt compelled to ask Roscoe some rather “folkloristic” type questions about his background. Rather than saying anything directly insulting, Roscoe had the decency to talk about another northern visitor who asked these kind of questions, which he felt were so much hogwash. I got the point and put a lid on my attempt to become a “scholar.”
From a musical point of view, I was very interested in attending a church service where I could experience the Baptist lining hymns. I was also fascinated with the idea that there were African-Americans in that area who sang this very “Anglo Saxon” music.
When I asked about local black musicians, Roscoe and his friends talked quite effusively about how much they admired their talent. Roscoe then offered to take us to visit a black Baptist preacher whose wife was known as a particularly good singer.
We had grown accustomed to the mountain cabins of people who were poor by any standard, but these people lived at a level that was several notches lower than what we had experienced. When we walked into the preacher’s house, the sense of poverty was truly oppressive, and my cousin and I were consumed with guilt. We evidently hid our feelings well, for the preacher was very friendly in a gentlemanly way, and Roscoe was quite relaxed and rather chipper.
We were introduced to the preacher’s wife, a slender and fragile-looking woman who appeared to be in her early 40s. She was happy to sing for us, but at the same time told us she was suffering from headaches that were so severe she was not able to go to church anymore. I sensed she was probably dying and couldn’t do anything about it.
As I look back at the scene in that house, I realize that although there was poverty, the only shame was my own. The preacher was old, his wife was ill, and they could not attend to housekeeping and repairs. The moldy smell that hit me when I walked in probably came from a leaky roof that had let water seep into the newspaper that lined the walls. The living room that the preacher and his wife greeted us in was dark because the cracked windows were stained and encrusted with dust. The old couch we were invited to sit on had holes in the upholstery, but it was perfectly comfortable. Here were two southern black people who took two white strangers into their home without a shred of distrust.
Then this woman sat on a chair in the middle of the room. She rested her hands delicately on her thighs, and leaning forward, sang for us. She sang from her heart and soul, closing her eyes, and putting herself completely into the hymn. I knew I was hearing something very rare both musically and spiritually: A black singer with a black voice singing a kind of music that was as “Anglo” as you could get. However, there was no doubt that this was her music, and her way of expressing her religion. As I sat there, I felt that with every note, she was truly drawing nearer and nearer to that heaven she longed to enter.
I had a tape recorder in the trunk of the car, but a perverse sense of guilt kept me from asking to record her, as though I would be “using” her if I did. When I saw Roscoe about six months later, I asked about this woman, and he told me that she had in fact died of something connected to her headaches.
The next day Roscoe introduced us to another preacher, who invited us to his church the following Sunday so that we could finally hear those hymns sung by a whole congregation. When I said something to the effect that the preacher seemed to be a man who stayed within the “straight and narrow,” Roscoe’s oblique response was that the man’s brother had recently been found dead in the bottom of a creek with a jug of liquor in each hand.
On Sunday morning we followed the directions we had been given and soon saw a small church. We parked, went inside where the service was starting, and noticed there were black as well as white people in the congregation. When we mentioned the name of the preacher who had sent us, we were told this was not his church. So we got back in our car and drove down the road until we came to another church.
The service was being held outside on a hillside, and there were no black people among the congregation. When the congregation sang a song about the loss of a mother, I remember a man, dressed in overalls, standing there with tears streaming down his face. Roscoe later told us the two churches had once been one, but had split over the issue of whether to allow blacks to remain in the congregation.
One night at the dinner table, Roscoe mentioned in a rather offhand way that my father “owns some kind of factory up there,” which he knew from a previous conversation in Chicago. We then heard the harsh scrape of a chair on the floor. It was Roscoe’s wife, Ethel, who had reacted strongly to the fact that she was sharing her table with someone from such a different and even foreign economic class.
In an interview regarding his wife’s displeasure with a photo of Roscoe in front of an old shed, Roscoe explained how his wife and neighbors would resent “taking the worst you can find to make a picture,” but then he concluded, “course it don’t matter to me.” And my father’s factory didn’t matter to him, either.
