Parting the Waters (3 page)

Through Mrs. Johns, Nesbitt invited the eminent preacher to deliver a trial sermon. The church was packed when the imposing figure of Vernon Johns rose to the pulpit, recited a long passage of Scripture without looking at the Bible, and then held the congregation spellbound for half an hour without a pause or benefit of notes. Dexter's stolid deacons were accustomed to quality, but in Johns they recognized a mind of a higher order altogether. Upon learning that Johns wanted to join his wife in Montgomery, they suspended precedent for the first time in Nesbitt's memory and offered Johns their pulpit without an investigation or a second trial sermon. Johns moved into the parsonage on South Jackson Street in October 1948. His behavior pitched the entire church into four years of awe, laughter, inspiration, fear, and annoyance. For Nesbitt, the responsible deacon, Johns became the most exquisite agony he had ever known in the church.

 

Vernon Johns was merely another invisible man to nearly all whites, but to the invisible people themselves he was the stuff of legend. The deepest mysteries of existence and race rubbed vigorously together within him, heating a brain that raced constantly until the day he died. His ancestry was a jumble of submerged edges and storybook extremes. During slavery, his father's father was hanged for cutting his master in two with a scythe, and even eighty years later it was whispered in the Johns family that the hunting dogs would not approach the haunted spot where the murder had occurred.

Johns's maternal grandfather was a white man named Price, of Scottish descent, who maintained two entirely separate families—one white, one Negro. This type of bi-patriarchy, though fairly widespread, was never publicly acknowledged in either culture. The Negro children handed down stories about how Price became one of the first inmates at the new Virginia State Penitentiary for killing another white man he caught trying to rape his slave mistress. He protected the mistress “just like she was a white woman.” For this he was admired by some Negroes, but he was by nature a mean, violent, complicated man. When his Negro wife died in the 1870s, he took all his Negro children into the other household to be raised by his childless white wife, “Miss Kitty.” Vernon Johns's mother, Sallie Price, made this transfer as a little girl, and years later she told her family how the taboos had been respected against all opposing reality, even in the intimacy of the home. She never called her father “father,” for decency required the Negro children to be orphans and the white couple to be missionary dispensers of foster care. When Price died about 1900, Sallie Price Johns went to the funeral with her young son Vernon and her husband Willie, son of the hanged slave, and sat through the burial services in a separate-but-equal family section, just across the gravesite from Miss Kitty and the white relatives.

Willie Johns died not long afterward, and in due course Sallie Johns married her dead husband's younger brother. So Vernon Johns finished his youth as the stepson of his uncle, and grandson of a slave who killed his master and of a master who killed for his slave. Only in the Bible did he find open discussion of such a tangle of sex, family, slavery, and violence.

Born in 1892, Vernon Johns grew up outside Farmville, in Prince Edward County, an area so remote that its inhabitants preserved a distinctive speech pattern from the early Scots who settled there. Outsiders found the accent faintly Elizabethan and the country correspondingly backward. It lay at the extreme northern boundary of the rich agricultural Black Belt, and Vernon Johns always clung to the belief that farming was the base line of independence and prosperity, even long after the twentieth-century marketplace had reduced his home region to something like a ghost of nearby Williamsburg.

Johns had a square head and jaw, flaring nostrils, a barrel chest, and huge hands that he joked were like Virginia hams. He looked like the farmer he was, except that he always wore scholarly horn-rimmed glasses. Poor eyesight caused him to vow as a youth that he would read the small print of the Bible only once. Usually he listened to others read out loud, and he first displayed extraordinary gifts by reciting from memory long passages he had heard only once or twice. In grammar school, scolded for erasing a blackboard filled with the week's assignments, Johns reproduced every word from memory. He soon moved on to more substantial feats, memorizing long biblical passages, including the entire Book of Romans. This greatly pleased his father Willie, who left the farm on Sundays to earn extra money as a “saddlebags preacher.”

Like most Negro parents, Sallie Johns and her husbands invested what meager educational funds they had in their eldest daughter, keeping Vernon on the farm. There his gifts seemed to multiply in the process of self-education. He would recite poetry behind the plow and scrounge books to read at night. He used these skills and his gumption to talk his way into several schools, including the Virginia Seminary at Lynchburg. Tossed out for rebelliousness, he ran away from home to Oberlin College in Ohio, pushed his way into the dean's office, and announced his readiness to begin classes. The dean replied, as politely as the erudite dean of a famous liberal white college could speak to a rude Negro youth during World War I, that Oberlin had already turned Johns down because of his worthless credits.

“I got your letter, Dean Fiske,” Johns replied. “But I want to know whether you want students with credits or students with brains.”

As both Fiske and Johns told it later, the dean rather impatiently handed Johns a book written in German and demanded that he read it—and was surprised when he did. He soon dispatched Johns to see Dr. Edward Increase Bosworth, the eminent dean of Oberlin Seminary. Bosworth tested Johns with a book of Greek scripture, and Johns smiled. In later years, he would discard his Latin and Hebrew on aesthetic grounds, but he would always collect histories and poems in his beloved Greek. By the end of the day, Bosworth was impressed enough to enroll Johns as a provisional student, and by the end of the term he had taken on the young phenomenon as his protégé—making him a full-fledged member of the graduate seminary and helping him find work as a part-time preacher to support himself. Within the year, Johns displaced Robert M. Hutchins as class leader in scholarship. Hutchins, a liberal Midwesterner in the abolitionist tradition, found himself pushed beyond the limits of tolerance, and he remarked that no country Negro could make the grades Johns was making without cheating. When Johns got word of the insult, he promptly sought out Hutchins on the campus, called him a son of a bitch, and punched him in the mouth. (The two later became good friends and remained so throughout Hutchins' long tenure as president of the University of Chicago.)

Just before his graduation ceremonies in the spring of 1918, Johns was chosen to deliver the annual student oration at the Memorial Arch, dedicated to the Oberlin students killed in China's Boxer Rebellion. After graduation, he enrolled in the graduate school of theology at the University of Chicago, headquarters of the Social Gospel theologians. Then he stepped back into the restricted universe of jobs open to Negroes, where his fame as a religious scholar and preacher quickly brought him offers of the best pulpits and teaching jobs in the 1920s, though his temperament caused him to lose or leave them just as quickly and make his way back to the family farm in Virginia. From there, he earned small lecture fees at Negro churches and schools up and down the East Coast. He would catch the Richmond train and rumble off, wearing a tattered suit with books stuffed in the pockets. On his return, his brother would often meet him at the station with a fresh horse, and Johns would farm for a few days before his next lecture.

This was the era of the Scopes trial, when theological liberals and fundamentalists battled not only in churches and colleges but also in courtrooms and legislatures and on the front pages over issues ranging from creationism and the Virgin Birth to the social obligations of Christians. Each side had its own pamphlets, journals, conventions, and rooting sections. Johns, an ardent exponent of liberal theology, was more than a little irritated by the failure of the liberals to include any works by Negroes in their annual book of best sermons. He sent the theologians in charge of the publication several sermons by Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman. When these were rejected, Johns sat down and wrote out a sermon of his own, “Transfigured Moments,” which in 1926 became the first work by a Negro published in
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. This analysis of the symbolism of mountains in the lives of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ would be studied by Negro theology students for the next generation. “It is good to be the possessor of some mountain-top experience,” wrote Johns, in a long passage on the need to tie the inspiration of leaders to the experience of the common people. “It is a heart strangely un-Christian that cannot thrill with joy when the least of men begin to pull in the direction of the stars.”

Within the insulated but resonant world of Negro church people, Johns was already as famous as Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Howard Thurman, already an internationally known mystic theologian on his way to breakthrough posts at both Negro and white universities. (Johns had courted the woman who married Thurman, and succeeded Mordecai Johnson as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, West Virginia.) They were his friends and peers, but here the similarities ceased. Whereas Johnson and Thurman were polished men who hailed from the Negro aristocracy and did the things respected scholars are supposed to do—publish regularly in the leading journals, retire into positions of responsible administration, and leave behind an orderly correspondence with other luminaries in the field—Johns was a maverick who seldom wrote anything down and who thought nothing of walking into distinguished assemblies wearing mismatched socks, with farm mud on his shoes.

Having married a daughter of a college president in 1927, he mingled thereafter in those circles only as a tourist. During the Depression his eccentricities carried him beyond maverick status into more or less the life of a bohemian. He would jump into the car with a friend and leave the family for months at a time, preaching here and there, hawking old books at ministers' conventions, selling subscriptions to fledgling magazines. Most of the people he saw on these tours knew nothing of his intellectual attainments. Among those who did, Johns did not bother to answer when they wondered why he eschewed the relative security of a college for life on the road. Johns loved to travel. Because Negroes had trouble finding motels and restaurants to serve them in the segregated South, he would pack blocks of cheese and quarts of milk in ice and take off on drives of non-stop poetry recital. Fellow travelers knew him to finish all of Keats in Alabama and get through Byron and Browning before hitting Farmville. Johns calculated distances in units of poetry, and if he tired of verse he waded into military history.

When the economy recovered in the 1940s, Johns went back on the college lecture circuit—speaking to chaplains, historians, and even economists, plus the usual run of theologians—but his manner never approached conventionality. University officials would answer a summons to his “office” only to find him at a phone booth in the bus station. Student emissaries, on chauffeuring Johns to the president's guest residence at the university, would ask for his bag and be handed just that—a paper bag from a grocery store, filled with books, underwear, and a semi-fresh shirt. Usually, the very brilliance of his lectures would make people forget such eccentricities, which, if remembered at all, tended to be regarded as amusing. Many members of the Dexter Avenue church in Montgomery were to find, however, that there was a biting side to Johns's iconoclasm.

 

At first, his differences with the Dexter congregation involved no more than subtleties, for in many respects the pastor and the members were agreed. All abhorred the slightest displays of emotionalism in a church congregation, for example. There was no shouting at Dexter, nor even any responsive “Amens” during the sermon. At their most demonstrative. the members might allow a quiet murmur of approval to run through them. This restraint pleased Johns. He did not believe in marathon prayer meetings or revivals or the hyperactive church auxiliaries that were so prevalent in many churches. Neither did Dexter, which did not even have Sunday evening services.

But Johns loved Negro spirituals—the music developed during slavery—believing them to contain both a historical and a spiritual authenticity that belonged in the church. Unfortunately, Dexter did not allow spirituals, either. Johns objected that the church mistook the form of dignity for its essence and campaigned to change the Dexter hymnal, which at that time contained no musical scoring for the songs—only the words, like a book of poetry. Johns argued that the hymnal was an affectation that made singing painful to the ear. And certainly the hymnal should include the spirituals. He tried to schedule spirituals at numerous planning meetings, only to be told that it was “not done at Dexter.” Finally, Johns went to the extreme of inviting the congregation to sing a spiritual that was not on the printed order of service. He beckoned Edna King, the church organist, to begin. She, a true Dexter member, failed to follow her pastor's wishes even under such pressure. Muscles twitched in his jaw and in hers, but she refused to play “Go Down, Moses,” “We'll Soon Be Free,” “I Got Shoes,” or any other spiritual. In response, Johns would lecture the congregation on the important differences between dignity, pride, and vanity. In time, he would do worse.

One of his first acts in Montgomery was to replace the tiny bulletin board atop the steps at the church entrance with a much larger one on the sidewalk facing Dexter Avenue. In 1949, all Montgomery read there that Vernon Johns would preach the following Sunday on the topic “Segregation After Death.” No doubt many whites cherished a private hope that the races would be separated in the afterlife, but the public notice also invited suspicion. Local leaders found it mildly unnerving that a Negro minister planned to address so volatile and worldly a topic as segregation in the first place, and the police chief guarded against the possibility of an incendiary trick by inviting the minister to explain himself down at the station.