When you drive up Rattlesnake Springs Lane, Sewanee,
Tennessee, then turn and climb the hill leading to “Possum’s End,” you’ll enter
the domain of The Rev. Francis Xavier Walter and his wife Faye, a clinical
psychologist. The domain showcases a renovated 1880’s tobacco barn built of
star pine that was transported from Virginia to Tennessee, and which the
Walters have made into a large, handsome home. And if you spend an afternoon
talking with Francis about his former work, you’ll probably decide that you were
in the presence of someone special — in this case, the man who helped launch
the famous “Freedom Quilting Bee” in the Black Belt during the Civil Rights
Movement in Alabama.
We’ve been friends with the Walters for most of the nine
years we’ve lived at Sewanee and have had our feet under their table and eaten
fare Faye prepared a la Alabama style
several times. The meals were usually preceded by a bit of drama (LOL) that
involved six of us acting out plays about the southern culture in southern vernacular
even we southerners find foreign to our speaking.
Francis, a native Alabaman, has just completed a book about
his life and his work in the Alabama Black Belt, “which has no title yet,” he
says, “but you could call it a memoir that focuses on my commitment not to
participate in the culture of racism and is also about all the ways race has impinged
on my life.”
Francis was born in Mobile, Alabama and graduated from
Spring Hill College, a Roman Catholic institution located two blocks away from
his home. He majored in English and minored in Latin, then entered the
Episcopal Seminary at the University of the South and was ordained a priest in
1957. He spent the next two years as a fellow and tutor at General Theological
Seminary in New York City and later served Grace Episcopal Church in Jersey
City, a ghetto church. He attributes much of his interest in dealing with
racial problems to the “living textbook” of this ghetto church.
Francis was eventually called to become Director of the
Selma Inter-religious Project in Alabama, a group comprised of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and other religious entities established in
Selma, Alabama to combat racial injustice. Through his work in that capacity and still serving under the
Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, he became totally enmeshed in the
fight against racism. However, when he returned home to Alabama to carry out his work
with the underprivileged people in the Black Belt, the Episcopal Bishop of
Alabama refused to give him a license to officiate in the state as a priest. He
was also monitored by the FBI and had difficulty getting an FHA loan to buy a
house.
Francis persisted in his work as an activist. “My mother, Martha,
had developed cancer while I was in high school and experienced what I call ‘a
repeatable process of opening to the infiniteness of God,’” he writes in two chapters
of his book entitled “My Mother and Father Cole” and “Conversion.” In 1951, his
mother attended a Christ Church Lenten Preaching Service where clergy she had
known for years vested in cassock, surplice, and stole. “As she was leaving the
service, she saw a Black man wearing a clerical collar. He was in the last row
of pews. One assumes everyone saw him, but she was the one who walked over to
the last row of pews and introduced herself to Father Cole. She asked him why
he wasn’t up front with the other clergy, and he told her that she’d have to
ask the other clergy. My mother turned around, went down the aisle to the door
in the parish hall, and headed to the rector’s office. She found the
embarrassed answer she received not an answer to her new-honed grasp of the
Church as the Body of Christ. Later, she approached the Black president of the
Women’s Auxiliary at the Church of the Good Shepherd and told her, ‘I’ve never
questioned how colored people are treated by us. But now I know I want you to
know I will no longer be part of it. I don’t know what I will do, but I will
never again be part of it.’”
His mother’s passion for justice and the Black struggle for
equality inspired Francis and later played a part in causing him to initiate his most ambitious project,
“The Freedom Quilting Bee Project,” which he helped promote and which became a
handicraft cooperative recognized throughout the United States. The project
gave granddaughters of slaves who had been field hands an opportunity to show
how they had been victims of poverty and rural isolation but were capable of
becoming dedicated artisans and businesswomen working with patchwork quilts.
Later, the University of Alabama Press published “The Freedom Quilting Bee” by Nancy
Callahan, a volume documenting the work of both Francis and the famous “freedom
quilters.”
My session with Francis could have extended into the evening
as he's an experienced raconteur, but readers will have to wait to read the
final, expanded version of his story that will be published by New South Books,
Montgomery, Alabama. It’s a fascinating account of the work of the Master of
Possum’s End and includes many anecdotes about his childhood, family life in
Alabama, as well as his early work as an Episcopal priest.
Francis describes his mother’s conversion as “a kairos, a Greek word for qualitative,
not quantitative time: a period in which something special happens.” He closed
our afternoon session by saying that his mother’s kairos “shaped future time for her, myself, my family, and who
knows else?” I’d say that the “who knows else” includes anyone privileged to
spend an afternoon with this engaging priest who made the cause for Civil
Rights legislation and fight for racial equality his kairos.
Photography by Victoria I. Sullivan
