AN AFTERNOON WITH FRANCIS

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

“A SENSE OF SELF AND PLACE”

One of the publications to which I subscribe is a magazine entitled Cooks Illustrated, a periodical that contains recipes, information about cooking utensils and other products, tips about processing food — a panoply of food fare contributed by three dozen test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Members of this staff test recipes over and over again until they achieve food excellence and also test kitchen equipment and food brands. My favorite articles in the magazine are editorials written by founder and editor Christopher Kimball. The editorials usually contain reflections on how to live a good life or highlight New England (Vermont) people and their way of life.

This morning while I had to sit still and treat an ailing back and leg with light therapy, I re-read an old editorial by Kimball that incited a lot of pondering in me. Although Kimball focused on the character of Vermonters, his musings, written in a style much like the essayist E.B. White, would appeal to a universal audience (in my opinion). The editorial was entitled “The Golden Rule,” and he prefaced his musings with: “It isn’t easy to scratch the surface of a Vermonter…” and concluded with the thought: “We often measure life by the number of new experiences we accumulate…Vermonters measure what remains steady…each of us is expected to measure up in the eyes of our neighbors. That’s the golden rule in country living, a sense of self and place in service of others…”

This editorial in a food magazine struck me as one that describes people who live in my first home of New Iberia, Louisiana. Recently, when a flood occurred in Acadiana, I went on Facebook to find out whose homes had been flooded so I could offer prayers and, in several cases, the use of my home, which wasn’t flooded. On Facebook, I read numerous accounts of the characteristic banding together of those in my home town — a place that already had the reputation of unifying “in service to others” in the event of disaster. The history of Acadiana is alive with the courage and steadfastness of those exiled from their native Nova Scotia by the British as far back as the 18th century.

During the recent flooding, when I read about the unifying acts of those who weren't flooded — how they helped their neighbors — I remembered the courage and steadfastness shown by everyone in Acadiana during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Lily. Victims of the flooding fled from New Orleans and environs to New Iberia for help, where they knew they’d find the unique hospitality for which Acadiana is noted.

After the recent deluge, those who had escaped the flooding went in groups, often in boats, to rescue flood victims, to help tear down the sheet rock in flooded homes and to reconstruct interiors, carry out sodden furniture, cook gumbos and étouffée for evacuated friends and family. With typical joie de vivre, they gave thanks that the flooding had spared many of them by cooking good food, storytelling, and holding rosary sessions and church services of thanksgiving. One of the unique ways they showed their gratitude for lives spared was through collecting rocks from the countryside, painting them with cheerful pictures — flowers, trees, people’s faces, anything that showed a “sense of place” for their lovely bayou country home. They shared these objects of art with their friends on Facebook. I don’t know where the repository for the rocks is located, but I hope to find out when I travel back to bayou country this month.

No, Vermonters aren’t the only people who measure what remains steady; however, reminders from editors like Kimball certainly seem timely in light of the storms and hurricanes that disrupt us this time of the year…not to mention the political storms that have made all of us uneasy about the country’s leadership. But I’ll be happy to return to bayou country to stay awhile among south Louisianans who have “a sense of self and place in service to others.”

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan, taken from my recent book of poetry, A Slow Moving Stream.

BIRDING

Most of the time when a person suffers from pulled muscles or a back out of alignment — the signs of aging — she’s inevitably given a tube of balm along with a treatment by a physical therapist or a chiropractor, perhaps a massage specialist. The tube is a receptacle of magic bullets reputed to stem the tide of pain and aging.

Yesterday, after four or five days of treatments, including the tube of balm, for an unrelenting attack to my back and leg, I went out on the front porch and applied my personal brand of balm: watching birds splashing in a freshly-filled bird bath under the towering hemlock in my yard. Hidden away in the understory were several species that flew in for a bath and directed my attention away from ailments — nuthatches, tufted titmice, a Carolina wren, and, finally, the premier birds of my notice: both male and female cardinals. Absent from the line-up were my favorite crow friends who’ve made only sporadic appearances on the Mountain this year.

The smaller perch birds stayed busy pushing each other out of the bath while the cardinals looked on in disdain and never entered the water, but they managed to make themselves heard by their “cheer, cheer” voices from a thicket near the drive. As I watched, the cardinals would swoop out of their lair and land near the bird bath but avoided disturbing the perch birds, just as the perch birds avoided these aggressive red beauties that are confident of their territory near a tangle of blackberry bushes.

I’ve written many poems about birds — crows, cardinals, sparrows, and hawks. The hawk was a powerful figure clinging to a telephone wire on my drive to work in Lafayette, Louisiana every day for years. It hovered over the sugarcane fields, waiting for a chance to swoop down on field mice. The hawk also appeared as the totem for a character in Martin Finds His Totem, my young adult book about a boy traiteur in Cajun country. On my daily drive, the mornings that the hawk wasn’t clinging to the wire, I often felt a bit anxious, as if the day lacked a solidness I couldn’t explain.

I’m not the type of bird watcher who has a bird list, so I guess I wouldn’t be bold enough to declare myself an official bird watcher, but I’m an appreciative watcher. Birds are spiritual symbols for me — symbols of comfort, peace, freedom, and joy, especially when the body has failed to behave as it should — or maybe shouldn’t — at age 81. If I’d written a poem instead of this blog today, it would’ve been entitled “Bird Balm.”

Here’s one of my very early, descriptive bird poems that I finally published in The Holy Present and Farda. It’s entitled “Unfinished Song”:

“Twisted fingers of trees,

filagrees of ruin,

taunt the false spring.

Robins and grackles

rally for season to commence

and sparrows twit further on,

perfect intervals before the resurrection.

They mock wire-sitting blackbirds

besting a wind that trembles
like memory rustling in stunted cane.

Farther in the woods

the sun streams through

labyrinths of branches.

Vultures circle wax myrtle.

Starlings arrange themselves in waiting,

faking the downstroke,

chorus witness to a new beginning.

Sometime before dark, near water,

hawks glide overhead, sent off course

to circumvent an anxious season —

the unfinished lark.”

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan