My White Tribe

by Vic Sizemore

On July 7, 2016, I forced myself to watch the video of Alton Sterling’s son breaking down and crying, "Daddy," as his mom spoke to reporters about her husband’s death at the hands of the Baton Rouge police. The video was heartbreaking, but the endless cataract of online news almost immediately churned it under.

One of my daughter’s summer reading assignments for fall semester was Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Both of her older brothers had read it for English class as well. It was first published in 1945. In an autobiographical sketch, Wright speaks of the “dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set.” He says, “While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro’s skin … makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.” Reading Wright’s book, my daughter will get a glimpse into what it was like to be a black boy in the United States seventy years ago.

I never read Black Boy in school. In fact, I cannot remember being assigned a single black writer until I chose an African American Literature elective my junior year in college. I was raised in a place that was not only lily-white, but white with a red neck. No black people lived up the Elk River until a woman moved her black husband and mixed-race children into a trailer beside North 119, between Elkview and Herbert Hoover High School in Clendenin when I was young. From passing cars, people hurled slurs and rocks at the children as they tried to play in the yard. Kids laughed about it at school. Eventually someone burned a cross in the trailer’s front yard—that was the story going around—and the family moved away. Nonwhite people did not often venture up the Elk River, not willingly.

My world was even more circumscribed than redneck Elk River culture. I was part of a frightened tribe that hid inside the Baptist church and looked with suspicion at every passing fad, television show, and popular song. Everywhere and at all times, Satan was trying to sneak his subversive message into our homes. We had to be diligent.

White Evangelical Christians, by definition, could not allow nonwhite Christians to join the tribe. They did allow nonwhites to come around for worship and fellowship, within reason, as long as they behaved in an appropriately white-Evangelical way. Acceptable nonwhite Christians—born again and in doctrinal, political, and social agreement with my tribe—fit into two basic groups: black believers, and nonwhite-other-race believers. The only times I ever saw nonwhite-other-race believers up the Elk River was as an object lesson for one missionary or another, a curiosity to marvel over. This was the 1970s.

However, because a born again black family sent their children up the river to Elk Valley Christian School, I became good friends with several from the Black Believers tribe. I played football and soccer with them, chummed with them in the hallways and classrooms. What I didn’t understand back then was how difficult it was for Doug, Tammy, Donald, and Steve, riding up the Elk River from Charleston every day on the green EVCS school bus with kids Tammy, in a conversation many years later, called “country ass creekers.” Not a single day went by for them without racial taunts from open racists. In addition, there was the continuous stream of microaggressions from us who liked them and meant well.

On a long ride home from a football game in seventh grade, Donald and I sat together in the dark bus, outside lights flashing across our faces. The bus reeked of sweat and diesel, and the plastic bus seat in front of us was cracked and dry. I talked of a job I’d been doing since sixth grade, picking up garbage in the parking lot down the street in Elkview, at the Goody Shop. They paid me seventy-five cents and a milkshake of my choosing. I usually got cherry because it finished with a pile of chopped up maraschino cherries in the bottom, slippery and chewy and sweet enough to make your stomach hurt. Sometimes I brought my brother or a friend to help pick up all the trash, and the shop owners—they were the parents of a former classmate, from my days in public school—would pay  us in money and milkshakes. I remember them as kind and generous people.

Donald and I talked of other things, and eventually, because the bus ride from Ohio Valley Christian School was long on those old busses, we eventually fell silent and listened to the cheerleaders harmonizing beautifully, but for far too long, on the nana nananana part of Journey’s “Loving, Touching, Squeezing.”

“If I lived in Elkview,” Donald said after a long stretch, “we would do that Goody Shop job together, wouldn’t we?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We would.”

At that point, I felt a rush of deep affection for my friend. However, I knew even then, that life would be dangerous for Donald if he lived up in Elkview. I was not angry or outraged—I had no idea it could be any different—but I was deeply sad for my friend sitting on the bus there beside me.

Looking back, I see the green and white Elk Valley Christian School bus lumbering across the Ohio Valley, hitting I79 South back toward Elkview, West Virginia. Inside, the girls in their green cheerleading culottes, and boys in their grass-stained uniforms, flirt and sneak kisses and touch those secret, off-bounds body parts, just as teenagers have on busses since teenagers have been riding busses, and did on carts or in barns and woods before that, back into prehistory. On this bus, there were these two boys, one black and one white. The white boy was not rich—far from it; his father was a poor Baptist preacher in a poor place—but he had white skin and blue eyes. He had a free pass into a world barred from the black boy, no matter what he did to gain access.

I had the same affection for Steve, Doug, and Tammy that I had for Donald. They were in my core group of friends until I left Elk Valley Christian School trying to get away from oppression of the religious kind. I loved them, but I also I remember hearing white students say things like, “Hey man, who hit you and blacked your face?” and “What’s worse than a face full of zits? One blackhead.”

In 1955, a black boy named Emmett Till from Chicago made the mistake of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. White men dragged him from his cousin’s house in the middle of the night, strung him up in a barn, beat him, and gouged out one of his eyes. He was defiant, cursed the white men who tortured him, so they shot him dead, tied a seventy-pound fan to his neck with barbed wire, and threw his carcass into the river.

That’s what it was like for a black boy in 1955.

In 1958, Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell preached “Segregation or Integration, Which?”  In the sermon, he preached, “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line." He warned that integration "will destroy our race eventually.” For shock value, he added, “In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife." 

In the early nineties, I attended seminary at Liberty University where there were more South Koreans in my classes than African Americans. For all the rebranding, the black community had still not forgotten Falwell’s civil rights record. One of the black students was Hiawatha. He educated me. He told me to watch how people reacted to him, and I did, hanging back so their reactions wouldn’t be mitigated by the presence of a clean-shaven white guy in a tie. Indeed, people gave him nervous glances in convenience stores. The young white girls at school gave him wide nervous berth in the hallways. I was astonished. Hiawatha shrugged it off in weary resignation.

Hiawatha became president of the graduate student body after the faculty deemed the elected president unfit to serve because he had been divorced. A charismatic speaker, Hiawatha received invitations to preach all over the south, and was eventually extended an offer to come on staff at the seminary after graduation.

We discussed it over lunch one day, and he eventually said to me, “I don’t want to be their token black.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “They love you.”

“Yeah?” he said, looking straight into my eyes. “Let me try to date one of their daughters.”

Recently, after I’d watched the documentary about food deserts called A Place at the Table, I was being taxi-dad, driving kids around town. I discovered that a kid I know and see relatively often is not only poor, but experiences every day what is now euphemistically called “food insecurity.” Not incidentally, the kid is African American.

All three of my kids are musicians and the circles in which they move are as diverse as any you will find in Lynchburg, VA. They have formed friendships with their black peers. It could be heartening to see what appears to be Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of “little black boys and black girls … able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Outside of school, however, things can get awkward fast. The disparity is undeniable—even if it is uncomfortable to acknowledge. One side of town is booming economically due in large part to the torrent of federal financial aid money pouring into nonprofit Liberty University, where Donald Trump recently gave the graduation address. At the same time, Lynchburg’s poverty rate is abysmal—for whites it is nineteen percent, which is over four percent higher than the national average. For blacks in Lynchburg, the poverty rate is thirty percent. According to the City Council’s analysis, the poverty is intergenerational.

Just as it was with Donald and me, these kids are on a path that will likely split along racial lines as they grow into adulthood. While they are reaching an age at which they notice and show discomfort with these inequalities, they also encode poisonous systemic notions about race, wealth, merit, and opportunity.

Take opportunity: My children do not have limitless opportunities—we live on teachers’ salaries—but their family and social situations have placed them on a springboard that, if they choose to use it, will launch them into success. They will have to work hard, but their work will pay off, and there is a safety net if they fail once or twice. Not so for many of their friends on the other side of the racial divide. Where my kids find a springboard, these friends too often find a fence, and behind that a wall.

I get push back from members of my tribe on this. Because they do not want to the R label, they discuss this issue carefully. Why do I hesitate even now to use the word, when racism—individual, institutional, and systemic—is such a massive and undeniable problem?

Is racism undeniable? Not in my tribe. I inevitably get some variation on two defensive responses: “You are the one who is racist, because you think black people need handouts, can’t be successful on their own merit,” and, “It is not fair to take away what I have earned fair and square and give it to someone else who refuses to work.” Race is always close to the surface in these discussions. In an online argument, one of my tribe—a member of my family—wrote to me, "Excuses, blaming whites and one party voting will never allow the African American community to excel. Ditch Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and make some changes."

The root assumption of both these claims is that most everyone starts with a similar array of opportunities, and some have squandered theirs, or at least not worked quite hard enough. This is simply not the case. In “The Case for Reparations”, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to the point. He writes, that, “America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it.” It is not ancient history either. We live in an America, “in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.”

I do not want my children growing away from their black friends, but I fear it will happen. I do not want them to grow into the advantaged Monopoly players who will someday run into these childhood friends in line at the movie theater and assume they are better off—which is nearly a statistical certainty—because they are smarter and have worked harder. I do not want their black friends—bright, beautiful, and talented kids—to circumscribe their dreams as experience is teaching them every day that they must.

During the winter of 2014, we were at my parents’ house for Christmas. They were both old and feeble. My mother had Alzheimer’s, though they had not told us yet, though we could tell she was getting forgetful. My parents are still Fundamentalist Baptists; more topics of discussion are potential sources of conflict now than are not. We sit cringing, waiting for comments about Muslims killing Christians, or gays trying to take away religious liberty. This particular Christmas, making small talk in their living room while we waited for my brother and sister to arrive with their families, dad asked me about my community college teaching.

“You teach a lot of black students?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “I do.” Some of my composition classrooms are over fifty percent black.

“They struggle a lot more than the other students don’t they,” he said. It was not a question.

I went into a monologue about all of the students I teach, the economic and social conditions under which many of them have to cobble together a college education, the challenges they face. He looked at me blankly and nodded. It was clear I was talking to myself.

Flipping through their new Elkview Baptist Church directory, on one of the ministry team pages, the men who run the sound booth stood proudly for their picture. One—a man I had gone to high school with—wore a tee shirt with the Confederate flag emblazoned across his chest. The caption: If you think this is hate, you need a history lesson. I pointed it out to my sister. She shook her head.

My mom asked our oldest son Evan about his life, and he talked about school and marching band and his girlfriend. She was interested in the girl, so Evan pulled out his phone to show her a picture. Evan’s girlfriend was in marching band with him. He was a drummer and she was in color guard. She was also Asian. My mom looked hard at the picture and said, “Oh.” She said, “Is she a dark girl?”

He looked at me, his eyes wide, somewhere between bemused and astonished. I shook my head, and he understood. Let it go. How can you possibly call it out every single time? Why would you ruin Christmas by being bristly? Anyway, she’s old, what good would it do?

What good does it ever do? The response I saw from my tribe to the murder of nine black worshipers in their church in Charleston, SC was not encouraging. They were angry and they were outraged—outraged not because nine human beings were dead, but that people were calling for the Confederate flag to come down. People who attended Elk Valley Christian School and were, as I was, friends with Doug, Tammy, Steve and Donald posted Confederate flags to their Facebook pages, just above diatribes and cartoons disparaging President Obama. No mention of the nine dead. I was dumbfounded in the face of it.

As 2015 ended, the news filled with reports that a grand jury had decided not to indict the police officer who gunned down a twelve-year-old boy with a BB gun. He was a big boy, one witness said, and scary. He was a black boy.

In August of 2016, a blistering report from the Justice Department outlined a culture of racial bias in the Baltimore police department after all the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray were acquitted of any charges. This followed similar reports coming out of Seattle, Chicago, and Ferguson, MO. Members of my white tribe posted videos of police officers pulling over black people and giving them ice cream, and called this evidenced that black people were overreacting, being too sensitive.

I watched the news of Alton Sterling’s death at the hands of the police, and wondered what has changed. I saw his boy weeping uncontrollably. I heard him call out, “Daddy.” He was a black boy. Summer, 2016.

In 2017, White nationalism has roared into the public square, commandeering the American flag to fly alongside the Confederate flag as symbols of the real—white—America. The concerted efforts at black voter suppression continue, now at the national level led by the President’s own executive action. The Attorney General is dismantling the checks on abuses in the criminal justice system and rescinding the previous administration’s directive that the Justice Department begin to disengage from the for-profit prison industrial complex. He is ramping up the war on drugs with its racially discriminatory laws. His Justice Department will begin suing colleges and universities, on behalf of white (and Asian) people, over affirmative-action admissions policies. This is what making America great again looks like to my tribe.

Yesterday, up the road from my hometown, in Charlottesville, VA, Richard Spencer led a crowd of white nationalists who carried torches and chanted Nazi slogans. They were protesting the slated removal of a Confederate statue—or maybe it was the Festival of Cultures happening in the same park, which celebrates the rich cultural diversity of the city. It looked for all the world as if they were trying to take the United States back to the time when Richard Wright wrote of not being able to walk in a white neighborhood without fear. Then again, maybe less has changed than I want to believe.

The city council in my town recently held an open community meeting called Poverty to Progress. I attended the breakout session on education where citizens brainstormed ways to help underserved kids in our city meet the many educational challenges they face. My wife attended the housing session, as her teaching and research involves service learning in the poorest downtown neighborhoods.

I volunteer with a nonprofit called WordWorks and we tutor the children in these neighborhoods in language arts and creative writing. I also see my teaching at the community college as a way to work directly for the causes of racial and economic justice. It is embarrassingly little; I could do more.

Because I am white, I could easily disengage. By default, I could move in circles no more diverse than those of my youth up the Elk River. I could still talk a good liberal game at parties, decry the actions of the present regime, and forget all about it on the way home to my white neighborhood where I will sleep without fear. My black friends and acquaintances—my black students—do not have that luxury. I remember what John Stewart said in the wake of the Ferguson unrest. “I guarantee you that every person of color in this country has faced an indignity, from the ridiculous, to the grotesque, to the sometimes fatal,” he said. For them, “race is there and it is a constant. You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.”

Vic Sizemore’s fiction and nonfiction is published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, Connecticut Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, [PANK] Magazine, Silk Road Review, Reed Magazine, Eclectica, and elsewhere. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award and has been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and two Pushcart Prizes. Sizemore teaches creative writing at Central Virginia Community College.

The Holy Fool in Winter

 by Vic Sizemore

My sister Alma, my brother Vaughn, and I have converged on mom and dad’s house to see if the danger is real. Might dad snap and stab mom with a kitchen knife?

The rain has let up, but the sky is dark and low. From where I sit in mom and dad’s living room, I am looking down Route 119 toward Coonskin Park, which is visible on the other side of the Elk River. The picture window is a gray slab splashed with the blacks and greens of wet trees along the mud-brown river. An occasional car hisses past on the wet road.

It smells like Christmas inside, though it is April. I stopped at Kroger on the way in and grabbed two rotisserie chickens—they are heavy on the sage and rosemary today—a pound of roasted red potatoes, and another pound of roasted Brussels sprouts. Mom cannot cook anymore, and dad was an old-school Baptist preacher, so cooking was never a part of his description—except for scrambled eggs now and then; when we visited, he used to yell out through the sleeping house that he was cooking eggs as if he were throwing a party.

For the past several years, my sister Alma and I have loaded up supplies and done the holiday cooking here, but even this is petering out. The kitchen is emptied of knives sharp enough to easily use for violence. The chicken is tender enough to tear off the bone with forks. That will have to do.

Two nights ago, dad called mom’s best friend in the middle of the night and asked her to come quickly—he couldn’t stop obsessing over the kitchen knives and he was afraid he was going to hurt mom. Understandably, she asked him how she could be sure he wouldn’t hurt her. He assured her he wouldn’t. In the end, Vaughn, who still lives within thirty minutes of them, drove over, met the friend in the driveway, and accompanied her inside.

          One day later, here we all sit in mom and dad’s living room. We are circled as if for Christmas, only without the kids fidgeting to get through dad’s preacher shtick before opening gifts. I sit on a dining room chair in front of the fireplace. To my right, mom’s best friend leans back on a dining room chair with her ropy, athletic arms crossed. To the right of her, mom sits on a dining room chair as well. Then dad, in his blue-gray recliner, and then Vaughn and Alma, and my brother-in-law Mike, squeezed onto the couch below the picture window.

          The oldest of us, Alma starts the conversation, and eventually tells dad we are at a loss as to what to do. Was he still obsessing over knives? Vaughn had taken the kitchen knives out of the house, but there are scissors, and letter openers—dad’s workbench down in the garage is covered with hazardous tools. If he is going to hurt mom with something sharp, confiscating the kitchen knives is not going to do much good. Alma asks him for a second time if he actually thought of doing something to mom with the knives, and if so, what.

Dad has his recliner folded closed and sits on edge leaning slightly forward, as if ready to jump up and flee. After a long pause, he says, “No.” “I just couldn’t stop thinking about the knives. I worried that I might start thinking about it.”

          “So you weren’t actually tempted to hurt her?” Vaughn asked.

          Dad nodded, his eyebrows pinched down like a boy in trouble. He was the center of attention, which was usual. All our lives he had been the center of attention, at church, or group meetings, reunions, family gatherings, pool parties. He was always speaking up, and the man stayed on message to the point of obsession, trying to steer the focus of every event or meeting to one single thing: you need Jesus, and if you already have him, don’t forget the rest of the world needs him too.

Just four months earlier we sat circled with children and spouses in this very room on these very chairs for dad’s Christmas routine. He tried to lead us in singing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night,” and “It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” his strong preacher voice carrying the melody, mom accompanying him in her clear alto. She enunciated all the correct lyrics—she could not remember her grandchildren, but Alzheimer’s had not yet started corrupting her hymn files.

No one else felt like singing, but the preacher pressed on—he’d had plenty of unresponsive congregations over the years. Plant the seed, and let the Lord take it from there, you can’t know what kind of soil your seeds are landing on. After the hymns, dad read the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2, all the way to verse 20 where the shepherds all return home, “glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.”

          In lieu of the usual mini sermon, he pulled out a piece of glossy paper snipped from a magazine, and read from it a prose poem-like thing about Jesus designed to convince us that every pursuit in the world, if not done to win people to Jesus, was bullshit. Remarkably, the poem managed to get all of our professions in—military, law, teaching, economics, writing—so that, but for the glossy magazine page from which he read, he could have penned it himself. I’d been lectured directly from the pulpit enough in my childhood and youth. I pursed my lips and waited through this part, aimed at me: “He never wrote a book, yet more books have been written about him than any other man in history…”

          “He can’t turn off the preacher,” we used to say of our dad. That is what he was to us, the preacher, whether he was behind the pulpit or driving downtown to Shoney’s Big Boy after Sunday morning church. He spoke in Bible verses and aphorisms, his clear, strong preacher voice carrying to all in the vicinity.

As we packed up to leave his house after Christmas, he said, “Thanks for stopping in, folks,” as if we were just friendly acquaintances.

We could have easily said, “Goodbye, preacher,” with a smiling handshake. It would have felt more natural than filing past them like a receiving line, giving awkward hugs.

During this family meeting to figure out what to do about dad’s knife obsession, Mike has sat silently down at his tablet. Toward the end, he breaks in and says, “Everything I’m reading says that whatever the focus of the obsession is—knives are not uncommon—that’s not the real problem. Something else is causing the anxiety.”

          We follow that, ask the preacher what he feels anxious about. Yes, mom has Alzheimer’s and is in decline; yes, they went to a support group which, instead of helping, gave dad a glimpse into what could be his future as she declined, and it scared the living shit out of him. Also, yes, mom can no longer run the household—plan meals, shop, cook, wash dishes, do laundry—which she had done as dutifully as any Baptist preacher’s wife ever has. Dad is retired and has plenty of time for these chores, yet the thought of learning all this woman’s work fills him with dread. Although he still travels all over to preach, church people have been bringing them meals three times a week.

He has not been able to preach recently, and this, we discover, is the real problem. Without a ministry, his life has no value. “I feel useless,” he says.

“Isn’t taking care of mom a ministry?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I consider it a privilege to minister to your mother in this way.” As he says it, his brow stays knit into its deep wrinkles and his eyes do not meet anyone else’s.

In his book God, Guilt, and Death, Merold Westphal writes of the believer’s ambivalence toward God. Ambivalence begins with the awakening to the “ontological poverty of the believing soul.” In short, if there is an Ultimate Other, who is not contingent and upon whom all existence depends, then by comparison, I, the center of my own observable universe, am really worth nothing at all. My very existence is less than shit.

If this is true, then the only way I can give my existence meaning is to figure out how to tap into this Ultimate Other—I must find God. The realization is expressed in phrases such as this one from a Baptist invitational hymn I sang countless times:

Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way

Thou art the potter, I am the clay

Mold me and make me, after thy will

While I am waiting, yielded and still

In another stanza, worshipers tell God, “Hold o’er my being absolute sway.” From our earliest years in Sunday school we are taught to say, “He must increase, I must decrease,” a mantra that only brings our attitudes into plumb with the already-established reality of our nothingness before the Ultimate Other.

          Add to this ontological poverty the notion that whatever measly existence we do have disgusts God, and you have dad’s religion. He grew up in a home marked by tragedy, bitterness, and booze. When he and his parents heard the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching at the Brethren church, they knew it to be true. They understood that, as Jonathan Edwards preached, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you … looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire...” In a novel, I once imagined an obsessed soul winner’s vision of the world as:

a meaty mass of human flesh sprang from the earth and rolled like a swollen creek down a mountain crevice—anguished faces, flapping arms and legs, twisting, churning torsos. Then, off a cliff as high as Hawk’s Nest, they hurtled for a brief instant into the sunlight, and then tumbled over themselves, screaming and crying, into the dark and craggy gorge below. Endless bodies continuously tumbling over the edge like a great rushing waterfall, their souls sprayed like spume out into misty air and disappeared into eternity—into eternal torment and flame.

Dad’s parents knew that they were indeed sinners in the hands of an angry God. Yet they were also eternal souls, of infinite value to God. In Mark 8:36, Jesus says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” World here is the Greek cosmos. The implication is that one human soul, since it is eternal, is worth more than the entire cosmos, the whole space/time/matter creation, which is passing away and will end.

In another piece of fiction, I recounted a story I’d once heard in Sunday school about how long the unsaved would burn in hell:

A bird lives on the moon. Every one thousand years this bird comes down to earth and pecks one sand grain from a rock the size of the Empire State Building. It gets one tiny grain and flies with it back to the moon. One thousand years later, it comes and gets another grain. And so on plucking one grain every thousand years. After that bird has moved the whole, massive rock and rendered it a pile of sand on the moon, the time spent would still not be equal to one second of eternity.

If living human beings who die “without Christ” really do burn in excruciating torment for eternity, nothing could ever be as important as saving a single soul. Nothing.

My dad got a heavy dose of this message at ten years of age when his parents accepted Christ and his home transformed from booze and fighting to peace and Jesus. Seeing this, he surrendered to Jesus as well, and determined to share this good news far and wide. Preaching the gospel so that, like the Apostle Paul, he “might by all means save some,” became his entire life and identity. Out of high school at sixteen, he left home for the newly established Appalachian Bible Institute. That was in 1957 or 1958, and his jaw has been set on this mission ever since. It is not just his calling, but the very substance of his existence, nothing less than his bid for immortality—not as a measure of time, as trusting Jesus gives eternal life, but as a quality of being. His air-hollow, empty being was filled with the heft of God.

When my wife and I announced our wedding date a few years ago, dad was not sure he could make the ceremony. He had a preaching gig and he could not get out of it. It came as a surprise to the woman preaching the ceremony, but not to me. Close to fifty years earlier, dad had missed his own sister’s wedding for a preaching gig. Alma, Vaughn, and I have reminisced about how our childhood was absent dad-the-father and chock full of dad-the-preacher. He passed out tracts, started up conversations with the sole purpose of setting people up for the big ask: “If you were to die right now, do you know…?”  Talking to mom’s friend on the phone—the one he had called in the midst of his breakdown—Alma mentioned that we didn’t remember him being around much. Plainspoken and brutally honest, mom’s friend said, “You don’t have to tell me. I was there while she was home and he was out saving the world.”

When he retired in 2006, we assumed he would have a rough transition into retirement. He had only ever been a preacher. Our worries were premature. He found ways to keep preaching. He went on at Appalachian Bible College as staff evangelist. He traveled all over West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, preaching the Word in season and out. He was ever more urgently seeking out preaching gigs. We changed our language about dad in retirement: it was not so much that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself—take up golf, or fly fishing—but that he wouldn’t know who he was. We predicted an existential meltdown for dad without his preaching.

Even during this intervention, brought on by his knife-obsessed meltdown, dad frets aloud that he has been forced by this episode to cancel one preaching engagement, and stresses that he might have to miss another one on Wednesday.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says.

“The first thing you need to do,” Alma says, “is start taking the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication your doctor gave you.”

“I don’t like that stuff,” he tells her. “It makes me woozy and I can’t drive.” Mom cannot drive him. If he can’t drive, he can’t preach.

At last we get him to acknowledge that he simply has to take the medication, and that he must see a psychiatrist for an evaluation—not an easy thing to get out of him. He does not want to see anyone who disagrees with his theology. (How can they help him if they do not have spiritual insight, cannot see through to the eternal tragedy—comedy, I guess, if you consider the ending—that has shaped his entire life.)

“This is not about philosophy or theology,” Alma says. “They are medical doctors.”

After some discussion along these lines, he agrees to do it. From there, we make practical arrangements to keep mom safe and fed in the meantime. After that, we break up the meeting. Mom’s friend springs up and strides to the kitchen where she makes a plate of food for mom. Dad follows and makes himself a plate. I pick at a couple roasted Brussel’s sprouts halves. Garlicky and bright with lemon, they are delicious, and my stomach again cinches in hunger.

Mom sits in the dining room eating with her friend. Dad goes down the hallway and returns with his journal. Alma looks through it to get an idea of when the obsession started and how concerned we should be. She calls me over to look. On one page, along with some Fox News-fueled hand wringing about Obama and the moral decline of the country, are the words, “The fields are white unto harvest.”

At eighty, he is still crying out in prayer, “Here am I Lord. Send me.”

Hungarian-American writer Lawrence Dorr has a fine collection of stories called A Bearer of Divine Revelation. In the last story, “The Angel of His Presence,” an old religious man takes in his enemy, feeds him, cares for him, does not allow his own people to harm this man, their sworn enemy. The religious old man lives “in total abnegation of the self ... amidst the running tide of killings and hate, praying for the peace of God for all.” He does not just pray for peace for all; he lives it, loves his friends and enemies alike while war rages all around him. He ignores the tribalism and hatred because he sees through his immediate surroundings to a deeper, spiritual reality. He lives his life by this spiritual light. He is a holy fool.

The Russian term for this kind of holy fool is yourodivyje, literally “fool for Christ”—Katerina in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov calls Alyosha a holy fool; Prince Myshkin in The Idiot is a holy fool. Dorr’s example is the historical Nicholas of Pskov. Nicholas stood before Ivan the Terrible after the Czar had massacred thousands, destroyed homes and farms, and sacked monasteries. Nicholas castigated Ivan, who could have him killed with no more than a nod, to his face and then, for emphasis, slapped a bloody piece of raw meat into his bare hand.

In the short-lived HBO show Carnivale, near the end of the second and final season, Sampson, a midget who runs the carnival, talks to Ben Hawkins, a gifted kid—a holy fool—who is out to stop the evil Brother Justin. Ben is determined to carry out his mission although it is almost certain to kill him.

“What the hell is it with you people?” Sampson asks.

“What do you mean?” Ben says.

“You know what I mean,” Sampson says. “You, Jesus, John the Baptist, the whole bunch of you—all fired up to throw your lives away.”

          It is only throwing your life away if what you believe turns out to be untrue. The holy fool lives by a different reality. I remember reading stories about holy fools who threw rocks at the homes of people they knew to be righteous and left the homes of evildoers alone. It makes no sense until you discover that they are seeing into a spiritual realm where demons roam. They skulk around the homes of the righteous because they are barred from entering; they are nowhere to be seen at the evil homes because the doors were flung open to them and they are inside.

Last year, dad and mom went and saw the movie Son of God, in an actual movie theater—something that was forbidden in our youth in Elkview; were they loosening up in their old age? Dad was very much moved by the movie, called me on the phone and went on and on about it.

What I had read about the movie was that movie Jesus was a sexy European man, with long brown hair and straight nose. The Satan character—cut from the movie, but clearly present in the miniseries The Bible that came before it, and from which some of the footage in Son of God was borrowed—had been made up to be a dead ringer for the despised and feared President of the United States. I found that fact alone disgusting, but I was also confident the movie was the worst kind of kitsch.

I listened silently, not wanting to ruin the experience for dad. He went on to talk of his health problems for a while, and eventually said, “Keep us in your prayers.”

“I’ll be thinking about you,” I said. Our two visions of the world no longer meet.

“You need to pray too,” dad commanded into the phone in his preacher voice.

I waited for the moment to pass so we could move on to other things.

“Are you on speaking terms with the Lord?” he asked.

“That’s not a conversation I’m going to have with you,” I said.

We waited through an embarrassed silence. We would have been using the same words to talk about vastly different realities—it would have been a pseudo-conversation at best.

Dad wrapped things up cordially but abruptly after this. I’m sure he was praying for my soul before he had even set down his phone. I was in danger of hell because I no longer believed essential truths about God and humanity, life and history.

          Apparently, many people still believe what dad does, or at least say they do. According to a recent Gallup poll, 42% of Americans believe God created the world in its present form sometime between six and ten thousand years ago; 76% of Americans believe the Bible is the actual holy words of God. Polls by both Gallup and the Pew Research Center show that four in ten Americans believe that all humanity has descended, with a sin nature, from a literal Adam and Eve who were created full-grown, Adam from dirt, Eve from Adam. Another poll by Life Way Research found that 61% of Americans believe in a literal burning hell, and 53% believe that salvation from that hell comes through Jesus Christ alone.

          The real question might be why there aren’t more people like dad, obsessed with saving souls. If you truly believe that people are dying and going to hell—to eternal burning torment, don’t forget—and you believe they must accept Christ as their Lord and Savior to avoid that fate, and that Jesus has tasked you with trying to save them, you have two choices: disobey God’s command or win souls to Christ. What else could possibly be more important than winning souls?

After our family meeting about dad’s knife obsession, each one of us calls him within a few days to encourage him to see a psychiatrist as he promised he would. After a week, I call to see how things are going. The preacher admits that he has not called his doctor about seeing a psychiatrist yet, but promises he will.

Instead of seeing a psychiatrist, he sits in his own basement for informal counseling with one of his church deacons—a very nice guy, and, coincidentally, a retired butcher. When we are not satisfied with that, he lines up a few sessions with a licensed counselor—one with his degree from a Southern Baptist seminary. The counselor tells him he is fine.

A couple weeks later, Alma calls him. The anti-anxiety meds have alleviated his knife obsession, which is good since he is still there at the house with mom, who is herself doing better on new Alzheimer’s meds. Not what we wanted, but it will have to do.

Then, several days later, Alma calls. “Dad stopped taking his meds,” she tells me.

“Why?” I say. “I thought they were helping.”

“They made him woozy,” she said. “He couldn’t preach.”

She tells me he is, as we speak on the phone, driving up the Elk River with his guitar, which he uses to lead singing—ladies ready to accompany him on piano are dwindling—in the back seat. Even if no one repents and turns their life over to Christ—which is ever more unlikely since the churches he visits are peopled with oldsters who have been listening to gospel sermons about as long as dad has been preaching them—he is going to preach the gospel, woe unto him if he does not.

This holy fool will preach until the day he can preach no more. Maybe when he can preach no more he will snap, find something sharp, and harm mom. It is hard to imagine because he has been a gentle, nonviolent man his entire life. Maybe, the day he steps from behind that pulpit for the last time—a day that looms ever closer—the preacher will begin to empty out. Empty, he will wither. Withered, he will dry and crumble. Crumbled, he will blow away and scatter in the breeze. No longer connected by his purpose to the Ultimate Other, he will exist no more and be gone.

Vic Sizemore's writing is published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, Connecticut Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, PANK Magazine, Silk Road Review, Reed Magazine, Superstition Review, Ghost Town, Entropy, Eclectica, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel Eternity Rowboat are published or forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Letters and elsewhere. Sizemore's fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award and has been nominated for Best American Non-required Reading and two Pushcart Prizes. Visit him at his website.