Old Glory (58 page)

Deedie met me at the church door.

“You mustn’t be embarrassed, now, if the spirit takes me and I get to do some shouting.…”

“Okay.”

“Maybe you’ll shout too.”

“Haven’t you heard about the Englishman’s stiff upper lip?”

“When I come to my church, I want to be
free.
”

The Middle Baptist Church had two great organs, mounted on either side of a raised dais where the elders sat in swiveling captain’s chairs. The organs kept up a continuous conversation with each other, whispering gently through the prayers, then calling at the tops of their voices for the gospel songs, saving their most intricate dialogue for the preaching, when they debated like a pair of orators over the words of the minister. The choir, in blue-and-cream robes, made a wide semicircle behind the organs and the club of elders; beyond the choir, a pair of heavy theatrical curtains were parted on an illuminated stage with a painting of Christ as its backcloth.

“I want to see Jesus!” we sang. “I want to see Jesus!”

The choir swayed and clapped. The elders, in enviably sharp suits, lounged in their chairs, legs crossed, letting just one foot keep time with the music. Everyone had a silk handkerchief blooming from his top pocket.

“I want to see Jesus!”

“Sure ’nough!”

“Yes, I do!”

“I want to see Jesus!”

There was a flurry of ecstatic shouts. The swoons and trances were getting under way. A woman went down in the choir, and was ritually fanned back to this world by her neighbors. I looked across at Deedie. She was clapping and stamping her feet. I had my order paper ready, but was hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to use it. Little boys of six and seven, dressed in exact miniature replica of the resplendent elders on the platform, were running between the pews. Deedie quieted them with an automatic, absentminded authority, and I remembered that she was a social worker in the city housing department.

It was the preacher’s turn. Passionately, expertly, he nursed us through to a climax. He made a vivid drama of his own beginning, standing limply, microphone in hand, waiting for the spirit to seize him.

“Oh … yeah … wait a little time. Wait a little. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Wait a little time … the Lord will pay …”

“Sure he will!”

“Amen!”

Then, in a voice that seemed to come out fogged and bewildered from deep in his solar plexus, he murmured: “I’m going to tell about Jesus. Going to … tell about Jesus! I may not be able to preach like Paul. I’m a weak man. I don’t have the power.… I … Oh—Jesus!” And he was away. God’s word was a two-handed sword cutting right and left, and he was its embodiment. Bald, brown, with sideburns and mustache, he bulged and shook with the force of his message. His face ran with sweat. He cried out, he fell to his knees. He was revived by the fanning surge of the organs. The congregation chanted, wept, screamed, swept from holy orgasm to holy orgasm.

For the first few minutes, I had been part of it; then something in me recoiled and I went suddenly frigid. I had no place here at all. I was white, I was an agnostic, I was a foreigner. I studied the order of worship and surreptitiously turned my wrist over so that I could see the dial of my watch. I seemed to be looking at the contortions of the preacher through the wrong end of a telescope. His body was thrashing like an amoeba in a droplet of water on a slide.

He came back to human size again right at the end of his address. The knot of his tie was halfway down his chest. He was mopping his face with a handkerchief which had fallen on the floor; and he was staring, smiling, at me.

“Brothers and sisters—I heard yesterday that we got a visitor in church this morning. When I woke up, I got to thinking … he’s from England … he’s white. And I hear a voice saying in my ear, ‘Brother—today when you preach you got to be so so-phis-ticated. You got to be so cool. You got to be so reason-able. Ha, ha, ha!’ ” He was impersonating a Devil’s chuckle. “And now look! I done preach just like I am!”

“Yes, sir!”

“That’s right!”

“So he did!”

“Because I can’t be nobody but who I am!”

“Hallelujah!”

No, no, preacher.
I
couldn’t echo that hallelujah. You offered me the microphone so that I could say a word to the congregation. I shook my head. Here, though, is what I think I should have said:

But that, though, belongs to the vainglory of the
esprit d’escalier
—the bold second thoughts on the front steps after the event is over. What actually happened was that I thanked the preacher for letting me visit his church. I said the singing was wonderful, the address moving, and I’d like to come again. Warmly holding each other’s hands, grinning like maniacs, we were both talking in our sleep.

T
 he river and
the city had merged into a blur in the slanting drizzle. Waterways Marine, a floating plaza of stores and offices, was moored off the slippery stones of the wharf. My boat had been winched up onto the deck of one of its supply vessels, and I was waiting to be taken on board the
Frank Stegbauer
, a southbound tow on which I was going to ride to Vicksburg. All the tows were late this morning. The radio operator kept on coming out of his office and changing their estimated times of arrival on a blackboard which mapped the movements of fleets out of Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, Greenville, New Orleans. The
Frank Stegbauer
had been expected at eight. Yesterday afternoon, I had heard that it was off New Madrid. It had been laying up in fog for much of the night, and now wasn’t due in Memphis before lunchtime. In the coffee lounge, relief bargemen and deckhands sprawled with their kitbags, watching the
Today
show and reading comics. It was clear that they didn’t share my own feeling of eager anticipation at getting onto a tow. They growled, cussed, and shifted irritably from ham to ham. For most of these men it would be fifty days before they would be home again: fifty days without a drink, with the shore severely out of bounds. Some had apparently done their fifty days’ worth of drinking last night. Small noises made them shudder. The whites of their eyes were stippled with blood.

I tiptoed out to look at Waterways Marine. A whole collection of industries had been assembled on the string of barge hulls that composed it. It was an employment exchange, supplying crews to the tow
fleets; it was an immense gas station, pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel every day into the tanks of the towboats. It was a wholesale grocery store and supermarket.

“Millions of dollars come into this city off the river,” said Mr. Tate, the manager; “and the city just don’t seem to notice.”

It was almost exactly the same line as I’d heard from the cotton factor and from the attorney in Cape Girardeau. The commercial life of the river was a well-kept secret. Its tonnage and money were huge; but where a single steamboat would have made its presence felt in town a hundred years ago, nowadays the tows passed through the city like undercover agents. A few bankers were in a position to measure the financial wake they left behind, but most of Memphis had simply forgotten that it was still a river town. The river gave it no particular cause to remember, and the city had withdrawn itself from the Mississippi because nearly all the memories it did have of the river were bad ones, of flood, fire, cholera and “Haul that barge, boy! Tote that bale!”

“I’m not complaining,” Mr. Tate said. “If too many folks got to know about the scale of our business down here, they might start trying to get their fingers in our pie.”

The
Frank Stegbauer
called in. It was off Loosahatchie Bar, and I went aboard the supply boat to meet it in midstream. A mile above the highway bridge, the tow swung around on the current and locked still, its engine thrashing the river behind it. Inching as cautiously as a pair of cat burglars on a pediment, the decks of the two vessels touched and held. My boat was swung onto the deck of the tow along with the frozen meat and vegetables, the mail, razor blades, newspapers and crates of Coke. Hoses were clamped to nipples on the towboat, and it fed for twenty minutes, suckled by the supply vessel on fuel and fresh water.

Up in the pilothouse I was introduced to Al the mate and Captain Mac and Chigger the deckhand. My attention, though, was distracted by the river itself. From this superior height of four balustraded decks, in the glassed-in warmth with its racks of electronic instruments, the Mississippi looked tame and shrunken. Shoaling waves that could have swamped my boat were innocent ripples. The wind and the rain simply added to the snuggery of the pilothouse and its family smell of coffee, waffles and polish. For a day at least, I was going to be able to look at boils, eddies and treacherously fast currents with genial condescension. From here I could put the river in perspective.

The
Frank Stegbauer
was pushing a small fleet for this part of the Mississippi; just nine barges, loaded with twelve million dollars’ worth of ammonia. As tows went, it was a tight little rig, as maneuverable as a taxicab. It also had the navigational advantage of being a pariah. When
other pilots saw chemical barges heading toward them downriver, they cleared the channel for them; no one wanted to risk collision with several thousand tons of poison gas.

In the afternoon it was Al the mate’s watch, and he steered the tow through weather that was thin, brown and greasy like cheap meat broth. Everything was a variant shade of tan: the low sky, the smudges of forested shoreline, the ruckled water. In the rain, other traffic on the river showed only as shadowy streaks in this wash of dirty sepia. A low sandbar changed into a tow, a tow into a line of ragged willows. Al combed his beard with a broken toothbrush and kept his eyes on the radar screen, where the river was as neatly mapped as on a chart. The dikes on our starboard side were laid out on the screen like the prongs of a fork, almost touching the faint glow in the center which was us.

“I suppose it must get a good deal easier after Vicksburg,” I said. “The dikes stop then, don’t they?”

“Below Vicksburg? Well … That’s, oh, Mile 437. Now, then. Mile 431, you got the Racetrack Dikes; Togo Island, 417; Yucatan, 410; Coffee Point, 405; Bondurant, 395; Cottage Dikes at 389; Spithead at 386 … Waterproof, 380 … and that about brings you down to Natchez. You want me to go on?”

I decided to keep my river expertise to myself in the future. We rumbled slowly on downstream, poised so high over the top of the engines that they made only a light churning sound under our feet. A pair of giant windshield wipers scraped backward and forward across the glass. Al reached for a plastic Ziploc storage bag from a pile at his side, undid his fly and took a leak into the bag, which he sealed and put on a shelf. He caught me watching him.

“I’m having me a pregnancy test,” he said. “I’m hoping for a girl.”

The tow was steered by a pair of parallel steel bars like the handles of a lawnmower. When we ran over a boil the bars shuddered, and one could feel the whole fleet wriggling in the water for a moment or two.

“You run into trouble with eddies yet?”

“I’ve steered clear of them so far.”

“That’s how you want to keep it. I’ve run tows bigger than this into eddies the wrong way, and been turned right around by them. I won’t fool with an eddy even in a towboat. Boils ain’t no problem, but eddies you got to watch.”

He pointed to a substantial stretch of forest on the Arkansas shore.

“See that willow plantation over there? In the springtime, when the river’s high, we’ll ride right over the top of those trees. Around April, that turns into a good piece of slack water. On an upstream run in high water, you won’t hardly use the channel at all. You’re hunting all the
time for slack water on the sides. If you know where to find it, you can knock days off a trip. Saves fuel, too.”

Al came from Caruthersville. He had worked as a carpenter before he started as a deckhand on the tows. As a riverman he could earn at least twice as much as he could on shore. Even Chigger, the youngest deckhand on the
Frank Stegbauer
, was making forty-eight dollars a day. Al was taking home the salary of a corporation executive—although “taking home” was not quite the right expression, since no one on a towboat saw much of home at all. The idea was that you worked thirty days on and fifteen off; in fact the working stretches were usually a lot longer. This was the fifty-second day of Al’s current trip. The only times he had left the boat had been to call his family from a pay phone on the levee. The crew was forbidden to go ashore in port. Ashore meant bars, and one drink could lose you your job.

“You must have worked out some system of brown-bagging.”

“If they hear there’s drink on a boat, the pilot loses his license. When he’s got that hanging over his head, he ain’t going to allow some dumbhead bargeman to snafu the whole rest of his life for a can of Bud.”

So the crew of the tow was as isolated as a capsule of astronauts. The rest of the world lay just half a mile to left or right. You could see it going by through the portholes almost within reach of your hand. Yet even the cities where the tows docked and refueled were unknown foreign places. Supply vessels came out from them; all the crew ever saw of them was their wharfsides, levees and floodwalls. The tow’s only means of contact with the outside were the marine radio and the black-and-white TV set in the pantry.