Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  POSTSCRIPT

  Guadalupe Reyes died on December 31, 2000.

  *Guadalupe Reyes’s daughter.

  God’s Shepherds

  Rev. Willie T. Barrow

  She is chairman of the board of Operation PUSH. It had originally been called Operation Breadbasket, founded by Rev. Jesse Jackson. She is seventy-five.

  I’M FROM A little farm in Burton, Texas, seventy-five miles from Houston. My daddy was a preacher. He pastored three churches for fifty years. Worked on a farm, had horses, cows, and chickens. He was Baptist, my mother was Methodist, and they got together, and chose the Church of God, and that’s what I am. It’s akin to Pentecostal. I was called to the ministry at age sixteen. I left Texas and stayed with my great-aunt in San Francisco, finished high school and college. And then went to Warner Pacific Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

  I was really wrapped up in the music ministry, in the street ministry, and the prison ministry. I spent my younger life visiting prisoners and caring for them, taking them toothpaste and toothbrushes, preaching to them. I used to preach on the street corners, Saturday evenings, had a choir, had an organist and a whole orchestra on 47th, 63rd, 39th Street . . . There were thousands of people just gathered to listen to the message. That’s where my ministry was, on the street. I preached that people can be transformed from the old life into a new life. I preached that you can live with yourself and with your neighbors. You don’t have to cheat, you don’t have to steal, you don’t have to lie. You can live a life of Christ. The youth hour in our church became bigger than the regular eleven A. M. service because we recruited and mobilized them from the streets, lifting young people.

  I came here in 1946, forty-four years ago. The labor movement was doing much of the work of the civil rights movement before Dr. King. The packinghouse workers union, many African-Americans worked there. The stockyards. That’s where I worked. I had a job packing sausage. I’d preach on Saturdays and Sundays. I used to stuff sausage and pack bacon and put Vienna sausages in cans. Before I did that, I had to work all the time. My parents weren’t able to send me to seminary, so I worked my way. Guess what I was? I was a welder. [Laughs] In Vancouver, Washington, during World War II. Vertical, overhead, and flat. I was a welder out here in this so-called man’s world.

  Of course, I joined the union—United Packing House Workers of America. Then I got involved in organizing. I was both a preacher and a labor organizer. After that, I joined the Indiana Reconciliation Movement. That’s when I went around the world and talked to Madame Binh—yeah, North Korea, South Korea . . . They wanted a black, they wanted a minister, and they wanted a woman so they found three in one! Then the civil rights movement, then Dr. King hired me. I worked for Dr. King eight years at SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Council]. Then came Operation Breadbasket—that became Operation PUSH.

  I got married in 1945. I married a guy from Belize, British Honduras. I had to adjust not just to a married life but to a different culture. When the doctors told me I couldn’t have a baby, we adopted two children. One’s dead now . . . Ten years later, I was on a mission to Jamaica. I had a whole two weeks to do preaching, so I thought I’d fast. After I came off that fast, I got pregnant. [Deep chuckle]

  I have a hundred and four godchildren. My husband is a Pisces and I’m a Sagittarius. I got all this fire. I just move all kind of ways. And Pisces is very slow, very passive, and very quiet. One of the outstanding characteristics that he had and possessed was he enjoyed me being me, he let me be me. He never stopped me from participating. My son became an entertainer, and he was gay. This was my natural son, Keith Barrow. He had extraordinary talent. Sometimes I think when the scientists get through researching gay people, they’re going to find that they are extraordinary, they’re geniuses, most of them.

  I really didn’t know it until other people around there, they said they saw symptoms. I didn’t know it until he was about eight years old. He went to college and got his PhD at twenty-two—this was at New York University. Keith wrote music and he got a big contract with Atlantic Records. Then he was getting ready to go to perform and he got real sick. Every time before he would go on stage, he would call me no matter where he was and ask me to pray with him. And I would pray with him. That night he called me, he said, “Mama, I don’t think I can make it—I’ve got to go to the doctor.” The doctor put him in the hospital. That’s when they detected he had HIV. I flew to New York, was with him in the hospital for over a month. And it went into AIDS like three years later. He was twenty-seven when he died.

  My husband died July the 7th—he’ll be dead two years. Keith died in 1983. He’s been dead over seventeen years ago. Me and my son, we were just very close. And now with him going, and my husband going after fifty-four years . . . Fifty-four years to the same man.

  My mother died very suddenly. She was out in the yard working and she felt real sick, came and laid down on the bed and died. She had a heart attack—she was sixty-two. I was a grown woman then. My father died, he was on his way to service, to church, and a drunk driver was driving and ran into him and killed him. I have seven brothers and sisters, and my oldest sister died at birth, and then my oldest brother, he’s dead. My middle brother is dead. My baby sister is dead. And my baby brother is dead. Nobody’s living but me and my older sister—she’s living in San Antonio. But the worst in all the deaths was the death of my son. It’s a strange hurt. It’s a hurt that you can’t scratch, it’s a pain that you can’t grunt it out.

  You can’t scratch, you can’t rub it. But I’m finding out how grief works. I’ve never done a lot of crying. Only after I leave my house, get in my car, it comes down, it just comes down on me. I think about my son, I think about my husband. My husband just had presence, and that’s what grieves me now. But the real grief all coming together affects me to the point that I don’t want to do nothing. Like some of the goals and aims that I have in life, I’m sluggish. That’s what I’m trying to cope with right now.

  Even seventeen years later, even two years later . . . Especially since I don’t have no other family and my husband is gone and my child is gone, I got to put my whole house in order. It’s difficult for me to make that start. It took me over a year before I could remove my husband’s clothing. It doesn’t diminish. And I’ve now finally got enough courage, aspirations to deal with his clothing. To even send the death certificates out that my husband is dead, I got to change the names. That kind of little business is very difficult. When I get really down low, I just go back to the Bible and I repeat those things that have kept me going. He promised us that He would be our mother, our father, our sister, our brother, and I just keep going over that. You promise to be with me. Keith is gone. Honey is gone. My husband—we called each other Honey. Now, Lord, I don’t have nobody but you, you’ve got to come and lift my spirit.

  I talk out loud. I just talk to the Lord. And I get refreshed in my spirit. And then I share a lot with my friends. I have friends who have lost children and who have lost husbands. So we share with each other. I have a list of people that I talk to that have lost their mates. I got their telephone number, I say, “I had you on my mind this morning. How you feeling?” Sometimes I call up those that I feel are much stronger. I say, “I need your help this morning.” And they’ll call me—just like the Fourth of July. They’ll call and say, “I know you’re going to miss Honey, and I just want you to know we’re here for you.” One of the things that I believe is that there’s a hereafter. And I try to live right. So even in my marriage, I never went to bed angry. If me and my husband had a problem, I would clear it up. We made a promise that we would never go to bed angry with each other. That’s why I don’t hold any grudges, I don’t carry any hate in my heart. I get it out. I say, “You know, what you said to me yesterday, I didn’t like it and I want you to know ’cause I got to try to go to sleep tonight.” [Chuckles] I keep a clear conscience. Because I believe if you want to go to Heaven, go to a place where you know that God is prepared for you,
things gotta be right.

  I believe the ultimate Heaven is where all good people will be. Ultimate Hell is where all bad people would be. But there is Heaven on Earth. When you’ve got trust, and loyal friends, and when you can help people that need your help, that’s Heaven—that’s Heaven. The most challenging words my son said to me were: “Mommy, don’t cry over me unnecessarily. I know you and I are close,” he says, “but remember the Scripture that Paul says. He said, ‘For me to live is death, but to die is to live again.’ Mama, if the Lord healed me right now, if I continue on earth, I may not be what I am today. If I die, I know I’m right. If I die now. But suppose I be left here for another thirty or forty years. I don’t know what I would turn out to be.” He said, “So, Mama, let me go. Don’t hold on to me. Let me go.” And that’s the thing that consolated me more than anything. He said, “If there ever was a time that God would perform a miracle, I’d rather die than He perform a miracle. Because if I lived a long time, I may not live right.” And that just comforts me.

  POSTSCRIPT

  If I’m preaching a sermon on someone’s death and I don’t know anything about the person, I preach to the living, those that are at the funeral. I say to them, “It is appointed unto man or woman once to die, you only die once. Are you ready to die? You that are left? I know you’re here grieving over your loved one. But he or she is gone. Are you ready to meet your Maker? And if you’re not, it is time. Are you holding grudges? Do you hate? Are you abusive? Then you need to change your mind. Because we too got to go this same way.”

  “You gotta stand your test in judgment.” You know that spiritual?

  [Laughs] That’s right, you got it.

  White people sing, “You gotta cross that lonesome valley, you gotta do it by yourself.” And black people, “You gotta stand your test in judgment, you gotta do it by yourself.”

  [Picks it up, sings] Nobody here can do it for you. You’ve got to stand all by yourself. Yeah, you know it! [Laughs]

  You know that song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”?

  [Sings] “Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by. Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by . . .” [A chuckle] Good God Almighty, you just turned me on. [Laughter]

  Father Leonard Dubi

  He is the pastor of St. Anne’s, a Catholic church, in Hazel Crest, a southwestern suburb of Chicago. It is a lower-middle-class congregation of white and black parishioners. He had been, in the early sixties, an outspoken advocate for civil rights and had, on occasion, challenged the city’s highest authorities, especially the elder Mayor Daley.

  I BROKE OUT of the womb at 8:21, July 9th of 1942, and last Sunday was the first time I ever said Mass at the exact same time that I was born, at 8:21—and I had this pious thought that this is what my life is about, it’s about living and dying. When we’re celebrating Mass, we celebrate Jesus dying and rising. And I’m born at that time.

  I turned fifty-eight years old last Sunday. On the 13th it’ll be my mom’s eightieth birthday. She’s dead twelve years. I’ve been thirty-two years a priest.

  No, I didn’t go to Catholic school. I was really marginally Catholic all my life until I went to the seminary. The reason I’m a priest is because of Mary Buckley, my teacher at Bowen High School. Recently, she called me up to tell me she was dying. It was the very day you called me about your book about death. I got a shiver when that happened. It tells me there is some higher power involved in this coincidence.

  I’ve been involved in social justice most of those years and believe that that’s the central way that we worship God in our world . . . in the action. That’s the action for justice. That’s the way that I show I love Jesus. I believe that Jesus talked about the reign of God and that’s got this worldly part. If we want to go to the otherworldly part, we gotta do the this-worldly part: helping people in very concrete ways.

  The way that Jesus lived and related to people is the way I believe God lives and relates to people. When I die, I believe that I will see Jesus. But I believe I also need to see Jesus right now. You know Sister Helen Prejean? Dead Man Walking. She asks the guy, “Patrick, do you want me to be there with you when you’re being executed?” And he says yes. And she says to him, “Well, Patrick, when you look at my face, I want you to see in my face the face of Jesus looking at you and loving you.” And the last face that he saw as he was executed, he looks at this Sister Helen. Now that’s what I believe about Jesus. I mean, he now exists in people who keep that spirit alive, and Sister Helen’s face was the face of Jesus.

  As for Heaven and Hell, I know people who live in Hell right now. They don’t know it, but they live in Hell. They’re miserable people. They’re just living for themselves, they don’t care about anyone: it’s only for me that I live, me and mine, and the only ones that they’re concerned about are their own children or their own blood relatives. They’re just concerned about possessions or grasping for things—they want more and more things. That’s Hell. I’ve been in my own kind of Hell. I’m a recovering alcoholic, as you know. Eighteen years ago, I went into recovery. It was the last time I got drunk. I had a blackout and I got arrested a block away from the police station. It was up in Michigan. I was on my way to see the family of a dear friend of mine who had died. I didn’t know he was dying, so I missed the opportunity of being with him when he died. I was feeling real guilty. His folks greeted me as I think that he might have. He liked to drink too. I had a couple of cocktails and it didn’t affect me and I said, “I’m not an alcoholic—I can drink.” The next day I had a couple of more and I went into a blackout—I was driving on my way back to my motel, and I was stopped. Instead of going to jail, I went into treatment. So it was the death of my friend that gave me a new lease on life. So that’s what death is. Death is opportunity, death is a doorway you walk through.

  I don’t fear death, I fear the dying. [A deep sigh] I fear the kinds of dying that I’ve seen people experience, terribly painful moments. Moments when they’re alone. I’ve been doing this kind of breathing every day. I started inhaling on the count of four, exhaling for the count of four, holding it for two. I’m up to twenty-eight or thirty now. Sometimes I get to the point where I’m afraid I’m going to stop breathing, and it reminds me of dying by suffocation. When that happens, how frightening that is. That’s the way Jesus died on the cross, he suffocated, he couldn’t breathe. That’s what that horrible instrument of the cross was. He died being faithful that there was still meaning and purpose in life.

  Both my mother and father died right in my presence. My father died in my house. My mother died in her house and I was there. Both of them died of cancer. My mother died first, twelve years ago. She died with great dignity and she was there with my father who said, “Mom, you can go.” As soon as he said that she expired and she looked, she looked beautiful.

  My father died of cancer of the stomach. I said, “What are you gonna do, Dad, when you can’t live alone?” He said, “I’m going to move in with you.” [Laughs] So he moved in. He couldn’t eat anything so he went down from oh, about a hundred and eighty pounds. He was less than a hundred and ten. He died at my house. I had him upstairs in my living quarters. He couldn’t stay in the bed because that was not comfortable for him, so I got these inflatable air mattresses. And we’d blow them up and we sat there and he had my remote control and he watched the ball games.

  He’s dying, but there was a lot of humor in it. I have a couple of cats, and they’re declawed, but whatever they were doing they had put their vestigial claws in that air mattress and it deflated. He says, “Those goddamn fleabags!” [Laughs] We laughed at that. And he continued to decline. We had the hospice nurse come in. He didn’t want to see anybody, any medical person. I remember picking him up. [He’s been going along quite easily, but now he strains, and fails, not to cry.] He’s a hundred and twenty, less, pounds, and he’s got his arms around me like a little, little boy. I carry him downstairs and put him in that bed. And I thought about the rever
sal of the roles and how this man who is my father, he’s now like my child. And he was dying, and I was able to be there for him and care for him. He lost control of his bowels. He wouldn’t have any nurse do that. “You’re gonna do that for me.” So I did that for him. And how close, how close we got. And that was so good because for a long time in our life I couldn’t be close to him.

  Death was a healing. I did the services for my mother and my father. My mother . . . We gave her a round of applause at the end. She was a lady who grew up in the Depression, and she was always afraid that she was not going to have enough. She was always concerned about saving. She had plenty—I mean, working-class plenty. They had their own house, they had their own car. They had enough money if they wanted to take vacations, which they didn’t. Now she has no more to worry about. She has gone home. My father had some struggles that I shared with him, with the alcoholism. Yet what a wonderful man he really was, he had insight into people and service. He was like the mayor of the block. When he was in health, he had a snow blower and he’d blow the snow of everybody on the block. Lots and lots of people came to his wake.

  The death of close relatives, when it’s hopeless it’s always a very difficult decision for people. I always listen to what they’re saying, and I try to reflect with them. If there’s any glimpse of how the person wouldn’t want to be this way, I try to balloon that and help them to make that decision. Ultimately, it should be that person’s decision. If the loved one doesn’t see it in the words or the thoughts of the dying, you can’t really persuade them to do that. I hope that everybody would come to an understanding that they don’t have to keep a person alive using all these extraordinary means. I know I wouldn’t want it. I have my living will. I don’t want to be kept alive.