Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  During these months, Clarence lived, worked, and slept with African Americans from many locales other than the Mississippi Delta. Given the rich oral traditions in black culture, he certainly heard new folktales (and new, regional variations of familiar ones) and new songs, sacred and secular, as well as different musical styles in which to play and sing them. And, of course, he encountered preachers, both licensed and “jack-leg,” or self-proclaimed, from whom he also learned as he observed. A handsome young man, whose intense vitality animated his broad, dark face, he may also have entered into romantic and sexual relations with women. While Franklin never mentioned this in later interviews, it would be odd if he had not continued to “think about girls” in a more mature manner. Nor would this appear unseemly. For many rural southerners, black and white, premarital sexual experience was common among young people, even expected. This was as true for preachers-in-training as for farmworkers or bluesmen. In these and other ways, then, Franklin’s physical journey was psychological and spiritual. His self-consciousness and his self-confidence deepened, and both reconfirmed his calling. His immersion into a broader African American culture widened his vision concerning his coming role, the culture of the people to whom he would minister, and the particular manner in which he would integrate the two into his life.33

  But in one sense the journey confirmed past experiences rather than opened new vistas. The thread of racial prejudice and segregation wove its way north from Mississippi. Its thickness varied, sometimes nooselike in density, sometimes thinner, as Mississippi physically receded, but it never broke. Young Franklin never spoke of it, but he could hardly have been unaware of its presence. The memory of the white agent’s cavalier attitude concerning food on the trip to Kentucky suggests as much. So did the atmosphere in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where the Franklins and Pittmans spent between two and three months in the late summer of 1932. Benton Harbor, boasting the nation’s largest outdoor fruit market, was an annual destination for migrant workers throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The workers who picked the crops (apples, cherries, peaches, and strawberries, among them) were largely black, and the yearly migration temporarily but dramatically increased the town’s black population. White residents took note. In 1923, more than fifteen hundred robed Ku Klux Klan members had stormed Benton Harbor and burned crosses to intimidate the black workers. Nine years later, the summer Franklin worked in the area, another crowd burned crosses and deported fifty blacks. In the worst of the Depression, those farm jobs were thought to be “white” jobs. This pattern of racial intimidation continued over the following years, as sheriffs’ deputies arrested black workers and then exiled them across the county line with orders not to return under threat of a jail sentence or worse. That Mississippi planters still wanted black laborers must have seemed cold comfort.34

  Yet there was no place else to go. After a brief stop to visit relatives in Arkansas, Franklin returned to Cleveland in late fall of 1932. He was, in his mind, more of a man now than ever before. Ruefully, however, he found himself back in his childhood home, dependent on parents who, however loving, nonetheless still saw him as a child. Even worse, he was back in the fields, sparring with Henry once again, aching for a permanent way out.

  Franklin’s chance came shortly after he turned eighteen in January 1933. The congregation of County Line Baptist Church in Tutwiler, thirty miles north and east of Cleveland, had need of a preacher and invited Franklin for a trial sermon. He delivered his sermon one Sunday, after taking the bus from Cleveland the night before, and he was accepted as a temporary pastor. This designation was unusual for a Baptist preacher, as a congregation either called a candidate to their pulpit or not. In Franklin’s case, there was strong opposition to his youth and lack of experience, but no other candidates were available. Franklin continued in this fashion for some months. One Saturday night he arrived at the deacon’s house in Tutwiler with whom he stayed, only to be told that the church had voted him out and invited another minister in his place. Downcast and discouraged, the young preacher prayed most of the night and attended services anyway. When his replacement did not appear, Franklin exultantly assumed the pulpit for both morning and evening services, and the church deacons promptly extended the young preacher’s contract for six months. In all the excitement Franklin missed that last bus and had to stay another night in Tutwiler. He arrived back home about 9:00 A.M. on Monday. There he found an angry stepfather already sweaty from two hours of labor in the fields. “Now this going off preaching and coming in this time of day is no good,” Clarence remembered Henry shouting, and he demanded his stepson choose once and forever if he would “preach or plow.” The young preacher, brimming with enthusiasm over the reprieve the congregation in Tutwiler had just offered, needed no other encouragement for this final confrontation. Claiming the right to determine his life’s course, Franklin recalled, that same day “I left home with virtually nothing. And I went down [into the town of Cleveland] and talked with a blind friend of mine, who was very active in our church, a very astute man named Jim. Jim said, ‘Well, son, you can stay here with me until you find a place,’ and that’s where I stayed until I got a little place.”35

  The place Franklin rented was in Cleveland, where he visited parents and sisters with some regularity and began constructing a life for himself as a preacher. While continuing his work at Tutwiler, he also took advantage of any opportunity to preach that came his way. The rallies at St. Peter’s Rock were by now comfortable opportunities, and he welcomed invitations from individual churches to take their pulpit on an occasional Sunday.36 In this regard, Benjamin J. Perkins proved a most welcome sponsor. Perkins, whose powerful sermons had so influenced Franklin, led churches in Clarksdale and Memphis at this time, and he frequently invited young Franklin to take his place in Clarksdale when he was in the Memphis pulpit. As word spread about the power of Franklin’s preaching, other churches requested his presence. Franklin shortly established a circuit of four churches between Cleveland and Clarksdale, most of them small plantation churches.37

  While riding the circuit, Franklin took another traditional step toward claiming adulthood when, on October 16, 1934, three months shy of his twentieth birthday, he married Alene Gaines. Other than that the Reverend E. W. Robert officiated, little is known of the ceremony itself. Nor did Franklin in later years ever mention the marriage publicly or discuss how he met Gaines and who her people were. The length of the marriage also remains a mystery. Whatever their relationship, marriage was an asset for Franklin, offsetting his youth and inexperience in the eyes of suspicious deacons and trustees. As if to underscore this new status, when he gave his name for the marriage license, Franklin exercised the prerogative of southern men, black and white, and gave as his name his initials, C. L.38

  Once married, Franklin’s dissatisfaction with the circuit grew. He wanted the prestige associated with leading one church as the full-time pastor, but his unease went deeper. There was an unsettled quality about him, a sense that his intense drive to define his place in the world lacked a key element. Like the overwhelming majority of rural black ministers, he had not finished grade school, and C. L. hungered for a systematic exposure to books and ideas, to enable him to understand better the new discoveries his inquisitive mind uncovered almost daily. Nor did he want to be like so many others who, between circuit preaching and working cotton, eked out a livelihood that just supported their families on the edge of dire poverty.39

  Greenville Industrial College, an Afro-Baptist institution, was located in the town of the same name a short sixteen miles south of Cleveland. Greenville in 1935 was a large plantation town of more than fourteen thousand residents. Home to wealthy planters who owned vast amounts of the rich alluvial land beyond the town’s limits, Greenville also served as a regional center for ginning, marketing, and financing the yearly cotton crop. The Percy family claimed Greenville as their ancestral home: LeRoy Percy, who had been a kingpin in state politics; his son, William Alexander Pe
rcy, a lawyer, financier, and poet famous for the literary gatherings held in his grand residence; and his nephew, Walker Percy, who, in 1935, was just awakening to the power that would make him a brilliant novelist and poet. For Clarence, however, that Greenville was more than 50 percent black was of far greater significance. The town housed at least twenty-eight black churches, with Baptists the largest denomination, and there were many more churches in the surrounding countryside. Since he would have to preach to support his family and pay his tuition, this was of more than passing interest.40

  Greenville Industrial College promoted the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington. The curriculum included theology, literature, and instruction in such trades as brick masonry, carpentry, and mechanics. “It was just a denominational school,” Franklin remembered. “It wasn’t really accredited.” In later years, he characterized his teachers as thoroughly conservative, but at the time, he acknowledged, he embraced what they taught. Beyond instruction in the basic principles of a good sermon (it needed “an introduction, a body, and a climax”), Franklin’s teachers stressed the literal truth of the Bible as the bedrock of one’s faith. They taught that “man has been on the planet for 6,000 years, stuff like that. . . . They wouldn’t dare touch upon anything that dealt with Darwin, anything like that. Evolution, etcetera.” Homiletics, the study of preaching, reflected this literal temperament as well. His instructors explained, and Franklin absorbed, that the Holy Spirit actually infused the preacher during the sermon and that the preacher became but a mouthpiece for the Spirit during the sermon’s emotional intensity. This Franklin accepted “as a matter of course at that time,” as did the majority of his various congregations. In this sense, Franklin’s Mississippi ministry was at one with his parishioners; he was, as he acknowledged, a fundamentalist himself. Yet, Franklin rejected one part of his Greenville training, at least in this passive way—a reflection already, perhaps, of a more complex understanding of the cultural sources of the Afro-Baptist faith than his teachers possessed or he could then express. He knew that many in his church audiences smoked, drank, and danced, but he never preached against such habits from the pulpit. With all of its limitations, his college experience proved critical nonetheless. “It was more than I had ever had,” a grateful Franklin later noted. “And it kind of challenged me to study.” That challenge became a lifelong habit.41

  During his Greenville days, Franklin preached with conviction and passion, “more or less religiously preoccupied, thinking about the world after,” as were most of his ministerial acquaintances. There were a few—“advanced ones,” he later called them—who raised ever so gently the question of civil rights, but the typical minister in his Mississippi circle was “more or less indifferent, because of his condition. The white people has taught him that politics had no place in the church, and that religion, in terms of society, was like a departmental thing. You’re over here, this is over here, and this is taboo.” The omnipresent threat of violence for breaking that taboo secured widespread public acquiescence. Franklin later recalled a story told by Benjamin E. Mays, a leading black scholar and president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, about an alligator placed in a pool surrounded by a fence, where he stayed for years. “And then they removed the fence, but he never came out of that pool.”42

  Franklin’s early ministry also taught him other lessons. One Sunday at Macedonia Baptist Church, a small plantation congregation just north of Shelby, Franklin entered the pulpit with news he was leaving. He had just accepted a call “to a much larger church” in Greenville, which would replace Macedonia on his Sunday circuit, Franklin announced before his sermon. Expecting sympathy and even applause at his success, the self-engrossed young preacher discovered instead that “the reverse happened. . . . They got mad. And there was absolutely no response to my sermon.” Within the Afro-Baptist tradition, there was no more dismissive conduct possible than to bear silently the minister’s words, withholding from him the verbal encouragement that united preacher and listener in a sacred, collective fellowship. C. L. Franklin still had much to learn.43

  By 1936, Franklin’s marriage to Alene Gaines had ended. Perhaps they shared a mutual recognition of a mistake made; perhaps the driven young husband found her lacking in qualities he thought essential in a pastor’s wife; perhaps she died suddenly. No record or memory exists. Whatever the circumstances, marriage remained an important status for the career of this intense, handsome preacher just then twenty-one. In the black church, in Mississippi as elsewhere in the nation, women made up the majority of any given congregation, and it was widely understood that an attractive and effective male preacher might stir multiple emotions in both himself and his majority female congregation. Martin Luther King Sr. recalled that for a young preacher of a marriageable age, there were “plenty of attractive young girls [who] would try to help him make up his mind.” Up to a point, this was accepted, but a single preacher who persistently engaged in intense, serial relationships could find his reputation and career seriously undermined. Functionally as well, young preaching men understood the value of a wife as a helpmate in the ministry. Pastors’ wives taught Sunday school, directed the choir, played piano, led prayer groups, and often chaired one or more of the various church societies in which women predominated, all the while quietly affirming her husband’s moral authority through her conduct as both wife and mother. She was also his eyes and ears among the members. For a driven young preacher such as Franklin, whose aspirations stretched beyond what he could then give full voice to, an ill-considered union might wreak havoc with his future. As King Sr. also noted, once he did marry, increased family responsibilities and the economics of circuit preaching often conspired to undermine the young man’s ministry: “Before long, this young fellow might find himself farming right along with someone who was about to become his father-in-law and pretty soon . . . a preacher found he wasn’t doing much preaching anymore.” Clarence Franklin had no intentions of allowing that to happen to him.44

  Franklin’s preaching duties, family ties, and friendships frequently brought him to Shelby as he traveled his circuit from Greenville to Clarksdale (and occasionally even to Memphis as a guest preacher for Benjamin Perkins). Sometime in 1935, in a Shelby church, he met Barbara Vernice Siggers, who came from a family with deep roots in the area. Although her father, Semial, was born in Kosciusko, Attala County, some 125 miles southeast of Shelby, her mother’s people had farmed in the area at least since the 1880s. Clara Lowe Siggers gave birth to seven children. Barbara, her youngest daughter and fourth in the birth order, was born on June 29, 1917, in Shelby. In the early 1920s, the Siggers family relocated to Memphis, part of a migration that more than doubled the city’s black population during the decade. In May 1923, Semial died, and Clara, perhaps with the aid of the very oldest children, struggled to provide for the family. Little is known of Barbara’s years in Memphis: where family members worked, what churches they attended, or what social activities they engaged in. She was an attractive and talented young woman who enjoyed reading, playing the piano, and the social activities so much a part of adolescent life. She attended (but probably did not graduate) Memphis’s outstanding black high school, Booker T. Washington. The school demanded intellectual excellence and a strict code of conduct. Each day began with morning devotions, attended by faculty and students, and concluded with an in-class devotional service in the afternoon. For Lucie Campbell, who taught English and American history at the school even as she achieved national renown as a gospel composer and choir director, Booker T. Washington “was the high school” for black Memphis teens. Attending this school, then, marked Barbara as different from most Memphis black children and from all but a handful of her contemporaries in the Delta.45

  Nor was it unimportant that Barbara grew into adolescence in Memphis rather than Shelby. The culture of black Memphis was electric during these years. Beginning in the 1920s, gospel quartets filled churches, part of a developing gospel blues music that would transform Afro-
Baptist religious expression. Memphians such as William Herbert Brewster and Lucie Campbell achieved national fame for their work. For those interested in more secular music (as in the Delta, they were often the same people), Beale Street was already a mecca, the “Main Street of Negro America,” as George W. Lee called it in 1934. Indeed, few guitar-picking black youth in the deep South did not dream of getting to Memphis. As Muddy Waters recalled of the late 1930s, when he still lived in rural Mississippi near Clarksdale: “Couple of us what plays, like me and Son Sims, sometimes we’d go up to Memphis just to come back for the big word, ‘We’s in Memphis last night.’ That was a big word, you see.”46

  Somewhere between ages fifteen and seventeen, however, Barbara and most of the family returned to Shelby. The depths of the Depression had finally bested Clara Siggers’s efforts to maintain the family in the city, although she left her youngest son, Semial, named after his father, with her oldest daughter so that he might obtain a better education than was possible in Mississippi. Barbara’s circumstances may also have contributed to the decision to return to the family farm. In March 1934, she had become pregnant. The biological father wanted nothing to do with mother or son (who was born on Christmas Eve in Shelby), and the boy, named Vaughn, did not meet him for more than three decades.47

  During his time in Shelby, Franklin became friends with Barbara’s brothers, Carl, Cecil, and Earl, and would “pal around with them,” family lore suggests. But none of the brothers served as matchmakers. Rather, when another Baptist minister invited Franklin to visit his church one evening for fellowship, the guest noticed a young, light-skinned woman at the piano singing in a beautifully clear voice. Another local minister, Reverend Honeywood, introduced them, and the two young people were smitten with each other. For a time they courted, although Franklin’s schedule of school and circuit riding often prevented frequent contact. As they discovered similar religious and musical commitments, their relationship grew.48