With the information Bill sent us was a photograph of a frail-looking man showing Bill a row of cement signs shaped like hearts on posts with the message: “Prepare to meet God” molded into them. We all felt like we had seen these signs before, but we couldn’t say when or where.
On the way home from school one afternoon, I saw a similar sign along highway 441 just south of Mountain City’s city limits sign. I’d seen it a hundred times, but it was just a part of the landscape. Like the grass and the trees and the telephone poles, it was supposed to be there. That sign is made of corrugated tin, but it bears a strong resemblance to the signs in the photographs. My curiosity was aroused. This person who had erected the sign in Rabun County had made other signs and Bill told us he had distributed them, sometimes alone, along roadsides throughout the entire continental United States.
What Mr. Mayes does is considered a type of folk religion. News articles about him have been published in Newsweek (October 26, 1970, and January 21, 1974), Life (June 9, 1958), and National Enquirer (February 2, 1982).
Mr. Mayes lives a long way off—a six-hour drive from Rabun County, Georgia. However, Bill and his wife felt so strongly about our interviewing Mr. Mayes that they invited us to come spend the night with them in Oak Ridge and drive on up to Middlesboro in the Cumberland Gap area of Kentucky the next morning with Bill and his son accompanying us, having taken the day off from their jobs.
So on a foggy, early spring morning in April, we drove up to Mr. Mayes’s house armed with cameras, tape recorders, and a high sense of curiosity. On the way, Bill had us stop several times to make photographs of Mr. Mayes’s work—a barn with corrugated tin letters stretched all across the side facing the highway telling motorists to “Prepare to meet God,” and then again to photograph a cross and a sign by the roadside on the way to Middlesboro.
Mr. Mayes and his wife Lillie live in a house shaped like a cross along a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Middlesboro, a small college town. They have four children and eighteen grandchildren. He is a thin man, weighing about one hundred and ten pounds now and standing five feet, six inches tall. He has been quite ill recently and so although he was very talkative, his voice was faint as he told us his story, and we realized from the emphasis on the information he gave us that he knows he is doing a very important work and he wanted us to understand that. Even though we knew that he had related his life’s experiences to many people, he was patient with us as he explained the details of preparing the bottles he ships to missionaries and others, and as he told us how he had made the signs and gotten them erected by highways and roadsides. [He began putting messages in bottles after his heart attacks because he was no longer strong enough to put out the cement signs by himself.]
Mr. Mayes told us that when he was a young man, he was seriously hurt in a mining accident. He promised the Lord that if he got well, he would dedicate his life to serving God. He felt the best way for him to serve God would be to post signs throughout the continental United States admonishing people to repent of their sins and accept God. He has been doing this for over sixty years in his spare time and for the most part using only money he and Mrs. Mayes have earned.
Mr. Mayes told us: “I run all this work interdenominational. My religion is the good that is in Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. My politics is the good that is in a common Democrat or Republican. There are good people in all [walks of life]. They all mean good; they just misunderstand, misinterpret [God’s word] The essence is, we’re all the same. When something goes wrong, we’re not gonna talk to Satan; we all know who to talk to—God.
“The cruelest thing on earth is race hate. My wife and I hope to come up with a force to drive race hate from the earth. The black is called dumb niggers, the yellow is called Chinks and screwy eyes, and the white is called white trash. We are all equal. Hitler killed six million Jews in five years; the white man killed thousands of Indians in two hundred years. That’s so wrong. The world needs one religion, one language, one nation, one kind of politics, and one race.”
Harrison Mayes is a self-educated man. “I went to school until I got to the [fifth grade]. Education is fine. I love it. I’m not against it, but education don’t give you the know-how that God wants. I wish I had a lot of education but I don’t. I don’t know English much, but I don’t pretend to know. Many highly educated people who’ve got university educations just don’t live up to what they’re supposed to. It’s just as well to say they’re astraddle of the fence [about their religion]. It don’t matter how many times you say, ‘Prepare to meet God.’ You’d better mean it. It’s a matter of what’s behind it.”
PLATE 352 “You can make fun of me, but when you go to making fun of the sacred work, you’ll go to getting in trouble. I asked one doctor to give me a little assistance in buying five of these sixteen-foot boards to make these wood crosses. He just made fun of my work and called me crazy and so on. Thirty days from that day, he never could work another lick. I felt like his making fun of me caused that.
“If you mess with this work I’m a-doing, you’ll get in trouble. Now, that’s just it.”
PLATE 353 Mrs. Mayes.
PLATE 354 “I tried to make this house mean everything. I’ve got eight rooms in this place. That represents the eight people that was saved in the Ark. This house is shaped like a cross. The front end’s got twelve windows and represents the twelve apostles. The back part has ten windows for the Ten Commandments.
“I built this place out of concrete because I don’t want it to never leave here. I don’t never want it sold. I want it to finally wind up with the Salvation Army, using it as a place of their business.”
PLATE 355 Note the crosses etched into the concrete walls of the Mayes home.
Mr. Mayes’s philosophy of life and religion is so different from anything I’d ever heard about that I was shocked—I sat up and listened, trying to comprehend all that he was talking about, wondering where he got his ideas, and marveling at the energy and ingenuity he has demonstrated to carry out what he believes in.
I assumed he belonged to one of the many Protestant country churches in this Bible Belt region of the United States. And he had at one time. He told us a story of why he withdrew his membership.
“I heard of a midnight show coming down here [in Middlesboro] in Otto Brown’s theater. It was advertised in the paper. All right, you had to be eighteen before you could get in and it was for men only. I knowed about what it would be, but I [wasn’t real sure]. It opened at twelve. I got in my car and went down there. I told nobody where I was going. Well, it wasn’t fit for cattle to look at, much less humans. Just about all of ’em in there was eighteen-year-old boys.
“Well, I went back to the house at two o’clock in the morning and put my car up. I thought I was slipping out and slipping in but when I come in, my wife jumped all over me. She thought I’d done wrong. I said, ‘Now, listen, I know exactly what I went for.’ I went to get a petition up to get that stuff stopped. Suppose I’d walked up to one of the businessmen that I know very well, my partners that I trade with, to sign a petition to not let no such a thing come in our city. Not to stop the theater, but to stop that [pornography] stuff. If one of those businessmen had asked me, ‘Well, what went on over there, Harrison?’ I didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’ If I hadn’t gone and seen for myself, it might have been an evangelistic program, for all I know. But I knowed what went on.
“I took my petition with all the [names] I got up and I give it to Mr. Brown. [I knew he was the manager of the theater.] I never since knowed him of having one [of those type films] because all the leading businessmen of town asked him not to do that.
“The pastor of my church, as good a man as they is in this country, come told me, he said, ‘Harrison, you’ve got to go up and confess it to the church that you made a mistake.’ [He was taking care of the church, which is natural for him to do.]
“I said, ‘Yes, I did. I’ll be right up.’
“So I went up to the church. I got up [before the congregation] and I said, ‘Now, listen, listen. I don’t owe nobody no apologies.’ I told them why I went and what I done and so on. I said, ‘Now I’m gonna ask everybody to forgive me, just forgive me. I’m gonna also ask, not that I’m mad at nobody, to take my name off of the church record so I can experiment on things I need to know to carry this work on.”
He’s waging a one-man war on pornography, sexual violence, abortion, racism, world pollution, overpopulation, and lawlessness. He’s done this through signs and in small bottles. The bottles contain messages sealed in them that are distributed to jails and cast into bodies of water throughout the world whenever he can persuade people to launch them.
HEDY DAVALOS
Interviews and photographs by Chris Crawford, Greg Darnell, Aimee Graves, Tammy Carter, and Denise Layfield. Editing by Allison Adams, Hedy Davalos, Richard Edwards, Kevin Fountain, and Cheryl Wall.
MRS. MAYES: I was nearly fifteen and he was nearly twenty when me and him got married. He was painting them [messages] on rocks then. He’d take a paintbrush and he’d go out and paint “Jesus Saves” and things like that on rocks. He would make little signs and tack ’em on telephone poles.
MR. MAYES: Well, here’s what happened. I tried everything. I tried preaching, I tried running revival meetin’s, and I tried going all over to Florida and different places making music. I never could make a go at nothing until I got into this sign work. That was exactly my calling.
I painted [my first signs] on logs. I put ’em up all over the place. Then I got to putting them on cardboard paper. I’d write whatever I wanted to. I tacked them on telephone poles. I got into bigger stuff, painting messages on rocks and big billboards. I just went on up to bigger and better things. I put ’em on four-foot by six-foot aluminum sheets where they would last. And I put them in forty-four states myself. Then I also got to having tracts printed up to send to the chaplains in the Army and on ships in World War I and II. I had a hundred thousand tracts made to send.
He had shown us his shop where forms were stored for making the huge concrete crosses. And we had already been outside to see and photograph the impressive rows of crosses erected in his yard.
I’d say I’ve got around sixty to seventy-five crosses set up around the United States. I don’t know exactly how many I’ve got left in the yard out there. I intended to make two hundred, but [my heart attack] happened and I had to cut some short. I intended to make four concrete ones for each state and put ’em around the capitals, out on the highways leading into these cities. They will finally crumble away, but I think seventy-five years is the life of concrete. Anyway, that’s a long time.
PLATE 356 Signs seen in the Mayes’s front and side yards and in his workshop, which is in the back part of his house.
PLATE 357
PLATE 358 A roadside sign erected by Mr. Mayes.
PLATE 359 One of several crosses standing in the Mayes’s front yard.
PLATE 360 “When transportation gets available, I want the crosses in the backyard moved to the country or planet they’re made for. I made one for the North Pole, one for the South Pole, one for the bank of the River Nile, one for the Suez Canal, one for the Panama Canal where it can be seen by the traffic in the shipping lanes. Others are designated for Germany, France—whatever name is cut on the cross. I made a few for the planets. I’ve got Venus out there, and Jupiter and several others.”
I used to take four or five boys [to help me] to put the concrete crosses up. Those crosses weigh fourteen hundred pounds apiece and my normal weight was 123 pounds then [I weigh 110 now] so I needed help, but you know how boys are. You can’t get them in the bed and you can’t get them out of the bed. Young fellows are just a public nuisance! One would want to go to eat at this place and the others at another place. I finally decided I was goin’ to put the crosses up by myself, me and the [truck] driver.
I loaded them here with a chain block. I’d drive the truck right in under the cross, stack ’em up several on each other. We’d drive right to the place [along the road] where I was goin’ to put one up. All I had to do was to dig the hole and in fifteen minutes I was ready to leave. I used posthole diggers. I’ve got two of’em—a little one and a big one. When it was raining real bad, the water would be pert’ near up at the top before I’d get the hole dug. I had the truck braced so it couldn’t get away. I’d pull the sign over to the edge of the truck and just tip it down right over the hole. I’d drop the cross into the hole. Or sometimes I’d dig down and hit rock, tons and tons of it. Then I’d just dig as far down as I could and pack rocks up around [the cross] where it didn’t go down in the ground far enough. I had some sacks with me and I’d just go over [to a rock pile alongside the road] and sack me up some of those rocks. I was trespassing but people that was guarding [on some new road project] would say, “He doesn’t look guilty. He’s got permission [to get those rocks or put up that cross].” I’d pour those rocks out around the cross and tamp ’em down a little bit and that cross would be just as tight as it could be.
[I’ve put a lot of crosses up] and I’ve put signs up in forty-four states myself. I don’t know exactly how many signs, but I could hunt the files up and tell you. When this [heart attack] happened, I had to quit. [That’s when I went to putting messages in bottles and distributing those.]
For the last forty years, hardly no individuals have let me put a sign on their place. I come along wanting to put a sign on a man’s farm place. He’s got all the room taken up that he can spare [with paid advertising]. He’s getting good money out of advertising signs put out on his property. I couldn’t pay that kind of money. Therefore he runs me off. Naturally, the highway won’t give me permission. They can’t, but I’ve got [my signs and crosses] on all the roads. I trespass and do it. I know where to put ’em so they’ll be out of the way. If I were to put ’em in the middle of the road, I ought to be put in jail. But it is my religious right [to put up the signs] even if it is trespassing. I’d pick out [a place] I wanted. I’d get right down across the fence, up on the bank, next to the farmer’s fence and put a sign up.
You [have to] put a sign 660 feet from the interstate highways. Nobody but great big ol’ companies can make signs that big. I can’t. I couldn’t stand it. I took it up with President Carter. [He came down to Middlesboro to make a speech and I went to see him.] I said, “I can’t make these signs [to be seen] this far. Talk with the interstate [highway] department and get them to give me a right to put my religious signs just across the road.” He took it up with them. It come down to my rights. They couldn’t stop me nohow because it’s my constitutional rights. They [wrote up something] so I could get just off of the right-of-way. In other words, he couldn’t say “yes” or “no” so I just went right ahead.
I’ll say every newspaper in the United States has got a picture of my signs because all kinds of men’s been here making pictures and talking to me. A lady from California come and got pictures of the small concrete crosses, and they’re in Washington, D.C. [in the Smithsonian Institution].
Well, in 1975 I decided to quit making crosses and signs, and I meant it! I had this stroke and I had so much trouble out of it that I didn’t hear God at this particular point. I was righteously mad. I didn’t care if the Lord did kill me. Then I had what you would call a vision. I know that was what it was. It said, “You hurt so bad, you don’t need to know what I’ve got you into. I’m going to let you in on enough. That’ll satisfy you. That’s all. That’s all.” Now you couldn’t stop me [from carrying on this work]!
I don’t ever want this work to stop. I can’t put no more signs up. I don’t make no more. I now put [messages] in bottles. I’ve got 56,000 of these bottles spread throughout the world. There are twenty languages in the bottles. “Prepare to meet God” is translated in fourteen languages: Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, African, Chinese, Syrian, Jewish, Japanese and English. “Jesus is coming soon; ge
t ready” is translated in six languages: Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. If you find [a bottle] in Australia, all you have to do is write me the number on it. Then I’ll check my files in there [in my office] to see when the bottle was put in the water. I’m sending the bottles to all parts of this earth to missionaries to have them throw the bottles into lakes, rivers, and oceans. If I’m sending bottles ten thousand miles away to the foreign missionaries, who’s gonna come here and get me for littering?
I’ll tell the missionaries, “You be sure and don’t let people see you throw these in the water, or they’ll call you a litterbug.” God’s got me doing this and litterbug or not, I’m not trying to hurt nobody.
[When I ship a box of bottles to a missionary], I’ll send a brand-new dollar bill to each one in the family for a birthday present if they’ll tell me the number of children they’ve got. Four or five years ago I sent a box of bottles to the Church of God missionary from Cleveland, Tennessee. He and his wife had seven children. I sent ’em nine one-dollar bills. I just make it a flat four brand-new one-dollar bills if the missionary don’t specify the number of children. [This helps out with their expense for distributing the bottles and shows my appreciation.]
Now here’s what happens [when people find the bottles]. Say a man from China opens this bottle and pulls out the message. He reads the message in Chinese. He ain’t Christian and he don’t know a bit more than nothing what that means, but he’s going to start trying to find out. If it wasn’t in Chinese, he would never try to find out. [I don’t understand these foreign languages, but I had some people at one of the universities do these translations for me.]
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