Brother to a dragonfly, p.1
Brother to a Dragonfly, page 1
BROTHER TO A DRAGONFLY
BROTHER
to a
DRAGONFLY
Will D.
CAMPBELL
Foreword by Jimmy Carter
Foreword to the new edition by John Lewis
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
BANNER BOOKS SERIES
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.
Original text copyright © 1977 by Will D. Campbell.
Reprinted by permission from the Will Davis Campbell Family Trust.
Foreword © 2000 by Jimmy Carter
Foreword to the New Edition © 2018 by John Lewis
All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First UPM printing 2018
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Campbell, Will D., author| Carter, Jimmy, 1924– author of foreword. | Lewis, John, 1940 February 2– author of foreword.
Title: Brother to a dragonfly / Will D. Campbell; foreword by Jimmy Carter; foreword to the new edition by John Lewis.
Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2018] | Series: Banner books |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017060271 (print) | LCCN 2018007084 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496816313 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496816320 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496816337 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496816344 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496816306 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Campbell, Will D. | Baptists—Mississippi—Clergy—Biography. | Civil rights workers—Mississippi--Biography. | Campbell, Joseph Lee. | Pharmacists—Mississippi—Meridian—Biography.| LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC BX6495.C28 (ebook) | LCC BX6495.C28 A33 2018 (print) | DDC 323.092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060271
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Foreword to the New Edition
by John Lewis
Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition
by Jimmy Carter
PROLOGUE
MORNING
MIDDAY
EVENING
EPILOGUE
FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
The original edition of Brother to a Dragonfly came out in 1977, forty years ago. It had been less than a decade since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed; a national holiday in his honor was still a distant dream. It would be another ten years before I came to serve in the United States House of Representatives. Memoirs from those deeply involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s had hardly begun to appear; most of us were more concerned with carrying it on than with recording our experience for posterity. My own book Walking with the Wind wouldn’t come out until 1998.
Both a committed activist and a superb writer, Will Campbell would author a total of seventeen books. Every one reflects the depths of Will’s heart and soul. Every one carries the gifts of Will’s spirit and sense of humor. Brother to a Dragonfly has the distinction of its 25th anniversary edition carrying a fine foreword by President Jimmy Carter. This edition has the distinction of being issued by the University Press of Mississippi. One could hardly have predicted either of those in 1977.
I often say to people that if anyone had told me during the height of the civil rights movement that I would one day be elected to Congress or experience even a small portion of what I have at this point in my life, I would have said, “You’re crazy. You’re out of your mind.” Yet Will Campbell and President Carter and Dr. King and I all were crazy enough to believe that the land of racial injustice in which we grew up could become a beloved community of racial healing and equal opportunity. The vision that called to us hasn’t yet been fully realized. It sometimes gets set back for a while. But to anyone who argues that nothing significant has changed since the days of Jim Crow in Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi, I say, “Come, walk in my shoes.”
We’ve come as far as we have, I believe, because we’ve been led by a force bigger than we are. I call it the Spirit of History. In a collection of sermons that Dr. King entitled The Strength to Love, he emphasizes the importance of facing our fears and the power of mastering them through courage, love, and faith. When we do that, the Spirit of History carries us forward.
During the civil rights movement, when we were developing strategies, someone usually said, “Call Will Campbell. Check with Will.” Will knew that the tragedy of Southern history had fallen on our opponents as well as allies … on George Wallace and Bull Connor as well as Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth. He saw that it had created the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That insight led Will to see racial healing and equity, pursued through courage, love, and faith as the path to spiritual liberation for all. It was, of course, the same wisdom that guided Dr. King and Rev. Jim Lawson to embrace the transformative power of nonviolence … the same wisdom that would guide Nelson Mandela to embrace truth and reconciliation as the path to a new South Africa.
Brother to a Dragonfly is a story of one brother’s love for another through many a tragic turning. It is equally a testament to the breadth and depth of heart that will lead us through the tragedies of our context toward the land we are called to become. It’s the Spirit of History.
—JOHN LEWIS
Member of US House of Representatives
2017
FOREWORD TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The occasion of a twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of Brother to a Dragonfly is noteworthy for several reasons. As a true story of family life in mid-twentieth-century Mississippi, the Reverend Will D. Campbell’s book has attained the stature of an American classic. Its author has made his own indelible mark as a minister and social activist in service to marginalized people of every race, creed, and calling. Those who read Dragonfly when it first appeared around the time of the American Bicentennial celebration in 1976 will be stirred anew by its honest and powerful voice. And a rising generation of readers, discovering the book for the first time, will be getting not only an unretouched picture of life in yesterday’s South, but also a clear example of prose writing with enduring and universal qualities.
When I first encountered Brother to a Dragonfly some twenty years ago, it had a profound effect on me. It opened onto a landscape with which I was thoroughly familiar: the rural Deep South of the Great Depression. Like Will Campbell, I was born into such a place, and in the same year; like him, I also was raised as a Southern Baptist, went off to war in the 1940s, and came home to a family and a church in a South and Nation that were soon to be thrust into an era of social transformation that would still be in motion at century’s end.
I felt that I knew this man. He had grown up in poorer circumstances than I, yet the pictures of life that he painted in his book were so close to my own experiences that they lowered the fences of social and economic class and gave us parity as brothers, in a biblical if not a familial sense. With equal effect, as I subsequently was to learn from others, Dragonfly also tore down the walls that separated white and black Southerners. Brother Will, as he was and is called by so many of us who know him, used the force of his words and the witness of his deeds to convey a healing message of grace, reconciliation, and faithful service to any and all who might pay heed.
The sense of pain and loss he felt at the death of his brother Joe, so poignantly recounted in these pages, made all the more meaningful his ministry to my family and me on the death of my brother Billy in 1988. Down through the years, as we have seen our native and beloved South slowly unburden itself of the dead weight of white supremacy, Will Campbell and I have shared the satisfaction and the blessings of that liberating spirit. For as the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed in the 1960s, the civil rights movement and the successful legal challenge to racial discrimination freed white men and women who had perpetrated injustice, as surely as it freed black men and women who were its victims.
Brother to a Dragonfly speaks to these complex psychological issues with disarming directness and simplicity. To read this compelling story and realize that it has lost none of its persuasive powers in a quarter of a century is to understand and appreciate its prophetic qualities and its narrative force. It is an affectionate, humorous, loving, and intensely personal story that escapes the confinement of ordinary life to soar aloft as a timeless chronicle.
Brother Will Campbell’s abiding gift—to his late brother and the rest of his family, to his small but deeply appreciative audience of churched and unchurched believers, and to us all—is not entirely encompassed by this book of true confession. But Dragonfly does stand as his representative letter of faith, no less now than twenty-five years ago.
—JIMMY CARTER
2001
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame …
—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
PROLOGUE
His name was Joseph. The name carries no special significance to his story. He was named for a country preacher of the area; not for the Joseph, son of Jacob, sold by his brothers into slavery, betrayed by wife of Potiphar, Saviour of his people, recipient of the blessing of his father. The Egypt was there with him as with Joseph of Hebron and was, as with him, at once his success and final defeat. But unrelated, I believe, to the name. Except that he, Joe, too, was a dreame
I know only that it was his saga and the saga of the times in which he lived. And, yes, mine too. Because the two lives, his and mine, were bound in those days so inextricably together.
Some of these things he was alone in, as was I. Some of them involved us both. Some were the stuff of that brief period in world and national history over which we had neither control nor influence. Yet we were there, Joseph Lee and I, sometimes in a nearness approaching, surpassing illness. And sometimes so far apart that neither could hear the cry of the other.
So far as Joe and I knew, this is how it began. Two lived just down the road. The other two lived in a house several miles away we called “across the river.” These four. And more. For they, too, had their history. But these were our history and we didn’t bother much with theirs.
Grandpa Bunt:
Never raised his voice, lost his temper,
lost a fight.
Some thought he had neither of the latter,
but he did.
Because even Uncle Bunt (everybody called him
Uncle) was a sinner.
“Have chairs,” he said to guests on the day of his
death.
And then insisted that his baby son not leave him.
(His baby son was our Daddy. And he came home
crying.)
Crying
because Grandpa said at sunset: “You have gone as
far as you can go.”
And Daddy knew.
Knew that Grandpa was
dying.
And he did die. And slept with his fathers.
But not before he made seventy-one crops.
And progeny plenty—
ten to be exact—
three of whom died ten days apart with
bleeding flux,
leaving them childless. But the new dispensation
brought seven more,
not counting another dead in the womb.
And not before he divided his earth,
giving each child enough for one more,
one last
generation to survive on the land,
and became a Baptist deacon,
and prayed long and pretty prayers about
stooping to drink
from the bitter springs of life,
and talked publicly with God about all the bad times.
And the good things promised.
Grandma Bettye:
Grunting every breath, sometimes twice,
with neuralgia and lumbago.
But smiling, too. Because her lover
(for sixty-six years her lover)
never once forgot to say: “Mighty fine supper,
Mrs. Campbell.”
No matter what the fare.
And once she cried when he asked if the bread, hon,
was cooked yesterday
or the day before.
That being as close to irreconcilable differences as
the years ever knew.
And she talked about the Glory Hole,
meaning the place just above the bridge
where we baptized.
And where
boys went bathing with her nod,
but girls’ bodies made it a naughty sacrilege.
And McComb City was the wickedest place in the world.
Camphor Balm from the Rawleigh Man and
aspirin from the store
were good for lumbago.
But not as good as salt mackerel
and knick-knacks Uncle Tiff brought from Louisiana.
She sat on the pew that ran crosswise
to the congregation.
Right up front. With Miss Emma, Miss Lola, Miss Eula,
Aunt Donnie, Aunt Ida,
not one of them either “Miss” or “Aunt,” but old, like
Grandma was old.
For old began at thirty.
And she wore the flannel bathrobe to church
the very first Sunday after Christmas.
Because it was the prettiest thing she
had ever seen,
and the Lord deserved the best.
And because it was 1933 and she didn’t have a
bathroom.
Grandpa Will:
Opening the gate,
leading from the barn lot
to the field of shriveled, crackling
corn stalks, good only for fodder now, because the
drought of ’31 had made it so:
“I want the Lord’s will to be done
and I know He knows
what’s best.
But I just can’t figure out what He’s got in mind.”
He called me Jack and gave me nickels.
Taught me how to chew tobacco—said I had worms.
(Though I didn’t skid along the floor.)
Let me turn the ice cream freezer, and
let me pick the first watermelon
because,
I was his favorite.
Because I, of thirty odd, bore his name.
Seventeen stalks of Mississippi Red sugar cane
stuffed in the rollers of the syrup mill,
snapping the pole that rolled the rollers,
the pole pulled round and round by a pair of
fine, fat Missouri mules.
“MY GOD, BOY, WHAT THE HELL’S THE MATTER WITH YOU!”
Not to me, but to Joe who silently took
both rap and rebuke.
Nestled close together, after Grandma died, in a
feather mattress,
picked from his own geese and stuffed by him in
the candy striped ticking.
The clock, carefully, slowly wound up tight each
night, goes off at four.
Two feet, now old, hit the floor,
followed by a crackling pine knot fire.
And fifteen minutes of aged body bends and push-ups.
Tallow is for tetter (that’s a foot disease).
Whiskey is for coughs.
Vicks Salve is for kids.
And Clara is the cook.
And then Miss Daisy Sandifer came to Grandpa’s house
because,
he said,
“Old rats like cheese too.”
And I went home not understanding.
Grandma Bertha:
Long auburn tresses dropping into the sourdough and
teacake batter
like tongues of fire in reverse
on Pentecost day.
And dark roasted coffee beans,
parched each morning
and ground by the first hint of day in a cast iron grinder.
“Be kind to the Lillys.
Lice don’t make folks trash.
They may be angels
unaware.
Some folks say I oughten to dip snuff.”
“I don’t care if he’s a darkie.
And I don’t care if he stole Albert Carroll’s old truck.
He’s fourteen years old,
and they ain’t gonna beat him.”
Buried at Hebron at fifty-nine.
The preacher said we ought to be thankful,
cause in New Orleans,
death was ugly.
Said four men had to hold the corners of the
casket down with shovels,
to keep it from floating.
Said God meant us to return to dust …
like at Hebron,
and nobody ought to be buried in New Orleans.
This was our history, Joe’s and mine.
Of course, we had a mother and a father also. But they are not history. They are a part of now.
Not many people today have grandparents, so they have antiques, anything older than fifty years, effigies of grandmas they never knew, symbols of grandpas they know mainly as Christmas cards, trying, pathetically, to create a history they do not have, or believe they do not have.
But Joe and I had a history. These four. They lived their lives; each one straddled the horse and rode it to the ground, neither applying the spurs nor holding too tight a rein, remaining firmly in the saddle until the end approached—all like a Remington canvas. And each leaving, even then, with a certain hesitation. But without murmur or rustle of thought in opposition to either the roughness of the ride or the imminence of the finale.
And then, ten years ago, long after the last of these in our history had gone, Joe died. Young. But, unlike them, Joe was in some sort of a hurry. About midnight he went into his room and locked the door. From then until eleven the next morning the remnant of what had tried and wanted to be his world sought to break through to him. Then, when it failed, the hinges were removed and he was waiting for it. But waiting dead. Not only willingly but hurriedly. Early. Without the hesitation of those who had gone before us.
