Will Campbell Tells Stories
To Synod Communicators

by Dee H. Wade

Were it not for him, I would not be here to listen to him and later to write about him.

Life has a marvelous way of curving back on itself. But that’s another story. He used to be known for his black, broad-brim preacher’s hat. But when he came to speak to twenty-some known associates of Presbyterian Voice, meeting on April 29 at the Brentwood Suites south of Nashville, he wore a baseball cap. As he told the gathering, it was the cap that Waylon Jennings was wearing when he died two years ago.

He is Will D. Campbell: farmer, preacher, author, musician, veteran of World War II, inside agitator for civil rights, Yalie, college chaplain, magazine publisher, Mississippian turned Tennessean, Montreat speaker, theologian, husband, father, and whittler. He knows everybody and everybody who knows him has a story he or she can tell.

Emett Barfield told this one: while he was the pastor of the 1st Presbyterian Church of Grenada, Mississippi, in the late 1960’s, the public schools were being integrated. Because he’s a disciple of Jesus Christ, Emett had to get involved in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to practice the ministry of reconciliation. But it was stressful, dangerous work, the kind that can set one painfully at odds with friends and family. Emett felt isolated and vulnerable, not wondering if he was doing the right thing, but unsure that he was doing it in the right way.

One dreary January day there came a knock at his study door. On the other side of it was Will Campbell, who introduced himself and offered the comradeship of a soldier fighting the same battle. They visited throughout the afternoon, talking, sharing stories, insights, and burdens. Together, they were “church,” the body of Christ present and living in the world.

Campbell himself told several stories to participants in the communication seminar sponsored by the Synod of Living Waters. One was about the handcarved cane he sports these days. Another was about how he came to receive that Waylon Jennings cap as a gift from Jessie Coulter, Waylon’s widow. Campbell knew Waylon Jennings “before he was Waylon Jennings,” he said, and once accompanied the country music star on a 31 city tour in 37 days. Because he operated the microwave oven on the bus more than anyone else, Campbell was named the official tour cook.

Each story was peppered with spontaneous asides and Campbellisms that have delighted his friends and maddened his detractors for years. Item: “The word ‘redneck’ is as nasty and demeaning to poor white southerners from rural areas as the ‘n-word’ is to African Americans.” Item: “(After 9/11) in the name of security, personal freedom is slowly but surely being eroded away. We’re going to wind up as a nation of vegetables.” Item: “I see that all of you in this room have the same incurable skin disease as I have. You’re white. You might manage communicating with each other, but can you communicate with people with different memories, backgrounds, habits, hobbies, what have you? Can you meet others outside of your own picket fence?”

The centerpiece of Campbell’s visit was a selection of stories and slides from his book Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places, with photography by Al Clayton (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1989). There were four of these, each an impressionistic portrait of someone Campbell has known, details such as names disguised to protect them from the prying of less sympathetic eyes. All were presented in first person narrative. Campbell is a chronicler of life as it is.

He looks without blinking at the tragic and comedic complexity of human beings, but he does so with the heart of a loving pastor. That’s his gift.

The first of this quartet was about “Bill,” the father of a young black man active in lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides across the South back in The Day. The next in line was “Aaron,” the father of two sons. One died in Viet Nam, and the other, a suspected member of the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested in North Carolina after a shooting of labor organizers from the Communist Workers Party. The third was the story of “Amy” a modern-day plantation owner from West Tennessee.

In each of these stories, there exists a tender understanding of the human predicament. It would be easy for Campbell to sanctify the black people and vilify the white people, perhaps even an expected literary strategy. But he steadfastly refuses that option. A Klansman is not sub-human, rather is a child of God no more or less than anyone else. (“Jesus died for everybody—he either did or he didn’t—I don’t remember any distinctions.”) A black sharecropper is not a character from central casting, rather is a living soul with the ordinary constellation of interests and influences. Some overlap, some compete, and some contradict themselves. As Campbell allows these human beings their voice, he includes elements of their dialect, in a respectful, restrained manner. Issues of social, political, and psychological significance congregate around these stories, but nothing obliterates the fact that they are about real people in real places.

This fact is most obvious as he turns to “Velma,” an African American nanny and cook to a white family. Campbell looks up from his printed notes and tells her story by heart, the story teller merging with the story. He knows this woman. Her ancient voice can be heard through his; the wave of her black, veined hand can be seen in his gestures; her dignified gravity can be felt in the way he holds himself. Witnesses occupy Spirit-swept territory as Velma all but stands up to cast a shadow, even if it is in the conference room of a new-fangled motor hotel in Brentwood, Tennessee.

It was thirty years ago when I first met him, at the Highlander Center outside of Knoxville. That was a good day. So is this one.