A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

How odd the vectors of life’s assaults, both the ones we manufacture and the ones that manufacture us, that rake our land, rearrange our fortunes, and set us on new, unscripted circuits. Where Pascagoula nestles along the Mississippi coast, the Longfellow House took Katrina full in the teeth, its live oaks ruffled, its first floor engulfed by Gulf waters brought ashore by the hurricane’s wide, wild August fury. But still the house stands, in all of its Greek Revival splendor. The house to the left of it and the house to the right of it are flattened, and who knows, who can tell whether it was built better, rigid enough here and flexible enough there. Or did it find a seam of the wind, an eddy, so that only repairs relatively minor are necessary for its return to square.

Right down the road, the home of Senator Trent Lott is spread across the ground, studs turned to toothpicks. Farther down the road, westward to Gulfport, lies Beauvoir, the home where Jefferson Davis finished his days. Beauvoir remains upright but battered badly, on life support, waiting the diagnosis of an expensive team of structural engineers.

One cannot help but speculate, let the brain wheels roll: does the largely intact house named for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as opposed to the obliterated residence of the former Majority Leader mean that God prefers poets to politicians? Or, given that Longfellow was born to the breed of New England, as opposed to the one and only Chief Executive of the glorious Lost Cause, has God elected the iron clad Yankee over the unreconstructed Rebel?

If we can postpone the search for any worthwhile theology, then we might suppose that storm debris and who got hit and who didn’t and who was left low and wet to fester in New Orleans point directly to the providential pathway of God. In this case, however, the argument falls flat on its nose. It turns out that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow never spent a single summer afternoon drinking iced tea on the veranda of the house that bears his name. In fact, he never stepped foot into the sovereign state of Mississippi. The name is a ruse, a slick attempt to increase the value of the old house when it was put up for sale.

Oh, the stories we tell, especially in the South, to make ourselves look good or feel better about ourselves, or withstand storms of the Spirit. We are a convoluted, tall tale kind of people, spun from yarns, living on legends as big as Texas. Some are mundane, like the name of a mansion we’re trying to foist off on some Northern dandy. Others entertain as they reveal, like the lore surrounding Bear Bryant and Huey Long and Tennessee Williams and Hank Williams, to name but a few, and still others are downright dangerous: Colored People were happier on Tara because for servitude they were made.

The truth, who can express it? The truth can only be lived, a wise one said, and we like our truth lively, driven by characters we have known and some we have loved. Casting agents looking to fill roles for the next Coen Brothers movie scout our family reunions, though some of our relatives they will find too ripe. They populate the stories we live to tell, over and over again, and, our appreciation of the eccentric being so high, the art forms of embroidery and exaggeration are usually unnecessary. Until the last of our little county seat towns are depopulated entirely, ours will remain an intimate world, communicated in personal terms. We know people and people know us.

If an antebellum house is given a name, even under false pretenses, what does that do but add another layer to our story and personalize further our landscape? This is a tiny thing illustrating a large principle: the truth is far too rich to be confined to a set of facts. When Jesus sought to share a major truth about the Kingdom, what did he do? He told a story. “There was a man who had two sons…” Metaphors. Similes. Analogies. Parables. They form the best literary bridge available leading from this world to the next. In their telling is our living.

The truth we can tell relative to Katrina does not include uneducated guesses about why this house fell and that one stood, who was hurt and who unscathed, who died and who lived, but about what happened afterward and what is happening still. This is Job’s story and it is Elijah’s. We cannot track the wrath of God in this storm, or verify God’s will in murderous wind and water. The providence of God, though, we do see. It breathes in the response, in the aid, in words of support, in the prayers, and in the honest grief over losses of life and home. The Gospel truth about this hurricane lives in the heart of a pastor from Vicksburg moving heaven and earth to heal the wounds of communities broken wide open, and huge is the difference he makes. The poetry flows through the scores, the hundreds, the thousands of souls who do likewise, in wondrously various vectors of hope.

Dee Wade visits Longfellow House before the hurricane