“When are you gonna lead one of these workshops for us?”
Tim asked me this question the first time he spoke to me about coming to the Wild Goose Festival. He messaged me out of the blue over something I’d written, telling me to get my ass to this three-day gathering of dissenters, agitators and wrongfully labeled heretics.
“How about I come and just write about what I see,” I said. And so I did.
That’s how it started, but Tim wouldn’t let it go. When this year’s call for contributors opened up, Tim reached out again.
“I dunno, Tim. What in the world would I talk about?” I said.
Justin Cox
There was a pause. “Talk about Will Campbell,” he said.
Tim, who knows I talk about the renegade Baptist preacher from Mississippi at the drop of a hat, is making me put my money where my mouth often leads — wondering aloud why more people don’t know about Will D. Campbell.
I’ve written in several places how I came to discover Campbell. I’ve shared in those same pieces how Campbell’s words, stories and life helped me make sense of my own. If Jesus made me believe there is a God of the universe worth following, Campbell let me know I could do that as a Baptist from the South.
I read Campbell often. Going back and mining for nuggets I might have missed the first time. Brother to a Dragonfly and Forty Acres and a Goat stay on my bedside table, highlighted all to hell. Sometimes I feel as if I’m pulled by an unknown force around this time of year to reread him.
Makes sense, I think. Campbell would have turned 102 this month on the 18th. I imagine he would have greeted the occasion with a mixture of humor and suspicion, two qualities he carried throughout his life.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’m pulled by an unknown force around this time of year to reread him.”
Reading Campbell for pleasure is one thing. Doing it to make sure I don’t look like a fool in front of a crowd is something else. I knew I’d need to revisit his larger collection. Brush up on his fictional work The Glad River, The Convention, and Cecelia’s Sin for starters. When I was finished, I picked up Providence.
Providence chronicles the story of a square-mile farm in Mississippi and how the land changed hands over the years. In one chapter, I came across a line that took me back to my own upbringing.
Campbell writes about returning to his family’s farmland in Amite County, Miss., and drawing water from an old well.
“I had forgotten how heavy a well bucket full of water is. I strained to bring it up from the 65-foot hole in the ground, wondering if it would be clear and cold as I remembered it being when I was a boy. I tilted the bucket and drank directly from it. It had no taste at all: pure water never does.”
Campbell and I are a couple of generations apart in age, but I, too, grew up on a farm that still had a traditional well on the property. It was located at the old homestead where my great-grandfather John Stigall raised nine children. Two of them were my great-aunts Emmie and Minnie. These women remained in this structure, some of which had been built right after the Civil War, until the 1990s.
My childhood summers were spent there, and tossing a bucket down the well was an everyday occurrence. We would pull the water up and dip a large metal ladle into the earth’s cool extract and drink deeply. I remember the water was tasteless, just as Campbell describes.
Memories are funny and fickle things. One usually produces another. I began recalling other times with Aunt Emmie and Minnie.
“Memories are funny and fickle things. One usually produces another.”
Both loved to play games; Emmie preferred the table variety. Card games like Rook were her favorite. Minnie ventured outdoors and joined us children in games like kick the can and roller-bat. Another of my favorites was an old tag game she taught us. It was attached to something like a nursery rhyme:
How far is it to Molly Bright?
Three scores and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, if your legs are long and light…
But you better watch out for two red-headed witches on the way.
I hadn’t thought of that rhyme in years and was surprised how easily I was able to draw it, much like the well water, from memory. Where had this song come from? I set aside Campbell’s book and went to digging.
The game, it turns out, is centuries old. It originated in Britain, changed its name along with a few words, and reappeared in the voices of enslaved people in the American South. Somewhere along the way, “Marlow Bright” became “Molly Bright.”
Marlow, marlow, marlow bright,
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, if your legs are long as light.
Sometime later, the mention of a “witch” appeared. In Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, the above rhyme is the same except for the addition of the line, “But take care of the old gray witch by the roadside!”
This is the game I remember from my youth, where groups of players stand at opposite ends of a designated play area and recite the rhyme back and forth. The game begins after the witch is mentioned, and they attempt to tag players in hopes of turning them into witches as well. The game ends when only one player is left untagged. Because correct wording matters little to a child, over time, Marlow Bright became Molly Bright.
Suddenly, I became aware that the version my aunts had passed down to me was more aligned with the tradition of African slave children.
Why? I have a theory. Nothing more, nothing less. I blame Campbell for giving it me.
My ancestors, like his, were poor rural working-class whites born before and after a Reconstructed South. They never were enslaved, but they did suffer. Not the suffering of bondage, but something else — they were taught to see themselves not according to class, but according to the color of their skin. They were hoodwinked into defending a system set up by those consumed with control, wealth and lust of power. A system never built for them.
I went back to Campbell’s Providence.
“It would be they who would swell the ranks of the Confederate army, would, for the first time, be needed and evangelized by the learned chaplains of the patricians who would convince them theirs was a holy war, and that, incidentally, there were human beings — Black people — to whom they were superior. Down the road lay a revolt of these whom the carriage trade callously referred to as ‘rednecks,’ but for now, in this formative period of the Cotton Kingdom, they were not needed.”
Redneck. White trash. Hillbilly. Insults, but also labels. Labels that kept poor whites in their place while convincing them they were better than someone else just because their skin was a different shade.
I come from these people. They raised me, taught me and loved me like no others ever could. And I would hate them if I wasn’t them. I could hate them if I didn’t see their suffering too.
I don’t know exactly how and where my great-aunts learned that song. I only know they did. I’d like to think they were taught it by children who didn’t look like them.
Maybe they weren’t the only ones. I hope so anyway. Others who experienced something closer to God’s Beloved Community before they learned to hate.
That’s what Will Campbell’s life and writing showed me and continue to show me.
That’s what I plan to talk about at Wild Goose.
Justin Cox received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity and McAfee School of Theology, where he received his doctor of ministry. He is an ordained minister holding standing in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches USA. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. His thoughts and reflections are his own.