When my father picked us up after Sunday school at First Presbyterian, he sometimes drove us to the levee, where he enjoyed watching the Mississippi.
We always encountered an old black man who wore a white robe and cotton-cloth cap. The preacher carried a cross of two crooked tree branches tied with a white cloth. He said he performed baptisms in the river, although I never saw him carry out one.
My father would give the black preacher a dollar and send him away. For a few moments, my father, saying nothing, looked at the dark brown Mississippi flowing toward the gulf. Tugboats pushed bigger cargo ships up the river, its banks in my memory lined with trees in flower. After a few moments, Daddy would turn and say “let’s go,” and we’d head home, where Mama cooked Sunday dinner.
My mother’s father and mother came to visit us every Sunday afternoon, my grandfather still wearing a tie and starched white shirt and my grandmother the nice dress she’d worn to church. They were Presbyterians, as was my mother. My father had been raised Catholic, but had to leave the church because of his marriage outside the faith.
My sisters and I were raised Presbyterian, going to Sunday school from early childhood. After “confirmation,” a significant childhood occasion, we studied the “shorter Catechism,” which detailed John Wesley’s Predestination doctrine. Some would be saved, others condemned.
After Sunday school, we sometimes went to church with our mother, especially on communion Sundays, when ushers passed out round silver trays with specially cut holes that held the small glasses of grape juice. The holes ringed the outer circumfrence of the trays, tiny suns in a symbolic cosmos.
The sanctuary’s dark wooden walls and abstract stained glass windows contrasted with the flowery dresses of the women and girls. The husbands, their hair combed back with hair tonic, wore business suits, their shoes buffed to a brilliant shine. A full choir in red robes with gray sashes sang the soaring Protestant hymns, the congregation joining in.
Before and after church, people congregated on the plaza at the foot of the concrete steps that rose to the sanctuary’s heavy wooden doors. The couples chatted with each other, their children running back and forth, the girls in black patent leather shoes with straps and the boys in nice pants and shirts, hair slicked back like their fathers’,
Daddy was never comfortable with the forced bonhomie of Protestant Christian Fellowship. He didn’t care for the sermons of our minister, Dr. Melton, especially when they appeared lifted from Reader’s Digest.
Over the years, my mentally unstable father attended church a few times, usually seated with me in the gallery, where we whispered about football. He came to church on the Sunday after John F. Kennedy’s assasination, his eyes red with sadness although we had gone to Tiger Stadium for the LSU-Tulane game the day before.
Vacation Bible School gave me my favorite church memories. On hot and humid weekday mornings, my mother would drive us to the church on North Boulevard in downtown Baton Rouge and drop us off. We’d hurry to a clasroom behind the sanctuary, where mothers younger than ours taught us the stories and heroes of the Old and New Testaments, especially the teachings of Jesus, pictured as pink-cheeked and golden haired in a cheap poster hanging on the wall. The women wore shorts, their tan and shapely legs stirring passions I didn’t understand.
Sunday school continued through high school. Classes moved from the sanctuary basement to the “rec center,” equipped with classrooms and a basketball court where Sunday night “youth fellowship” commenced. My Uncle Mac, my mother’s older brother, taught a class on the Reformation, which although tilted toward the Protestant side gave a good foundation in early modern European history.
A youth minister named George Klett stirred my religious faith in my impressionable early teen years.
Mr. Klett was a young man with dark, slicked back hair, who wore thick black glasses. The old minister, Dr. Melton, rarely allowed Mr. Klett to give a Sunday seromon, and he was a dull speaker with a monotonous Southern drawl. His duty was to develop our youth program, a mission he carried out diligently.
One Easter, he organized a love feast to commemorate Christ’s Last Supper. We gathered in a room in the rec center. Perhaps each person brought a dish, or the church staff prepared the meal. In subdued light, we teens and Mr. Klett recalled Jesus’ final meal with his disciples.
To prepare for the banquet. Mr. Klett led an Easter contemplation group, which met on Wednesday nights for several weeks. After one session on Peter’s denial of Jesus and the savior’s passion, I and a young woman with long brown hair and sky-blue eyes engaged in an intense conversation on the rec center steps, a streetlight illuminating the sidewalk. Despite our sharing of deep feelings, the relationship advanced no further.
In a year or two, Mr. Klett left for another church, or perhaps he suffered a crisis of faith, or was embroiled in a scandal. I’d pretty much lost my religious belief by then and instead of going to Sunday school walked down to the newsstand at the end of North Boulevard to look at issues of the Sporting News and the Village Voice.
The burden of those years was church youth retreats. Boys and girls gathered for entire weekends for the church's campaign to keep us from drugs, sex and rock and roll. The speakers aspired to hipness, to speak in our teenage language. I spent those sessions in a fog of confusion.
Once I roomed with a boy from church whose mother was eternally pregnant, leading to overheard snatches of gossip whenever she appeared in her maternity dress. The family
bore eight children. This family member, a boy of 16 or so, assaulted me for hours with filthy stories. A chaste lad, I felt my neck, ears and face burn as he kept the filth coming. That was in Gulfport, Miss., where later I played a high school football game, one of the few in which I satisfied the coaches.
In one daylong restreat, we rode a bus, or different cars, to a church in Clinton, La., a small city north of Baton Rouge that hadn’t developed much from its ante-bellum plantation days. We met in a small library with a vending machine that dispensed free soft drinks. The preacher who spoke to us chain-smoked cigarettes. A nervous man, he wore a black shirt and white collar in the day’s heat and somnolence.
After the talks, we saw Kirk Douglas play Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.” I wasn’t sure and remain unenlightened about what Vincent’s cutting off his ear had to do with the Christian message. On the way home, the ladies gossiped about the preacher, finding his smoking unseemly for a man of the cloth.
Although I attemded LSU, its campus just a few miles from First Presbyterian, I stopped
going to church. After my father devoted Sunday mornings to fishing, and bought a camp
on the Atchafalaya Swamp, my mother felt compelled to join him, leaving the church she’d loved since childhood.
As I was swept away by the cults of rock and roll and radical politics, religion’s roots proved shallow after all of those years of indoctrination.
Now that I am an old man, my memories of First Presbyterian show how deeply they were
implanted. In quiet moments, I hear Mr. Klett’s voice intoning “well done, my good and faithful servant.”
