"Is the present the victim of the past; or
is the past the victim of the present?"
The Circus in the Attic - Robert Penn Warren
When I was a young, I spent most of my days on the Southside of Paducah. Mom and Dad were working, and this was my daycare, preschool and kindergarten rolled into one where most days I found myself at the stoop of a white clapboard shotgun house on Jarrett Street in the Southside of Paducah.
My grandparents attended East Baptist Church. A Southern Baptist Church as it were where despite the directional references, I never felt much direction while attending, heavenly or otherwise. But it was a place where poetry fell out of people’s mouths when they rose from the hard-wooden pews to testify. They revealed their joys and sorrows. They sought forgiveness. But most of all they told their own stories. Because most were poor, and they tended to clutch their Bibles as tightly as their purse they had no particular way of expressing themselves. They spoke in a rhythm that mimicked the way stripes of mist eased over Island Creek on summer mornings. Their words were so vivid and perfect, they seemed to have been carefully chosen. But for them, telling a story was innate. They were born with the ability to testify, and in doing so gave praise to their God
We took words seriously in those days. We had a deep reverence for language and storytelling. So, it’s no surprise that testifying was a sacred act for many poor people in those days before television, internet and social media. I laugh as I recall thinking I bet they would have made great photographers if they’d had cameras. Their words becoming the imagery of their lives and times.
But testifying does not only take place in church. The act of telling one’s story might be holy, but it can be done anywhere. In those days, they told their stories not only on front porches and around kitchen tables but also in the aisles of the local A&P and the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices.
They told tales in their gardens while they hoed beans or in the shallows of the river bottoms where the barges plied their trade. Often, they are stories of nostalgia, for they were a people always mourning the past. Always holding tight to the old ways, grieving because they knew how easily things can slip away forever.
The beauty was in the testimony itself, even when there is ugliness mixed in, too. In these river bottoms of Western Kentucky, we know what it’s like for the eyesore and the magnificent to coexist. The true beauty was their story, told to one another in those days now so long ago.
Today when we “testify” our stories are rooted in the modern world and told in increasingly modern ways: on laptops, blogs, social media, cameras in our phones, in texts and videos. Validation comes in the form of the sum-total of our digital “Likes” and “Friends” some of whom we do not know and have never met. They exist only in digital bytes of information. But their was a rhythm of life, told person to person, face to face that has been lost in all the technology and yet I look for it still with my pen and camera.
Not long ago, I went back to Jarrett Street and stood along the banks of the creek. I watched in the dark, as the sun rose. Hoping for a clear horizon. I had no real idea for what, or whom I was waiting. Just a feeling. A memory that stirred from deep down within, had drawn me to this place.
The old house is now gone as well as East Baptist Church and its hard wood pews. But their stories remain. I return here as often as I can to remember. And to be thankful for the blessings in my life. Their stories come back to me rising slowly in my mind like the sun now beginning to rise over the horizon.
The sun begins to shine across the water below. Ripples form where Mayflies land softly on the surface and reflections of clouds begin to float along the surface, the creek a mirror of the world above and the secrets she holds and the mysteries she cannot let go. I reach down and dip my fingers into her cool muddy water. “I know, I whisper to myself, I will tell your story, I will testify.”