John Perkins | Charles Marsh

This was a talk given at the Abundant Life Banquet, December 4, 2009.

In 1980 I finished college in Massachusetts and through a series of circumstances having little to do with interest in social justice, I accepted a job for the summer in the innercity of Atlanta. In preparation for the summer ahead I was asked to read a book, by John Perkin called Let Justice Roll Down. Many of you know this marvelous and moving memoir. And the book pounded me at every level.

So I called Perkins from the cottage in North Carolina and told him I was coming to Jackson, Mississippi the next weekend. He and his family lived in an intentional community called Voice of Calvary, which ministered and built community among the poor.

I hoped we could get together for a visit. I told him I was enjoying his book and that I was sure it would prepare me well for my summer in the inner city. Perkins, in his friendly manner and inviting drawl, said that he would be happy to meet with me, just call him when I get to town.

He asked me what the weather was like in North Carolina. A cool breeze was blowing down the mountain side, and I was sitting in a rocking chair on the screen porch wearing a sweat shirt. He sighed and said I'd better enjoy it while I could, because in Mississippi the heat was already sticking in the air. Ninety degrees, and not even June.

“You have family in Mississippi?” he asked.

“Yes sir. My grandmother lives over by Belhaven College.”

“My mom and dad are from Jackson,” I added. “So it kind of feels like home to me.”

“Well, I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

Perkins asked me to pick him up around five o’clock in the afternoon. He wanted me to drive him to Yazoo City where he was scheduled to speak at a youth rally. I was a little uneasy about the assignment. Mickey Schwerner’s burned-out station wagon was the only image in my head of blacks and whites driving together along country roads in Mississippi. In fact, aside from a few times in high school when I drove a black teammate home after basketball practice, I had never been in the same car with a black person.

Perkins’s idea was that we would talk on the way up—which was about an hour’s drive—and then stop at Shoney’s on the ride home—after the youth rally—for a piece of their famous hot fudge cake. Five minutes north of county line, Perkins fell into a deep sleep, and his body slumped into the space between the seat and the door of my rental car. It was the end a long day for him. Those of you who know know that he waked up at 5AM for devotionals in preparation of the eventful days of a community builder.

He was exhausted. And I drove northeast. With no map and no conception of where Yazoo City lay in the complex geography of the Mississippi Delta. I had been to Yazoo City once, I think, years ago, to play a junior high school basketball tournament. But that didn’t help me now. I was completely lost. But I still could not bring myself to wake Perkins up. Here slept—and snored loudly I should add—a black man who except for the grace of God had every reason to choke the life out of me. Here was a “modern saint”; as Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield once called him. I knew he had just days earlier returned from a grueling trip to Haiti, where he had visited slum areas throughout the country, sharing his Christian community development vision with pastors, laypeople and community organizers.

Besides that, I knew from his memoir that Perkins had the reputation of a tireless worker. And here I was, a white fifth generation Mississippian, with a fairly sordid family history (as far as the race issue goes) and I had no intention of interrupting Perkins’s much-needed rest. On I drove, as the late afternoon light faded, and still no sign of Yazoo City. I don’t know how far I would have gone had I not needed to stop for gas in a town called Bellzona. There under the bright lights of Shell Oil station—in Bellzona Perkins woke up.

“I guess I fell asleep, didn’t I?”; He looked at me like he had not idea who I was—perplexed by my presence at the wheel of the car.

“Where are we"; he yawned.

“Bellzona. I must have missed Yazoo City.”

He looked at his watch. “We won’t make it to the youth rally.”

“I;m so sorry,”; I said. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I didn’t know what to do.”

“That’s ok,” he said and shrugged. “I didn’t really want to talk to those kids anyway.”

Perkins then smiled and said, “Let’s drive back to Jackson get some hot fudge cake at Shoney’s.”

With two hot fudge cakes and a pot of coffee between us, I wanted to know how the white churches in Jackson had responded to Perkins’s work at Voice of Calvary. His simple answer—they didn’t responded at all—surprised me. He seemed puzzled when I asked why this was so.

“You tell me,” he said.

“I really don’t know,” I replied.

“Well, why are you working in the inner-city this summer?”

“I believe God wants me there,” was all I could say, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. (In fact, I didn’t tell him that a beautiful young Presbyterian minister’s daughter was also working there, and that my real motivation was to get to know Karen Wright a whole lot better, and as it turns out, I did. We’ve been married for 27 blissful years.)

“Then I guess that’s why the white churches don't care so much about poor neighborhoods. They don’t think God wants them there. Most of the preachers know better, but they’re scared to tell the truth. So nothing really changes in the way white people think about blacks.”

As I drove Perkins back to his home in west Jackson, I told him about my grandmother who lived in the stately Bellhaven neighborhood.

“You know, Dr. Perkins, the first thing she does every morning is open her Bible and read her devotions. She’ll pray a while. She’ll listen to a sermon on tape—maybe one of my father’s, or David Dehann, or some Bible teacher. But she won’t give an inch on her racial views. She thinks Martin Luther King, Jr. was nothing but a trouble-maker.”

“He was a trouble-maker!” Perkins said.

“Yes, I know, but that’s really what I mean. I've heard her say that slavery wasn’t so bad. Lots of blacks had it good then, better than they do now.”

I had never told anyone—certainly not a black man—about my family’s racial views, and I told him I lot more then than I’m telling you now. I told him so much I felt like I had come clean with a dirty secret, and Perkins was my confessor. Finally, I stopped talking, and I braced for a large helping of penance, guidelines of restitution, and the like.

But his response was bewildering. Or perhaps it was just the kind of response a kindly southern confessor should make.

“What does your grandmamma grow in her garden?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What does she grow? Does she have cucumbers, or tomatoes? I have the sweetest tomatoes in my garden this summer. You can eat them like apples. Your grandmother like tomato sandwiches? I bet she does.

“Let me ask you another question: does she like blueberries? I love blueberries,” the then-50-year-old Perkins said excitedly, and in great detail he described all the ways he loved to eat blueberries: freshly picked, over ice cream, in blueberry pie, with syrup.

“I always keep blueberries in my refrigerator. When we get to the house, I’m gonna give you a bag of blueberries, and I want you to take them to your grandmother and tell her they’re a gift from me.”

I drove back to my grandmother’s house carrying a plastic bag of sweet blueberries from a man whose brother had been murdered by a white police sherriff to a while lady whose grandparents had been founding members of the Ku Klux Klan.

I didn’t realize then what Perkins was showing me, but I see now that evening was something like an altar call—the kind of gift that makes you a giver and marks you as a new kind of person. I haven’t really been the same since I accepted those blueberries.

Dr. Perkins didn’t hit me with guilt and judgment—as he might have, and which I no doubt deserved—but he accepted all my overbearing earnestness and offered something unexpected back. He surprised me with joyful notion that forgiveness and justice spring finally from the freedom that comes through Christ, from the deep and abiding gladness of the Easter world, the miraculous discovery that though we might deserve thorns, we are offered blueberries.

Well, I went to the inner city of Atlanta that summer, and I came back every year for five years. Throughout graduate school I lived with the inevitable tension between the academic life and the world of service and activism—tensions which have remained alive over the years, and which are no doubt part of the motivation of the Project on Lived Theology. I was there in the years preceding the invasion of crack cocaine and gang violence, but there were many hard times and difficult days. Three of the children from our community center were abducted by the serial killer, Wayne Williams, who murdered more than 30 children from Reynoldstown and the surrounding neighborhoods, and our kids lived in fear that the “napper” would find them. There were times of great joy as well: Body and Soul group, hoops, Bible and poetry; camping adventures in the mountains of north Georgia; the talent show where ten teenage boys, with whom I worked closely throughout the summer, stood on stage and imitated my laugh for five minutes. I didn’t get it, but the pantomime brought the house down. Boiling hot dogs in an un-airconditioned kitchen in a deep south summer became a time for listening and learning and being together. Even the dreaded “chokers”, slabs of government issued peanut butter on white bread— actually Southern Baptist Home Mission Board—brought us closer together. Occasionally a lady on the block would bring us a bag of blackberries, and we’d phone our mothers and grandmothers for recipes. There was also plenty of time for just hanging out, sharing our hopes, being together day in and day out.

Students, you know what I mean, don’t you?

Every time you step into the doors of Abundant Life, or into some redemptive/healing space in some excluded neighborhood, you get a sense and taste of a new Kingdom; and it’s not all bells and whistles, in fact it’s quite often mundane, irritating, unsexy; but you know that you have left all that is familiar and entered a fuller, richer, [] of the Body of Christ. [Karl Barth] You see and experience Christ there in ways you have never seen and experienced him before.

The great atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said—in one of his seething rants against the church—that Christians must sing more beautiful songs before I will believe in their redeemer.” You who give your time and energy and imagination—you tonight—are singing beautiful songs.

But don’t forget the lesson of the blueberries. The Grace of everyday gifts and mercies. So in a profound sense we are gathered here tonight to celebrate not only CALM but you the students who give time and energies to this mission of mercy, community building and Christ-shaped love. 1

Visit a hospitality house, a tutorial program for low income children, an AIDS clinic, a hunger relief agency, a Habitat for Humanity site, a student group sitting in an administrative building in support of a living wage for university workers—you will find there people who are moved to act for others, who live passionately into the depths and breadth of the world’s concrete needs, because they see a light shining in the darkness; who believe that transcendence empowers rather than diminishes the love of life, that hope and miracle and mystery animate the protest against cruelty, focus moral energies and heightens discernment of those places in the world that call out for healing and wholeness.

1 Diane Nash, quoted in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, ed., A Circle of Trust: RememberingSNCC (New Brunswick, NJ:: Rutgets University Press, 1998), p.19.