Somewhere Between Hurt and Hallelujah

For two months, when I was sixteen, I was the voice of the high school news on WPMO, the AM station in Pascagoula Mississippi.

The station scheduled we three volunteers—News, Sports and Weather—at seven on Sunday morning, a time when we were not only the least likely to be heard, but they expected we would hate and eventually quit, relieving them of the task of firing us. In fact PHS News lasted two months before my friends decided that Saturday night trumped Sunday morning, and the job proved too much for me alone.

But during those months I got to listen to another voice, one that, ever since, has haunted the edges of my own. In a tiny, poorly soundproofed room next to the station’s office, at six thirty in the morning, a little, bandy-legged, brokedown man preached his heart out to the sleeping town, a lone technician, and three teenagers standing openmouthed outside the glass, watching him cry out his faith and his pain.

            “Do not despair-AH! Hallelu-JAH! Christ is ris-EN! Hallelu-JAH!”

            I don’t remember his name. We called him Reverend Hickey, for the way his blotchy, blood-suffused neck stuck out of a cheap, short sleeved dress shirt whose collar seemed determined to strangle him to a dead faint. That would have suited me fine. He was everything I feared, everything I didn’t want to be.

            “And the LORD-AH, says to you-AH, ‘Where is thy faith-AH?’ ” There wasn’t a cool word in him. Reverend Hickey exhorted. He cajoled. In the space of a minute he went from tender supplication to full-out cry. He cried out in the poetry of his people, the small and the poor and the just-getting-by, the last chance, last hope Mississippi farmers and fishermen who had lived off their wits and their God and almost nothing else for generations, while the world changed around them faster than they could comprehend.

            My friends snickered behind their hands but knew better than to laugh outright. I tried to pretend he didn’t exist at all. He represented all that galled me about my people, the ones that, on the newscasts I worshipped on national TV, looked ignorant and petty and mean. Endless reports about the outrageous things we Southerners did, delivered from a cool, distant place where I imagined no one stopped anyone from realizing their dreams, became a beacon for the someday when I would get away, when I would never hear those I loved say things that made me want to curl up and cry. I would never sound like they did. Instead, those professionally neutral anchormen, so unlike those around me, became my family of choice as my shame about my own, seen through their worldly eyes, grew. By the time I found myself at WPMO I had assumed an air of weary ennui, every word careful, vernacular eschewed, emotion cooled to reflect how not from Pascagoula I was. The fact that my family said that I was gettin’ above my raisin’ let me know I was succeeding.

But as I stood week after week watching that preacher howl and cry and sweat, the rhythm and the words woven together as beautifully as any song, in spite of myself I began to understand him just a little.  He wasn’t just talking to the Lord I hadn’t believed in for years. He was talking to the part of me that so often felt more than I could contain. He spoke to that place somewhere between hurt and hallelujah, to the need to look up from the ground and believe there would be better someday.  If those newsmen spoke from a safe, rational place, Reverend Hickey howled from his belly, with a cadence and feeling that I knew lay in mine. By the time Sports and Weather decided to sleep in on Sundays I realized there were other ways of telling the truth, ways that lay inside that brokedown place, and that the truth there lay not just in fact but in faith and fear, in looking around instead of looking down.

I left Pascagoula, but never did take up a career in the news. I became a poet, writer and psychoanalyst instead. I never became a believer in that breakdown man's god, but I learned to do my best to understand, and speak, not only with my head but with my belly, the way Reverend Hickey taught me, to reclaim and reflect my love for the parts of my people that dwell in the only eternity I know, the one between hurt and hallelujah, the purest news of all.