The Chicken Bone Special, Churchification, A Discourse on Whooping, A Jailer Addressing His Prisoners, World-Class Screamers, Talk Among Parishioners, Immortality, Paradise Valley, A Roller-Skating Princess, The Process, Party Time on the Gospel Highway, The Throes of a Revolution, An Open Letter to the NAACP
C.L. (to the right of the podium) and the New Bethel congregation. Courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, and the Franklin family.
In some ways, Reverend C.L. Franklin is the real superstar in the family.
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound
The little boy’s name was Clarence. His first memory of his father was of Willie Walker coming home from the war. His last was of Willie’s back. Goodbye for good. Clarence was three, maybe four. Nobody knew where Willie went. Or where he came from. He just showed up one day and began courting Rachel Pittman, whose family lived near Indianola, Mississippi, the Sunflower County seat. On January 22, 1915, Rachel gave birth to a boy. She named him Clarence, Clarence LaVaughn Walker.
Undated photograph of C.L. preaching at New Bethel Baptist Church. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
Willie worked as a sharecropper until he was drafted to fight in the war. It’s thought he was stationed in France, where blacks were citizens. When he returned, Willie could not abide Mississippi, where ten blacks were lynched each year.
They had a hunting season on the rabbit.
If you shoot him you go to jail.
The season was always open on me.
Nobody needed no bail.
—Roebuck “Pops” Staples, “Down in Mississippi”
Left alone with two children (Louise arrived in 1916), Rachel remarried in 1919. Her new husband was Henry Franklin, a sharecropper from Doddsville, another Sunflower County town, twenty miles north of Indianola. Franklin adopted Rachel’s children. Now the boy had a different name, Clarence LaVaughn Franklin.
Sunflower County is near the center of the Mississippi Delta, an ellipse-shaped plain that runs 250 miles north–south, Memphis to Vicksburg, and holds some of the world’s most fertile soil. Along the Delta’s western flank and paralleling the great brown river run the 61 highway and the Illinois Central Railroad, side by side, the one reaching to Minnesota and beyond, the other to Chicago.
The Franklins’ cotton field adjoined the railroad tracks. Picking or sowing, Clarence watched the Illinois Central’s famous Chicken Bone Special carry migrants north to the Promised Land. As he would recall:
Just across the railroad track was the 61 highway. And it was meaningful to me to see the trains coming from Memphis en route to New Orleans and Jackson. The people would be waving out of the windows at us in the field. And cars going down the highway with different license plates from New York and New Jersey and the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Connecticut, and wherever. It gave me a deep longing to someday see these places where the cars came from, where the trains came from, and where the people on the trains came from.
Out on Highway 61, heat waves hover over the blacktop. Now and...
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Tony Scherman has written many dozens of articles since the 1980s, at first largely about music, but recently branching out all across American culture. His two books are Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (1999) and Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (2009), with David Dalton. Scherman lives in a small Hudson River town just south of the river’s widest point.
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