Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

Among the True Believers

Waco, Texas, is a quiet respectable town, a city of 100,000 with a well-endowed university, several art museums, a zoo, a famous collection of the manuscripts of the nineteenth-century English poet Robert Browning. It welcomes visitors with tourist attractions as wholesome and nostalgic as the Dr. Pepper Museum and the Texas Ranger Museum. An 1870 suspension bridge across the Brazos River—once for cattle, now for pedestrians—links miles of parks and greenways. My 1950 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia describes Waco’s “air of ease and opulence.” It’s a city of churches, of serious Christians. Baylor, the world’s largest Baptist university, sets the moral tone for the town secular Texans call “the Buckle of the Bible Belt.” But like its worldly neighbor Dallas, Waco is internationally famous for something it would rather bury and forget. It was just eight years ago—after a fifty-one-day siege by the FBI—that the Branch Davidian compound near Waco was burned to the ground, killing eighty-five members of the cult along with its prophet, David Koresh. Today it’s hard to find anyone in the city who cares to talk about the Davidians, and harder yet to get directions to the compound they called Mount Carmel. Among the True Believers 89 But we hadn’t journeyed to Waco, a place considerably o≠ the beaten path, just to contemplate the wellsprings of Dr. Pepper or cruise the front gate of President Bush’s ranch. By luck we met Tom, a photographer from Oregon. Discouraged by the townsfolk, he’d found his own way out to Mount Carmel, along the identical back roads and gravel byways of this flat, almost featureless countryside. He drove us out there on a bright Sunday morning toward the end of a bitter Texas winter, a warm, cloudless day that belied the tornado watch we sweated all day Saturday (most of Waco was destroyed by a killer tornado in 1936). Instead of a burned-out hole in the ground, a site of desolation littered with glass and scorched timbers, we found a strange community assiduously rebuilding. Mount Carmel has become a shrine to martyrs of the federal government ’s excesses, and as such it attracts like-minded pilgrims from all the millennial cults, armed posses, and Christian fringe sects that make America such a di∞cult place to govern or explain. When Janet Reno gave the order that triggered this massacre—or mass suicide or tragic accident, according to your prejudice—she provided a loose community of outcasts with an iron backbone of common grief and outrage. Whatever happened here on April 19, 1993, the flames that were reflected in this quiet farm pond in a green meadow on the edge of the Texas outback are still burning bright, at least in the combustible imaginations of a host of passionate Americans. The legions of the paranoid. Liberals call them “scary” but they aren’t, unless you’re so urban and sheltered that a few shoulder holsters set your knees to knocking. They have an Old Testament gravity about them, a way of looking you in the eye that says, “Ignore me at your peril.” Several dozen came here on a Sunday morning, with their tools and picnic lunches, to finish the memorial chapel that stands on the slight rise above the cemetery where Koresh and the Davidians are buried. Their children were running among the graves, each marked by a stone and a tree, now six or seven feet tall, that was planted in 1993. 90 Spirits of the Place The gravestones of the seventeen children who burned—“Star, 6,” one is inscribed—are decorated with dolls, toy animals, a hobbyhorse. As an appeal to our sympathy the teddy bears may seem a little staged or obvious, but it’s a hard-boiled visitor who doesn’t pause and bite his lip. “Where you from?” a gaunt, grizzled Jeremiah of a man asked my wife, and the answer, “North Carolina,” apparently encouraged him to go on (I think “Chicago” might have stopped him). “You ever use that sugar substitute they call Equal?” (She does, extravagantly, in the most alarmingly oversweetened tea and co≠ee I’ve ever gulped by accident.) “You do? Let me tell you, it’s poison. It killed my wife, she got a brain tumor from drinking Diet Coke. Monsanto Chemical, they make it, those Bilderbergers...