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C H APTER II 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Washed in the Blood AT LEAST, MY MOTHER AND MY SISTERS AND I BEGAN GOING TO CHURCH, NEVER my father, who at that point in his life still had a bellyful of what he had been raised doing as a son and a grandson of Baptist preachers. His father Amos and his grandfather James had both been famous as backwoods Baptist ministers, and Willie had suffered through that upbringing from birth tllltil he made his break for the Gulf Coast. Not until he was confined in a nursing home years later did my father rediscover a need to get right with Jesus. So while my mother and sisters and I went every Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night to the Camp Ruby Baptist Church, he stayed home if he was not out looking for work. My family hadn't needed churchgoing when we lived in Nederland, and we hadn't gone to church in Livingston where we didn't have the clothes for it, but in the Camp Ruby community , we joined the rest ofthe hopeless and rump-sprung inhabitants in worship services every time the d(X)r opened. For my mother, the Camp Ruby Baptist Church offered somewhere to go, a place where she could talk to other people, an outlet for her abiliry to play the piano, and maybe a connection with a higher power that could bring her family some groceries, clothes, furniture, and a way out ofthe situation we were in. Being raised in a family descended from nineteenth-century immigrants from Ireland, Dorothy Jane Irwin had always been superstitious, and now religion was worth a try, though I'm certain she never thought ofher leading us to regular worship of the Southern Baptist god in those teml5. Luck and the lack ofit were real, opening an umbrella in the house was a terrible and stupid thing to do, drinking milk while eating fish was fatal, breaking a mirtor was a sevenyear sentence to ill fornme, and probably God was real, too, except He didn't listen very well or seem to give a damn about the situation of the Duff family. 4 3 44 HOME TRUTHS But we kept Him advised aoout what was going on and what we needed and wanted, so He had no excuse to say He wasn't being kept current. "Pray your daddy gets a job," my mother would say, on the occasions when the advisability arose of reminding the Deity that a nice little shove would be helpful and much appreciated. Maybe Brown and Root would be purring a new pipeline through from Houston to Oklahoma City, and God would be willing to arrange employment on the right-of-way crew for Willie Duff, ifwe children asked Him nicely. Maybe He would respond quicker and more fully to the pleas of a child than He had proved willing so far to do when grown people came whining and ttying to cut a deal with Him. It was worth a try certainly, prayer and churchgoing, so we caught rides with fellow seekers each day of the week the Camp Ruby church was open, and we showed up. I did my reading assignments for Sunday school and Training Union and Prayer Meeting, and I excelled in Sword Drill, which was the name given to the race to be the first to find a verse thrown out as jump ball by our religious instructors. I knew the answers to the questions about the meaning of Scripture and the connections between one character and another in the Old and New Testaments. I could do biblical exegesis with the best of the locals, though I didn't know I was doing it. And, as usual, my being first in such endeavors C05t me dearly with my peers. Not one of the males near my age in the Camp Ruby Baptist Church could abide being arotmd me, and I didn't blame them. Nothing I knew about or cared aoout or did or could do connected in any way with those people. For one thing, all of them went to school at Big Sandy, a country institution of only a couple ofhtmdred or so srudents in all twelve grades. Their fathers were fanners or unemployed sawmill workers or people who had never worked a day. They had last names like Tolar, Brazile, Moy, Pickens, Dikes, Dillon, and Redd. About half the school was made up of Alabama...

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