Salvation on Sand Mountain Read Free

when the church was filled with families from all over Jackson County. “They’ll be back,” said Cecil, the guitar player, and he patted me on the arm. “You come back, too.”
     
     
    I grew up in a Methodist church, but ours must have been an odd kind of Methodism. We were a small congregation in East Lake, an urban residential neighborhood of Birmingham, and occasionally we’d get a preacher from what we thought
of as the sticks, from a place like East Gadsden, a small mill town at the foot of the Appalachians, or Arab, pronounced A-rab, on the top of Brindley Mountain.
    These preachers sometimes seemed a little out of place in our quiet, sober neighborhood, where the families of grocers and plumbers and office workers tried to secure a hold on middle-class respectability. The preachers would attempt to liven up the services by shouting till they were hoarse. Sometimes they resorted to bolder tactics. In the middle of a sermon, for instance, Brother Jack Dillard, my favorite, would suddenly be so overcome by the Spirit, he would run down to the piano and start banging away on it. He could not, in fact, play the piano, but that didn’t seem to matter.
    Brother Dillard believed in obeying the Spirit, and he encouraged those grocers and tradesmen to do the same, although I don’t recall ever seeing any of them follow his example. Of course, all of us teenagers got saved in that church during Brother Dillard’s tenure, some of us multiple times. The record was held by a girl named Frances Fuller, who never passed up an opportunity to rush to the altar. She occasionally had a seizure halfway there, and someone would have to run to the kitchen to find a spoon to put in her mouth. The choir would continue to sing “All to Jesus I Surrender,” and I remember my father’s grip would tighten on the back of the pew in front of him until they got Frances up on her feet and back in her seat again.

    What we really worried about, though, was Brother Dillard’s heart. Years later, it would kill him. We worried because he always worked himself into such a sweat when he preached that he would have to take out his handkerchief and mop his forehead, cheeks, and neck. This was such a familiar habit that it didn’t distract us one bit from his sermon, not even the Sunday when, instead of pulling his handkerchief out, he retrieved his pocket comb by mistake and began combing his hair while he shouted, “When we were yet sinners, He died for us!”
    Those days were filled with desperate innocence and with a spiritual light that I would later miss. We were a naive little church, always prey to a good sob story — the missionary we sponsored in what was then Southern Rhodesia, for instance. Years later we discovered he actually owned a fairly sizable rubber plantation, on which local villagers worked for next to nothing. The young men lived in barracks on the plantation, and the owner would have informal Bible study with them sometimes at night. For this, he was called a missionary, and we would send him a good portion of our foreign missions budget every month.
    And then there was Dr. Doctorin. Dr. Doctorin came to us in 1958, at a time when the newspapers were filled with stories about Lebanon’s civil war, and with photographs of U.S. Marines wading ashore in Beirut. There was a lot of concern both for our soldiers and for the poor Lebanese. We
considered ourselves fortunate when Dr. Doctorin showed up at our church one Sunday night to conduct an impromptu revival. The timing could not have been better. Dr. Doctorin said that he had just come from Beirut. We took up a huge love offering for him. I remember that he wept when we brought him the overflowing collection plates.
    It was the last time we ever saw Dr. Doctorin, and it was not until many years later that I began to wonder if he really had been a doctor, and if his name could really have been Dr. Doctorin, and if he were really from Beirut.
    We weren’t always right in