“Nobody wanted to know Daddy when he was dying. He was so alone. He was scared. I could see the fear in his eyes when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to … I don’t know … they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer.”
Her own death was preceded by a serious fall, after which she lay alone for some time until her housekeeper found her. It does not say how long this was. Her last words were: “I’m so tired.” I can’t help but think the look in her fathers eyes haunted her all her life. It was a vision of humanity, through the view of someone who felt abandoned by it.
I was feeling this energy already in Showboat. Her character is a sad one, but she inhabited that role a bit too well. If it is true that “your life is the only Bible some people will ever read”, many Christians have turned their backs on the Bible, ignored it, perverted it. They would be more honest and more virtuous as chicken sacrificing “heathens” who never mouth the word love at all. As I think about it, the likely reason that the preacher never came to see Gardner’s father was that he was a “nobody”, precisely the sort of person Jesus would have cared most for.
And I was watching all this, trying to decide who I am supposed to be. I feel compassion sometimes, and certainly in the abstract. Sometimes I am kind in person, although usually I am too afraid. The feeling of being burned alive emotionally is something I am still trying to calm.
But I feel we are meant to feel love for one another, but in a paradoxical way not get stuck in the love. Feel love, but don’t identify with it. Feel love, but allow its pain to dissolve in God somehow. Most of what I feel are my most important insight come to me by the figurative corner of my eye. I was not quite sure what I was feeling, but I have had the sense for some months that some subterranean growth is happening in me, something working which is above my ability to perceive. Perhaps it might most usefully be called God’s Plan.
As you might expect, though, that soulful rendition of Old Man River affected me.