MANNERS & MORALS: Funeralizing Uncle Row

MANNERS & MORALS

In the sun-worn clapboard cabin, the 113-year-old black body of Uncle Row Adams lay very still beneath the patchwork coverlet. Over his bed, his tall silk stovepipe hat hung on a peg in the wall. Through the dusty windows, his daughter Ella could catch glimpses of the worn-out Texas land. She wrote laboriously: “Sir. This to say Popa offi low. Now he done stop eating ennything, wont nothing and no one. I am riting let you no he no good. He might be living when you get hear and then he might not.” A few hours later, when the coons and possums and mean grey foxes began to move through the scrub oak and cedars, Ella added a postscript: “Popa pass tonight. Will funeali him Friday.”

Old Uncle Row could remember the days of his slavery, and the time when his part of Texas was rich cotton land. He could remember the Yankees coming down the road “all brass buttons and bayonets,” remember the uncertain years while the family that had owned him disintegrated and disappeared. Uncle Row stayed on, farming a little, a good hand with horses and stock. He hunted wildcat, bobcat, polecat, foxes, coons, possums and rabbits. Nights, he took a coal-oil lantern down to the Keechi Creek, baited up with rabbit entrails, fished all night long. Uncle Row could catch catfish, when no one else could. There was a secret to it, but Uncle Row said: “Bless my soul, I’d explain it to you but you wouldn’t understand.”

Uncle Row liked good food and comfort and whiskey. He had legally fathered 17 children and, he admitted to other men, one “brush colt” somewhere along the way.

Four days after his death, in the shed-1’ke white church at the end of a rutted whiteclay road, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered to funeralize Uncle Row. Outside, the men stood in farm clothes or funeral-black town clothes. Inside, the preacher’s voice was solemn, thin and reedy. The congregation murmured, its responses gathering resonance and urgency. Intoned the preacher: “We got a race to run for God, running to beat the devil who is trying to defeat us. Have faith in God, run on.” The congregation chanted: “Run on. That’s right. Amen.” Said the preacher: “There’s temptations to upset you on the way. The devil he tries to make you fall. Keep running. And if you fall, get up again. Run on.” Echoed the congregation: “Run on, run on, Lord Jesus.”

Cried a deacon: “An old sheep, he know the road.” The chorus swelled to a kind of triumph: “That’s right. That’s right. Unh-hunh.”