LIV.

The carpenter Jonas Jackson, called Big Jim Crow, was contracted by the preacher known as Swampy Joe to build a new church in Strangetown.  It would be the second such freedman's church in the district, the first being Jessup Floyd's African Methodist Church.  It was to be known as the Chapel of Freedom, and the cost was put up by a parishioner's trust funded by Maw Possum and The Major.  Swampy Joe, whose Christian name was Joseph Greene, was a highly unusual preacher.  

Before Emancipation, he was a slave preacher on Drummond Downs, which was on the Mooresville Road. He had surreptitiously run an invisible church from inside a crumbling gambrel-roofed barn on the outskirts of the plantation. It was partially caved in and grown over with brush and ivy, the rafters sagging with wisteria. And in this crumbling structure he ministered his fellow brothers and sisters into the presence of the Holy Spirit. His church was vaguely of the Baptist tradition. The power of his theology was Freedom, and his brothers and sisters were the Israelites. This was a common theme among most slave churches. What made Joseph Greene's church so unusual was its Hoodoo ritualism.  

At his invisible church, Joseph Greene would throw himself into trances and speak in tongues. He'd call up Ring Shouts and dance bare-chested around the fire, babbling glossolalia and blowing goofer dust from his palm into the faces of his supplicants. He'd charm snakes with fevered hymns and snap chains with his teeth. It was a dazzling spectacle of the Holy Spirit!  It was also provocative to the slaveowning society and placed his life at great risk, but risk it he did as he travelled by night to preach and shout and dance at the various plantations. He'd baptize in the marshes of Limestone Creek where he earned the name Swampy Joe. Now that the war was over, the Chapel of Freedom would become a beacon for all the freed slaves whose Salvation was groomed in the shadow of Swampy Joe. 

Evander Pruitt accompanied Big Jim Crowe to work on the church.  It was his penance for his sins - his recent ones, anyway.  Unlike the traditional gable and steeple of Jessup Floyd's AMC, which was on Strange Street itself, Swampy Joe's church was being built with a thatched hip roof. Keen on the power of symbolism, Swampy Joe had a well dug into the groundwater, and instead of a bucket he hung a bell.  He would ring it on Sundays and his congregants would stand in line as he cast water on them drawn from the well using a gnarled stump of ash wood for an aspergillum. His eyes would lift into his head, and he would cast some benediction, then quote Leviticus or some such, and then open the double doors which revealed a room of split-log pews and a great chest-like structure which doubled as some form of altar.  A grotesque Catholic-like crucifix was hung by hemp at the back end.  

Swampy Joe's performance had tempered somewhat since Emancipation. He slackened somewhat from his Hoodoo roots.  His renowned ministry in the in the County was suddenly challenged by the appearance of another renowned minister. This was Jessup Floyd, who had come by way of a prominent family of New England freemen. He was an educated and well-spoken brother. He had organized congregations of the African Methodist Church among the Low Country Gullah of the Carolina Sea Islands. Now that the war had ended, Jessup Floyd had come to the Nickajack to bring his orthodox brand of social and spiritual enlightenment to the emancipated slaves, who were left bereft with sudden freedom and little more. 

Jessup Floyd always wore a black waistcoat to service with a clerical collar, and his salty beard and gray hair gave him an avuncular air.  In spite of this observant outfit, he had the personal touch. He recounted the possibilities of free labor in devotion to Christ.  He shared the Israelites rejoice of Freedom, and the earnest labor and study of these people to follow in the pathway of the Lord. He dazzled his congregations with photographs of himself in Faneuil Hall in Boston, and shaking hands with Frederick Douglas, and of his free children who were never sold off, and of him standing next to white men, all of them smiling. To freedman this was all quite foreign, but it proved that some form of harmony existed elsewhere when their current post-war world was fraught with violence and tumult. And so Jessup Floyd's flock increased to Swampy Joe's consternation.

But if Jessup Floyd's favorite Gospel was Mark, then Swampy Joe's was John. Whereas Jessup Floyd could recite the Aquinus and Augustine when the assault of logic required it, Swampy Joe could recite Acts and Revelations when the Holy Spirit compelled it. He did it in the fever of what he called the "Gittup." And whereas Jessup Floyd's orthodox Sunday service over the newly emancipated freemen was noted with satisfaction by the Greeks, Swampy Joe's preaching was regarded as bombastic and heathen by the same.

And so the Chapel of Freedom rose from the funky bottoms of Strangetown by the earnest labors of Big Jim Crow and his crew. For his penance, Brother Pruitt helped build the church. He saw no error in the charge. Penance was penance, and Evander Pruitt always paid for his sins - recent ones anyway. Before service, Swampy Joe would slather his hair in pomade and douse his head with water.  In the heat of summer, he would steam and bead water.  His preaching was fevered and fervent. He scooted and shouted and sweated and seethed. What he seethed at was what Lyman Resnick, editor of the Limestone Democrat, was calling the "New Condition." It was not pejorative, but an apt label for the post-war limbo of black-white labor relations. But for Swampy Joe, he proclaimed the New Condition was the freedman's chance to forge a new identity.  The New Condition was a black Israel freed.  And that black Israel meant a new brotherhood nation of freedom, free labor, free choice, free worship, and free expression. When Swampy Joe trifled with sermons preaching land reform and support for the Fifteenth Amendment, his church on Drummond Downs was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan. On the front page of the Limestone Democrat, the arch-conservative Lyman Resnick could scarcely conceal his satisfaction.  

And so Swampy Joe paid homage to Maw Possum, who proffered him a Quark and a Promissory Note for the construction of a new church, smack dab in the middle of Strangetown. And he rode the cars to Huntsville to draw upon her check from the parishioner's trust at the State Bank on Jefferson Street, and returned to Strangetown to place this cash in the hands of Big Jim Crow, who immediately began construction of the Chapel of Freedom. And so it rose on Strange Street, across from Jessup Floyd's AMC. And the music of both churches would rise on Sunday's into the milieu of sound of Strangetown's busy streets. And so it was that the aroma of sound from both temples would compete but was deemed pleasing all the same to the Lord.