A MORAL CONSPIRACY

The constable eyed Preacher Madison intently, surprised at the difference in the man now and the one he had met previously.  Barnes had erroneously picked Preacher Sewell to be the leader of the group, because he did most of the talking.  What the constable didn’t know was that George Washington Madison played the empowerment game better than any black preacher in Arkansas. His life had taught him that the only thing humility and meekness got you was a hard row to hoe and a lot of shit in your life. And he wasn’t having any of it.

Born in a converted pigsty outside Pine Bluff, Madison quickly learned his niggerhood and decided it was no way to live.  By age ten, he had absorbed just about everything the black public schools could teach him, and he knew none of it was going to make his life a lot better.  He could be a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, or a black college professor, but he knew he would still be a nigger in a state owned and operated by whites.  Body and soul, he would still not be much better off than his granddaddy who was a slave in northern Louisiana just two generations back.

In a church on a hot August Sunday morning when he was thirteen years old, George Washington Madison solved the riddle of his blackness and the whiteness of the world he lived in.  It came to him suddenly that all across Arkansas and Louisiana and Mississippi and Tennessee, indeed across the whole country, that millions of blacks and whites were sitting in churches reading from the same book and singing songs of praise to a man who lived two thousand years ago and taught that living a right life here and now was preparation for another better life to follow.

Madison never concerned himself with the veracity of the after-life proposition.  What he knew to be important was that both blacks and whites believed it to be true.  And this fact was his hook, the single vine that properly seized and shaken could move the whole pea patch.  And George Washington Madison would rattle a lot of pea patches in his time, with Mowbry County being neither the first nor the last.