Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition Read online

  Instruction and ritual are minimal, belief all. Jesus is with you always, in the spirit; He waits to comfort you. He will return in the flesh on the appointed day, which will be soon, perhaps in our lifetime. Our Lord is the incarnation of the fellowship and the perfect eternal patriarch. Suffer the little children to come unto me, He said, and hinder them not. Of the Trinity, He is the personal God. Each Christian must find Him individually, out of free choice, and be guided thereafter by readings of the Bible and in communion with others who have also found Grace. The Southern Baptists have no bishops. The pastor can do no more than advise and lead. Members of the congregation form the priesthood of the believer. They learn to speak in a scripture-laced discourse called the language of Zion.

  The service codifies the morals of the believers. It makes explicit what the consensus holds to be decent and right. But it is much more, and those who do not grasp that added dimension will always underestimate religious faith. It catches the power. It is the parabolic mirror that bends the rays of tribalism to one white-hot focus: Saved by Jesus Christ, united in the fellowship of the Lord. Born again!

  There was no question I would be raised in this faith, which is today shared by 15 million people in the United States and ranks second in numbers only to Roman Catholicism. Virtually all my forebears on both sides of the family as far back as the mid-1800s, close to the founding of the denomination in 1845, were Southern Baptists. All lived in Alabama and Georgia, the fundamentalist Bible Belt. Theirs was an activist religion. How well I remember sitting as a six-year-old in the Sunday School class, held at the Pensacola First Baptist Church just before service, learning to sing the heart-thumping refrain,

  Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before.

  When I was sprung from the Gulf Coast Military Academy in the summer of 1937, my religious training acquired a new dimension. I was now eight years old. My parents had separated and divorced. My relationship with my mother, who retained custody, remained loving and close, but the divorce had shorn her of support. Pensacola was gripped by the Depression, and times were hard. My mother found work as a secretary, but the wages were marginal, and it was several years before she acquired the additional training and experience to move to a better job. During that first year she placed me in the care of a trusted family friend.

  Belle Raub, Mother Raub as I quickly came to call her, lived on East Lee Street in Pensacola with her husband, E. J., a retired carpenter. She was a heavyset, bosomy woman in her late fifties. She eschewed makeup and favored long, floral-print dresses. She wore a cougar-claw pendant that I found fascinating. (“Where did you get it? Where are cougars found? What do they do?” Monsters of the land.)

  Mother Raub was in fact the perfect grandmother. She was forever cheerily working in and around the house, from before I woke in the morning to after I fell asleep, gardening, cleaning, cooking, and crocheting spokewheel-patterned bedspreads that she gave to friends and neighbors. She was attentive to my every need and listened carefully to every story of my life, which I considered to have been both long and filled with meaning. I gave her no problems with my manners or discipline; the Gulf Coast Military Academy had taken care of that.

  Mother Raub had edged the porch with a small botanic garden of ornamental plants. I set out to learn the many kinds as best she could teach me. I found the living environment fascinating: elephant-ear arums the size of kitchen tables sprang from the soil along the front of the porch; a persimmon tree next to the street yielded winter fruit; and in the vacant lot behind the Raub property, second-growth turkey oaks formed a miniature forest. All this and the surrounding neighborhood I enthusiastically explored, freed from the twenty-four-hour discipline of the military school.

  I acquired a black cat and planted a small garden of my own in the backyard. In a soft sandy spot nearby I began to dig a hole to China or to wherever else the shaft might lead, a project never completed. I learned the joy of fried grits at breakfast time: Mother Raub indulged me in this and in all other things. E. J., who had a drinking problem and was periodically scolded by his wife, was kindly in a gruff, distracted way.

  In the fall I entered the nearby Agnes McReynolds Elementary School, located beyond the vacant lot and one block west, each day carrying my lunch of a sandwich and banana in a tin pail and finding, miraculously, that by noon the banana was always squashed and oozing out of its skin onto the bottom.

  Soon judged by my teacher at Agnes McReynolds to be too advanced for the third grade, I was given a written test and skipped to the fourth. This was a serious misdetermination for me socially. I was already small for my age, and growing more shy and introverted all the time. For the rest of my school years I was destined to be the runt of my class. (Upon entering Murphy High School in Mobile four years later, I was the only boy still wearing short pants. I soon switched to the brown corduroy knickers then in vogue, the ones whose legs rubbed together and squeaked when you walked.)

  Mother Raub was a Methodist, not a Baptist. This meant that the services she and E.J. attended weekly, after dropping me off at the First Baptist Church, were a bit more sedate and less evangelical. She was nothing, however, if not a fierce moralist in the stricter Methodist tradition. Smoking, drinking, and gambling were in her eyes among the gravest of sins. She was undoubtedly aware that my father zealously overindulged in all these vices. She asked me to swear that I would never in my whole life give in to the same temptations, and I gladly agreed. It was easy: eight-year-old boys then were not prone to vices beyond occasionally betting marbles on games of mumblety-peg. In the nearly sixty years since I have kept my promise, except for the odd glass of wine or beer with meals—not because of piety, but rather because I don’t much care for the taste of the stuff, and, at a deeper and probably more cogent level, because of the later downward spiral of my father’s life as a result of alcoholism, which I witnessed with helpless despair.

  Mother Raub was a woman with a steadfast heart and a mystic soul. Holiness was for her a state to be ardently sought. She told me a story about a very religious friend who wished to unite with Jesus through prayer. One day this good woman looked up from her devotions and saw a strange light in the room. It was a sign from God.

  “Where in the room?” I interrupted.

  “Well, in the corner.”

  “Where in the corner?”

  “Well…in the upper part of the corner, next to the ceiling.”

  My mind raced. Her friend had seen God! Or, at least, she had received a Sign. Therefore, she must have been a chosen person. Maybe the light gives you the answer to everything, whatever that is. It was the Grail! The leap was possible if you prayed in some special way.

  So I prayed long and hard many evenings after that, glancing around occasionally to see if the light had arrived or if any other change had occurred in the room. Nothing happened. I decided I just wasn’t up to bringing God into my life, at least not yet. I would have to wait, maybe grow a little more.

  At the end of that school year I left Mother Raub, this time to rejoin my father. My interest in the mysterious light faded. Perhaps (I cannot remember exactly) I stopped believing altogether in the existence of the light. But I never lost faith in the immanence of the Lord. He would come soon as a light unto the world.

  In the fall of 1943, when I was fourteen, I came back to spend another year with Belle Raub. I was old enough to be baptized and born again by my own free will. No one counseled me to take this step; I could have waited for years before the weekly altar call struck home. One evening it just happened. Mother Raub and I had walked over to the McReynolds School to attend a recital of gospel hymns sung a cappella by a traveling tenor soloist. I have forgotten his repertoire as a whole. But one song, delivered in measured, somber tones, deeply moved me. It was a dissonant piece that gripped the listener in Pentecostal embrace:

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  Were you there when they naile
d Him to the cross?

  Sometimes it makes me to tremble, tremble.

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  An otherwise restless and free-spirited adolescent, I wept freely in response to the tragic evocation. I wanted to do something decisive. I felt emotion as though from the loss of a father, but one retrievable by redemption through the mystic union with Christ—that is, if you believed, if you really believed; and I did so really believe, and it was time for me to be baptized.

  Dressed in my Sunday clothes and accompanied by Mother Raub, I called on the Reverend Wallace Rogers at the First Baptist Church to announce my decision and to select a time for baptism. For a teenager to meet the pastor of a large congregation was an exceptional event. I was tense and nervous as we walked into Rogers’ office. He rose from his desk to greet us.

  He was dressed in sports clothes and smoking a cigar. A cigar! In his friendly, casual way he congratulated me on my decision, and together we chose a date for the baptism. I filled out the application form as he watched and drew on his cigar. Mother Raub said nothing, then or later, about his transgression. But I knew what was on her mind!

  One Sunday evening in February 1944, I stood in the line of the newly converted in a room behind the pulpit. While the congregation watched, we came out one by one to join the pastor in a large tank of chest-deep water in the choir loft at the front of the church. I was dressed in a light gown over my undershorts. When my turn came Rogers recited the baptismal dedication and bent me over once like a ballroom dancer, backward and downward, until my entire body and head dipped beneath the surface.

  Later, as I dried off and rejoined the congregation, I reflected on how totally physical, how somehow common, the rite of passage had been, like putting on swimming trunks and jumping off the tower at the Pensacola Bay bathhouse the way it was done in 1943, letting your toes squish in the bottom mud for a moment before you kicked back up to the surface. I had felt embarrassed and uncomfortable during the baptism itself. Was the whole world completely physical, after all? I worried over Dr. Rogers’ comfortable clothing and cigar. And something small somewhere cracked. I had been holding an exquisite, perfect spherical jewel in my hand, and now, turning it over in a certain light, I discovered a ruinous fracture.

  The still faithful might say I never truly knew grace, never had it; but they would be wrong. The truth is that I found it and abandoned it. In the years following I drifted away from the church, and my attendance became desultory. My heart continued to believe in the light and the way, but increasingly in the abstract, and I looked for grace in some other setting. By the time I entered college at the age of seventeen, I was absorbed in natural history almost to the exclusion of everything else. I was enchanted with science as a means of explaining the physical world, which increasingly seemed to me to be the complete world. In essence, I still longed for grace, but rooted solidly on Earth.

  My fictional heroes in late adolescence were the protagonists of Arrowsmith, The Sea Wolf, and Martin Eden, the Nietzschean loners and seekers. I read Trofim D. Lysenko’s Heredity and Its Variability, a theory officially sanctioned by Stalin as sound Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and wrote an excited essay about it for my high school science class. Imagine, I scribbled, if Lysenko was right (and he must be, because otherwise why would traditional geneticists be up in arms against him?), biologists could change heredity in any direction they wished! It was rank pseudoscience, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time. And I didn’t care by then; I had tasted the sweet fruit of intellectual rebellion.

  I was exhilarated by the power and mystery of nuclear energy. Robert Oppenheimer was another far-removed science hero. I was especially impressed by a Life magazine photograph of him in a porkpie hat taken as he spoke with General Leslie Groves at ground zero following the first nuclear explosion. Here was Promethean intellect triumphant. Oppenheimer was a slight man, as I was a slight boy. He was vulnerable in appearance like me, but smilingly at ease in the company of a general; and the two stood there together because the physicist was master of arcane knowledge that had tamed for human use the most powerful force in nature.

  Shortly afterward, during my first year at college, someone lent me a book that was creating a sensation among biologists, Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? The great scientist argued not only that life was entirely a physical process, but that biology could be explained by the principles of physics and chemistry. Imagine: biology transformed by the same mental effort that split the atom! I fantasized being Schrödinger’s student and joining the great enterprise. Then, as an eighteen-year-old sophomore, I read Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species. It was a cornerstone of the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory, one of the books that combined genetics with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Mayr’s writing reinforced in my mind the philosophy implicit in Schrödinger. He showed that variety among plants and animals is created through stages that can be traced by the study of ordinary nature around us. Mayr’s text told me that I could conduct scientific research of a high order with the creatures I already knew and loved. I didn’t need to journey to a faraway place and sit at the feet of a Schrödinger or a Mayr in order to enter the temple of science.

  Science became the new light and the way. But what of religion? What of the Grail, and the revelation of purest ray serene that gives wholeness and meaning to life? There must be a scientific explanation for religion, moral precepts, the rites of passage, and the craving for immortality. Religion, I knew from personal experience, is a perpetual fountainhead of human emotion. It cannot be dismissed as superstition. It cannot be compartmentalized as the manifestation of some separate world. From the beginning I never could accept that science and religion are separate domains, with fundamentally different questions and answers. Religion had to be explained as a material process, from the bottom up, atoms to genes to the human spirit. It had to be embraced by the single grand naturalistic image of man.

  That conviction still grips me, impelled and troubled as I am by emotions I confess I do not even now fully understand. There was one instructive moment when the subterranean feelings surfaced without warning. The occasion was the visit of Martin Luther King Sr. to Harvard in January 1984. He came under the auspices of a foundation devoted to the improvement of race relations at the university. Its director, Allen Counter, an old friend with a similar Southern Baptist background, invited me to attend a service conducted by the father of the martyred civil rights leader, and to join a small group at a reception afterward.

  It was the first Protestant service I had sat through in forty years. It was held in Harvard’s Memorial Church. Reverend King gave a quiet hortatory address organized around scripture and moral principle. He omitted the altar call—this was, after all, Harvard. But at the end a choir of black Harvard students surprised me by singing a medley of old-time gospel hymns, with a professionalism equaling anything I ever heard in the churches of my youth. To my even greater surprise, I wept quietly as I listened. My people, I thought. My people. And what else lay hidden deep within my soul?

  chapter four

  A MAGIC KINGDOM

  COME BACK WITH ME NOW TO OCTOBER 1935, TO PENSA-cola, for a walk up Palafox Street. Let’s start by peeking over the seawall that closes the south end of the street. Down there on the rocks, kept wet and alga-covered by the softly lapping water of the bay, sits a congregation of grapsid crabs. They resemble large black spiders, with crustaceous skins, carapaces the size of silver dollars, and claw-like legs that spread straight out from the sides of the body. They rest on needle-tipped feet, alert and ready to sprint forward, backward, or sideways at the slightest disturbance. Drop a pebble among them, and those closest to impact scurry for cover.

  Let’s turn and stroll north along the street, just looking around. On the right is the Childs Restaurant, where the courthouse crowd gathers for lunch. Stop for a moment and pass your hand through the light beam across the entrance. The door swings
open, a miracle of modern technology. Do it again; this time let the couple waiting behind you walk on through. People don’t seem to mind kids’ playing with the beam. A little farther along is the Saenger Theater, Pensacola’s premier palace of pleasure, in summer “cooled by iced air.” This Saturday’s matinee bill is an episode of the Flash Gordon serial (Flash escapes from the lair of the fire dragon), followed by Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. You’ve seen the feature; there’s a scary scene near the end in which Flynn skewers Basil Rathbone in a duel on the treasure island, and the treacherous French pirate falls dying in the surf.

  This section of lower Palafox, west to Reus and east to Adams, is the busy part of town. Model A Fords are on the street, a pretty good crowd of shoppers on the sidewalks. Be careful when you cross Romana Street up ahead; a kid on a bicycle got run over there last year; that’s what they told me.

  It’s hot, as always. North Florida is still a tropical place in the early fall. Afternoon thunderheads are gathering to the south and west across the bay. No breeze has kicked in yet; the air hangs heavy and moist and laced with engine fumes. Let’s cross Palafox over to the courthouse, on your left. On the lawn next to the sidewalk a fire ant colony is swarming. The ants are pouring out of a mound nest, here no more than an irregular pile of dirt partly flattened by the last pass of a lawnmower. Winged queens and males are taking off on their nuptial flight, protected by angry-looking workers that run up and down the grass blades and out onto the blistering-hot concrete of the sidewalk. The species is unmistakably Solenopsis geminata, the native fire ant, I can tell you now. Another fifteen years will pass before the infamous Solenopsis invicta, imported from South America, will spread this far east from its point of introduction, Mobile, Alabama. I’ll be here as a college student to watch that happen.