I Can Still Hear My Father's Voice...

Published: Wed, 06/15/22

Hi ...

The essay below was written by the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and United States Senator, Raphael Warnock.

Like a vitamin for the soul, it will uplift and inspire you.

May it also serve as a reminder to encourage the Black fathers in your midst to be the best fathers they can be.

Feel free to share,

Brian

Raphael Warnock: I Can Still Hear My Father’s Voice

By Raphael Warnock

Rev. Warnock is a Democratic senator from Georgia and the author of “A Way Out of No Way: A Memoir of Truth, Transformation, and the New American Story,” from which this essay is adapted.

I can still hear my father’s voice.

“Wake up, son. Get dressed. Get ready. Put your shoes on. There’s something for you to do.” My dad almost never allowed me and my siblings to sleep late. It did not matter whether it was a weekday or a weekend, during the school year or summertime, the admonition was the same.

One sleepy-headed morning, I pushed back: “It’s Saturday. Get ready for what? What do you want me to do?” He paused and then blurted out, “I don’t know yet. Just be ready!” That was my dad. Loving. Gentle. No nonsense. A small giant of a man with a fierce work ethic and a profound sense of duty.

Jonathan Warnock was 52 years old when I was born, the same age I am now. As a young man, Dad was drafted in the U.S. Army during World War II and served about a year, all stateside. He experienced firsthand the indignities of that era’s Black military men, who served their country dutifully at a defining time in its history yet were treated as second-class citizens, particularly in the segregated South.

Dad headed back home to Savannah, Ga., on a public bus. He was dressed proudly in his Army uniform as the bus rolled through town, pulled to a stop and began filling with new passengers. The white bus driver pointed at my father and ordered him to get up and move farther back so a white teenager could sit. To the white driver and passengers, the skin he was wearing was more consequential than the U.S. Army uniform he was wearing.

Dad knew the grave consequences a Black man could face if he dared to disobey. Black men and boys had been dragged from their homes and lynched for less. He obliged but never forgot.

My dad always worked for himself, in part because of his own internal entrepreneurial drive but also because of his refusal to suffer the everyday indignities and economic vulnerabilities of working for people who refused to acknowledge his humanity in the Jim Crow South. His hauling business sometimes transported produce — peaches, cantaloupes, watermelons — or plates of glass or junk cars to area markets or factories.

Late one rainy evening in the early 1960s, he and one of my older brothers, Jonathan Emmanuel, were transporting a load of glass in the truck with two other teen boys whom Dad had enlisted to assist. Suddenly a car appeared out of nowhere on the rural Georgia highway and rear-ended Dad’s truck. The car slammed hard into the truck and skidded partly underneath its chassis. When Dad and his stunned passengers climbed out of their vehicle, they saw blood and glass everywhere. They also saw a horrific scene inside the car, where the driver, a young white man, had been decapitated. A passenger, another young white man, had been thrown from the vehicle but miraculously survived the crash. White residents of the area heard the commotion and began gathering at the scene. Shattered lives and shards of glass spilled all over that rural Georgia highway.

Within minutes, the sheriff, also white, arrived with his lights flashing and sirens blaring. As Dad looked into the sea of white faces, a sense of foreboding filled him. Saddened by what had just happened and terrified by what appeared on the verge of happening, Dad inched close to the boys and whispered that they had to stick together. They might have to fight for their lives.

Dad began to pray. Not the long or eloquent prayer of a Sunday morning preacher, but the hushed sounds and urgent pleas of a man in trouble. As they would sometimes do in the late-night prayer services of the Holiness Church tradition in which I was raised, Dad simply called on the name of Jesus — repeatedly, silently, passionately. The sheriff approached and in his thick Georgia drawl questioned Dad and his passengers about the accident. Then, after taking his time to survey the scene, the sheriff turned to Dad with an unexpected question: “You boys need a ride home?” In shock, Dad and the teenagers glanced back and forth at one another. The sheriff added that he’d warned the young men in the car multiple times about driving drunk and flying so recklessly up and down those rural back roads.

Dad and his helpers all lived to tell the story. And tell it Dad did, after he entered parish ministry in his forties — over and over in his sermons, recounting God’s grace and mercy.

I entered the world on July 23, 1969, the 11th child in our big, blended family. I was never forced to give up my seat on the bus to a white passenger, as my father had been. When he told his children the story, Dad never seemed bitter. It was at his church that I learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In Dad I saw a true patriot who loved his country despite its flaws, a man who never lost faith that his country someday would find a way to live up to its ideals.

All the boys in our family helped in some way in Dad’s hauling business (though my older brothers always claimed I wasn’t required to work as much as they had been). By the time I was old enough to assist, Dad’s business focused mostly on abandoned cars, salvaging their metal at the local steelyard in exchange for cash. Dad would leave his business cards, with his telephone number and the message “We Buy Junk Cars” in large letters, on old cars.

A brilliant, self-educated man, my father even devised his own pulley system to load the cars onto the truck and stack them atop one another. How Dad designed and built different versions of these pulley systems — welding together spare parts of steel on the back of an old Mack truck, safely lifting, loading, stacking and hauling cars — all without any formal training in engineering or physics and without incident, baffles my mind to this day. He took the old vehicles to a small piece of property he owned off the beaten path, next to a railroad track. He then salvaged the metal parts and took them to Chatham Steel Corporation in town for cash. It was grueling work, and sometimes he was so tired when he made it home that his eyes closed while he was chewing at the dinner table. And that was just the exhaustion from his day job.

His work as a pastor came with its own time demands and responsibilities. He preached with clarity and fire. Often using vivid illustrations and recalling the challenges, near-misses and miraculous survival stories of his own life, Dad spoke of a God who walks beside you through life’s dark moments and dangerous valleys. One who never abandons us, especially those who feel forgotten, discarded and lost in a mean, cold world. The junkman who lifted abandoned cars on weekdays, seeing their value, lifted broken people on weekends, convincing them of theirs.

The encouragement and the model he provided propelled me to become the first college graduate in my family. I went to Morehouse College, the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and eventually became the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he preached. I remember how proud Dad was when the membership of that church overwhelmingly elected me to serve in June of 2005. I picked up the telephone, wished him a happy Father’s Day and shared my news. My sister later told me that he was so moved he wept.

My dad died in 2010 at the age of 93. I sometimes wonder what he would think about the fact that on Jan. 5, 2020, his youngest son was elected Georgia’s first Black United States senator and only the 11th in the nation’s history. What would he think about the attack on the Capitol the very next day?

Both say something profound about the America he knew and the one he always knew we could become. What does it mean in a moment like this to wake up, get dressed, and put your moral and marching shoes on? Who do we want to be as a nation? Do we lean toward the hopeful, multiracial majority that showed up in Georgia, ready to move forward on Jan. 5? Or do we fall back to the America that showed up on Jan. 6, bitter, destructive, divisive? These are all vital conversations — ones I wish I could have with my father. But he has passed into the light.

I remember preaching his eulogy. I opened with a Shelley poem. The poem focuses on the epitaph of an Egyptian pharaoh whose tombstone boasted of his greatness, beginning, famously, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” Shelley used the sharp irony of the former king’s near-buried tomb and the decay surrounding it. I contrasted that poem with the biblical story of Enoch, a humble man whose story is barely told in the scriptures.

We learn simply in Genesis 5:22 and 5:24 that “Enoch walked with God.” There is little else. “His story, though it should, will not tonight make the CBS Evening News,” I said of my father. “In the eyes of the world, my daddy was an ordinary man. But that’s all right. Because Enoch was an ordinary man. But he had an extraordinary epitaph.”

My father represents the salt of the earth, blue-collar brother, brilliant despite not having a college degree or prestigious credentials, innovative enough to create miracles with his hands, the kind of Black man whose life doesn’t make the headlines for either shooting hoops or shooting bullets, for breaking out or breaking in.

So, like most among us, he remains unseen. He loved his wife. He took care of his family. He shepherded the people in his church. He endured racism without becoming bitter. And he loved his country. He was a walking sermon. We laid Dad to rest in a veterans’ cemetery in South Carolina, not far from our home in Savannah. And the inscription on his tombstone is how he would want to be remembered: “Private Jonathan Warnock. He walked with God.”