"Confrontation Between the Saints" contemporary figurative painting

"Don't it say back in Leviticus somewhere that Jesus drank wine?"

My big fear growing up was that the levee right behind our house would break, and the Mississippi River would flood like the great flood of 1927.  Partly this was because there was a local flood in 1972, when I was five, and I remember my teenage uncle catching a catfish on a rod and reel in our front yard.  

Other than floods, the other big source of drama in my formative years was my father's drinking, or rather my mother's over-the-top reactions to it and how this melodrama was made even more intense by the LDS church.

Daddy wouldn't go to church with Mom and us, so The Church would send the missionaries by the house occasionally.  Once we even had women missionaries in Greenville, and they came by too.  They seemed like adults to me at the time, but now I know they were just 19-year-old girls straight down from Utah and Idaho, lost and unsure and wondering why the Lord had sent them to the Delta of all places.  Usually the missionaries would catch Daddy when he came in from welding for the evening.  Tired, dirty and a little beered up, he wasn't in the mood for visitors, but he would always stop and talk for a while, and even listen to a Bible reading and a lesson.  Things would go fine until they would get to the Word of Wisdom (The Prophet Joseph Smith's revelation prohibiting the Saints from tea, tobacco and alcohol).  Then things would get a little tense, and Daddy would share his knowledge of the Bible.  From a long line of Baptist moon-shiners, Daddy had inherited quite a litany.

At church, we were all encouraged to pray for Daddy that he might stop drinking beer and come to church with the rest of us.  Sometimes after supper, Mom would cry and tell me stories about her father (an Irish mill worker) and make me promise that I would never drink beer, so these visits by the missionaries were very dramatic and emotionally charged for me.  These visits were confrontations between the primal forces of my world, like earth and water:  southern poverty versus progress, rural isolation versus the larger outside world, oral tales versuss the written word,  the lowlands of Mississippi versus the high desert mountains of Utah.

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