A FREE MAN

95 Year old Deacon James Dobbins teaches us about true freedom

He pulled me up towards the pulpit and through the sanctuary to a small room at the back of the tiny church. “You can visit back here with Reverend Ates, Mr. Chris,” he said, then turned and re-entered the main room, shutting the door behind him.

Reverend Ates was a big black man, built like a lineman. He was composing himself for the service so we exchanged few words. Before long, I heard Brother Dobbins begin the service in the sanctuary next door.

The voices were few but the music was sweet. There were descants and harmonies, choruses of “Amen” and “tell it brother!” There couldn’t have been more than ten people in that room but there were enough spiritual fireworks to fill the church to overflowing.

Reverend Ates told me it was time to join the others. By then, I knew I was in for a treat.

This story is tough to tell because it is black and white. It’s a story about black folks and white folks and the problems they sometimes have understanding one another. It’s the story of the Concord Baptist Church in Round Top, Texas and its oldest deacon, a man named James Walter Dobbins. And, it’s the story of the wisdom that comes only from travail.

The Concord Church is now over 103 years old. African-American people have worshiped there continuously for all those years. Today, only six members remain. They are all advanced in age. The tiny congregation can barely afford to pay a minister to offer services once a month. Deacon Dobbins is the senior deacon of that church. Next February 4th, he will turn ninety-five.

He was born near Round Top and spent much of his early life on the “Rosenburg place” just across the creek from our little town. He went to the tiny one-room “colored school” that was once out front of the Concord Baptist Church.

Under the tutelage of his first teacher, a man named Madison Knotts, James Walter Dobbins got his early schooling. There is a sign on Highway 237 that marks the location of that old school, now long gone.

In 1912, the white citizens of the area built another school close to the Bethlehem Lutheran Church and the “colored” folks inherited the old “white” school whose site was just off Mill Street. A new teacher, a lady by the name of Urissa Rhone Brown, took over after a short stint by her brother. I had heard of her by various ways since I moved to Round Top. She was to stay for many years and was respected by both blacks and whites in the town.

When James Dobbins was six or seven years old, just as he was starting school, his house burned down. He eventually went to live on the Heller farm near Walhalla where his grandfather, “Papa George” Cottonwood, lived.

When he was about thirteen years old, soon to leave school and take on a man’s job, his mother, Lizzie Cottonwood, gave him some advice that stayed with him his whole life.

“I was thirteen years old then,” he remembers. My mother told me ‘Buddy, I want to tell you somethin'. After while, you are gonna be out on your own. I want you to know this. You are goin' to have to go to the white people to make your livin'. We ain't got nothin. What we doin' here is farmin' land for the white people, and we workin' on halves and the white men gettin' half. We ain't gonna have nothin' to offer you. If you don't be nice, they ain't gonna like you and you goin' to have it hard.’"

Deacon Dobbins took what she said as gospel. “I ain't never had it hard. I've taken that and I used it,” he says. You will discover as you read this story that Mr. Dobbins has made “being nice” a guiding principle for his whole life. He’s an amazing man. He has little formal education but I would suggest that he holds a “Ph.D.” in life. The more I was around him, the more I learned. He is also remarkably well preserved. He looks closer to sixty than ninety-four. In fact, I don’t think I have ever met a person his age so strong and vital. He still reads without glasses and commonly does hard physical labor. I tried to figure out what his wife was feeding him. Whatever it was, I wanted some of it.

He says his longevity and vitality are due to hard work and staying “right” with God. He’s worked hard all his life. Starting when he was a young boy, he “chopped cotton and picked cotton and all like that."

Then, when still a teenager, he began work as a sharecropper. “I worked oxens for my team. I'd go out there and get up that steer... an’ put a yoke on him and then I could call up the other steer and put the yoke on him. That was my team and I would plow land. I worked on the halves.” Pretty soon, he had a few mouths to feed. “I got married when I was twenty-three. I still got nine kids livin'. My oldest son is 74. I got all these kids, and I never had to go to the jail for one of them.” He’s very proud of his children. At one point he had three kids in college at once.

Mr. Dobbins’ first wife died a few years back. They were married for quite a while. “If she'd of lived one more month,” he reminisces “we'd of been together sixty-nine years. We made sixty-eight. We never quit sleepin' with one another. Those little winds and things that blew up between us, they didn't go anywhere. They stayed right there. I was blessed. So many people get married and go a little while and they part.” Mr. Dobbins had a considerable career. “I done farm work until I was about 60 years old. I bought a tractor when I was about 50. I put them horses and mules down and bought me a tractor. From then on I did tractor work about ten years.

For many people, forty-five years of hard labor would be a reason to to retire. Not Mr. Dobbins. He was just getting started. “When I was sixty years old, I went into milkin'. I milked for thirty-two years. I milked for seven or eight people and I never got laid off and I never got fired...four o'clock in the morning and four in the evenin'.”

Since he had to milk seven days a week, I asked if it interfered with his church going. He said he worked it out. “Black people's church sometimes don't come off ‘til in the evenin'” he explained. He just loaded up the kids and took them with him. “I had to get my little family and get my buggy and horses...an go milk. I didn't have a car when I first started.” After about fifteen years, when he was in his seventies, his employers started giving him a two week vacation. Up to that time, he never had time off.

Then, when in his eighties, Mr. Dobbins retired from milking and started his yard business. At ninety-four, he is still doing yard work, including the yard of the Concord Baptist Church. The day I met him, he was cutting all the heavy brush out of the gully next to the church with a hoe. He had come into Klump’s Restaurant for a drink and a break. He wasn’t even winded.

Mr. Dobbins is a prudent man. He has always been careful with his money. “People gave me jobs to do and I was able to save a little money. I put money in the bank and I got to the point where I could buy what I want. Directly, I got to drawin' money on my money. Directly, when I went to buy a new car, I paid for that car. I didn't let that banker make no money on me. I have my home and I have nice cars and I know how to handle my money pretty good,” he says.

Mr. Dobbins drives late model vehicles and dresses quite well, especially at church. He has a nice home in La Grange. I considered what this meant. Here was a man who had raised nine children, several of whom had graduated from college. He had paid for their rearing and their education by sharecropping, milking and doing yard work. Then, he had the discipline and fortitude to build an essentially debt-free existence. In today’s credit card riddled society, that feat is hard to imagine. “That's the result of hard work,” laughs Mr. Dobbins. Even though he has a little money, the thing he values most in life is his relationship with his creator. He’ll tell you all about it. “I got to front him all the time. I can't go out there and say what things are goin' to be without talkin’ about the good Lord. He's the one that's got to plan it. If he ain't in it, it ain't nothin' anyhow. I don't put nothin' ahead of God.

“What about the rich man?” he asked me. “He had everything he want...everything he want. I built all his barns and everything...and that night, the Lord called him. That money didn't do him a bit of good. You just can't do nothin' without God. You got to have him.” Spending time with Mr. James Dobbins is kind of like traveling with a prayer meeting. He’s a one-man revival. I visited for several hours with him, on two different occasions, while doing this story. Afterwards, he invited me to attend a Sunday service and musical program at his church. I was honored to do so.

Reverend Ates was getting warmed up. He had begun slow and easy, letting his parishioners join in at every opportunity. Then, with a great booming voice, he poured out his sermon. It wasn’t a nice, low-key, thoughtful sermon like the ones at my Episcopal Church back home. This was a sermon that crashed like thunder and blew like a pounding gale. It filled the church with rhythm and tempo. People in the church jumped to their feet from time to time as though their pews had caught on fire. And burn they did, aflame with excitement, caught up in their shared vision of a better world. Reverend Ates’ whole body began to shake. His voice quivered and pitched, rose and fell. He said things I have heard one hundred times before in other churches but it sounded like I was hearing the words the first time. Then they began to sing. Maybe eight voices and they sounded like a mass gospel choir. Mr. Dobbin’s voice rang out above the refrain. I kept thinking to myself. “How can he sing like that? He’s ninety-four!”

After the service, I met his second wife. She fed me some chicken wings and french fries. She’s a nice young lady of about fifty years. He says she takes good care of him and I believe it.

Deacon Dobbins carries his faith around with him where ever he goes. He doesn’t save it for Sunday. He says every day is God’s day. “I thank the Good Lord for ever bit” he says. “He's the one carryin' me. I stay close to God. I pray for you night and day. When I go to bed, I talk to the Lord. When I get up in the mornin', I don't get out of the house without talkin' to the Lord.

“You know why?” he asks. It’s a rhetorical question. “‘Cause I don't know what I'm gonna run into before the day is gone. In God's plans is things you are going to run into and don't know nothin' about. What's for you - you gonna get it. Can't nobody get you out of it. No sir!”

So Mr. Dobbins believes that “what’s for you...you gonna get it.” He thinks hard times are fated, difficulties are inevitable. That’s an attitude that many older black people share. It comes down from slavery and from the long Jim Crow era that followed. Blacks in America have had to get used to hard times. Often, they were the only times available.

Since the first black man was brought into the English colonies and held as a slave, no other single issue has caused more pain and contention in our country than the relationship between black people and white people. One of the most devastating wars our country has ever suffered, and the only war we fought amongst ourselves, had this problem at its root.

Since that time, and the “emancipation” of the slaves, the reconciliation of the two races has been slow. These days, people don’t want to think about race problems. We have heard too much about it. We are tired. We want it to go away.

The problem is, we still live in a society, 130 years after the freeing of the slaves, where racial hatred remains relatively common in both blacks and whites. People who call themselves Christians, people who are kind, generous, giving, moral people in affairs with their own race, will justify cruelty, violence and injustice when a member of the other race is concerned. I had never understood this. I don’t see any place in the Bible where “love thy neighbor as thyself” is qualified by the color of your neighbor’s skin. Some social scientists think these feelings are actually genetic. They theorize that racism is a form of territoriality left over from the million years we were fighting over turf as hunter-gatherer savages.

Who knows where the roots of hatred are buried. It probably doesn’t matter. It is the fruit of the plant that causes pain and sorrow. Mr. Dobbin’s family history and early life were typical for a black man early in this century. His grandfather, George Cottonwood, was the son of a female slave and a white man. The white family kept young George when he was born and refused to let him mix with his mother’s kin until he was twelve years old. Years later, when James Dobbins was a young sharecropper on that same family’s land, his grandfather’s half-brother walked up to him one day in the field.

“When I was young, I wasn't thinkin' nothin' about black and white. I come out of the field one day and Old Man Heller, Papa George's half brother, says to me ‘Walter, you know what we had to name George after?’

“I said ‘No sir,' and he said ‘See that cottonwood tree down there on the branch. That's what we had to name him.’ He was a Heller you know but they had to pick a name for him.’”

Because of “Papa George’s” special lineage, he had privileges that did not extend to the other black folks who lived on the farm.

“Papa George could come out of the field with a hoe on his back and walk on through the white picket fence, open the gate, go up the walk, open the door, sit down at the table and tell Mary Helen, that’s his half sister, to bring him some food.

“We was darsn't to go in there. We better not try that. But, ‘Papa George’ could.”

“Papa George” lived into his sixties. When he was killed in an automobile accident, the white family who had refused him his birthright, claimed him in the end. “They didn't bury him in our cemetery,” remembers Mr. Dobbins. “They buried him in the white cemetery.” Many black families were broken up during slavery. Many more were devastated by the poverty and oppression that was the lot of African-Americans in America over the next hundred years. All in all, black folks have been ill used in this country and it has made a lot of them angry. Many whites have felt like the march to racial equality is upsetting their lives and communities. They are angry, too.

Mr. Dobbins doesn’t think anger is a very effective way of dealing with people. He gave me some advice about that.

“I have a temper. I have a bad temper...but I'm gettin' better with that. My temper was that I didn't want to take nothin' off you. If you said somethin' to me wrong, and I knew it was wrong, then that temper would get in me...but I finally learned what to do. Finally I got to where I could just smile at you and go on.

“What changes my temper is that I finds out that the easiest way to handle anybody is not to let them know they got you. Maybe it upsets you, but go ahead on and bite your tongue and be nice to them. It'll work.”

Back in the early 1990’s, when I moved to Round Top from the big city, I discovered a little town that was a bit behind the times. Folks there were not as concerned with being politically correct as people in Houston. Round Top folks weren’t any more racist than the big city people, but they were a lot more honest about their feelings.

According to some of the old timers I have interviewed in the past, Round Top was always a tough town when it came to African-Americans. One old guy described Round Top in the 1920’s as a “Nigger don’t let us catch you in town after dark” kind of town. Another old timer, who had been here all his life told me this story about an event he said occurred early in the century.

“They said a black man raped a white woman and they went from house to house and finally found him on his bed,” the old man told me during his interview. “They took him into Carmine and they bought themselves some chains and they took him in the woods and chained him to a tree and piled the brush over him and set him on fire right there.

“Them fellas, they went to town and went to drinkin’ and somehow or other, the word got into La Grange. Old man (County Sheriff’s name deleted) came on out there from La Grange in a horse and buggy. He asked them boys what had happened and they told him.

“He said ‘I’ll tell you one thing boys, you done a good job. Y'all saved the county a lot of money. I’m goin’ back to La Grange and y'all can do whatever you want to do.’”

I don’t know if that story is true or not but even if it wasn’t factual in this instance, similar events certainly happened time and time again throughout the South well into the 1920’s.

Deacon Dobbins says the sword cuts two ways. He told me a story about another racially motivated crime. “I remember a time when black people lived right here in Round Top,” he says. “There was a black man; he had mean blood in him. All people has not got the same blood. Some is good and some ain't. That is still goin' on, both colors. At this time, this was a pretty mean black man. He fooled around and got into it and he killed a white man right here in town. From then on, it was pretty rough here in Round Top for a black man. “I was livin' across the creek here,” he remembers. “Way back yonder it was tough but now it ain't like that. I seen the time when we couldn't come in the front. We had to go in the back.”

Hard times not withstanding, James Dobbins believes in taking the straight and narrow road. “I never drank, no smokin' and goin' on like that. I never did that. I was very careful. It's how you carry yourself. You can, most of the time, look at a man and see what's in him. In just a little while, you can tell what he's up to...tell if he's right or wrong. You watch ‘em just a little bit and you know.”

Mr. Dobbins is not a complainer. He has a lot of white friends and even when I tried to incite him into it, he would not talk them down. He says that most folks in Round Top have always been nice to him.

“I don't have any problem in this town. They respect me real good in this town. The same way in La Grange.” It must be true. There are over 80 members of the La Grange Lions Club and only two of them are black. Mr. Dobbins is one of the two. He is also on the Board of Directors of the La Grange Senior Citizens organization. When those groups meet, it is common for them to ask Deacon Dobbins to offer the prayer. He says his success with white people is all a result of being nice, and that he is able to be nice, even in the face of prejudice, because of his faith in God. According to Deacon Dobbins, “God says ‘If I'm with you, its more than the whole world against you...because I am the world.’” He even attributes his longevity to his commitment to treat others with kindness. “I would never have been in this world yet, if I hadn't made up my mind to be nice to everybody.”

What Mr. Dobbins calls “bein’ nice,” many of us would call being selfless. He doesn’t just mean being friendly and pleasant. He means putting others before himself. “Any time you get off in self,” he says “your prayer ain't goin’ to go through no how.” He has one special project that has engaged his free time for years. When he is not working or taking care of the Concord Church, he and his wife visit prisons all over the state and try to bring encouragement to people there. At ninety-four years old, he regularly ministers to some of the most forgotten people in our state. “I got special things I do. I watch out for people who are in prison and in beds in the hospital. I go to God special for them, night and day. I pray for those people. That's my job now. I've been in prisons for four or five years. I'm workin' on black people so strong...to get an education. If they don't get an education, they goin' right back in there. They got nothin' else to do!”

James Dobbins made his living with his hands and his back, but he tells the inmates that today’s world is different. “Everything you do now, you got to look in a book to get there. It ain't like it was when I came along. It's a different story now. If you don't get your education, you know you are goin' back to the joint without even gettin' started. You know that cause you ain't got nothin' else.”

He shares his lifelong experience with these troubled men, trying to bring them hope and motivate them to use learning as a tool for making a better life. “I had a big family and I had to work hard to get them through college. If you don't have the right knowledge, your knowledge is tellin' you somethin' wrong all the time. It's leadin' you to destruction.”

And every day, in every way, Deacon Dobbins shares his faith. “When I get up in the mornin' and go to bed at night, I go back in my room and go down on my knees. Some things is for you and some things ain't for you, but if you go to God in time, he can have a merciful hand with you.”

The afternoon program didn’t start until 2:30 so I went home to try to convince my wife that I had missed lunch. It didn’t work. She could smell the chicken wings on my breath.

When it was time, I returned to the church. Out front was a white van. Scrawled across the side was the name “The Gospel Tornadoes.” As I entered the church, I noticed that it was beginning to fill up a bit. In a church with six members, twenty-five people looks like a crowd. People from other churches had come by to hear some music and a little preachin’. By the time the band was set up, there were five, maybe six local preachers in the crowd. Thirty or forty people sprawled out on the pews waiting for the program to begin.

Finally, the band finished its sound check and left to put on the formal clothes in which they perform. Mr. Dobbins stood up. He welcomed everybody to the House of Prayer. He acknowledged the visiting ministers. While he talked, I watched the eyes of the people who were gathered there. All I saw was love and respect...and the comfort of shared experience.

After a few words from a couple of the pastors, the Gospel Tornadoes took off. It was a hand-clappin’, foot-stompin’, amen-yellin’ hoedown. It’s been a long time since I have had such fun or been so inspired. Those people were not just listening to music. They were worshipping at the top of their lungs! Before long, I was too.

Looking around, I noticed how few young people were in the crowd. It made me wonder what the Concord Baptist Church must have been like in its heyday, back when times were harder and people held a little closer to the comfort of their religious beliefs. They must have had some hot times back in those days. That little church must have lit up like it was on fire. I’m surprised it’s still on its foundation.

Mr. Dobbins has a birthday coming up. As I said before, he’ll be ninety-five on February 4 in the year of our Lord, 2,000. He’s looking forward to a little party. In the black community, the church folks have a tradition of dedicating special events to appreciate their clergy. These gatherings are called “appreciations.”

Five years ago, a couple of months before Mr. Dobbins’ ninetieth birthday, he got a call from the Reverend of a church over in Fayetteville that he sometimes attends. Since the Concord Baptist Church only has services once a month, Mr. Dobbins visits a number of other churches in the area on a regular basis. That Fayetteville minister, Reverend Roy Green, asked Deacon Dobbins when his birthday was coming up. He said he had been watching Mr. Dobbins over the years. “You are such a nice man,” he said. “I'm gonna give you an appreciation.” Mr Dobbins was stunned. "I'm used to you givin' preachers an appreciation, not just a deacon like me," he stuttered.

Five years later, as Mr. Dobbins told the story, he still wept to think about the Reverend’s kindness. “It was three months before that time came around.You could not get up in that church house that night. They was lookin' through that door over here and through that door over there. They was standin' up everywhere. Some people called me up afterwards and said ‘We was there but we couldn't get off the highway.’” It started a tradition. Ever year since, Reverend Green has thrown an “appreciation” for James Walter Dobbins, the simple deacon who has won the admiration and respect of so many. People come from all over on that day to express their love and affection. Many of them are white folks, friends Mr. James Dobbins made while being “nice.”

At the last celebration, Reverend Green told him "Mr. Dobbins, I'm never gonna quit. Long as you live, I'm gonna be doin' this." Mr. Dobbins hopes that he lives a while longer but he knows he’s not in charge. “God can do anything you want to do. He got all the power. He do things that he wants to do. He knows what's goin' on.”

James Dobbins thanks God for every day he awakens. Each one is a new opportunity. He knows some day he will die. He knows he will leave this life but he has faith that he can never leave one part of it. “Once in Christ, you are never out. After you have been born again, and God has blessed you and give you the right kind of spirit in your mind and heart, he won't let you get out. He will suffer you. He may make you sick or somethin' will happen to you. He will make you pray. He will make you stay with him.”

So, that’s the story of the Concord Baptist Church and Deacon James Dobbins. In my poor way, I have done my best to tell it. If I got to preachin’ a little bit, well, you’ll just have to forgive me. I found some new hope in that little church. I remembered a dream I had when I was a younger man. It was a dream that some day, all the people on this poor bedraggled planet would learn to accept each other as they are. It’s a dream that people will finally see that the different colors of our skin, our different cultures and beliefs, are like the different colors of the rainbow, each one special and unique, each one bringing a special gift to the rest.

It’s a dream I share with a lot of other people, but we’re all just dreamers...idealistic fools. There has always been hatred and distrust in this world. It’s not very realistic to think that we could leave all that behind. It’s only a dream...just a beautiful dream. Still, I’d share it with you if I could.

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