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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News
Summer Time: Camp Devotion By Gayle White - Staff The hardwood shavings aren't as cushy as the old pine sawdust. There's electricity to run fans, stoves and even, in a few radically updated cabins, window air conditioners. And there's plumbing --- no more toting water from the spring across the road. (It's a good thing, too, because a person could get hit hauling full buckets across the busy highway these days.) But when 85-year-old Mary Parker Ramsey watches her great-granddaughter sitting with her friends in the worship services or running across the lawn, she sees herself as a girl. Most of the time, Salem is just a plot of land and some empty rustic cabins, but for one week a year, Brigadoon-like, it comes to life. And for that week, everything centers on faith and family. Late summer is camp meeting time in Newton County and many other communities around the South. It's a period suspended in time and space when multiple generations attend a sort of extended church camp together. There are worship services twice a day, daily Bible study and crafts, and plenty of time for rocking and spinning tales. "When you leave Salem Road and turn onto that campground, you're in a different world," says Bradd Shore, director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. "It's like some idealized museum of what Southern small-town life could be." Shore started studying Salem three years ago when he was looking at Newton County for "grass-roots experiments that manage to counteract some of the corrosive elements in modern families." In his work, he ran into Sam Ramsey, 63, furniture merchant, Covington mayor, program director at Salem and nephew of Miss Mary. The next thing he knew, the nice Jewish professor from New York was tapping his toes in the wood shavings to the beat of old-timey hymns alongside Ramseys, Cooks, Cowans, Kemps and Ellingtons. He was hooked. Now he and a team of students are writing a book and filming a documentary about Salem. "Despite the fact that people tell us it's mainly about church services or religion, it's not true," Shore says. "The total experience of camp meeting cannot be explained just by what goes on in the tabernacle. . . . It infuses the notion of family with religious spirit and it infuses the notion of religion with family spirit. . . . This has effects on generations and on people's sense of themselves." American landscape At Salem, people identify themselves by clan and seniority. Miss Mary is "the oldest living Ramsey,"
a claim that carries some weight around Salem where Ramseys have
had a cottage since 1840 and where about 50 of the 400 attendees
are connected to the family. She met Spence Ramsey on the last night
of Salem Camp Meeting in 1934 andmarried him in 1938. Spence Ramsey died in 1998. "He loved Salem next to me," his widow says. His picture is displayed at the tent now with all his ancestors for whom camp meeting was as regular a part of the Christian year as Christmas and Easter. And on "Salem Sunday," the Sabbath after the Friday when camp meeting begins, all his descendants come to worship in the tabernacle and break bread afterward --- his son, three grandsons and four great-grandchildren. "They know they must be here," Mary Ramsey says, "and they don't let me down. It's a mighty nice feeling to have them all together." Camp meetings have been a part of the American landscape since the late 18th century, imported to the Colonies by Presbyterians from Scotland and Ireland, many of whom settled in the South. Among the largest and most significant of the meetings was a gathering at Cane Ridge, Ky., in 1801, when 25,000 souls came together under Barton Stone, a Presbyterian minister disillusioned with Calvinism. In Methodist circles, circuit-riding preachers spread the word about meetings that were scheduled between the planting and harvesting seasons when farmers could get away from their crops. Camp meetings are scattered throughout Georgia. Salem, among the oldest in the country, has been meeting since 1828. Its open tabernacle with hand-hewn beams, built in 1854, is on the National Building Survey of the Library of Congress as one of America's historic buildings. 'Week of concentrated religion' Across from the tabernacle, Laura Kemp is rocking and crocheting, a craft she learned at Salem from her great-aunt Mary Sue Maddox. Kemp, who is one of the Ramseys, came to camp meeting for the first time when she was a week old. She's figured out that this is her 50th. "It's my golden jubilee," she jokes, "like the queen." Staying busy most of the year as an Atlanta social worker, she doesn't think about Salem much "until about June. Then I can't wait." Her best Salem friend, Sandra Keller, an Ellington by birth, is visiting with her on the porch. Keller, a Weight Watchers instructor, missed one year of camp meeting when she lived in New Orleans. Otherwise, the two have been having these long talks ever since they were little girls bustling out to look for each other as soon as their parents' cars parked at Salem. They seldom saw each other outside camp meeting, although Keller did visit Kemp once in the winter. "It was weird seeing each other with wool clothes on," says Kemp. They share memories --- finding a snake on the porch, eating Butterfinger candy bars and drinking Nu Grape from long-neck bottles, singing about Jesus taking "your sense" away and not knowingwhy the congregation dissolved in laughter. "I always had a stubbed toe because I always went barefoot," says Keller. "We just went from morning till night as fast as we could go, having as much fun as we could," says Kemp. The religious significance escaped them in those days. Salem meant family and friends. Even as an adult, Keller says, "I would come for years and not really go to church much. I wouldn't go to classes at all." Keller's husband is Jewish, and their family is not very religious, she says. But sometime after she had children of her own --- her daughter's 16 and her son's a college sophomore --- she started to go to the tabernacle with them. "Now it's one week of concentrated religion for me, sort of a renewal." Mystique of Salem For other campers, Salem is an extension of an active church life. Even for them, worship at Salem is different from Sunday morning in the sanctuary. There's no liturgy here, no Apostles' Creed, prayer of confession and such. Just a lot of singing and preaching. Salem always has one Methodist preacher and another who is either Baptist or Presbyterian. This year the non-Methodist is a Texan, the Rev. William J. Carl III, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Dallas. In his initial round as a Salem preacher in 1988, he delivered the famous "squirrel sermon." He was in high homiletic gear when a rodent fell out of the rafters onto a female worshipper. She screamed and jumped up. The congregation scrambled. About all Carl could do at that point was pronounce a quick benediction. On this Wednesday morning, after a few verses of "Jesus Saves," "Shall We Gather at the River," and the Salem theme song, "There's a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place," Carl takes the pulpit. His theme is the "theological identity crisis" caused by biblical illiteracy. "We've got to get in touch with the story," he tells his congregation. "Story shapes identity. It helps us figure out who we are. . . ." The message seems to have a dual meaning. Old songs, simple messages, big dinners cooked with family recipes, even the heat and the shavings are part of the culture of Salem, says Shore. "It's back to the basics," he says. "The
discomfort of the place is central to its effectiveness. It bonds
people. We live in worlds that are artificially conditioned. The
smells, the heat, the sensory experiences are so different from
the rest of the year. The sawdust is a great symbol of a kind of
grit." The women won, and now when Huckaby steps into the kitchen where his wife, Lisa, 41, is preparing her grandmother's chicken noodle casserole, it's cool and comfy. Keeping her company is a cousin, Keri Hampton, 24, and her daughter, the newest Cowan, 5-month-old Kaitlin. A small television sits in the corner. "We added that when the Braves started getting good," Huckaby confesses. Then, a cellphone rings. "This is a new thing," says Lisa Huckaby.
"We used to be cut off from civilization." "We used to do what y'all are doing now," Kris Bartholomew, 33, tells Jenna Huckaby, 10, and her four friends as they splash in the spring. That's something Shore says he hears over and over again. He calls it "identity updating" as people move through the stages of life at Salem, watching the elders age and die off and the younger generations come along behind. Some people have told Shore they want to be cremated when they die and have their ashes mixed with the shavings at Salem. They'll then join the communion of saints memorialized by the photograph galleries in the entryways of many a Salem tent. The family pictures, along with the old family furniture and the linens and dishes once used at home and now relegated to the tent, indicate passage of time. In another sense, everything seems to stand still. Part of its mystique is that Salem is a temporary state, says Shore. For a few days a year, children can play in blissful freedom without benefit of soccer leagues or gymnastics classes, people can cook and eat big meals without worrying about diets, life can go on without computers and video players, and extended families can live together under one big, rustic roof without fussing and feuding. "Salem limits the 'Sweet, Sweet Spirit' to one week a year," says Shore. "That's just long enough." < More MARIAL in the News |