"Like a bird flying through the air, or as when an arrow has been shot at a mark, the parted air straightaway flows together again so that none discerns the way it went through... Even so we, once born, abruptly come to nought... but the just live forever."

Jim was a Black man raised under the social protocol of Jim Crow, which Jim had learned good, but was never bent by it. His speech was always "Yes, suh" or "No suh," but he talked straight and couldn't tell a lie if his life depended on it. He was the kind of guy Robbie Burns had in mind when he wrote, "An honest man's the noblest work of God." But the thing that most moved me about Jim, was his resemblance to the suffering side of Christ. He didn’t say it all at once, but the sum total of his life said it, but said it not taking any honor to himself. Jim was a humble man, if ever there was one.

To begin with, his physical appearance had been "crucified." Injured in his youth in a cotton mill accident, old Jim sat and walked crooked because of it. He held his head to one side a lot, and shook a little when he talked. He lived alone in his old wood-board house, with his horse roaming about, a thick piece of rope drooping from his neck to make him easier to catch. For awhile Jim's sister lived in an adjacent house with a nephew called Eugene. Our nearest neighbors, their little spread sat on a little grassy hill overlooking the highway about three-quarter of a mile south of us. Jim's sister, who always called us "the Benedicks," once whitewashed her house on the three sides that could be seen from the road. Needless to say, change was spare.

Jim never quite came to terms with the 20th century. He had learned farming behind a mule, and his work was always either on the farm or in the cotton gin that milled the cotton he had grown and/or picked. One day, when he was courting, he crossed the field where we farmed, (we didn't live here then). And a man had strung up an "electric fence," not the kind with a proper transformer, but an unregulated one hooked up to a generator. Hitting the wire in the dark, the force of the shock knocked Jim unconscious. He never could stomach the wonder of electricity after that. Kerosene lamps and wood-burning stoves remained part of his life until he passed away sometime in the mid to late 1970's. When he had first moved into his house in town, Jim asked the city right away to cut off the electricity that the previous occupant had used. When I asked him to show me his Bible one day, he had to fish for it in the folds of his bed covers. It was in three or four pieces, but still treasured.

They say of Jesus: "He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief." Jim had been hurt by life in many ways, but there was one special hurt that must have taken a good while to heal. That was the question of his young wife, the one he was courting when he hit the electric fence. She was a good deal younger than Jim, yet he loved her dearly. She never could get used to keepin’ house and cookin’, so they hadn’t been married long when she up and left… Went home. Some time later, Jim went to see her and managed to talk her back to his side. But not long after that, she left again… this time for good. Not one to force his way on someone, old Jim never went back for his helpmate again. But I don’t think he forgot his young bride for a long, long time. You could tell this was not a story Jim relished telling, and that he would much rather leave it buried in a rusty chest somewhere. There was no blame to pronounce, just a silent hurt that needed to be alone to starve to death.

Jim was a man's man, who always held his head high, and his heart belonged to Jesus Christ. The day I realized that was the week after Hurricane Carla had swept through here (1960), with the eye passing right over our neighborhood and city. We had sought refuge in the local high school. But when I asked Jim where he had sat out the storm, he said, "Right here." And when I asked him why he hadn't gone to town, he replied affirmatively, "I got more faith than that." Now I don’t think faith ought always to lead a person to ride out a storm, but I recognize that God can ask us -- for one reason or another -- to trust Him in a certain situation. Anyway, I wasn’t about to argue with Jim about his choice. He probably didn’t have a very good way to get to town and away from the storm anyway. His only transportation, after all, was his old horse.

Aches and pains and assorted illnesses began to catch up with Jim in his old age. Hearing about one particular setback convinced me for good that this man knew how to suffer in silence, how to pick up his cross and go with it. We were interviewing him for a photo school assignment, and I wanted to get his thoughts down on paper too. So I took a little tape recorder and we headed to his house in town. Jim told us, again without the slightest tinge of self-pity how he had recently gone through some awful sickness in his new house in town. He got so bad he couldn't turn himself over in bed, and it was some while before a relative discovered his inconvenience. But he never once complained about any of it… this man of God.

In our last conversation with Jim, sometime in the '70s, he said with more pride than pronunciation that he was the "superintendent of the Sunday School at St. Petersburg Missionary Baptist Church." Jim’s little church community was formed in fact out of a confluence of three now defunct country churches. Each of those old white clapboard churches used to be packed with farm workers and families like Jim's; now they were either dead or had gone to town like Jim. In his youth, Jim had been baptized in "the baptizin' hole" right here on Peach Creek, on the eastern border of St. Benedict's Farm. In this last conversation we asked our old friend a lot of questions about the Christian faith, including one about the Lord's Supper, in which Jim said he believed like we do: Jesus is in the Bread and in the Cup. Because I have known Jim Burgess, I feel like I know the Man in the Bread and Cup a whole lot better.

This good neighbor of ours is gone now. We don't even know "where they have laid him" or what kind of stone marks his grave. Like Melchizedek, we can't tell you who this man's parents were, or where he was born. But we do know where he has gone, and that he will be waiting for us up there. This man Jim, this friend. He was the kind of Christian Paul had in mind when he wrote, "as poor... though enriching many, as having nothing, yet possessing all things." If I were to write an epitaph for Jim, this is what it would be: "Henceforth, let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the brand marks of Jesus."