Roger Barbee

By Roger Barbee

Mill Workers

                                    They emerge from the mist of cotton spun,

                                    pale cheeked, hungry eyed souls staring ahead.

                                    Spent men in mended bibs and misshaped shoes

                                    rushing from what was, not to what should be,

                                    followed by women in worn-thin dresses,

                                    too tired to rush for what waited at home.

                                    All carry the burden of too little

                                    and the responsibility of too much

                                    as they trudge from their lint-filled stations

                                    only to return in two-thirds of day

                                    to burden the owner’s load like his mule,

                                    each breath filled with fibers of work and death.

By Roger Barbee

 I was flying from Myrtle Beach back to home, and I had a connection to make in Charlotte.  As it seems to happen at times, I landed at gate D-20 something and had about 30 minutes to get across the airport to gate A-something. And, I am the first on a plane, but the last off. So, my connection time was shortened. However, after I de-planed, I gathered my two bags, placed them on my knees, and began quickly to cross Douglass Airport.

The concourses at Charlotte are connected by a rather steep, carpeted, and long ramp which I had managed before on trips. However, this time I had two bulky gym bags riding on my legs.  I hit the ramp with speed and was powering up quite well, and then the top bag began to slide, and before I recovered, the bottom bag began to go with it. As I tried to adjust them with one hand, my wheelchair began to turn sideways, and I was running out of time. I had a connection to make and this mess was going to cause me delay. As I leaned into the ramp, trying to hold the bags with my chest while pumping to get all the way to the top, I felt two hands take control of my chair and a strong voice said, “I got you.” Someone had taken control of my situation and before I knew it, I was on the level hub and the same voice said, “You got it now?” And before I could turn and say “Thank you”, he melted into the crowd, going back the way he had been headed.

As I think of the Cruxification and the latter words of Jesus, “I thirst”, I think of my experience. No, I was not suffering like Jesus, but I was in distress and an angel came out of the crowd and took control for me and gave me relief from my thirst. We thirst for many things in this life. Sometimes we thirst for knowledge and wisdom, sometimes we thirst for friendship, or love, or any number of things. And, sometimes we may thirst but not be aware of it, and I hope that you may have an angel come out of the crowd and satisfy your thirst.

(for Gail who asked how we are)

By Roger Barbee

Several flowering plants form new blooms from the dead wood of a previous season’s cycle. Next to our screened-in porch is one such plant—a dwarf, lime hydrangea which we planted two years ago. Since I have yet to move my stationary bike out to the elements and continue to ride in the dry of the porch, I have been watching this shrub for several weeks and it has, like all plants, taught me a lesson.

Although the browned and dead flowers from last summer are not attractive, Mary Ann prefers to leave them attached to the stems even though they could be snipped off. Thus, as I have been riding each morning, I sort of wished that she had removed the unsightly, spent blooms. However, I now understand that her decision has helped me see the cycle of nature.

The lime hydrangea does what it is designed to do. It grows by feeding from the past cycles of its life. As I look each morning at the brown and dead blooms, I also can see small, green leaves emerging on the stems that hold those dead blooms. Soon those small green leaves will be in full splendor and new, deliciously lime colored blooms will emerge. The old will be gone, and the new celebrated. Soon.

Living under self-quarantine because of the COVID-19 virus, I think of the lime hydrangea and it’s gaining the new from the old. So often in our belief that we, mere humans, are in control because of our 401k’s, our superhighways with fast cars, our 10,000 square foot houses, and more, we lose our way. We lose sight of how frail we really are- think of the TB sanitariums of the 1930’s, and other examples besides this virus which is just beginning for us.

Yet if we accept the fact that we need to come together and “be our brother’s keeper”, we will continue.  Like the simple plant that makes new by using all its parts and history, we need to band, to do what is best for the tribe, not any individual. This is not the time to think individually, but the time to think together. And when we think of the tribe, we each will give up some things or many things. So be it. To bloom again. Gloriously.

By Roger Barbee

David McCullough’s The American Spirit is a timely read. A 2017 collection of fifteen of his speeches covering several years and settings, it is timely because its sub-title, Who We Are and What We Stand For is a reminder that 2022 is a good time to re-examine our character.

The selected speeches scan from 1989 to 2016 and were delivered at the White House and the United States Capitol and Monticello and other such settings, but, as fitting for a scholar like McCullough, most were shared at colleges and universities. As expected, each speech gave some history of the occasion, information about some of the people behind the occasion, and as he writes in the introduction, he always came away from each speaking date “with my outlook greatly restored, having seen, again and again, long-standing American values still firmly in place, good people involved in joint efforts to accomplish changes for the better, the American spirit still at work.” But, best of all, he gives a lesson or lessons in each speech.

 At Hillsdale College in 2005, for instance, he quotes Daniel Boorstin, Barbara Tuchman, E.M. Forster,  John and Abigail Adams, and speaks of such Signers as Benjamin Rush. Not surprisingly, all of his words are spoken from his love and appreciation of our history, which he implores us to learn. He shares how his friend Daniel Boorstin thought that “trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers”,  and he cautions us that, “Citizenship isn’t just voting.” And he shows us how to be more than just voting citizens.

“Read. Read, read!” A command from a fellow citizen who knows the necessity of being informed.

Now, I am sure that when McCullough delivered these speeches he was thinking of our secular citizenship and the debt we owe our country. He is correct that a good citizen does more than vote in every election cycle. A good citizen reads and studies and thinks of history and the events and people who came before. And a good citizen understands that those folks were like us-fallible humans.

But McCullough’s words are applicable to another citizenship role in many of our lives—the role of citizenship in Christ. Just as we are told to read our secular history, we need to read and study not only the Bible but other sources concerning Christianity.  Read the histories of Jesus’ world and better understand the forces He encountered. Read modern day Christian writers such as Clarence Jordan, Howard Thurman, C.S. Lewis, Samuel Wells, A.W. Tozer, or any number of the good writers available. Their words are reminders of how a Christian life should be lived, and when attending Sunday service do not act and think like the secular voter McCullough warns us against who believes that showing up is all that is required.

McCullough tells us that being a citizen requires more than voting just as Jesus tells us that being a Christ Follower requires more than sitting in a pew on Sunday.  Both citizenships require action: Acts of study, thought, and deeds. Anything short is false.

By Roger Barbee

Many years ago a fellow member of a church I then attended gave me a small piece of paper. As he handed it to me, he said, “I’ve always tried to live this poem.” On the paper was printed “A Better Way”  below which were twelve lines of rhymed poetry. At the bottom of the  page was printed Edgay [sic] A. Guest. While I did not like the poetry in and of itself, I did like the message by Edgar A. Guest.  I tucked the small rectangular piece of paper in my Bible and read it or referred to it often. Recently I even used all twelve lines of A Better Way in an essay. Until yesterday.

Yesterday our pastor used a poem in his weekly message to the congregation. He shared how he had read the poem in the 7^th grade and was influenced by it. The poem he referenced was Live Your Creed by Langston Hughes. My wife noticed the similarities between Guest’s and Hughes’ poems, and she asked me about them. Oh, what I discovered about the poets and me.

 Edgar Guest was born in Birmingham, England in 1881, and his family moved to Detroit, Michigan when he was ten. When his father lost his job, young Edgar worked odd jobs after school and in 1895 was hired as a copy boy for the Detroit Free Press, where he would work for almost sixty-five years. When he was seventeen his father died, and he began working full time for the paper. He slowly worked his way up and his first poem appeared in the paper in 1898, and by 1904 his weekly column, “Chaff” was published. Eventually his verses became the “Breakfast Table Chat” which was syndicated to over 300 United States newspapers.

Guest broadcast a weekly NBC radio program from 1931 to 1942, and in 1951 his show “A guest in Your Home” appeared on NBC television. He published over twenty volumes of poetry and has been called “the poet of the people.” Concerning his poems, he said,   “I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them.”  Edgar Guest died on August 5, 1959.

Now, I was more familiar with Langston Hughes and his poems. I had even taught some of them and admire his work. However, after much looking on the Internet and reading the listed poems in the PDF of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, I can find no poem titled Live Your Creed composed by Hughes.  I did find many praises to the poem for its inspiration written by ordinary folks like me, but no references from serious scholars.

The two poems are too similar: The Sermons We See begins: “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day”, and Live Your Creed, as quoted by several admirers,  begins: “I’d rather see a sermon than to hear one any day.” One word (in bold) difference. I found that Guest wrote his poem in 1926 and that the poem I had carried all these years was just the first two stanzas of Guest’s four stanza poem and “A Better Way” was not the title. The original poem had been all hacked, and I had blindly accepted the fake. Now I know better, but I still have not found out all I want to know about the poem alluded to Hughes. I now stand corrected and better informed about Guest and will continue reading and searching more about Hughes.

By Roger Barbee

As a life-long reader I was interested in a recent article in a major, national newspaper that focused on how nine contemporary authors arranged some of their bookshelves. I looked at the photographs and read some of the text. But I became disinterested because I had never even heard of any of the writers much less read any of their books. I pasted a copy of the article to my four sons and two never responded and the other two laughed at (with?) me. So, I placed all the communication about the article in my trash folder and forgot about it until this morning.

My modest library holds a vast range of books that are arranged by topic. The religion shelves hold books by Thomas Merton, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Elaine Pagels, C.S. Lewis, and other examiners of our spiritual selves. The western section is loaded with Wallace Stegner with many other lovers of that land such as Terry Tempest Williams. The shelves dedicated for Black studies have books by Gloria Naylor, Langston Hughes. Ernest Gaines, and other writers who are brave enough to investigate race in America. The four-tiered lawyer’s bookcase holds prized first editions and some are signed such as the treasured  copy of W.S. Merwin’s last book, Garden Time. Next to that collection is a closed cabinet with English writers. Some loved first editions of Thomas Hardy’s poetry sit on the top shelf beside a modest collection of J. L. Carr. There is shelf space for nature books and political ones and biographies. It is a small, personal library, but I am pleased with it and continue to add to its growth.

So what’s the rub concerning those nine writers and their libraries?

While I did enjoy reading some of their explanations for how a  particular shelf was arranged it still rankled me that I had never heard of any of them, so I went to Google and read of their successes and awards. It should be an humbling experience not to recognize the name of a best-selling author, but I felt none of that. In fact, I felt no negative sense for not ever having heard of any of the nine. I began to wonder if I am illiterate concerning current, popular authors. Am I a snob in by reading choices?

None of us,  I suspect, want to be illiterate about anything and never to be accused of snobbery. But what does this self-examination of my reading choices say about me? Discerning. That fits! We all are given gifts by our Maker and discernment is one of those gifts. So, while I may not know of or have read any of the nine authors in the article, that fact says nothing about them and their writing, but it reveals that I am a discerning reader who unlike other readers does not choose to “try anything” to read. But then,  there is still the chance that sometime in the future I will pick up a book by one of them and bring it home, read it, and find it one to keep and place it on a shelf in my modest library.

By Roger Barbee

A road trip to the Sandhills of South Carolina is required. Unlike most requirements, this one is given freely because of the summer days I spent with Aunt Lynn and her husband Uncle Gene when I was a young boy. 

The year 1928 was not the best of times to be born, but Aunt Lynn’s parents and nine children managed through the Great Depression, even using it like a fire to temper their strength and resolve. She grew and married a local boy, Eugene Burch. They, too, farmed– cotton, corn, soy beans, corn, timber, wheat, and what ever else would bring them a profit. They also had chicken houses and that is how I experienced some wonderful summer days as their egg gatherer, cleaner, grader, and packer. But most of all, I remember those summer days as ones where I was given the responsible for me: The accountability of how I performed my egg duties, how I chopped my two rows of cotton as Uncle Gene chopped his four, and how I managed the other given tasks that, when done correctly, contributed to the farm’s success.

Aunt Lynn allowed me to grow during those hot summer days by giving me freedom that her older sister, my mother, could not. She shepherded me so that any decision I made seemingly was mine, but they were mostly hers. Her stern hand guided me as she fed me great meals that never seemed to lack anything a young boy wanted.

But every great summer day ended, and a ride for me with some local farmers who worked the 2^nd shift in Plant 1, Cannon Mills, was found, and I returned home: A boy rich with memories of many achievements and adventures on a small, Sandhill farm.

By Roger Barbee

According to a Google search I recently conducted, as many adults regularly play chess as are users of Facebook. That is a large number of the world’s population, and while I am not a user of  the latter, I play the former. My rating is about 725, which means that I am far from being a good player. But that is okay because my rating cannot gauge the satisfaction I receive from playing on-line chess: I have won a few more games than I have lost; I have had some draws; I have lost to women; I have lost to younger players; I have played players who live in a range of countries; I have been checkmated by a player waiting for a flight in an airport; I have learned about COVID in other countries through the message board; and I have been gifted by a player in India.

Recently I logged in and requested to play. The machinery spun and a player’s user name, national flag, and rating appeared on the screen. The player’s rating was about fifty points higher than mine, so I would be awarded ten points for a win, two points for a draw, and six points for a loss. I was excited because I would rather lose to a superior player than beat a lesser one; plus, sometimes I play poorer against lower rated players. So I moved my white pawn and waited for his response with a dark piece.

By my fourth or fifth move, his superior skill was causing me trouble. I could find no way to penetrate his wall of pawns, and he was beginning to advance his major pieces. I had a sinking feeling, but I continued looking for some way to gain some foothold. Yet it seemed the harder I tried, the more perilous my position was. My big blunder in losing my queen did not help my cause, and soon, mercifully, my doom was imminent. I had several pawns, one lonely king, and a rook to my opponent’s  array of powerful pieces. Then his queen captured my rook. Done! Kaput! Fried! But—wait. The result screen showed that my opponent had resigned, and I was awarded ten points for the win. I messaged him and asked why. He responded, “I am rated higher than you, and the game was not fair.” He had required me to play while not patronizing me by “letting” me win.

Fair? The game was more than fair; it was just. I was whopped by a superior player, and I wonder if he is not a superior person as well? I mean, would I resign a game I had clearly won because I was rated higher than my opponent? Do I have the character required to freely give away ten points of my rating?

He required me to play then he gave me the gift, and I do not mean the ten points. When he resigned he created a moment of kindness and gentleness. When he resigned, he demonstrated that chess on my level is more than points in a rating. When he resigned, he acted like the champion he is.

By Roger Barbee

Painter’s Helper

The oval, green mat lies at the garage entrance of our kitchen door. It is just a regular cotton mat placed there for folks to wipe their feet if necessary before entering our home. But James Taylor, Jr., a student of mine years ago, showed me that it is more than a door mat.

During the late 1970’s Jim was a student in one of my 7^th grade English classes in what was the Lower School, grades 3-8. Jim was a small boy who, like his classmates, usually followed directions, always wore his tie as loose as possible, diligently did his homework/assigned reading, and couldn’t wait for athletics at the end of his demanding academic day.

Sometime during the late spring of 1984  Jim re-entered my life, and I remember his entrance into the same classroom in which he had been a student. Grading papers, I heard the door open , and in walked Jim. Standing at the door he greeted me, looked around the room, and asked, “Has the room always been this small?”

He was graduating SSSAS that June and had been accepted to UVa. Needing a summer job he had heard that I owned a small painting company and asked if I needed any painter’s helpers. Jim was one of the best hires I ever made and each summer as an undergraduate he worked as a helper, good painter, gardener at my home, driver of paint vans, and managed everything when I was away When I would return from a trip, customers or contractors we painted for, would say, “Go away! Jim does a great job.”

During one of his earliest fall years in Charlottesville, Jim borrowed a van to use moving items. A roommate and he were building bunk beds for their room, and he wanted it to take items back to campus and to carry lumber needed for the beds. Weeks later when he returned the van he explained that the windshield had been replaced. It seems that a 2×4 had slid forward and put a small crack in the original windshield. He paid for a replacement. I told him that my insurance would have covered that accident, but Jim said, “Yea, but I broke it.”

At UVa Jim and Alice met, and after graduation they asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13, St. Paul’s great description of love, at their wedding. I read from a KJV Bible that had belonged to Rev. Emmett Hoy, the deceased and beloved headmaster of SSS when Jim was a student there. After the ceremony I gave Alice and Jim the Bible.

Jim and I always stayed in touch while Alice and he lived their shared lives in Richmond. When I worked at NCS, outside my office was a wrought iron landing and stairs that led to a flagstone patio. It was, I think, a fire escape for the original school building. On pleasant days I kept the door open that led to it and like he had in the late 70’s, Jim, one fine, spring day, just walked through the door to visit. I never asked him, a resident in Richmond, how he knew where to find me; I simply enjoyed his presence. Years later Jim sent me a video of him standing on a long extension ladder as he placed Christmas lights on their Eastern Shore home. It was a  happy reminder of where/how he had learned to safely use a tall ladder.

A year ago he called me to plan for Alice and him to stop in Woodstock for lunch on their way home.  By then he had been the CEO of a NYC firm for several years,  spoken at a SSSAS commencement, commuted to NYC from their home in Alexandria, and stayed in touch all the time. After our lunch, my wife Mary Ann rode home with Alice to show her the way to  our home, and Jim rode with me.

I had often asked Jim about his work managing a large company that owned open-air shopping malls, and he always was patient and used exact examples to illustrate his methods. In my view,  success came from his attention to detail, his compassion, and a bit of developed raw  talent, but his work ethic more than anything. For instance, on our brief ride from the Woodstock Café to our house, he shared how, if he were visiting one of the company malls to see how it was functioning and noticed a dropped receipt in the parking lot, he always picked it up. “Why, for goodness sake?” I asked. “To check its date and determine if the folks you’re paying to clean the lot are doing it right,” he explained. A CEO, it seems, is not too proud to pick up trash, at least not Jim.

When we arrived at our home, Jim and I went through the garage to enter the kitchen door. He was in front of me and as he began to open the door he glanced down at the green mat. He stopped, looked at the mat deciding that something about it was wrong and bent over to correct it. Jim then opened the door and walked once again into my life. But this for the last time.

Jim died June 14, 2026.

By Roger Barbee

The loud voices from every side that are involved in the oft referred to culture wars give me pause, and I remember the experience of my mother.

My mother was a divorced woman of six children in Kannapolis, North Carolina during the 1940’, 1950’s, and 1960’s. She hemmed washcloths in Cannon Plant #1 and attended a local Baptist church. It is that Baptist church during the 1950’s and its treatment of my mother that caused me to remember. While I was only a boy of only eight or so, I was old enough to hear adult talk and old enough to sense something was wrong.

A devout Christian, my mother took her six children to church twice each Sunday and every Wednesday night. She Believed and worked to make sure that her children Believed. The church we then attended accepted our presence in Sunday School and “preaching” and Training Union, and all else. However, my mother was told by church deacons that she would not be allowed to teach children Sunday School because she was a divorced woman. And, as one deacon strongly pointed out, the Bible taught against divorce, and it did not matter that my father was an abusive alcoholic who had deserted his wife and children. She was divorced, so no teaching children for her.

A few years after this ugliness, we moved to an in-town mill-hill house and began attending a Baptist church a few blocks from our new home. My mother confessed that she felt uncomfortable in a woman’s Sunday School class because she was the only divorced woman in the class, and she was often reminded of that either directly or indirectly. However, before long the church announced that an adult was needed to teach the children’s Sunday School and my mother stepped up.  Perhaps she was the only adult who volunteered to teach the class, but no matter, she began teaching the class and for the next fifty years she taught “her children” the Bible. When she retired from teaching the class, the church named the Children’s Sunday School wing in honor of her—the divorced woman who at one time was considered “unfit” to teach in her Baptist church.

All of this occurred over sixty years ago, and now, a divorced man, I have been a deacon and Sunday School teacher in a Baptist church. Some Baptist churches even have pastors who are divorced. There has been a cosmic shift and our culture survives. The issue of “divorcement” is not the only cultural change in these years, but it is the one I am most familiar with, and it demonstrates that things do change, and our culture can and does change as well. And we are no worse off for the cultural change.

For instance, many church attendees are quick to point out the sins of homosexuals. These church goers, while admitting “we are all sinners”, seem to condemn homosexuals because, as I am often told by church goers, “They continue their sinning life style.” Yet, the same church goers will admit  that every church is “Full of sinners”. But perhaps those sinners have a different favored sin than the homosexual– if one’s sexuality is a sin. In fact, I suggest we all have a favored sin, a breaking of a Commandment that we seem to gravitate to. Me? I’ve never met a woman that I have not liked, and I work at controlling that part of me, even at the advanced age of almost 75.  I once saw a church sign that read: “Don’t judge the other person because they sin differently than you do.” Amen to that.

What I find wrong in my mother’s ordeal with her first church and what she initially experienced at her second one is not what the Bible teaches, but how some deacons and church members interrupted its teachings. The Bible is a complex book that teaches simple truths such as “Love one another as I have loved you.”

All of this noise surrounding CRT, LGBT, BLM, and more will pass, but it will take its toll just as the “good deacons” did with my mother. But my mother knew that the battle was not about her, but one within each of the church leaders who were searching for an external enemy instead of looking inward, where the  greater threat stirred. Their names do not appear anywhere honoring their service to either chuch. But the divorced woman’s does.