Church was the central institution in my parents’ lives, starting in childhood. At my father’s funeral, his former pastor at Broadmoor Baptist Church in Jackson, Dr. Jim Futral, said of my parents, “They were here every time the doors were open and sometimes when they weren’t open.”
He wasn’t exaggerating much.
On Sunday, Calvary Baptist Church in Carroll County, my father’s childhood church, will hold homecoming, celebrating its 137th anniversary. On June 7, Carroll County’s Liberty Baptist Church, my mother’s old church, will mark its 175th anniversary.
When I was growing up, the family attended both homecomings most years. Homecoming featured the pillars of what it means to be a Southern Baptist: preaching, singing and eating.
My father and I would always compare notes after the first trip around the buffet (although nobody called it a buffet in Carroll County) tables. Where are the fried pies? Who made the best pimento cheese sandwiches this year? Be sure to get a piece of that chocolate cake.
Liberty’s homecoming was an annual event for my daughters, too. They attended until they went to college but have returned a few times since.
My parents stopped attending Calvary’s homecoming during the last few years of their livess. Part of the reason was that they didn’t want to go out of town two weekends in a row. And my father was the youngest of 11 children, and as his brothers and sisters passed away, he apparently didn’t feel the need to go every year.
There was always a touch of melancholy in my father’s visits to Calvary. His parents, many of his brothers and sisters and a host of other relatives are buried there.
To hear my father tell it, the Corders were related to almost everybody in the northeast Carroll County community of Calvary, through blood or marriage. My mother’s family, the DeLoaches, were related to most of the other people in the county.
Going out to Calvary is like stepping back in time. It’s located on a gravel road not far from Duck Hill. My father said the gravel was an improvement over the dirt that covered most county roads prior to World War II.
The Calvary homecoming was also a school reunion for my father, who attended the Calvary school through the eighth grade. One of his teachers at that institution of learning and basketball was Iona Watson Lott, the mother of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott. Yes, we’re distant cousins.
Not surprisingly, my father would never listen to any negative comments about his favorite U.S. senator.
My father went back to Calvary’s homecoming in 2011-13. His last homecoming was on the church’s 135th anniversary. I’m happy that I was able to attend it with him.
If I was in Mississippi and not working, I attended the Liberty homecoming annually until a few years ago. My mother wasn’t able to attend in the last couple of years of her life, which was a troubling sign of how sick she was.
Liberty’s homecoming was a livelier event than Calvary’s for me because so many of my cousins attended.
Liberty was founded in 1840, just seven years after the founding of Carroll County. To give you some historical perspective, that was 25 years before the end of the Civil War.
The present Liberty church is the “new” church, which was founded around 1890. The old church was located a few miles away.
I’ve only been to old Liberty once, for the burial of my great-grandfather George Lake DeLoach. It’s back in the woods. When Granddaddy DeLoach was buried there, it was so wet that boards had to be put down on the “road” so that people could walk to the cemetery without bogging down in mud.
According to family lore, his wife, Helen, said she didn’t want to be buried next to her husband because she wanted people to visit her grave. Grandmama DeLoach is buried in the cemetery at the “new” Liberty, as are my mother’s parents.
My father often spoke of his childhood at Calvary with affection. But there was at least one thing about going back to his boyhood church that he found irritating.
Over the years, my father was called on to say prayers at Liberty a few times, including once before the homecoming feast. I asked him why he was never called on to pray at Calvary.
“The people at Liberty only know me as an adult,” he said. “At Calvary, they still think of me as a kid.
“My mother has been dead for more than 30 years, and people out at Calvary still call me ‘Lorena’s boy.’ It’s ridiculous.”
Nostalgia is no cure-all, apparently.
• Contact Charles Corder at 581-7241 or ccorder@gwcommonwealth.com.
