Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 6, 1991 TAG: 9104060408
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Mornings, she reads the Scriptures. Afternoons are spent listening to religious programs and praying for people. Before bedtime, she's back on her knees again, praying and reciting Bible verses from memory.
At First Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, they call her Mother Hamilton. And though she's 93, she rarely misses a chance to worship in the front row as her son, the Rev. McKinley Hamilton, leads the congregation in prayer.
Jennie Hamilton walks with God, as they say. In fact, she seems to have a direct link from her house to his.
For her and many other elderly blacks, religion isn't reserved for Sunday mornings. It's a daily, if not hourly, pursuit.
Which may well be a key to these statistics: Among the elderly, suicide rates are lower among blacks than whites. And among elderly blacks, that rate directly correlates to religiosity - the more religious people are, the happier they tend to be.
For the past two years, sociologist Bill Nye, an associate professor at Hollins College, has been studying these factors, interviewing 36 black Southwest Virginians, all of them age 55 and older.
Some of them are well-known people like Roanoke Mayor Noel Taylor, Roanoke Tribune editor Claudia Whitworth and musician Daniel Womack. Others, like Mother Hamilton, are institutions among their church communities though lesser known in the area.
Nye plans to publish his findings in a book on aging among blacks, which will focus partly on the importance of the church. He says it's one of the few aging studies undertaken that focuses specifically on blacks.
"Before the Civil Rights movement, there weren't many opportunities for blacks aside from the church," Nye, 47, says. "Most of them had menial jobs, they were discriminated against, and the church was what made up for it.
"It gave them meaning, opportunities for status, spiritual and sometimes material support."
Throughout the interviews, Nye was impressed by the strength the participants draw from religion. Few said they were afraid of death, and some said they avoid conflicts daily so that if they should happen to die, their consciences would be clean.
When he asked Mother Hamilton about death, for example, she described to him a vision she had as a young woman:
I have seen my death already. . . . I was praying, and I was on my knees; and I got up and went to bed that night, and I traveled. It looked like everything I saw on that road was white.
And when I got to where I was going, it looked like there was a door opening, and a man just standing there at that door. And he told me, "Go sit to your right until the day of the resurrection, and you shall be judged." . . . And that man's face was so glistening, I couldn't look at it, because his hair was like lamb's wool - white as snow. And his eyes were like a ball of fire; he was so bright.
He put his hand on his heart; it looked like I could see his heart. It looked like there was something connecting him to me. . . . There's none going to see him but the pure of heart. He's going to give you a new body. If that heart ain't right with God, you're going to hell, because that's the end of you. And God has talked to me like I'm talking to you.
Another interviewee, Roanoker Alice Ward, similarly expressed the meaning of religion in her life. But at age 62, with a lack of education and family support, she struggles to make it by juggling part-time work.
Religion, then, serves also as catharsis for Ward - an outlet that remains steady in spite of her troubles:
You have an old house like this one here with air holes . . . . Pay a whole lot of money and you can't enjoy the place. Yeah it looks good, but the heating and everything, it's rough. And people ain't suppose to live like that. The good Lord ain't say people was suppose to live like this. He say we're suppose to help each other. But people don't believe in helping you. In place of helping you they bring you down and that's not fair. I wish I could be a congressman. . . .
What we got to do but nothing, work all our lives and suffer. Then get on your knees and thank the good Lord that you able to do it and that you have made it as far as you have. 'Cause if it wasn't for the good Lord we wouldn't be nowhere. We would be hurting. Yes, Lord, thank you. Stick with me. That's all I can say. Stick by me.
Nye says the importance of religion among elderly blacks was heightened as "the unintended result of segregation."
The black church became an "island of freedom," he adds, noting that it's produced such major leaders as ministers Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy.
While religion remains an integral part of life among most blacks 55 and older, it is questionable whether it's as important among younger blacks, Nye says.
"Blacks and whites both tend to reject the religion of their parents, though many of them return to it at middle age."
But he predicts interest in the black church will pick up among all ages in the not-too-distant future - not only for spiritual reasons, but for political strength as well.
"Race relations have been ignored for 10 or 15 years now, and I think they're getting harder to ignore," Nye explains. "Again, the leadership will probably come from the church."
At 86, interviewee Daniel Womack was one of many who addressed the ungodliness of a society that discriminates. The blind musician reads the Bible daily in Braille and incorporates religion into the gospel and folk music he performs.
When Nye asked him to comment on the segregated world he grew up in, Womack summed it up this way:
The man who put us in this world [put us] here for a purpose. . . . I believe Abraham said, "We are one blood; God created all nations out of one blood." Those nations are the separation that was made by man. God didn't do it. It was made by man after he realized, "I want my name to go for this, and I want my name to go for that, and I want my race to go for that, and I want my nation to grow up into my thought." And we began to name nations!
Always, somebody is going to stand up and say, "I'm first," or, "I'm nothing and I'm always going to be nothing," putting himself less than what he is.
I'm something, myself! I'm not ashamed. I don't meet strangers . . . I meet people. I love people. I love the white, I love the yellow, I love the red, I love the black. I love the creed, I love the color, regardless of who you are, just so you be nice to me so I can treat you nice.
I love you. And unless we do that, we don't love God.
A constant theme among all those interviewed was the ability to focus on the positive rather than the negative. Nye says he left many of the interviews filled both with joy and admiration.
"I wish I had their peace of mind, that resiliency, the strength that comes from religious beliefs and the faith that things will work out in the end always," he says.
Roanoker Jeroline Lewis, a 65-year-old diabetic, perhaps best revealed that strength when she described to Nye her philosophy of life:
To trust in the Lord. That's the best thing you can do is to have faith and to trust in God, cause if we don't we'd be lost. . . .
Even though I'm on medication, and I'm on this insulin, I thank God 'cause a lot of people take three times as much insulin than I do . . . What's for you, you're going to have, and what's not for you, you can't. So God didn't intend for all of us to be better.
God made us just the way he wanted us to be, and if we try to change everything something is going to go wrong.
I accept myself as God made me, and he made me the person I am, and that's the one I'm going to try and stay . . . until God calls me.
by CNB