Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 15, 1995 TAG: 9505160024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DRAPER LENGTH: Long
Kerns, a Pulaski real estate agent and Lumbee Indian, married J.C. Lawson, a United Methodist minister from Hermitage, Tenn., on the shore of Claytor Lake. The ceremony, itself, wedded Native American and Christian traditions.
Lawson, who has Cherokee and Shawnee forebears, met Kerns four years ago through their work with a Native American ministry of the Methodist Church. Both held seats on the ministry's board of directors.
It was Kerns' outspokenness that first attracted Lawson's attention. "I said, who is that woman with all that mouth," he joked.
Given the weather in the New River Valley on Saturday, a traditional church wedding might have been a better option, but Kerns had something she wanted to say through the outdoor ceremony. The broad smile she wore through it all only showed that much brighter against the gray, dripping sky.
"I wanted to do it this way to honor my people and my family and J.C.'s family, and really let my friends know who I am," Kerns said.
Kerns, who looks much more Native American than Lawson, said she had lived in Pulaski for 26 years; all the while, it was as if she were living two different lives. She came to Pulaski from Robinson County in eastern North Carolina, where there is a large population of Lumbee Indians, and experienced ``culture shock," she said.
About 80 of Lawson's and Kerns' friends and relatives came to the lakeside beach of the Homestead Inn near Draper for the wedding. Several people came from Lawson's Dotson Chapel in Hermitage, near Nashville; some helped raise a couple of tents that were called for after the rain started.
Harold and Jean Johnson of Nashville, holding umbrellas, sat under a tree just a yard or two from the lake, waiting for the service to start. "He's been very good to us," Harold Johnson said of Lawson. "He preaches from his heart."
The weather and the need to erect tents to shelter the wedding guests delayed the ceremony, which was scheduled to begin at 3:30, until well after 4. However, some aspects of the marriage had begun much earlier, Lawson explained as he waited for his bride to arrive.
The day before, he had fasted and prayed. At sunrise Saturday, he and his bride-to-be had gone to different spots on the lake for a traditional Native American purification ceremony that involves water and prayer.
For the afternoon part of the ceremony, Lawson, who wears his graying hair long in the back, wore a leather shirt of Native American design that he had made himself. "I minored in art in college," he said.
Lawson also made the knee-length leather dress Kerns wore. It was fringed on the bottom and decorated in front with red and blue bead work.
"I can't believe you did that," Angie Huff of Pulaski, a friend of Kerns', told Lawson before the ceremony as they talked about the dress. "That's love."
At that moment, though, Lawson had other things on his mind. He had lost the only copy of the wedding vows he and Kerns had written down the night before. "She'll kill me," he said. The vows were reconstructed during the rain delay, however, and things moved along without a hitch.
Both Lawson, 44, and Kerns, 45, had been married before. Kerns' two sons, Tim Davis, who is headed to Boston College on a football scholarship, and Joey Davis, who graduates from Virginia Military Institute next weekend, escorted their mother. Lawson's 18-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, also attended.
Tim said he preferred the Native American ceremony to a traditional church wedding. The ceremony will help educate people about Native American ways and will help keep the family's traditions alive, he said.
Lawson, as a Methodist minister, said he didn't see any conflict in the merging of Christian and Native American traditions in the wedding ceremony. He pointed out that Christianity and native traditions bear some striking similarities but also some differences. Both incorporate prayer and sacrifice and a respect for all living things, but native traditions are more inclusive of living things, he said.
Don Scott of Pulaski, a minister with the Disciples of Christ and a student of Native American religion, said the Cherokee people are closely related to fire. He opened the wedding ceremony with a "smudging" ritual in which he used turkey feathers to fan cedar smoke onto the bride and groom.
In one hand, Scott held a smoldering fire in a turtle shell inside an abalone shell. As Scott fanned the smoke, Lawson raised his arms and turned to let it settle all over his body, almost as if he were bathing in it. Scott then asked the wedding guests if they would like to take the smoke, and many did.
Then Kenneth Locklear, a Native American Methodist minister from Greensboro, N.C., explained the symbolic part that meat, corn and blankets play in the ceremony. Meat symbolized Lawson's responsibility as a provider; corn, Kerns' role as a homemaker; and blankets, the warmth and companionship the two would share.
With the exception of a circular wedding march or dance at the end, the rest of the ceremony had a more traditional wedding feel to it. Pamela Rice, a Native American from Reidsville, N.C., sang "Unto These Hills," a song about the uprooting of the Cherokee from the Southeastern mountains in the 1830s and their forced march to the Oklahoma Territory, and another song from the Lumbee Indian tradition.
Rev. Robert Mangum of the Maggie Valley area of North Carolina oversaw a communion service, which concluded with the bride and groom sharing the bread and wine with all the wedding guests.
At one touching point near the end of the ceremony, Lawson and Kerns lit candles in memory of dead friends and relatives. It was just then that the rain stopped for a moment and a single white sea gull circled the lake, as if on cue.
Lawson, who in his youth was a machine gunner with the 4th Marine Division patrolling Vietnam's demilitarized zone, said as he lit his candle that a lot of his friends from those days have been on his mind lately.
After the reception, the couple planned a honeymoon in California and Mexico before settling down in Hermitage near the historic home of Andrew Jackson, which holds some irony. As president, Jackson oversaw the forced migration of Indians in the Eastern United States to the West.
by CNB