
          Preacher's Parable.
          By Egerton, JohnJohn Egerton
          Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 23
          
          Forty Acres and A Goat. By
Will D. Campbell. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1986. 336
pp. $14.95.)
          An unusual combination of life experiences has shaped Will
Campbell's career as a preacher, farmer, social activist, and
writer.
          He was born and raised in a hardscrabble farm family in south
Mississippi during the lean years between the two world wars. He was
ordained in a country Baptist church when he was 17 years old. He was
a medic in the Pacific in World_War_II. He graduated from Wake Forest
University and the divinity school of Yale University. For six years
in the 1950s, he was a race_relations troubleshooter in the South for
the National Council of Churches. And for the past 25 years, he has
headed a Nashville-based "rag-tag bunch of bootleg preachers and
drop-out parishioners" known as the Committee of Southern
Churchmen.
          Nine years ago, in a book called Brother to a
Dragonfly, Campbell told the story of two boys become men--he
and his brother Joe--in those years of poverty and turmoil that marked
the South in the middle decades of this century. It was a remarkable
book, lavishly praised by such literary giants as Walker Percy and
Robert Penn Warren, and it was a finalist in the National Book Awards
competition and a winner of several other non-fiction honors.
          Before and after Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell
wrote a half-dozen other volumes on religion, race, and the human
tragedy, including a novel, The Glad River,
that linked 16th-century Anabaptists in the Netherlands and
20th-century Southern Baptists in Louisiana.
          He is an unconventional man, an uncommon preacher and writer with a
common touch that is incisive, inclusive, and often eloquent. His new
book, Forty Acres and a Goat, is more in the style of
Brother to a Dragonfly than his other works, and it is,
like the man himself, hard to classify. His publisher calls it a
memoir, but it is more nearly a parable or an allegory. Its characters
include historical figures, ordinary people, multiple souls in
singular bodies, animals that behave like humans (and vice versa), and
several members of the Campbell clan.
          The forty acres in question make up a rocky patch of hillsides and
creeksides where Will and Brenda Campbell have lived for more than
twenty years. The goat was a family pet named--like so many people and
things in middle Tennessee--for Andrew Jackson, who once lived in the
neighborhood. The story, in its most basic dimension, is about the
little farm and its menagerie of animals and the people who have come
and gone there.
          But there is much more to it than that. It is about land and time,
ancestry and kinship, civil_rights and human wrongs, manifest destiny
and original sin. The two protagonists, Will Campbell and a more
symbolic but no less real character named T. J. Eaves, grapple
throughout with the crucible of race, a white_man and a black_man
striving to understand the single most complex and enduring test ever
to face this country of immigrants and captives.
          "Say good-bye to Jackson," Eaves tells Campbell as the two
men part company near the end of the story, and when his friend and
brother is out of sight, Campbell hears his own voice saying,
"Well, we almost made it."
          In real life--and in good books--things are never quite finished,
never wrapped up in pretty little bundles that won't come undone. So
it is in Will Campbell's parable. And so it is with Campbell himself,
and with the people about whom he writes so compellingly, and with us
all.
          
            John Egerton's most recent book is Southern
Food. He lives and works in Nashville.
          
        
