JOHNNY CASH WAS A STORYTELLER. He told many stories in song, stories of love, death, violence, country life, the alienated and forsaken, and, of course, religious faith. Cash told these stories in lyrics he composed and in songs written by others that he made very much his own. He also told his life story at considerable length, twice, first in Man in Black, and then later, and at greater length, in Johnny Cash: The Autobiography, which he wrote with Patrick Carr. These stories are well known to Cash fans.
Not so well known, though, is the novel Man in White, but it should be, both for its own sake and because of what it tells readers about its author. It is unusual to find a singer writing a novel, but the story of Saul, now known as Paul, the author of the New Testament Epistles bearing his name, is more than a novelty, even if its author claims in the introduction that he has no status as a novelist. Cash is, however, a storyteller, which seems enough, if one tells a story well and at some length, to qualify as a novelist. As Cash writes, “I found a story to tell in those few verses [the biographical details about Paul found in the Bible] and the story I tell around those verses is my own” (8).
When Cash says that the story is his own, he means, first, that he has made up much of the narrative. However, the story of Saul becoming Paul is also the story of Johnny Cash on his way to Damascus, or, more literally, on his lifelong struggle to find his spiritual way. The novel is one of three lengthy attempts by Cash over three decades to chronicle his spiritual journey. The first, Man in Black, from the 1970s, Cash acknowledges to be a “spiritual odyssey” (13). Johnny Cash: The Autobiography, written in the 1990s, takes the story further and presents it in greater autobiographical context, but the heart of the account remains Cash’s spiritual struggle. Man in White comes between the two, in the 1980s.
Johnny Cash did not live his spiritual life in secret. He increasingly sang and talked about it. Cash publicly declared his life as a Christian and commitment to God on his television show, The Johnny Cash Show, on November 18, 1970 (Autobiography 274–75). He also wrote about it. Sharing was a way of testifying to the truth as he saw it.
In the prefatory “Personal Note” to Man in Black, he thanks friends and fans for living the story with him and expresses the belief that “if only one person turns to God through the story which I tell, it will all have been worthwhile” (13). Similarly, in the introduction to the novel, he writes, “by novelization of the activity and reality surrounding a tiny grain of truth, great truths can be illuminated and activated” (8). His purpose is surely much humbler that Milton’s in Paradise Lost, where the poet offers to “justify the ways of God to men” (I, 26). For Cash, God’s ways are obviously right and need no justification or defense. The onus is on humans to study, pray, and struggle toward the right; sharing one’s personal story, though, may encourage others in their struggles.
The idea for Man in White came to Cash as he completed the last in a series of correspondence courses that he and his wife, June Carter Cash, took from Christian International in Phoenix. The course was on the life and epistles of St. Paul. Paul immediately interested Cash and set him on a mission to learn as much as possible about the early follower of Christ. In his autobiography, Cash notes that Paul fascinated him because of his “dramatic conversion” and “trials of faith.” Also striking, he writes, were the parallels he saw between Paul and himself:
He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in the music business, or at least those of us with my kind of drive, want our music heard all over the world. He was a man who always had a mission, who would never stop, who was always going here, going there, starting this, planning that; a life of ease and retirement wasn’t on his agenda, just as it isn’t on mine. I’m much more interested in keeping on down the roads I know and whatever new ones might reveal themselves to me, trying to tap that strength Paul found: the power of God that’s inside me, that’s there for me if only I seek it (312).
That Paul found his Savior—the Man in White—on the road, fit well with Cash’s journey theme. As surely as any medieval pilgrim, Cash saw life as a spiritual pilgrimage. Cash recalls in Man in Black that after connecting with Sam Phillips at the Sun Record Company, he wrote a song entitled “My Prayer” (renamed “Lead Me, Father” when he recorded it three years later). He repeatedly sang the song in his mind or aloud every few days for years, calling on God to walk beside him, strengthen him, and pick him up when he stumbled (75).
Dave Urbanski, in The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash, quotes Cash regarding the song “Meet Me in Heaven,” which he recorded on the Unchained album. Cash explained that he wrote the song for June, though the title comes from words on the tombstones for his brother Jack and their father, and that the song is about people “‘going down a trail together forever’” (150). Cash chose well for the concluding song to Solitary Man—the old country spiritual “Wayfaring Stranger.” The individual is a stranger because his true home is across the Jordan and that is where he is traveling, to see loved ones again and, of course, to be with his savior.
Although congruent with Cash’s own spiritual vision and personal spiritual journey, Man in White also merits respect as a carefully constructed novel. This observation should not be particularly surprising. Obviously, Cash could write. His many songs testify to his ability to narrate stories, use metaphors, develop themes, and engage the listener/reader. Trying something as extensive as a novel, though, was a unique effort for him, and he struggled with the novel on and off for almost a decade, beginning in 1977. It was finally published in 1986. As Steve Turner points out in his The Man Called Cash, “For someone used to telling stories in three verses and a chorus, a ninety-thousand-word novel had been an ambitious task” (180). Cash acknowledged the challenge: “It took me a long time, years and years during which my energies focused for a spell, then went somewhere else—music, drug abuse—but I kept at it. . . .” (Autobiography 311).
The attractiveness of the novel begins with its title, recalling by contrast the phrase the “Man in Black”—both Cash’s performing attire and the title of his first autobiographical book. Although Saul/Paul is the protagonist, the title refers to the ultimate hero, Jesus. White refers to the radiance of the sinless and divine Christ, especially the image of the Resurrected Christ that Saul first sees when he is struck down on the road to Damascus and that returns to him many times. The sin and redemption theme is conveyed by the black/white contrast, but not in a simplistic all-or-nothing way. All humans are sinners, Cash believed, more or less a standard Christian concept. Everyone needs redemption. For Cash, the movement through life is a journey, progressing through fits and starts, toward that redemption.
The black-and-white contrast is only a partial antithesis. Cash explained much later one dimension of the symbolism in connection with the two dogs on the cover of the album American Recordings: one black with some white, the other primarily white with a smattering of black. Although he named the dogs Sin and Redemption, he noted that even in sin a person is not all bad, and conversely, no one is ever perfectly sinless (Urbanski 142).
Yet black is also a symbol of compassion for and solidarity with the sufferers and sinners of the world, an attitude best conveyed in the song “Man in Black” from 1971. Cash, according to the lyrics, dresses in black for those who are hopeless, hungry, imprisoned, sick, and lonely, as well as for those who have died in war and those who have missed out on the words of Jesus. Surely much of these misfortunes are caused by people’s sins, sometimes the sufferers’ own sins, but that is no impediment to compassion. Instead, it marks a source of community between Cash and humankind, including St. Paul, a shared experience of sin and the need for redemption.
Early in Man in White, Saul appears as a largely unsympathetic character, his primary attributes zeal and hatred: a zealous commitment to serving God and hatred for those who approach God in other ways, especially for those who follow the crucified Jesus. Cash uses contrasting characters and irony effectively in establishing what Saul is like and, consequently, the extent to which he changes after his conversion.
Cash introduces characters that contrast with Saul especially regarding a matter dear to the author’s heart: religious tolerance. Saul is determined to destroy Jesus’ followers, but others take a sharply different approach. When Peter and John are arrested, Gamaliel, a respected teacher and member of the Sanhedrin, speaks in opposition to trying to eradicate the Christians. In doing so, he expresses greater faith in God than does the ardent Saul: “I advise you, leave these men alone and let them go. If their activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you cannot stop them. You will be fighting against God” (26). The exhortation by Gamaliel carries the day, and, after a cautionary scourging, Peter and John are released. Saul stands watching: “He had never felt such hatred. ‘What idiotic fanaticism!’ he thought. ‘It would be better if all Israel were rid of these religious lepers. . . .’” (27).
Undeterred, Saul embarks upon his mission to eliminate Jesus’ disciples. He brings Stephen before the Sanhedrin and, with the aid of testimony from two brothers, Shemei and Cononiah, who serve Saul as informers, succeeds in gaining a guilty verdict. Stephen, whose story is told in Acts of the Apostles (6.8–8.2), is beaten and stoned to death, his official crime being blasphemy.
The novel makes Saul more responsible for the incident than does Acts, where he is described as being one of the men who approved the execution. However, in Acts the witnesses lay their coats at Saul’s feet, which implies a special role for Saul. In the introduction, Cash recounts having many questions about Paul as he began studying him, including why those who killed Stephen laid their garments at his feet. Serious biblical research brought him many answers, as in this incident, when the elder and Temple guards remove their robes so “no one could later prove that this execution was carried out with Temple sanction” (45).
After the execution, Saul encounters Nicodemus, a former member of the Sanhedrin who had not been present for Stephen’s conviction. The two men disagree regarding the execution, and Nicodemus assures Saul that he would not have voted for Stephen’s death (47). Saul is also contrasted with Baanah ben David, an elderly rabbi who is also Saul’s landlord, the rabbi’s solicitous concern for Saul’s mental and physical well-being at odds with the young man’s passionate obsession with exterminating the Christians (62–63, 84–85).
Saul defends his efforts in terms of his commitment to the One God. He explains to Nicodemus that the first prayer he had memorized as a child was the Shema, a declaration of the Jewish belief in the unity of God. The prayer, which comes from Deuteronomy (6.4–5), Cash renders as “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord he is One.” The irony of Saul’s reciting this prayer lies in his failure, from the novelistic point of view, to understand his initial misapplication of it. Initially, he sees in this basic principle of faith the rationale for destroying the Christian community. Much later, as one of the most important figures in the rise of Christianity, he will offer the same prayer, but with a radically different view of God and of his own spiritual role (49, 219).
A serious flaw in Saul within both the narrative of the novel and Cash’s own personal credo is his intolerance. He believes in one God in a certain way and cannot tolerate those who believe in God in other ways. Cash makes his point clear in Man in Black:
I’m sure denominations are important for bringing a body of believers together and giving them strength and motivation, but when this or that denomination begins to feel or, still worse, begins to teach that their particular interpretation of the Word opens the only door to heaven, then I feel it’s dangerous. True, such preaching may convict [a term Cash often uses instead of convert] some people and win them over. But how many more nonbelievers are alienated and will shy away from any further look at the plan of God?
Telling others is part of our faith all right, but the way we live it speaks louder than we can say it. The gospel of Christ must always be an open door with a welcome sign for all (33).
This issue of tolerance also appears in Cash’s novelistic depiction of disagreements among the early Christians; the disagreement parallels the distinction quoted above between speaking one’s faith and living it. After Saul’s conversion and his later return to Jerusalem, he finds himself arguing with James about faith versus good works. James argues for good works, while Paul urges seeking converts on the basis of faith alone. “‘So you say you have faith,’ said James. ‘And I say I have works.’” Paul then seeks conciliation by accepting James’s position that they must live their faith through their actions, adding that the followers of the Lord “are justified by faith in him, that the righteousness of the Law is attained by total faith in him” (206). Saul’s ability to find common ground demonstrates how far he has evolved from the earlier unbending zealot.
Another imaginative use of irony occurs in the rat episode shortly before Stephen’s trial and execution. Saul, who lives in a cellar room beneath Baanah ben David’s synagogue, discovers that a rat has been chewing on one of his biblical scrolls. He catches the rat and, filled with loathing for it, plans to kill the animal, only to be brought up short by the realization that the rat now contains within its stomach fragments of the sacred Scriptures.
Unable to kill something that possesses a bit of divine truth, Saul tosses the rat outside. Ironically, Saul has no trouble arranging for Stephen’s death later that day, unable to comprehend that the martyr may also possess at least a fragment of divine truth. No less ironic is the prayer that Saul utters after receiving authorization from the high priest, Jonothan ben Annas, to leave Jerusalem to search out Jesus’ followers. He praises a God that is “unchanging, all mighty, merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and in truth, remembering loving kindness for a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sins, and giving pardon to the penitent” (55–56). The reader will search in vain for much evidence of these qualities in Saul at this point in the story.
Among the novel’s structural successes is a series of deaths that increasingly impacts Saul. First, of course, there is the death that occurred prior to the opening of the novel, that of Jesus. Then Stephen is stoned to death, “his face covered with blood but his countenance joyous” (45). The next important death is narrated through Saul’s memory of an earlier event: the death of his friend Michael.
Still in Jerusalem prior to his setting forth for Damascus, Saul recalls returning from an earlier trip to find that in his absence a group of young men had gathered to protest the raising of a Roman standard over one of the city gates. Roman soldiers attempted to disperse the group, the confrontation turned violent, and a large number of protesters were either killed outright or crucified. One of the latter was Michael. Saul finds his friend still alive on the cross and asks why he engaged in such a foolish action. “‘For you,’ Michael whispered. ‘And for Israel.’” In Saul’s dreams, Stephen, Jesus, and Michael mingle, a disturbing combination for the self-proclaimed persecutor (69).
Dreams and visions run throughout the novel, as they do throughout Cash’s life. In a recurring dream, Saul is standing in a river of blood, sometimes with Gentiles calling to him for help, a foreshadowing of the mission he will later undertake to bring Christianity to the Gentiles, as well as to the Jews. In one version of the dream, he is lying in the blood with his arms around the foot of a cross. Pulling himself up, he is blinded by the light emanating from the cross but is able to make out the sign for Jesus the Nazarene. Interpreting the dream is not difficult for Saul—Jesus’ blood offered as a sacrifice for humankind with Saul’s role to save others through the blood of the Savior—but accepting the message is not yet possible for him (72–73, 77–78).
Saul finds himself living a real-life version of the dream during the scene in which he leads an assault on the Christians worshipping in the Synagogue of the Isles of the Sea. Aristotle of Crete is scourged, and when Saul kicks Aristotle’s wife in the stomach, Barnabas intervenes, leading Saul to take a sword from one of the Temple guards and hold its tip to Barnabas’s throat. In a fit of rage, Saul hits Barnabas on the head with the flat of the blade, knocking him unconscious; he then stabs an elderly man in his hip when he refuses to stop praying. In the aftermath of the violence, Saul finds himself standing in a pool of blood. The terror he felt during his recurring dream returns, and to counter it he shouts the aforementioned Shema (95–97).
The spiritual line between visions and dreams was very fine in Cash’s life, and both had great impact on him. Two especially significant examples involved his brother Jack and his father, Ray Cash. Both related to death and the next life. Jack was fatally injured in a table-saw accident in 1944 at the age of fourteen and died about a week later. Shortly before his death, Jack, calm and seemingly quite rational, spoke to his family surrounding his deathbed of a beautiful river that was going to take him away and of angels singing (Autobiography 35–36). In his accounts of the event, Cash never seems to doubt the truth of his brother’s vision.
In the case of his father, the vision was Cash’s own. Ray died on December 23, 1985. On Christmas night, after returning from the funeral home, Cash decided for the sake of the children in the family to set off the fireworks he had purchased earlier and that were a traditional part of Christmas for the Cash family. When he later went to bed, he dreamed that a silver car pulled up and deposited his father. As Johnny reached out to shake his father’s hand, a great row of light flashed up between them, widening and separating the two men.
The following morning, Cash went to pick his mother up for the funeral and shared with her his father’s message that he was happy and comfortable where he was. Again Cash seems to accept the visionary nature of the experience and its essential reality. He describes the experience in the introduction to Man in White (14–15) because, although he admits that he never had an experience comparable to Paul’s vision near Damascus, the dream about his father was the closest he ever came. As he writes, “I was never privileged to have an experience like Paul did just outside Damascus, but on Christmas night 1985 I had a visionlike dream and saw a light that was unearthly and much more beautiful than the whole box of fireworks” (15).
Saul’s life-altering encounter with Christ is described in terms of such an overpowering light: “a light far greater than the sun” that blisters his face, singes his hair, and blinds him. For just a second, Saul had seen the Man in White, and the figure remains on the back of his eyelids as a negative image (118–19). The story of the great light, Saul’s blinding, and his later recovery of sight comes from Acts of the Apostles (9.3–18, 22.6–13, 26.12–18).
Neither in Acts nor in Paul’s Epistles does one find any indication that Saul was anything but fully committed to persecuting the Christian church. In Man in White, though, Cash looks toward fictional credibility and psychological complexity in depicting a Saul who is growing ever readier for a conversion experience. Saul has undergone the troubling dreams about Stephen, Michael, Jesus, and the bloody stream already mentioned, certainly signs of a mind in torment. Then, as he approaches Damascus, he does so after days of uncertainty: “Fears and doubts had plagued him for the last six days.” Further, “the purging of the Nazarenes in the city of God had brought him no real satisfaction,” and every night he has been dreaming of Stephen, the executed Christian’s face “in a blissful smile” (118). The questions continue: “Should he abandon his mission? How many would die in Damascus in the fulfillment of his task? The thought of the dying men, women, and children overwhelmed him, and he was almost sick to his stomach. . . .” (118).
At this moment, though, he pulls himself back from such doubts, worrying that “The Evil One is working against God’s work” in his mind (118). Then comes the light, and Saul, as a character in a novel, is primed for the great change. The miracle may be decreased by the psychological preparation of Saul, but in terms of plot and character development the troubled portrait adds greater credibility to the story.
Not only the road on which Saul treads but his entire life has led to this moment. Having witnessed the Lord and been so transformed, Saul has reached a point that is both crisis and climax. This is the great turning point in his life and in the character Cash has drawn. Yet it necessarily is also the high point of the narrative. After witnessing God so immediately, what can the character possibly do to compete with this moment? After the miracle on the way to Damascus, all must, to some extent, be anticlimactic. Yet the rest of the novel is not without artistry and interest, even if on the whole it lacks the emotional power of the narrative up to Saul’s conversion.
In a later incident also demonstrating Cash’s ability to identify with his protagonist, Paul escapes from Damascus by being lowered in a basket from a city wall, an incident, like many in the novel, based on much sketchier biblical treatment (Acts 9.23–25). The novel adds a mishap as Paul lands in a thorn bush.
The powerful song “The Man Comes Around” from the album of the same title refers to a whirlwind in a thorn tree as part of the phenomena accompanying the return of Christ at the end of the world. In the liner notes to the album, Cash said that the phrase came to him in a dream in which Queen Elizabeth (certainly an unlikely subject for a dream) tells Cash that he is like “a thorn tree in a whirlwind.”
Cash later recalls a similar reference in the Book of Job. The song, though, follows the novel by several years; any cause-to-effect relationship regarding this passage in the novel as effect instead likely involves another dream of Cash’s, one he experienced repeatedly when he was attempting to recover from drug use in 1967. As he recalls in Man in Black, a glass ball would begin expanding in his stomach and eventually lift him off his bed. Then the ball would explode, sending pieces of glass through his body. Sometimes he also would dream of pulling briars, splinters of wood, and thorns out of his flesh (145).
Psychologically, the thorns in Paul’s flesh, like those within Cash’s dream, convey the lingering guilt of past transgressions. Paul is no longer the Saul who persecutes Christians, but he still remembers his earlier sins. His past also makes it difficult for some Christians to get beyond his earlier actions, including those who flee when Peter introduces Saul upon his return to Jerusalem (202).
Prior to returning to Jerusalem, Saul makes a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai, ascending “The Stairway to Heaven” and, after undergoing a beating at the hands of two young men descending the mountain, finally reaches the top and an arch called “The Gateway to Heaven.” Passing through the “Gateway,” he reaches the place where tradition said Moses had been visited by God.
With night approaching, he gathers branches and leaves for a bed and, just as he is about to fall asleep, sees the Man in White. He hears the voice of Jesus and receives both his new mission to confirm the Lord’s “new covenant” and a vision of the future destruction of Jerusalem (173–82). After witnessing the destruction until “not one stone was left upon another,” he recalls that much earlier incident with the rat chewing one of his scrolls. Now the scriptural passage that the rat de voured comes back to him: “‘This house which I have sanctified in my name will I cast out. . .’” (183). The return to this earlier incident with the rat effectively bookends the long portion of the protagonist’s life stretching from his career as ardent persecutor through his conversion and his reception on Mt. Sinai of his new calling: to make his body “the temple of the Most High” and carry the new covenant to the Gentiles (178). The old house of faith has given way to the new one, as the Old Jerusalem, in the long tradition of Christian eschatological doctrine, yields to the New Jerusalem.
Saul is now ready to set out on his mission to spread the news of Jesus. First, he returns to Jerusalem, where he encounters Barnabas, whom he earlier had knocked unconscious after holding the point of a sword to his neck. Barnabas is again beaten, this time suffering at the hands of the Roman soldiers and the chief priests and elders. After Saul receives his new name, Paul, in another vision of the Man in White, he encounters the bleeding Barnabas. Now, however, Paul, armed with his faith, his new name, and his great mission, is the healer. He and Peter pray with their hands upon Barnabas. The image of the Man in White appears again behind Paul’s eyelids, and when he opens his eyes the scar that Paul’s sword had left on Barnabas’s neck is gone along with his other wounds (217).
Johnny Cash has written the story of Paul up to his embarking on his many journeys to help establish and stabilize a number of Christian communities. Paul’s subsequent activities are beyond the scope of the author’s intentions, and so the novel, except for a brief epilogue and some song lyrics by Cash, ends here. However, the section concludes with the unusual note: “THIS STORY HAS NO END” (219).
Novels, of course, are supposed to have ends, and this one is no exception. Cash is writing, though, a narrative within the much longer story often known as salvation history. That history, for Cash, continues, and will continue until the end of the world when Jesus comes again, as he is described doing in “The Man Comes Around.”
The individual story of Paul, however, does have an end, although Cash seemingly has no desire to write a fictional account of his missionary work that produced the epistles, an account that would make the novel much longer and certainly less focused. So the novel jumps over those endeavors and concludes with a brief, impressionistic account of Paul’s impending death, including again the image of the Man in White (223–26).
The lyrics that follow the epilogue recount going to Damascus and standing at the spot where Saul had seen his great light (227). The lyrics point out, though, that the moment of revelation and conversion need not be on the road to Damascus. It could be anywhere, even in a closet. Johnny Cash walked that road to Damascus in his novel about Paul. He also walked his own personal Damascus road throughout his life, walking from sin to redemption, hoping that he would get there and stay there. The novel certainly helped with that. It also turned out to be a good novel.
EDWARD J. RIELLY chairs the English department at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. In addition to ten volumes of his own poetry, he has published several nonfiction books. His recent publications include The 1960s (Greenwood), Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (ABC-Clio; recently released in paper by the University of Nebraska Press), Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond (a collection of essays from Haworth), and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (Greenwood). He is editing Baseball in the Classroom: Teaching America’s National Pastime, a collection of essays on baseball as pedagogy, for McFarland; and is writing Sitting Bull: A Biography (Greenwood) and Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (University of Nebraska Press). He also writes a newspaper column on baseball and has published many individual articles, book reviews, short stories, and poems.
Cash, Johnny. American IV: The Man Comes Around. American Recordings, 2002.
———. American Recordings. American Recordings, 1994.
———. Johnny Cash: The Songs. Ed. Don Cusic. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.
———. Man in Black. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1975.
———. Man in White: A Novel. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987.
———, with Patrick Carr. Johnny Cash: The Autobiography. New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1998.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.
The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha. Ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfield, and James R. Mueller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Turner, Steve. The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love, and Faith of an American Legend. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2004.
Urbanski, Dave. The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash. Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Media Group, 2003.