Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
Foot washing is a sacrament in Protestant orders that understand the Bible as the word of God, including the Old Particular Baptists and the Primitive Baptists, especially in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions from Pennsylvania to Georgia. In the Primitive Baptist churches I grew up in, the ritual was part of an annual communion. After a short sermon or reading from scripture—I think there is a story in which Christ humbles himself to wash the feet even of the apostles who would soon betray him and enjoins others to such humility—the members of the church would rise to sing hymns, called out by title or hymnal page number, and a procession would begin in an orderly fashion such that, sister with sister, and brother with brother, a pair would form and a wash basin would be chosen to fill with warm water. With two small white towels the partners would sit on and kneel before the front pew and alternate soaping and rinsing the feet of the other. It was touching to watch an elder and younger man exchange the service, lean and muscular, gnarly and horned. Maybe ten basins were in use at a time, and everyone else kept up the singing while the pair worked silently. I sang the lyrics of “Palms of Victory” or “Come Unto Me,” watching every grimace and blush on my mother’s face with her slender feet in the old woman’s hands the last time. A thirteen year-old knows his single mother’s foot. An 8½ narrow: back when a Naturalizer salesman would bring his shoehorn and ramp-stool over to straddle his customer’s fitting.
To wash one’s own feet independent of the rest of the body, and even to wash the feet of others, was not an unusual act in the time and place Jesus Christ lived, in an economy of hospitality, Greek in origin. He and his friends wore sandals, of course, and customarily the feet were the most unclean part of anyone entering a home, particularly travelers. Was that the function of the first foyer, the anteroom? Odysseus, dressed as the beggar back at Ithaca, was recognized by the scar on his leg when the old nurse was cleaning his feet. A warm foot bath was a welcome, and for a friend to give one to a fellow friend was perhaps a tenderness. Reciprocity was at the heart of it. Not to return the favor was to upset a balance. It may well be that, originally, “the shoe was on the other foot” when an erstwhile guest held his former host’s upon repayment of a visit. Somewhere Guy Davenport must have an annotated bibliography on the topic, tracking it homosocially through art and literature.
In Greek drama it was even more honorable to wash a horrible foot, a putrid foot. In Philoctetes, the ogre has been exiled on his island on account of a deception rooted in foot disgust. His fellow sailors led their wounded, festering compatriot ashore and sneaked back to the boat slip without him, unable any longer to abide the smell of his rank, diseased, accursed foot. But the play concerns a second deception in which a young honorable man is enlisted, by Odysseus, to gain Philoctetes’ trust, to hear his laments and sympathize, to enter his cave and tolerate the stench—and then snatch the ogre’s magic bow when he is seized again predictably by foot pain. Because the young man’s sympathy is real, his guile is tested. Nonetheless he executes the plan and procures the treasured bow for Odysseus in the wings. It is for Philoctetes as though the first betrayal was reopened. Whatever psychic detachment from his own extremity he had managed is annihilated. His relationship with his own living rot, we know then, will only grow more shameful. And Odysseus, elsewhere the revenant hero, messiah incognito, is here a craven opportunist, whose villainy, equally, is detachment from shame.
When my stepfather Frank, in a torrent of spite and fury, humiliates my mother in the company of family or friends, over dinner or in his own hospital room, as he does regularly, relentlessly, set off by her miscomprehension of something or an oversight he has discovered, the room is stunned, shaken. There is nothing like it. Mortification is arresting for everyone present. However nefarious or admirable his other dealings may have been, the great disgrace of his life will have been his terrorism of the one devoted to him. The lasting shame of mine was enduring it by detaching from it. I left when I was seventeen, five years into their marriage, and I visit as seldom as I feel I can.
Frank has had, for five or six years now, a chronic wound on the sole of his right foot, a condition not uncommon to advanced type 2 diabetics like himself. Bones in his feet are gradually crumbling and splaying, and abrasions form. Charcot Syndrome. Because of the related impaired circulation and complete localized nerve loss, there is no pain, but there is constant danger of necrosis and toxic shock. The wound on his sole has intermittently wept and cracked and granulated for years, but never closed, despite a number of stimulative water and pressure and debridement treatments, and its inability to heal is the single reason he has been prohibited the kidney transplant for which he arranged a donor long ago but for which he would need to be infection-free during post-operative immunosuppresion therapy. The aperture of his wound has varied from dime to half-dollar size and I have seen it three or four inches deep. Even then, it was frightfully clean, like a throat.
My mother cleans it, every evening, after dinner, after the dishes. She has a kit, a kind of carpet bag, with gloves and sprays and brushes and ointments and individually wrapped antiseptic wipes. He lifts his heavy leg to the butcher block table in their kitchen, and her movements are quicker and rougher than you might imagine, though her concentration is intense. She wipes the gullet of it, and the rim, she gets it to granulate. After twenty-five years of marriage she knows this part of his body best. He hasn’t ever really seen it. Often, during, feeling nothing, he watches television.