I have a vinyl record from 1969 of a sermon my grandfather gave when he returned to Bastrop, Texas, where he was born. He was born in 1928 and back then most of the black folks there, including my grandfather, were descendants of slaves. He began preaching when he was 16 or 17, and when he first started he got paid in canned goods, but he went on to start what became one of the largest churches in the black community in Dallas, at least before megachurches.
I found the record in my grandmother’s closet in 2012, when I was in business school. Her closet was this great archive: She hoarded all these old press clippings and church programs and photos—there were cassettes, but I’d never seen any vinyl.
I’ve got 30 cousins, so there’s a lot of clamoring for things, but I just said, “Hey, Granny, can I take this?” She was in a good mood that day, I suppose, because she gave it to me.
The album cover is fuchsia, which is strange, and it has white lettering that says “Community First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas,” which is the church he founded. The choir—the C.H. Gerald Inspirational Choir—is named after my grandfather, and in a great case of nepotism, the director is his second-oldest son. On the B-side, the name of the sermon is “A Crown in Lay-Away”—my grandfather was known for his weird sermon titles.
We always had to go to church, but I don’t really remember hearing my grandfather preach in person. I remember more just hanging out with him. He’d take my cousin and me—we were, like, seven, eight, nine years old—to IHOP, and then after IHOP he’d take us to the Dollar Store and get us these cap guns, and he would always tell us about fighting in the war in Korea and about shooting people. We knew that in the imagination of a lot of people in the black community in Dallas, he was a huge, larger-than-life figure. But for us, he was this guy who was really cool—and who you were deathly afraid of.
For such a long time, it was illegal for black people in this country to read and write, so the black experience in America is largely an oral experience. And a lot of that came through the church, came through religion. So to have this recording of my grandfather at 41, at what became a sort of very prominent church that he had founded, and in the town where his family had lived all the way back to slavery, is incredibly moving.
~ Casey Gerald, author, There Will Be No Miracles Here, Austin, TX