Elijah’s Beginnings
Author’s note: In spite of how this might seem otherwise, just keep in mind, this is a Science Fiction novel.
Elijah was the name bestowed on the child by his grandmother, who prophesied, ‘You, child, shall go forth in the spirit of Elijah of old, and reunite the hearts of the children to the fathers and mothers, and you will call down fire from the sun.’
Someone said, ‘Don’t you mean, from heaven?’
‘No, I said, from the sun.’
That was at the Sunday morning service of the Holiness Church, up Spit Holler, Harlan County, Kentucky, on his eighth day of life. His parents took him there that morning at Granny’s insistence. They feared her, which is why they consented for him to be called Elijah. But they feared that church even more. They feared what some of the members were capable of when they were in a supercharged state of ecstasy. They feared the snakes they occasionally brought out during services.
Apart from that one Sunday morning, they stayed put in the Baptist church where there was less chance of being bitten.
Elijah’s daddy, Samuel, was the local postmaster. Earlier in his life, someone had talked Granny into sending Sammy to a boarding school in a different county. It turned out to be a pretty good place, so she sent his younger brother, Uncle Fred there beginning the following year.
The dorm parent, who insisted on being called ‘Andy’, noted the fact that the two were fatherless, and took them under his wing. Even during Sam’s final year, when Andy had left the school and become the pastor of a church in the next town, he’d have the boys over for weekends.
Then, Sam went on to college in another county not far off. That’s how Sam and Fred turned out differently than their mother.
To be sure, they all got religion, but while Sam and Fred were going forward at alter calls during ‘Religious Emphasis Week’ organised by their church run school, Grandma was whoop’n it up and dancing up and down the wooden aisle of the old Holiness Church up Spit Hollar.
Uncle Fred married a classmate straight out of high school in his wife’s hometown near where the school was, and brought her home to Harlan County, where they grew beans and sold milk from a few cows they bought. Sam married much later to a neighbour girl that he had been taking a growing interest in during his summers at home. Her father was the old postmaster, so he got a job as a mail carrier, and later inherited his father-in-law’s job.
They would have sent Elijah to the same school Sam and Fred had attended, but it had closed. The boy’s dorm had burnt down during Fred’s last year there - no fault of Fred’s, mind you - and a few years later, the denominational committee decided that the need for a school of that type had passed, and turned it into a social services centre for the community.
So, Elijah attended the local school that housed everyone from first grade through high school in the same building.
In a way, Granny had a bigger hand in raising Elijah than she had Sammy and Freddie. It was a bit of a tug-of-war at times between Granny and Elijah’s parents. If his parents disapproved of the Holiness Church, at least Granny was satisfied that he went to church, though on occasion, he skipped out.
As punishment for skipping out a few Sundays in a row, his Grandmother would take him to the Spit Holler Holiness Church. Thus, he attended that church a total of five times in his life. Once at eight days as described above, three times when his grandmother decided to intervene with his delinquency, and once more after that for her funeral.
The first time, Elijah had grown into a barefoot hill-billy, occasionally getting in trouble for stealing watermelons from old Charlie Combs’s patch. Granny showed up at the door and announced she was taking young Elijah to church, where they were having a revival meeting.
She promised Mummy and Daddy she wouldn’t let him near the snakes.
The visiting preacher, Brother Billy Simpson, preached a hell fire and brimstone sermon that frightened little Elijah out of his mind. He went up at the end, kneeled at the altar, and repented of stealing Charlie Combs’s watermelons.
They didn’t bring out the snakes because Brother Billy didn’t believe in snake handling.
The music was electric - not as in electric guitars or amps, but with a piano thumped very loudly, with a beat that would put any bar or nightclub to shame.
The second time was after Uncle Fred had started taking Elijah coon hunting. Since Uncle Fred wasn’t much of a church going man, he’d occasionally sneak off with him on a Sunday morning. It was on a Sunday that he shot his first coon. They skinned it, and his mother promised to make him a coonskin hat.
Granny showed up a few nights later and announced she was taking Elijah to church again.
That night was a simple midweek prayer meeting, no preaching, but the Spirit moved, so they decided to bring out the snakes.
Elijah disappeared out the back door and hid in the shed in the back and fell asleep. It turned out, that was where they kept the snakes. It was dark, and someone walked into the shed at the end of the meeting carrying the box of them, and plunked them down next to Elijah, and shut the door and locked it.
His screams alerted his granny to his where-abouts.
On the way home, he promised to go to church, as long as he didn’t have to be near snakes again.
A few years later, Elijah had his own pick-up truck that he had patched together himself with parts from three other cars, and that had become a distraction. His grandmother arrived once again to take him to church.
This time, Elijah got the Holy Ghost.
He didn’t even go to the front to tarry for the Spirit’s power. He got it right where he was sitting, far enough from the front just in case they brought out the snakes.
He began bubbling over in other tongues, couldn’t even speak any English to explain himself, and felt drunker than his Uncle Albert.
Of course, he didn’t have to explain himself. Those sitting around him escorted him forcibly to the front, where he carried on with the glossalelia, eyes generally half open, half shut.
He opened his eyes to find he was staring into those of a snake. A voice from somewhere (was it Granny’s?) said, ‘When you next meet one like this, know that you are near your destiny.’
He went out cold.
His grandmother was waiting for him patiently as he picked himself off the floor. The snakes had been put away, and most of the people had left. He didn’t remember much of what she said on the way home, but she seemed very happy.
For a few weeks after that, his experience held him on the straight and narrow. If not a Holiness Pentecostal, at least he was a better Baptist - for a while.
Not long after that, he was back to squealing the tires of his pick-up around blind curves on the mountain roads with his friends. There was just enough oncoming traffic in those parts to make it as exciting as snake handling.
The only other excursion to the Spit Holler Holiness Church was for his grandmother’s funeral, as she died of a snakebite a couple months later.
The grandmother we’ve been describing was the one with the surname of Dove, making her Elijah’s father’s mother. Her own parents were descended from a Charikee lass who had become the wife of a French fur trapper. Elijah’s grandfather, the one with the Dove surname, was Irish, who had been travelling in the area and had a fling with Granny during her wild days - followed by a shotgun wedding. He died not long after Uncle Fred was born, of too much moonshine.
The other half of Elijah’s forebearers were Ulster Scotts, who had followed Daniel Boon through the Cumberland Gap. Most of them were quite respectable, with the exception of Uncle Albert, an alcoholic, who would sometimes tell stories of being abducted by aliens.
Also among his relatives on that side were upstanding members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Granny Dove didn’t much approve of the Ku Klux Klan connections, but she mostly kept her mouth shut. Nobody made a big thing of it anyway. There were no Black people nor Jews in their section of Harlan County to make it an issue, so Elijah grew up blissfully ignorant.
He heard the word ‘nigger’ plenty of times tough. His dad, having been to a liberal arts college, disapproved of it, calling it the ‘N word’. Uncle Fred was a different matter, but whenever he said it, it wasn’t necessarily derogatory.
He said that during his last couple of years of high school, ‘nigger clothes’ were the in thing. He even wore them a few times at family gatherings - his bellbottom britches with a high waist line, his silk shirt with the wide stretchy elastic at the hem that would have shown his tummy if not for the high waist line, the platform leather shoes, his dark glasses - and then he’d strut around as though he were on stage at a rock concert. Some of his favourite tunes of those times was ‘nigger music’, Jimmy Hendrix, et al.
With his friends at school, the word carried feelings ranging from hate to awe and admiration. Someone noted that in the movies, the only actors that didn’t talk with an accent were the ‘niggers’ like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith.
But everybody seemed glad that none lived nearby. Elijah didn’t know if it was good or not. The only time he’d met any was on the basketball court at tournaments.
As for politics, Elijah defaulted to the assumption that anything that’s good for the Christians must be of God, therefore any laws forbidding what the Bible forbids must be laws worth campaigning for. As the country was founded on Christian values, white Christians, who were the sum of what he saw around him, had God’s mandate to rule America.
But Elijah was well aware that his perspective was limited, having hardly seen anything outside Harlan County, except on trips made to tournaments with his school’s basketball team.
The biggest city he’d ever been to was London - not London, England, but London Kentucky, population 7 thousand. The farthest place anyone he knew had spent very much time was, UK, where his coach spent one year. That’s University of Kentucky.
Uncle Fred suggested that a stint in the Army would expand his horizons. Elijah thought that was a grand idea, but first, he would go on a road trip and discover America for himself.
So, upon receiving his High School diploma in the same building in which he learned his ABCs, he set off to discover America.
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