If the Reverend Donald A. Harp ever reads this . . .
If the Reverend Donald A. Harp ever reads this I’ll simply say up front, you were right. So very right.
I started visiting Peachtree Road Methodist United Methodist (PRUMC) in the heart of Buckhead as a law student at Emory University needing prayers before a four-hour Tax exam. Then I got married to a fellow law student and we joined PRUMC. This was about the time Don arrived to pastor that grand, aging building with the steeple perched on Peachtree Road.
I grew to love PRUMC. I grew to love Don. I remember so many little things in those 10 years – but this post is not about the many things. It’s about one thing in particular. The one thing here over 25 years later, I laugh about.
Don was raised south of Atlanta in the town of Fayetteville. Today part of the Atlanta metropolis, back then almost as many acres of farmland and pasture as miles separated Atlanta from Fayetteville.
We – the congregants of PRUMC – heard many sermons referencing life growing up in Fayetteville. Stories of wisdom gleaned from the well-worn bible of his Granny Harp.
Every now and then Don referred to his doctor, Ferrol Sams. The doctor he left all the fancy internists in Buckhead to drive the 40 some miles for a check up. The good physician who had been his doctor for most of his life. During sermons, Don mentioned Sams’ late-in-life literary exploits. Books this country doctor wrote and published while in his 60s.
Not only books. “Bestsellers.”
The copy I’m reading from the library.
Bestsellers? Even long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I understood making the NYT Bestseller list was a big deal.
But . . .
Can we talk?
At the time, I stuffed this bestseller information in a file marked from the overly-enthusiastic lovable person that was Don. I was certain his doctor was a nice man. One who wrote books in his 60s. Even a 20-something Jamie thought Ferrol Sams sounded cool albeit ancient. He was a nice physician who wrote books bought by his patients. End of story.
Till 2016 when surfing the Interent when I should have been researching and I saw a book by Ferrol Sams listed as one of the top Southern novels.
This piques interest of now decades older Jamie Miles struggling to pen a first draft of a Southern novel.
* * *
Reading Ferrol Sams Run With the Horseman, I can’t help but laugh. As in this little joke is on me.
After each page of this book, I pick my jaw up off the floor and push it squarely back into joint. How does this doctor from Fayetteville, Georgia – one who swapped stories with my Don Harp over a sheet of white paper rolled out on a table — write like this?
Beyond gifted. Words that paint scenes so nuanced, almost painful in their perfection. Effortless writing about such things as the flatulence of a stubborn mule and a boy and everything that is meaningful and humorous in rural Georgia in the midst of the Great Depression.
As far as the cavernous racial divide existing in the 1930s South, he writes from the viewpoint of a young white male in that region and time:
By the time he was four or five year old, the Southern white was so subliminally convinced of his superiority that later Supreme Court decisions, demonstrations, and riots served to only confirm his belief. Nowhere could there have been a keener consciousness and awareness of race and racial differences than in the close associations of daily life on a Georgia farm.
There it was all laid out. One didn’t talk about being superior; one lived it.
Love goes out to you Rev. Harp. And to the departed Dr. Sams. Who, btw, is in the Georgia Authors Hall of Fame along side Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Flannery O’Connor.
I swear. I didn’t see this one coming but I’m glad I finally did see the light.
A complete surprise. An utter delight.
xo
