Growing Up AME

“God gives us the right to choose; a special gift to employ.
He grants guidance, hands over the essentials; we seek, knock and we find. Our route is as ambiguous as our direction; even though it’s a road well traveled. We have our gear, supplies at hand, as God provides and is always near. Sometimes we waste resources and miss our calling……we drift; we waver; we stumble; our resolve is bruised, we’re offended. We blame. We forgive. But our goal is to know our heritage; a goal that sticks like glue. Unlearned outlooks are ours; given with a price we can ill afford to pay. We must pay. Courage to act becomes an after thought; we take the road less traveled and find peace; gratification that rest our souls. Suddenly our values; our character are shaped. We move forward like Abraham, Moses, Paul; our work is not finished, but we look forward with hope filling  the vacuum of faith. God’s legacy through Christ is our legacy.

“We are hard press on every side: but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed, 2 Cor. 4: 8-10

Introduction
    There are many chapter is your life. Like episodes from a continuing made for television movie. Sometimes you replay them over and over in your mind, sometimes for the effect, sometimes for the memories, but always for the awesome incredible journey that you've made, a journey that you've conquered. That's what life is; a series of short stories if you will, that define the essence of us all. These stories are a book, that illustrate the way that we've lived our lives, hopefully the way the Lord would have us live it.
    The African Methodist Episcopal Church set the definition of me in my childhood and/shaped my perceptions as a man. Everything that I am leads back to that foundation . I find myself returning to those roots and the principles that I was taught by my parents. They are principles that I practice at work and at my leisure.
    I grew up AME. That's my legacy. It is a legacy that my father and mother passed on to me and my sisters. There was nothing special about us. We were no different from many black kids growing up in the south in a time of racial change. We toiled, we sweat and we were provided for as we made our way through the different stages of our childhood. It was a childhood filled with memories that have lasted a lifetime. That is what it meant to grow up AME. AME is not really words from an Alphabet, or an abbreviation, it not a union slogan or the initials of some civil rights group. The AME church is an institution, that many Americans particularly of the African Ancestry have come to identify with. It defined me, my two sisters and my brother as people.
    The AME church is a legacy that was passed on to me from my father and mother., Rev. and Mrs. CE Jenkins Sr., Charles Edward and Lula Mae Jenkins. This is their story, a story of hope and prayers. It is an American Saga. A modern day roots. A story that deserves to be told. It is a story of a couple from North West Tennessee, who grew up near the Kentucky border, who united to form a perfect union. One that produced  over 56  years of marriage and 56 years of services to the Lord. Not an incomplete accomplishment, but one that inspired the masses.
      There are countless people that my father and mother influenced in their fifty-five year journey in the ministry. Some remain vividly locked in my memory, while others seem to fade with time.
    I think back on that journey. I think of all the accomplishments that my father has obtained. I think of all the sacrifice that my mother made, but most of all I think of all the people who have come to admire and respect them and love them enough to call them Mom and Dad. This is their story. One that deserves to be told.
    I think of the staying power that my father possesses. He has an insatiable desire even to this day to learn and continue to learn in spite of age. In spite of sickness. ( a quadruple by-pass surgery for my father) and (A operation to remove a tumor for her colon, which my mother endured.)  Now the devastating fall that my father endured in February of 2007. It left him paralyzed, unable to move any parts of his body accept for his head and his left hand.  He now spends his time in a nursing home, with his bad heart and unable to breathe without the aid of a ventilator;  he struggles to hold on to life.
  He 's seventy-nine years old now and even though he cannot walk or talk because of  the tracheotomy  procedure he went through, my father's days are spent struggling to know where he is or who is is.  My mother suffers too from Alzheimer disease; so much so that she barley remembers my Dad.  Despite all this both are blessed and God's grace has shined on our entire family. Both old now, riddled with sickness my Father 79 and my mother 81 years of age. But they press on despite this and we all agree that God is still a good and merciful God. He still a loving God and Jesus Christ is Lord.
  Growing up AME, defined an attitude. It served to define the elite of the African American race. In the 50's and 60"s prosperity reigned for the AME church. These were the years of change , as change swept across this great country of ours. The civil rights movement, Kennedy Cuban Missile Crises, the Bay of Pigs, The Man from Uncle, the Beverly Hillbillies all were apart of the time when I grew up AME. It was a time of hope, a time of change and if anything changed as the bible said it would, that is what it meant growing up AME.
    It meant putting a face on the Civil Rights movement. It meant defining what Martin Luther King stood for. It meant witnessing man's first steps on the moon, that July day in 1969. That adventure helped define America in the sixties. For me it meant coming to understand the game of basketball. It meant enjoying a good church hymn, some with a tinged of swing, such as "Oh Happy Day", or "Walk Around Heaven" or " Lead me, guide me along the way. " It meant lively sermons at: Saint Paul AME in Chattanooga. It meant attending vacation bible school and getting a quarter every Sunday after church to buy a snack at the neighborhood 5 and dime store. That is what it meant to grow up AME.
      It meant leaving the town of Fayetteville one sunny November Friday in 1960 and the entire school came out to wish us well as we sped off in our station wagon as my father took his new assignment in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I'll never forget that day.  If there were ever a time that there was a black version of Mayberry, it was Fayetteville, Tennessee.  A place where everything and everybody moved slow and deliberate, where people were not in a hurry and they stood for something or at least gave the impression that they did. We lived in a different world today.  That is the tragedy that confronts not only the AME Church but America itself.
      This story is about a man and a woman who made a commitment to one another and to God to serve him and to live their life together. I had three brothers and sisters,  It is a story that we hold dear to our hearts. One that must be told. This is not a story without its ups and downs, nothing in life can be so shallow most certainly not a story. I'm sure everyone would like to celebrate and talk about the virtues of their parents, we are no different and I surely make no apologies for it.
    Like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the union between Charles Edward and Lula Mae has endured, primarily because both shared a common bond. They were different in the ways that they approached things. My father being direct and calculating and very sociable, while my mother is more indirect, but calculating and driven. But both were committed to devotion to the Lord and his work and passing on those virtues to their children.
    At times we struggled with that charge. Experiencing the normal growing pains that are attributed to kids growing up in a minister's household., stern and disciplined. Despite that, we always managed to challenge it and to interject our individuality, sometimes to our own disadvantage and sometimes to the expense to others.
    It is a origination of sorts of attitude, passed on by baby boomers who have not yet matured into the adults they are capable of becoming.
  My mother traveled along that journey in support of the values that my father tried to instill and still does to this very day. She has been and continues to be a shining beacon. A solid rock in the face of adversity. One who continues to stand out and give of herself to everyone she comes in contact with.
    My mother and father's generation signified a new beginning. No longer were they willing to accept the status quo in the south. They were determined to carve a new south, one based on the character of the person and not entirely based on the color of one's skin. Many generations were born products of the early 20's and late twenty's. Some call that time roaring, but not roaring in the deep south, in the time of prohibition, when racism ran rampant and caused thousands upon thousand of African Americans to uproot their families from the Mississippi Delta to the hills of Tennessee .
    They uprooted their families and moved them to so called greener pastures in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York , Boston, and all along the eastern seaboard. It did not matter, what matter was the opportunity that many felt presented itself. The point was blacks in the south were not content to be nannies  as many of their forefathers and mothers had been. They wanted to be defined a man and woman bent on carving their own niche and taking complete advantage of what it meant to be free and in America, to live the American dream.
    My father's father was railroad man, working as a mechanics helper, a diamond of a job for anyone who lived in western Tennessee at the time. As a result my father was able to see more than just Paris, as he lived for a time with his beloved uncle Curley in Canton, Ohio. An uncle that he loved very much who only just recently passed. There was a new world out there, one that my father thought was his to conquer, his to explore, beyond the confines and restriction of Paris, Tennessee. My mother born in Puryear, Tennessee and raised in Paris by a loving Aunt, Dora Kendall, when her mother passed away, she served as a shining beacon and role model. She learned a refined manner and a protocol to live by.
    It was an exciting time for them both when they entered into that union of marriage, on March 18, 1949. My father determined to defy instruction from the white man. He would be a minister, spreading the gospel and teaching the word of God to African Americans. No white man would rule his destiny. His destiny would be ruled by God. That is the backdrop that we were born into from this union which produced four children and five grand children, who continue to define the trail blazer path that my mother and father pioneered some fifty-six years go.
    There is a sort of arrogance that defined my father and his descendants, never settling for limitations that were put forth or dictated by the white establishment, but striving to be more in spite of this. This not only is gene or characteristics of future generations passed on to his immediate children, but also exhibited in the spouses that those children chose In my case, passed on to my son that could choose his own route despite that others would have him believe.
    This is not a story of turmoil, dejection,  or tragedy, where many kids grew up on crack or in jail,  perhaps even dead. No, despite the pressures, it is a story of triumph and survival of the human spirit. That one uses to fight the odds and obtain the heights and progress, that in all too many cases were not necessarily in the cards.