Terry L. Jones
Cypress Creek Baptist Church
I grew up within spitting distance of Cypress Creek Baptist Church in Winn Parish. The congregation was small, with twenty-five or so people on Sunday morning being considered a good turnout, but it was an important part of my upbringing.
My great uncle Austin Jones was the Sunday School teacher for us boys. It was a thankless job trying to keep the attention of unappreciative kids whose ages ran from eight to eighteen. We fidgeted in our chairs, daydreamed, and hoped we weren’t called on to dismiss class with a prayer. Uncle Austin had the patience of a saint and did his best to turn us to the light.
When Sunday School was over, there was hymn singing. Mr. Deloy Green led us in singing the great old Gospels in his unique way of projecting his deep baritone voice out of one side of his mouth. I still love Gospel music and find it sad that so many churches today have almost completely abandoned those classic songs that carry such a powerful message.
Brother Lewis B. Williams was our minister, and his sermons were filled with hellfire and brimstone. One-hour sermons were the norm; ninety minutes were not unheard of. Throughout the sermon, elderly deacons such as Mr. Arthur Chandler and Uncle Alson Jones frequently exclaimed, “Amen!” whenever Brother Lewis said something particularly noteworthy.
The sanctuary was simple and we sat on hard cypress pews under bare lightbulbs. Open windows struggled to catch a breeze in the summer, and gas space heaters along the wall baked us in the winter. When the church finally upgraded its furniture, I was able to acquire two of the old pews. Today, they sit on my front porch, and their backs still bear the initials that bored teenagers carved into them.
Two annual highlights were the graveyard work day on a Saturday in May and the week-long revival that was held in August.
Graveyard Working always brought out a large crowd to tend the graves of lost loved ones. Grass was mowed, sunken graves were replenished with new dirt hauled by wheelbarrow, weeds around headstones were hand trimmed or pulled up, and flowers were lovingly set in place.
After a couple of hours work, there was dinner on the grounds. The long wooden picnic table in the side yard sagged with fried chicken, ham, chicken and dumplings, potato salad, peas, cornbread, and every kind of dessert countryfolk could rustle up.
The church had no indoor plumbing, so we had to use outhouses to answer the call of nature. The ladies’ outhouse was conveniently located off the gravel road, but the men’s outhouse was tucked away next to a thicket outside the graveyard. Wasps were an ever-present danger, and one had to keep a wary eye out when tending to business.
Cypress Creek Baptist Church was established in 1885, and six generations of my family are buried there. I personally helped dig some of their graves. When I was a youngster, graves were the responsibility of the deceased’s family and friends, not the funeral home. Hacking a six-foot deep grave out of the piney hill red clay was hard work, so the manual labor was mostly left up to us boys. The grown men supervised, and every so often one of them would jump into the hole and use a premeasured stick to make sure the sides were plumb, because it wouldn’t do to have the coffin get stuck halfway down.
It just so happened that I spent part of one Saturday helping dig a grave before I went to Alexandria that night to meet my future wife’s family for the first time. When I was introduced to James Janette, Carol’s father, he asked the obligatory question, “Well, son, what have you been up to today?” “Digging a grave,” I replied. He just stared at me for a minute, and Carol says it’s the only time she ever saw her father speechless.
For the week-long August revival, a guest preacher was brought in to share the message. Whenever I hear Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” I think of those hot August nights when the ladies feverishly fanned themselves with their wooden handled church fans, and the old men sopped their sweaty faces with a handkerchief.
It was on such a night in 1966 that I was saved at the age of fourteen. Brother Willie Broadway was the guest minister and his message moved me. When the invitation was made, I was ready to commit to Christ but couldn’t bring myself to take the first step down the aisle. Fortunately, James Moffett, one of my best friends and classmates, was sitting next to me, and he suddenly stood up and headed for the pulpit. I quickly followed behind. We made our public professions of faith that night and were baptized in Willard Taylor’s farm pond a few weeks later. James went on to become a well-respected minister, himself.
Not long after our baptism, the congregation updated the church with brick siding, indoor plumbing, and central air and heat, but in my mind’s eye I still see the peeling clapboard and black cypress pews of my youth.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. An autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, costs $25. Contact him at tljones505@gmail.com
