The River Preacher

Although absent from the Mississippi River’s edge for almost four decades, one Louisiana preacher still inspires

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The name George West may not ring a bell, but his memory is crystal clear for many of this place’s older residents and for those who have seen his painted image. He was the “River Preacher,” an elderly age-bent man, dressed in white holding onto a white cross and standing at the River’s edge.  Preferred to be called the “Messiah of Jesus,” West treated ferry passengers as members of his flock.  For over twenty years he invited the passengers “to come down into the water and be saved.”  When the New Bridge was completed in 1968, ferry service was discontinued, and the preacher lost his flock.  He died of natural causes within a year.

What about his comings-and-goings still prompts interest thirty-six years since his death in June 1968? As is often the case, when piecing together a legend’s real story, it helps to begin with the source: the family.

George West was born February 13, 1885—the seventh of ten children born to Andrew West and Mary Ricks in Ascension Parish. His parents divorced and his father married Louisa Cole. They had three more children, as did George’s mother. George married Octavia Fitch in Houma and they had only one son, Andrew. He, too, became a minister, but he never married nor had any children. He lived and ministered in Houma and Algiers where he died. George and his son were not the only ministers in the family. Today, ten ministers, including two pastors, currently continue the line of the faithful preachers and baptizers.

George and his son were not the only ministers in the family. Today, ten ministers, including two pastors, currently continue the line of the faithful preachers and baptizers.

Every two years, the descendants of George’s grandparents, Henry and Emma West, hold a family reunion. In preparation for the celebrations, Sheila Wilson, George’s great niece, compiles an inch-thick book with pictures and stories about the family. Her 2001 “family book” includes stories and recollections about her great uncle, perhaps the most famous of the West relatives. To his family, he was known as “Uncle George” or “Uncle Teat.” Meanwhile, the folks around the Ascension parish river communities of Geismar, Prairieville, Dutchtown and Gonzales referred to him as the “Gown Man,” “the Preacher,” and sometimes “the Prophet.”

Wilson’s book traces the West family back to the 1800s. For all the stories recounting Uncle George’s years after he returned to Louisiana, little is known about the forty-something years West was gone. Sometime during his twenties, West left Prairieville. Fifteen or so years later, one of his siblings received a package of what the sender called “his things.” But, no one in the family knew if he was living or dead. Then, sometime in the early 1940s, West returned to Ascension Parish.

In Sheila Wilson’s family book, Burnie Dean West Washington, tells of her Uncle George’s return.

“Cornelia Alner Hill West, my grandmother, whom I called Mother ran a laundry room across from OV Burns Store. She and Burnie Dean were doing laundry when a long black car drove and dropped off this tall, black man dressed in a long white gown, with a brimless white cap, carrying a long white cross. Cornelia, said ‘I bet that is Dudley’s brother Teat.’ She had never seen him, but she was right. That gentleman was her brother-in-law.

Uncle Teat had returned from the dead so it seemed. Family members took him to see his sister Della who was married to Allen Jackson and lived in Sunshine LA. She was at the well drawing water, he walked toward her and called her name and she fainted.”

Dressed in a white gown with a beakless cap, George carried a white, cloth wrapped cross. He told his family had been up and down the Mississippi and across the country. He told them he had baptized in forty or so states and along the Mississippi, from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. George had gone where he thought the Lord was leading him to preach and to baptize in the rivers. He called himself “the Messiah of Jesus.”

Burnie Dean Washington was roughly eight years of age when he returned. She recalls that Uncle George and her family walked about a mile to Bayou Manchac. There, George baptized her and other family members. Later, he baptized two of her children in the bathtub because George believed one had to be immersed fully, otherwise one was just considered “christened.”                       

Sheila Wilson, the great niece and family historian, recounts two of her own stories in her own book:

“The most startling thing that I remember about Uncle Teat’s visits was the unwrapping of his cross. Who would’ve thought, that white could come off a cross. I remember staring in awe. I didn’t know what to expect. I had seen the movie The Invisible Man; maybe I thought nothing would be there.

“He would slowly unwrap the body of the cross (the longest part) first, then he would unwrap the arms or the shortest part. Of course, it was a couple of sturdy wooden branches, put together to make a cross. He would then soak that cloth in water and blueing. That would keep it pretty and white.”

The other story was about him cooking eggs: “Uncle Teat was the first person that I saw putting baking powder in eggs. He broke the eggs open into a bowl, added a little baking powder and beat them up. When he put the eggs into the skillet to fry them, I thought they would come over the sides of the pan. They were almost too pretty to eat, but not quite.”

As Sheila Wilson researched her family tree, it seemed George West was the connecting memory. Lollie West Quinn, born in Robinsonville, Mississippi, remembers George was a regular visitor to her family in Memphis, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. He wore a long white gown, a brimless white cap, and carried a white cross. A step grandchild, Kay, in New Orleans described him the same way and added that he carried a tambourine, sang spirituals and preached the gospel.

In the 1940s, George West returned to the parish of his birth, preaching and baptizing along the mighty river. He preached where folks gathered along the river: ferry landings. Though most Baton Rouge and Port Allen residents claim him as their river preacher, he also preached and baptized at the landings of White Castle/Geismer and Plaquemine/St. Gabriel. In addition, he preached in front the Black Cat Bar in Geismer. In the field behind the bar, the Negro leagues played on a baseball diamond throughout the summers. Nobody knows if he made any converts near the Black Cat.

In recent years, newspaper stories with old photographs have led Sheila Wilson to add to he family stories by tracking down artists that memorialized her uncle. Baptism on the Mississippi by Albert DeForest of Baton Rouge was one of those images. Wilson wanted to purchase one of the paintings and tracked down DeForest in Baton Rouge. DeForest showed her snapshots of other paintings of the preacher that he’d done over the years. They were among his most popular paintings that he displayed at festivals, galleries, and malls. He said that Rev. West stayed on 32ndh Street not far from his place near Eugene and that you could almost set your clock by his comings and goings to the river. DeForest told Wilson that his original intent was to paint riverboats, but he had seen the old preacher at the ferry landing for twenty or thirty years. He simply couldn’t paint the boats without the baptizer. DeForest told Wilson that it was George’s dedication that led him to paint the preacher.

Malaika Favorite, an Atlanta-based painter and poet who grew up in Geismer, also remembers George West, whom her father called “a river preacher.” On a trip home in the 1990s, she visited the newly formed River Road African American Museum. She met Kathe Hambrick, executive director, and saw a stack of old roof tin there. Favorite asked Hambrick if she could have some to paint. Hambrick agreed and asked that Favorite paint something for the museum. She asked the painter-poet that the “art tell a story of our history.” Malaika chose the white-clad figure as her subject. Though she remembers him already stooped over, she painted him as a younger man, tall and strong, in acrylic on an eight-by-three foot piece of roof tin. Her painting, “River Preacher,” is now the museum’s logo. Malaika later wrote a poem by the same name in 1995 and it was published in Big Muddy, a literary journal of Southwest Missouri State University Press in 2002.

Eight feet of tin grabs your attention, but residents of Port Allen drive by an even larger image with the river preacher titled “The Spirit of Port Allen”. Brian Farroux, owner of Brian’s Furniture in Port Allen, commissioned Troy Hotard to paint the preacher and the old ferry that were so much a part of the port city’s history. Hotard’s mural painted on the Jefferson Street side of Brian’s Furniture shows the preacher in the foreground with a ferry boat in the background. Farroux owns another painting of George West, a one-of-a-kind original, painted by prolific painter and lithographer, Robert Rucker. Farroux, who intended to make prints of the piece, commissioned it, too.

Artist Don Wright never met George West, but the river preacher is one of his most often painted images. Like West, Wright lived all over, “like a gypsy” just as his father, a welder, had done. Wright returned to Louisiana in the seventies, years after George West  died. Like West, Wright wanted to be near the river. As he got to know the Baton Rouge area and its cultural heritage, he kept coming across stories and pictures related to the river preacher. Wright has painted George West’s image in over one hundred paintings and produced a dozen or more sculptures, some even cast in bronze. He’s now working on a painting that has Clementine Hunter, holding her own river baptism picture, standing on the river bank greeting Wright’s river preacher.

What is it, then, about the river preacher that connects us to him? With family stories and artists’ musings about the legend, will the legacy grow? Will the art inspire still more stories?

When you cross the river these days, you usually drive across a bridge. Cross the river on a ferry, there’s wait time, down time, time to just watch and perhaps remember other ferry waits … other crossings. You might remember the river preacher in white from so many years ago or from a painting you recall. His image washes over you and lives on—George West, the gown man, prophet, preacher, river memory.  

Writer Susan Hymel grew up in West Baton Rouge and remembers seeing the river preacher when she’d ride the ferry from Port Allen. Writing a historical biographical sketch reminds Susan of the reasons she majored in history so many years ago.  There’s always a thrill interviewing descendents and connecting the written material to family and other first person accounts.