One of the noblest deeds of the Protestant Reformation was its emphasis on the importance of literacy. It was Johannes Gutenberg who, like John the Baptist, stood in the river and pointed to Luther when he invented the printing press in the fifteenth century. The most famous book he printed with it was the Bible, an affordable product mass-produced for the masses to learn to read and read for themselves, and soon to translate into secular and living languages.

  Sola scriptura follows in the educate-thyself spirit of the Reformation: to take the power away from the obfuscating clergy urging trust in their secondhand account of the text, to take scripture out of the dark ages and turn on the reading light. If a text is truly holy, it needs no human political intercession, no third parties between the reader and it. A Christian doesn’t need anything between him and scripture in order to be a Christian.

  The foundational principle of sola scriptura, and therefore the importance of literacy to the Protestant Reformation, carved for the Christian soul a path that forks in two directions. If you choose one road, Protestantism is simply the first step toward a secular society. One who travels down this road begins with the Bible, but even though he learned to read in order to read it, he is now able to read a great many other texts as well—science, philosophy, literature, whatever else—and winds up an atheist or an agnostic or a secular person who doesn’t worry about the God question too much, or a mainline Protestant Christian of moderate, reasonable, quiet and personal faith who can live without constant moral and existential crisis in the everyday modern world of science, humanism, democracy, enlightenment values, and the separation of church and state, who does not interpret scripture literally or fundamentally. One who travels down the other road turns away from all the saints and icons and costumes and ritual and narrative and art and all the rest of the ancillary (so he believes, though it is in fact essential) material razzle-dazzle of Catholicism toward iconoclasm, austerity, refusal of ornament, scorn of tradition, toward the “purity” of the text and what it “means”—and at the end of this road lie fundamentalism, fanaticism, insanity. Because if you truly believe that scripture is all you need and you truly believe the scripture, you will inevitably arrive at a Christianity that looks less like, say, the United Methodist Church and more like the one practiced by the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., with its glossolalia, its prophecy, its belief in an interventionist God and the usefulness of praying to that God for specific outcomes, and its absolutely foundational beliefs in the existence of the Devil and the imminence of the end of the world.

  I mistrust and reject any arguments for the usefulness, moral or otherwise, of literature. “All art,” as Oscar Wilde writes in the preface to the expanded edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is quite useless.” I am a proud and constant warrior for l’art pour l’art, and Oscar Wilde’s knee breeches are blazoned on my shield. Any entreaties for art’s power to instruct or improve cheapen it, ask it to be propaganda. But it’s undeniable that sometimes a work of literature—usually an aesthetically hideous one such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin—brings about positive change in the universe.

  Toward the end of one of our conversations, Mark Harris asked me if this project might somehow lead to his being released from parole. I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe, but probably not. The woman I spoke on the phone with at the Arkansas Department of Corrections while trying to locate him told me that he would assuredly be on parole for the rest of his life. Mark is now essentially free in most of the ways that count in immediate, day-to-day life. As he said, he is as happy as he possibly can be, although he is five years on the labor force and very poor, scrabbling to supplement his income with gig-economy work when not packing boxes at a candy factory at an age when most people are readying for retirement—and he has to check in regularly with his parole officer, and can’t leave the state of Georgia. Not being allowed to leave Georgia is a hell of a lot better than not being allowed to leave prison, but if this book somehow ever exerts any pressure on the world outside its pages, I hope that it might flip the switch of some legal Rube Goldberg machine that will in the end result in his parole being lifted. Mark has already traveled across the universe in books and in his mind much farther than many people ever do, but I, at forty, have seen London and Rome and Athens and surfed in Hawaii and hiked to the craters of volcanoes in Costa Rica and stood on the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland—to name a few of my favorite places on Earth where my body has physically been—while Mark, at sixty-two, has seen Tyler, Texas, trailer parks in Baton Rouge and Springdale, Cave Mountain in the Ozarks, the insides of many jail and prison cells, the cemetery in Star City, the place where his father is buried in Arkansas, and now, Georgia.

  The slave trader John Newton did not merit grace, but was given it. I am not sure I believe in grace, but I believe that Mark Harris deserves to be given the chance to see the world outside Georgia, perhaps if only to partake in the marvel of being alive at a time when it is possible to see the clouds from above as well as from below, which he never has, as he has never been on an airplane. I know that suffering is not measurable or comparable, but I believe this man has suffered more than he has sinned. I believe he deserves a way out.

  14

  Christ of the Ozarks

  ONE OF THE EARLIEST KNOWN DEPICTIONS OF THE CRUCIFIXION—it may even be the earliest—is called the Alexamenos graffito. Scratched into the plaster wall of an interior room in a house near the Palatine Hill in Rome, believed to date from somewhere between the late first century and the late third, it shows a young man—the most fastidiously rendered element of the picture—venerating a crucified human figure with the head of a donkey, with the Greek sentence (with either an obscure local variant or a phonetic spelling error in the second word) “ALEXAMENOS CEBETE THEON” bashed out below the image in sloppy, violent strokes: “ALEXAMENOS WORSHIPS HIS GOD.”

  The graffito is probably mocking some guy named Alexamenos who was an early Christian living in Rome. The Romans associated donkeys with Jews and Christians—a lowly association Christians subverted and embraced and wove into the narrative, as Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem at the beginning of the end of the story in all four canonical gospels, fulfilling Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” The image of an ass-headed theriocephalos was a grotesque of buffoonery in antiquity and beyond; Nick Bottom for most of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the other most notable example (I once played that role in a production of Midsummer—it’s a fun part, requiring the actor to both don the donkey head mask and later dress in drag). The graffito probably implies something like, “We worship gods and goddesses worth worshipping, like Jupiter, Apollo, Venus—deities depicted as idealized human specimens radiating dignity, strength, and beauty—but get a load of that loser Alexamenos, worshipping some scrawny Jewish peasant, a criminal executed in the most painful and humiliating way.” This crude work of vandalism was almost certainly done at a time when crucifixion was a method of execution still regularly conferred upon the worst criminals (Constantine, the first Christian emperor, abolished it in the fourth century), and whoever drew it was someone for whom tortured human bodies nailed to crosses and left to die was a sight of everyday life. It was drawn from within a pagan culture that hadn’t yet undergone what Nietzsche would call the transvaluation of values, in which people still exalted strength, wealth, and beauty: outward and visible power. They still lived in a world of Good and Bad, and had not yet entered the more counterintuitive Judeo-Christian paradigm of Good and Evil.

  The ubiquity of the image of the crucified Jesus has numbed it into a neutral banality, but if one bores through that and really focuses one’s attention on it, it again becomes terrifying and bizarre. The Buddha, at rest, beams with wisdom and serenity, and Islam refuses to grant its faithful the childish gift of an image—Mohammed is an abstract void who cannot be depicted at all—but what religious figure other than Jesus is most often depicted as the object of the extremes of human sadism and cruelty? Other than the Christian saints—beheaded, stoned, flayed, pincushioned with arrows, etc.—I don’t know of any.

  The Alexamenos graffito sharply illustrates how recently and dramatically Christianity has reshaped the psychology of Western culture. It’s a change Machiavelli didn’t like: “Our religion, moreover, places the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects, whilst the other, on the contrary, places the supreme good in grandeur of soul, strength of body, and all such other qualities as render men formidable; and if our religion claims of us fortitude of the soul, it is more to enable us to suffer than to achieve great deeds.”

  I recently heard someone call the image of Jesus on the cross “the ultimate example of topping from the bottom”: That’s what Machiavelli thought of it, and in my proudest, “most anti-God mindset” days, I agreed. Sometimes I still do.

  Matthew 27:39-42:

  And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.

  With my aloof, skeptical heart, I’m afraid I probably would have been one of those bystanders, mocking, pointing out the demonstrably obvious absurdity, needing proof to believe. Those passersby on the very day Jesus was crucified, before he was even dead yet, the chief priests, the scribes and elders, who said, You who supposedly cured lepers with your touch, multiplied loaves and fishes, turned water to wine and raised the dead, if you’re really magic, if you’re really the son of God, save yourself, come down from that cross—then we’ll believe you: They were the first in a long line of doubters that would include the author of the Alexamenos graffito, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, George Carlin, and, in my nastier moods, me. (And with our blithe jeering and mocking we keep on refueling Christianity’s energy—it needs us: Why else would the Gospel of Matthew have included that anecdote?) And all of us, all down the line, arrogantly, blunderingly miss the fucking point.

  What is the point? That’s much harder to say. One can’t really say it. Or write it, or think it. One can only feel it.

  In 1978, the year members of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., murdered Bethany Alana Clark and buried her on Cave Mountain, my parents were living in Fayetteville. My father was an undergraduate studying physics at the University of Arkansas, and my mother, who had recently graduated from the same with a degree in history, was teaching high school in Siloam Springs, a small town about forty minutes away near the Oklahoma border. My parents had just met, and at the time, my mother was drifting away from a raucous circle of friends who knew one another from the university’s MFA program in creative writing.

  The novelist and short story writer William Harrison and the poet James Whitehead founded the program in 1965. Soon thereafter, they hired the poet Miller Williams, and those three guys formed its core faculty and led it for about thirty years. Now Miller Williams is probably better known as the father of the country/folk/rock star Lucinda Williams, who is around my parents’ age and briefly attended the University of Arkansas at the same time they did.

  “Lucinda used to be my daughter,” Miller said to me once. “Now I’m her father.” He said that in the longest conversation I ever had with him, when we had lunch together during a month in 2012 I spent in Fayetteville taking care of Jay and Joyce’s chickens while they were in Australia photographing a solar eclipse. After lunch, we went back to Miller’s house for a while, only a few blocks from Jay and Joyce’s, where I saw a framed painting on the wall of his living room—an amateurish but by no means bad watercolor portrait of a much younger Miller Williams. I think mostly because he was a bit embarrassed by it and wanted to explain why he had a portrait of himself on the wall of his own house, he said, “Johnny Cash painted that.” (Johnny Cash is the most immortal Arkansan, and the most Arkansan immortal.) The signature in the bottom corner was childishly readable. I had not known that Johnny Cash was an amateur watercolorist or that he sometimes painted portraits of his friends and gave them as birthday presents—which was what that picture was.

  “How did you become friends with Johnny Cash?” I asked. Miller had Alzheimer’s; he was lucid that day, but he knew his memory was vanishing. He shrugged and shook his head.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  Miller Williams died a few years later in 2015. Right before he died, Lucinda Williams set one of her father’s poems, “Compassion,” to music, and it’s on her 2014 album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone; the title is a quote from the poem. There’s another Lucinda Williams song, one of her best, “Pineola,” which begins “When Daddy told me what happened/I couldn’t believe what he just said.” It’s about the death of the poet Frank Stanford, who had been a student of her father’s and a regular visitor at his house in the 1970s. Stanford was living in Fayetteville when he committed suicide at the age of twenty-nine on June 3, 1978, a month after Newton County Sheriff Hurchal Fowler and Deputy Ray Watkins arrested Suzette Freeman, Lucy Clark, and Royal, Mark, and Winston Van Harris in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness. Frank’s wife, Ginny Crouch, and the poet C. D. Wright, with whom he had been having an affair, were in another room of the house when he did it, and those who knew them and the situation have told me that it might not have been the only factor in his suicide, but that love triangle blowing up into the open was what spurred it. He shot himself three times in the heart with a .22.

  In 2009, I was living in Iowa City with one of my best friends then and now, the poet Kevin Holden. That year, Kevin and a few other poet friends drove down to Fayetteville for a long weekend to attend a conference celebrating the work of Frank Stanford, which included an all-night marathon reading of Stanford’s magnum opus, the 15,283-line epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which he had spent many years working on and published in 1977. As we were talking about it after Kevin returned from that trip, I was somewhat surprised to learn that Stanford had achieved a kind of mythic cult-hero status among a certain milieu of poets, and Kevin was somewhat astounded to learn that my mother had known Frank Stanford.

  In the late 1960s and ’70s there was a cadre of writer friends in Fayetteville—people who were in the MFA program, taught in it, or had recently left or graduated from it—which included C. D. Wright and Ellen Gilchrist, and orbited around the gregarious, charismatic, brilliant, movie-star handsome and demoniac Frank Stanford. Everyone involved with that scene was very frequently very drunk. The most serious boyfriend my mother had before she met my father was the poet Leon Stokesbury, who was part of that circle, and that’s how my mother spent a lot of her time in Fayetteville in the 1970s hanging out with poets. It’s true my mother knew Frank Stanford, and by the time she broke up with Leon, she hated his guts.

  In early May 1969—a few years before my mother met these people—Allen Ginsberg, who a month before had given an interview in Playboy in which he frankly and openly discussed his homosexuality, along with his longtime partner Peter Orlovsky, visited Fayetteville for a few days. One of the things they wanted to see was Christ of the Ozarks, which had been erected a few years before in 1966. John Wood, another poet in this circle, an MFA student at the time, describes this thing pretty well in an article he wrote about Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s visit to Arkansas in the September 1, 2012, American Poetry Review:

  I do remember that the next day Allen, Peter, Jim, Frank, Jack and Lynnice Butler, and Sandy and I all went to Eureka Springs to see The Christ of the Ozarks, a tasteless monstrosity built by Gerald L. K. Smith, the anti-Semite. A brochure given out at the statue remarked how it could support two Volkswagen buses from each arm and withstand certain high mile an hour winds. . . . I remember that Allen made a comment to whomever we paid the entry fee that he had a beard just like Jesus had.

  From left to right: Sandra Wood, John Wood, Frank Stanford, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lynnice Butler, Jack Butler The American isolationist and anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith had had that massive concrete statue installed on top of that hill near Eureka Springs as the first step toward the religious theme park he intended to build. Smith, a supremely ugly character, is worth a few words. Originally from Wisconsin, he was ordained as a Disciples of Christ minister at the age of eighteen, moved to Louisiana, and rose to national prominence during the Great Depression as the national organizer of the populist firebrand Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth movement. Jews were Smith’s main bugbear from the beginning; even before he hooked up with Long, he had been influenced by The International Jew, published in four volumes starting in 1920 by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Publishing Company. After Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith failed to take control of his faction in Louisiana, soured on the political Left, and switched sides as he began to focus on anti-communism. For the next quarter century after that, he dwelt as a fascistic, anti-Semitic troll under the bridge of mainstream American politics, founding the America First Party in 1943 and running for president three times in 1944, 1948, and 1956 (receiving 1,781 votes the first time, then 48, then 8). Toward the end of his life, he bought a house in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and began to fantasize about a religious theme park that would include a life-size re-creation of ancient Jerusalem and a massive statue of Jesus on the peak of Magnetic Mountain. He raised a million dollars toward the cause and hired Emmet Sullivan, a sculptor who had worked under Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore, to design the monument and oversee its construction. The rest of the religious theme park was not completed in Smith’s lifetime, but he did live to see Christ of the Ozarks standing on that high hill just outside Eureka Springs.