Marshall
By Allen Kelley
January 8, 2023, 2:32 p.m.

It was when summer turned to autumn in 1964 that a pivotal event occurred in my life when an unlikely but likable person came into my life and enabled me to face the future with gratitude and hope that had been missing for some time.

First, a glimpse of my first 18 years leading up to 1964. Though my parents, my sister and my brother were born in Knoxville, they were all living on Long Island, New York when I was born in 1946. When I was 5 years old, my parents moved back to Knoxville with just me; by then, my sister was married and my brother was in his final year of high school and they remained in New York. My parents bought a home on eight acres of land in rural East Knox County in 1951 for $5,000 and I quickly learned to feed hogs, retrieve the eggs from 200 hens and unsuccessfully keep weeds from our large garden.

My parents had a troubled marriage and after several periods of separation, they divorced when I was ten. The year 1958 brought major changes into my life as both of my parents married someone new and I acquired a step-mother, a step-father, three step-sisters and two step-brothers. I had been living for six years in North Hills (near Cas Walker) but when my mother remarried, we moved into the home of my step-father and his son, in an area between the Halls and Powell communities on Dry Gap Pike.

Church involvement had been very consistent over the years for my mother and I but not for my newly acquired family members. At first my mother and I would drive alone into downtown Knoxville on Sunday mornings, but over time and with a longer drive than it used to take, our attendance lessened. At the same time, my mother's second marriage began to disintegrate as evidenced by their arguments and my step-father's increasing devotion to moonshine. It was soon after my mother and step-father had returned earlier than expected from a vacation drive to Florida in July of 1962 that they got into a terrible, lengthy argument on a Saturday night. The following morning, my mother and I went to church but when we returned home, things between them were no better and my mother decided to take me and drive off, leaving him with no transportation as my step-brother was out of town with our other car. As we rolled down the driveway, my step-father, his face covered in shaving cream walked outside and glared at us as we passed him and drove away. It would be my last view of him; he then took gasoline inside our home, locked the doors, went upstairs to my bedroom, poured the gasoline around the perimeter of the room and ended his life with a pistol shot to his head. It was obvious that the fire had been lit but the fuel burned up with minimal damage to the house!

My mother, who was now a widow sold the house and the two of us moved back to North Hills and into our previous home which my mother had been renting during the years we had been living with my step-father and his son. I liked being back in a house that certainly felt like home and in my “old” familiar neighborhood, but in school I found it a real challenge to reconnect with classmates I had not seen in nearly four years. Also, around this time, my father and his new family (which now included a half-brother), moved away from Knoxville to Long Island, New York. I was emotionally close to my dad so helping him to move so far away was another tough adjustment to make. While so much tumultuous change was taking place, my mother and I had become very active again with church – with both Sunday School and worship. I was actually attending both Sunday mornings and evenings and on Wednesday nights as well. It was that Fall, when our church was hosting a revival pastor from Texas, that I made a public commitment to “full-time Christian service,” though I had no idea at that time how that willingness to serve God would be manifested in the coming years.

One day and to my complete surprise, I received a call from the associate pastor of our church which went something like this: “Allen, we have a problem at church and I think you can help with it. There are children playing on the elevator when they should be in their Sunday School class and we are willing to pay you to be on the elevator on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings. Would you be willing to do that?” I agreed to the proposal and soon found myself greeting a multitude of people on Sunday. The elevator was in the almost new education building and serviced 3 levels. Before and after Sunday School or the evening classes, the elevator would be packed like sardines and but for most of the time, I was totally alone and feeling “stuck” – doing my job but greatly missing the classes I would otherwise be participating in!

During my teen years, I had quite a challenge dealing with acne. My caring mother, took me to several dermatologists. I took antibiotic injections for the condition, sat in front of special lamps that seemed as bright as the sun, and then went through numerous x-ray treatments of my facial skin after having my mouth and eyelids covered by lead before each “zap.” The benefit was minimal and my self-esteem suffered at times. In recent years I had several skin cancers surgically removed and told that those x-ray treatments in the 1960s were likely the cause. The dermatologists of today will say something like, “We didn't know then what we know now.” Thanks.

It was during the closing weeks of my senior year of high school when a girl in my senior class began to notice me in a very friendly way. Something was really different about Debbie (not her real name) and the looks and comments she was giving me. I welcomed every bit of it and it wasn't long before I was arriving at school earlier than ever in order to walk with Debbie part of the way from her home to our school. Over the next few months, our relationship grew exponentially. I called her. I took her out to eat and to movies. We talked, we laughed and we listened to Buddy Holly, Gene Pitney, and the Beach Boys on vinyl albums at my house. We were exceptionally close and affectionate and readily verbalized our love for each other. We also were anticipating the impact that the coming year might have on our relationship. While my plan was to live at home and attend the University of Tennessee, Debbie was to be a student at Carson Newman College in Jefferson City beginning that Fall.

In the summer of 1964, I entered the University of Tennessee college of engineering but soon I found myself floundering in some of my classes. I felt pulled between spending time with Debbie while trying to devote enough time to my studies just to pass. With the arrival of Fall, Debbie began college as planned at Carson Newman. Both of us soon felt the strain of separation and over the course of a couple of weeks, I sensed that this young woman I had given my heart to was losing her interest in me. Things came to an emotional and sad conclusion for me one night as I used up my last change in a phone booth and learned that someone else had taken my place in Debbie's life. It is hard to put into words the extent of rejection and disappointment I felt the night I got what to me was “the big dump.” In retrospect, she had every right to end our relationship; we were not engaged but I doubt that I would have ever ended our relationship myself. I obsessed over the loss and I believe that my grades during the first year of college reflected what I was going through emotionally.

I continued to faithfully carry out my job as the church's elevator “operator.” Being at church, arriving ahead of others and being one of the last to leave, I became aware of the janitorial staff for my church. There were three African Americans (Negroes back then) who cleaned and maintained the church; two men and a woman. I observed how they would move about quietly and almost unnoticed -- turning on lights, adjusting the thermostats, sweeping and dusting and then just disappear as people began to enter for worship. They would then reappear after a service ended.

During some evenings, I would enjoy shooting basketball in the huge area known as the “multipurpose room.” One Sunday night, as I was shooting baskets alone before it was time to begin another “shift” on the elevator, one of the janitors and I exchanged greetings. Our initial conversation led me to feel like I would enjoy speaking further with this black janitor named Marshall. When I asked where he might be when it was time for the Sunday night service to begin, he told me of a door I had never noticed before that would take you down a long flight of stairs to a huge basement directly beneath the sanctuary. I was awed by the size of both the room and the boiler that was a key part of the heating system that could make 1,200 people comfortable just above us. Marshall explained that during the worship services, the janitors could not make any noise so they would just stay quietly in the boiler room until church was over and it was time to close up the building for the night.

Prior to that evening, I thought of Negroes as those in “the back of the bus” and working the jobs that all the people I knew would never want. Marshall came over as someone with a sincere interest in whatever I had to say; in fact, he was a remarkable listener, the kind of person who instinctively knew when to respond to something I said. Before long, I began to share my deepest feelings of heartache over the recent breakup with Debbie. At some point, Marshall used the term, “It's a man's world” which I took to mean that there are other “fish in the sea” and that my world had not really come to an end. It would be the following year that singer James Brown would really make a hit out of Marshall's sentiments with a song with those words, but what came over me that night was a caring concern for me as a person that totally spanned the racial divide we shared! This nearly invisible black janitor was, in his own way, encouraging me and helping me to move forward and believe that I had a future. In that hour of sharing, that man seemed more genuine and sincere than anyone I had ever met! I became aware that night that while hymns were being sung and a sermon was being preached just above where we sat in a sooty, dimly-lit, quiet basement, I was exactly where I needed to be! Any guilt I felt for skipping the church service, was replaced by a sense that I had been on the receiving end of some very special care that ultimately originated with God.

I left the church that night without the sadness I had arrived with and drove home with a different outlook about not only my future but also about people of “color.” There were a few other occasions for brief conversation with Marshall but nothing to compare with the night I have described when I unpacked before him some very heavy emotional baggage. Some months later, I became aware that I had not seen Marshall for a few weeks. I asked the member of our church who supervised the janitors about him and learned that he had recently been in a terrible car accident, could no longer work and was “not right in the head anymore.” I do believe that I saw Marshall on a downtown sidewalk, seated in a wheelchair about a year later – his head showing the scars of trauma and his blank expression revealing that he was now living with brain damage so severe that he could no longer communicate with anyone.

I went on to receive Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees and served as pastor of five churches in five states over a period of forty years. Just prior to my retirement in 2012, an opportunity came to me on the “giving” end toward a black person. I was appointed by the Supreme Court of the State of North Carolina to become the legal guardian for a 38 year old African American who had spent his entire adult life in prison for murder. I appeared with him in court, visited him in jail and in prison, and secured a home for him to rent and furnish following his release for time served. He also became a guest in our home. It was truly a special blessing to both receive and later to give something valuable which involved a person so different from myself yet created in the image of God.

In 2016 I moved back to East Tennessee and in 2018 experienced another blessing when I journeyed to Kenya as part of a mission team from our church in Maryville. Some from our team were doing medical screening while my role was to alternate sessions with our lead pastor as about 100 local pastors walked or traveled by bikes and motorcycles to our location to worship and attend teaching sessions.

God works in our lives in interesting and sometimes highly unpredictable ways. The rest of that first year of college was difficult but that Sunday night in a church basement was a pivotal turning point in my life. The compassionate listening of a black janitor enabled me to move beyond self-pity and despair and also took away any racial prejudice that I had accumulated up to that time but didn't really know I possessed. That next year some great things took place. I took some aptitude tests and switched from engineering to liberal arts at UT in Knoxville and my grades steadily improved. I also met a dedicated Christian woman named Sue who would become my dear wife in 1968 and together we raised two sons and a daughter who collectively now have seven children.


This article is part of our "Life Matters" series. If you would like to submit an article for possible inclusion in this series, please email it to jpayne@knoxvilledailysun.com.

Previous articles:
• Meet Him at the Manger