What Will We Do with What We Know?

Published in 1977, Will D. Campbell’s memoir Brother to a Dragonfly is as relevant now as it was then. Campbell tells the story of himself, his older brother Joe, and their family working on a small cotton farm in Amite County, Mississippi, after WWI, during the Great Depression, and into the 20th Century. The memoir is about more than the bond between two brothers, or the poor, rural southwest Mississippi county in which they struggled during both world wars, or rampant diseases like hookworm, or deaths too soon, or community, or family.

On a rainy day when he was five years old, Campbell and his brother Joe played in their corn crib with two cousins.  Joe, the oldest and the leader of the band, sat high in the rafters, fashioning a long cable, a wooden pulley, and a rope into a contraption he would use to glide like a bird to the ground. All the while, his brother and cousins admired him. Campbell writes that the family corn crib, which their father had built, was “headquarters for so much learning.”

A corn crib as headquarters for gain, improvement, and learning! Not a book or video or cell phone or computer like the one on which I type, but a barn-like building, the center of “much learning”  for an attentive child. What could a child learn from a farm building?

Campbell beautifully answers that question in Brother. He takes the reader from the corn crib classroom to other “headquarters for much learning” he encountered in his rich life. He continued to learn, finding headquarters for learning in the U.S. Army during WW II, at Ole Miss, at Wake Forest University, and at Yale University, where he became an ordained Baptist minister. Yet brother Joe always taught him most. Even during wartime, when they were separated, Joe remained his leader.  Joe insisted that he read Howard  Fast’s  Freedom Road. Campbell credits the novel as the catalyst for the change Joe promised. The novel of Reconstruction pushed him past the margins of what his Mississippi racial mores had taught him.

Brother is relevant today because it tells of some of Campbell’s trials, and how he faced them to try and influence change.  He watched helplessly as Joe slid into pill addiction. He worked with people like John Lewis to register Mississippi voters; fought Jim Crow; became active in the NAACP; preached to protect and help the South’s poor. Marches. Civil disobedience. Arrests. Threats. Fired. His time, like ours, had challenges which Reverend Leonard L. Hamlin, Sr. recently spoke of in his discussion on Luke 10:13-16. Hamlin mentioned some of the crises we face today and asked a question that is really a challenge: “What will we do with what we know?”

Campbell shows us how to face our issues. He learned from the corn crib.  He answered Hamlin’s challenge before it was asked.

Roger Barbee
Woodstock 22664

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