CHAPTER XX.APPEARANCE, MANNERS, HABITS.
The Rev. Dr. Walker stands five feet seven inches in his stockings. He weighs 160 pounds. He has a peculiar stoop in his shoulders, not from age, but from a constitutional pliancy of his back-bone, aided by his early habit of incessant reading. In walking, he has a peculiar swaying or swinging gait. Seen from behind, he looks, as he walks with head depressed, bended back, and swaying gait, like an old man. But the expression of his face is singularly and engagingly youthful. A smile plays ever on his countenance. The pleasant, youngish looking face is in marked contrast with his head, which is prematurely gray. Sometimes in referring to his gray hairs, Dr. Walker says that they cannot be signs of hard work or trouble, because he was told by his mother that he had a number of gray hairs in his head in his infancy. His skin is very dark, but there are many very much darker men among the colored people. He never would be taken for a great man, judging from his appearance. Not a large man in stature, without a commanding appearance, he never would be looked at for the second time when one passes him on the street and never would be taken for one of the world’s most famous preachers in any large gathering with other distinguished men. It is when he begins to speak that the latent powers of the man are at once apparent to the close student of human nature and the practiced observer of men. When seated, he is like a sea at rest, calm and undisturbed; when on his feet, he is like the sea in action, or like some dictator suddenly sent from another world to correct the faults and foibles of this world.
In manner he is still, to some extent, a rustic. His world-wide travel, his acquaintance with some of the greatest and best of earth and his life in the metropolis of America, have not been able to make much impression upon him. He is an unassimilated man. Great, indeed, are the assimilating powers of the large cities. A youth will go to New York or Boston, awkward, ill-dressed, bashful, and capable of being surprised. After only a few years’ absence, he returns to his country home a changed being; his clothes, his accent, his affectations, and his manners are “City-made.” His friends do not recognize him at first sight. They do not quite understand his language when he speaks. All his ways are changed. He is another man. It is so with most, but not with all. Some men there are—very few, yet some—who resist effectually or, one might say, unconsciously, and to the last, the assimilating influence of the large cities. They are the oddities, the stared-at, the men of whom anecdotes are told. There is one thing, though, which can be said of them which cannot be said of the other class; there is no affection about them—they do not put on. Everywhere and all the time, Dr. Walker keeps to his Southern training and his Southern style. “I am not a society man,” he often says, “and you cannot expect me to be up on etiquette and decorum, and all those fool things.” When asked to do the honors at some wedding feast, or sit down and enjoy a sumptuous repast in courses, he has been heard to say, “I am not used to that kind of thing, and I cannot get above my raising.” But it must not be thought that because it is admitted that he is still a rustic in some things that he is at all boorish, unmannered or impolite. No man enjoys the society of people, the intercourse of men, the mutual exchange and interchange of ideas and opinions more than he does, and he would not be likely to mistake finger-bowl for drinking purposes. But his politeness is the politeness of tact and good common sense rather than the politeness of the books and of so-called high society.
In some respects he is exceedingly frank: in others, no man is more reserved. He likes company and likes to talk about the things which interest him most, and there are thousands of living mortals who will testify that they have never found any man in general conversation more interesting or more entertaining than he. In Georgia, where people are always very democratic in their ways, for hours and hours great crowds of men, old and young, have considered it a privilege and an honor to be permitted to stand in some barber shop or drug store or grocery store and listen to Dr. Walker talk. It is very difficult for him to go one square in his home town without being stopped by somebody who really has no other motive than just to hear him talk. When one succeeds in detaining him for a little while, that is usually the signal for others to join the number, and by this process it is not long before Dr. Walker has been intercepted and made to talk. Such a thing would disturb and annoy an ordinary man. But when he is asked if it does not tire him to be worried out by people who merely want to take up his time in talking, he says: “It pleases them, and it doesn’t hurt me.” He loves a joke—not likes, but loves—and tells a comic story with great glee. His cheerfulness is habitual, and probably he never knew two consecutive hours of melancholy in his life.
He possesses one of the most remarkable memories for names and faces that God has ever given to any man. At one time his membership in Augusta consisted of more than 1,200 persons, and he knew them all by name, and could call their names as soon as he saw them anywhere and at anytime. In Augusta, with a population of 15,000 colored people, more or less, he knows more than half of them by name. The same is true of the people in the country districts in and around Augusta where he has been. He knows the leading men and women in religious, political, and educational circles throughout the state and nation, and can call their names without a moment’s hesitation, tell where they are, and what they are doing; in many instances, he knows about their past, about their family connections, about any difficulties they may have had. Of course, this wonderful power of memory must of necessity stand him in good stead in his sermon preparation, in his delivery of sermons, and in his literary work; but it is little short of wonderful how one man could, in the first place, know so much about so many people, and, in the second place, how, if he did know, he could remember it all, even to the smallest detail.
Though humble, meek, modest almost to the point of shyness, there is nothing of obsequiousness about him. It is not his way to bow and scrape and cater to any man, while at the same time he has a becoming respect for the deeds of men and never fails to praise a fellow-mortal for the good that he does. But he hates hypocrisy, he hates cringing. He has never found it necessary to go out of the way to speak with any of the great men of the world with whom he has come in contact or who have attended his meetings in various places from time to time. Sometimes, when he has been told that Mr. So-and-So (a person of some influence) is in the audience, he has replied, “Give him my number, please: if he desires to call, I shall be glad to see him.”
He is not what may be called a bookish preacher—that is to say, his sermons do not smell of the lamb. His sermons are, nevertheless, always carefully prepared beforehand, but it is a preparation of prayer, Bible reading and meditation. He goes to the pulpit from his knees, and has often been heard to say, “I know what I am going to say before I come into the pulpit; I know the hymns I am going to sing, the chapter that I am going to read, and I know where the text is to be found.” His favorite source of information outside of the Bible is the daily newspaper. He always reads with an eye single to the use he can make of the news in his preaching or in his public addresses. In this way, he keeps abreast of the times, and frequently has well-matured opinions on important matters, and many times has spoken of them in public before some other ministers have heard of them. When he enters the pulpit, free from the narrowness that must come to the man who uses only his Bible commentary, he seems to feel himself under divine compulsion to deliver a message of transcendent importance to dying men; there is an air about him of a soldier who has a divine commission to fight a great battle for humanity. He speaks directly to the heart, in language all hearts can understand. Humor and pathos, pleading and scorn, impassioned exhortation and cutting sarcasm, all are used in his discourses with tremendous effect.
That he is a man of unpretentious habits and winning manners is evidenced by the great love manifested toward him by the children in the city of Augusta, where he lived so long. Even the children know him and call him by name, and it is an honor without dissimulation, and a tribute without sinister motives that the little children pay when they run in great crowds at sight of the affable preacher, crying as they run, “Howdy, Brer Walker?” “Howdy, Brer Walker?” Many times Dr. Walker will stop and talk with them, ask after their mothers and fathers, and also about their schooling; often he will tell them a little story, and then invite them to church and Sunday school the following Sunday.