"There I was, holding my insides in my hands. That was the first time I heard the audible voice of God." "I made it to the eighth grade, but when I was just shy of turning thirteen years old, I got shot in the stomach with a twelve-gauge shotgun. "By the time I was eight, I'd seen two men killed in our house. They all knew what it was like to be poor. "In 1948, when I was six, we lived on nothing but parched corn for three weeks, like rats. I was like a lamb thrown into a den of lions when we moved to Clouds Cove," Charles said. "He died in the Tennessee penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence for killing his second wife. "My real daddy lived to be eighty," Charles said. "Amen," said J.L., who knew something about drunks himself.
Then my mother got remarried, and we moved to a houseboat at Clouds Cove." "Up until I was five years old," Charles said, "I lived in a tent on the banks of the Tennessee River at Old Whitesburg Bridge. It was a story, both lurid and familiar, that could only have come from the South. Brother Carl and Brother Charles hugged, and after a few introductory comments about the beauty of the afternoon and the love he felt from everybody gathered there, Brother Charles began to testify.
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