Jesse Helms: A Complicated Man

photo credit: abbyladybug

Al Adams, former legislator and law partner of Terry Sanford told me a story the day before Jesse Helms’ funeral of the time Sanford found himself seated on an airplane next to, as synchronicity would have it, Jesse Helms, as diametrically different from the ex-Governor as two southern boys could be. The morning after Helms and Sanford shared the cordial flight, a mock-up front page was delivered to Sanford: Terrible Tragedy, Governor Sanford in Plane Crash, the headline screamed, below, the subhead, News Not So Bad. Jesse Helms on Plane Also.

My, my, my. A complicated man.

Jesse Helms started his career as a figure of fun at our house, a sort of cardboard cutout representing a way of thinking that seemed to be mercifully fading, finally, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War. At his home on Channel Five, the sign-off song was not the Star Spangled Banner but a tune he later whistled to another Senator, Carol Moseley Braun, following a brag to make “cry,” Dixie hilariously and ironically penned by a Daniel Emmett, an Ohio songwriter in the antebellum New York minstrel scene, who, the story goes, adapted it from a traditional slave tune.

Ol’ Jess claimed to never have used the enn word, but he sure trafficked in other euphemisms, sandwiched in between his stock lines, delivered, jowls quivering, such as “those who would destroy the free enterprise system,” chortling, “Martin Luther Coon,” or “Martin Lucifer King,” the latter a subtle reference, an excellent snap-shot, into the man’s complex nature. Jesse Helms was a life-long Baptist—and a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason. 

Now, I don’t care which sort of monkeys-flying-out-of-your-butt malarkey one hangs their hat on and given the demand to make a choice, I’d probably go with the Brotherhood, based as Freemasonry is on knowledge rather than the nasty “faith” based hoo haa of Christianity.

The problem with adherents of both is while the Masons have no beef with Baptists, the converse is not the case; the Baptists have decreed that Freemasonry is incompatible with Christianity, perhaps partly because of the sentiments of a leading luminary of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Brigadier General Albert Pike, the only Confederate General with a statue in DC, who thought enough of the fallen angel to invoke him in his monumental 631 page Morals and Dogma: “Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! It is he who bears the Light.” (Helms aside, it might also be worth mentioning that counterpoised to the knee jerk claim of the religiosity of the founding fathers, Freemasonry had much greater influence on the young US and its new capital, named for a dedicated Mason who refused communion, George Washington, 33rd degree).

“Lucifer’s not a bad guy, he’s just misunderstood,” my friend Ashley croaked from his three-hundred year old death bed. Maybe yes, maybe no, but he certainly isn’t the sort of figure a good Baptist should probably be cavorting with. I don’t give a tiddly-boo one way or another. But on the hatred that Helms displayed toward Americans who differed from him, in the larger scope of his status as a “Christian,” he gets no pass. Just as the concept of “race” is biologically absurd, a divisive, antiquated theory used to separate the have-nots from one another, the Bible and “God” make no mention of the creation of “races.” All the peoples of the earth are presumably descendants of Adam and Eve and worthy of the love one should give all of God’s children. God never makes mistakes. All peoples, extending from the various ethnicities to the Gay community, are creations of the God figure, deserving and worthy of redemption expressed by Jesus and their Bible. When Jesse held others up as figures of disdain, he flew in the face of that which he held central to his belief system, as does anyone who claims to be a Christian yet harbors hatred in their heart for others.

Jesse lay in repose at Hayes Barton Baptist Church. I dropped in to say goodbye. As I walked toward and up into the imposing edifice, past the herd of dark suits, muttering up-link trucks and cops, cops, cops, I had time to think about a message to dead Jesse. After a kind greeting by the Funeral director, who asked how my head was these days, I walked the central apse and found myself before the flag-draped coffin flanked by stone-faced North Carolina Highway Patrol troopers. 

Standing at the alter of that magnificent church, gazing at that box containing the corpus of this man who had so much pain to others in thought, word and deed, wrapped in that banner signifying the higher aspirations of so many, the dream of equality, democracy and a better life, every snarky, black thought I possessed about him fled. Jesse Helms died as shall we all, united with others he disdained via the great leveler, the commonality of the other side. I could only muster something akin to pity, that someone could harbor such dark beliefs, hatred in his heart for so many years—that and a sense of relief, that his struggle was over, that Jesse Helms was finally at peace.