In the kitchen with Mama one morning before school eating breakfast when we hear the front door open and Spencer walks through the door. “I could smell that bacon when I pulled into the drive, Mama. How about a slice on one of those biscuits?” “Where are you coming from? Betty didn’t have breakfast for you or have you even been home?” “I been down to Glenville, had to see a man. Haven’t had time to get by the house.” “Glenville to see a man,” Mama said, raising an eyebrow, just slightly. “I’ll pour you a cup of coffee.” Looks at me, “Got a pair of socks I can borrow?”
Spencer was a testament to the redemption that comes to the wayward son who after miles driving fast on late night Georgia roads beats the sun home by morning. Most of us play simple roles, fit to carry a scene or two. Spencer was a song.
Six days out of seven
Worked hard at doing right
But believe me, you could set your watch
By me on Friday night…..
Heading out of Statesboro one night south to Claxton on 301 when a state trooper shows up in his rear-view mirror. Most would stop. Spence decided to make a race out of it. Driving fast all the way to Caxton, sharp left on 280 at the light and Pembroke is 17 miles straight ahead, tires leave the pavement at the Canoochee River Bridge, top that hill in Groveland and and run straight for home, the trooper’s lights slipping farther and farther behind, then cut the lights and slip slowly up the lane behind the house, park out of sight in the back yard, run into the house just in time to step out on the front porch eating a cold biscuit when the trooper pulls into the yard. “I’ll get you next time,” he says, “be looking for you.”
He was one of those guys that every woman loved, men just shake their head at and smile. His mama didn’t want him after he was born. She tried for a month or two. His daddy, Winton Moore, who soon enough disappeared, didn’t even claim him. So Dot brought him back to Pembroke for Mama to raise. Not that Dot didn’t love him, loved him like you might love somebody else’s puppy, bring a toy, some candy, sit him in her lap, tousle his hair, laughing and singing in the front porch swing. Then she would up and leave again, pulling out in a red Ford. You could hear her for half a block, “Love you baby boy,” waving as she drove out of sight.
Dot would come around, leave a little money to help out, sweeping in with a big smile, flash and color, and enough disruption to keep Spence just slightly off balance. During the war years she and Winton ran a juke joint on the Ogeechee River off Highway 17 that offered booze, music, a little gambling, perhaps more. After the law shut them down, Winton wandered off, eventually for good. Dot lived in Savannah, running the Southern Kitchen Café, a small grill on Bull Street, doing well enough. She did benefit from patronage, a businessman who kept her in nice clothes, nice Ford cars, and an apartment. In a gesture that suggests more than mere physical affinity, he continued to send flowers on her birthdays long after she had remarried and moved away, sent them until she died, and then sent a big wreath of white roses for her funeral. I wondered when I saw them, largest of all the florals, how did he even know?
Spencer often said that while the Lord gave him grace the devil gave him style. This was only half true. He got the style from his mother. I don’t know where she got it. Not her father, a quiet man of no distinguishing behaviors aside from regular habits, whose pleasure was riding his bicycle out in the country, his dog Bobo in a basket hung on the handle bars. Her mother, Spencer’s grandmother, Mama, had not so much of style but heart and the knowing smile of someone familiar with faults and frailty who never got so far as needing to forgive anyone, she just loved them. And when Dot would again drive away Mama would open the screen door, “Have dinner in a few minutes Spencer, then you can walk over to Lint’s.” And thus passed most of his youth. Mama was home, hot breakfast, dinner. Mama was home. Spence looked after his Uncle Lint until the old man died, set a fire in the stove for him every morning, sleeping in the next room, close if Linton needed help during the night.
In high school Spence was one of Robert Bowers’ boys, playing basketball alongside Gene Sanders, a friend for life. Mr. Bowers was coach and chemistry teacher who would have known that Spence didn’t have a father around and who, with a sturdy blend of perception, an awareness of the ways of teenage boys, and just enough discipline herded Spencer through four years of high school. He started seeing Betty Josey. They would have made a handsome couple, he with a curl of hair over his forehead and the smile of a young man getting away with something, and Betty, strawberry blond, big smile, and dangerous blue eyes. Took her to a dance at the DeSoto Hotel in Savannah, Betty in a full swing skirt worn over petticoats, Spencer in white bucks, a white sport coat, bright red boutonniere. Dot would have paid for that. He married Betty Josey in 1954. He was twenty. She was eighteen and right out of school. He got and kept a job with the highway department, the ticket to a steady income and benefits for lots of young men in small towns such as Pembroke.
Their marriage followed a familiar pattern, beginning in the blush and bloom of forever true love until the drinking became a problem, drinking and nights someplace other than home. “Been down to Glenville….had to see a man.” I don’t know how long, how many years he drank but I do know that he finally quit, quit it all, and quit it big.
Sometime in his thirties Spencer got saved, joined AA, began a life’s mission of helping others find a way out their varied addictions, and eventually started preaching. He was ordained in 1970 and pastored his first church in Stilson for twenty years, followed by Starlight Baptist, and Beards Creek Primitive Baptist in Tattnall County, a congregation established in 1804. Will and I dropped in on one of Spencer’s sermons when he was pastor of the Christian Church of Pembroke. We didn’t tell him we were coming, just took a seat near the front and waited for him to enter the sanctuary and step up the pulpit. He just got started in his Sunday morning greetings to the congregation when he saw us looking up at him. It just stopped him, broke out in tears and said, “Well look who’s here.” I’d driven seven hours the previous day for that moment. He asks us to stand and introduced us to the congregation, some of whom I knew from high school. He was so pleased. We had lunch afterward at a café on main street and Will and I headed back to Chapel Hill.
Spencer preached a good sermon. Where he was light on a biblical scholar’s analysis of scripture, he was strong on the wages of unrepentant sin but then, before casting all who sat before him into despair he lifted his eyes, raised his hands to the rafters, and spoke with the comforting voice of a shepherd calling his flock. With the familiar expressive intonations and gift for melody I had heard in his voice all of my life, he brought them home, “Lead us not into temptation, may your souls find their salvation, in God’s great eternal love. Amen.”
I last saw him preach at Gum Log Primitive Baptist, a country church not close to anything unless you consider Kite something, in eastern Johnson County nearly eighty miles from Pembroke. Martha and I were on a drive through Middle Georgia and stopped by for the Sunday morning service. Spencer was starting to show a little frailty and depended on a friend from Pembroke to drive him each Sunday morning. By this time Betty was bed ridden, unable to attend his services. She died in 2015 after sixty-one years of marriage.
Martha and I made several visits to Spencer in an assisted living facility in Richmond Hill. On our last visits his memory was gone and he no longer knew who we were. He is buried out at Northside Cemetery in Pembroke, close to the graves of his mother and grandmother, alongside Betty and the son who died before him, an addict that Spencer wasn’t able to save. I did not attend his funeral, a lasting regret as we had an agreement that he would speak over my grave or me over his. Depending. Spunk Moore they called him in high school, one of Robert Bowers’ boys. You’ve driven miles, son, driving fast on late night Georgia roads, but, the song goes, “don’t you worry, close your eyes, you’re going home.”
Georgia Stories and Songs 
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