safe at home
Reviewed by Paul Leslie, History Department, Nicholls State University Thibodaux, La.
AUGUST 27, 2007 archive
SAFE AT HOME is a confessional memoir written by Marc Jolley to provide insights into his life for his two sons following the death of his father.
Although it was intended for family eyes only, Joseph Price, the editor of the Mercer University Press Series on Sports and Religion, prevailed upon Jolley to share his work with the general public. What emerges is an interesting and sensitive presentation of the first forty years of his life that many readers from middle America will find familiar and enjoyable.
Born in Cleveland, Tennessee in 1939, Marc Jolley's first twenty or so years were undistinguished. He was safer at home with the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of his youth than he realized. His father commuted sixty miles roundtrip every day to Chattanooga for work, and his mother stayed home to raise three sons.
Baseball provided the bond between father and sons, especially their fan support of the New York Yankees. When old enough, all of the boys in the family played T-Ball, Little League and tried out for their local high school team.
In baseball, Marc found something more than a game. He discovered the lessons of life that he missed from the sermons of the local "intellectually challenged" Baptist preachers. While they preached apocalyptic visions of hell, fire, and damnation, Marc worried over the whereabouts of the Little League opening-day ceremonies.
Thumbing baseball cards in his bedroom provided the litany of prayers that he needed. On the field, he learned many of life's lessons: it taught him how to win and lose, it taught him to respect his "enemies," it taught him to set goals, it taught him to work hard and to hustle in life, and it taught him respect for others in spite of their color and the racism of the local clergy.
Jolley's memoir focuses on more than the author's attachment to baseball and to his nuclear family. He provides insights into the struggles precipitated by Baptist fundamentalists who mounted witch hunts at seminaries "with their torches and King James Bibles, complete with their naïve and exclusivist hermeneutics." They loomed over the Southern Baptist Convention like a demonic cloud. The more they attempted to secure seminary doors, Jolley writes, the more faculties left.
Through all of this, or for twelve years of his life, Marc Jolley struggled to reconcile his religious education with the troublesome presence of fundamentalism. Within two years after completing his dissertation, he found himself slowly slipping "into melancholia." The light at the end of the tunnel came after a visit to his secular church: Yankee Stadium.
He realized that his problem had been one of confusing "employment with calling." Rejecting a life behind the pulpit, he accepted a position with Mercer University Press, knowing that in the future he would have to field many bad bounces, but those would not be the problem they once were. Rather, God, family and baseball had taught him that it is how you handle the aftereffects of the bad bounces, especially "the next morning after you wake up."
Jolley's work is well written and, most importantly, it represents a sincere effort to capture his first forty or so years on earth. At the end, the author provides a short annotated bibliography of sorts and just possibly hits on the difference between his youth and today: "There is nothing better and more like home for a boy than playing catch with his father."
Despite the fact that his maternal grandfather served as a local circuit riding preacher for the Baptist church for fifty years, family members from now on will have no questions about Marc's abandonment of the pulpit. Here is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants a "How To" guide for writing his or her own personal history.
Just do it!
Jolley, Marc A. SAFE AT HOME: A MEMOIR OF GOD, BASEBALL, AND FAMILY. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2005. 139 pp. ISBN 0-86554-740-8.
Copyright © 2007 by Paul Leslie.