A(nother) Hillbilly Elegy

The redemption of Wildman Perry

In the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, I considered offering my thoughts to the cacophony of unschooled opinion. But of course there is nothing that I could add that would edify or offer unique insights into the event. I was once held up at gunpoint so considered discussing my reaction to looking down the barrel of a six shot pistol. It ended up being a very funny story in a Keystone Kops kind of way but it offered me enough insights that I can say with confidence that, based on my experience, Donald Trump’s upraised fist and injunction to fight demonstrated remarkable courage in the heat of uncertainty and continued threat. I know that I would have responded quite differently and I am left very impressed by his situational awareness.

When Mr. Trump subsequently invited J. D. Vance to be his Vice Presidential partner I knew I had my story. I would offer an elegy to my hillbilly friend, Sandy. Like Mr. Vance’s elegy, it will not be in iambic poetry.

Shortly after becoming interested in history, I stumbled across the worldview presentations of Chuck Colson of Watergate fame. When Colson completed his prison term in 1975 he vowed to do what he could for prison reform and started a new organization called Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM). By the mid 1990s, when his organization had grown across North and South America sufficiently that he could leave the management of PFM to others, Chuck began to concern himself with the issues leading to incarceration. He wondered how a person’s worldview affected the quality of their decision making and his daily Breakpoint articles became a staple of my broader investigation into the historical forces which created the culture in which we live.

I became a huge fan of Chuck Colson and, in 2007 I read about a one year internship program sponsored by his organization that was designed to dig deeper into how worldview affects cultural development. With my wife’s permission I signed up for the internship. As luck would have it, my eldest daughter had also read about the program and we signed up together.

The program included 3 weekend residencies at a conference center near Washington, DC. For the first residency weekend my daughter and I determined that I would fly in from Peru and she from Toronto, meet in Dulles Airport and then take the train together to the conference center. As I walked down the long corridor to the train station I could see my daughter. And I could see the burly guy with her. I was immediately on full alert thinking this guy was hassling her. As I got closer, I could see the shaved head, the heavily tattooed arms and the deeply lined face. Full alert became DEFCON 4. I was getting ready for what I assumed was coming next. He was taller and heavier than I and clearly was more experienced with fighting but I felt I could be a match for the first 5 or 10 minutes.

“Hi Dad, this is Sandy.”

This is how I met Sandy and this is his elegy.

To say that Sandy had a tough life is to make a mockery of the meaning of “tough”. When he was born, his father refused to retrieve he and his mother from the hospital. Sandy recounted to me that his father never said anything kind to him or used his name in any sentence that was not filled with foul epithets. He saw more of the back of his father’s hand than a smile on his face. Life can be tough when your father actively works to hurt you.

Fortunately, Sandy’s mother compensated to the extent she could and protected Sandy from the worst of his father’s tyrannical outbursts - often at the cost of her own split lip. Sandy did have siblings but, strangely, they were not subject to the same level of abuse. Who knows why - certainly Sandy was never able to discern his great sin.

Despite his mother’s best efforts, Sandy and his brother descended into lives of crime and chaotic violence. Sandy once showed me the scars of the several bullets that had passed through his body and the knife cuts that opened wounds that left significant scar tissue. With the tattoos, I was left with the strong impression that I was seeing Ray Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man” and, more than once I watched for his tattoos to start moving and tell their story. As one who was raised by loving parents in rural Canada, hearing Sandy’s stories was apocalyptic and profoundly moving.

Sandy told me that the only things he ever received from his father were the names and addresses of the families in the Appalachian mountains of western South Carolina who were growing marijuana and needed a sales outlet to the coastal cities. Like his father and grandfather before him, Sandy was that outlet. His predecessors sold the products of Appalachian stills and Sandy sold the products of the soil. His father’s imprimatur was required to expand and extend his business as the producing families were shy to the point of firing on anyone they didn’t know who showed up uninvited in their yards. I asked Sandy what would happen if I drove out to the mountains and tried to buy marijuana from them.

“They would shoot you on sight, Bish.”

“Would they shoot me or shoot at me?”

“They would shoot you and they never miss. You would be dead.”

Another dream died hard. I had never met someone who could state so unequivocally that he hung out with people that shot to kill in a non-military context. As an aside, I don’t remember the circumstances that led Sandy to call me Bish, but I don’t think he ever called me by my name.

Sandy, then, was the marketer (his description) in a highly lucrative business. His brother was the leader of the South Carolina chapter of the Hell’s Angels and this gave him an automatic sales outlet. When I asked why he didn’t join the motorcycle gang he shrugged his shoulders and said,

“Bad for business. I wouldn’t be able to sell to any of the other gangs.”

Nothing personal - just business. This was the early, anger-filled period of Sandy’s life. He told me that it was nothing to have $50,000 in his pocket and be as high as a kite on heroin or cocaine. He carried two pistols and knives in each boot. His anger always resulted in a fight and more than once he was left for dead.

It was the anger that led to incarceration and he was a guest of the state for the four years between 1984 and 1988. When I asked him what prison was like he showed me a picture of his cell at the maximum security prison where his term was served. He had the picture because the closure of the prison was the subject of a local news report and it was his cell that was pictured. The prison had been built during the Civil War to house Union soldiers and then converted to civilian use following the war. As a result the door was only four feet high, the cell walls were cut stone which dripped water continually and the entire edifice was overrun with insects and rodents. I suspect that part of the illness that took Sandy’s life at too young an age resulted from those four dank years.

When he left prison, Sandy had to recover his business which had been poached during his absence. The new entrepreneurs were not willing to cut Sandy back in and the violence in his life ramped up significantly. The nadir of his life came when, in a cocaine induced stupor, Sandy got into a fight and was left for dead in a water-filled ditch with two bullets in his body. He regained consciousness with the water lapping his nostrils, and with enough energy to crawl to a nearby tree, he promised God that, should his life be preserved, he would change his ways. He then passed out for an uncertain period of time.

What was not uncertain was the change in his heart when he regained consciousness. He told me that the fiery hate and anger that had filled his life from birth was gone and he was able to smile and laugh from joy rather than revenge for the first time in his life. He credited his mother’s unrelenting prayers for his survival and the dramatic change in his life. I only knew the changed Sandy and a more gentle soul I have never met or known.

Following our meeting at the train station, Sandy and I became fast friends and I never tired of his stories and his ready laughter. We once had a contest among those who attended the Colson residency to see who had the funniest story that involved a personal screw-up. Sandy’s story easily won against some stiff competition.

Aside from his wife, Sandy’s first love was all things Harley Davidson. As preparation for a trip to a “tribal” meeting of “kettle heads”, (who knew bikers were known as “kettle heads”) Sandy challenged someone to a wheely race down main street. As he pulled back on the handlebars to bring his front wheel off the ground, Sandy was left with the handlebars safe in his grip but not attached to the bike. In a flash he remembered that thing he had forgotten to do. His bike wavered and then crashed to the ground wiping out half a city block of expensive, Hell’s Angels-owned bikes. When he skidded to a stop, he looked up into the eyes of a local policeman and happily held out his wrists for the obligatory handcuffs. His laughter in telling this story rings in my mind to this day and I remember having sore ribs at the time of the telling.

“Bish, I was never so happy to see a cop as I was that day.” Classic Sandy.

While my youngest daughter completed her graduate program at NC State in Raleigh, NC, I was able to visit Sandy at his home south of Charlotte, NC. On one occasion he took me to the prison at which he was a volunteer chaplain and asked that I make a presentation about a book I had recently written about the US Civil War. My book concentrated on what I consider to be the spiritual implications of that war and Sandy thought his students might enjoy my “insights”. It was my first of many trips into “houses of penal incarceration”.

There is a reason that prisons are called “slammers”. There is nothing quite like the sound of an iron bar door slamming into a magnetically controlled locking mechanism. I asked Sandy how it felt when he entered prison for the first time as a “guest” and he shrugged,

“It is not something you want to experience, Bish.” Indeed.

After passing through three sets of “slammers” we were met by a Black guy with the most startling blue eyes I have ever seen. He was obviously a good friend of Sandy’s and kept calling him “Wildman”.

“Uh Sandy… what is with the Wildman?”

“Tommy and I were friends when I was in prison, Bish, and you have to remember that I was consumed with rage at that point in my life. If someone looked at me sideways I would fight him.”

It turns out that everyone in prison has a shiv or knife of their own design made creatively from whatever materials are at hand. Sandy demonstrated how he could produce his knife from his sleeve with a simple flick of his forearm. No one, according to Tommy, messed with Wildman Perry. Interestingly, Sandy also told me that the other way to avoid fighting was to carry a Bible. A Bible was viewed as a sacred talisman and no one wanted to get crossed up with its Author.

When I asked about Tommy, who had been incarcerated since at least 1984, Sandy told me he was serving a life sentence for having killed someone when he was 17. I am not soft on crime but there is a big difference between demanding life in prison for a stranger and then meeting that stranger when they are just over half way through their sentence. Given that Tommy had missed the last 40 years of technological development, I asked Sandy how he would do if he got an early release. Remember the old guy (Brooks) on Shawshank Redemption who was released and then hung himself? That was Sandy’s response. Tommy, he said, would never adapt.

About 50 inmates, with a roughly equal racial makeup, turned up for my presentation and all listened carefully to what I had to say. The ensuing discussion turned into one of the most erudite conversations I have ever had about the Civil War. Most of the guys accepted my hypothesis about the spiritual nature of the war but several thought that I was wrong. In their view, the war and the president who started it (Lincoln) was a travesty and impediment to human development. I was impressed by their detailed knowledge of the political implications of the war, the motivation and effectiveness of the abolition movement, the Emancipation Declaration and the results of the 13th and 14th Amendments. It was a remarkable and revealing conversation. In fact, their arguments caused me to revisit mine. Sandy sat off to one side and smiled because these were “his guys” and they were performing very well after all the hours of teaching and mentoring he had invested in them.

Following his faith conversion, Sandy cleaned up his life, reconnected with his daughter, married into a stable Christian family and raised a son and daughter with his wife. He became a long haul trucker and a slightly over-the-top fan of “Ice Road Truckers”. When he learned that my father-in-law had pioneered ice road trucking and that I had connections with one of the stars of the show, he pushed me to find a way for him to get a job running trucks out to the mining camps in Canada’s north. I laughed at the thought of Sandy and his southern drawl hauling material across ice roads in -40 degree temperatures.

“Sandy, you would die the first time you stepped outside the cab of your truck!”

“Bish, I can do it and it would allow me to die happy.”

He was serious but we couldn’t make the connections work to get him up to Yellowknife.

Instead we worked on a business plan to start a prison ministry called “Rescue the Captives”. We applied for government funding and the business plan was submitted to a number of foundations who supported prison ministries. Timing is everything. The government funding, tentatively approved was rescinded when Barack Obama became president. He took “compassionate conservativism” in a new direction which was too bad because Sandy had a million ideas and was very keen to build a community to support recently released inmates while they got back on their feet.

Sandy continued to work part time in prison ministry and eventually became ordained into the Lutheran church. I was fortunate to be able to watch him play drums at a worship band practice and it occurred to me that there were other reasons for calling him “Wildman”. Let us just say that his drumming was “energetic”.

When his wife died suddenly, he took a job working in prison ministry full time and supervised the housing and training of perhaps a dozen newly released inmates. I don’t suppose they understood how fortunate they were to have a mentor of the experience and stature of Wildman Perry.

Prior to covid, the vicissitudes of Sandy’s early life finally caught up with him and attempts to obtain a liver transplant were unsuccessful. At much too young an age Sandy died in the comfort of his children and new wife. There is no doubt in my mind that Sandy heard, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” as he crossed the bar.

Hillbilly or not, Sandy Perry lived a remarkable life. Perhaps he is known in Heaven by his prison number or as Wildman or as Sandy. It doesn’t matter. To me he represents the tremendous power of redemption and will be remembered as one of the most remarkable men I have known.