In a world full of sinners, hypocrites, whoremongers, and thieves, William Carlton (W.C.) Rice saw himself as a modern-day Noah: ordained by God to prophesy destruction, to call the unsaved and endangered to salvation, and to build with his own hands a vessel for his and for others’ deliverance. He was the spiritual inheritor of the Old Testament hero, his warnings not of the flood but of the fire next time, his Ark not a boat but a Garden.
“Remember,” Rice would say, “Noah built the Ark and God borned the spirit in Noah’s flesh like he has in mine.”
In the Biblical account of the flood, God speaks the dimensions of His Ark to Noah, naming in detail the materials and layout of the construction, its width, breadth, and height. And in similar fashion so did God speak to W.C. Rice—every day, for close to three decades—the blueprints of His Garden. “The best way I can describe it to you,” Rice once explained, “it’s like a puzzle. You got to put every piece together, to make it come out right. So that’s what God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost did with me. See, they built it. I built it, but they built it through me. Just like a puzzle. And we’re still building it. I will be as long as I live.”
* *
The Miracle Cross Garden still sneaks up on you as you curve around the bend of Autauga County Road 86 near Prattville, Alabama. A few wooden crosses pointing in all directions, growing from the ground or nailed to trees and posts, evolve around the corner into hundreds. Words painted in red and black across weather-beaten boards warn the driver that “YOU WILL DIE”; to “REPENT”; that “HELL IS HOT.” A graveyard of broken appliances covered in more painted words preaches the sins of sex, the fires of hell, and the possibility of salvation from both through Jesus; other planks of wood and appliance carcasses boast cryptic strings of numbers. Looming over the nearly three acres of roadside evangelism are three enormous crosses, standing in remembrance of the crucifixion scene at Calvary. On the other side of the street, surrounded by still more crosses and crowned with an air conditioner fan, a hollowed mound of wood and dirt reconstructs Jesus’ empty tomb. A rusted blue car, overgrown with vines and perched on the edge of one of the landscape’s natural bluffs, proclaims in huge letters: “THE DEVIL WILL PUT YOUR SOUL IN HELL, BURN IT FOREVER.”
Many visitors have come to Prattville from across the U.S. and beyond, having seen the Cross Garden in a book or magazine or on the internet. Some visitors have told Rice that they first stumbled as unsuspecting drivers onto the Cross Garden, were moved by the scene, and accepted Jesus as a result. But to many, the Cross Garden is an eerie, even frightening, stretch of land, offering a grotesque vision of Christianity: crooked crosses sprouting chipped and splintered from dry red dirt; crosses wrapped in barbed wire or covered with the repeated word “HELL” in sprawling black paint; jagged pieces of metal rusted to an orange-brown, the words “REPENT YOU WILL DIE” printed over a faded “READ YOUR BIBLE”; the appliances and automobiles which form so much of the Garden broken and wrecked, Rice’s creation springing out of rust and decay. It is without doubt a strange landscape, complete with its own language the outsider must struggle to understand—a language made largely of numbers, of truncated sentences and loose associations, overflowing with commas and repetitions, full of contradictions. In the Cross Garden, threats of damnation are juxtaposed against images of salvation: a cluster of thin, white crosses angle upwards out of the dirt, the single word “HELL” painted across each. Sin and Salvation, Jesus and Satan, Heaven and Hell, the Flesh and the Spirit come together in a kind of perpetual battle; the violence of their coexistence is wrought into the broken and beaten landscape of the Garden. Mixed among the description of Hell’s fiery fury are calls to redemption and glory, signs which insist and beg, perhaps even soothe, signs which offer the only way out of the Cross Garden’s nightmare: “JESUS WILL HELP YOU”; “JESUS SAVES”; “JESUS DON’T LIE.” “WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH JESUS?”
In the midst of all this sits the home of W.C. and Marzell Rice. A van is parked in the driveway, the image of Jesus carrying His cross painted against its side; there’s also a pickup in the garage around back, a five- or six-foot cross extended upward out of its bed. “DON’T BRING THE DEVIL IN THIS HOUSE,” signs at the front and back doors implore the visitor: “LEAVE THE DEVIL OUTSIDE.”
In the last years of his life, W.C. Rice found himself increasingly confined, by diabetes, to a wheelchair. Up until his death he continued to add to the Garden, just not as much as he liked. When he could not do the work himself he would give the instructions to his wife Marzell, instructions given first to him by God. Rice died on January 18 of 2004, his body giving out finally to pneumonia. He was 73 years old, and surrounded by family.
In reporting his death, local papers anticipated public questions about the fate of the garden. “Garden remains tourist attraction,” a paper from nearby Montgomery proclaimed; “Widow vows to maintain husband’s cross garden,” another headline assured (and, so far, she has). As always—Rice and his crosses had long appeared in area papers as recurring local-color items—headlines were more concerned with the Garden itself, an item of curiosity and local weirdness, than with its message. In his later years, Rice had become celebrated as a “folk artist,” his front yard likened to other home-made revelatory spaces like Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. But unlike Finster, who created from it a cottage industry, Rice rejected the “folk-art” label. “I don’t know anything about art,” he insisted.
He was up to something else entirely.
* *
W.C. Rice was born on February 20, 1930. He was saved on April 24, 1960—”in a house trailer, down in Fort Rucker. Sunday morning, about two o’clock.” That night, God healed Rice of an ulcerated stomach that had troubled him for some fifteen years. “Next thing I know, I come up out of the chair, and I spit tobacco all over that refrigerator, and I started preaching.” Rice never had another taste of tobacco, and was never bothered by ulcers again. “God borned the spirit in my flesh-body when He saved me that Sunday morning,” he explains. Ever since, Rice has been listening to God, talking to God, and preaching God’s word—from the makeshift pulpits of his pick-up truck and living-room recliner, in his occasional writings for local newspapers, and, above all, through his Garden.
Rice’s first congregation, early that April Sunday morning, was his wife Marzell; with her husband’s help she, too, “came to the Lord” later that morning, around nine o’clock. Eventually Rice also helped bring his mother and father, both of them death-bed repentants, into the fold. “I won their souls to Jesus,” he told me a few years before his own death, and added an important distinction: “I didn’t save them. Can’t nobody save a person. You can pray for them and the Lord does that. He’s the one that does the saving.”
To commemorate his parents’ salvation, Rice tacked three small cards above his kitchen door, each professionally printed in black and white and picturing a cross alongside printed text. The first card also bore a strip of black cloth, “in remembrance of God’s son,” and included a quotation from Scripture. The other cards included the dates of his parents’ births and deaths and read, “I thank the Lord for saving my MAMA and DADDY.” Then the Lord spoke to Rice, and told him to move his crosses outside.
“You see, from the three cards how big it is now.” We were sitting in his living room, Rice talking and talking; I visited Rice several times before his death and he would talk each time for as long as I would listen. Confined by diabetes and other health problems to a fat recliner, Rice gestured to the world beyond the living-room walls. “And it ain’t come to an end yet.”
The three little cards grew into Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden, a landscape of revelation that has attracted visitors from all over the world. With the advent of the internet word traveled far and visitors would come from Germany or Japan to the United States, just to visit Prattville and Rice and the Garden. Some visitors kept a distance from the man inside (when I was a teenager in Montgomery most people I knew were afraid of the Garden’s unseen creator); others knocked on Rice’s door to meet the man behind the crosses, to sign his guest book, even to give him more crosses or to listen to him preach. For all the hellfire of his Garden, Rice’s demeanor was always inviting and warm. He welcomed the attention as a means for spreading the Gospel. Rice insisted that he would not argue or force religion, but would welcome the questions of the curious as invitations to witness. Once that door was opened, he said, you would probably have to stand up and leave before he would stop talking.
This was essentially true.
* *
The inside of the Rices’ house is as elaborately designed an environment as the Garden outside. Wooden, plastic, stone, and metal crosses—bought from stores, ordered from catalogues, or received as gifts—cover the living room walls and dangle in heavy bunches from the ceiling. Hangings depict Jesus in velvet, bearing His cross and walking on water. A tapestry reproduces the Last Supper. The face of Jesus, his scalp bleeding beneath a crown of thorns, looks through the peeling paint of an ancient plywood canvas. Photographs of Rice, his family, his dog and his truck are tacked to walls and ceiling amidst scores of newspaper clippings, strings of numbers, a few small rebel flags, and more crosses.
“I got a lot of Catholic stuff in here,” Rice told me. “But I don’t know nothing about it, all I know is a cross. The reason I got it is because I like the crosses and they like crosses. A lot of this stuff comes from Roman, Inc., in Chicago, Illinois. You see, they put that stuff on sale every once in a while, and I ordered me one of em and I liked it, so I ordered some more of em. I wound up getting nineteen. See, it’s just like making cars, all this stuff—every year they come out with a different model.”
He leaned further back in his recliner. His activities were largely confined by now to that chair. Unable to add to the Cross Garden as much as he would have liked, he still managed to spend time outside in his wheelchair, but less and less time. Marzell had begun helping him with the Garden’s upkeep and new additions.
“I don’t have no enemies,” Rice said. “You know, a lot of people tote enemies in a sack. Some of these people, you can’t talk to them, the Bible says just shake the dust off of your feet and go on and leave them alone. So that’s why I say I don’t carry none of them, I don’t carry none of them devils on me. Them peoples don’t like me, about the Cross Garden and all this stuff. Oh yeah, I get persecuted; my wife does, too. Yeah, it’s a hard, hard, straight line to walk.”
On another occasion Rice indicated pictures, taped to his wall, of him and his old Labrador retriever, Mac. “He was a praying dog,” Rice said proudly. “I got a pulpit over there. I’d call him–‘Come on boy, we got to go pray.’ He’d come around on that side, I got a stand about that high, he’d walk around that side and put his feet up there on that stand; I’d come around this-a-way, I’d bow my head and pray, he’d stand right there like he’s a-praying.
“People, people, people used to come by here. They’d bring people, people out here to see that dog, praying dog. So God works through all kinds of things, see. And I believe some people got saved by seeing that dog.”
* *
“I can back up every piece of the stuff out there,” Rice says on another occasion, as if offering a challenge. “I don’t care which one you ask about, I can give you a Bible answer for it.” Sure enough, he is impossible to stump. I ask him at one point how many crosses are in the garden, a question he says he gets all the time. For the answer, he says, count all the crosses outside, inside, and on all the papers throughout and around the house. Then count all the words in the King James Bible. The numbers will be the same. “I’ve never counted all the words in the Bible,” he admits, also noting that he can’t walk well enough anymore to count the crosses outside. “But, it can be done. It’s a little long a job to do, but it’s not impossible.”
* *
Rice described the Cross Garden as a “warning station.” “That’s what them signs is about down there. I warn people.” Signs marked “YOU WILL DIE” are not threats, but facts, intended less to scare than to explain: warnings that we all must die, that we know not the hour, and that if we are not born again, then we are bound for the fires of Hell. “The biggest part of the people that’s gone on and died, their soul’s in Hell,” he would say, and plead of his visitors: “Don’t, when you die, go to hell-fire. And want water, cause you ain’t going to get none. There’s no water down there. There’s no air conditioners down there. They’re wailing,” he sayid of the damned, “and gnashing of teeth. They’re mad. They’re on fire. Never get out of there. Be down there forever.”
Thus, a cinder block on the ground outside warns the visitor with a single word: “HELL.” A toilet seat lying in a patch of dead grass elaborates: “HELL IS HOT.” Discarded air conditioning units, refrigerators, Coke machines, and ovens add cryptically to the messages of a burning eternity with no ice water:
TOO LATE
IN HELL
FIRE
WATER
ALL KIND’S
IN, HELL
FIRE WONT
WATER
SIN SOUL
HYPOCRITES
IN HELL
WONTS
WATER
DRY
RICH
MAN
HELP ME
CRYING
IN HELL
WATER
REPENT
SEX
USED
WRONG
WAY
IN
HELL
SEX
SIN
HELL
FIRE
HELL IS HOT, HOT, HOT
The messages distill Rice’s imagery of Hell into a few frantic words. The messages of the Garden comprise Rice’s Bible, stripped to hits most fundamental bones and emotional core, constellations of meaning exploded down into a few words, a single word, a chain of numbers, even a single number. A sign on one cross bears the inscription “JESUS SAVES”; beneath it is a second sign: “HELL SEX.” Other signs say simply “JESUS” or present the numbers 8 or 26 or 7 in bold red or green, offering no instructions for their interpretation.
Rice’s religion was rooted firmly in a language of numbers, and Rice would claim an “understanding of numbers” given by God. “He works with me in numbers. That’s part of my calling. He works with numbers in the flesh-body. If you start paying attention to it, you’ll see things, different numbers.” And so Rice would tell stories: of the ten virgins, of the two thieves, of the three men thrown in the furnace, of the eight saved in the flood. He spoke of seven, “God’s perfect number,” and of twenty-seven, “my mother’s number” (Annie Mae Rice was born on April 27, 1905; she was born again on April 27, 1976, the say she died). The numbers are reflections of spiritual realities, embodying layers of meaning so thick that Rice, who admittedly loved to talk, would say, “I can’t get into all that—I won’t get through talking.”
Off and on over the years, Rice would buy out the back page of the local Prattville Times and Centerville Press newspapers, and fill these pages with written sermons, plain black crosses, and significant numbers arranged into patterns. His writings for the paper (dictated to Marzell, who typed them out) contain long and tangled discourses on, among other things, the meaning of various numbers, relying heavily on stream-of-conscious Biblical associations and rendered more or less indecipherable to readers unfamiliar with Rice’s language:
Today is the 30th day of March! Yesterday was the 29th day of March! My daddy died on the 29th day of January, 1977, two sevens, two thieves on the cross. One asked Jesus, one did not. On Saturday the 29th, when I got to the Nursing Home, my daddy had just passed away around four o’clock. There was one furnace and there were three men put in that furnace, they looked in there and saw the fourth man, His name was Jesus. So my daddy went to be with the fourth man, just like Lazarus, Jesus. No. one, Lazarus, no. one My daddy, No. one, makes three persons or three spirits.
In the same essay, God Himself becomes a number—the number three, indicating the trinity. “I am,” Rice writes, “No. 3’s servant.” “There is no other person on earth who can stop the No. 3’s. Man can destroy the body but man cannot destroy the soul and spirit. Hallelujah, Praise the No. 3’s. What a miracle, miracle, miracle.”
As Rice writes, the numbers pile quickly upon one another, simultaneously referencing multiple points—dates, events, Bible verses—and spinning convoluted webs of spiritual meaning. He continues:
* *
“When I die,” Rice once said to me, “put my old body in the ground; my spirit’s going up there to live with all them spirits up there, Jesus and God and all of em, all them people that’s done gone on to Heaven. I’m looking forward to it,” he said, but added: “I want to stay here as long as I can. The Lord knows all that. Just like me talking to you today. You see, when I’m dead and gone in the grave, I can’t talk to more people. I’ll have a spiritual body, I’ll be living over there. So they get more good out of me as long as I stay on this earth. Like I’m talking to you today, see. But according to age and time, you know, flesh-body wears out.”
“He ain’t coming back to get these crosses and all here. No, He ain’t coming back. Ain’t coming back after no church building on this earth. He ain’t coming back. The people is the church. The ones that’s been born and saved and are living for Him, that’s the church; that’s the ones he’s coming back after. He ain’t taking no church building, no building, that’s all going to be burnt up.”
“I’m in a lot of books. Magazines. All these things going throughout the world. On the internet. I’m on there three times, and you can’t tell how many more times I’ll be on there after I’m dead and gone. They’ll still be putting me on that internet system, circulating around the world. So this Cross Garden will never die. The wood will rot down, signs will rust down, but it’s been planted in people’s hearts, just like Jesus Christ. I ain’t calling myself no Jesus, cause there wasn’t but one—that another one,” he points out, always on the lookout for numbers—”but it’s been planted in people’s eyes, it’s going throughout the world all kinds of ways.”
“So,” one of Rice’s Centerville Press writings reads, “I’m warning you sinners and hypocrites just like Noah, warned the people in the other world, and did what God told him to do, he built an Ark, told the people it was going to rain. They didn’t believe him. It’s a sad thing that there was not one soul outside Noah’s family saved. 8 souls saved.”
“And,” Rice would say, leaning back in his chair, repeating a favorite phrase: “on and on it goes.”
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