The right third of the image provides important details of the story (Fig. 3). The smooth curve of the back support of Nellie’s chair, simulating an elegant open parenthesis, leads the eye to the action. Like the pages of a book, this image reads from left to right and top to bottom. In the vignette at top right, Pierce, having chosen catalogue of fanciful goods over recitation of religious obligations, falls stricken as though dead to the floor, his body supported by the older sister in her two-tone (blue over purplish-red, slightly metallic) dress. In the final figural scene at lower right, Pierce’s body is laid out on a bed, doctor consulted and undertaker called. All this happens in the presence of a cloud of witnesses, the floating faces of neighbors, mostly gazing full-on at Pierce or looking out, in shock and incredulity, into the viewer’s space. Four figures in profile mark the image’s right margin and concentrate the story’s punch by closing the parentheses opened by the back of the mother’s chair.
We, the viewers, join this crowd of faces, rounding out the circle of spectators. Pierce, the artist, provides only one figural clue to the happy ending of his autobiographical Christian morality play. Narrative resolution hangs on a child, a smile, and the color red: we take our cues from his youngest sister’s hopeful expression, as she stands in the foreground, white ribbon in her hair, at the head of the bed. Her bright-red dress points back across the panel’s surface to its visual bookend in the less saturated red carved text at left: “Obey God and Live.” And live Pierce does, his sense of self, looking back, changed forever by this moment of divine intervention. Pierce understood this narrative as a miracle story more than a tale of judgment, though miracle and judgment are not antithetical here: “Obey God and live!” is but a short (though important) step away from “Obey God or die!,” as Pierce implied when he said, “I was laid out for dead once by not doing what the Good Lord told me to do.”
From a psychological and spiritual perspective, in the midst of the conflict suggested between Good Book and Wish Book, this is a story of liberation, an assertion of the possibility of transformation, personal and social. Having a story, especially one manifested in material form that invites repetitive handling, viewing, and recitation, provides a way of organizing and getting hold of life’s uncertainties. Elijah Pierce may feel pulled in two directions, but he controls this story. He relates a narrative he understands as truth and he testifies to this accomplishment. As maker of the narrative, he has creative voice and authority: this is his image, his framing, his interpretation of events. Pierce tells a story of obedience to God, but as both subject and narrator of the story—as one who “knows” the outcome—this is in fact his “vision of heaven,” as the subtitle he selected asserts, his vision of power and life. Far from being subject to the crowds of white model consumers pictured in his Sears Roebuck catalogue, he answers here only to God.
Obey God and Live is about choice and will as well as obedience, about choosing the Good Book with its lasting spiritual rewards over the Wish Book with its glossy fleeting material promises. While he found the world of goods and parties attractive, Pierce depicts himself casting his lot with the God whose powerful dark hand anointed him just as surely as it recalled to mindfulness his religious obligations. In this woodcarving God’s hand descends in rebuke and consecration. This is a conversion story and a resurrection story. Pierce understood this visionary event as a demonstration of God’s sustaining and renewing expectations in his life.
Elijah Pierce located the production and circulation of his woodcarvings in a rich network of social activities and events. He sometimes carved alone, but more often worked in his Long Street barbershop, between clients and during conversations with them. Carving was an industrious pastime. It usefully occupied hands in times between people needing haircuts. In the process, it operated as meditative exercise, social network, personal memory, entertainment, devotional activity, and social commentary. Wood was a multifaceted medium for Elijah Pierce. His was a kind of performance art lodged in the routine of his daily life. He made space to exhibit many artworks, densely populating with relief carvings and three-dimensional figures-in-the-round the walls and surfaces of his shop’s duplex, a mirror image second room immediately adjacent to the first, with barbershop and art gallery occupying space under one roof. This set of practices with respect to his work in wood gave him ample opportunity to articulate, recollect, and reinterpret, over and over again, the stories manifested in his art. For Pierce, church (the Gay Street Tabernacle Baptist Church) and workplace (the Long Street Barbershop and Art Gallery) were not distinct sacred and secular spaces, as some have suggested, but rather two interwoven locations of personal devotion and conviction. His rooms on Long Street combined religious display with popular whimsy. Pictures of Jesus and of cigar-smoking, card-playing canines lived comfortably in a single space, each inflecting the other. In the barbershop, and in demonstrations of his artwork elsewhere, he acknowledged the power of this extra-ecclesiastical mixture: “I can get to a lot of people who don’t go to church, and change their lives.”
He repeated, with singular frequency, the life-defining story pictured in Obey God and Live. The image remained in Pierce’s personal possession, on display in his barbershop. He never copied the carving; in fact, he generally declined to copy any of his images, believing that the pictures belonged to a particular vision, as revealed to him in a particular piece of wood. After the artist’s death in 1984, the Columbus Museum of Art acquired this carving from his estate.
When Elijah Pierce talked about Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven), he consistently remarked that God had commanded not simply that he read the bible but that he read a “certain passage of scripture in St. Matthew,” somewhere “around the 16th chapter,” he recalled. While it is difficult to pin down precisely what might be meant by “around the 16th chapter,” it seems worth noting, given Pierce’s interest in “signs,” that Matthew 16 begins with a request that Jesus show a “sign from heaven” and moves from there to a declaration of Jesus as messiah. The chapter’s near-conclusion is perhaps most relevant to the experience Pierce pictured in this vignette, to his admission that he reached first for the Sears Roebuck catalogue, with its pages and pages of earthly goods, when God told him to read first the bible: “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Matthew 16:26). Pierce says as much in fewer words: “Obey God and Live.”
Much might be said about the specific sensory and material capacities of Pierce’s medium, about the kinds and qualities of the wood he selected, the tools he used to carve into it, the tactile experiences of working with it, the ways different grains and differently sanded surfaces felt to the hand, the smells (of sap and shavings and paint and varnish) it introduced to his home and barbershop. From a visual perspective, wood offered Pierce a particular set of characteristics as well. The one that arrests my attention at this moment concerns relations among media and color, and especially between this medium and the range of possibilities presented for skin color. Wood, unlike bleached paper products made from wood pulp and fibers, naturally appears in a range of beiges and browns. The most common and immediately available alternative media for inexpensive figural religious devotional and domestic decorative objects set a much lighter base standard. Chalkware, for example, like the bisque and parian wares and the more expensive kinds of porcelains and marbles they imitated, was, on its own gypsum-derived terms, the starkest of whites. When left unpainted in areas representing skin, or when merely coated in clear varnish, as was often the case, the default color was white, the “natural” base tone of the medium. In the context of twentieth-century racism and race relations in the United States, and when replicated over and over again in church and school and home and missions field, these objects (in medium as well as decoration) instantiated whiteness as the “usual” color for skin, human and divine—and this was especially the case in Christian educational and devotional pictures and objects.
Wood offered a different set of “natural” possibilities, and Elijah Pierce’s practice with respect to treatment of these surfaces suggests that he recognized these implications and pursued them. Medium thus took on an important, and literally substantial, narrative content. Pierce either painted the skin of his figures in a range of light to medium browns (often approximating the color of the wood itself, once varnished) or left faces and arms and hands unpainted, covering them only in varnish and letting the brown tones of the wood, accentuated by the darkening of aging shellac, represent skin color. While there are exceptions, Pierce’s figures can be taken to be dark-skinned, even when contemporary audiences thought they “knew” the figures to be white, as in the cases of Jesus or Abraham Lincoln, for example. Pierce’s representation of the ideal Universal Man (1937) made moving and sophisticated use of medium in this regard. His carving of the historic 1937 boxing match between Joe Louis and James Braddock shows the two fighters with the same varnished but unpainted wood skin tone, even though contemporary press and populace seemed determined to focus almost exclusively on the men’s racial difference.
The medium Pierce used provided him with the opportunity to set “natural” or “neutral” skin tone in a darker shade of brown than the “neutral” or “natural” standard of porcelain or plaster or marble. The color that Pierce’s medium “naturalized” conformed to darker skin with greater facility than to pale. In Obey God and Live he underscored this commitment in his decision to render God’s hand in richest brown. He accomplished this by varnishing this area but letting the wood’s own natural (and naturalizing) brown show through.
In the 1930s and 1940s (two decades or so before the 1956 date he later affixed to Obey God and Live, but years after the transformative event it represented) Elijah and Cornelia Pierce took his carvings on the road, traveling to county fairs and churches and other available venues to engage in what they called “sacred art demonstrations.” In an interview he elaborated: “Every piece of work I got carved is a message, a sermon. Preacher don’t hardly get up in the pulpit and preach but he don’t preach some picture I got carved. My [second] wife and I did a lot of travel with those pictures…. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and back to Columbus. People would ask me to comment on this picture, what that one means. My wife could talk about them near as good as I could. We never sold any tickets to our program, but everywhere we’d go, the program’d pay our expenses…”
His work could also be viewed in their home, by appointment, and at his barbershop.
The broadsides that the Pierces and others produced to advertise these religious art displays, at home and on the road, cast the work in the common genre of objects performing important roles in American domestic missionary activity and Christian education. From the eighteenth century to the present, Christian individuals and institutions used a wide variety of pictures—large and small, handmade and manufactured, and in many media—in evangelization efforts. “BEHOLD! The Man Who Carves His Sermons In Wood” proclaimed one poster (Fig. 4), with the text situated as a masthead or title for a photograph of Elijah and Cornelia, in church vestments, preaching his sacred artwork. The many pieces displayed in the photograph include a Last Supper that Pierce fittingly carved into one of Cornelia’s breadboards (“This is my body broken for you, take and eat,” says the Jesus of Christian scripture and liturgy, in blessing and consecration, over the bread on the table before him). Pierce proved himself to be an effective material and performative interpreter of ritual and biblical vocabularies and phrasings. The broadside’s “behold the man who carves,” while overtly alerting potential audiences to the times and places of traveling displays, also wielded added weight and authority for biblically literate audiences in its iteration of an assertion concerning the story of another woodcarver of sorts, the story of Jesus the carpenter and his Passion: “Ecce Homo,” “Behold the Man.”
Another broadside, likely dated between 1944 and 1947 (Fig. 5), advertised work exhibited by appointment in Pierce’s home, exclaiming:
LOOK: It’s Your Chance to See The Mammoth Sacred Art Demonstration. Possibly one of the most interesting and inspiring features of the great work that is done by Rev. Mr. & Mrs. E. Pierce. Their unique Biblical and Educational Art exhibit, portraying many Biblical Characters and events; all having been accomplished with an ordinary pocket knife and chisel. You cannot afford to miss seeing the great masterpiece The Book of Wood, Portraying THE LIFE OF CHRIST. Open for appointment at 144 Ever[e]tt St. Columbus, Ohio.
Of his vocation as evangelist, Pierce said: “After running from the ministry for 20 years every time I refused to preach, He [God] made me carve it. As my wife told me, ‘God made you preach every sermon in wood.’"