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MINISTER OF THE WORD

Serran Thomas Forbes overcame illiteracy to become a deacon

by Tom Rowan

Let’s assume you don’t read Chinese. But suppose that every newspaper you see, every magazine, every book, every menu, every document – every street sign – is in Chinese. How would you cope? How would you manage day-to-day living in a world where literacy is assumed?

In a comparable situation, Deacon Thomas Forbes of Incarnation Parish in Northeast Washington managed for 59 years. Now nudging 75, he was 59 when he learned to read and write the native English he had been speaking all his life. Today, much to his own astonishment, he not only reads easily and confidently, he’s an ordained permanent deacon who uses an IBM typewriter and can manage a computer. He’s even an author; four years ago he wrote a brief autobiography, “Sharing My Gift with Others.” Mastering reading skills opened a whole new world that Deacon Forbes never dreamed possible when growing up in poverty on a farm in St. Mary’s County.

A tall man with wide shoulders and big hands that reflect decades of hard physical labor, Deacon Forbes didn’t learn to read as a child because his parents were illiterate and he never went to school. And he never went to school because his family needed him to work on the farm. This was back in the ‘30s, in the bleak days of the Depression. The Forbes family – parents, Thomas and five siblings – were sharecroppers. Two-thirds of everything they grew on the farm went to the landowner; the family kept the remaining third.

They were poor, but Deacon Forbes remarked in a recent interview that poverty “didn’t seem so bad at the time” because just about everybody they knew were poor. The Forbes family home was a four-room farmhouse built like a barn with no insulation, no electricity, no water (running or otherwise) and a wood stove for heat. It was young Thomas’ job to carry water for cooking and washing to the house from a pump about 300 yards away.

In winter the cold was brutal, especially at night. With the stove off, heat would escape through the cracks in the walls, and through those same cracks snow would swirl in. “You could wake up in the wintertime and be covered with snow,” Deacon Forbes recalled. Since the family couldn’t afford winter boots or overshoes, “we took burlap bags and wrapped them around our feet and legs up to the knees to keep the snow off. The snow was (sometimes) knee-deep in those days.”

The work was strenuous and constant and left no time for school. The family had no machinery; they used horses and oxen. Young Thomas’ father taught his son how to plow when the boy was 10 years old, and he soon was able to navigate the plow horses and work in the field alongside his father. The example of hard work which his father gave him was quickly learned and lasted a lifetime. Even at age 10 young Thomas had a reputation as a good worker; when white farmers in the area were short-handed, they arranged with his father to hire him out, for 50 cents a day. All money he earned went to his father to help support the family.

Thomas and his father had a sporadic but lucrative sideline – as grave diggers for their parish, St. Joseph’s in Morganza. They dug the graves the old-fashioned way, with picks and shovels, and when they were busy on the farm they would dig graves at night by lamplight. The pay was good: $17 per grave. “That was a lot of money in those days,” said Deacon Forbes. “People worked for a dollar a day.” In spite of his workload, he found time to help the nuns with the various chores at St. Joseph’s. Also, his parents insisted that the family attend Mass every Sunday and holy day.

When illness forced Thomas’ father to quit farming, the future deacon, always in demand, hired himself out at age 18 to neighboring farmers for $9 a week. He remained a farmer until he was 28. Along the way, he met the love of his life, Mary Elizabeth Dorsey, at a dance in Leonard-town. She was the only girl he ever dated, and the courtship lasted four years.

Courting Mary Elizabeth was no casual undertaking; it was an exhausting challenge. She worked in Leonardtown, and the rigors of Thomas’ farmwork kept them apart except on weekends. After a grueling week on the farm, Thomas was able to get a ride from Morganza to Leonardtown to see Mary Elizabeth, but for the return trip of eight or 10 miles he was on his own. As he recalls, “I used to walk from Leonardtown to Morganza, and half the time I was asleep. I would fall asleep while walking. Right there on my feet!” But love conquered fatigue, and the couple was married in 1944. They’ll celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary in November.

In 1951, the 28-year-old Forbes and his young wife gave up farming and moved to Prince George’s County where opportunities were greater. He got a job with the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission and learned several trades – plumbing, bricklaying, cement finishing – but it was here that his inability to read became a career handicap. He was a smart and hard worker, and said his superiors wanted to make him a foreman but couldn’t because he couldn’t handle the paperwork: writing up job descriptions and reports, or even listing the names of workers.

In 1969 he had what he describes as a call to the ministry, “a call from God telling me to become more involved in the Church.” That call took the form of a couple of severe heart attacks that eventually forced him to retire in 1976. Absent the heart attacks, “I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Deacon Forbes. “They gave me a chance to realize what He wanted me to do.”

The future deacon started attending daily Mass, was active in the St. Vincent de Paul Society, became a Eucharistic minister and made Communion calls to the sick. He also formed a prayer group that met weekly at a sick person’s home, a rewarding activity that prompted him to consider the diaconate.
This was where illiteracy loomed as an insurmountable obstacle. Until then, thanks to being a keen observer with a great memory, he had carved out an urban life without being able to read. He learned the layout of Washington’s streets by walking extensively through the city. He even drove to New York without being able to read the highway signs. He managed this because two years earlier he had taken a bus to New York, memorized the route the driver took, and two years later followed the same route.

However, there’s no way to finesse the diaconate program, and it seemed an unlikely goal. Forbes asked Msgr. Thomas Wells, then head of the archdiocesan program, about the reading involved in preparing for the diaconate. He chuckled recently at the memory of the priest’s response: “Some reading is required.” That’s putting it mildly; the deacon formation program is a demanding course that at that time required substantial reading over a three-year period. Now candidates for the diaconate spend four years in reading and course work.

Undaunted, Forbes faced this new challenge with the same determination that had carried him over previous obstacles. Father Michael Wilson, who knew Forbes in the Serra Club of Washington, introduced him to a retired teacher who agreed to tutor him. He went to her home one day a week, every week, for a full year and advanced quickly. Rading was a sunburst of revelation. For the first time he saw what words looked like. As the weeks and months went by, Forbes, a quick and enthusiastic learner, became a voracious reader. He learned to use a dictionary. He read biographies of people like Jackie Robinson and Lena Horne. With his teacher, he read from the Bible. She loaned him books, and he read aloud at home, sometimes far into the night. After 52 sessions with his tutor, sessions that changed his life, he was able to enter the diaconate program.

“The people in my deacon class were fantastic,” Forbes said. “They knew my faults and tried to help me in any way they could. I wasn’t proud. If I didn’t know how to pronounce a word, or what it meant, I’d ask.” Also, his wife, whom he had courted to the point of exhaustion some 40 years earlier, sat beside him at all his diaconate classes for three years.

Terror gripped him early in the program when he was asked to read aloud to the class. “Everybody was cool and comfortable,” he said, “but I was terrified. I was perspiring, my heart was pounding, my glasses were fogged up.” However, he got through the reading and became more comfortable as it progressed. “The first time I heard him read,” said Msgr. Wells in a 1987 Catholic Standard interview, “I had chills go up and down my spine – you think of that kind of dedication. . . The guy is just filled with love, and he just wanted to do the work of God.”

And that’s what he’s doing. Forbes has been a deacon for 12 years now, and loves every minute of it. “I’m happy the Lord has led me this way, so I can reach out to people,” he said. “My thing was always helping people.” A man who laughs easily and has a winning smile, he ministers to the sick and shut-ins, but also takes part in funerals, weddings, baptisms and marriage preparation work. In addition, he is moderator of the Washington council of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Daughters of America.

He continues to advance his reading skills through weekly literacy sessions sponsored by Prince George’s County library system. “I call that going to school,” he said. A highlight of the sessions for Deacon Forbes is when he, who learned to read at 59, is asked to help someone in the class who’s reading at a lower level. “That’s a great feeling.”

Regarding the vocation that he cherishes, he said, “The more I do (my work as a deacon), the more I love it. . . I think that’s what the calling is, to serve God’s people, and that’s what I want to do.
“I have a beautiful life.”

Reprinted with permission of the Catholic Standard, Washington D.C., Aug. 5, 1999.
 
Editor’s note: On April 21, 2000 -- Good Friday -- Deacon Thomas Forbes died at age 75.

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