Meroney: Speaking of your faith, what’s your estimate of how many people you’ve led to Christ through personal one-on-one interaction?

Carter: I would say several hundred. I’ve been on Christian mission programs for the Southern Baptist Convention—to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, other places like that. I’d spend a whole week, or ten days, just going from one house to another explaining the plan of salvation to people who did not have any faith. A lot of them have accepted Christ. I teach a Bible lesson every Sunday when I’m at home. I taught this past Sunday, and I’ll teach next Sunday as well. We have only about 30 members of our church who attend our services—it’s a small church. But we have several hundred visitors who come—sometimes it’s as high as eight hundred. Most of the time, though, it’s in the two hundred range. Many tell me they’ve never been to a church before. I don’t have any doubt that a few of them, maybe every Sunday, decide to accept the lessons that I teach.

Meroney: Is there more racism in the country now than when you were president?

Carter: I think there is. After the civil-rights movement was successful—about a hundred years after the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War—there was a general feeling in this country that the main elements of racism, of white superiority, had finally been overcome. With the news media showing the police abuse toward black people in some places, and the terrible events in Charleston, South Carolina, maybe we’ve been awakened to say that we’ve still got a long way to go. The burgeoning of obvious, extreme racism has been a sobering factor for us.

Meroney: In your new book, you publish some of your poems. What impact did the legendary Southern poet James Dickey, who also wrote the novel Deliverance, have on you?

Carter: James Dickey was a close personal friend of mine. When I was campaigning for president in 1976, he used to come down to Plains and sit on the balcony of our depot and sometimes read poems to the people and shake hands and let them know he was for me. On my inaugural day, when I became president, he gave the preeminent inaugural poem—he wrote it especially for me. I was with him also when they had the inauguration of the movie version of Deliverance in Atlanta. I sat side-by-side with him at the first showing.

Meroney: What was your reaction to the novel and film?

Carter: I was overwhelmed. The Chattooga River on which it was filmed was a place I had canoed—I knew its ferocity. In fact, just the day after seeing Deliverance, I went down the river again. I was really impressed with the music, too.

Meroney: What was it like watching the film with the author?

Carter: He was very excited—or concerned—about the movie, in which he played a small part, the sheriff. Dickey was completely intoxicated when the movie was getting ready to start. When he sat next to me, he really didn’t know much of what was going on until the scene where the banjo player came forward and he kind of sobered up a little bit. By the point in the film when Dickey appears as the sheriff and welcomes the people who come up off the river, he was completely sober. He and I had a lot of good times together, and we made a lot of jokes back and forth. Deliverance was a dramatic and wonderful success—one of the 26 movies that were made in Georgia while I was governor, of which I was proud.