Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  The next morning, she walked into her parents’ bedroom to kiss them, as if she was headed to her regular job. She wore a hat, which confirmed their suspicions that something was afoot. Sylvania roused herself from bed and said, “Mildred, if you walk out that door, you’re never welcome back.” Not bothering to respond, my mother retrieved her suitcase and walked to a trolley stop.

  Free at last, Mildred began a new job and enrolled in college classes on the side. Before long, the family she was living with invited a sailor for Sunday dinner—the man who would become my father. They had a storybook romance, carried on through love letters and weekend leaves.

  As soon as my father received his discharge from the navy, the young couple got married. Their pastor required a private counseling session before the ceremony, and only then did my mother learn how babies are made. “What he described was so appalling, I nearly backed out of the wedding,” she later admitted.

  She did not back out, and over the next four years she moved west to Indiana and Arizona, then southeast to Atlanta, and birthed two sons. She looked forward to fulfilling her lifelong dream of serving as a missionary in Africa—a dream dashed by the onset of my father’s polio, the act of faith to remove him from the iron lung, and the miracle that never came.

  * * *

  —

  On one visit to Philadelphia, I ask Mother if she learned any good qualities from my stern grandmother Sylvania. She thinks for a moment and says, “Responsibility. You do what’s expected of you.” As an adult, Mildred Sylvania Diem put that lesson into practice.

  In December 1950, her future blank with grief, Mother began a new life in Atlanta with Marshall and me. As a first step, she learned to drive. Next, she began teaching the Bible in private homes. A few churches and individuals sent in donations, and our little family scraped by. I often heard comments like: “Your mother’s a spiritual giant. Imagine, raising you two boys and carrying on that workload. She’s an angel straight from God.”

  Once we were well along in school, Mother decided to pursue a goal she’d been harboring: to finish college. She signed on with a fledgling Bible college that agreed to grant her credit toward a degree for every course that she taught. She studied hard, learning enough to instruct the small classes of three to five students. Through that educational barter system, she earned a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s of theology. “I learned more from teaching than I ever did as a student,” she says, looking back.

  To help with finances after we bought the trailer, she agreed to drive a van twice a day, transporting children to and from a day-care center. Evenings, she typed up the sermons of a professor at Columbia Seminary, to be compiled into books.

  Despite Atlanta’s strict segregation, a new opportunity soon arises: she gets invited to teach Bible classes in an African American home. Word of my mother’s teaching spreads, and soon she’s conducting classes in other Black neighborhoods. In one apartment complex they begin calling her “Miss Jesus.” She mocks the Black students’ dialect and some of their customs, yet she seldom turns down an invitation, often traveling alone at night to areas where she is the only white person not wearing a police uniform.

  Mother comes away with a host of generalizations about race. “We always start the meetings real late. They have no sense of time, you know. They go by CPT—Colored Peoples’ Time—some inner feeling they have. That’s just the way they are.

  “They have a whole different understanding of right and wrong, too,” she continues. “A Black man told me, ‘You gotta understand. If we find out a woman’s been cheatin’ on us, we beat her or kill the other guy involved. We can’t help it.’ You see, it’s a cultural thing with them.”

  My mother, who refuses to fly on an airplane (“If God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings”), never gets any closer to Africa than the African American communities of Atlanta. I never hear her express much disappointment. She has transferred her missionary hopes to us, her sons, whom she devoted to God at her husband’s graveside.

  During one of Colonial Hills’s conferences, she invites a missionary couple over after church to tell us about their time in Africa. Hoping to please her, I talk about going to Africa as a missionary veterinarian. “I want to take care of the sick lions and elephants,” I say.

  Marshall lives to regret his declaration, as a seven-year-old, that God wanted him to be a missionary. Mother holds that pledge over him like a sword. “You’ll never make a missionary with that attitude,” she says when he does something to displease her.

  * * *

  —

  Most kids know little about what their dad or mom does at work. Not Marshall and I—we have no time off from the God-business. We tag along to Mother’s Bible clubs and teaching assignments, and are expected to believe as firmly as she does.

  Although nearly everybody is religious in the South, Mother has more stringent standards. Out of two hundred conversion decisions, she claims, only one of them proves genuine. We are different, she believes, wholly dedicated to God in a way that others aren’t. They talk about avoiding the things of the world; we actually do it. They sing about the Second Coming; we expect it any day.

  Mother has strong opinions about denominations. She doubts that Catholics are Christians at all. Presbyterians and “those Whiskeypalians” are beyond the pale. Methodists have lost their fire, and their churches are “more like lukewarm social clubs than houses of worship.” Even Southern Baptists are suspect, because you can see deacons standing on the front steps of the church smoking cigarettes. Also, some Baptist organists play softly during the pastoral prayer, which means they probably have their eyes open.

  Our home looks like a Christian gift shop. Every plaque and wall calendar features a Bible verse, and the magazine rack is stuffed with titles like Voice of Prophecy. Missionaries’ prayer cards cover the front of our refrigerator. At breakfast each day we pull a verse-to-memorize card from a plastic Bread of Life container in the shape of a miniature bread loaf. On the wall hangs our only artwork, a reproduction of Warner Sallman’s famous Head of Christ. Its airbrushed Jesus appears a bit sad, his eyes raised upward as if looking for help.

  We grow up listening to religious radio nonstop. I think Mother just feels better with someone talking about God in the background. Marshall and I practice mimicking the angry, heavy-breathing Southern preachers and their warbling-soprano wives. The rants by Carl McIntire against godless communism keep us on edge. Predictably, Dr. M. R. DeHaan’s Radio Bible Class comes on every Sunday morning just as we are sitting down to a breakfast of fried eggs. I don’t really listen to his sermons, but for years afterward every time I hear his gravelly voice, I smell fried eggs.

  When very young, we say a prepared blessing—“God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food”—but after a certain age we have to come up with our own. I pray for pets and neighbor kids. I peek through squinted eyes and thank God for the meat, the potatoes, and each vegetable, except tomatoes. Marshall cracks up when I end a prayer with a rhyme I’ve picked up somewhere: “Amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen. Hen died, Ben cried, then committed suicide.” Mother does not think it funny.

  We are so immersed in spiritual talk that one time, when the phone rings, Marshall answers it with, “Our Father who art in Heaven,” rather than “Hello.”

  At school we discover just how different we are from other kids. We don’t cuss or go to movies, know no music written in the past fifty years, and own no television. We spend much of our spare time doing church activities. And on Sundays we aren’t allowed to swim, fish, or play ball.

  I don’t mind most of the rules. In fact, I feel set apart, dedicated, even morally superior. We have the truth, after all, unlike most of our friends. I excel at church, and soon Mother’s friends are calling to ask me to pray for a lost wallet or watch. “That boy’s prayers get answered,” they say, and I swell wi
th holy pride.

  Mother informs everyone that both Marshall and I plan to be missionaries. In the seventh grade I screw up my courage and tell her that first I’d like to try playing minor-league baseball for a few years. She snorts disapproval.

  * * *

  —

  For a long time our family life is calm, like the silence before an earthquake. And then, just as Marshall enters high school, the warning tremors begin.

  Suddenly, everything we do seems to enrage our mother. I get lost in the woods and return home a little late for dinner. Marshall forgets to tell her about a band concert he’s playing in over the weekend. The atmosphere becomes icy, and she acts like we’ve committed the unpardonable sin. “I hope you have ten kids just like you!” she yells. We’ve heard that line before, and I wonder if she learned it from her own mother, Sylvania.

  She who endured so many whippings as a child turns easily to corporal punishment. As the eldest, Marshall bears the brunt of her fury. “I’m going to get Mr. Bonds from church to blister you with a hickory stick. He’ll knock some sense into you!” Or even, “Do you know what they did to disobedient children in the Old Testament? Read Deuteronomy. They stoned them to death!”

  Marshall provides plenty of fuel for her ire. In school he has earned the reputation “Does not live up to potential.” Although his IQ tests at 151, he rarely completes homework assignments and doesn’t bother to study for tests. His music teachers hail him as a prodigy, but he practices his instruments only when he feels like it, which is seldom.

  My guard goes up one day when I walk in after school and see Mother ironing. The hot smell of pressed cotton wafts through the trailer. Rather than gently smoothing the creases, she is slamming the iron down like a hammer. Her face has a twisted look, and all my senses go on alert. What did I do wrong? Or is it Marshall again? I creep past her to my bedroom. I know she sees me, but she says nothing, and neither do I.

  Wordlessness fills our home. The three of us don’t say anything that evening. At dinner I listen to the sounds: the clatter of stainless steel on Melmac plates, the clink of glasses, the gristly noises of chewing and swallowing, a ticking clock. She looks at us harshly, as if she can read on our faces something to dislike. Marshall and I lock eyes, coconspirators at brooding.

  It becomes a kind of game. When one of Mother’s dark moods hits, we stop speaking. How long can we keep it up?

  We maintain the silence as long as a week, always aware the explosion will come. When it bursts, the words echo off the trailer walls. Her voice starts out low and works up until it’s high and taut as a violin string. “You think you’re so smart,” she tells Marshall. “Let me tell you something, mister. You have another think coming. You’re lazy. Good for nothin’. You only think of yourself. You’re a slob. Just look at your closet. You think I’m your slave? I tell you what I’m gonna do, and I don’t mean maybe. I’m gonna take all your clothes and throw them out in a mud puddle. Then maybe you’ll appreciate what it’s like to live with a slob.”

  Marshall defends himself. “Yeah, but like I told you, I’ll clean the room this weekend. I’m in high school now. It keeps me busy.”

  He’s only stoking the fire. “Don’t you sass me like that! You think I don’t see that sneer? And don’t ‘yeah’ me. It’s ‘Yes, ma’am’—Do you hear me? If there’s one thing I demand, it’s respect, and if I can’t teach you, I’ll get someone in here who can.”

  I slide down in my seat, trying to be inconspicuous. With my homework spread out before me, I grip the edges of the dining-room table hard enough to feel the pulse in my fingers.

  The fight drags on, and eventually I retreat to our bedroom at the back of the trailer. Lying in bed that night, I can’t fall asleep. Is that a sob I hear coming from her bedroom down the hall?

  Marshall never ducks. He always takes her on—and always loses. Her yelling drowns out his arguing. Watching how they clash, week after week, I decide on a different tactic with Mother. She already thinks I’m a sneak, so why not be one. I will turtle down, hide my feelings, avoid all conflict. I won’t see things or hear things. I will become invisible.

  Marshall and I face a common foe. In our bunk beds at night, we talk about her. In the past we dared not question the woman who, as everyone reminds us, has sacrificed her own life in order to rear us. After the many explosions, after days of silence at the dinner table, doubts steal in. We can’t put together the two people who are our mother: the angelic one everyone else sees and the volatile one we live with.

  Certainly, no one could accuse our mother of “unspiritual” behavior. Unlike some women in our church, she has never worn a pair of slacks, nor does she wear nail polish or makeup, not even lipstick. She never fails to have lengthy personal devotions every morning, and she teaches the Bible for a living. What chance do two adolescent kids stand against such an authority?

  Mother claims she hasn’t sinned in twelve years—longer than I’ve been alive. She follows a branch of the holiness tradition that suggests Christians can reach a higher spiritual plane, a state of moral perfection. The pastor of her Philadelphia church uses a glove to illustrate the point. “The Holy Spirit lives inside you like my fingers in this glove,” he says. “It’s not you living now; it’s the Spirit of God in you.” Her bookcase is stocked with books describing this state, called the Victorious Christian Life.

  Sinlessness guarantees she will win every argument with us, her sons, at least in her mind. It also guarantees that—like her own mother—she sees no need to apologize, ever.

  As we’re lying in our beds one night, Marshall reveals something that makes my blood run cold. “I hate her,” he says. “Always have. Even when I was your age, ten years old, I wanted her to die. I had this foolish notion that if I touched her lightly in the same spot a million times, an open sore would develop and she’d die. I tried it, every time I passed her.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “She just said, ‘Quit hitting me!’ and that was that.”

  * * *

  —

  Our three-person family isn’t working anymore. I have no way to put into words the changes going on, but something is tearing me inside. I want to run up to someone I recognize in church and say: “Please, please can you help us? I need someone to know what’s happening at home.” Then I remember my mother’s reputation and realize that no one will believe me. She’s a saint, the holiest woman in Atlanta.

  In church Mother wears a beatific smile and has a glow about her. She attends every service, takes notes, meekly submits to male authority. When people praise Marshall for playing the piano or trumpet, she nods with parental pride. Yet I’ve never heard her compliment him after a musical performance, or me after a good report card. “I don’t want you boys to get proud,” she says.

  I start to worry about her. Out of the blue she says things like “It’s just too much,” leaving me to guess what’s wrong. “I can’t take it anymore!” she says one day. “I don’t know if it’s worth going on living.” I stare at her, wondering if my mother is coming unhinged. When I make plans to visit a friend, she says, “Go ahead if you insist. But if you do, I probably won’t be here when you get back. I may be with the Lord.” Now what am I supposed to do?

  I sense that Mother has concerns I know nothing about. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know!” she says, too loud, when I see something I like in a store. I can tell that repairmen, plumbers, garage mechanics, and car salesmen are ripping her off, yet when I try to bring it up, she lashes out. “I’m telling you, son, the man told me those front-wheel-drive cars are no good. And he’s nobody’s dummy. You think you know more than him?” I learn not to challenge Mother.

  It’s the 1960s, and to her it must seem as though the world is coming apart, scattering danger everywhere. Mother leaves tracts around the house with provocative titles: “Satan’s Music Exposed,” “Hippie Peace Sy
mbol and the Cross of Antichrist,” “Skimpy Skirts and Hippie Hair.” She has so much to oppose. Hippies. The Antichrist. Communism. The Illuminati. Intellectualism. The occult. Her thick-headed sons.

  Whatever’s bothering her works its way into her body. After a blowup with Marshall one night, she claims that a blood clot has gone through her heart. A few weeks later, she has trouble moving her left arm. “I think it’s a broken muscle,” she says.

  Eating becomes a chore. “It’s something left over from the desert fever in Arizona,” she explains. “It attacks your liver. You’re supposed to eat lots of macaroni and cheese and candy—especially chocolate—but you don’t really want to, you’re so stuffed-feeling.” I ask what might taste good. Wrong question. “Eat—how can I? I’m sick! If I even try to think about food, I want to throw up.”

  Knee problems develop. Convinced one leg is an inch shorter than the other, Mother gets a shoemaker to build up her left shoe to compensate. Now she stands lopsidedly and walks with an unnatural gait, torquing her back. An orthopedic surgeon agrees to remove a vertebra and repair a disk.

  Another doctor gives her cortisone shots for pain in her shoulder. She refuses to let him X-ray it, though: “I’m claustrophobic. If I go into one of those machines, I can’t breathe!”

  After she falls in the trailer, Marshall accompanies her, with a suspected broken arm, to the hospital. The doctor calls him out into the hallway and says, “I can’t find anything wrong with your mother, but she won’t leave here unless I do something, so I’ll put a cast on it. Don’t worry, she’s fine.”

  Mother seems content only when something goes wrong physically—and for her, “content” means miserable. Some days she lies in bed with a washcloth over her head. “My nerves have about had it. I can’t eat anything. Maybe it’s an ulcer acting up. I need to get away somewhere, but I’ve got nowhere to go. Leave me alone, child. I have a headache!” I flash back to the stories she told of her own mother, lying on the couch with an ice pack on her head.