I could never bring myself to ask my mother about one of my earliest memories of her. In my child mind, I’m alone in the living room, playing with blocks on the floor. Suddenly I’m looking up across the room at Mom and her twenty-something sister Dortha—Dottie, we called her—by the half wall with the wooden columns to the ceiling. They’re screaming at each other, and Mom grabs Dottie by the hair and yanks hard. She grabs Dottie’s arm and digs long fingernails into her flesh. I know it hurts, because she does it to me when I misbehave. Four little crescent moons. This is the beginning.
This was how you taught obedience. Until fear of God replaced fear of pain, this was how you learned obedience.
Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
* * *
My grandfather lost his license to practice law in federal court in February 1989. My mother could give me a detailed explanation of the state court disbarment from ten years earlier, complete with objective legal experts to support her conclusions, but I never understood how she rationalized the “nine-judge complaint” that came close to decimating the Phelps-Chartered law firm—nothing beyond “These people were always coming after us. They hated us.” She dismissed the charges filed against seven of the firm’s attorneys as “our annual Disbarment Rites of Spring,” as she and her siblings had begun to call them: trumped-up charges filed with the goal of shutting down our family’s civil rights work. In the disciplinary complaint, nine senior federal judges charged that my grandfather, my mother, and five of my aunts and uncles had made false accusations against them, and that they all deserved to be disbarred. A prolonged investigation ensued, one that found that Phelps-Chartered lawyers had violated the Code of Professional Responsibility. More than three years after the complaint was filed, my grandfather surrendered his license in exchange for the federal judges allowing my mother, aunts, and uncles to continue practicing in the federal courts. Nearly a decade later, my Gramps would commemorate the death of one of those nine judges in his Sunday sermon—a celebration of the murder-suicide in which the judge and his wife were both found dead, his courthouse revolver on the bed between them. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.
Many years later, I would email to ask my aunt Dottie about the disciplinary complaint that finally ended my grandfather’s legal career. I hadn’t seen her since the incident I’d witnessed in my living room at age four, my only childhood memory of her being the moment she chose to leave Westboro forever. I wasn’t sure I could trust her. Reading her account of those days, the first thing that leapt out at me was the timeline—a connection I had missed all my life. Gramps had surrendered his law license in the spring of 1989, the end of his decades of successful and acclaimed civil rights work. At nearly sixty years old, he was suddenly and unwillingly facing an enormous vacuum in his life—and just a few months later, the biking incident at Gage Park with my brother Josh and the two men emerging from the bushes.
The end of one crusade leading directly into the beginning of another.
Dottie also asserted that her father’s removal from the federal court was justified, recounting a scene of deliberate lies and fabrication of evidence that I found difficult to imagine. As I pondered her assertions for a moment, trying to determine whether my family was capable of such things, an uncomfortable memory surfaced.
In my twenties, my mother and her siblings agreed to be interviewed once more on the subject of their father’s abuse, but only because it would get Westboro a platform on the Oprah Winfrey Network, a show hosted by Rosie O’Donnell. My uncle Nate had been interviewed, and the producers wanted to give us an opportunity to respond to his claims. Stomach twisting, I watched the interview the day it was published, expecting my family to cleverly evade the grisly accusations, to tell selective truths, to employ misdirection. These were all deceptive tactics, I knew, but I was consoled by the fact that they weren’t outright lies. The truth was important to me—it was our defense against the never-ending attacks that came at us every day—and I anxiously wondered what Nate was going to say and just how my family would be able to respond honestly without hurting the church.
The answer was that they couldn’t. There sat my mother, four aunts, and two uncles—all in their forties and fifties by this point—giggling at the reporter’s grim questions, all pretending they had no idea what Nathan could possibly be referring to. “I don’t even know what a barber strap is!” said one incredulously. “Does he have a picture or something, so that we might know what he’s talking about?” another derided. “Nate always had an overactive imagination.” The smugness and condescension stunned me. The footage went on for nearly twenty minutes, and it was painful to watch. “There wasn’t any physical abuse, just forget that!” “They used to call it spanking!” As if it were all just a confusion of terms.
“Did you feel emotionally abused as a child?” the producer asked quietly. They erupted in laughter.
“Do you mean by Nathan?”
They went on at length about Nathan’s shortcomings as a child—“disruptive, destructive, distressing”—and I sat there mouth agape at the double standard. My family would never stop harping on the sins of Nathan’s youth, but would lay none of the responsibility at the feet of their father. Nate was to be held forever accountable for not conforming, for not just learning to fear and obey the way that they had all learned to. My mom and her siblings were holding Nate to account for the chaotic state of their childhood home—but they never would with Gramps.
Because Gramps had stayed. And Nate had left.
A vexing thought began to take hold. As members of Westboro, we behaved as if everyone in all the world were accountable to us, as if they all were steadfastly bound to obey our preaching—because we were the only ones who knew the true meaning of God’s Word. Presidents and kings, judges and governors, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa—all were subject to our understanding and our judgment. And all the while, we ourselves were accountable to no one outside our fences. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. Who would have the audacity to contradict the mind of Christ?
Nathan had dared to question the judgment of the church, and he had faced our collective wrath as a result. The facts were in Nate’s story, but we said he was fabricating it all in order to make a name for himself off of the church. “But go ahead and write some books and whatnot,” one of my uncles scoffed. “We don’t really care.” We dismissed Nathan as being driven by the same pecuniary motive people falsely assigned to us, and for partly the same reason: to avoid facing an uncomfortable truth, a blurring of the line between the good guys and the bad. So we called the truth a lie and rewrote history—as though it were in our power to dictate reality so long as it was in the church’s judgment and interest. So long as we all held the line, no one could prevail against us.
We were the Jacobs. We were always under Satan’s attack. We had to protect ourselves.
I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church. That for us, the church was the truth, and disloyalty was the only sin unforgivable. This was the true Westboro legacy.
I walked away from the video and pushed the troubling thoughts away, knowing without thinking that Nate would go away at the end of this news cycle and something else would take his place. I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. I instinctively held on to the hope that had carried me through all the storms we’d weathered at Westboro.
As long as I stayed and did what I was told—as long as I believed—everything would turn out okay.
4. The Tongue Is a Fire
“Talking to her is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant!” my mother exclaimed with a slight shake of the head. She leaned down to take the paintbrushes from my grubby hands, and for a moment her blue eyes were level with mine
—now wide with mischief imagining what it might be like to take a drink from a fire hydrant. “You’re so much like her.” She grinned and kissed my cheek.
I only had a fistful of years under my paint smock back then, but already—and to my greatest delight and honor—the comparisons to my aunt Margie came swift and steady: big hair, big voice, big personality. “Big personality” was sometimes code for “big drama,” but I didn’t know that yet. I adored Margie, and from the way my mother, grandmother, and the rest of my aunts spoke of her, I knew this resemblance to be a very good thing. “She has such beautiful, beautiful hair,” said one. “She is so sharp, just smart as a whip,” said another. “You sure do talk a lot,” said most of them. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, though it didn’t often occur to me to try. Mostly the words tumbling around inside my head mirrored the unruly curls that sat atop it: copious and uncontained, inevitably springing loose from every paltry attempt at confinement.
It fell to my poor mother to shoulder the yeoman’s share of the burden this created. She tried to help me build something inside myself, a sort of internal levee system to keep my mental machinations from flooding every adult conversation in the vicinity—not to mention the rare moments of peace that so seldom found purchase in our household of five children and counting. Although it wasn’t a particular strength of hers, either, my mother worked diligently to teach me the art of holding my tongue, of knowing when to speak—and as with every challenge she faced, her tools of choice were found in the Bible, 1611 King James Authorized Version only. “The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,” she would quote. “But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”
These verses only served to confuse me for a number of years. I wondered what was so “deadly” about my constant complaints about my four-year-old sister’s horrid behavior toward me. I couldn’t see how my never-ending interrogations surrounding the puzzling characters we encountered on the picket line—“Karl the Fat Fag”—could ever be considered “iniquity.” No matter how much effort my mother invested in the construction of this system, my incipient levees failed miserably, washed away by the endless streams of syllables that surged from brain to open mouth with the force of a great deluge. I wouldn’t have had the vocabulary or self-awareness to convey it at the time, but at the root of all my words was a pathological imperative that has never left me, one that continues to override the usual etiquette of distant, restrained discourse with strangers. I was animated by a set of twin desires that I now understand will never be satisfied: the need to understand, and to be understood.
I grew up considering myself exceptionally fortunate to be surrounded by people who could help me on both of these counts. Conversations with elementary school classmates taught me young that the Westboro way of life was not common—not just our daily protesting, but the fact that nine siblings had settled down in the immediate vicinity of their parents’ home, forming an exclusive, tight-knit community. I pitied the poor chumps who were their parents’ only child and the ones with cousins flung halfway across the country—meanwhile, I had dozens living nearby. My aunts and uncles were my teachers, and my cousins my confidants. Who needed school friends when I had family? There was always someone to talk with. I never had to be alone.
My parents carefully avoided favoritism in our home, but I found myself unable to do the same when it came to my aunts. They took turns cycling in and out of the top spot for various reasons. Rachel was beautiful just like her biblical counterpart, and she shared sticks of mint gum in little foil packets. She’d call me Mickey and find fun ways to teach me new skills—like how to make change while collecting Happy Meals in the drive-through at McDonald’s. Lizz would let me sit in her pew during church sometimes, taking my hand firmly in hers whenever I’d get fidgety; she’d use the pad of her thumb to rub soothing little circles on the back of my hand, so that the move never felt like a punishment. Becky had the most boisterous laugh, and before she got married, she’d come over to watch my siblings and me during the pickets when the weather was too cold for us to attend. We’d play Farkle and crack up each time we’d accidentally-on-purpose call it “Fartle” instead. Abi was the baby of my mother’s family, funny and crass. We’d take turns massaging each other’s shoulders, and she’d remind me of how much I loved to have my hair washed as a baby. How it was the one thing that never failed to calm me down.
Margie, though, would always be particularly special to me. She’d been named for my grandmother, and I for the two of them, though I never used the name outside of official documents. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, goes the Proverb, and I had one. Nothing pleased me more than when Margie would drop by and scoop me up to run errands with her—to the bank, the post office, the grocery store, I took any and every chance I could have to be near her. All the comparisons from my loved ones might have influenced me, but I recognized a kindred spirit in her. She’d come in like a whirlwind, a bundle of energy enthusing about one topic or another, whatever she happened to be turning over in her mind in that moment. An epiphany! A revelation! An unexpected turn of events in a case she was working! Can you walk with her while she talks? There’s so much to do, not a moment to spare! Gran would jokingly ponder the absurdity that if Margie was able to speak her thoughts as rapidly as she did, how much faster must her mind be thinking them, unencumbered by the mechanical burden of forming sounds? I say without conceit that this, too, was a problem I recognized. It was a constant source of frustration that I could never make my mouth move fast enough to keep up with my thoughts—even when I was speaking at a pace that made my words unintelligible even to my own ears. (I’m sure it was a still greater source of frustration to my mother. “Would ya slow down, Meg?!”)
Where my mom was Westboro’s logistical powerhouse, Margie was our legal one. They had fallen into these positions in the most natural way possible—not by vote or by fiat, but simply by doing the work. Their roles were dictated partly, even principally, by their place in the family lineup: following the common pattern, the heaviest responsibilities tended to fall to the older Phelps siblings. When the second and third children abandoned the church as young adults, Margie and my mother were left to pick up the slack. Their individual personalities played into the equation, too, of course. My grandfather required much of his children and he held them to the highest of standards, even when society at large would have considered them either too young or too old to be commanded in such a fashion. Other children might have chafed at his rigid requirements, but my mother seemed to have a perpetual sense of urgency about meeting them. Her deep aversion to disappointing her father, her aptitude at pacifying him, and her willingness to use any means necessary to get her younger siblings on board with the program—including physical force, not unlike what my grandfather had modeled—these were the attributes that helped to mold my mother into a combination of something like a political whip and his girl Friday.
This is not to say that she was unaffected by her father’s severe treatment of their family. She told me one day, laughing but abashed, that she and her siblings used to refer to their father as “T.B.” in the notes they left for one another at the law firm: “The Beast.” Still, the accounts I heard over the years from and about my mom left me with the knowledge that any such quiet dissent was about as far as she went in pushing back against his demands. Many years would pass before I felt the least bit unsettled by the striking correlation between her view of her father and her view of God. “You wanna sum up the whole Bible in just three words?” she would ask. “‘Obey, obey, obey!’” It was an approach of appeasement: if only you could work hard enough to placate the strict demands of an exacting taskmaster, his wrath would turn away from you. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. Gramps was not God, but Westboro members were i
nclined to conflate the moral judgments of the two—in practice, if not in theory—because in spite of his faults, my grandfather had been chosen by God to lead us. Who were we to question His choice?
By virtue of my grandfather’s onerous temperament and our family’s battles with the Kansas legal community, my mother had grown up in what she called a “pressure cooker”—the same phrase she would later use to describe our life working in Westboro’s “War Room,” as the office we shared had been dubbed. The unrelenting pressure through the decades only fed her sense of urgency, and it seemed to have had the effect of making her the embodiment of every cliché about diamonds similarly pressured: hard, abrasive, brilliant. My mother had an eye for identifying the roots of problems and their solutions, and she was almost ruthless in her pursuit of both—even when this meant mowing down our loved ones in the process. Tender as her gentle teaching and sweet encouragement could be, her bitter reproaches at the slightest displeasure would bring me to my knees in a heap of desperate sobs on my bedroom floor, face pressed to the floor and tears sliding down my forehead as I prayed to the Lord for mercy, for Him to please just fix whatever was defective in me to have vexed my mother so.
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