Praise for Jesus Land
“What makes Jesus Land unique and easy to relate to is its unadorned, dark humor . . . Many of us could have had the misfortune of stumbling into Jesus Land but few would have the spirit to survive.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Unflinchingly honest.”
—Washington Post
“[A] rough, brutal, and shockingly good memoir . . . Jesus Land is matter-of-fact, clear-eyed, and compassionate, without vindictiveness, which is, of course, what real Christian charity is about.”
—Boston Globe
“[A] darkly comic memoir.”
—GQ
“Julia Scheeres has written a love story that is as romantic and as sad as any recent memoir you’ll read . . . What Scheeres’ devastating book maps out is the story of this thwarted relationship, which somehow survives every twisted setback and deprivation to emerge intact. . . . It’s tough going, but life-affirming.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“What did Julia and David learn from their strict Christian upbringing? How to write apparently . . . Everything in this memoir, including its final tragedy, is brightly, clearly rendered, by a voice as rich in forgiveness as it has unforgivable stories to tell.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“[Scheeres] deftly exposes the disparity between her parents’ religious beliefs and their actions . . . and confesses with honesty and emotion her guilt and shame at abandoning her little brother in her search for acceptance. This work will force readers to relive the angst of being a teenager at a new school and desperately trying to fit in. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Jesus Land is a fascinating study of how so-called discipline warps young minds . . . poignant and [more] important to share.”
—Seattle Weekly
“[Jesus Land] is a book readers are sure to be talking about, and references to such titles as “Running With Scissors” and “Girl, Interrupted” will likely be drawn. Scheeres succeeds at relating a harrowing life story with effortless humor and wisdom.”
—Chicago Tribune
“[A] gripping memoir.”
—Essence
“The grace and emotional brawn that carried Julia Scheeres through the pummeling brutality of her youth has enabled her to tell the tale with a measured intensity that pulls you to her side and keeps you there. I could not stop reading this book.”
—Mary Roach, best-selling author of Stiff
“The writing is Dickensian in its blend of the tender, the brutal, and the absurd.”
—Booklist
“A harrowing memoir of coming-of-age amid religious zealotry . . . Scheeres manages to balance her righteous rage against fanatical hypocrisy with a smart sense of humor . . . poignant and heartbreaking.”
—Mother Jones
“A frank and compelling portrait . . . Tinged with sadness yet pervaded by a sense of triumph, Scheeres’s book is a crisply written and earnest examination of the meaning of family and Christian values, and announces the author as a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jesus Land is an extraordinary memoir not just for the jaw-dropping tale it depicts, but for the wit and honesty, and literary courage within it pages. This book will make readers think of the Liar’s Club and Bastard Out of Carolina, but there’s nothing derivative in it. For all its hardship and terror, it is above all a love story. Scheeres is the real thing, and this is a book that should last for a long, long time.”
—Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance and On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal
“The road out of an intolerant small town leads straight to a faith-based reform school in journalist Scheeres’s scarifying memoir . . . A bristly summoning of unpretty events, conveyed with remarkable placidity.”
—Kirkus
“This book will break your heart and mend it again. Julia Scheeres peels back the shiny, plastic veneer of fundamentalist Christianity to reveal the intolerance, hypocrisy and cruelty that can lie beneath. She does this with a merciless eye for detail, and an uncanny ability to evoke the essence of the Midwest. However, it is the exquisite candor and humor which makes Jesus Land so worth the reading. That, and the simple human love that shines out of every page.”
—Lisa Reardon, author of Billy Dead and The Mercy Killers
“Woody Allen once said ‘If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.’ He was right. Jesus Land is the story of Christianity gone horribly awry, of children entrusted to unfit parents, and of siblings united against terrible odds. Scheeres’ is a heart-breaking memoir, a compelling read that will hold you fast from start to finish and leave you in tears.”
—About.com
“Julia Scheeres’ beautifully-written memoir took my breath away—for the cruelties she suffered, for the courage it took to survive and tell her story, and for her enduring, sparkling faith. She is able to describe the everyday details of her experience with a clear, candid eye, and without bitterness—making her story vividly alive, at turns heart-breaking and humorous.”
—Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair
“A real-life coming-of-age tale is told in Jesus Land . . . Scheeres . . . looks back with journalistic clarity and literary grace at her teenage years.”
—PW Daily
“In this brilliant, sorrow-filled, race-tangled memoir, Ms. Scheeres story-telling skill makes you cheer for her and her adopted brother every step of the way as they navigate a cruel childhood. You will especially love the well-written sections about Ms. Scheeres’ exile to a Dominican Republic reform school—inhabited by many emotionally-uneven adults who prove the adage that some Christians are too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.”
—Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell
JESUS LAND
JESUS LAND
A MEMOIR
JULIA SCHEERES
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Jesus Land
Copyright © 2005, 2012 by Julia Scheeres
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-61902-134-1
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR DAVID
“And ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free.”
—JOHN 8:32, ESCUELA CARIBE HANDBOOK
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE IN GOD WE TRUST
1 THE HEARTLAND
2 FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS
3 EDUCATION
4 HOME
5 BODY PARTS
6 VIRGINITY
7 SHARP OBJECTS
8 FREEDOM
PART TWO TRUST NO ONE
9 THE ISLAND
10 THE PROGRAM
11 DEAD BABIES
12 NEW GIRL
13 PRO-GRESS
14 RAPTURE
15 AGUA DE COCO
16 THE PASTOR
17 TURKEY
18 FLORIDA
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIA SCHEERES
READING GUIDE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The time element is compressed for the sake of narrative flow, but the events portrayed herein are true.
JESUS LAND
PART ONE
IN GOD WE TRUST
CHAPTER 1
THE HEARTLAND
It’s just after three o’clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.
A quarter of a mile downwind from Hanke’s Dairy, the stench of cow shit slams up our noses, and we rise in unison, stomping on the pedals and gasping toward the cornfield on the other side.
It’s been two weeks since we moved to the country, and this is our first foray into the wilderness beyond our backyard. Our destination is a cemetery we spotted during a drive last Sunday that Mother insisted on taking after church. While David and I sat in the back of the van glaring out opposite windows, she coasted down dirt lanes, chattering about edible corn fungus, pig manure fertilizer, and other gruesome factoids she’d gleaned from her recent subscription to Country Living magazine.
David nudged me when we drove by the graveyard. It was set back from the road a bit, filled with brambles and surrounded by one of those pointy black fences that circle haunted houses in children’s books, usually with a large KEEP OUT sign on the gate. This fence bore no such sign. We looked at the tombstones jutting sideways from the ground like crooked teeth, and knew we had to return.
We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death-related. It’s part of our religion, the topic of countless sermons: Where will YOU spend ETERNITY? THE AFTERLIFE: Endless BLISS or Endless TORTURE? We are haunted by these questions. If we die tomorrow, will we join the choir of angels or slow roast in Hell? We’re not sure of the answer. So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.
Once we pass Hanke’s Dairy, we sit back down onto our bike seats. Along the length of the cornfield, a series of plywood squares nailed to stakes bear a hand-scrawled message:
Sinners go to:
HELL
Rightchuss go to:
HEAVEN
The end is neer:
REPENT
This here is:
JESUS LAND
You see such signs posted throughout the countryside: farmers using the extra snippet of land between their property and the road to advertise Jesus Christ. Mother approves. She says the best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ as a missionary martyr, but posting signs by the side of the road can’t hurt either.
“Anything to spread the Good News,” she says.
It was her idea to move to the country. She grew up in rural South Dakota and had been threatening to drag us back to the boonies for years. Dad finally caved in. His drive to Lafayette Surgical Clinic, where he’s a surgeon, is half an hour longer, but now he’s also gotten into the country act, donning his new overalls to drive his new tractor around our fifteen acres.
Our three older siblings escaped this upheaval by leaving for college, so that leaves my parents, my two adopted black brothers, and me.
Jerome, our seventeen-year-old brother, hightailed it out of this 4-H fairground a few nights after we landed. He got into a fight with Dad, stole the keys to the Corolla, and drove off. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, which is fine by me, since Jerome is nothing but trouble anyhow.
So basically it’s me and David, our ten-speeds, and the open road. And while the country graveyard is puny compared to the one by our old house—Grand View Cemetery, which we visited often in search of fresh graves—it still contains dead people, and that’s what interests us.
It takes us five minutes to pedal past the cornstalks, standing higher than a man’s head, to a cluster of double-wide trailers on the other side. They’re anchored in a half circle, with an assortment of plastic flamingos and gutted vehicles strewn on the bald clay before them. The irritating twang of country music leaks from the trailer nearest the road, and as we sail by, a heap of orange cats lounging in the engine compartment of a rusted station wagon scatters into the dry weeds.
I curse myself for wearing a dark T-shirt in this booming heat. We haven’t seen another human since we walked outside and would have stayed indoors ourselves if boredom hadn’t driven us into the farmland.
“Watch for heatstroke,” Mother, a nurse, warned us before we left. “If you get cramps or diarrhea or start to hallucinate, walk your bikes.”
Sweat drips into my eyes, warping the landscape, and I lift my T-shirt to wipe my face, flashing my bra at the empty world. Ahead of me, David rides shirtless, his scrawny torso gleaming like melting chocolate. He’s draped his T-shirt over his head and tied it under his chin like a bonnet. Like a girl. As if he didn’t look dorky enough with those black athletic glasses belted to his head with that elastic band. If anyone from Harrison sees us, we’re doomed.
William Henry Harrison is our new school; Hick High, the townspeople call it. There will be 362 people in our class, compared to twelve at Lafayette Christian, our old school, and we don’t know a single one of them. These are farm kids who’ve known each other since they were knee-high to a rooster, kids who’ve probably never seen a real live black person before. Kids who worry us a lot.
I stand up and stomp on my bike pedals, trying to catch up with David and tell him to put his shirt back on, but he’s on his second wind and flying over the crumbling pavement at enormous speeds. I yell at him and he rolls to a stop in the shade of an oak tree, turns and grins as I glide up beside him. I stand over my bike, panting, and point at his head.
“What’s up with that?”
“Keeps the sweat outta my eyes.”
“Looks queer.”
He shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Come on, take it off. Someone might see you.”
“So?”
“Do you want people to think you’re some kind of weirdo?”
He shrugs again and stares across the road at a herd of cows trying to cram themselves into the shade of a small crabapple tree. His jaw is set; once David’s brain has clamped onto a notion, there’s no unclamping it.
I shake my head and reach into the grocery sack strapped to his bike frame for a can of strawberry pop. When I yank off the metal tab, warm red froth bubbles over my fingers.
“Gosh darn it!”
I hand the can to David.
“Go on and drink your half.”
We’re saving the other can for the graveyard. I lick the sugar from my fingers and watch a cow, this one with a black body and white face, plod after the shadow of a small cloud that drifts across the pasture. When the shadow slips over the fence, the cow halts, lifts its tail, and spills a brown torrent onto the ground. I wrinkle my nose and turn to David.
“Remember when we used to ride to Kingston pool to swim every day?”
He stops drinking and peers at me sideways. His face is dry while mine drips sweat; maybe there’s something to his bonnet notion after all.
“’Course I remember, dufus. That was just last summer.”
“Point is, we never knew how good we had it, compared to this.” I swipe my arm across the landscape: corn, cows, barns. More corn.
“Could be worse,” David says, giving me the pop can.
“How’s that?”
“We could be dead.”
“Well, yes. But this has gotta be the next best thing.”
He snorts, and I drain the can and drop it back into the sack.
We push off and are just gaining momentum when a long red car with a jacked-up rear end barrels around the corner ahead of us. It races in our direction, the thrum of the motor getting louder and faster. Suddenly, it lurches into ou
r lane.
We swerve down a small embankment into a cornfield, crashing hard into the bony stalks and paper leaves. The car blurs by amid hoots of laughter.
David untangles himself from his bike and offers me a hand up. I charge up the embankment to the road.
“Stupid hicks!” I scream after the car, as it evaporates into the horizon. “Frickin’ hillbillies!”
David walks over to stand beside me.
“They must be bored too,” he says. He shakes his head at the blank horizon and reties his bonnet. He always takes things calmer than I do.
We’ve seen the country kids before as we’ve traveled back and forth to town for church or supplies. We’ve seen them slouched against pickup trucks, sharing round tins of spit tobacco. Lounging on plastic chairs in front yards, watching cars go by. Maneuvering giant machines through the fields, their bodies dwarfed by metal.
They are alien to us, as we must be to them.
So much for the famous “Hoosier hospitality.” When we moved to our new house, no one stopped by with strawberry rhubarb pie or warm wishes. Our neighbors must have taken one look at David and Jerome and locked their doors—and minds—against us.
David and I shove back onto County Road 50, determined not to waste our journey. We clear a small rise and spot the cemetery a quarter mile ahead.
“Race you!” David shouts.
We crouch behind our handlebars, and David gets there first, as always. We lean our bikes against the fence, which is coated with a fine layer of orange rust, and walk around to the gate. It creaks as I push it open. David rushes past me to a gray block of marble just inside the fence that is roped with briars. He tramples down the vines and squats before it.
“Here lies Mabel Rose Creely,” he reads as I peer over his shoulder. “Born April 18, 1837, dyed November 9, 1870.”
He looks up at me with a smug grin.
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