Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Sawdust Trail
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
The Road Through Hell
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
The End-Time
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Acknowledgements
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, October 2012
Copyright © 2011 by Donna Johnson
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Johnson, Donna M.
Holy Ghost girl : a memoir / Donna M. Johnson. p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54518-8
1. Johnson, Donna M.—Childhood and youth. 2. Children of clergy—United States—Biography. 3. Terrell, David, (David R.) 4. Evangelists—United States—Biography.
5. Camp meetings—United States. I. Title.
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For Amber and Kirk.
And for my brother and sisters.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a
religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to
make individuals exceptional and eccentric.
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
I understood the stillness behind the sky
But never the words of men.
Friedrich Hölderlin,
“In My Boyhood Days”
Prologue
“DONNA, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE COMING TO THE FUNERAL, BUT I HEARD Daddy’s gonna try to raise Randall from the dead. Call me.”
My sister left the message as my husband and I stumbled into our darkened kitchen hauling groceries, deli takeout, and briefcases. We had finished another twelve mind-numbing hours at our marketing firm, making deals, finessing budgets, and placating clients, employees, and sometimes each other, racing toward every deadline as though it were life or death. The red light of the answering machine winked at us from the counter. My husband flipped on the overhead light.
“That preacher’s going to resurrect his son? We’re going, right?”
I shook my head no and said yes. Randall Terrell had been dead twenty-four hours. I was still deciding whether to attend his funeral and everyone else had moved on to resurrection. Even Jesus stayed in the tomb three days, but my family had not followed convention, not in life and apparently not in death.
Randall, his sister Pam, and my brother Gary and I spent our formative years traveling the revival circuit known as the sawdust trail. Our families formed the inner circle of a Holy Roller tribe that preached, prayed, and scared sinners into the fold under giant gospel tents that eventually included the world’s largest—a red, white, and blue canvas almost as long as two football fields. I was three and Gary was one when my mother signed on as organist for Randall’s daddy. She sold everything and joined the caravan of eighteen-wheelers, faded station wagons, leaky campers, and other gimpy vehicles that limped and lurched from one breakdown to the next. In later years a fleet of Mercedes and a small jet would join the convoy, churning a wake of suspicion that eventually led to the downfall of Brother David Terrell: healer, end-time prophet, and as close to a father figure as I would get.
We descended on towns like a flock of magpies, our public-address system crackling and squawking with cries of “Repent” and “Be Saved,” “Jesus Is Coming Soon” and “Be Healed,” the phrase that drew multitudes. When Brother Terrell asked those in need of prayer to come forward, most of the congregation rushed toward him. The lines looped around the tent in a human labyrinth of suffering. Strangers pressed against one another, sweat and breath mingling in a collective desire to be touched by that hand. As believers passed under him, they were caught for a moment in a fierce blue gaze just before he squeezed his eyes shut, rolled his head upward, and slapped his right palm on their foreheads. “In the name of Je-sus.” They reeled and hit the ground as dead weight. They threw down their crutches. Praise God. They didn’t walk, they ran. Hallelujah. The deaf heard. Glory be to God. And the dumb spoke with the tongues of angels. Amen.
I had not seen Randall or his father for more than twenty years. It had been longer since I had stepped inside a tent. During the intervening years I had indulged in the posthippie haze of the seventies well into the mideighties before finally graduating from college. Like the woman at the well, I had married and divorced more than one man and lived with several who were not my husband. I had written reams of advertising copy, attended my daughter’s graduation from college and graduate school, and married a poet who was also a successful entrepreneur. Somewhere along the line, I had become a semirespectable, doubt-ridden Episcopalian with Buddhist tendencies.
My sister’s message on the answering machine brought it all back: blond pine shavings covering the dirt floor of the tent, feathered and piled one up
on the other, each singular as a snowflake. My brother and I bedding down with the Terrell kids on that field of sawdust, wrapped in a nest of quilts while the adults paced the tent, praying into the early hours long after the crowd melted away and the last amen was uttered. The warmth of the cannon-shaped kerosene heater roaring beside us on teeth-chattering cold nights, its red tip glowing in the darkness like the all-seeing eye of God.
That November evening as my husband and I stood, mouths agape, in the white-tiled kitchen of our urban home, I felt the past rise up and move toward me like some long-slumbering, pitifully deformed creature. It smelled of pine shavings and kerosene. Its rough, dense texture moved in and out of memory like a tent flap blowing in the breeze. My mother pulsed out a familiar melody on the Hammond organ:Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down. Ain’t no gra-ave gonna hold my body down.
Somewhere a tambourine kept time.
The Sawdust Trail
1960–1962
THE TWILIGHT SOUND OF CICADA
SINGING OF A DAY
ALREADY GONE BY.
Dōgen
Chapter One
THE TENT WAITED FOR US, HER CANVAS WINGS HOVERING OVER A FIELD of stubble that sprouted rusty cans, A&P flyers, bits of glass bottles, and the rolling tatter of trash that migrated through town to settle in an empty lot just beyond the city limits. At dusk, the refuse receded, leaving only the tent, lighted from within, a long golden glow stretched out against a darkening sky. She gathered and sheltered us from a world that told us we were too poor, too white trash, too black, too uneducated, too much of everything that didn’t matter and not enough of anything that did. Society, or at least the respectable chunk of it, saw the tent and those of us who traveled with it as a freak show, a rolling asylum that hit town and stirred the local Holy Rollers, along with a few Baptists, Methodists, and even a Presbyterian or two, into a frenzy. Brother Terrell reveled in that characterization.
“I know they’s people call me David Nut Terrell. I’m not ashamed of it.” He bounced up and down the forty-foot-long platform with the pop and spring of a pogo stick. “I’m crazy for Jesus, crazy for the Lord.” The crowd was on its feet, pogoing with him.
The tent went up in all kinds of weather, but in my memory it’s always the hottest day of summer when the canvas rises. A cloud of dust hangs over the grounds, stirred by the coming and going of the twenty to thirty people it took to raise the canvas. Local churches sent out volunteers, but most of the work was done by families who followed Brother Terrell from town to town, happy to do the Lord’s work for little more than a blessing and whatever Brother Terrell could afford to pass along to them. When he had extra money, they shared in it. He had a reputation as a generous man who “pinched the buffalo off every nickel” that passed through his hands. He employed only two to four “professional” tent men, a fraction of the number employed by organizations of a similar size. The number of employees remained the same over the years even as the size of the tents grew larger. “World’s largest tent. World smallest tent crew,” was the joke.
The air smelled of grease and sweat. Men dressed in long pants and long-sleeved shirts (the Lord’s dress code) ran back and forth, calling to one another over the gear grind of the eighteen-wheeler as it pulled one of seven thirty-foot center poles into the air. I held my breath as the men wrestled the poles into place, praying that a pole didn’t fall and knock a couple of men straight to glory, but making sure I didn’t miss it if it did. With a couple of center poles secured, the men broke for lunch, mopping their faces with red or blue bandanas or an already soaked shirtsleeve. Pam and I brought out the trays of bologna sandwiches our mothers had made and walked among them passing out the food. I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the greasy imprints their fingers made in the white bread or the sour hugs that accompanied their thank-yous.
It took three to four days to put the tent up, and the site looked different each time we visited. Some days I picked my way through red and blue poles that lay on the ground in seemingly careless arrangements, imagining them as tall slender ladies who had fainted in the heat or young girls waiting to be asked to dance. Proof that a romantic temperament can take root anywhere, because the only dancers I had seen were believers who jigged in the spirit. The men rolled out sections of canvas over the horizontal poles, attaching the cutout pieces to the base of the now-raised center poles. They laced the sections together and swarmed the flattened tent like a team of tiny tailors stitching a ball gown for a female colossus. With the sewing finished, a man was stationed at the winch attached to each of the seven center poles. Someone shouted, “Go!” and the men cranked in unison. The canvas rose around them, and when it reached waist height, crew members hunched over like gnomes, scrambled underneath, and pushed up the secondary poles. A few more cranks and the peaks billowed thirty feet in the air.
With the tent secured, the crew hung spotlights and secondary lighting from the poles, hammered together the sections of the platform, unloaded the Hammond organ, and positioned the amplifiers and speakers. The expanse of the tent posed a challenge for the sound system, so it was important that the speakers be positioned in just the right places. The tent families unloaded stacks of wooden folding chairs and arranged them in orderly sections that fanned outward from the platform. Twenty-five hundred chairs for the first night, with a thousand more stacked in the truck to be squeezed in as needed throughout the revival. Long one-by-one boards were placed between the chairs’ legs to connect them and keep the rows uniform.
By seven o’clock on opening night, a dusty brown canvas and a collection of scuffed-up poles had been transformed into an ad hoc cathedral. People came from near and far. Black and white, old and young, poor and poorer. Women with creased brows and apologetic eyes as faded as their cotton dresses, clutching two and three children who looked almost as worn out as their mothers. Men, taut as fiddle strings, hunch-shouldered in overalls or someone else’s discarded Sunday best, someone taller and better fed. They came to find a sense of purpose and a connection to God and one another. They came because the promises of the beatitudes were fulfilled for a few hours under the tent, and the poor were truly blessed. They came for miracles, answers, and salvation. They came to see the show.
It was our first night in Chattanooga. Up on the platform, Mama pulsed out a bass line on the organ and Brother Cotton swung his arm through the air like a metronome as he led the audience through another chorus of “Jesus on the Mainline.” He yelled, “Call him up and call him up” into the microphone and the audience screamed back, “Tell him what you want.” Brother Cotton’s job as song leader and front man was to warm up the audience for Brother Terrell. Sometimes the crowd was cold and unresponsive, and he sweated through his undershirt and dress shirt just trying to get them to say amen. He said the crowd in Chattanooga was so hot, they warmed him up. He and the audience fed off each other, tossing the lines of song back and forth until the words gradually ebbed and music took over.
In the Holy Roller lexicon, “shouting” is another word for dancing in the spirit. Believers clap their hands and sway, stamping one foot and then the other as the organ, trombone, drums, guitars, and tambourines pull them into an ecstatic dance that wipes out the conscious mind and leaves the body with little control over its movements. The crowd was in full shouting mode that night, churning the sawdust and the dirt under it into the air. Floodlights filtered through the dust, casting the scene in an otherworldly haze as Brother Terrell’s wife threaded her way through the flailing bodies and herded Pam and Randall and Gary and me under the packed tent. Betty Ann’s job was to keep the four of us kids corralled and quiet during a service that lasted from two to five hours, depending on how the spirit moved on a particular night. Given that our ages ranged from one to seven, she may have pulled the toughest tent duty of all. Jostled by the clapping, stomping people, Betty Ann pulled Gary from Randall’s arms and shifted him onto her hip. She peered through the crowd to point out a row of chairs, and that’s when Ra
ndall made his escape. She called after him, then looked around and smiled apologetically at whomever happened to notice. People held the Terrell offspring to a higher standard than other kids, and when they fell short, it was her failing, not Brother Terrell’s. She shrugged and steered Pam and me to our seats. We joined the singing just as Brother Terrell walked onto the platform and took the microphone from Brother Cotton. He finished off the chorus with the audience and raised his hands in prayer. Mama slowed the tempo of the music and brought the volume down.
Brother Terrell spoke in a low, quiet voice. “Put your hands up with me and tell Jesus how much you love him. We looooove you, Lord. We magnify your holy name, God. We ask you to look down and bless us tonight, Lord. Open our hearts that we might hear what you have to say. Ooooooooh, God.”
In a matter of seconds the mood went from celebratory to somber. Hands were raised across the tent. Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand or more, raised their voices in an orchestration of prayer and unknown tongues that gained in volume and momentum, then drifted to a close. Brother Terrell walked over to the podium and opened his Bible. “I feel like we need to carve deep into the meat of the Word tonight.”
Three hours later he was still carving, explicating scripture after scripture. In all that time, he had not once roused the audience to its feet, danced across the platform, or asked a single person to run around the tent for Jesus. His Bible lay open on the pulpit and his finger moved across the page. “Hebrews, chapter eleven, verse one. ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”
Holy Ghost Girl Page 1