The thin slats of the wooden folding chair cut into the backs of my legs. The crinoline petticoat my mother forced me into sawed at my waist. A three-year-old’s version of hell. I yawned and squinted across the curved backs of all those people, leaning over the Bibles flapped opened in their laps. Hungry, hungry, devouring every morsel of spiritual food Brother Terrell handed down.
“Now what does that mean—faith is the substance of things hoped for? Everyone thinks Paul is talking about miracles here, and he is. But that ain’t all he’s saying. He’s saying faith is a real thing in the world. It has substance. It is substance. Amen?” He looked over his shoulder at the preachers lined up behind him on the platform.
“Amen. That’s right.” Their heads bobbed in unison.
Brother Terrell pulled at his nose, put his hands on both sides of the pulpit, and rocked forward. “Let’s go on a little deeper in the Word now. Hebrews, chapter eleven, verse three. ‘Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.’ ”
He moved out from behind the pulpit and strolled up and down the platform. He held the microphone so close to his lips, it was almost in his mouth. “Saints, this means the world and everything in it was spoken into existence by the world of faith. What Paul is saying here is that the very earth we walk on, the earth we are made up of, was created by faith. Are y’all with me?”
Amen, they were.
He walked over to the song leader, who sat with the ministers on the platform. “Brother Cotton, what time is it?” The man looked at his watch and mouthed back the answer.
Brother Terrell turned back to the audience. “It’s eleven thirty. Time flies, don’t it? Y’all ready to go home?”
The crowd yelled, “NO!”
I groaned and dropped my sweaty forehead into my hand. I had faith that if something didn’t happen soon, I would die of boredom and go straight to Beelzebub. My legs pumped back and forth, hitting the underside of my chair. Betty Ann reached across Pam, grabbed my knee, and applied pressure.
“What?”
She shook her head from side to side. My brother lay with his head in Betty Ann’s lap and his body curled in the chair on the other side of her. My legs slowed. A stream of drool oozed from his sagging mouth onto Betty Ann’s skirt. My stomach went queasy.
“You got spit on you.”
My words came out in a whisper loud enough that people turned and stared. Pam giggled, and her mother yanked her hair. Pam shot me a look that meant I would get it after church. At five, she was two years older than I was and capable of making me pay for every sin I committed against her. I placed my hands on either side of my seat and pushed my weight away from the wooden slats to relieve the pressure on my bony butt. I leaned forward slightly and the chair tossed me headfirst into one of the metal tentpoles. Two adults jumped up to see if I was okay. One of them helped me up and dusted the sawdust off my dress. The other said too bad there was no ice around. I put my hand to my head and felt a bump rise under the skin. Pam looked at me with suspicion.
“You did that to get attention.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
Betty Ann shushed us.
“Donna, sit down. Now. Pamela Eloise, shut up and pay attention.”
Pam pointed her finger at me. “She’s not paying attention.”
Betty Ann pinched her full lips into a hard little knot, raised her eyebrows, and inclined her head toward the platform and my mother. I sighed and sat down. Brother Terrell preached on.
“Faith changes things. When I was a boy doctors diagnosed me with cancer of the bone. They operated nine times and removed all the bone in my leg. I spent so much time in hospitals, I had to drop out of school in third grade.”
I sat up and listened. This was the story of the scar. Brother Terrell clipped the microphone around his neck, bent over, and rolled up his right pant leg to just below his knee. He spoke off microphone, and his voice sounded small and distant. “They wanted to amputate, but my mother wouldn’t let them. She believed God would heal me.” He gripped the white rail of the prayer ramp behind him, balanced on his left leg, and held his right in the air, crooked at the knee. His calf gleamed white under the spotlights, exposed between the dark fabric of his pant leg and sock like some subterranean creature seeing light for the first time. Only it wasn’t the first time. Brother Terrell revealed the scar at almost every revival.
“Come on up here, you that wants to see.”
People rose across the tent and made their way to the front. Men, women, children, even the scoffers crowded ’round.
“Go ahead, touch it. Jesus told Thomas to put his finger in the nail holes. See for yourself what faith will do.”
He lost his balance for a moment and one of the ministers on the platform brought him a chair. He took a seat and stretched out his leg. The scar ran along the inside of his right leg, from knee to ankle. One by one, people laid their fingers in the long trough of purple tissue. It was two fingers wide, two fingers deep, and marbled with yellow and green.
Pam and I threaded our way through the crowd. We never missed a chance to look at the scar. Randall stepped from behind a rear corner of the platform where he hung out with the tent crew and walked with us to the front. Brother Terrell acknowledged each of us with a quick hug and we huddled there beside him as people came forward. Randall was seven years old and not afraid of anything. He laid his fingers in the scar as he always did. Later, I would ask him for the hundredth time what it felt like, and he would tell me that it was as slick and hard as the devil’s backbone. As much as I longed to run my fingers down the length of the scar, I could not bring myself to touch it. I stared at it for as long as I could, trying to peer past the outraged skin into the empty cavern of Brother Terrell’s calf. There was something there or something not there that I needed to understand, but I did not know and could not have articulated the nature of that something.
Brother Terrell picked up the microphone that hung around his neck and spoke directly into it. “The doctors said I’d never walk without crutches, that I’d be a cripple for the rest of my life.
“Then one day when I was nine years old, Jesus stood in my room. He said, ‘David, get up. Walk.’ I reached for my crutches. He said, ‘Not with those.’ ”
Brother Terrell leapt from the chair and people scattered like the jacks Pam and I threw between services. “When Jesus heals you, praise God, you don’t need no crutches. You don’t need no bone. You don’t need nothin’ but faith to take that first step.”
The words flew from his mouth with the ferocity of hornets and we rushed before them to our sections and seats. It wasn’t so much what he said, but how he said it. Every word uttered with such urgency that I half expected the world to end before he finished his sentence.
He prowled in front of the audience now, swishing the microphone cord when he turned so that it trailed him like a living thing. His pant cuff fell a bit as he walked, but I could still see the naked glow of that pale patch of skin.
His words slowed and lulled the crowd into believing the storm had passed. “My mama had faith. She believed.”
Then he crammed the microphone into his mouth again and the veins on his neck popped up. “You got to have faith. You got to hold on. You can’t lie there on your cot and die!”
His voice grew louder with each sentence. “You got to get up. Get uuuuuuup. Get uuuuuuup!”
He went hoarse each time he screamed “get up.” The ministers on the platform stood. Mama stood and clapped her hands and amened.
“Yes. That’s right. Bless him, Jesus. Tell it, brother.”
“When Jesus tells you stand up and walk, you better get on your feet. Get up!”
People all over the tent rose from their seats, hands in the air. Pam and I stood in our chairs, trying to see over or around the grown-ups. My mother began to play “God Don’t Never Change,” a fast-paced song t
hat turned up the energy.
Brother Terrell stood at the top of the prayer ramp and the crowd moved toward him. The sick, the blind, the deaf, the deformed in body and spirit. By the time the prayer line formed, his right hand was red and hot and jerking like a downed power line.
My mother was deep into the music, a gap-toothed double-wide smile parked across her face. Betty Ann left my brother in the care of a friend and moved to the front to help with the prayer line. Pam and I climbed down from our chairs and made our way to the side of the platform at the end of the prayer ramp. Brother Terrell was someplace else entirely. Randall came and stood beside us, his cowlick standing straight up.
“Look at that.”
A woman with a stomach so large she looked two years pregnant labored up the ramp, pulling herself forward by the rails, breathing through her mouth. With each step, her face turned a little redder. Randall put his hand over his mouth.
“Her stomach will be there three days before the rest of her. Daddy’ll be lucky if she don’t die before she gets to him.”
We giggled. Brother Terrell leaned over and whispered something to the woman. She nodded and raised her hands. The people who stood in line behind her on the ramp backed up. Betty Ann and the preachers who waited in front of her on the ramp moved away. If this woman went down in the spirit, no one wanted to go with her. Randall, Pam, and I edged beyond the corner of the platform for a better view. No one was left on the ramp but the woman and Brother Terrell. The music and the clapping stopped. He raised his hand to place it on her forehead, but before he could touch her, the woman’s skirt dropped around her ankles. Her big stomach was gone. Randall let out a whoop. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder at the men on the platform, and they all doubled over laughing. He whirled back toward the audience and jumped up and down, just above the ramp where the woman still stood with her hands raised and her eyes closed.
“She’s healed, praise God. The spirit of God has filled this place like a mighty wind, just like in the Bible, hallelujah! The healing power of God destroyed the tumor. It’s gone.”
Anyone still in their seats rushed to the front. My mother pounded the Hammond and we sang on and on about all that God could do and how he never changed.
The woman stood there in her blouse and slip with her eyes closed, her arms and hands raised, her lips speaking a language that made sense only to her. Betty Ann and the other women recovered their composure and moved toward her. Someone pulled up her skirt and held it in place at her waist. Someone else grasped her elbow and eased her down the ramp. She never opened her eyes or put her hands down. When they reached the bottom, the women talked to her and tried to get her to hold her skirt up. She grasped it for a moment, then let it fall and began to dance in her blouse and slip. Pam, Randall, and I watched in astonishment. The woman didn’t seem to know she had lost her skirt, or if she knew, she didn’t care. Brother Terrell had that effect on people.
The miraculous and the mundane tap-danced up and down the aisles of the tent together, and it never occurred to me to question if one was more real than the other. I don’t think it occurred to the adults either. We experienced the world through the scrim of belief, and that made everything possible. No one followed up to see if the miracles held, but people who said they were healed often returned. The Woman Who Used To Be Big, that’s what we called her, came back and gave her testimony several times during the monthlong revival.
“I went to the doctor to be checked out like Brother Terrell told me. The doctor said, ‘What happened to the tumor?’ I said the man of God healed me.”
As word of the healing spread, the crowd increased until people stood two and three deep along the outside perimeter of the tent. Ambulances transported people from hospitals. Stretchers and wheelchairs lined the aisles until the fire marshal complained and we moved the sick behind the platform, where they waited until Brother Terrell called a prayer line.
Chapter Two
I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER’S FIRST MEETING WITH DAVID Terrell as the Holy Roller equivalent of the big bang. It must have seemed as though their twin histories had been spinning toward each other with cataclysmic urgency since birth. They were kindred spirits, each believing he or she had been plucked from the mass of ordinary folks by the long bony fingers of God and set aside for great things. Almost all of the childhood stories told by Brother Terrell and my mother focused on the experience of being chosen. Brother Terrell often said from the platform that growing up he had always had a sense that he was different. No doubt the leg surgeries and hospital stays that were a part of his illness set him apart from other kids. The visit from Jesus at age nine must have sealed the deal. Then there were the visions: He foretold his uncle’s and then his grandmother’s death; and the voices: when he played alone he often heard God calling his name.
My mother, too, grew up on a first-name basis with God. She was only eight when she heard the voice calling her name in the woods next to the Assemblies of God church where her daddy was pastor. There were no burning bushes, no glowing figures, only an ordinary and somewhat familiar voice calling, Carolyn. She wandered through the trees and looked behind the largest trunk. Carolyn. No one there. Carolyn.
That night as she told her family the story, a feeling of awe swept over her. That voice, the voice that called her name in the trees, the voice that sounded so familiar yet belonged to no one, that voice was the eternal I Am, the same voice that spoke the world into existence. She knew it. When her parents asked how she knew, she shrugged and asked, “Well, who else could it have been?” In her family, no one would have suggested it was her imagination. My Pentecostal grandparents and their children existed in a reality that was an extension of biblical times. They believed the temporal world lay like a fine curtain over the realm of the eternal. At any moment the archangel Michael might reach through the veil and tap them on the shoulder with a heavenly message. Or the devil might slip through and tempt with some cheap bit of finery. It could be hard to tell one from the other at times, especially given Satan’s love of deception, but no one questioned the veracity of the experiences.
Being singled out by God brought the kind of attention that was hard to come by for kids in large, poor families. Born in 1932 to Alabama sharecroppers, Brother Terrell was the youngest of seven kids. The family lived in a shack without running water or electricity. A broken-down horse provided the only transportation. The Great Depression and the death of Brother Terrell’s father turned the family’s subsistent poverty into a struggle for survival. His mother left him in the care of one of his sisters and went to work in the fields with her other five children. She left at sunrise and came home at sundown. On Sundays, she hitched the horse to a rickety wagon and drove her brood to the nearest holiness church, a backwoods term for a nondenominational Pentecostal offshoot. Her faith was her only source of hope.
Mama’s childhood was slightly less desperate. She was one of the middle kids in a family of nine children. Her daddy was the pastor of a string of Assemblies of God churches throughout Alabama and Florida. He farmed to put food on the table. My mother and her siblings picked cotton to pay for their shoes and other necessities. Mama and Brother Terrell were thought to be sensitive children by their mothers and downright peculiar by their siblings. Brother Terrell wrote songs and picked out tunes on a neighbor’s guitar early on. For a brief time during adolescence he harbored hopes of making it big on the Grand Ole Opry, but the visions kept coming and he realized that God would not let him go.
Mama was a musical prodigy, further proof of God’s favor. Her story is that while picking at the notes on the piano in her daddy’s church one day, she was suddenly able to play a hymn straight through. From that moment she could play any song she wanted. When she was fifteen, she saw herself in a night vision playing a big pearly accordion. A night vision is a foretelling of the future, only the seer is asleep. People who have night visions often go on to full-fledged wide-awake visions. When Mama opened her eyes,
she could still feel the heft of the instrument against her. She was meant to have an accordion. Her daddy said that might be true, but he didn’t have the money to buy one. Another teenage girl might have pleaded or thrown a fit. My mother fasted and prayed. In the early hours of what was to be her fourth day without food, a knock on the door awakened her daddy. He turned on the light and opened the door. There on his front porch stood a man he recognized but didn’t know well.
“Preacher, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got to give you this.”
He thrust a wad of bills at my grandfather and turned to go.
“Wait. What is this? What’s it for?” My grandfather tugged at the man’s sleeve.
The man shook him off. “Look, I haven’t been able to sleep for days. Something keeps telling me to bring you this money. I don’t know what it’s for. But you have to take it so I can get some sleep.”
Later that morning my grandfather went to town and ordered an accordion from Sears, Roebuck. My mother played it in church the day it arrived. She says she never hit a wrong note.
By the time Brother Terrell came along, Mama needed a second chance to fulfill her destiny. She had blown the first one. Her mother had told her, “Honey, any woman can get married and have children. God has something better in mind for you.” Mama’s plan was to go to Bible school and become a missionary, but she ran away from home, or away from her controlling daddy, instead. My grandfather had the idea that his high-cheeked, leggy daughter was something of a wild girl and he was determined to rein her in. According to Mama, the last straw came when he dragged her out of a boy’s car at a local snack shack in “broad daylight” and whipped her with his belt. She was eighteen years old.
She hopped a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles. There she dropped her middle name, Carolyn, in favor of her first name, Betty, and cut her long, stringy hair into a bouncy bob. One broken taboo spawned a host of others: movies, skating rinks, lipstick, slacks, bathing suits, men. The path to perdition is tediously routine for a Holy Roller girl. She went to church, she prayed, but God no longer dropped by. She met my dad in LA, a sinner boy who was everything my grandfather feared. He smoked and drank and indulged a taste for all things fast. Cars. Boats. Women. Mama’s religious beliefs and naïveté cast her as something of an exotic in my dad’s eyes. Her LA nickname, Betty the Body, tells the rest of the story. My dad wooed her with professions of love, promises of repentance, and declarations that she alone could save him. Six weeks after they met, my parents married. Asked why she married a man she hardly knew and one so different from her, my mother’s answer is typical: “I guess I thought I could help him.” The cost of bringing a soul into the fold was never too high.
Holy Ghost Girl Page 2