Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  My grandfather’s response to the Las Vegas wedding was to the point: “I guess she had to get married.”

  I was born a year after my parents married. Still, I’ve always considered their wedding a shotgun marriage of sorts, a trigger-happy God pointing the gun, my mother’s guilt egging it all on. She had come close to the fires of hell one night, parked above Los Angeles in my dad’s car, the windows steamed with lust. They married soon after. The marriage lasted two years, most of which my dad spent scrambling for the door. He made his final exit when my mother told him a second child was on the way.

  Mama discovered he had another woman and her disgrace was complete.

  My mother returned to her parents’ house pregnant and prodigal with a toddler in tow. She had rebelled against her father. She had eaten of the tree of good and evil. She had known better. She was practically a divorced woman, and in the rural Pentecostal South that put her perilously close to being a hussy. Pentecostals conceded that divorce might be a necessary evil in extreme cases, but remarriage was condemned little more than legally sanctioned adultery. At twenty-three, my mother’s vision of herself as God’s own girl was lost. She was grateful when her parents allowed her to move into the apartment in the basement of their church. She was grateful when my brother was born healthy, grateful when she found a job, grateful her daddy never said, “I told you so.” She woke early Monday through Friday, dressed for work, dropped my infant brother and me at the babysitter’s, and headed to Whitman Trailers for another day of typing and shorthand. On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights she plinked out hymns on the piano at her father’s church as she had done for years before her trip out West. She was as grateful as she could be, a grateful corpse of a woman.

  And then she heard David Terrell preach. He was a twenty-seven-year-old six-foot looker with black hair, blue eyes, and a smile that flashed Holy Ghost charm to the last soul in the last row of the big tents in which he preached. My grandpa looked out over his congregation from the big throne of a chair that sat between the choir stall and the pulpit and smiled. The pews were full. He was lucky to have caught David Terrell between revivals. Later he would think otherwise.

  From her seat at the piano, Mama watched Brother Terrell walk to the pulpit and place his Bible on it. She was close enough to see the light bob off his Brylcreemed hair when he bowed his head and asked Jesus to hide him behind the cross. He opened his eyes, clutched at the sides of the pulpit as if it were a lifeboat, swayed a bit, then let go. He took three steps to the right, turned, and took another three to the left.

  “I came here . . . I came here tonight . . . I thought I’d preach on reaching the promised land. But now, now, I don’t know.”

  He didn’t sound much like a big-time preacher. His speech was slow and halting, and his shy demeanor stirred Mama’s protective instinct. Oh, what a stirring it must have been. Fifty years later and we still feel the ripples.

  Brother Terrell cocked his head and stared past the congregation. “I feel like . . . I feel like the Lord is leading me in a different direction. A lot has to happen before you reach the promised land, amen?”

  No answer. He brought his hand to his brow as if to shade his eyes and surveyed the congregation. “Y’all awake out there? Well? Maybe you will be soon.”

  He walked back to the pulpit, flipped his Bible open to Exodus, and read aloud the story of Moses. In chapter two, Pharaoh’s daughter defies her father and saves baby Moses from drowning in the Nile. He lives in the palace as an Egyptian but cannot forget that he is an Israelite, a member of the slave race. In a fit of pique, he kills an Egyptian. Chapter three opens with Moses on the lam. God appears to him as a burning bush with a gift for gab and tells him to confront Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When Moses asks who he should say had given him such a charge, the bush says, “I Am who I Am.”

  Brother Terrell moved away from the podium and walked in measured steps, heel to toe across the small platform, each step, each word a considered choice. His eyes searched the floor as if looking for a path that would take him where the spirit would have him go.

  “God chose Moses. That’s why he didn’t let him drown. God had a plan for him and Moses didn’t want any part of it. He was running from God.”

  Running from God. That was it. That was his way in. “You can’t outrun God. When God chooses you, you’re chosen for life.”

  Brother Terrell stepped off the platform into the narrow space between the altar and the pews. “I said you’re chosen for life.” He moved relentlessly, back and forth, picking up speed and volume as he went.

  “You can take a wrong turn!”

  Encouragement came from the back of the congregation. “Yes. Amen, you can.”

  “You can get stuck in Egypt for years.” He broke into a run across the front of the church.

  The audience couldn’t resist. “Uh-huh. Come on now, Brother.”

  The deacons in the front row raised their eyebrows and chuckled. Maybe this boy really could preach. He stopped and squalled into the face of one of the church’s biggest supporters. “You may get stuck on a bench. You may feel like you’re wasting your life and your talent.”

  The deacon was taken aback, but his arms shot into the air when Brother Terrell clapped his hands on the man’s head. “Restore his zeal, Lord. Bring him back to that holy ground, that hallowed place where you first made yourself known to him. In the name of Jesus, amen.”

  Brother Terrell launched back into his sermon with the same volume and fervor as before. He headed down the center aisle of the church. “You may be about to give up. You may think that no one hears your cries, that no one cares. But I’m here to tell you that I AM, the Lord God Almighty, has heard your cry.”

  He reached the back of the church and started back toward the front. It was as if there were something inside him that would not let him stand still, would not let him shut up. Words and movement and sweat poured from him. His shirt was soaked. The Brylcreem failed and a slick hank of hair fell across his forehead. He ranted like a man possessed.

  “I AM has seen your affliction. I AM has felt your sorrow. I AM will deliver you, I said he will take you by the hand and lead you out of the land of bondage.” Each time he screamed the words “I am,” he threw himself forward at the waist until he was crouched at a ninetydegree angle to the floor, running up and down the aisle. Steady murmurs of “amen,” “hallelujah,” “thank you, Jesus,” and “yes, Lord, yes” ran under and around Brother Terrell’s words, a rowdy communion of sounds and syllables that blurred the boundaries between preacher and congregation.

  He reached the front of the church and fell to his knees. “Your cry has surely come before the Lord of host and the day of your deliverance is at hand!”

  With the service at its emotional peak, Brother Terrell made his pitch for Jesus. He implored every person in the congregation who didn’t know the Lord to come to the front and lay down their burden of sin. Usually the invitation was accompanied by music, but there was no music that night. He turned to find out why, and saw an empty piano bench. My mother was on her knees at the altar. She had been seduced by the world. She had lost her way. It poured out of her: guilt, recrimination, resentment, self-loathing, and betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. Her daddy’s. Her husband’s. Her own. She had come to the end of her ability to make things work. She longed to go back to that time when God was as present as her breath, back to that place where everything had purpose and meaning.

  Brother Terrell placed his hand on her forehead, and she felt the weight of her failed marriage and all that had led up to it fall away. She saw her life as it was before, filled with grace and promise and rising on the wind of the spirit. In that moment she was changed.

  Brother Terrell preached at Grandpa’s church for a week. When the revival ended, he asked Mama to join his evangelistic team and become the organist for his tent revivals. She had never played an organ, but she knew that wasn’t a problem. She sold her furnit
ure, the wedding gifts, knickknacks, flatware, all of her slacks, and the more fashionable dresses and skirts in her wardrobe. It all had to go. What she couldn’t sell, she gave away. She kept a few of her plainer dresses, a couple of toys, two pots, a set of sheets, a few towels, and her old ’49 Ford. She didn’t want anything to slow her down.

  Chapter Three

  BROTHER TERRELL COULD SCAT ON SCRIPTURE LIKE A JAZZ SINGER HOPPED up on speed. He started slow, establishing his theme in a soft melody, circling around and over and through it for three, four, and five hours. He riffed on stories about his childhood, his last meal, or that time he ate a green persimmon, then meandered back to one of his standard themes of holiness, divine healing, the dry bones of institutionalized religion, or a medley of all three—without notes or outlines. I grew up thinking of him as the only one of his kind. He was in fact the last of his kind, or one of them. The sawdust-trail preachers were disappearing even as Brother Terrell joined their ranks. The term “sawdust trail” refers to the circuit traveled by the tent preachers and to the sawdust-covered aisles that a convert walked down to profess his or her new faith. The revivals peaked in the nineteen-forties and early fifties with the healing crusades of A. A. Allen, William Branham, Jack Coe, and Oral Roberts.

  Brother Terrell styled himself, consciously or not, after the preachers he admired most. He emulated the meek persona that was the hallmark of Branham, a mystic who often stared into space and frustrated his backers by walking off the stage when he didn’t feel the spirit. As Brother Terrell’s ministry grew he exhibited the flamboyance of Coe and Allen. Coe was famous for socking people with stomach ailments in the belly as he pronounced them healed. From Allen came the practice of passing out anointed handkerchiefs.

  Brother Terrell pitched his first tent in his late teens or early twenties. It was an old army tent canvas, shot through with so many holes that it let more rain in than it kept out. In the early days he sat at the front of the tent strumming his guitar and singing “ I Saw the Light” before an audience that consisted of his wife and infant son and thirty-six borrowed, empty chairs. The odds of him becoming a successful tent preacher were long. Many of the well-known revivalists had died, quit, or succumbed to scandal by the early nineteen-sixties, victims of the backbreaking labor, grueling schedules, and emotional grind that defined their way of life. A few, like Oral Roberts, had enough education and savvy to establish institutions and transform the notoriety of the sawdust trail into a more mainstream, and more bankable, respectability.

  By the time my mother joined the team, Brother Terrell’s tents were full most nights and he was considered a comer on the revival circuit. Still, it took a lot of poor people giving their last dollar to support a big tent operation. The crowds he attracted were a fragment compared with the earlier revivalists. Older preachers counseled him to find another way to make a living. The days of the great revivals were over, they said. With radio and movies and now television, the devil could distract people without much effort. Brother Terrell understood what they were saying, but he didn’t believe it applied to him. The Lord would make a way. Meanwhile, he stood in front of his audiences, held a white gallon cardboard bucket in each hand, and begged for money for more than an hour at a time.

  “I haven’t paid my team in weeks. We done everything we can to cut costs. We need five thousand dollars just to make payments on the equipment. I can’t do this on my own. I need your help.”

  People trickled up in ones and twos. Pam, Randall, and I dropped in the quarter or dime we had earned polishing Brother Terrell’s shoes and the shoes of the other preachers who traveled with us.

  “There’s a lost, dying world out there. A world that hasn’t heard the gospel. If you don’t help us, they’ll die and never hear it.”

  A cry entered his throat. I felt sorry for Brother Terrell, sorry that he had to cry and plead for money. Late at night when he and the other preachers sat around talking after a long service, I often heard him say he would rather take a beating than beg.

  We said we were living by faith, but any reasonable observer would have said we were barely scraping by. Each revival cost thousands of dollars in rent, fees, and ads. Brother Terrell had to make monthly payments on the tent, PA system, organ, and other equipment. My mother and other members of the evangelistic team stayed up all night praying with him that God would meet our needs. And I guess he did, but at the last minute and often with barely enough. Someone donated a house for us to live in during one revival, but it didn’t have electricity or running water. Pam and I took baths together outdoors in a galvanized aluminum tub with water that came through a hose connected to a windmill. When we finished, Randall and Gary plopped into the same dingy water and showered off with the hose afterward. We didn’t go hungry, but we ate mayonnaise sandwiches and pork and beans for lunch, and bologna sandwiches and pork and beans for dinner. I wondered from time to time why miracles performed under the tent were perfect and complete, while in our daily lives God left things half finished. It was as if something distracted him midway through a job and he wandered off, leaving us with just enough food in our bellies and just enough hope in our souls.

  When a windstorm damaged the tent, or one of the trucks that hauled the equipment had engine trouble, or a speaker blew, or a creditor demanded immediate payment, the financial strain increased. The men and women who traveled with Brother Terrell were in their early to midtwenties and completely dedicated to helping him spread the gospel. Mama and the others often signed their paychecks and put them back in the offering, trusting God to meet their needs. Betty Ann found it more difficult. In the eight years she had been married to Brother Terrell, she had watched his reputation grow and his ministry expand, but they still lived like poor people. All of the money that came in went to the ministry. There was no home, no stability, no reliable income. Loud and angry voices sometimes filtered through the walls of the Terrells’ bedroom all night long. Brother Terrell emerged the next morning looking beaten. My mother would sit and drink coffee with him and “try to encourage him.” Afterward, she counseled Betty Ann on how a minister’s wife had to support him, especially in hard times.

  One night in Huntsville, Alabama, as Brother Terrell stood in front of the prayer ramp, offering buckets in hand, the Woman Who Used To Be Big walked up and snatched the microphone from him. She had joined the tribes that followed us as we moved in the vicinity of their hometowns. Dockery, the toughest of the tent men, started toward the front to lead her back to her seat, but Brother Terrell waved him off. The woman held a ten-dollar bill by a corner and waved it over her head.

  “I’m giving my last ten dollars to Brother Terrell. God healed me of a tumor a few months back. Oh hondalie condalie.”

  Sufis twirl, Hindus chant, Buddhists sit in silence. Holy Rollers and charismatic Christians babble like fools or speak the language of the angels, depending on who describes the experience. Believers lapsed into speaking in “tongues” or glossolalia when their euphoria stretched beyond the bounds of ordinary language.

  The Woman Who Used To Be Big closed her eyes and began to jerk. Brother Terrell ducked a thrown elbow. When the jerking slowed, he thanked her and reached for the microphone. She backed him off with one hand.

  “When the doctor checked me out, he said what did the preacher do with the tumor? I said I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just know I was sick and now I’m well. Hondalie condalie. A mighty wind swept down from the top of the tent, and I was healed.”

  Brother Terrell reached again for the microphone, but she turned away from him.

  “I’m not done yet, Brother. You’ll know when I’m done.”

  He dropped the buckets and started laughing. She waved her ten-dollar bill again.

  “This ten dollars is to prove God for my son. He’s an alcoholic, but if God can bust a tumor, he can heal a drunk. This man is giving us everything he’s got. Y’all help me support him.”

  As she spoke, the black woman who sat next to Pam an
d me rose to her feet and waved a bill in the air. The words poured out of her mouth, soft and incessant. “Tell it. Amen. Go on now. Yes. Yes.” A soft alto counterpoint to the solo performance of the Woman Who Used To Be Big.

  Purses snapped open across the tent and wallets were fished out of pockets. Soon everyone waved bills in the air.

  The Woman Who Used To Be Big laid the microphone on the prayer ramp. She gripped Brother Terrell by the shoulder with one hand and with the other she motioned for people to come up to the front. Brother Terrell buried his face in his hands and cried as people walked down the aisles and dropped their money in the buckets that stood at his feet.

  We didn’t have to worry about money again during that revival. Brother Terrell paid the bills and had some money left over to give to my mother and other members of his team on the payroll, as well as the families who traveled with the tent.

  When the people ran out of money to give, they brought bags of clothes and quilts and grocery sacks filled with vegetables from their gardens: tomatoes, peaches, okra, greens, and squash, bushels and bushels of squash. I hated squash. God, I thought, must possess a spiteful sense of humor.