Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  Two days later Richland County set Brother Terrell free. A newspaper photograph shows him smiling for the cameras, riding on the shoulders of followers as they carry him away from the jail. He told reporters he harbored no hard feelings, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. He said the revival had been such a success he was going to enlarge his tent to seat another twenty-five hundred people. The judge survived, though some believers still contend he died within the month. “Touch not my anointing, touch not my anointing,” they mumbled, underscoring the biblical warning with meaningful looks only they could decipher.

  Chapter Twelve

  SAWDUST-TRAIL PREACHERS LOVED TO BRAG ABOUT THEIR TENT SIZE. During the nineteen-forties, Oral Roberts claimed his tent was the world’s largest. The faith healer Jack Coe covertly measured Roberts’s tent and had his own extended by three feet, just enough to transfer bragging rights to his operation. A few years after Coe’s death, Brother Terrell was able to make the same claim. The new tent was big, but no one can remember just how big. It accommodated anywhere from five to ten thousand people, depending on who is giving the estimate. My mother remembers it as stretching the length of two football fields. Others put the length at a football field and a half. Brother Terrell made the proud claim that the tent was bigger than the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus tent.

  It was hard to feel persecuted under the world’s largest tent. Every night was one long hallelujah party. In the midst of all the celebrating, Randall’s stomach rose like a harvest moon. His long, mournful face bobbed above his thirty-six-inch belly, giving him the appearance of a sideshow freak: nine years old and eight months pregnant. His energy diminished until the tent men carried him into the services on a cot. Brother Terrell prayed for Randall night and day, but he didn’t get any better. Everyone agreed the Lord was putting Brother Terrell’s faith to the test. And Randall, was he being tested too?

  I asked my mother once if God hated kids. She looked shocked and said no, of course not. The story of Abraham offering his son as a human sacrifice at God’s bidding had convinced me otherwise. The adults interpreted the story as a test of Abe’s faith. I remember thinking, He has a knife at his son’s throat, and it’s only a test? Small wonder that when the grownups spoke of the necessity of trusting God, I always heard an unspoken “or else.” I banished these thoughts as soon as I had them. I didn’t want him coming after me.

  As Randall lay on his cot growing weaker and God tested his daddy and his daddy pursued my mother and my mother prayed for the strength not to acquiesce and acquiesced anyway, people began to get healed right and left under the tent. During one service, a man stood a few rows from where Randall lay and began to yell, “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus” in the flat throaty monotone of a deaf-mute. Brother Terrell ran over and interviewed his sister, who said the man had been deaf since birth but had been healed spontaneously while listening to Brother Terrell preach. Brother Terrell brought the man to the front and put him through his standard tests. He stepped behind him and clapped his hands, and the man jumped. Still standing behind the guy, he spoke simple words to see if the man could repeat those words; he could. While this was going on, a young man on crutches stubbed to the front. He said he had broken his leg a couple of weeks before, and . . . before he reached the end of his story, Brother Terrell slapped his hand on the man’s head, shouting, “In the name of Jesus! Be made whole!”

  He hit the guy so hard, the man fell to the ground.

  “Now, get up and walk. Don’t be afraid. Come on.”

  He pulled the man up and together they walked across the front of the tent. When they reached the altar area, the man grabbed his crutches and beat them into splinters on the ground. The spirit, and some would say frenzy, could not be contained. A woman who sat close to us and who had been too shy to make eye contact earlier was suddenly running around the tent at full speed, hair and skirts flying. Another woman close by thrust her baby into the arms of a nearby stranger and took off after her. I figured they would be walking by the time they made it all the way around, but they didn’t even look winded when they returned. Men all over the tent climbed the new tent poles for Jesus. Brother Terrell made his way to Randall’s cot and knelt beside him. We expected him to rise with Randall on his arm, but he stood up alone.

  Brother Terrell preached on divine healing every night. “I feel the presence of the Most High God tonight. Someone, oh, someone is reaching out to God tonight. Some-ooooooooone is touching the hem of his garment.”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder at the men on the platform. “Would some of y’all go bring Randall up here? I want him to be right in the middle of this divine power.”

  Just as the men settled Randall and his cot at the very front of the tent, the blood came. It covered the sheet that draped Randall and turned the sawdust around him red. The crowd issued a collective ooh.

  Brother Terrell never missed a beat. “Clean him up.”

  A couple of women scurried to the front and washed Randall’s face with a damp towel. Someone exchanged the bloody top sheet for a clean one from a nearby camper, and Brother Terrell preached on.

  “By the spi-rit of the Most High God, I was sent here tonight to set the captives free. By his stripes we are made whole, not just better, but whole. I proclaim victory over death, victory over disease, victory over the devil, victory over everything that would destroy God’s people.”

  He stood over Randall and began to sing “Victory in Jesus” a cappella and the crowd joined in. He broke down by the end of the chorus and someone led him away. Dockery and the other tent men carried Randall behind the platform and the crowd sang on.

  Randall went to the hospital for a transfusion. Brother Terrell didn’t want him to go, but the evangelistic team talked him into it; just so the boy could get some blood in him, they said. Two days after the transfusion, Randall was back at the front of the tent on the cot. A couple of weeks later, he was off the cot, and by the last night of the revival, he was well again.

  The last service of the revival was over and we were packing up to move on. Pam shimmied up one of the thin six-foot poles that held up the outside curtain of the tent. She hung there for a second and looked down at me, dangling a long chain of spit from her lips, and then sucked it back up before it escaped. I grunted and strained on the pole next to her. She dropped to the ground, sprang up like a coil, and hauled herself up again, hand over hand. My spaghetti arms gave out before I was halfway up, and I plopped down hard, dress flying up, panties exposed. No way to pretend I meant this to happen. I stood up and looked around. On one side of us the night: layers of black broken by blasts of artificial light blaring from tall, dark poles and spilling from the mouths of squat machines rolled from place to place, thick cords snaking behind like tails. Adults strolled in and out of the electric glare, animated with the business of breaking down the tent and moving on. Generators, giant cicadas of sound, whirred an incessant drone, while three eighteen-wheelers grunted and wheezed and the tent men pitched their voices.

  “Back it up, Red.”

  “Tell me when.”

  “Come on. Come on. Stop. Whoa, I said.”

  I pushed my back against the pole, spread my legs into a wide v, and stretched my arms level with my shoulders as far as they would reach. Half of me in the dark, the other half in the bright light of the empty tent. Folding chairs slapped shut one by one. Randall, Brother Terrell, Brother Cotton, and assorted other brothers walked down the long uniform rows, plucking each chair off its legs, picking the rows clean, stacking the chairs end to end, section by section. Someone threw a quilt over the big Hammond organ. Soon they would pull apart the platform, dismantle the prayer ramp, and lower the tent to half-mast. Most of the men worked until two or three in the morning, slept a few hours, and returned at first light. They would remove the poles and the augers that anchored the tent deep in the ground, and as the sun came up, they would pull the tent apart and load her into the back of the eighteen-whee
ler.

  Usually we were long down the highway by the time the tent was loaded. But on this night, there were no adults hurrying us into cars. They sat together under the floodlights that hung from the center poles and talked and talked. Sister Waters was there. Randall said she was like the measles, hard to get rid of. The baby cried and Sister Waters took her from Betty Ann and thumped her on the back like a watermelon. The harder Tina cried, the harder she thumped. It was late at night or early in the morning and Pam, Randall, Gary, and I fought to stay awake.

  “Afraid they’ll miss something,” the adults murmured, and they were right. We threaded a circle of twine through our fingers and snapped it. We arm-wrestled and popped our knuckles and kicked our feet until our bodies began to wind down and we moved slower and slower and then hardly at all. Gary went down first, then Randall. Pam and I hung on, despite knowing looks from the adults. I tried to figure out what those looks might mean, but couldn’t follow a thought.

  My head grew heavier until it leaned against Mama’s shoulder and my eyes shut for a minute, only a minute. They opened again as someone, a man, carried me from the tent into the cold, damp night air. He held me high on his shoulder, his arm wrapped tight around my legs. I breathed in familiar aftershave: Dockery or Brother Cotton, someone I knew. My head bounced and I saw my mother close behind with Gary in her arms. Low, serious voices moved around us. Smoke shot from a tailpipe, gray and blue against the blackness. Odd, how the mind records the most random detail and leaves the larger picture a blur. A car door opened and hands reached out and pulled me in and down, onto a scratchy weave of upholstery. My head settled on a broad thigh. A woman’s sob broke through the static of voices. What? A question, soft and unformed, rose from the bottom of my consciousness. I tried to push myself up and was pulled back down by hands, warm and soothing, on my shoulders, my forehead. The door closed. Car wheels crunched through gravel. We were moving. I let myself sink back into sleep. Everything was okay as long as we were moving.

  The Road Through Hell

  1962–1966

  NOTHING IS SO MUTE AS A GOD’S MOUTH.

  Rainer Maria Rilke,

  “Straining So Hard Against the Strength of Night”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING WITH RANDALL’S FEET IN MY FACE AND PAM curled beside me. A familiar arrangement. We were used to rolling out of bed after a long night of travel, and tiptoeing around the new house or trailer while our parents slept. Their sprawled bodies and slack faces communicated everything we needed to feel secure. We must have lived in the cheapest and shabbiest of places, but I didn’t experience them that way. My mother’s presence, and her determination to scrub every corner of every place we lived in, made these temporary dwellings feel like home.

  Pam stirred and we sat up together and looked around. The dingy little room in which we found ourselves felt utterly forsaken. There was no window with morning light streaming through, no heater, no sad-sack Jesus staring down from the colorless wall, no boxes of sheets and bedspreads and whatnots waiting to be unpacked. I could feel my mother’s absence. She was gone; worse, she had never been here. I looked to Pam for reassurance. She put her fingers to her lips, took my hand, and we crawled to the other end of the bed, where our brothers slept. She shook Randall’s shoulder. He pushed her away and sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes with his fist. Gary startled awake. I put my arm around him and rocked him against me. The four of us said nothing, hoping, I think, to keep the forlornness of this place from hardening into a more solid reality.

  Sister Waters rolled into the doorway. “Y’all going to sleep all day?”

  When people said Sister Waters was half-Hi-waiian, I always imagined a little line drawn down the center of her. This split somehow explained her dual personality. The Waters was two women: the one who smiled and told our mamas how much she loved us, and the one who grabbed and twisted and pulled at us till it hurt when they were not looking. It was the mean Waters with whom we now found ourselves living. The mean Waters who explained that we were so much trouble our parents had sent us to live with her, without saying good-bye, so they could preach the gospel without having to stop and tend to us every five minutes. The mean Waters who huffed down the hallway of her shotgun house every night, grabbed Gary from the bed, and kicked him to the john, saying it was time he learned to pee in the pot, while Pam, Randall, and I wound ourselves around her legs and begged her to stop.

  I spent most days waiting for Pam and Randall to come home from school. The Waters often locked me out of the house when they left in the morning and didn’t open the door again until they returned. If it rained, I sat in a corner of the porch and watched the water pour from the sky. When the rain stopped, I set my naked one-armed baby-doll adrift in a mud puddle and played out the Moses story. I sat on the front porch steps and turned the knobs of the Etch A Sketch until I became the darkened endpoint that moved across the light-gray slate, creating a world of lines and boxes and losing myself in that world. I tried not to think about food because most days there was nothing between breakfast and dinner. Sometimes I dug turnips from an abandoned vegetable plot to eat, and when I was thirsty I put my mouth over the water hydrant at the side of the house. If I needed “to go,” I went to the old outhouse in the field. Having no idea I was a poverty-stricken kid, I pretended to be poor. I didn’t feel mistreated. I felt fortunate. Gary was too little to play outside all day and had to stay inside with Sister Waters. I wasn’t sure why I had to stay outside and didn’t want to risk asking. It was clear who had the better end of the deal.

  At some point in the day, my thoughts went into hibernation. I sat on the porch, elbows to knees, and watched the clouds move across the sky, careful not to think, not to want, not to anticipate. Longing rooted me in time and deepened the chasm between where I was and where I wanted to be: with my mother, or at the very least playing freeze tag with Pam and Randall. I spent my time looking instead of thinking. I studied birds, ants, trees, bushes. If I looked at something long enough, the veil that separated me from it fell away. There was no I. There was no it. There was only the experience of connectedness. Then I was back in my body again. These moments, unsought and unarticulated, came to me from that time until my early twenties. And in a sense they saved me, first from loneliness and later from nihilism. When as a teen I read in Alan Watts’s This Is It that underlying the great religious traditions of the world is “the sensation of basic inseparability from the total universe, of the identity of one’s own self with the Great Spirit beneath all that exists,” I applied it to what I had always considered my own singular experience. And to what I imagined people experienced under the tent. But of course as a five-year-old kid in Andalusia, Alabama, I was just trying to get from one part of my day to another. The clouds passed, insects crawled over my fingers, the sun burned a hole in my brain, the rain dripped, dripped, dripped, the bus groaned to a stop, Pam and Randall trudged up the hill, and time started again.

  Pam took me to the side of the house, away from Randall, and opened her hand to show me little hard white balls wrapped in pieces of notebook paper. Atomic FireBalls. She had picked them up off the playground after other kids spat them out. She unwrapped each one, explaining that they were red when they were brand-new. We held them under the water hydrant and washed off the germs. I promised her I would never tell Randall (“He would want some”), or anyone else (“They wouldn’t understand”).

  I daydreamed of living with Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, or her brother, Uncle Dave. The last time I could remember seeing them was at Grandma’s funeral. She had died after gallbladder surgery just as Brother Terrell had predicted. I thought my aunts, uncles, and my grandpa blamed Brother Terrell for her death, and that’s why we never saw them. My mother told me later she avoided them because they were suspicious of her relationship with her employer.

  One morning I woke up convinced that two of my youngest uncles were there. I had seen them roll a new red tricycle into the ho
use for me during the night. It was the same tricycle one of them had backed his car over and mangled three years earlier. I climbed out of bed that morning eager to find the tricycle (never mind that I was too big to ride it now anyway) and eager to see my uncles. When I couldn’t find either, I asked Pam and Randall where they had gone.

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Ron and Uncle James Earl.”

  Pam scraped the last of her grits away from the side of the bowl. She raised her head and paused before licking her spoon. “What are you talking about?”

  “My uncles. They brought me a new tricycle last night, but I can’t find it.”

  Randall smirked. “Keep looking. I bet ’chu find it before we get back from school.”

  Before Sister Waters put me out for the day, I peered in every corner of the house and looked under the bed and behind the sofa again and again. I pulled back the grimy little curtain that hung from the kitchen sink and watched as the cockroaches scattered. Outside, I searched under the bushes at the edge of the bare dirt yard and around the outhouse. Every few hours I sucked up my courage and knocked on the door to ask Sister Waters if she had found the tricycle yet. She looked out of her hard little eyes and issued a grunt that I took as a no. I threw myself down on the wooden front steps and tried to figure out why no one admitted seeing my uncles or the tricycle. I reviewed the places I had looked and realized there was still one place I had overlooked: underneath the house.