Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  She held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Are you feeling sick again?”

  The people who passed the porch on their way to work looked so different from the men and women I had known. I had never seen a man with a briefcase or a woman in a suit. The women in particular caught my attention. With their matching coats and skirts, purposeful strides, and straight-ahead stares, they constituted a third gender. I decided they were hermaphrodites, a word I had picked up from a recent sermon. Sometimes I imagined the porch breaking free with me and Gary aboard and gliding down the street past the suits, or sailing up past the clouds and the ghost of a moon on the rise. I wrapped my arm around a peeling column, curled my bare toes into the edge of the splintery boards, and peered into the sky. I had recently learned from one of the Smith kids that Earth was not fixed as it seemed, but was spinning in space and at the same time traveling in a vast circle around the sun. These facts I could not comprehend. I believed that if I looked long enough and hard enough and stood perfectly still, I might see some trace of the planet’s turning, some vestige of its journey, but of course I never did.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AN ALARM SHOULD HAVE SOUNDED THE DAY SISTER COLEMAN APPEARED at the Smiths’ house: a siren’s whup whup whup; the blast of a foghorn; an automated voice announcing, “Danger, danger.” No such luck. Gary and I watched from the front-porch swing as she turned in from the sidewalk and walked up the steps, moving at her own pace, neither fast nor slow. Church people were the only ones to call on the Smiths and they always came at night, after the service was over. I dragged my feet and slowed the swing. She stepped onto the porch and stood feet apart, hands on her hips. She stared at us as if deciding what she was going to do. Gary and I squirmed uncomfortably. My hand slipped nervously up and down one of the chains that tethered the swing to the porch ceiling.

  “Are you here to take us to the orphanage?” I asked.

  Her lips tightened into a thin line of a smile. “Are you expecting someone to take you to the orphanage?”

  “Uh-uh.” Gary and I shook our heads vigorously.

  She walked over to the swing and eased herself down between us. “I’m Sister Coleman. I met your mama at the revival here a few months back. She asked me to keep an eye on you chillens while she’s gone.”

  White people didn’t use the word “chillens.” She said it as though she were making fun of it somehow. I studied her a little harder. She wore her mostly gray hair pulled back into a bun like many of the women who came to the tent, but her knee-length wraparound skirt looked newer than the clothes they wore. Her attitude was different, too, more in charge, or maybe it was the rolled-up shirtsleeves.

  “You sure you’re not from the government or something?”

  Again, the tight-lipped smile. This time the skin around her eyes crinkled.

  “I’m sure. How can I convince you?” She pulled two chocolate bars out of her pocket and waved them through the air.

  “I’m convinced.” I grabbed the candy bars and handed one to Gary. We ripped them open. I wanted to eat mine slowly, square by square, but I couldn’t, and it was gone too fast.

  She cocked her head toward me and raised one eyebrow. “What do you say?”

  On the other side of Sister Coleman, Gary held up his half-eaten chocolate bar. “Thanks.”

  How did he manage to make a candy bar last so long? Sister Coleman nodded her approval. Gary beamed a chocolate-covered smile her way. She laughed and hugged him. Everyone loved my brother.

  I tugged at her sleeve. “Got any more?”

  Sister Coleman joined us regularly on the porch after that day. She never went inside the house and the Smiths never came out on the porch when she was there. If we were still in our pajamas at the end of the day, she sucked in her breath and wagged her head. She asked what we had eaten and usually disapproved of our answers: beans, cornbread crumbled into powdered milk, or “Nothing yet, ’cause we’re fasting.”

  “You chillens need to eat regular.”

  She told us about Bug, her adopted son. He was my age but he couldn’t see, hear, walk, or talk. God was going to heal him soon. Sometimes she and her sinner husband took Bug to their lake house. She could tell he liked to feel the breeze from the water, because he closed his eyes and stopped making noises for a minute.

  Gary jumped from the swing. “You have a lake?”

  “We don’t own the lake, but we have a house there.”

  My only experience with lakes was glimpsing them through a car window as we drove past. “You live there?”

  “No. We live at our other house.”

  Two houses, and one of them on a lake. This woman was more interesting all the time.

  Sister Coleman began to lobby my mother through letters and phone calls to let Gary and me move in with her family. She told Mama the Smiths neglected us, that we asked—begged, even—to come live with her. She promised she would give us a good home, and that my mom wouldn’t have to pay her anything. Thus began our descent into the ninth circle of hell.

  The day we moved into Sister Coleman’s house, she gathered us up next to her on the sofa and told us she had always wanted children, had in fact wanted us, and now the Lord had given us to her. Her remarks made me feel special, and uneasy. What did she mean, God had given us to her?

  “You mean to take care of, while our mother is away.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “God gave us to you to take care of until Mama comes back.”

  “Of course. What did you think I meant?”

  I shrugged. “Plus, you already got Bug.”

  I pointed to the quilt on the floor where Bug lay on his side, legs in braces, eyes staring at nothing. He drooled and vocalized in the flat, toneless voice of a lost lamb or calf. Bug was big for a six-year-old, but Sister Coleman carried him everywhere. She would not put him in a wheelchair. I have no proof, but I believe it was Bug who first brought Sister Coleman to the tents. Each time a revival came to town, she lugged him to the front row and waited.

  Gary and I were physically everything Bug was not, but emotionally we were a mess. My brother was a bed wetter with a nervous stutter and was prone to visions or nightmares, depending on your perspective. I was a thief who lied to cover my transgressions and committed the unpardonable childhood sin of sassing and talking back on a regular basis. Maybe Sister Coleman did not know this about us, or maybe she thought she could change us for the better. She made sure we went to bed and woke up at the same time, ate three meals a day, and visited the doctor when we were sick. She even took us on vacation once. When I turned seven, she enrolled me in first grade and bought me new clothes to wear to school. My blouses were tucked in, my socks matched, and headbands kept my hair out of my face. I looked respectable for the first time since Mama left us in Houston. Within weeks, Sister Coleman had given us more toys and clothes than we had ever owned: stacks of books and a big easel for me, trucks and a G.I. Joe for Gary.

  The only material thing we lacked during the year and a half we lived with the Colemans was a room of our own. Their home was the newest and most comfortable house we had lived in, but it had only two bedrooms; Sister Coleman and Bug slept in one and the sinner husband had the other to himself. I camped in the living room on a daybed and Gary slept on a single bed pushed against a corner of the den. The Colemans seemed to like each other, or to have once liked each other. They laughed together when Gary or I told funny stories, and at those moments their eyes held and a wistful look passed between them, but they never touched. Brother Terrell’s ministry may have been responsible for the rift between the Colemans. Women who followed the ministry often ended up alienated from their husbands. Sometimes men complained of the money their wives gave and sometimes they said the preacher had taken their place in their wives’ affections. Brother Terrell explained his effect by paraphrasing Jesus: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, and a man’s enemies will be of his own household.”

  Sometimes after sch
ool Sister Coleman picked me up and took me to her office, a three-room building surrounded by a dirt parking lot. On my first trip there, I was so distracted by the green metal vending machine in the hall (three kinds of snacks) that I didn’t pay much attention to Sister Coleman’s explanation of what kind of work she did. Until we walked into the main room. Teeth, sets of teeth, top and bottom, the whole pink and white inside of a mouth, many mouths, were scattered across counters, shelves, and the very table where Sister Coleman directed me to sit.

  “I . . . I . . .” My hand flew across my mouth, as if to safeguard what was inside.

  She nudged me toward the table. “Child, did you hear what I said?”

  I shook my head no.

  She took my hand away from my mouth. “What is it?”

  I pointed around the room. “Whose are those?”

  She laughed. “We make them at the lab, then bring them here for the employees and me to finish up.”

  I put my schoolbooks on the table and used them to nudge a set of dentures out of the way.

  “They won’t bite, you know.”

  I didn’t know.

  She walked back to the entry. “Come on out here. We’ll get you a snack.”

  It took me a long time to choose between peanuts, orange crackers with cheese, and orange crackers with peanut butter. After changing my mind at least four times, I chose the peanut-butter crackers. I savored every bite, wiped the crumbs from my mouth, and crumpled the cellophane wrapper. “I could eat a dozen of those.”

  Life sometimes offers hints of what’s to come, a foreshadowing that we can only decipher years later, if at all. People say, “I should’ve seen that comin’,” but the signs are often subtle, saying one thing and meaning another. Once or twice a week we went with Sister Coleman to an abandoned movie theater where we met with about five other believers and “had church.” These people, mostly women, were followers of Brother Terrell who had decided they could no longer tolerate the false doctrines of the institutionalized church. There was no minister and no music to accompany our strained renditions of old gospel choruses. Someone, often Sister Coleman, opened the service with a prayer and asked if anyone had a testimony to share about how the Lord was moving in their lives. The Man Who Dreamed Hurricanes always had something to say. In his early twenties with tightly tucked shirts and a painful crew cut, the Man Who Dreamed Hurricanes regaled us with weather details from his latest vision. He said the Lord had given him the ability to see the storms before they hit so that he could warn us. Each week he set up his easel in front of the proscenium and, armed with a black Magic Marker and large flip tablet, became God’s own weatherman.

  “Last night the Lord showed me there’s another tropical storm out there.” He drew an ominous x somewhere in the vast blank space that represented the Caribbean. “It’s gonna gather power until it turns into a storm as destructive as Hurricane Carla.” He drew a scary swirled image with a black oval in the middle. “It will hit the Carolina coast and come right through Columbia.” He drew a star to represent Columbia and little dashes to represent the path of the storm. South Carolina would be obliterated by hurricanes that year, thus saith the Lord.

  Sister Coleman and her white-haired aunt Eunice sat in the wooden theater seats, nodding yes, yes. After service, women gathered around Weatherman and assured him he had a real gift, but no one stored up provisions, and no one made plans to leave the state. As it turned out, the hurricane season was one for the record books that year. In Florida.

  As part of our bedtime routine, Sister Coleman read aloud to Gary and me from a book entitled The Rapture. The book weaves apocalyptic events into a story where characters wake to find that their Christian loved ones have been taken to heaven during the night, or raptured. Those left behind endure clouds of swarming insects. Rivers run in blood. Multiheaded beasts run through the streets. The sun burns the skin from their bones. And of course, the moon turns to blood too. The book turns the apocalypse into a story, and that story lived in my imagination in a way that sermons had not. Fear caused me to consider my sins in a more serious way; I did not want to be left behind when my mother and brother were raptured to heaven. Besides, Sister Coleman was so kind to me; she made me want to be good, really good, with no stains on my soul. One night as she closed the book, I looked into her eyes and told her about how Randall sometimes bribed me to touch him and how Pam and I took turns pretending to be the husband with each other.

  “A girl with a girl? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Does that mean I have a reprobate mind?”

  She said she didn’t know, but that I needed to kneel beside the bed and ask God for forgiveness. We prayed, and I cried so much I thought surely my sins had been washed away. Wrong. The next morning Sister Coleman announced Gary and I could no longer play together without adult supervision.

  I was confused. “What do you mean? What do we do?”

  She gave me a long, meaningful look. “Nothing. That’s the point. You do nothing. You stay away from each other unless there is a grown-up in the room.”

  I thought she might relent, but she didn’t. When Gary started kindergarten a few months later, she would not let us walk to school together. She made him leave first and let me go a few minutes later. She didn’t know that Gary waited for me behind a bush just around the corner and that we finished the walk together.

  The more Sister Coleman knew about me, the less she liked me. One day after meeting with my first-grade teacher after school, she strolled into the empty classroom where I waited, grabbed my arm, and squeezed it hard. Her voice was steady and even.

  “Get to the car now.”

  I stumbled through the hallway and into the parking lot, with her hand heavy on my shoulder. Once we were in the car, she turned the key in the ignition and pumped the gas pedal. The engine sputtered to life and she turned and glared at me.

  “Why are you disappearing into the woods with boys during recess?”

  “I’m not.”

  “They’ve seen you.”

  “It’s boys and girls.”

  She gripped the wheel and gunned the engine. “You are a perverse child.”

  I didn’t know the word “perverse,” but I could tell it didn’t mean anything good. I tried to explain.

  “We go into the woods so they can repent and give their hearts to the Lord. I’m doing God’s work.”

  It was true. I witnessed to my classmates during recess, then took them into the woods, where I had them kneel down and ask Jesus to be their personal savior. Tammy, the prettiest girl in my class, had almost gotten the Holy Ghost after only a few minutes of coaching.

  “One boy said you kissed him.”

  “He said he wouldn’t repent if I didn’t.”

  She put the car in gear and we pulled out of the parking lot and away from the school.

  “If you’re so concerned about the Lord’s work, why did you steal cookies from another little girl? And why did you lie when the teacher asked you about it? She knows you did it.”

  There it was, another sin. Two with the lie. Three if you counted the kiss, and I had to, considering how much I liked that boy.

  I was not surprised when Sister Coleman began to favor Gary over me. As the chosen one, Gary dwelt in a land of perpetual smiles and kindnesses.

  “Here, honey, let me help you with those buttons.”

  “Do you want another sucker?”

  Or turning to her old aunt Eunice, “He’s just the sweetest child I’ve ever seen.”

  She answered most of my questions with a terse yes or no and little eye contact. Questions that required further explanation were ignored. Her emotional coldness made me miserable, but I understood and accepted it as the penalty for my sins. I was always looking for ways to ingratiate myself with her. Once when we were on a long trip, I devised a game in which Gary counted gas stations and I counted churches. When Sister Coleman heard the rules, she sighed and responded exactly as I had ant
icipated.

  “Honey, I’m afraid you’ll always lose counting churches.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

  The next time we stopped for gas, I got the sucker and the pat on the head, and Gary got nothing. I remained the favorite for a day or two, until I felt so guilty and so bad for my brother, I engineered my own fall from grace.

  I pulled out a bag of books I kept under the daybed. In the bag was the oversize Bible storybook my mother had bought and for some reason Queenie and Rita had inscribed. The inscription read: “To David and Betty. May God bless and keep you always. Queenie and Rita.” Everyone called my mother by her middle name, Carolyn, but Betty was her first name, and it was the name she had used in Houston when living incognito with Brother Terrell. I handed the book to Sister Coleman and asked if she would read us a story. She opened it and studied the inscription.

  “Do you know what this says?”

  I shrugged.

  “Why do you think this is addressed to David and Betty? Isn’t Betty your mother’s first name?”

  I nodded. “Yes, but everyone calls her Carolyn. They probably meant Betty Ann. David and Betty Ann. That book probably belonged to Pam and Randall.”

  She knew I had engineered her seeing the inscription and that I was lying about the ownership of the book, but she didn’t know why. I didn’t know either. What I knew but could not articulate was that sometimes I felt so awful, so sinful, that I wanted to pull everything down around me, wanted in fact for everything to fall on me like the dead weight of a felled tree and crush me into the ground. Maybe that “everything” was Sister Coleman. Tim-ber.

  Sister Coleman opened the door to her lab and flicked on the light. My eyes lingered on the vending machine as we walked past and entered the main room. It was a Saturday and the employees were gone. Gary and Bug had stayed at the house with the sinner husband. I moved the teeth aside and placed my books on the table. The plan was for me to read and do homework while she caught up on work. She fished her white lab coat off the rack and pulled it on while I lost myself in a library book. A package of crackers fell onto my opened book. I looked up. She smiled and turned to study the dentures on the shelf. I opened the package, stuffed the crackers in my mouth, and went to the water fountain for a long drink.