Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

My husband and I arrived early for the morning service. I leaned against the half wall outside the auditorium and watched people stroll in while my husband sat in the car and studied. A woman with a boy of about eight walked over and stood beside me. The boy picked up a stick the size of a pencil, turned his back to me, and pretended to write on the wall. I asked him what he was writing. He didn’t look up or indicate in any way that he might have heard me.

  “He doesn’t mean to be rude. He can’t hear.”

  I turned to look at the woman. She was Mexican American, in her thirties, and she wore a regular knee-length dress, not the grounddragging garb that was more and more the uniform of the women who came to hear Brother Terrell preach.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I told the woman I was sorry, as if I had something to do with the boy’s deafness.

  “He’s never been able to hear. I saw the ad in the paper for this preacher. He heals people?”

  I nodded. God and Brother Terrell healed people, at least sometimes. What that meant about either of them or if it meant anything at all, I didn’t know.

  “How does it work?”

  “I’m not sure . . . but it seems to work.”

  “No, I mean how do I get him to pray for my son?”

  I told her about the prayer lines and how sometimes Brother Terrell called people out of the audience to pray for them. “But he may not do either and if he doesn’t, try to grab one of his associates and tell them about your son.”

  My husband walked up from the parking lot. I said good-bye to the woman and turned to enter the building. She grabbed my hand. “You have seen people healed by this man?”

  I nodded. She looked so eager to believe. “Please pray he will heal my son.”

  Brother Terrell spent the service prophesying about famine and the end-time. I despaired for the woman, the boy, and for myself. After the offering, Brother Terrell began to prowl the audience. He called out an older man and a younger man and prayed that God would heal them of alcoholism and nerves. Please. Please. That little boy. Please. Brother Terrell walked back toward the platform. I prayed harder. He stopped and turned around.

  “There’s somebody else here. Someone who feels like this is their last chance.” He walked down one of the two aisles. “You there. The lady with the little boy. Stand up, ma’am. Your son too. The Lord is showing me he’s deaf.”

  The woman began to cry and Brother Terrell put his arm around her. “I know what it’s like to see your son suffer, to weep and cry for his healing. The Lord of Hosts has heard your prayer today.”

  He knelt before the boy and cupped his hands over the child’s ears. “In the name of Je-sus. Stretch out your hands and pray with me, people. In the name of Je-sus. Be gone, you foul spirit of deafness. Release this child.”

  Brother Terrell moved behind the boy and clapped his hands. The boy whirled around and the crowd rose in unison. They moved toward Brother Terrell and the boy from all directions, pressing against them. Yes Lord. Yes Lord. Yes. Brother Terrell asked the boy to repeat what he heard and the mother translated his request in sign language. Again he moved to stand behind the boy.

  Brother Terrell said the word “baby.” The boy said, “Bah-bah.” Hallelujah.

  Brother Terrell said, “Mama.” The boy said, “Maaaaaaah.” Amen. Praise God.

  Brother Terrell said, “Dad-dy.” The boy’s response was lost in a din of praise. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A haze of light seemed to fall on the upturned faces and hands. My husband, an introverted cynic, stood with his hands raised at shoulder level, a tentative posture compared with the outstretched arms of those around us. His eyes were closed and he wore a beatific smile. Tears dripped off his chin. I raised my hands, too, letting go of the questions and the arguments and all the resentments, reaching for a place where everything belonged, even me.

  That afternoon as my husband and I drove through the parking lot, I saw the woman and her son sitting on a bench beside the road. The boy’s head moved from the right to the left and back again, over and over in a rhythmic pattern. I asked my husband to stop the car so that I could talk to the woman. She smiled as I approached.

  “That man. He healed him. My son can hear.”

  I looked at the boy, sitting on the edge of the bench, his head turning from side to side. “What is he doing?”

  “He’s listening to traffic. He’s never heard it before.”

  Chapter Twenty

  NONE OF THE HEALINGS I WITNESSED GROWING UP HAD EVER FELT SO immediate, so personal. Maybe it was having contact with the boy and his mother before and after Brother Terrell prayed for them. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to live without Brother Terrell and his ministry at the center of everything. Or maybe it was because I was sixteen and longed to go home. With the miracle of the deaf boy, God seemed to beckon me. “You belong here,” he seemed to say. “Here” was among the Terrellites.

  My husband agreed. He continued going to law school but swore off atheist philosophers. I swore off pot, scoured the scriptures for obscure references to the end-time, tried to like Richard Nixon (an honest man chosen to lead the country, according to Brother Terrell), and switched the radio station in my car from rock and roll to country and western. We bought and stored extra food in our pantry to prepare for the famine. I burned my jeans and wore long, hippie-looking dresses. When my mother called, I told her of my conversion experience and she gave me her phone number. We both agreed it was best that the whereabouts of her ranch remain a secret, if only to thwart the devil. I tied a blessed handkerchief around the steering column of the car and we began making the three-hundred-and-sixty-mile round-trip between Groesbeck and Bangs on most weekends.

  Located at the western edge of Brown County, ten miles outside the county seat of Brownwood, Bangs is situated in a sort of borderland along which the rolling gentility of the central Texas landscape gives way to the windswept desolation that eventually becomes west Texas. Until the big tent came to town in 1972, a truck stop and a convenience store were the most visible landmarks along Highway 84 West. The wind blew all winter long, and in the summer, the sun beat the land into submission. Wind, dust, and truck-stop grease. Still, one person’s hell is another’s Promised Land, or at the very least, Blessed Area.

  The Terrellites descended on Bangs like a biblical plague. They came in their broken-down trucks and leaky campers and station wagons that rattled when they rolled. A few drove new cars, all that remained of the middle-class life they had abandoned. The women, in their high-necked, ankle-length dresses and bird’s-nest hair, resembled refugees from the Grand Ole Opry. The men, perpetually pale and skinny from months of fasting, had taken to shaving their heads, a look locals associated with Charlie Manson or Hare Krishna devotees, neither of whom were popular in and around Brown County. Some believers applied Old Testament admonishments to modern life and went about their daily business dressed in sackcloth and ashes. One early arrival told a reporter, “You think we look bad? Wait’ll you see the ones coming from behind.”

  They came from California, the Dakotas, New York, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Florida, and from all across the South. The influx began in 1972. Within a year, Bangs’s population of twelve hundred had almost doubled, and the Terrellites were spreading to surrounding communities. Other Blessed Areas scattered across the South experienced similar growth. The population of rural areas around Fort Payne, Alabama, increased by twenty-eight percent. No one in Bangs could figure out why these people were coming or how long they would stay. Finally they read the explanation in the paper: The Terrellites were there to wait out the apocalypse. They would be there until the end of the world. Meanwhile, they would build a tabernacle. The tent would remain up until the church was finished. This put no one’s mind at ease.

  Locals blamed Brother Terrell for bringing the first homosexuals, hippies, and blacks to the community. The town of Coleman in nearby Hamilton County saw its black student population increase from sixty to one hundred a
nd twenty within months. Just a few years earlier a sign posted inside the city limits of the Hamilton County seat had read: IF YOU’RE BLACK, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN HAMILTON. Believers were blamed for everything from vandalism to cattle mutilations, but nothing stuck until the death of that little girl I’d read about in the Mexia paper. The sheriff, judge, and district attorney had called for an investigation. Reporters from Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, and the wire services swarmed. An AP story quoted the stepfather of the girl as saying he didn’t just let his stepdaughter die.

  “I believe it was the will of God, and if he wanted her to die, it didn’t make no difference if I took her to fifty doctors.”

  Brother Terrell and his followers said the child died because the parents did not have enough faith. Even in my new nonrebellious mode, this explanation was hard to swallow. The girl’s parents had prayed and they had asked Brother Terrell and several of the ministers close to him to pray, and now everyone said the parents didn’t have enough faith. I argued the issue with a friend in the ministry. Jesus had said that faith equal in size to a mustard seed could move mountains. Surely these people had at least that much faith, or they wouldn’t have been living in a tent in Bangs.

  The friend shrugged off my argument. “You better make sure you know exactly how much faith you have when you decide not to take your kid to the doctor.”

  I filed the deaths under “unknowable,” but that didn’t feel right either. If the child had received medical care, she would have lived. That much we knew. My prayer became, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

  Brother Terrell’s notoriety turned to full-blown infamy. Newspapers ran photos of him arriving and leaving the tent in Bangs in his Mercedes or Lincoln. They showed him stuffing his pockets with love offerings and ran the photos alongside the squalid living conditions of some of his followers. They emphasized that no one really knew where or under what conditions he lived, something my mother gave thanks for daily. After the article was published, Brother Terrell said from the platform that the reporters were out to get him, and we all nodded and said amen, including those of us who knew that the newspaper articles were a fairy tale compared to what was really going on.

  He railed against the press. “These bunch of lying reporters better watch out. The Bible says, ‘Touch not my anointing.’ They come against God, and they’ll wish’t they hadn’t.”

  But the reporters kept on coming. A follower knocked one out of her chair during a tent service when he raced up behind her, grabbed her camera, and ran out of the tent with it. She ran after him and into a line of men with folded arms. Yes, they had a seen a man with a camera. No, they wouldn’t tell her which way he had gone.

  Brother Terrell responded to the media coverage with increasingly grandiose claims. “In the Bible Paul said, ‘Follow me as I follow Christ.’ All this fasting and praying has purified my body, my mind, and spirit.”

  He leaned toward the audience as he spoke and trembled. He danced in place, and then hopped on one leg across the platform. “I’m pure like Paul. I’m without sin like Jesus. You can follow me all the way to glory, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!”

  The preachers and supporters who sat on the platform stood and shook their fists in the air, yelling amen. Mama stood with them, clapping her hands, shouting, “Preach it, preach it.” My mind rebelled. How can he say he is without sin? Rowed up at the back of the tent, so that they could be the first ones out and escape unwanted attention, sat three little girls. My sisters lived with my mother, but none of the tent crowd in Bangs knew about their existence. When Mama attended the services in Bangs, she handed them off to a woman she had taken into her confidence in Groesbeck. When my mother moved, the woman and her family moved also. They lived on one of Brother Terrell’s properties close to my mother’s farm, though of course they didn’t know the exact location of the farm. The story, should anyone in Bangs ask, was that these girls were the woman’s grandchildren.

  “God has sanctified me. My body is a living sacrifice for the gospel. I’ve been washed in the blood. Purified by his word. I’m a Jesus man! Everything I do is holy!”

  Everyone around me stood and applauded, including my husband, who knew everything I knew. To ponder whether the content of Brother Terrell’s sermon matched the reality of his life was the equivalent of grabbing a spiritual fire extinguisher. My brain said, Wait a minute, and my instincts compelled me to step into the flame of belief and burn, burn, burn.

  Doubt is a lot like faith; a mustard seed’s worth changes everything. Away from the tent, the questions kept coming. How can Brother Terrell claim to be without sin? Why doesn’t it matter that he is committing adultery and lying? Mama tried to explain.

  “Perfection in God’s eyes is not the same as our idea of being perfect.”

  “King David had a man murdered, and the Bible says he was a man after God’s own heart!”

  No matter what Brother Terrell did, God loved him. We loved him. I, on the other hand, failed the holiness dress code, and that was something neither the Lord nor his people could forgive. Two new converts, hippie girls turned Holy Rollers, informed me my sleeves were too short and my neckline too low. They were kind in that churchy, bless-your-heart kind of way. I bit my tongue and borrowed a sweater. In the summer months, when the tent turned into a canvas steam bath, I tried to steal a little comfort by going braless under loose blouses and covering the evidence with a shawl. Things jiggled when I raised my hands to pray, and people were scandalized. I couldn’t please God or the Terrellites, and I couldn’t stop the questions. Why was it more important to look holy than to live holy? Why did Brother Terrell and my family have so much stuff, when Jesus said to sell everything and give it to the poor? Why had an omnipotent God let that child die? I broached these issues with other believers as much as I could without betraying my family, and was urged to pray harder and not give in to the devil. My old misgivings about the ministry returned, and my resentment against God, the all-or-nothing ego at the center of the universe, grew. It was all his fault: my mother’s abandonment of my brother and me, the sadness at the center of her life. Then there was the secret of my sisters’ existence. The way they met their daddy in a roadside park after a tent service, so they could hug him through the car window. And there was the loss of that high-school boyfriend, a small grief that grew larger as I tallied the offenses.

  I tried to discuss my doubts and resentments with my mother, but I couldn’t get past her defense of Brother Terrell. Jesus had said that the poor would always be with us. It wasn’t his fault that he had to keep his family (her and my sisters) a secret. It was the fault of his enemies, who would use the information to destroy the ministry. Couldn’t I see that? When she wasn’t defending Brother Terrell, she was calling to tell me how depressed she was.

  “Sometimes, I just wish the Lord would take me.” It seemed to me that my mother saw death as the only way out.

  After nine months of trying to be a good Terrellite, I quit. I lacked whatever it took to live right, which in my mind was to abide by Terrellite doctrine. I also lacked the ability to stay married. My husband and I divorced, and I spent the next three years careening between sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the increasingly paranoid reality of the Terrellites. With their big egos, infidelities, and cash transactions, these worlds were surprisingly alike. All I had to do was change clothes and I felt at home.

  Despite Mama and Brother Terrell’s attempts to keep the whereabouts of her ranch a secret, IRS agents showed up in the small town close to where she and my sisters lived. This scared Brother Terrell. He stopped visiting my mother’s house and bought another ranch about an hour and a half away. No one, including my mother, knew where it was located. There was just one problem: getting my mother and sisters to the ranch without revealing its whereabouts. I wasn’t along for these outings, but my sisters recount the experience from time to time at family gatherings: Brother Terrell is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes with
Mama beside him in the passenger seat. My sisters are in back. They rock along some gravel farm-to-market road with Brother Terrell hitting the brake and the gas pedal, the brake and the gas pedal. They pass some rancher poking along in the opposite direction, raising his hand at every vehicle that passes, howdy-howdy (pronounced “hidy” in Texas). The sun in his eye makes him question what he saw. What’s a Mer-say-dees doin’ out here? And that woman on the passenger’s side, what was that white thing over her eyes? Somethin’ over the kids’ eyes too.

  Brother Terrell wrapped blessed handkerchiefs the size of bandanas around the eyes of my mother and sisters, trying without success to avoid tangling strands of his daughters’ fine blond hair in the double knots he tied at the backs of their heads. Just another happy family out for a Sunday drive, mother and kids blindfolded. The trips to the ranch were plagued by bouts of motion sickness, forcing Brother Terrell to pull over and let one or all of the girls heave, blindfolds lifted just enough to let them see, and miss, their feet. When the car finally stopped, my sisters found themselves in the middle of a seven-hundred-plus-acre ranch with a guitar-shaped swimming pool. The pool was modeled on the one Elvis had put in at his Memphis house. My sisters thought of the ranch as a mysterious place. They parked their bikes in one place when they left and found them in another when they returned. Their toys, too, seemed to have a life of their own and were always someplace other than where they had left them. When the girls asked their dad what was up with the toys, he said they had most likely forgotten where they had left them or that the cleaning people had probably put a few items back in the wrong place. The truth was more surreal. Brother Terrell had another secret family he brought to the ranch between my mom’s and sisters’ visits. He had become involved with a woman preacher who traveled with him, and they had a daughter together who was the same age as the twins. They kept the girl’s parentage a secret by telling her and everyone in the ministry that she was adopted. To complicate matters, Brother Terrell had adopted a young boy from Mexico around the same time, and he and the girl grew up as adopted siblings. Years later, the girl and the boy would tell my sisters that they had often wondered why there were three ponies, three beds, three bikes, three of everything, when there were only two of them.