Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  I became suspicious of Brother Terrell’s relationship with the woman when I noticed on my visits to Bangs that they were almost always together. Instead of referencing Mama from the platform as he had once done, he talked about the preacher woman, calling her a great woman of God. She had replaced Brother Starrs, who had replaced Brother Cotton a few years back, and was now the one who introduced Brother Terrell. She had become his de facto second-in-command. I often glimpsed them getting out of the Mercedes together at the back of the tent. Then one day I saw her with Pam and Brother Terrell’s other daughters. There was something about their body language, the ease and familiarity with which the Terrell girls interacted with her, as if she were a family member. I asked my mother about the relationship one afternoon as she drove me, blindfolded, from Bangs to her farm for a visit. She admitted that Brother Terrell was involved with the woman. She didn’t mention the daughter.

  “He said it was a mistake. He got himself into a mess with that woman, and now he says he’s working everything out. I believe him. He’s always done right by me and the girls.”

  I adjusted the blessed handkerchief that covered my eyes, careful not to let it slip.

  The walls that divided Brother Terrell’s lives began to crumble. My mother confronted the preacher woman and told her about my sisters. The woman didn’t believe her. Someone broke into the prophet’s ranch house. The next week, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed a long piece describing the ranch and the house in detail. The guitar-shaped swimming pool received special attention. Brother Terrell told my mother IRS agents had broken into the house with the reporter. Around the same time, Randall spotted my sisters during a tent service in Bangs, noticed the resemblance they bore to his own sisters, and confronted my mother.

  “Carolyn, I know those girls are Daddy’s. They look just like him.”

  My mother admitted the truth. Randall confronted his daddy, who admitted nothing. Randall made it his personal cause to force his father to publicly recognize my sisters. When Brother Terrell and the preacher woman arrived at the tent before the service started, they saw Randall walking around with my sisters in the area at the back of the platform where all the insiders would be sure to see them. Brother Terrell gave Randall a quick nod on his way past. My sisters looked the other way.

  During the mid-to-late seventies, Brother Terrell fasted more than he ate. My mother told me he weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, not much for a man six feet tall. She was afraid he was dying. I made my way to Bangs to see him preach for what my mother said might be the last time, though I could not imagine the world without the force that was David Terrell.

  His shaved head gleamed under the lights; his all-black attire hung off his ruined body. He paced around in that aimless way I remembered from earlier fasts. “Y’all know I been prophesying the destruction of America for years; well, God told me the time has come. I asked the Lord the other night if there was anything I could do to hold off what’s coming.”

  He pulled his shirttail from his pants and began to unbutton it. “God told me there was only one way.”

  The people around me began to rock and moan. I don’t know if they knew what was coming next. I didn’t. Brother Terrell slipped out of his shirt, revealing a short-sleeved white T-shirt underneath. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it through his pants, doubled it, and held it at both ends. Clutching the waistband of his trousers with one hand and the belt with the other, he walked over and stood in front of one of the young men seated on the platform. He looked down at the man and extended the belt to him.

  “Brother Walker, God told me he needed someone to stand in the gap. I need you to stand up and take the belt.” The man did as he was told.

  “The prophet always has to bear the signs in his own body.” Brother Terrell walked over to an empty folding chair and Brother Walker followed, the belt dangling from his right hand. Brother Terrell knelt in front of the chair and took off his shirt.

  “God told me someone has to take the whipping for America.”

  Brother Walker dropped the belt and backed away, shaking his head. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder. “Pick it up, Brother Walker. I know you don’t want to do this, but you have to. I have to.”

  The younger man picked up the belt and beat the prophet. When Brother Walker collapsed in tears, Brother Terrell called one of the other ministers to take his place. After the second whipping, the welts began to bleed. Everyone in the tent wailed and cried, and I was right there with them. Oh God. Oh God. Oh Lord. He called preacher after preacher. If they did not hit him hard enough, he looked up and told them that if they didn’t want to see children running through the streets of America with their skin melting from their bones, they better hit him harder. We screamed and moaned with every lash. The blood ran down his back. After about an hour, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and a couple of men ran to help him up. Blood seeped through the cotton of his shirt as he stumbled offstage between the men. The preacher woman spoke over the microphone as the men led Brother Terrell offstage.

  “We’ve just seen an innocent man take a whipping for the sins of this country. I want everyone to gather in the altar and pray. Pray for Brother Terrell. Pray for America.”

  I skipped the altar and headed for my car. I passed my sisters, crying in the back row, fists stuffed into their mouths. Their fake grandma was on her knees. I wanted to comfort them, but that would have frightened them more. I stepped out into the night feeling purged of every transgression and wondered if Brother Terrell felt the same. The whippings continued off and on for several years and most of the men associated with the ministry, including Randall, had to take a turn with the belt. Brother Terrell never handed the belt to my mother or the preacher woman, who sat on opposite ends of the platform.

  Not long after I witnessed the whipping, Brother Terrell sent word through my mother that if I didn’t get right with God, I wouldn’t live past twenty-five. Right on cue, I came down with an illness that doctors could neither diagnose nor cure. Sores erupted on my body. I was beset with fever and chills. My bones ached and my energy dwindled. No matter how much I ate, I lost weight. After several months, I made my way to the tent in Bangs. Brother Terrell began calling people out of the audience almost at once that night. He made his way to our section. I tried to catch his eye but he looked over my head and asked a man in the back to stand up. He prayed for him and moved on to the young mother across the row. Finally, he pointed at my most recent live-in boyfriend and told him to step into the aisle. He clapped his hand on the man’s forehead and told him he had been bound by the powers of Satan and from that moment forward, he was free. The boyfriend hit the ground so hard he had a lump on the back of his head for a couple of weeks. He later told me he lost consciousness as soon as the prophet laid hands on him. He estimated he was out for ten minutes, maybe longer.

  Brother Terrell placed his hands on my head next, and it was as if a curtain fell over my senses. Sight, sound, smell, and touch were gone. The I that was me, separate and distinct, released its hold, and I experienced myself as a vast and bliss-filled darkness. I did not shout or speak in tongues. I did not fall to the ground as my boyfriend had. I was there, but I was not there. I don’t know how long I drifted like this before slowly becoming aware of sound and of being back in my body. When I opened my eyes, I knew Brother Terrell had prayed for me, but I didn’t know the content of the prayer. It didn’t matter because the sores, fevers, and lethargy that had plagued me for months disappeared that night. The healing increased the dissonance between what I believed and what I thought. I believed Brother Terrell was a prophet and a healer. I knew he was a liar and an adulterer. I did not know how to reconcile the two. I also believed the Terrellites were right about what God required—complete withdrawal from the world and sacrifice in every aspect of life—and I knew I was not capable of that. I was seventeen when I left Brother Terrell’s ministry for what would be the last time. There were no epiphanies, only a sense of regret and
failure. I pushed these feelings away when they surfaced, and over time they turned to anger and then, to my relief, something that felt like indifference, only heavier.

  It was well after midnight. The bars had closed and my friends and I had taken the party to someone’s house in the country. Bodies packed every room. We were smoking and drinking and hovering over the pile of cocaine on the coffee table. Musicians ran up and down guitar scales, and somewhere in the back of the house, someone pounded out the drum solo from “Wipe Out.” We talked and talked about terribly important things. Out of that din, a clear, mellifluous voice sang:Though God slay me

  I will trust him

  I shall then come forth as gold.

  Everything fell away but the song. It was “Job’s God Is True,” a song Brother Terrell often sang under the tent.

  For I know that he is living

  I can feel him in my soul.

  I followed the sound to the front porch. A young blond woman who fronted a local band and who minutes earlier had bent over the cocaine with me sat on the porch swing, strumming her guitar and singing. I asked where she had learned the song and she told me she had attended Pentecostal churches, even tent revivals, as a kid.

  “There’s power there. Can’t deny that.” She looked up and smiled.

  I nodded and walked back inside.

  Over the next five years Brother Terrell and my mother drifted further apart, but she didn’t seem to realize it. After a while, only the preacher woman and her family accompanied him to the ranch, but Mama maintained he was working everything out. Eventually a grand jury convened to examine the IRS evidence against him. It came out in the hearing that my mother had made a down payment on a property with thirty thousand dollars in cash. The attorney who handled the transaction remembered it ten years later as one of the strangest moments of his career.

  “This woman hands me all this money in a bag. A brown paper bag! I kept waiting for the wise guys with machine guns.”

  My mother told the grand jury she had borrowed the money from an individual, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell them who had loaned it to her. She had promised the person she wouldn’t. The jury sent her home to reconsider, but her answer remained the same. She spent several weeks in the Wichita County jail for contempt. Eventually the person she had “borrowed” the money from (she told me it was not Brother Terrell) released her from her promise and she answered the jury’s question. Mama told me later that while she was in jail, the preacher woman and Brother Terrell had been in Hawaii ready to leave the country “if things went wrong.” It was the closest my mother ever came to saying a bad word against Brother Terrell. She wouldn’t elaborate on which things could have gone wrong. I assumed she meant answering the grand-jury question in a way that would have incriminated Brother Terrell. I remembered that during the weeks my mother was in jail, he had called me almost every day.

  “I’m really concerned about your mama,” he said in that hoarse, overworked preacher voice.

  I asked my mother what she thought about a man who would have left the country when she was facing legal repercussions for protecting him. Instead of answering my question, she voiced a fear around which she had detoured for almost twenty years.

  “I guess he didn’t really care what happened to me.” She looked tired and defeated.

  If anyone had asked me at the time of this conversation if I still believed in David Terrell, I would have said no, and I would have been wrong. Belief, like love, can go underground. It can become a part of our operating system, without our knowledge or approval. As my mother spoke of Brother Terrell’s betrayal, another layer of faith fell away even as I recognized its existence. What a surprise to feel its absence. Within hours, the illness from which I had been healed returned. I had been symptom-free for nine years. One doctor said the symptoms I experienced can occur and then disappear and remain dormant for years. I nodded, thinking all the time, You have no idea. I sometimes think that the timing of my healing and my relapse were weird coincidences. What I believe, or what I think I believe, is far less rational. I had faith once in a man’s connection to what I thought of as God. Strange as it seems, that faith, misplaced and undeserved, made me well, and when the last remnant of it deserted me, I fell ill again. The symptoms remained for two years until we found a drug to control them. These days I am mostly well.

  After an investigation that lasted almost a decade, Brother Terrell’s case went to trial. I’m not sure how much of a role, if any, my mother’s answer to the grand jury played. We learned during the trial that Brother Terrell had fathered a child with Sarah, the woman he had taken home after a tent service more than twenty years earlier. Pam murmured during the trial something about hoping there were no more children hidden under a bush somewhere. Her dad was found guilty of criminal income-tax evasion and sentenced to three ten-year sentences, to run concurrently. It wasn’t until my mother tried to see Brother Terrell in prison that she realized he had finally worked everything out. He had put my sisters on the visitors list as his daughters. The preacher woman was listed as his wife. My mother’s name was not on the list.

  There is a small tree—I picture it as a skinny, overgrown bush—in the yard of the prison where Brother Terrell served his time. He told my sisters that when he finished his work as a prison janitor, he went to the tree to read his Bible and pray. Since praying and pacing were synonymous for Brother Terrell, he walked around the tree and called out to his God, sometimes in silence and at other times aloud. Did he beg forgiveness and ask for a second chance? Did he call down the wrath of Jehovah upon his enemies? Knowing Brother Terrell, I would bet he did both.

  My sister Carol met a man who served as chaplain of the prison after her daddy left.

  He told her that her father had become something of a legend. Five years after his release, the longtime prisoners still talked about the tent preacher, and when they were troubled, many of them visited what had become known as the Prayin’ Tree.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  AFTER SEVERAL FALSE STARTS AND STOPS, I FOUND A PATH THAT LED away from the tent and the Terrellites. I went to college and studied philosophy, literature, and journalism. For a long time I felt like a cardboard cutout of a person, flat and one-dimensional, propped up with a plastic stand, nothing behind me. I watched the students, teachers, employers, friends, and colleagues around me and picked up cues on how to be in the world: Look them in the eye, firm up the handshake, file down the emotion, read good books, wear good shoes, dark colors, the best haircut you can afford. Fake it till you make it. Gradually, the years between me and the tent stacked up until they formed a wall of experience that separated me from my former self. Upon meeting my relatives who remained in the ministry, my husband and friends commented, “I don’t know what to think. They’re so different from you.” The elevenand-a-half-year-old girl who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the world—the very thing everyone under the tent warned against—had gotten exactly that: the world, in all its messy glory.

  When casual acquaintances asked where I grew up, or where I came from, as we say in Texas, there was a long and uncomfortable pause. After a moment I might say, “Oh, we moved around,” or “We lived all over,” which led to questions about whether my “stepfather” was in the military. If I felt brave, I laughed and said, “Oh, something like that,” and made a fast getaway. Most times I stammered and shifted my eyes until the conversation limped off in another direction. The question of where I came from struck me as a paradox. I had not lived anywhere long enough for a place to stamp itself upon my psyche in the cozy shape of a Monopoly house. Brother Terrell’s ministry was the only home I had known, and that did not constitute an answer anyone could understand. I experienced myself as an exile, an orphan, a ghost girl, all of the above. There was the time I had passed through and the time I now inhabited. I had no way to connect the two. Until my sister’s telephone call and Randall’s funeral.

  Randall knocked on death’s door off and on fo
r forty years. Maybe that’s why when the door finally opened and he slipped through, it came as a shock. With the help of his daddy’s prayers, he had spent most of his life proving doctors wrong, and I guess some of us thought he always would. One of his sisters sobbed, “I thought he was going to get a miracle.” All the hemorrhages and death sentences he had survived didn’t count.

  On the night prior to the funeral, family members gathered in the funeral home in Brownwood, the largest town close to Bangs, and greeted one another with exclamations of surprise at how long it had been since we last saw one another. The old animosities no longer held. Betty Ann gave me a long hug and said, “How’s your mama? Tell her I love her.” Only my mother and brother were missing; they had begged off, saying neither of them felt up to it. Betty Ann drew my sisters to her and they clung to her like a long-lost aunt. The preacher woman’s daughter was there, laughing and talking with my sisters. I marveled at the banality of the scene. After all the lies and secrets, we were, finally, like any other family. Voices, soft and layered one upon the other—how you been, have you seen so and so, that’s her over there, her husband died ten years back, oh no, it’s been so long—all spoken in half whispers, as though we feared to wake the dead.

  At the edges of the crowd, the conversation was of an entirely different nature: Should Brother Terrell raise Randall from the dead? Maybe he should leave him in peace. He was so sick when he died. Well, God had promised Randall a miracle. But he had already been embalmed. Wasn’t that a problem? If only Randall hadn’t been sick so long. If only Brother Terrell had gotten to him before the mortician. No one said, “Look, this isn’t going to happen.” Several of us had left the ministry decades earlier to pursue nursing, software development, accounting, and other careers built on reason and rationality, but that evening we had once again taken our places in a universe where the impossible could happen, whether you really wanted it to or not.