How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  My friend Suzette and I had researched the Holy Warriors online and found they traveled the South during revival season, from Texas to North Carolina, spreading the Gospel with—according to their website—a “unique blend of physical strength and prayer.” Suzette had wanted me to go with her to the movies instead. We shared a love of classic film, and The Postman Always Rings Twice was playing at the dollar theater in Greenwood. When I told her I couldn’t, she poked her lips out. Like me, Suzette had few friends, and she took it hard when I bailed on her. “But, Willy,” she said. “It’s Lana fucking Turner!” I was firm. “I have to,” I told her, and here Suzette dropped her head, knowing my next words, my new excuse whenever I needed to be with my father and not with her. “Because my mother would have wanted it.” Sometimes she even mouthed the line along with me, but never did she try to further her case once I had mentioned the dead parent.

  After we parked the Chevy in the empty gravel lot beside the coliseum, my father looked around, and said, “Let’s stay put a minute.” He tilted his head against the window and shut his eyes. He dozed. We were the first to arrive, and I was happy he’d found some time now to rest. In the past months, the man had been unflagging. The Harvest Festival, the BSU play, and his true mission, the one he filled his days with in between preaching on Sundays at Second Baptist: He proselytized in every corner of the Delta, expanding his reach into the black neighborhoods and towns, encouraging residents to attend his church no matter the color of their skin, even offering to drive them if they needed the ride. It’d become more than a pet project for him. Since my mother had left us, he was obsessed with integrating Second Baptist. When he told the congregation of his plan, couching it as something “the Lord has put on my heart,” the deacons threw a fit. They held an emergency business meeting after service, and a Dickerson man called for my father’s immediate resignation. It was voted down, my mother’s passing still fresh on everybody’s minds. My father told them he needed to pray more about the matter before speaking on it again, and they thought, I was sure, that that was the end of it. Only I, sitting in the back pew during this meeting and listening to the men carry on, knew that my father had no intention of stopping. If anything, their resistance strengthened his resolve that he was doing the right thing. After this close call with dismissal, however, he kept quiet about the outreach, doing it in secret, with me riding shotgun in the Chevy with him.

  As he slept in the truck, more vehicles pulled into the lot and filled the empty spaces around us. Some were these fancy church buses from the bigger churches in the Delta, filled with members who wore matching T-shirts. My father had wanted Second Baptist to make a strong showing, but none in the congregation had purchased tickets. This did not, however, deter my father from going. “Two is better than none,” he’d said, and now he was snoring and I didn’t have the heart to wake him.

  At six thirty, two burly men in purple tanks and bicycle shorts pushed open the side doors of the coliseum. They remained by the entrance to collect tickets as people started to file in. Even from my perspective in the truck, a good hundred yards away, the definition was clear on their plump and hairless muscles. When Suzette had seen some of their pictures on the website, she admitted to being tempted to go herself. “But then,” she added, “I bet they’d talk all about Jesus and it wouldn’t be worth it.” Thanks to her, I had seen several shirtless men before tonight. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jin, kept a desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection in the back room of their restaurant, The China Belle, and allowed Suzette and me to use it for homework. I was homeschooled and had already finished my homework when I saw Suzette in the afternoons after the bus dropped her off from the junior high. We mostly went online for dirty pictures. She had a talent for finding fake photographs of nude celebrities, the ones with the faces of famous people cropped onto anonymous bodies. She was partial to the Denzel Washingtons and the Chris O’Donnells. I claimed to like the Dolly Partons, making Suzette laugh hysterically every time I defended my choice. “Oh, you wouldn’t know what to do with Dolly,” she said, “if the old girl pissed on you first to give you a clue.”

  The coliseum was a spacious metal building normally rented out by the county to gun shows and beauty pageants. Tonight was something very different, and by seven, most everyone had gone inside except for my father and me. With the show about to start, the two Holy Warriors shuffled in last, but not before giving each other enthusiastic high fives. They left the doors open. It was a warm night, and the coliseum likely had no air-conditioning to speak of. Strobe lights suddenly flashed from somewhere inside and spilled into the parking lot from the open doorways—green to yellow to purple—set to an electronic dance mix, the kind of music Suzette listened to. After the lights and music were finished, a voice came on the sound system, welcoming everyone, so loud I understood every word from my perch outside beside my father. When the crowd went wild with applause, he finally woke.

  He jumped, blinked, looked around. “All right,” he said, sniffing. “All right now.” He rubbed his nose, then nodded and said he was ready to get out. We entered the coliseum out of breath from the heat just as the announcer was saying, “Strength, Lord. We ask thee for strength. For your mightiest mighty.” The inside looked like a gymnasium. There were bleachers and a stage and a concrete floor the size of two basketball courts. The Holy Warriors had forgone the bleachers and stage, and gathered everyone in the center of the floor around a platform festooned with strobe lights and half-hidden by fog from a fog machine. My father held an arm out in front of me to stop me from going any farther inside. I understood why: The audience, nearly two hundred souls, was standing in front of their rows of metal folding chairs with their heads bowed. The announcer, a Holy Warrior himself, was leading them in prayer. He stood on the platform, wearing the same uniform of purple tank and bicycle shorts as the rest. The strobe lights dimmed. He was both thinner and hairier than the two at the front door had been. He also had a microphone headset like Madonna’s to amplify his deep voice. As he spoke, he sounded like thunder itself making words. We waited for him to finish, and then my father found one of the Holy Warriors idling by the bathrooms and gave him our tickets. This one was bald, with tattoos of the cross on one arm and a crown of thorns circling the bicep on the other. He led us to our seats, smiling the whole way, his wrecked teeth the only flaw on an otherwise perfect form.

  “Here you are.” The bald man pointed at the numbers taped to the backs of the chairs that matched the numbers on our tickets as if we might not believe him. Before going, he winked. “Y’all enjoy now.”

  As a series of demonstrations unfolded before us, each one more bizarre than the last, my father slumped lower and lower in his seat. He’d nod off only to be jerked awake, time and again, by another loud noise created by one of the performers crushing something or by a sudden flash of lights. He seemed to take this in stride, even grinning at some of the more ridiculous acts. The Holy Warriors were agile and fast. Their flesh looked stretched over pure rock, not over meat and bone like the rest of us. I wondered how long it took a person to get that big and that tough. Since my mother’s funeral, I’d lost about thirty pounds. Our diet had drastically changed in her absence, and at twelve, I’d also hit my growth spurt, adding another five inches to my frame, compounding the weight loss and prompting my father to joke about putting a brick on my head to slow me down. I was thin but weak. These bodybuilders could easily break a nothing boy like me, a thrilling thought in itself. Onstage now was a black Holy Warrior who was screaming, “All for Jesus!” and toting several concrete blocks he then proceeded to pulverize with his bare feet. After him, twin Holy Warriors trotted out, both of them with thick handlebar mustaches. Their talent was breaking planks of wood with their faces. “I pray the prayer of Jabez,” one said to the other. “Do you?” In answer, the other twin cracked several two-by-fours in half at once, using his forehead as a kind of battering ram. This went on and on between them, each
brother adding another piece of wood to the pile they demolished until I thought one or the other would knock himself unconscious. Now my father was wide awake. He wasn’t paying much attention to the twins; he was turning around and counting the number of people in attendance.

  Onstage, behind the performers, sat a large blue tub covered in a tarp. I remembered this from their website. To the untrained eye, it resembled a large Jacuzzi minus all the jets and filtration pipes. Actually, it was the latest in evangelical outreach, a portable baptistery. Designed for Baptist missionaries in jungles where the water was too dangerous, the portable baptistery was used by the Holy Warriors to expedite the process of salvation. The idea was to get sinners to confess their sins publicly, accept Jesus into their hearts, and then baptize them—all in one night. Even Suzette had admired the efficiency. When she questioned me about baptisms, she was shocked to learn I hadn’t been baptized. “Not yet,” I said. “I think my dad’s forgotten about it.” While my mother was still here, all he talked about was the fate of my eternal soul. In his worried and quiet way, he’d explained to me the age of accountability, which I was quickly approaching. As soon as I reached puberty, I would be an adult in the eyes of the Lord and, therefore, needed to make some decisions. “This is not to scare you,” he told me. “Just to prepare you.” My mother told me in private that he wanted to baptize me himself, but he never said so to me. And lately he was too busy with other people’s souls out there in the hinterland to worry much about mine.

  “You see that?” I whispered to him. I meant the baptistery, and he said, “I sure do, son,” referring to something else entirely. “Twenty-seven,” he said, and I realized he was talking about the number of nonwhites in the audience. He was so gleeful that I didn’t point out how they all seemed to be sitting in segregated groups away from the whites. He was goofy with happiness. The same kind of goofiness he carried with him on our visits into the black communities. A goofiness that made people who came to their doors suspicious and weary. Sometimes they never opened their doors but yelled through the walls for us to leave, to get the hell off their property. And we did—but not before my father yelled back that we weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses and were, in fact, “good clean Baptists!” His reputation grew in these neighborhoods until nothing greeted us at the doors but silence, that same sort we’d experienced at Old Man McBride’s house. Still, we persisted. Then something strange happened back in August while we were eating lunch at a restaurant in Itta Bena.

  A black woman approached our table. She wore this red coat with thick shoulder pads and a skirt of the same color. Her hair was tied up in a knot behind her head, not a strand of it out of place. She looked how I imagined a high school principal would look, and I could see on her face right away that we were in trouble. She asked my father politely if he was the man going around door-to-door, asking families to his church. He smiled big and said that was him. Without asking, she slid into the booth next to me, her face hardened for battle. “Now listen,” she said, “I am the lead deaconess at my own church, and I don’t appreciate you going off and meddling with a flock that don’t belong to you.” My father reached over the table to touch her hand; she flinched. “Don’t touch me, sir.” My father, taken aback, explained—in that same earnest way he tried to explain to his white churchgoers at Second Baptist—that he was doing the Lord’s work. “You go faster alone,” he told the woman, quoting a favorite Hebrew proverb of his. “But you go farther together.” The woman laughed. “Cut the crap, honey,” she said. “If you cared about these people, you wouldn’t meddle with them like this. Most of them you are talking to can barely make ends meet—why don’t you drop them off a food basket next time instead of an invitation to some white church that don’t want them to begin with.” My father tried to say something, but she wouldn’t allow him to interrupt her. “And another thing: If I hear of anybody crazy enough to go to your piddly church and then get themselves embarrassed, or hurt, or worse—well, then, I am holding you”—she pointed her finger at him—“responsible for it.” She then looked at me and her face was soft again. She patted me on the arm. “You talk to your daddy now and you tell him I’m right.” She got up to leave, my father too stunned to say anything. Later we found out she had paid for our meal, a gesture that turned his cheeks red and inspired him to leave the waiter a larger-than-normal tip. In the Chevy, on the way home, he told me not to worry about that woman. People like her would come around. “It’s scary,” he said, “to do the new.” As for me, I thought the deaconess made plenty of sense. My mother would have, too, if she’d been alive to hear it.

  The last Holy Warrior decimated a phone book with his mouth, then the one who’d led the prayer in the beginning returned wearing only the bicycle shorts. He jogged onto the platform as the fog machine was cranked back up and the strobe lights flickered to life. As the music got louder and louder, he used all his strength, which was considerable, to pull the portable baptistery to the center of the platform. Sweating, he tossed aside the tarp, and the audience, sensing what was coming next, applauded. The announcer’s body was similar to the swimmers’ bodies I’d seen on TV at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Fooling with the baptistery had tired him out, and he panted, leaning against the blue tub, as the clapping died down. Then he asked, “Who will join me?” and while we contemplated his request, he did a limber backflip into the water, splashing the people in the front rows. The other Holy Warriors came back to the stage, as did a woman with a bowl cut who wore a floor-length robe that must have been suffocating for her to wear. She held a cordless microphone, and as the announcer resurfaced, she began to sing the praise song, “I Adore You.”

  Because he was hidden from the waist down, the announcer looked naked in the tub. The hair on his chest was matted from the water. “Come to me,” he said. “For he says those who accept me on earth shall not be turned away in the hereafter.” I imagined the celebrity face that would have been pasted onto the announcer’s body. Suzette would most likely say Joey, that guy from Friends. I decided no face, famous or otherwise, should be on his. It was nice enough—a strong nose, dark black eyes, and a full thick beard. He held out his arms, and several people in the audience took this as their cue. They rose. The robed woman lowered her voice, singing the chorus of the praise song over and over in a hushed chant. When I stood, I half imagined my father would stop me. He didn’t. He wasn’t even paying attention to me; he was glancing at all the others who were standing.

  My father often spoke of receiving a direct message from the Lord. He referred to it as a “call.” He’d received a call to preach and another, he told me, to marry my mother. And yet another to desegregate Second Baptist. He believed everybody got at least one—the one being the call to salvation, this one being the most important. “When you hear him,” he said, “all you have to do is follow.” When I was younger, I had asked what God’s voice sounded like, and my father explained it wasn’t exactly a voice. “But a feeling,” he said, “that gets stronger and stronger until you can no longer ignore it.” I kept waiting for this feeling to find me, but it never did—or, at least, not that feeling. Several others came and went inside me, though, ones I wanted desperately to ignore: embarrassing longings for the same naked male celebrities that Suzette wanted, wild urges with nowhere to go and no language to express them. I hoped the call from the Lord would put these to rest once and for all. As I stood watching the shirtless Holy Warrior reach out for sinners, it occurred to me that maybe my case was special. Maybe I had to make the first move to show the Lord I was serious, willing. God, after all, had brought both of my most potent desires in tandem tonight: my want to be held by a man, to feel his body pushed against mine, to feel loved and sheltered in a stronger set of arms than my own, and my longing for true salvation, the peace that surpasses all understanding.

  I was the first to walk down the aisle. Passing the rows, I heard murmurs of approval from the audience. When I reached the edge of the platform,
the man-made fog had coated most of the raised floor so that the tub appeared to be floating on a cloud. Looking down at me, the announcer said, “This little one has come to the Father, and the Father turns none away.” He beckoned for me to join him in the water. First I undid my shoes and then peeled off my shirt, revealing my scrawny chest, a cage of ribs protruding through the skin. I eased into the water one leg at a time. The coliseum had warmed it, so I wasn’t cold as I sank into the little pool, the water reaching my collarbone. Like dew, droplets clung to the announcer’s hairy nipples. I was close enough to lean in and lick them dry. He was no longer wearing his headset, so he shouted for all to hear when he asked, “Do you accept Jesus, my son?” I nodded. In that moment I would have likely accepted anything this man had offered. As if knowing this, he made his move, covering my face in his large hands. He plunged me down, down, down. The seconds I was under I prayed. I wanted to resurface into someone new, the old me, the strange boy I was, to be shed like dead skin. Rising back up, I heard the applause. A line of people had formed in the aisle. I waded over to the lip of the tub, winded and gasping. The announcer grabbed my toothpick arm and lifted it in the air to more applause. “Who’s next?” he cried, and then he released me. He turned to beckon to someone else, and another Holy Warrior standing nearby onstage was telling me to hurry. “More souls!” he said. I monkey-climbed out, my body wet and heavy in the humid coliseum.