Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  He graduated from Ohio State and wrote for a year at the Marion Star. In 1976, he moved to Florida and became a staff writer at the Tampa Tribune.

  On the night they met, he asked for my mom’s phone number, which he wrote on the back of a matchbook and promptly lost. He looked everywhere for her for three weeks before he found her and asked her out again. Five months later, they bought a house.

  By 1982, my dad had left the Tampa Tribune and was writing for the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, covering municipal governments and the police beat—“looking for mistakes that people made.” He’d been reporting for seven years. The stories he engaged with on a day-to-day basis had shrunk the scope of his worldview to prostitution sweeps, drug sweeps, sweeps of public restrooms. People who’d fallen on hard times or tragedy. The world was cruel. My dad drank to cope. He smoked pot and dabbled in cocaine and other hard drugs.

  My mom drank heavily, as well. One day, she was supposed to meet the man who was installing new carpet3 in their home after work. She forgot and went to the bar instead, like she did every night. When she came home, my dad was pissed.

  “You can’t tell me what to do!” she yelled in return. “Who do you think you are?”

  Then she realized what she’d said. She recognized those words: she sounded just like her stepfather. My mom was shocked. She had vowed never to be like Doug, ever, in any way. And here she was saying the same things he did, probably doing the same things that he used to do.

  She moved out to get sober. My dad slept alone. He got a teddy bear and a roommate. He turned thirty.

  My parents tried to be friends. When my mom began a program of living sober, my dad followed. He got a mentor and took his first steps, but when he got to one that asked him to search for a higher power, he panicked. He had been raised culturally Jewish, but had drifted away from the Jewish community. Considering his recent lifestyle, he didn’t feel comfortable with God. He had turned away from any attempt to contemplate, let alone make a connection with, a spiritual presence. He didn’t even think to call himself an atheist; he just abstained. Now asked to search for a higher power, he floundered. Presenting himself to an anthropomorphized god embarrassed him. He looked for any kind of sign, or spiritual connection that he could buy into. One Sunday, his roommate invited him to Unity-Clearwater, a New Thought church.

  Leddy Hammock had taken over as co-minister just the year before.4 She was a third-generation Unity minister—a welcoming woman with fiery red hair and a voice like a lullaby. Instead of sermons, she gave lessons. Her lessons were only forty-five minutes: my dad liked that. Part of the lesson was meditation. He liked that, too. He liked the positive, reaffirming messages he heard: Leddy said that he was the creator of his own world, that he had the power to make himself happy and make things happen in his life. She taught that “thoughts held in mind reproduce after their kind,” and that sins are errors of thought. That people are not punished for their sins but punished by their sins. She said that there is no such thing as a punishing God, that God is not a man or woman, that God is spirit and principle.

  He began reading all the New Thought authors he could: Emmet Fox, Charles Fillmore, H. Emilie Cady, Thomas Troward. He drove the church bookseller crazy with how quickly he’d finish one book and ask for the next—he began to build a New Thought library of his own. He was fascinated by Ernest Holmes’s book Science of Mind, which teaches that people are at all times engaged in their own transformations. He started listening to meditation tapes by the spiritual author and modern-day mystic Joel Goldsmith, seeking out the intuitive guidance of what Goldsmith called his “still small voice.”

  He made friends with people at Unity-Clearwater, including Leddy, and invited my mom to meet them, too5—she fit right in. My parents got back together. They were still sober and went to church every Sunday, talking for hours about the class they were taking together, studying H. Emilie Cady’s Lessons in Truth. They got engaged and rented a new house on Allemande Drive with zigzag wallpaper. My mom got pregnant.

  The closing decades of the nineteenth century were a confusing time for the American establishment. The Thirteenth Amendment had recently been ratified. Blacks were moving into cities and vying for the same homes and jobs as whites. Increased industrialization was reducing the demand for men’s physical labor.6 More and more, unemployed men found comfort in bars, opium dens, casinos, and brothels, which inspired the rise of moral reform groups largely led by women.7 The number of women in higher education also increased dramatically, as did the number of women in the workforce.8 Organizations dedicated to their political advancement sprang up like daisies—Wyoming and Utah had already given them the vote. The closing of the nineteenth century was a time for women.

  Meanwhile, research in the scientific and medical fields was raising questions about the unseen world.9 James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation showed that electricity, magnetism, and light were manifestations of the same phenomenon. Edison’s invention of the electric bulb illumined every living room. The telegraph circulated information with unprecedented ease. Germ theory, popularized in 1876, introduced the general populace to the theory that sickness was caused by outside forces, not internal weaknesses.10

  Hypnotism was also popularized, and its effects were widely debated, dominating medical journals between 1882 and 1893. In one school, Jean-Martin Charcot, head of the Paris women’s asylum the Salpêtrière, claimed that hypnosis was similar to hysteria and related to internal weakness. Conversely, Hippolyte Bernheim, professor of internal medicine at Nancy-Université, believed that hypnotism operated on the power of suggestion. The debate gave new, scientific validation to more general fears of contagion11 brought about by germ theory and other studies of the unseen.

  This debate over the extent to which the ethereal could influence the material inspired further exploration into the unseen. Many women saw hypnotism as an opportunity to bring about a new era in which mind ruled matter.12 The financial, political, and social disenfranchisement of women meant their abilities to effect social change had been contingent upon their abilities to influence the thoughts and behaviors of men. But their claims to power had previously been based upon self-sacrifice and spiritual superiority on the grounds of moral purity,13 reinforcing the association of women with the “feminine heart”—as opposed to the “masculine intellect,” or mind. Now studies in hypnosis challenged that, suggesting women’s own minds might be better suited than their hearts to empower them—if they could harness the mind’s potential. Their minds, not only their hearts, would save them, and save the world.

  In 1862, Mary Baker Eddy traveled from Rumney, New Hampshire, to Belfast, Maine, to see a famous healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.14 Quimby had been conducting experiments with mesmerism since the 1840s, after observing the demonstrations of French mesmerist Charles Poyen, and had developed a method of hypnotic healing that appealed to Eddy. According to Quimby, a patient’s own belief in the effectiveness of a given cure did more to promote her health than the cure itself. Similarly, diseases themselves stemmed from the minds of the sick, who could be cured by redirecting negative thoughts. The reasoning could be done either aloud or silently in the mind of the healer. In the ten years prior to Eddy’s visit, Quimby had reportedly cured thousands of people around New England.15

  Eddy was the youngest of six children16 born to a quick-tempered and punishing father.17 Since childhood, she had suffered from a nervous sickness that resulted in fainting episodes,18 sometimes rendering her unconscious for hours at a time. She treated chronic indigestion with a strict diet of water, vegetables, and bread,19 at one point eating just once a day. Having found traditional medicine to be ineffective in relieving her symptoms—not to mention riddled with undesirable side effects and risks—Eddy had turned to allopathic medicine and alternative therapies such as homeopathy and hydrotherapy to treat her mysterious illnesses.20

  Eddy’s first husband died suddenly in 1844, when she was six mont
hs pregnant.21 The shock left her bedridden for months, during which time she became interested in mesmerism, animal magnetism, Spiritualism, clairvoyance, and the stories of Jesus as a healer.22 Her son was sent away to live with relatives, and though Eddy’s second husband promised to become the boy’s legal guardian,23 he never followed through, and Eddy lost touch with her son for the next twenty years.24 Her new husband was unfaithful, and often traveling for his work as an itinerant dentist; he would eventually abandon her.25 Detached from familial ties, and desperate for any relief from her misery, she decided to visit Quimby, whose reputation had preceded him.

  After working with Quimby for a short time, Eddy pronounced herself cured. For the next three years, Quimby tutored Eddy in his brand of mesmerism, and they kept in close touch until his death in 1866.26 In accordance with his beliefs about the mental origins of sickness, he considered Bible stories and church sermons meant to frighten practitioners into submission a root cause of many ailments. To treat these cases, he would furnish his patients with reinterpretations of Bible stories he’d penned himself,27 meant to free them from their fears. Taking a cue from Quimby, after his death Eddy penned her own reinterpretation of scripture, and in 1875 published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which became the foundational text of her new religion, Christian Science.

  The central principles of Science and Health are threefold:

  First, God is all.

  Second, God is good and therefore everything is good, and true evil doesn’t exist.

  Third, God is Mind—or Divine creative force—and therefore the true world is pure spirit, immaterial. What appears to exist as the material world is an illusion caused by another creative force: “mortal mind,” or human thought.28 Unlike Divine Mind, mortal mind is temporal; it dwells in the illusion of material reality, ruled by the faulty reports of the senses. It believes in evil and, by believing in it, manifests it in the illusionary world.29

  It follows, then, that as children of Divine Mind, humans have godlike abilities and can overcome the appearances of evil,30 which they bring upon the world: struggle, sickness, and death. In order to do this, one must repent sins and let go of the unreal—material reality—relying instead on God, or “immortal and omnipotent mind.” One does this by silently “arguing” away the appearance of evil.31

  Christian Science practitioners were trained in healing techniques and claimed to be able to argue away financial difficulty, relationship troubles, ill health, and any other scourge that might befall patients’ material perceptions. Healing was deemed more easily forthcoming if the patient was receptive. However, one need not be intentionally receptive to be influenced by others’ thoughts. Similar to Quimby’s ideology, in Christian Science the evil thoughts of others make us sick.32 Likewise, believing that said evil has no reality makes us well.

  Christian Science spread like wildfire. Soon, Eddy was giving lectures to packed theaters around the northeast33 and teaching classes to students who delivered the good news far and wide. One of these students was the New Thought “Teacher of Teachers” Emma Curtis Hopkins, then a sickly thirty-two-year-old New Hampshire mother and housewife to an insolvent and abusive husband. In December 1883, Hopkins was healed by a student of Eddy’s. Later that month, she journeyed to Boston to study with Eddy herself. With a convert’s enthusiasm, by January Hopkins had committed fully to the advancement of Christian Science, writing to Eddy, “I lay my whole life and all my talents, little or great, to this work.” That September, Eddy appointed her editor of the fledgling Christian Science Journal.34

  When my mom went to work for the Largo Police Department in Largo, Florida, in 1984,35 they hadn’t had a victim advocate in months.36 In the two years since joining the New Thought Movement, she’d earned her master’s degree in psychology while working full-time as a case manager for Boley, a mental health agency. One afternoon, a client wandered away from his group home and was picked up by police.37 He was schizophrenic and was so distraught his speech was unintelligible to the officers. All they could make out was my mother’s name. They called her and she came immediately. Though the officers hadn’t been able to calm the man, he went away with my mother easily. When she later applied for the position of victim advocate, she was hired on the spot.

  A stack of old crime reports sat atop her new desk. She began to pick through them. In one, a woman had been raped and left for dead behind a bar. In another, an intruder had raped an elderly woman in front of her husband. There were many cases of child abuse and many of sexual abuse, but the vast majority—75 percent—were domestic violence cases.

  That year, Florida legislators toughened the state’s domestic violence laws, enabling police to make arrests on misdemeanor assault or battery charges even if they hadn’t witnessed an incident38—typically a requirement for misdemeanor charges. To do so, the law said, they must have evidence that a victim had been injured or have probable cause to believe that an injury could be inflicted if they didn’t make an arrest. But at the time, there was no state- or countywide protocol for responding to domestic violence calls39—there wasn’t even a domestic violence detective on the Largo police force.40 Officers would show up, walk the offender around the block, then take him home.41 Though domestic violence was legally a crime, general thought was that there was no point in arresting an abuser: they’d just have to release him later, and then he’d go and do it again. Often, victims recanted their claims, which seemed like a waste of everyone’s time to the officers.42 It seemed to suggest that the claims weren’t true, or were exaggerated at the very least.

  Also that year, the Florida legislature passed a law enabling victims to take out injunctions for protection against their abusers43—but only if they were married—and even then, there was no mandatory penalty for an abuser violating his injunction. Besides which, law enforcement generally considered matters between spouses to be private;44 they were a family’s business, not the state’s, and state attorneys didn’t like to prosecute them. If an officer even wrote a report when responding to a call, he most likely soon forgot about it.

  By the time my mom arrived, detectives at the Largo Police Department were used to working without a victim advocate. When officers responded to a rape call, or a child sexual abuse call, or a domestic violence call, they were supposed to call my mom to the scene.45 She was to connect the victims with services or housing, and assist them with safety planning and legal aid throughout the court process. But the officers would forget my mom was there, and when they remembered, they wouldn’t use her. Her desk was in the lobby; detectives were in the back. Though this made her available to homeless people who came in off the street looking for housing, it made it hard for my mom to get involved with criminal cases.

  My mom battled to get officers and detectives to include her; some of them didn’t think the role was necessary and refused to call my mom at all—one officer believed that women were never raped, and that claims of rape meant they were “hiding something” like infidelity or prostitution. No point in calling a victim advocate to the scene if the victim wasn’t a victim. Others thought it was a pain in the ass to have to keep her informed as to a case’s progress.

  Once, at an officers’ training session, my mom stood up in front of the class and announced, “I’m your victim advocate! Use me!”46 They all laughed.

  Such was the culture. At Christmas, officers hung their favorite mug shots on the station tree as ornaments. Black humor kept them sane while they were doing their job—caring too much about victims, on the other hand, didn’t help. Getting sensitive would get them in trouble. Teasing among them was merciless.

  Domestic violence cases continued to flood in. My mom fought to work on them. Through her studies at Unity-Clearwater, she had come to believe that no one was purely evil. People could behave in evil ways, but ultimately they were all children of Spirit, like her, and thus on the path to spiritual enlightenment. It was her role as a student of Truth to make them realize their poten
tial. With some it was harder than others, but if she persisted, love would prevail, so she pushed on.

  Then one day, her desk was gone from the lobby. Someone had moved it to the back among the detectives—one of them in the Crimes Against Persons division saw the value in a victim advocate and began encouraging others to give my mom cases. Soon, they were calling her out daily on cases of child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, and attempted murder. But never for domestic violence. If she went on those calls, they said, she’d be out every night. So they left the reports on her desk. It was an improvement.

  That year, the local chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) began lobbying the Police Standards Council47 for a countywide policy for police to arrest abusers every time they responded to domestic violence calls, and track domestic violence arrest and prosecution rates. They wrote letters and made phone calls and attended county commission meetings—and made themselves general pains in the ass. It took two years, but in 1986, the county passed the policy.48

  Soon after, the Standards Council formed a Domestic Violence Task Force,49 which included the director of St. Petersburg’s domestic violence shelter, Community Action Stops Abuse (CASA); a leader from NOW; and other advocates and government leaders, including my mom. She couldn’t change what had happened to her, but she might be able to stop it from happening to others. And where she couldn’t prevent it, she could change the way people were cared for afterward. It was a matter of changing people’s perceptions—inside the government, but the general public’s as well.