by Diamond
Yes, I remember.
Chapter 3 Preacher’s Kids
As we speak our truth regarding religion, it’s not to disparage or disrespect its sanctity. Remember, we were taught faith at an early age and understood God was good. However, we were inundated with the doctrine of denomination, and we came to understand some harsh realities about the church, especially the black church.
Religion and God have always been an integral part of the black community and the black family. Conservative values and faith in God were the glue that sealed our hope and etched it into our very being, all going back to the days of slavery.
Since the days of slavery, most black people have felt out of place or uncertain of their place. With that said, everyone, especially black people, wants to belong or to become affiliated with something higher than themselves. Because of the atrocities of slavery, black people needed something to sustain and uplift them.
Ancestrally, from the very beginning of slavery, black people were told and even coerced into believing they were not good or not good enough. This is nowhere in scripture, yet this belief was instilled in our ancestors and has been passed down from one generation to the next generation.
Slavery started in the U.S. in 1619, and it took almost three centuries for parts of the country to view slavery as extreme cruelty. During those days, black people didn’t have rights. They were considered property, not human beings, and religion was used to keep black people in bondage and oppression, thinking that that’s where God intended them to be—instead of speaking what scripture really says, which is that we are all designed by God to be equal and free.
Slaves were used to pick cotton, plant and harvest other crops, build railroads, wash clothes, cook, and clean. They did this from sunup to sundown. Slaves were beaten, lynched, and maimed to keep them in line. Slaves were intentionally set against one another to cause strife and dishonesty.
Back in the day, the slave masters were so cruel, they would sell off the children of the adult slaves to other slave masters, causing family separation.
Mm-hmm.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve always hated being a preacher’s kid. I could never live up to the expectation of being perfect. In my eyes, “being perfect” meant having no flaws. Not only did I have flaws, but there were also secrets lurking in the crevices.
There is a difference between God and religion. God is the source, the supplier, the creator and ruler of the universe. Religion is doctrine, theology, and persuasion. We don’t serve religion; we serve God.
Yes. For me, God lives in me. Religion is something that was being indoctrinated into me.
I love God, and I will never stop loving God, but I loathe religion.
Mm-hmm, the indoctrination of religion.
You may ask me what I mean by that.
Yes, please explain.
I hated the construct and dogma of an ideology that made some appear more superior than others. Religion has always had people pointing the finger at each other as to who is right and who is wrong. Religion was used by some to keep people in line. It was a means of controlling people. That’s not God’s love; that’s conveniently applied abuse.
Yeah, sis; I’m with you on that.
Well, we grew up in a very religious family. I can’t count the number of churches we attended. We became members of some, and others we didn’t. I remember being in church all day on Sundays, and I used to dread it. First, there was Sunday school, then morning worship. Afterward, you went home, ate, and then came back for evening service. On Tuesday nights, it was prayer service; on Thursday night, it was Bible class. After all of that, there would usually be Saturday choir rehearsal or someone’s usher board meeting to attend—and God forbid if you didn’t show up.
Mm-hmm. You’re taking us way back.
Services were always so long and drawn out. I was always irritated by it.
The first church we went to was the Church of Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith. I was five, and Silk was six years old. We were baptized in that church. I will never forget it because it was a big church, and the children went to mini-church.
The church teachings were strict. I remember having to wear patty-cakes, which were called chapel scarves, on our heads. All the women in the church, even down to the children, had to have their heads covered.
Mm-hmm. Yes, I remember.
Mother would get us up early on Sunday morning and get us ready for Sunday school. We would have on our pretty little dresses with matching shoes, our little purses, and we were ready.
Don’t forget the matching hair bows.
That’s right. Sunday school classes used to be in the basement of the church. I remember sitting there listening to the stories and being ready for it to be over. After Sunday school, there was a children’s church, but most of the time Mother had us in the sanctuary in the front row. The one thing about Mother, she didn’t play. She would sit us in the front row and let Silk hold the switch in her lap to keep the rest of us in line while Mother sang in the choir.
Yes, she sure did. I was the oldest, so I had to keep everyone else in line.
Living the apostolic faith was very rigid and strict. Anything that defiled the temple—meaning your body—was forbidden, like wearing pants or makeup, drinking alcohol, or smoking cigarettes.
There was no listening to the radio because that music was worldly. Any music other than gospel music was prohibited. Many times, I had to sneak and listen to some secular music to keep up with the trends.
You see, being in school around my peers and not knowing about a new rap song or a new singing group could make me seem lame. So when Mom and Dad would leave the house, we would blast the radio, the record player, and the tape recorder.
But we had to make sure that we were on the lookout. When that Thunderbird or Cadillac Seville drove into the driveway, everyone knew what to do: go turn it back to the gospel stations, just like Momma had it, or you were going to get it. We even had our own chant, “Momma is here. Momma is here. Momma-Is-Here!”
We had been to several different churches by the time we were in middle school, and Mother and Father just did not agree with the majority of them. Throughout the years, we went through this span of churches. Mother had become an ordained evangelist and Father an ordained minister. Then they opened their own church.
Being a preacher’s kid meant we had to set, and be, an example, but we had no clue how to be the example. We were in middle school, about to approach high school. We wanted to be normal, like everyone else.
Because our parents became so ingrained in religion, they missed all of the telltale signs of ill treatment and abuse. Once they started the church, nothing was ever as it appeared, in my opinion.
Yeah. Sitting here now, looking back, it was like we had to put on a mask to appear a certain way when we were out in public.
From the eyes of a preacher’s kid, it seemed that the brunt of building the church fell on our little shoulders. We had to illustrate how to lead a godly life and go out to win souls. Having to set the example and be the example was far too much of a burden to bear.
Remember, my hair was falling out; I was coming into puberty, so my skin was breaking out; I didn’t want to be an example. Heck, I didn’t even want to be seen.
By the time I had gotten to the eighth grade and Silk had gotten to the ninth grade, Mother sat us down and told us that we could not wear pants anymore, and we weren’t allowed to wear makeup. She said we needed to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable before God.
Gasp. Now, that was a real blow for me. What was I going to tell my friends when they asked me why I always wore a dress? How was I going to participate in gym? I was thirteen years old, just starting the ninth grade with people that had seen me wearing pants. I had my favorite pants that I loved to wear. Now, all of a sudden, I would have to go to school looking and feeling like I was in some kind of cult. I literally went into a state of depression and
rebellion all at the same time.
Yes; we were ticked off. We could not understand why, in the prime of our young lives, right in front of our peers, it was God’s will for us to go to school looking different from everyone else. A drastic change of this magnitude made it easy for us to be bullied and harassed. It was an embarrassing time, so humiliating that I just checked out.
I remember feeling that our lives were ruined, all because of religion. What other children were allowed to do, Mother would not let us do. I started to rebel; I hated school, and I hated my life.
Yes, the way to godliness was presented as total strictness and restrictions.
When parents go into extreme thinking, they will push children to the edge, or over the edge, and the children will have nowhere to go but down. Mother never gave us any wiggle room. It was just, “Do what I say, or else.”
In our opinions, looking back over those days, maybe Mother saw that we were growing up and developing and was afraid that men would start looking at us in a sexual way. What Mother didn’t realize is that we were already being abused. In my opinion, making us wear dresses gave easy access for the abuser to abuse us even more.
I spiraled out of control. I remember getting into trouble, then pulling Silk into it so she could be in trouble with me. It was nothing for my parents to get a call from the principal’s office, saying they were kicking Silk and me out of school because of the mess that I had gotten into.
By the time I got into the ninth grade, I was already skipping school. I got tired of going to school and being the laughingstock. Day in and day out, schoolmates made derogatory remarks, just to humiliate me. On the days that I went to school, I was always in trouble for sassing back to a teacher or something else. I had gotten so bad that I was kicked out of school for half of my ninth grade year.
After I was kicked out of school, Mother made me get up in the mornings and go to the cleaners with her and Father and work during the day.
Silk was so upset about our new life of restrictions that she took pills to try to end her life! Thank God, Silk is still here to tell the story.
That’s right. Because I’m still here, I will tell the story: Being young, not knowing or understanding, all bundled up with a feeling of worthlessness, made me blank out. I didn’t want to be here. I couldn’t do anything. I lost a lot of weight because I was too depressed to even eat. I didn’t have another lie to tell my friends. I didn’t want to go through life like this.
By this time, our parents had a church. As it happened, we had a small fire at our home, and while the house was being renovated, the family moved into the Sunday school part of the church. Well, we were in really close quarters. One day, after coming in from school, I decided to just go to my zone. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I felt so alone, and no one understood or cared about the emotional pain that was wreaking havoc on my body. I was literally motionless. I wanted to die. I remember saying to myself, “If I have to live like this, I may as well be dead.”
I can’t remember what I took, but it was a handful of pills. I swallowed them down with a cup of water. I walked downstairs into the sanctuary part of the church and lay on the pulpit and fell asleep. I can’t remember how long I was there for. All I remember was my mother and father calling my name and trying to get me to drink milk to throw up whatever I had swallowed. I was so weak. I couldn’t walk; my words were very sluggish, and I was in and out of consciousness.
Finally, I came to. My parents asked me why I had tried to take my life. I was honest in telling them the exact reason why. I hadn’t done this for attention. I did it because I hadn’t wanted to live like that.
Looking back on that moment, I believe that may have been a small wake-up moment for my parents. Mother slacked off just an eency-weency bit. We still couldn’t wear pants, though.
The church was connected to my parent’s second dry cleaners. Occasionally, my sister and I would work at the cleaners after school. When we were there by ourselves, I would search through the bags of clothes for any orders that had been there longer than a year. If there were any pants that I could fit in, I would put the pants in my book bag, change into them when I got to school the next day, and change back when it was time to go home from school. I learned how to cope.
About two years later, our aunts, uncles, and cousins from Mother’s side of the family were visiting for the summer. Mother saw my cousins with their pants on, and she later sat us down while they were there and told us that we could start wearing our pants again. We were so happy, we jumped up and down like typical teenagers. We didn’t want our cousins poking fun at us.
I was just finishing eleventh grade, about to go into the twelfth grade. I would save up my little money and have my father drive me to the clothing store on Grand River Boulevard to purchase my pants, all in different colors.
The summer of my tenth-grade year, I had to go to summer school because, throughout the school year, I just didn’t apply myself. During summer school I got into a fight with a girl who thought her boyfriend liked me. That was the furthest thing from the truth. We fought, she won, and a few years later the boy ended up getting killed.
Mother was so annoyed with me for always getting into trouble or being in some type of confrontation. She was tired of being in a big city, always being afraid for our safety. She started contemplating moving us all back to North Carolina.
After enjoying a great weekend with our cousins and aunts—along with getting into a fight with some girls at Stoepel Park because they accused my cousin of touching their stuff—we came home to another chaotic event in the front yard of the house. After this chain of events, my parents said it was enough and that we were moving.
Mother and Father sent my brother to North Carolina to stay with my aunts and cousins. Then, a few weeks later, my father drove me to North Carolina. While I was there, I lived with my aunt and her three children in a small three-bedroom house. Living with my aunt was different from living with my parents. Mother and Father had rules; my aunt was relaxed. No, she didn’t let us do whatever we wanted, but she didn’t try to control what we did—and she allowed us to be ourselves.
She was considered the fun aunt; she was not strict or strenuous. Though we did go to church, we could wear whatever we wanted to wear. Our living conditions had changed; they were not what we were used to. My aunt didn’t live in a big house, there was no swimming pool in the backyard, and there was no dry cleaners to clean your clothes. There was just a washer and dryer, and if you wanted something pressed, you had to iron it.
The house was heated with a kerosene heater, and Auntie wouldn’t allow us to take showers in the morning because she thought we might catch a cold. It was life made simple.
As for me, Mother and Father kept me in Detroit with them so that I could continue with school and help with their new janitorial business while the family was transitioning from Detroit, Michigan, to North Carolina. At that time I was four months pregnant. A month before, I actually went with another friend to the clinic to see if she was pregnant. To keep her from feeling alone, we both took the test. After she took the test, the nurse told her that it had come back negative. Then the nurse asked me to go into another room. While I was sitting there, she told me that my test had come back positive. I gasped and said, “Are you saying that I’m pregnant?”
She was very straightforward, yet reserved, as she said, “Yes.”
I instantly got hot all over, and my mouth got very dry. I had to stay calm because I had to drive back home. I was sixteen years old, and my parents were pastors. Lord, how was I going to tell my mother this? It’s one thing to be a preacher’s kid, but it’s another thing to be a pregnant preacher’s kid. So I kept it a secret between myself and my sisters.
I remember standing in front of the mirror and seeing this little pouch in the lower part of my belly. It felt strange. I wasn’t bloated, and this wasn’t gas. I was carrying a little human being inside of me.
Well, a few weeks later,
one of my aunts found out. During this time I was going to summer school. After school I would go home and sleep for the rest of the day. All I wanted to do was sleep. Then one evening I was at the kitchen sink washing the dishes. Out of nowhere, I heard my mother gasp loudly. I acted like I heard nothing, even though I knew that she had figured it out in that moment.
Later we went out to do the janitorial business. We would go in after business hours and work late into the night to clean up office buildings. On that particular night I was walking through to another office, and I walked in on my father consoling my mother. That was my confirmation that she knew I was pregnant. They never saw me, and I don’t recall ever telling them what I had seen that night. I continued working and contemplating in my head how I was going to tell them.
Finally we got home, and my mother asked me to come into the kitchen. My heart dropped, but I had to suck it up. “Come in and have a seat,” she said. “Do you want some ice cream?”
I replied, “Yes.”
She placed the bowl in front of me. I held my head down and began eating very slowly. The tension was so thick that a knife with a super sharp blade would have been too dull to cut through it. My mother asked me if I was pregnant.
I replied, “Yes.”
She asked me how far along I was.
I replied that I didn’t know for sure.
Y’all, I thought my mother was taking it hard, but then I looked up at my father’s face and saw the disappointment. I looked back down and continued eating the rest of my ice cream. My father asked me why I didn’t use protection.
I replied that I didn’t have access to protection. You see, back then, in the eighties, teenagers didn’t have easy access to certain forms of birth control. You had to have parental consent. And going to my parents, who are pastors, to ask them for their consent to get birth control so that I wouldn’t get pregnant at the age of sixteen would have been like jumping in the middle of an ocean without a life jacket, knowing damn well that I didn’t know how to swim.