Holy Ghost Girl (17 page)

After the service that night, the tent manager relayed to Brother Terrell and the rest of the team what the sheriff had said: too many complaints, turn down the speakers.

Mama snorted. “They don’t tell those worldly entertainers to turn down anything. This is the state fairgrounds! They must be used to noise around here.”

Everyone agreed we were being persecuted, but the speaker volume was lowered before service began the next morning. Brother Terrell asked the sparse daytime audience to move closer to the large speakers at the front of the platform so they could hear. The lower volume worked with the smaller, more compact seating arrangement, but posed a problem at night, when the crowd, though small for us, was still too large to be contained in one or two small sections. The volume crept back up and the sheriff began to make regular appearances. The sound system had posed problems before, but the tent team and authorities had usually reached an agreement. Before we reached that point in Columbia, someone called the press. We didn’t make the front page as folks would later remember, but the newspaper coverage did stir up interest. Our crowd size increased, and so did the noise and the pressure for a showdown.

Brother Terrell began to point out the sheriff’s car from the platform. “That viper out there that’s supposed to protect us is out here trying to shut down the revival. They’re trying to stop God. You can’t stop God.”

Mama played “I Shall Not Be Moved,” and the crowd joined hands and sang, swaying to the music. Inspired by the civil rights movement, two hundred of the faithful descended on the Richland County courthouse demanding freedom of religion. The sheriff scratched his head and told Brother Terrell’s followers and the reporters who accompanied them he wasn’t out to restrict anyone’s religion. The people who lived in the area just wanted a little peace and quiet, that was all. He wasn’t aiming to run the tent revival out of town, just to get the speakers turned down. Cameras clicked and reporters scribbled away and we made the next day’s papers.

One night as Brother Terrell paced and preached below the prayer ramp, two men in suits approached him from the middle aisle of the tent. One of them said something in his ear. Brother Terrell pointed the microphone at him, but he brushed it aside. Brother Terrell spoke for him.

“He wants to know if I’m the Reverend David Terrell.” He looked at the man. “Yes, sir, I am.”

The other man took Brother Terrell’s hand and placed an envelope in it, then both men turned and walked back down the aisle in no particular hurry. A couple of guys with beefy arms started toward them, but Brother Terrell waved them away.

“Please, y’all, stay seated. We’ll not respond with violence of any kind here tonight.”

He opened the envelope, pulled out the document inside, and stared at it for a moment. “I don’t read so good, so I don’t know what all this says, but I believe it’s from those devils that want to shut us down.”

He held up the paper and ripped it down the middle, then shredded each half. “Whoever signed this, whoever has aligned himself with the powers of the enemy, will be dead within the month.”

He tore the strips of paper into small pieces and tossed them into the air. They fluttered in the light around his shoulders and drifted to the ground. “That’s thus saith the Lord.”

Reporters wrote that Brother Terrell had torn up a court order in the middle of a church service. People who had never been to a tent revival showed up to see what would happen next. The crowd was so large we couldn’t seat everyone, and the speaker volume crept up again. When the sheriff didn’t appear, people congratulated Brother Terrell on showing the devil who was boss. He said he wasn’t convinced it was all over, that he still felt uneasy in his spirit. Brother Terrell’s spirit was the divining rod in all things. If a tent man decided to marry a particular woman and Brother Terrell told him he didn’t feel settled in his spirit about it, there was no marriage. Increasingly, believers sought his input on changing jobs, taking trips, making major business decisions, and other life decisions. There was always talk among the inner circle about how he had saved someone from making not just a mistake, but a tragic mistake. His intuition held sway in his own business as well. If plans had been made to hold a revival in a certain place and Brother Terrell began to feel uneasy about it, plans were changed.

His uneasiness didn’t necessarily lead to a clear view of what was wrong. He and the evangelistic team speculated on whether the Klan might be driving the problems with law enforcement. Mama said under her breath several times that it sure would be good if they knew what was on that paper he had torn up. We found out about a week later when two more men approached Brother Terrell just before he walked onto the platform. One of them touched his shoulder and reached out as if to shake his hand.

“Reverend Terrell?”

“Yes, sir.” Brother Terrell stuck out his hand and when he did, the other man handed him an envelope.

“If I were you, Reverend, I’d read that before I tore it up. Could save you more trouble.”

After church that night, my mother and a couple of ministers puzzled over the paper and figured out that Brother Terrell had to appear in court the next week. Looking back, it’s clear no one understood what was going on. Dreams, visions, prophecy, and scripture, our primary tools for making sense of the world, offered no insight on how to deal with legal issues. Late one night while my mother was praying, she had a vision in which she saw the finger of God pointing toward an angel, a youngish man with dark, curly hair.

“It means God is sending an angel to help us. We just have to hold on and believe.”

Members of the congregation approached Brother Terrell a couple of nights later and told him an angel had been present while he preached. They described him as having dark, curly hair and a presence that glowed. Mama said it was her angel, it had to be; he had the same hair.

The adults gathered in the middle of the tent after church on most nights and talked about the Persecution of the Saints into the early morning hours. It was upon us, they said. This was it. While Pam and I sat in our chairs and played here’s-the-church, here’s-the-steeple and bit our fingernails to the quick, they spoke of the government pressuring them to deny Christ, of having 666 carved into their foreheads, of being thrown into jails and insane asylums for refusing to give up their faith. They spoke of Christian women strung up naked in public. Of children turning their parents in to the authorities. No one mentioned turning the speaker volume down. What began as a misdemeanor charge had escalated into the apocalypse. But then, that’s what we expected.

Our lives became the twenty-four-hour prayer channel. When the grown-ups were not pacing and praying all night and in between services for the courage to stand up for Jesus, they were laying hands on Randall. His stomach had been swelling for months and now it was so large, he had to wear a man’s shirt to keep it covered. During the evening services, Brother Terrell called him to the front and had the congregation put their hands up and pray for him.

After these prayers, Randall examined the profile of his body in the dresser mirror. “Hey, y’all, I b’lieve it’s gone down a little. Look.”

Everyone said yeah, maybe he did look smaller, at least a little, when it was plain he looked the same or larger.

About a hundred of the faithful accompanied Brother Terrell to court. My mother and Betty Ann and key members of the evangelistic party like Brother Cotton stayed behind to organize an all-day prayer meeting under the tent. I was relieved. If they put Brother Terrell in jail, if they yanked his fingernails out with pliers and tortured him for his faith, someone would still be around to drive to the store and buy groceries. As it turned out, the four of us kids were on our own that day. We started a couple of halfhearted fights with local children that didn’t go anywhere, wrote cusswords in the dust on believers’ cars, and played a lot of chase. Randall ran backward on his heels, his belly bouncing slow like a beach ball. As Pam, Gary, and I closed in on him, he turned around to run in earnest and slammed face-first into the ocean of humanity that was Sister Waters.

The Waters, as Pam called her, was five feet tall and weighed at least two hundred pounds. She lived in Andalusia, Alabama, but she followed the revivals from town to town and had decided that she was called by God to keep an eye on us children. Her calling compelled her to grab Randall by the shirt and me and Pam by our ponytails at every opportunity, hissing under her breath, “You better sit your tails down before the devil gets a holt of you.”

She was so worried about Brother Terrell that day that she swatted Randall aside and continued in prayer. “Help him, Lord. Help him, Jesus.”

We watched in relief as she rolled by, her hands stretched open against her sides, fingers wide. Each time she took a step, she pointed a short, squat foot and the opposite hand moved forward in tandem. The effect was a dainty, mincing walk that set her body vibrating against the thin, strained cotton of her dress. Once she was out of earshot, Randall made a wavy motion with his hand and said, “God moved on The Waters.”

Late that afternoon, a man named Sam, a longtime follower of Brother Terrell, delivered the news. The evangelistic team, the tent crew, and the families who followed the tent gathered in the backstage area to hear the news. Sam was a short, wiry man with a t-shaped nose and a brown, well-creased neck. When he spoke, his eyes hopped about like a bird and his face turned red.

“Judge said he should’a not torn up that paper. They took him to jail.”

Mama spoke up. “For tearing up a paper?”

“I don’t know what for. They just took him. He didn’t say anything, didn’t speak a word against ’em.”

Brother Cotton started up the steps to the platform. “I better tell the people. Don’t turn the sound system on, Dockery. I don’t want to make things worse.”

I slipped to the side of the platform and watched him walk to the middle of the stage. He beckoned people to move in closer. “Those of you who can hear me, come on up to the front. I can’t use the microphone. Everyone, move on in here.”

Brother Cotton didn’t sugarcoat it. “They’ve taken Brother Terrell to jail.”

Silence.

“I know how y’all feel. But I’m not in despair. And don’t you be either. We’re gonna go right on holding services. We’ll let you know when we hear news of Brother Terrell. We’re going to rest a bit now, but we’ll be back in a couple of hours to carry on the night service, and we’ll be here tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, and tomorrow night. The devil may have pulled the plug on our PA system, but he can’t shut us up. Amen? Can y’all hear me out there?”

Someone yelled no and Brother Cotton laughed. “Well, come on back tonight, and I’ll say a lot more you can’t hear.”

Brother Cotton stayed at the little trailer behind the tent to prepare for the evening service and the rest of us—Laverne, Betty Ann, the baby, Mama, and the four of us kids—went home for a couple of hours. The house was quieter than a three-bedroom house with eight people in it should be. Betty Ann took the baby and retreated behind the door of her bedroom. Pam and Randall and Gary and I scrubbed the day’s dirt off, dressed for the evening service, and made peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner. There were no fights and no play either. Three weeks of waiting for the worst had finally worn us out.

 

 

Brother Cotton walked up and down the aisles, yelling at the top of his lungs without a microphone that night. When his voice played out, he grabbed the four offering buckets from a back corner of the platform and held them, two in each hand, in front of the prayer ramp. People began to sing, “What you give to the Lord, give it in Jesus’s name, and he will give you some more.” They waited in line to give money and they filled the buckets twice.

 

 

Two days later Richland County set Brother Terrell free. A newspaper photograph shows him smiling for the cameras, riding on the shoulders of followers as they carry him away from the jail. He told reporters he harbored no hard feelings, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. He said the revival had been such a success he was going to enlarge his tent to seat another twenty-five hundred people. The judge survived, though some believers still contend he died within the month. “Touch not my anointing, touch not my anointing,” they mumbled, underscoring the biblical warning with meaningful looks only they could decipher.

SAWDUST-TRAIL PREACHERS LOVED TO BRAG ABOUT THEIR TENT SIZE. During the nineteen-forties, Oral Roberts claimed his tent was the world’s largest. The faith healer Jack Coe covertly measured Roberts’s tent and had his own extended by three feet, just enough to transfer bragging rights to his operation. A few years after Coe’s death, Brother Terrell was able to make the same claim. The new tent was big, but no one can remember just how big. It accommodated anywhere from five to ten thousand people, depending on who is giving the estimate. My mother remembers it as stretching the length of two football fields. Others put the length at a football field and a half. Brother Terrell made the proud claim that the tent was bigger than the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus tent.

It was hard to feel persecuted under the world’s largest tent. Every night was one long hallelujah party. In the midst of all the celebrating, Randall’s stomach rose like a harvest moon. His long, mournful face bobbed above his thirty-six-inch belly, giving him the appearance of a sideshow freak: nine years old and eight months pregnant. His energy diminished until the tent men carried him into the services on a cot. Brother Terrell prayed for Randall night and day, but he didn’t get any better. Everyone agreed the Lord was putting Brother Terrell’s faith to the test. And Randall, was he being tested too?

I asked my mother once if God hated kids. She looked shocked and said no, of course not. The story of Abraham offering his son as a human sacrifice at God’s bidding had convinced me otherwise. The adults interpreted the story as a test of Abe’s faith. I remember thinking,
He has a knife at his son’s throat, and it’s only a test?
Small wonder that when the grownups spoke of the necessity of trusting God, I always heard an unspoken “or else.” I banished these thoughts as soon as I had them. I didn’t want him coming after me.