Holy Ghost Girl (3 page)

We giggled. Brother Terrell leaned over and whispered something to the woman. She nodded and raised her hands. The people who stood in line behind her on the ramp backed up. Betty Ann and the preachers who waited in front of her on the ramp moved away. If this woman went down in the spirit, no one wanted to go with her. Randall, Pam, and I edged beyond the corner of the platform for a better view. No one was left on the ramp but the woman and Brother Terrell. The music and the clapping stopped. He raised his hand to place it on her forehead, but before he could touch her, the woman’s skirt dropped around her ankles. Her big stomach was gone. Randall let out a whoop. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder at the men on the platform, and they all doubled over laughing. He whirled back toward the audience and jumped up and down, just above the ramp where the woman still stood with her hands raised and her eyes closed.

“She’s healed, praise God. The spirit of God has filled this place like a mighty wind, just like in the Bible, hallelujah! The healing power of God destroyed the tumor. It’s gone.”

Anyone still in their seats rushed to the front. My mother pounded the Hammond and we sang on and on about all that God could do and how he never changed.

The woman stood there in her blouse and slip with her eyes closed, her arms and hands raised, her lips speaking a language that made sense only to her. Betty Ann and the other women recovered their composure and moved toward her. Someone pulled up her skirt and held it in place at her waist. Someone else grasped her elbow and eased her down the ramp. She never opened her eyes or put her hands down. When they reached the bottom, the women talked to her and tried to get her to hold her skirt up. She grasped it for a moment, then let it fall and began to dance in her blouse and slip. Pam, Randall, and I watched in astonishment. The woman didn’t seem to know she had lost her skirt, or if she knew, she didn’t care. Brother Terrell had that effect on people.

The miraculous and the mundane tap-danced up and down the aisles of the tent together, and it never occurred to me to question if one was more real than the other. I don’t think it occurred to the adults either. We experienced the world through the scrim of belief, and that made everything possible. No one followed up to see if the miracles held, but people who said they were healed often returned. The Woman Who Used To Be Big, that’s what we called her, came back and gave her testimony several times during the monthlong revival.

“I went to the doctor to be checked out like Brother Terrell told me. The doctor said, ‘What happened to the tumor?’ I said the man of God healed me.”

As word of the healing spread, the crowd increased until people stood two and three deep along the outside perimeter of the tent. Ambulances transported people from hospitals. Stretchers and wheelchairs lined the aisles until the fire marshal complained and we moved the sick behind the platform, where they waited until Brother Terrell called a prayer line.

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER’S FIRST MEETING WITH DAVID Terrell as the Holy Roller equivalent of the big bang. It must have seemed as though their twin histories had been spinning toward each other with cataclysmic urgency since birth. They were kindred spirits, each believing he or she had been plucked from the mass of ordinary folks by the long bony fingers of God and set aside for great things. Almost all of the childhood stories told by Brother Terrell and my mother focused on the experience of being chosen. Brother Terrell often said from the platform that growing up he had always had a sense that he was different. No doubt the leg surgeries and hospital stays that were a part of his illness set him apart from other kids. The visit from Jesus at age nine must have sealed the deal. Then there were the visions: He foretold his uncle’s and then his grandmother’s death; and the voices: when he played alone he often heard God calling his name.

My mother, too, grew up on a first-name basis with God. She was only eight when she heard the voice calling her name in the woods next to the Assemblies of God church where her daddy was pastor. There were no burning bushes, no glowing figures, only an ordinary and somewhat familiar voice calling,
Carolyn.
She wandered through the trees and looked behind the largest trunk.
Carolyn
. No one there.
Carolyn.

That night as she told her family the story, a feeling of awe swept over her. That voice, the voice that called her name in the trees, the voice that sounded so familiar yet belonged to no one, that voice was the eternal I Am, the same voice that spoke the world into existence. She knew it. When her parents asked how she knew, she shrugged and asked, “Well, who else could it have been?” In her family, no one would have suggested it was her imagination. My Pentecostal grandparents and their children existed in a reality that was an extension of biblical times. They believed the temporal world lay like a fine curtain over the realm of the eternal. At any moment the archangel Michael might reach through the veil and tap them on the shoulder with a heavenly message. Or the devil might slip through and tempt with some cheap bit of finery. It could be hard to tell one from the other at times, especially given Satan’s love of deception, but no one questioned the veracity of the experiences.

Being singled out by God brought the kind of attention that was hard to come by for kids in large, poor families. Born in 1932 to Alabama sharecroppers, Brother Terrell was the youngest of seven kids. The family lived in a shack without running water or electricity. A broken-down horse provided the only transportation. The Great Depression and the death of Brother Terrell’s father turned the family’s subsistent poverty into a struggle for survival. His mother left him in the care of one of his sisters and went to work in the fields with her other five children. She left at sunrise and came home at sundown. On Sundays, she hitched the horse to a rickety wagon and drove her brood to the nearest holiness church, a backwoods term for a nondenominational Pentecostal offshoot. Her faith was her only source of hope.

Mama’s childhood was slightly less desperate. She was one of the middle kids in a family of nine children. Her daddy was the pastor of a string of Assemblies of God churches throughout Alabama and Florida. He farmed to put food on the table. My mother and her siblings picked cotton to pay for their shoes and other necessities. Mama and Brother Terrell were thought to be sensitive children by their mothers and downright peculiar by their siblings. Brother Terrell wrote songs and picked out tunes on a neighbor’s guitar early on. For a brief time during adolescence he harbored hopes of making it big on the Grand Ole Opry, but the visions kept coming and he realized that God would not let him go.

Mama was a musical prodigy, further proof of God’s favor. Her story is that while picking at the notes on the piano in her daddy’s church one day, she was suddenly able to play a hymn straight through. From that moment she could play any song she wanted. When she was fifteen, she saw herself in a night vision playing a big pearly accordion. A night vision is a foretelling of the future, only the seer is asleep. People who have night visions often go on to full-fledged wide-awake visions. When Mama opened her eyes, she could still feel the heft of the instrument against her. She was meant to have an accordion. Her daddy said that might be true, but he didn’t have the money to buy one. Another teenage girl might have pleaded or thrown a fit. My mother fasted and prayed. In the early hours of what was to be her fourth day without food, a knock on the door awakened her daddy. He turned on the light and opened the door. There on his front porch stood a man he recognized but didn’t know well.

“Preacher, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got to give you this.”

He thrust a wad of bills at my grandfather and turned to go.

“Wait. What is this? What’s it for?” My grandfather tugged at the man’s sleeve.

The man shook him off. “Look, I haven’t been able to sleep for days. Something keeps telling me to bring you this money. I don’t know what it’s for. But you have to take it so I can get some sleep
.
”

Later that morning my grandfather went to town and ordered an accordion from Sears, Roebuck. My mother played it in church the day it arrived. She says she never hit a wrong note.

By the time Brother Terrell came along, Mama needed a second chance to fulfill her destiny. She had blown the first one. Her mother had told her, “Honey, any woman can get married and have children. God has something better in mind for you.” Mama’s plan was to go to Bible school and become a missionary, but she ran away from home, or away from her controlling daddy, instead. My grandfather had the idea that his high-cheeked, leggy daughter was something of a wild girl and he was determined to rein her in. According to Mama, the last straw came when he dragged her out of a boy’s car at a local snack shack in “broad daylight” and whipped her with his belt. She was eighteen years old.

She hopped a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles. There she dropped her middle name, Carolyn, in favor of her first name, Betty, and cut her long, stringy hair into a bouncy bob. One broken taboo spawned a host of others: movies, skating rinks, lipstick, slacks, bathing suits, men. The path to perdition is tediously routine for a Holy Roller girl. She went to church, she prayed, but God no longer dropped by. She met my dad in LA, a sinner boy who was everything my grandfather feared. He smoked and drank and indulged a taste for all things fast. Cars. Boats. Women. Mama’s religious beliefs and naïveté cast her as something of an exotic in my dad’s eyes. Her LA nickname, Betty the Body, tells the rest of the story. My dad wooed her with professions of love, promises of repentance, and declarations that she alone could save him. Six weeks after they met, my parents married. Asked why she married a man she hardly knew and one so different from her, my mother’s answer is typical: “I guess I thought I could help him.” The cost of bringing a soul into the fold was never too high.

My grandfather’s response to the Las Vegas wedding was to the point: “I guess she had to get married.”

I was born a year after my parents married. Still, I’ve always considered their wedding a shotgun marriage of sorts, a trigger-happy God pointing the gun, my mother’s guilt egging it all on. She had come close to the fires of hell one night, parked above Los Angeles in my dad’s car, the windows steamed with lust. They married soon after. The marriage lasted two years, most of which my dad spent scrambling for the door. He made his final exit when my mother told him a second child was on the way.

Mama discovered he had another woman and her disgrace was complete.

My mother returned to her parents’ house pregnant and prodigal with a toddler in tow. She had rebelled against her father. She had eaten of the tree of good and evil. She had known better. She was practically a divorced woman, and in the rural Pentecostal South that put her perilously close to being a hussy. Pentecostals conceded that divorce might be a necessary evil in extreme cases, but remarriage was condemned little more than legally sanctioned adultery. At twenty-three, my mother’s vision of herself as God’s own girl was lost. She was grateful when her parents allowed her to move into the apartment in the basement of their church. She was grateful when my brother was born healthy, grateful when she found a job, grateful her daddy never said, “I told you so.” She woke early Monday through Friday, dressed for work, dropped my infant brother and me at the babysitter’s, and headed to Whitman Trailers for another day of typing and shorthand. On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights she plinked out hymns on the piano at her father’s church as she had done for years before her trip out West. She was as grateful as she could be, a grateful corpse of a woman.

And then she heard David Terrell preach. He was a twenty-seven-year-old six-foot looker with black hair, blue eyes, and a smile that flashed Holy Ghost charm to the last soul in the last row of the big tents in which he preached. My grandpa looked out over his congregation from the big throne of a chair that sat between the choir stall and the pulpit and smiled. The pews were full. He was lucky to have caught David Terrell between revivals. Later he would think otherwise.

From her seat at the piano, Mama watched Brother Terrell walk to the pulpit and place his Bible on it. She was close enough to see the light bob off his Brylcreemed hair when he bowed his head and asked Jesus to hide him behind the cross. He opened his eyes, clutched at the sides of the pulpit as if it were a lifeboat, swayed a bit, then let go. He took three steps to the right, turned, and took another three to the left.

“I came here . . . I came here tonight . . . I thought I’d preach on reaching the promised land. But now, now, I don’t know.”

He didn’t sound much like a big-time preacher. His speech was slow and halting, and his shy demeanor stirred Mama’s protective instinct. Oh, what a stirring it must have been. Fifty years later and we still feel the ripples.

Brother Terrell cocked his head and stared past the congregation. “I feel like . . . I feel like the Lord is leading me in a different direction. A lot has to happen
before
you reach the promised land, amen?”

No answer. He brought his hand to his brow as if to shade his eyes and surveyed the congregation. “Y’all awake out there? Well? Maybe you will be soon.”

He walked back to the pulpit, flipped his Bible open to Exodus, and read aloud the story of Moses. In chapter two, Pharaoh’s daughter defies her father and saves baby Moses from drowning in the Nile. He lives in the palace as an Egyptian but cannot forget that he is an Israelite, a member of the slave race. In a fit of pique, he kills an Egyptian. Chapter three opens with Moses on the lam. God appears to him as a burning bush with a gift for gab and tells him to confront Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When Moses asks who he should say had given him such a charge, the bush says, “I Am who I Am.”