Holy Ghost Girl (4 page)

Brother Terrell moved away from the podium and walked in measured steps, heel to toe across the small platform, each step, each word a considered choice. His eyes searched the floor as if looking for a path that would take him where the spirit would have him go.

“God chose Moses. That’s why he didn’t let him drown. God had a plan for him and Moses didn’t want any part of it. He was running from God.”

Running from God. That was it. That was his way in. “You can’t outrun God. When God chooses you, you’re chosen for life.”

Brother Terrell stepped off the platform into the narrow space between the altar and the pews. “I said you’re chosen for life.” He moved relentlessly, back and forth, picking up speed and volume as he went.

“You can take a wrong turn!”

Encouragement came from the back of the congregation. “Yes. Amen, you can.”

“You can get stuck in Egypt for years.” He broke into a run across the front of the church.

The audience couldn’t resist. “Uh-huh. Come on now, Brother.”

The deacons in the front row raised their eyebrows and chuckled. Maybe this boy really could preach. He stopped and squalled into the face of one of the church’s biggest supporters. “You may get stuck on a bench. You may feel like you’re wasting your life and your talent.”

The deacon was taken aback, but his arms shot into the air when Brother Terrell clapped his hands on the man’s head. “Restore his zeal, Lord. Bring him back to that holy ground, that hallowed place where you first made yourself known to him. In the name of Jesus, amen.”

Brother Terrell launched back into his sermon with the same volume and fervor as before. He headed down the center aisle of the church. “You may be about to give up. You may think that no one hears your cries, that no one cares. But I’m here to tell you that I AM, the Lord God Almighty, has heard your cry.”

He reached the back of the church and started back toward the front. It was as if there were something inside him that would not let him stand still, would not let him shut up. Words and movement and sweat poured from him. His shirt was soaked. The Brylcreem failed and a slick hank of hair fell across his forehead. He ranted like a man possessed.

“I AM has seen your affliction. I AM has felt your sorrow. I AM will deliver you, I said he will take you by the hand and lead you out of the land of bondage.” Each time he screamed the words “I am,” he threw himself forward at the waist until he was crouched at a ninetydegree angle to the floor, running up and down the aisle. Steady murmurs of “amen,” “hallelujah,” “thank you, Jesus,” and “yes, Lord, yes” ran under and around Brother Terrell’s words, a rowdy communion of sounds and syllables that blurred the boundaries between preacher and congregation.

He reached the front of the church and fell to his knees. “Your cry has surely come before the Lord of host and the day of your deliverance is at hand!”

With the service at its emotional peak, Brother Terrell made his pitch for Jesus. He implored every person in the congregation who didn’t know the Lord to come to the front and lay down their burden of sin. Usually the invitation was accompanied by music, but there was no music that night. He turned to find out why, and saw an empty piano bench. My mother was on her knees at the altar. She had been seduced by the world. She had lost her way. It poured out of her: guilt, recrimination, resentment, self-loathing, and betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. Her daddy’s. Her husband’s. Her own. She had come to the end of her ability to make things work. She longed to go back to that time when God was as present as her breath, back to that place where everything had purpose and meaning.

Brother Terrell placed his hand on her forehead, and she felt the weight of her failed marriage and all that had led up to it fall away. She saw her life as it was before, filled with grace and promise and rising on the wind of the spirit. In that moment she was changed.

Brother Terrell preached at Grandpa’s church for a week. When the revival ended, he asked Mama to join his evangelistic team and become the organist for his tent revivals. She had never played an organ, but she knew that wasn’t a problem. She sold her furniture, the wedding gifts, knickknacks, flatware, all of her slacks, and the more fashionable dresses and skirts in her wardrobe. It all had to go. What she couldn’t sell, she gave away. She kept a few of her plainer dresses, a couple of toys, two pots, a set of sheets, a few towels, and her old ’49 Ford. She didn’t want anything to slow her down.

BROTHER TERRELL COULD SCAT ON SCRIPTURE LIKE A JAZZ SINGER HOPPED up on speed. He started slow, establishing his theme in a soft melody, circling around and over and through it for three, four, and five hours. He riffed on stories about his childhood, his last meal, or that time he ate a green persimmon, then meandered back to one of his standard themes of holiness, divine healing, the dry bones of institutionalized religion, or a medley of all three—without notes or outlines. I grew up thinking of him as the only one of his kind. He was in fact the last of his kind, or one of them. The sawdust-trail preachers were disappearing even as Brother Terrell joined their ranks. The term “sawdust trail” refers to the circuit traveled by the tent preachers and to the sawdust-covered aisles that a convert walked down to profess his or her new faith. The revivals peaked in the nineteen-forties and early fifties with the healing crusades of A. A. Allen, William Branham, Jack Coe, and Oral Roberts.

Brother Terrell styled himself, consciously or not, after the preachers he admired most. He emulated the meek persona that was the hallmark of Branham, a mystic who often stared into space and frustrated his backers by walking off the stage when he didn’t feel the spirit. As Brother Terrell’s ministry grew he exhibited the flamboyance of Coe and Allen. Coe was famous for socking people with stomach ailments in the belly as he pronounced them healed. From Allen came the practice of passing out anointed handkerchiefs.

Brother Terrell pitched his first tent in his late teens or early twenties. It was an old army tent canvas, shot through with so many holes that it let more rain in than it kept out. In the early days he sat at the front of the tent strumming his guitar and singing
“
I Saw the Light” before an audience that consisted of his wife and infant son and thirty-six borrowed, empty chairs. The odds of him becoming a successful tent preacher were long. Many of the well-known revivalists had died, quit, or succumbed to scandal by the early nineteen-sixties, victims of the backbreaking labor, grueling schedules, and emotional grind that defined their way of life. A few, like Oral Roberts, had enough education and savvy to establish institutions and transform the notoriety of the sawdust trail into a more mainstream, and more bankable, respectability.

By the time my mother joined the team, Brother Terrell’s tents were full most nights and he was considered a comer on the revival circuit. Still, it took a lot of poor people giving their last dollar to support a big tent operation. The crowds he attracted were a fragment compared with the earlier revivalists. Older preachers counseled him to find another way to make a living. The days of the great revivals were over, they said. With radio and movies and now television, the devil could distract people without much effort. Brother Terrell understood what they were saying, but he didn’t believe it applied to him. The Lord would make a way. Meanwhile, he stood in front of his audiences, held a white gallon cardboard bucket in each hand, and begged for money for more than an hour at a time.

“I haven’t paid my team in weeks. We done everything we can to cut costs. We need five thousand dollars just to make payments on the equipment. I can’t do this on my own. I need your help.”

People trickled up in ones and twos. Pam, Randall, and I dropped in the quarter or dime we had earned polishing Brother Terrell’s shoes and the shoes of the other preachers who traveled with us.

“There’s a lost, dying world out there. A world that hasn’t heard the gospel. If you don’t help us, they’ll die and never hear it.”

A cry entered his throat. I felt sorry for Brother Terrell, sorry that he had to cry and plead for money. Late at night when he and the other preachers sat around talking after a long service, I often heard him say he would rather take a beating than beg.

We said we were living by faith, but any reasonable observer would have said we were barely scraping by. Each revival cost thousands of dollars in rent, fees, and ads. Brother Terrell had to make monthly payments on the tent, PA system, organ, and other equipment. My mother and other members of the evangelistic team stayed up all night praying with him that God would meet our needs. And I guess he did, but at the last minute and often with barely enough. Someone donated a house for us to live in during one revival, but it didn’t have electricity or running water. Pam and I took baths together outdoors in a galvanized aluminum tub with water that came through a hose connected to a windmill. When we finished, Randall and Gary plopped into the same dingy water and showered off with the hose afterward. We didn’t go hungry, but we ate mayonnaise sandwiches and pork and beans for lunch, and bologna sandwiches and pork and beans for dinner. I wondered from time to time why miracles performed under the tent were perfect and complete, while in our daily lives God left things half finished. It was as if something distracted him midway through a job and he wandered off, leaving us with just enough food in our bellies and just enough hope in our souls.

When a windstorm damaged the tent, or one of the trucks that hauled the equipment had engine trouble, or a speaker blew, or a creditor demanded immediate payment, the financial strain increased. The men and women who traveled with Brother Terrell were in their early to midtwenties and completely dedicated to helping him spread the gospel. Mama and the others often signed their paychecks and put them back in the offering, trusting God to meet their needs. Betty Ann found it more difficult. In the eight years she had been married to Brother Terrell, she had watched his reputation grow and his ministry expand, but they still lived like poor people. All of the money that came in went to the ministry. There was no home, no stability, no reliable income. Loud and angry voices sometimes filtered through the walls of the Terrells’ bedroom all night long. Brother Terrell emerged the next morning looking beaten. My mother would sit and drink coffee with him and “try to encourage him.” Afterward, she counseled Betty Ann on how a minister’s wife had to support him, especially in hard times.

One night in Huntsville, Alabama, as Brother Terrell stood in front of the prayer ramp, offering buckets in hand, the Woman Who Used To Be Big walked up and snatched the microphone from him. She had joined the tribes that followed us as we moved in the vicinity of their hometowns. Dockery, the toughest of the tent men, started toward the front to lead her back to her seat, but Brother Terrell waved him off. The woman held a ten-dollar bill by a corner and waved it over her head.

“I’m giving my last ten dollars to Brother Terrell. God healed me of a tumor a few months back. Oh hondalie condalie.”

Sufis twirl, Hindus chant, Buddhists sit in silence. Holy Rollers and charismatic Christians babble like fools or speak the language of the angels, depending on who describes the experience. Believers lapsed into speaking in “tongues” or glossolalia when their euphoria stretched beyond the bounds of ordinary language.

The Woman Who Used To Be Big closed her eyes and began to jerk. Brother Terrell ducked a thrown elbow. When the jerking slowed, he thanked her and reached for the microphone. She backed him off with one hand.

“When the doctor checked me out, he said what did the preacher do with the tumor? I said I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just know I was sick and now I’m well. Hondalie condalie. A mighty wind swept down from the top of the tent, and I was healed.”

Brother Terrell reached again for the microphone, but she turned away from him.

“I’m not done yet, Brother. You’ll know when I’m done.”

He dropped the buckets and started laughing. She waved her ten-dollar bill again.

“This ten dollars is to prove God for my son. He’s an alcoholic, but if God can bust a tumor, he can heal a drunk. This man is giving us everything he’s got. Y’all help me support him.”

As she spoke, the black woman who sat next to Pam and me rose to her feet and waved a bill in the air. The words poured out of her mouth, soft and incessant. “Tell it. Amen. Go on now. Yes. Yes.” A soft alto counterpoint to the solo performance of the Woman Who Used To Be Big.

Purses snapped open across the tent and wallets were fished out of pockets. Soon everyone waved bills in the air.

The Woman Who Used To Be Big laid the microphone on the prayer ramp. She gripped Brother Terrell by the shoulder with one hand and with the other she motioned for people to come up to the front. Brother Terrell buried his face in his hands and cried as people walked down the aisles and dropped their money in the buckets that stood at his feet.

We didn’t have to worry about money again during that revival. Brother Terrell paid the bills and had some money left over to give to my mother and other members of his team on the payroll, as well as the families who traveled with the tent.

When the people ran out of money to give, they brought bags of clothes and quilts and grocery sacks filled with vegetables from their gardens: tomatoes, peaches, okra, greens, and squash, bushels and bushels of squash. I hated squash. God, I thought, must possess a spiteful sense of humor.

THE REVIVAL IN HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA, ENDED AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT. IN the hours that followed, Mama, Betty Ann, Pam, Gary, and I exhausted ourselves with waiting for Brother Terrell. He made the rounds among the tent crew, giving last-minute instructions, digging in his pockets, and passing out money. He was close now, just a few feet away, standing next to the eighteen-wheeler, talking to Dockery. The smell of diesel permeated the air, and in the distance I could hear the
thawp thawp
of the wooden folding chairs as they were snapped shut. Closing time.