Holy Ghost Girl (7 page)

Usually a good praying-through made everything better, but something had passed between Mama and Betty Ann and Brother Terrell on the road to Atlanta that could not be undone. It was neither named nor denied, but after that night in the car, it was always with us. I brushed past it when I ran by my mother and Brother Terrell in the hallway, his hand reaching out to steady her when she stumbled. It stood behind Betty Ann in the doorway as she watched my mother and Brother Terrell sit on the bed, and count the offering, careful not to touch, stacking the ones, fives, tens, and twenties, stuffing the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into the paper rolls from the bank. It elbowed its way to the breakfast table one morning as Brother Terrell related a vision of tanks rolling across the border from Mexico, and my mother stood and told him how the vision ended, because she had seen the same thing. I heard its voice in the muffled and not-so-muffled arguments that drifted from the Terrells’ bedroom. And I saw its shadow move across my mother’s face when Betty Ann announced her pregnancy.

AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE TENT GROUNDS HAND-PAINTED SIGNS, AND later commercially printed banners, proclaimed in large red letters: END-TIME HOLY GHOST REVIVAL! SIGNS AND WONDERS. SALVATION! DIVINE HEALING! EVERYONE WELCOME. The last phrase was code for “segregation ends here.” The year was 1961. Our signs went up in Bossier City, Louisiana, as the first busloads of freedom riders made their way from Washington, DC. They were headed for New Orleans, but the rides ended in Alabama, where a succession of mobs organized by men who held dual membership in the local police department and the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the buses and beat the activists.

 

 

Brother Terrell stepped down from the tiny trailer he kept parked at the tent grounds and turned to walk toward the tent. Before he reached the tent curtain, three men approached him. The largest man blocked his path and two smaller sidekicks took up positions on either side.

The bigger man jabbed his finger at the preacher. “You David Terrell?”

“Yes, sir, but I cain’t talk right now. I got to preach tonight.”

“You can damn well talk to us.”

“Look, we can talk after service. Right now, I got to go.”

The three men tightened the circle around Brother Terrell. One grabbed his broken arm, still wrapped and cradled in a sling. “Preacher, you should’a talked to us
before
you set up this tent.”

“We got the permits . . . what do you mean?”

“He means we don’t like nigger-lovers in Bossier City.”

Inside the tent Brother Cotton made the introduction. “Put your hands together and welcome God’s man of the hour, Brother David Terrell.”

Brother Cotton turned to hand Brother Terrell the microphone, but there was no Brother Terrell. The ministers on the platform looked around uncomfortably. Brother Cotton cleared his throat.

“I hope this don’t mean there’s been a rapture, or we’re in trouble.”

The audience laughed and craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of Brother Terrell. My mother played the opening notes of “I’ll Fly Away” and Brother Cotton and the audience started to sing. When Brother Terrell had not appeared by the second verse, Dockery went to look for him. He found him surrounded by the men, one of whom still gripped his bad arm.

“Let him go, mister.”

“I don’t need no glorified carny tellin’ me what to do.”

“I’m not tellin’ you. I
told
you. Take your hands off him.” Dockery had the broad shoulders and ropy muscles of a fighter. He rarely fought since joining the tent team, but sometimes his temper got away from him, and he had to pray through at the next altar call. This would be one of those nights. He grabbed the man who held Brother Terrell’s arm.

“Now, Dockery, now hold on . . .”

As the words left Brother Terrell’s mouth, one of the men took a step toward Dockery, and another landed a punch on Brother Terrell’s jaw. That’s when Dockery went wild. Randall came running with the other tent men and gave us an eyewitness account later that night. He said Dockery punched and kicked and yelled and that it took Brother Gunn, Red, and a couple of others to keep him from killing the man who hit Brother Terrell. Once the tent crew had separated Dockery from the attackers, Brother Gunn, one of the more even-tempered tent men, turned to ask them what they wanted. The largest of the three men shrugged off Red and walked back over to Brother Terrell.

“You better git them niggers out from under that tent. I mean clear ’em out.”

Brother Terrell spread his good hand in front them, pleading, “Those people came to worship God. I can’t, I won’t, ask ’em to leave.”

“It’s on your head, preacher.” The men turned and walked away. One of them lit a cigarette. Dockery started to yell that there was no smoking on the tent grounds, then let it go when Brother Terrell waved him and the others closer.

“Look, I got to take the platform. Someone call the law.”

Dockery snorted. “Those men probably are the law.”

In a tradition that harkened back to the roots of the modern Pentecostal movement, sawdust-trail revivalists had long welcomed blacks and whites under their tents. It all started when the one-eyed son of former slaves, Reverend William Joseph Seymour, founded a storefront church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. After praying for months for an outpouring of the spirit, Reverend Seymour and his followers began to speak in tongues one day in 1906. They kept at it for the next three years. What became known as the Azusa Street Revival drew thousands of blacks and whites and was characterized by the
Los Angeles Times
as “. . . a disgraceful co-mingling of the races . . .” Holy Roller churches based on the Azusa Street experience sprang up all over the world, with one notable difference: There was no mingling of the races. Tent evangelists such as Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Jack Coe, and others persevered in interracial worship, but seated blacks and whites in separate sections of their tents when traveling through the South.

Not one for half measures, Brother Terrell said others could compromise with the devil, but bless God, he wasn’t afraid to face Satan head-on. “Red, yellow, black, or polka-dotted, we’re all God’s children, and we all sit together under my tent,” he said.

Not that we identified with the civil rights movement. The same whites who hugged the necks of black believers under the tent thought nothing of using the
n
-word in everyday life, and would not abide mixing with blacks under any other circumstance. Brother Terrell told racist jokes in private and most of us, with the exception of my mother, laughed at them. We saw no contradiction in using our “colored” brothers and sisters in Christ as a punch line while risking life, limb, and tent to worship with them.

Brother Terrell’s defiance did not go down well in the South. City officials delayed permits, issued noise violation citations for sound checks, and pressured local newspapers and radio stations to deny us advertising. Notes left under the windshield wipers of our cars threatened to cut down the tent and whup our cracker asses. It was clear someone or something was after us, but the adults would not say who or what. When I asked my mother, she hemmed and hawed and said something like, “Oh, honey, the old devil is after us, that’s all.” That’s all? Judging from the fear in her face, I figured the horned one must be close enough to spear our backsides with his pitchfork. When vandals slashed the tent in town after town, I was sure of it. The sheriff or constable or whatever brand of law enforcement that happened to show up walked around the tent saying, “Now, what’d y’all expect?”

The answer revealed itself that night in Bossier City. After the fist fight, Brother Terrell walked under the tent and up the ladder to the platform. Brother Cotton was in the middle of another song. Instead of continuing the song the way he usually did, Brother Terrell signaled my mother to stop the music. He walked to the podium and sat his Bible on it without opening it up.

“Let’s move straight to prayer tonight. We ask you, Father, to hide us behind the cross. Cover us with your blood, Jesus. Deliver us from our enemies. Pray with me, people. There’s an evil gathering against us. God is our only defense.”

Brother Terrell walked away from the pulpit and fell to his knees in the middle of the platform, rocking back and forth. “Oh God. Oh . . . oh God. . . . Throw up a hedge, Lord. Protect us from the powers of the enemy.”

The ministers on the platform knelt at their seats. My mother knelt beside the organ stool. Across the audience, people slipped from their chairs onto their knees and began to plead with God for protection. Betty Ann told Pam and me to bow our heads and pray, and she, too, began to keen.

“Oooooooooooooh God . . . Have mercy, Lord. Have mercy. Oooooooooooooh God . . .”

Brother Terrell paced the platform and exhorted us to call out. People all around us entered into what we called travail, a weeping and mourning that came when the worst had happened or was about to happen. In travail we experienced the emotion of the situation, wrestled with it in prayer, and believed we could change it. It was as if we could sense the onset of some evil, could hear its heartbeat as it approached, but could not see or name it. The woman kneeling next to me prayed aloud and with her eyes open wide. Her lips exposed her teeth in a weird half grin, half grimace. She made a strange highpitched sound.

“Neh, neh, neh, neh, neh, neh, neh.”

A collective wail rose from the congregation. We didn’t know what we needed protection from at that point, but when Brother Terrell told us the enemy threatened us, we believed him. The wailing went on for about forty-five minutes, reached a crescendo, softened, and died away. By the time we took our seats again, it was dark outside.

Brother Terrell flipped open his Bible just as a long line of cars began to turn from the highway onto the tent grounds. Usually when people arrived late, they switched their lights off to avoid creating a distraction, but these cars kept their lights on, and instead of parking, they circled the tent. Betty Ann’s mouth opened and closed like a fish as she watched them. People turned and stared over their shoulders. A black woman sitting close to us murmured, “Lord, Lord, Lord.”

Brother Terrell glanced up, and then looked down at his Bible as if nothing were amiss.

“Turn with me to Second Corinthians, chapter four, verse eight: ‘We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed . . .’ ”

Around and around the cars drove, maybe twenty, maybe more, high beams glaring. When they finally came to a stop, they left their lights on, pointing toward us. After a minute or two, people turned toward the front in their chairs and opened their Bibles. They tried to focus on Brother Terrell, tried to take in the encouragement he plucked from the scripture, but the car lights beamed a steady stream of anxiety our way.

“We need to keep our minds on God tonight, people, no matter what the devil throws at us.”

Pam and I asked Betty Ann what was going on. She put her finger to her lips and told us to pay attention as she always did. Her hands worked the handkerchief she held beneath her swollen pregnant belly, twisting it back and forth until it was the shape of a dog bone. She asked Pam if she knew where Randall might be. Pam raised her eyebrows and arranged her face in the self-righteous expression we wore when we referred to the morally and spiritually inferior. “Mama, there’s just no telling.”

As she scanned the audience for her brother, the prim look on her face turned to shock. I followed the line of her raised arm and pointed finger. Twenty, fifty, a hundred figures in long white robes materialized along the perimeter of the tent. Black eyeholes gaped out of tall, pointed heads. Backlit by the headlights, the apparitions billowed and glowed like angels of destruction, or one of the hybrid creatures that roamed the end of time in the Book of Revelation. The hair on my legs and arms stood up. The end of time. The moon would turn to blood. Stars would fall, trumpets would sound, and the veil between heaven and Earth would be rent. I wanted my mother. She sat behind the organ, hand over her mouth. All around us, people turned and whispered. Pam worked herself into the crevice between her mother’s arm and body. Betty Ann bounced Gary on her lap until he started to cry, but she didn’t seem to notice.

She whispered, “Where’s Randall? Where’s Randall?” Her eyes rolled across the tent looking for a blue checked shirt.

Brother Terrell called to us from the platform. “Please, let’s keep our minds on worshipping God here tonight. Don’t let the devil scare you. That’s what he wants to do, scare you.”

The devil.
That explained why the adults were so scared. I shut my eyes tight and pled the blood of Jesus in silence, the way the adults did when Brother Terrell cast out demons.

“The blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus. I plead the blood of Jesus.”

I opened my eyes. Lines of black people shuffled down the sawdust aisles. The woman who sat in front of us pulled three kids, two little boys and a girl of about ten, off the pallet she had spread for them. She shook out the quilt and folded it in half, bringing one end under her chin and holding the other in her long outstretched arm; the edges matched just so, her movements slow and meticulous. She repeated the process and handed the quilt to the girl.
Her daughter, that’s her daughter.
She pulled a creased paper bag from her purse, placed the jar of water and the saltines the boys had snacked on earlier into the sack and handed it to her daughter. Her right arm settled on the girl’s shoulders as her left hand snapped shut around the wrists of the boys. They joined the exodus. Some said angels led the people safely through the white robes. Others said the Klan never intended to hurt us; they only meant to scare us. If that were so, they only partially succeeded. The woman and her children did not seem frightened, and neither did the others who left the tent that night. Bone-weary, but not afraid.