Holy Ghost Girl (23 page)

Everywhere I turned, I faced the backs of people. I missed the spotlight that had so recently shone on me, so I closed my eyes and began to jerk and speak in tongues again. I felt a hand on each elbow. I fluttered my eyelids and saw a young man on one side and Betty on the other.

“Isn’t it wonderful how God is blessing this child?”

“It is, and he’s gonna bless her some more when we get home.”
She knew.
I stopped jerking.

 

 

A permanent uneasiness took up residence in me that night. I couldn’t decide if my initial experience with the Holy Ghost was real or faked. If it was real, why didn’t I feel different? If it was faked, I had blasphemed and that was the point of no return that preachers had always warned against.

“There is one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and once you cross that line there is no way back. God will turn you over to a reprobate mind. Even if you want to find your way back to God, you won’t be able to.”

Did I have a reprobate mind? What exactly was a reprobate mind? Had God turned his back on me? These questions weighed on me for the rest of my childhood. Whenever I committed some wrong—watching
The Monkees
on TV, attending movies or high-school football games, making out with a boy, or God forbid, wearing slacks—they always resurfaced. I was never sure where God and I stood after that night, but I was pretty sure there was a vast amount of space between us.

One night after evening worship, the Smiths gathered around their small kitchen table with other church people. I walked in just as Brother Smith pounded the table to make his point. “The Assemblies of God is the only church today that stands by the truth. Everybody knows they only kicked David Terrell out because he had two wives.”

His back was to the door that led from the living room to the kitchen, so he did not see me enter the room. Sister Smith shushed him, and he and the others turned to look at me. My face grew hot, and I felt as if the floor had given way, as if I was standing there with nothing to support me, nothing to save me. Brother Terrell’s visits to our house in Houston, the gifts, the empty couch in my mother’s living room all came together in that instant, and I knew that my mother was one of those two wives and that it was an awful, shameful thing and that her shame was my shame. I knew, and from that moment on there was no way to not know.

 

 

Gary and I passed our days swinging on the rickety wraparound front porch. We pumped our legs out as we arced up toward the peeling blue of the ceiling and snapped them at the knees as we swept back toward the edge of the porch. I looked over my shoulder as the swing rocked to and fro. Roses, ramshackle sheds, scuppernong vines, and patches of bare earth slick and shiny as Brother Smith’s bald head jammed against the heavens and were gone. The world in all its misbegotten beauty rushed through me; glory, glory, glory. Wanda found me there weeping once, and asked what was wrong.

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just so . . . you know, beautiful.”

She held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Are you feeling sick again?”

The people who passed the porch on their way to work looked so different from the men and women I had known. I had never seen a man with a briefcase or a woman in a suit. The women in particular caught my attention. With their matching coats and skirts, purposeful strides, and straight-ahead stares, they constituted a third gender. I decided they were hermaphrodites, a word I had picked up from a recent sermon. Sometimes I imagined the porch breaking free with me and Gary aboard and gliding down the street past the suits, or sailing up past the clouds and the ghost of a moon on the rise. I wrapped my arm around a peeling column, curled my bare toes into the edge of the splintery boards, and peered into the sky. I had recently learned from one of the Smith kids that Earth was not fixed as it seemed, but was spinning in space and at the same time traveling in a vast circle around the sun. These facts I could not comprehend. I believed that if I looked long enough and hard enough and stood perfectly still, I might see some trace of the planet’s turning, some vestige of its journey, but of course I never did.

AN ALARM SHOULD HAVE SOUNDED THE DAY SISTER COLEMAN APPEARED at the Smiths’ house: a siren’s
whup whup whup
; the blast of a foghorn; an automated voice announcing, “Danger, danger.” No such luck. Gary and I watched from the front-porch swing as she turned in from the sidewalk and walked up the steps, moving at her own pace, neither fast nor slow. Church people were the only ones to call on the Smiths and they always came at night, after the service was over. I dragged my feet and slowed the swing. She stepped onto the porch and stood feet apart, hands on her hips. She stared at us as if deciding what she was going to do. Gary and I squirmed uncomfortably. My hand slipped nervously up and down one of the chains that tethered the swing to the porch ceiling.

“Are you here to take us to the orphanage?” I asked.

Her lips tightened into a thin line of a smile. “Are you expecting someone to take you to the orphanage?”

“Uh-uh.” Gary and I shook our heads vigorously.

She walked over to the swing and eased herself down between us. “I’m Sister Coleman. I met your mama at the revival here a few months back. She asked me to keep an eye on you chillens while she’s gone.”

White people didn’t use the word “chillens.” She said it as though she were making fun of it somehow. I studied her a little harder. She wore her mostly gray hair pulled back into a bun like many of the women who came to the tent, but her knee-length wraparound skirt looked newer than the clothes they wore. Her attitude was different, too, more in charge, or maybe it was the rolled-up shirtsleeves.

“You sure you’re not from the government or something?”

Again, the tight-lipped smile. This time the skin around her eyes crinkled.

“I’m sure. How can I convince you?” She pulled two chocolate bars out of her pocket and waved them through the air.

“I’m convinced.” I grabbed the candy bars and handed one to Gary. We ripped them open. I wanted to eat mine slowly, square by square, but I couldn’t, and it was gone too fast.

She cocked her head toward me and raised one eyebrow. “What do you say?”

On the other side of Sister Coleman, Gary held up his half-eaten chocolate bar. “Thanks.”

How did he manage to make a candy bar last so long? Sister Coleman nodded her approval. Gary beamed a chocolate-covered smile her way. She laughed and hugged him. Everyone loved my brother.

I tugged at her sleeve. “Got any more?”

Sister Coleman joined us regularly on the porch after that day. She never went inside the house and the Smiths never came out on the porch when she was there. If we were still in our pajamas at the end of the day, she sucked in her breath and wagged her head. She asked what we had eaten and usually disapproved of our answers: beans, cornbread crumbled into powdered milk, or “Nothing yet, ’cause we’re fasting.”

“You chillens need to eat regular.”

She told us about Bug, her adopted son. He was my age but he couldn’t see, hear, walk, or talk. God was going to heal him soon. Sometimes she and her sinner husband took Bug to their lake house. She could tell he liked to feel the breeze from the water, because he closed his eyes and stopped making noises for a minute.

Gary jumped from the swing. “You have a lake?”

“We don’t own the lake, but we have a house there.”

My only experience with lakes was glimpsing them through a car window as we drove past. “You live there?”

“No. We live at our other house.”

Two houses, and one of them on a lake. This woman was more interesting all the time.

Sister Coleman began to lobby my mother through letters and phone calls to let Gary and me move in with her family. She told Mama the Smiths neglected us, that we asked—begged, even—to come live with her. She promised she would give us a good home, and that my mom wouldn’t have to pay her anything. Thus began our descent into the ninth circle of hell.

 

 

The day we moved into Sister Coleman’s house, she gathered us up next to her on the sofa and told us she had always wanted children, had in fact wanted
us
, and now the Lord had given us to her. Her remarks made me feel special, and uneasy. What did she mean, God had given us to her?

“You mean to take care of, while our mother is away.”

“Excuse me?”

“God gave us to you to take care of until Mama comes back.”

“Of course. What did you think I meant?”

I shrugged. “Plus, you already got Bug.”

I pointed to the quilt on the floor where Bug lay on his side, legs in braces, eyes staring at nothing. He drooled and vocalized in the flat, toneless voice of a lost lamb or calf. Bug was big for a six-year-old, but Sister Coleman carried him everywhere. She would not put him in a wheelchair. I have no proof, but I believe it was Bug who first brought Sister Coleman to the tents. Each time a revival came to town, she lugged him to the front row and waited.

Gary and I were physically everything Bug was not, but emotionally we were a mess. My brother was a bed wetter with a nervous stutter and was prone to visions or nightmares, depending on your perspective. I was a thief who lied to cover my transgressions and committed the unpardonable childhood sin of sassing and talking back on a regular basis. Maybe Sister Coleman did not know this about us, or maybe she thought she could change us for the better. She made sure we went to bed and woke up at the same time, ate three meals a day, and visited the doctor when we were sick. She even took us on vacation once. When I turned seven, she enrolled me in first grade and bought me new clothes to wear to school. My blouses were tucked in, my socks matched, and headbands kept my hair out of my face. I looked respectable for the first time since Mama left us in Houston. Within weeks, Sister Coleman had given us more toys and clothes than we had ever owned: stacks of books and a big easel for me, trucks and a G.I. Joe for Gary.

The only material thing we lacked during the year and a half we lived with the Colemans was a room of our own. Their home was the newest and most comfortable house we had lived in, but it had only two bedrooms; Sister Coleman and Bug slept in one and the sinner husband had the other to himself. I camped in the living room on a daybed and Gary slept on a single bed pushed against a corner of the den. The Colemans seemed to like each other, or to have once liked each other. They laughed together when Gary or I told funny stories, and at those moments their eyes held and a wistful look passed between them, but they never touched. Brother Terrell’s ministry may have been responsible for the rift between the Colemans. Women who followed the ministry often ended up alienated from their husbands. Sometimes men complained of the money their wives gave and sometimes they said the preacher had taken their place in their wives’ affections. Brother Terrell explained his effect by paraphrasing Jesus: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, and a man’s enemies will be of his own household.”

Sometimes after school Sister Coleman picked me up and took me to her office, a three-room building surrounded by a dirt parking lot. On my first trip there, I was so distracted by the green metal vending machine in the hall (three kinds of snacks) that I didn’t pay much attention to Sister Coleman’s explanation of what kind of work she did. Until we walked into the main room. Teeth, sets of teeth, top and bottom, the whole pink and white inside of a mouth, many mouths, were scattered across counters, shelves, and the very table where Sister Coleman directed me to sit.

“I . . . I . . .” My hand flew across my mouth, as if to safeguard what was inside.

She nudged me toward the table. “Child, did you hear what I said?”

I shook my head no.

She took my hand away from my mouth. “What is it?”

I pointed around the room. “Whose are those?”

She laughed. “We make them at the lab, then bring them here for the employees and me to finish up.”

I put my schoolbooks on the table and used them to nudge a set of dentures out of the way.

“They won’t bite, you know.”

I didn’t know.

She walked back to the entry. “Come on out here. We’ll get you a snack.”

It took me a long time to choose between peanuts, orange crackers with cheese, and orange crackers with peanut butter. After changing my mind at least four times, I chose the peanut-butter crackers. I savored every bite, wiped the crumbs from my mouth, and crumpled the cellophane wrapper. “I could eat a dozen of those.”

Life sometimes offers hints of what’s to come, a foreshadowing that we can only decipher years later, if at all. People say, “I should’ve seen that comin’,” but the signs are often subtle, saying one thing and meaning another. Once or twice a week we went with Sister Coleman to an abandoned movie theater where we met with about five other believers and “had church.” These people, mostly women, were followers of Brother Terrell who had decided they could no longer tolerate the false doctrines of the institutionalized church. There was no minister and no music to accompany our strained renditions of old gospel choruses. Someone, often Sister Coleman, opened the service with a prayer and asked if anyone had a testimony to share about how the Lord was moving in their lives. The Man Who Dreamed Hurricanes always had something to say. In his early twenties with tightly tucked shirts and a painful crew cut, the Man Who Dreamed Hurricanes regaled us with weather details from his latest vision. He said the Lord had given him the ability to see the storms before they hit so that he could warn us. Each week he set up his easel in front of the proscenium and, armed with a black Magic Marker and large flip tablet, became God’s own weatherman.