Holy Ghost Girl (32 page)

“God has sanctified me. My body is a living sacrifice for the gospel. I’ve been washed in the blood. Purified by his word. I’m a Jesus man! Everything I do is holy!”

Everyone around me stood and applauded, including my husband, who knew everything I knew. To ponder whether the content of Brother Terrell’s sermon matched the reality of his life was the equivalent of grabbing a spiritual fire extinguisher. My brain said,
Wait a minute
, and my instincts compelled me to step into the flame of belief and burn, burn, burn.

Doubt is a lot like faith; a mustard seed’s worth changes everything. Away from the tent, the questions kept coming.
How can Brother Terrell claim to be without sin? Why doesn’t it matter that he is committing adultery and lying?
Mama tried to explain.

“Perfection in God’s eyes is not the same as our idea of being perfect.”

“King David had a man murdered, and the Bible says he was a man after God’s own heart!”

No matter what Brother Terrell did, God loved him. We loved him. I, on the other hand, failed the holiness dress code, and that was something neither the Lord nor his people could forgive. Two new converts, hippie girls turned Holy Rollers, informed me my sleeves were too short and my neckline too low. They were kind in that churchy, bless-your-heart kind of way. I bit my tongue and borrowed a sweater. In the summer months, when the tent turned into a canvas steam bath, I tried to steal a little comfort by going braless under loose blouses and covering the evidence with a shawl. Things jiggled when I raised my hands to pray, and people were scandalized. I couldn’t please God or the Terrellites, and I couldn’t stop the questions. Why was it more important to look holy than to live holy? Why did Brother Terrell and my family have so much stuff, when Jesus said to sell everything and give it to the poor? Why had an omnipotent God let that child die? I broached these issues with other believers as much as I could without betraying my family, and was urged to pray harder and not give in to the devil. My old misgivings about the ministry returned, and my resentment against God, the all-or-nothing ego at the center of the universe, grew. It was all his fault: my mother’s abandonment of my brother and me, the sadness at the center of her life. Then there was the secret of my sisters’ existence. The way they met their daddy in a roadside park after a tent service, so they could hug him through the car window. And there was the loss of that high-school boyfriend, a small grief that grew larger as I tallied the offenses.

I tried to discuss my doubts and resentments with my mother, but I couldn’t get past her defense of Brother Terrell. Jesus had said that the poor would always be with us. It wasn’t his fault that he had to keep his family (her and my sisters) a secret. It was the fault of his enemies, who would use the information to destroy the ministry. Couldn’t I see that? When she wasn’t defending Brother Terrell, she was calling to tell me how depressed she was.

“Sometimes, I just wish the Lord would take me.” It seemed to me that my mother saw death as the only way out.

After nine months of trying to be a good Terrellite, I quit. I lacked whatever it took to live right, which in my mind was to abide by Terrellite doctrine. I also lacked the ability to stay married. My husband and I divorced, and I spent the next three years careening between sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the increasingly paranoid reality of the Terrellites. With their big egos, infidelities, and cash transactions, these worlds were surprisingly alike. All I had to do was change clothes and I felt at home.

Despite Mama and Brother Terrell’s attempts to keep the whereabouts of her ranch a secret, IRS agents showed up in the small town close to where she and my sisters lived. This scared Brother Terrell. He stopped visiting my mother’s house and bought another ranch about an hour and a half away. No one, including my mother, knew where it was located. There was just one problem: getting my mother and sisters to the ranch without revealing its whereabouts. I wasn’t along for these outings, but my sisters recount the experience from time to time at family gatherings: Brother Terrell is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes with Mama beside him in the passenger seat. My sisters are in back. They rock along some gravel farm-to-market road with Brother Terrell hitting the brake and the gas pedal, the brake and the gas pedal. They pass some rancher poking along in the opposite direction, raising his hand at every vehicle that passes, howdy-howdy (pronounced “hidy” in Texas). The sun in his eye makes him question what he saw.
What’s a Mer-say-dees doin’ out here? And that woman on the passenger’s side, what was that white thing over her eyes? Somethin’ over the kids’ eyes too.

Brother Terrell wrapped blessed handkerchiefs the size of bandanas around the eyes of my mother and sisters, trying without success to avoid tangling strands of his daughters’ fine blond hair in the double knots he tied at the backs of their heads. Just another happy family out for a Sunday drive, mother and kids blindfolded. The trips to the ranch were plagued by bouts of motion sickness, forcing Brother Terrell to pull over and let one or all of the girls heave, blindfolds lifted just enough to let them see, and miss, their feet. When the car finally stopped, my sisters found themselves in the middle of a seven-hundred-plus-acre ranch with a guitar-shaped swimming pool. The pool was modeled on the one Elvis had put in at his Memphis house. My sisters thought of the ranch as a mysterious place. They parked their bikes in one place when they left and found them in another when they returned. Their toys, too, seemed to have a life of their own and were always someplace other than where they had left them. When the girls asked their dad what was up with the toys, he said they had most likely forgotten where they had left them or that the cleaning people had probably put a few items back in the wrong place. The truth was more surreal. Brother Terrell had another secret family he brought to the ranch between my mom’s and sisters’ visits. He had become involved with a woman preacher who traveled with him, and they had a daughter together who was the same age as the twins. They kept the girl’s parentage a secret by telling her and everyone in the ministry that she was adopted. To complicate matters, Brother Terrell had adopted a young boy from Mexico around the same time, and he and the girl grew up as adopted siblings. Years later, the girl and the boy would tell my sisters that they had often wondered why there were three ponies, three beds, three bikes, three of everything, when there were only two of them.

I became suspicious of Brother Terrell’s relationship with the woman when I noticed on my visits to Bangs that they were almost always together. Instead of referencing Mama from the platform as he had once done, he talked about the preacher woman, calling her a great woman of God. She had replaced Brother Starrs, who had replaced Brother Cotton a few years back, and was now the one who introduced Brother Terrell. She had become his de facto second-in-command. I often glimpsed them getting out of the Mercedes together at the back of the tent. Then one day I saw her with Pam and Brother Terrell’s other daughters. There was something about their body language, the ease and familiarity with which the Terrell girls interacted with her, as if she were a family member. I asked my mother about the relationship one afternoon as she drove me, blindfolded, from Bangs to her farm for a visit. She admitted that Brother Terrell was involved with the woman. She didn’t mention the daughter.

“He said it was a mistake. He got himself into a mess with that woman, and now he says he’s working everything out. I believe him. He’s always done right by me and the girls.”

I adjusted the blessed handkerchief that covered my eyes, careful not to let it slip.

 

 

The walls that divided Brother Terrell’s lives began to crumble. My mother confronted the preacher woman and told her about my sisters. The woman didn’t believe her. Someone broke into the prophet’s ranch house. The next week, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
printed a long piece describing the ranch and the house in detail. The guitar-shaped swimming pool received special attention. Brother Terrell told my mother IRS agents had broken into the house with the reporter. Around the same time, Randall spotted my sisters during a tent service in Bangs, noticed the resemblance they bore to his own sisters, and confronted my mother.

“Carolyn, I know those girls are Daddy’s. They look just like him.”

My mother admitted the truth. Randall confronted his daddy, who admitted nothing. Randall made it his personal cause to force his father to publicly recognize my sisters. When Brother Terrell and the preacher woman arrived at the tent before the service started, they saw Randall walking around with my sisters in the area at the back of the platform where all the insiders would be sure to see them. Brother Terrell gave Randall a quick nod on his way past. My sisters looked the other way.

 

 

During the mid-to-late seventies, Brother Terrell fasted more than he ate. My mother told me he weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, not much for a man six feet tall. She was afraid he was dying. I made my way to Bangs to see him preach for what my mother said might be the last time, though I could not imagine the world without the force that was David Terrell.

His shaved head gleamed under the lights; his all-black attire hung off his ruined body. He paced around in that aimless way I remembered from earlier fasts. “Y’all know I been prophesying the destruction of America for years; well, God told me the time has come. I asked the Lord the other night if there was anything I could do to hold off what’s coming.”

He pulled his shirttail from his pants and began to unbutton it. “God told me there was only one way.”

The people around me began to rock and moan. I don’t know if they knew what was coming next. I didn’t. Brother Terrell slipped out of his shirt, revealing a short-sleeved white T-shirt underneath. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it through his pants, doubled it, and held it at both ends. Clutching the waistband of his trousers with one hand and the belt with the other, he walked over and stood in front of one of the young men seated on the platform. He looked down at the man and extended the belt to him.

“Brother Walker, God told me he needed someone to stand in the gap. I need you to stand up and take the belt.” The man did as he was told.

“The prophet always has to bear the signs in his own body.” Brother Terrell walked over to an empty folding chair and Brother Walker followed, the belt dangling from his right hand. Brother Terrell knelt in front of the chair and took off his shirt.

“God told me someone has to take the whipping for America.”

Brother Walker dropped the belt and backed away, shaking his head. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder. “Pick it up, Brother Walker. I know you don’t want to do this, but you have to. I have to.”

The younger man picked up the belt and beat the prophet. When Brother Walker collapsed in tears, Brother Terrell called one of the other ministers to take his place. After the second whipping, the welts began to bleed. Everyone in the tent wailed and cried, and I was right there with them.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh Lord.
He called preacher after preacher. If they did not hit him hard enough, he looked up and told them that if they didn’t want to see children running through the streets of America with their skin melting from their bones, they better hit him harder. We screamed and moaned with every lash. The blood ran down his back. After about an hour, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and a couple of men ran to help him up. Blood seeped through the cotton of his shirt as he stumbled offstage between the men. The preacher woman spoke over the microphone as the men led Brother Terrell offstage.

“We’ve just seen an innocent man take a whipping for the sins of this country. I want everyone to gather in the altar and pray. Pray for Brother Terrell. Pray for America.”

I skipped the altar and headed for my car. I passed my sisters, crying in the back row, fists stuffed into their mouths. Their fake grandma was on her knees. I wanted to comfort them, but that would have frightened them more. I stepped out into the night feeling purged of every transgression and wondered if Brother Terrell felt the same. The whippings continued off and on for several years and most of the men associated with the ministry, including Randall, had to take a turn with the belt. Brother Terrell never handed the belt to my mother or the preacher woman, who sat on opposite ends of the platform.

Not long after I witnessed the whipping, Brother Terrell sent word through my mother that if I didn’t get right with God, I wouldn’t live past twenty-five. Right on cue, I came down with an illness that doctors could neither diagnose nor cure. Sores erupted on my body. I was beset with fever and chills. My bones ached and my energy dwindled. No matter how much I ate, I lost weight. After several months, I made my way to the tent in Bangs. Brother Terrell began calling people out of the audience almost at once that night. He made his way to our section. I tried to catch his eye but he looked over my head and asked a man in the back to stand up. He prayed for him and moved on to the young mother across the row. Finally, he pointed at my most recent live-in boyfriend and told him to step into the aisle. He clapped his hand on the man’s forehead and told him he had been bound by the powers of Satan and from that moment forward, he was free. The boyfriend hit the ground so hard he had a lump on the back of his head for a couple of weeks. He later told me he lost consciousness as soon as the prophet laid hands on him. He estimated he was out for ten minutes, maybe longer.