Jesus Land Read online

  “They spelled ‘died’ wrong.”

  “Like, duh.”

  I pick my way through the brambles and crooked tombstones to a large tablet set off by itself in a corner and tap it with my shoe to flake off the mud plastering its surface.

  “Check it out!” I call to David. “Enus Godlove Phelon! He’s got your same birthday, June 2, 1851! Died October something . . . I can’t make it out.”

  “What’s that name again?”

  “Enus Godlove Phelon.”

  “Anus?”

  “No, Enus! With an ‘E.’”

  “What kinda name is that?”

  “A redneck name, for sure!”

  We snicker and kick about for more stones. As I crouch to read them, I try to put the car out of my head and focus on the dead people beneath our feet. This is serious business, and I’ve got serious questions.

  First, there’s the appearance of the folks in the boxes. Do maggots fester in their eye holes like in horror movies, or do they stay pickled like the frogs in Biology class? David thinks it takes about two hundred years for a person pumped full of formaldehyde to turn into a skeleton, but I’m not so sure . . .

  Then there’s the Afterlife question. Where is the soul of the person I’m standing on right now—Heaven or Hell? Were they satisfied with their lives, or did they want more? If they could go back and do it all over again, what would they change? Is Heaven all it’s cracked up to be?

  As I’m contemplating all this, I detect a movement out of the corner of my eye and raise my head. The red car. It prowls noiselessly along the cemetery’s edge and rolls to a stop beside our bikes. I look at David, who’s bent over a marble cross, cracking up over some dead woman named “Bessie Lou.”

  “David.”

  “. . . better name for a cow, don’t you think?”

  “David, stop it!”

  His head shoots up at the alarm in my voice, and he follows my gaze to the car—four white bodies emerge from its interior—before standing to untie his T-shirt and slip it over his narrow shoulders.

  They’re farm boys, our age. Bare-chested and wearing cutoff jeans and baseball caps. You can tell they’re farmers by their sunburns: Their faces, necks, and arms are crimson but their torsos are pasty, as if they’re wearing white T-shirts. If you looked up “redneck” in the dictionary, they’d be there to illustrate, and I’d say as much to David if they weren’t marching toward us with tight faces.

  They halt in a row behind the fence. I glance at David. Behind his smudged glasses, his eyes are wide with fear.

  “Whatch y’all doing?” the tallest one asks as a cow moos in the distance. He takes off his Caterpillar cap and fans his face with it.

  “Just looking!” I say breezily, as if this was Montgomery Ward’s and these boys were salesmen come to check on us.

  “This here’s the final resting place of my great-great-grand-daddy!” yells a boy with a Snap-On Tools cap.

  The tallest boy tugs a piece of field grass from the ground and sticks the end in his mouth. He chews it slowly and saws his eyes back and forth between David and me.

  David’s mouth is gaping. I step between him and the farm boys, still grinning.

  “We just moved out here from town and . . .”

  “Obviously y’alls ain’t from around here, else you wouldn’t be in there,” says a third boy—this one in an International Harvester cap.

  The runt of the litter, an acne-scarred boy in a Budweiser hat, grabs the fence in his fists and shakes it violently, rattling our bikes. Behind the tall iron grate, his stumpy body heaving back and forth in anger, he looks like a caged monkey having a tantrum.

  “This here’s an American cemetery!” he shouts. “Only Americans are allowed in there! It’s the law!”

  I take a deep breath and look back at David, who’s now gaping at the trampled brambles at his feet. Close your mouth.

  “That’s fine,” I say, shrugging. “We’ll just leave, then.”

  I move toward the gate, and the human fence behind it, listening for the rustle of David’s footsteps at my back. Move.

  “What’s wrong with blacky?” the runt asks. “Cat got his tongue?”

  He lifts his Bud cap and orange hair falls to his neck. I ignore him, keeping my eyes on the road beyond him, the road that will lead us to safety. He moves aside at the last moment to let me push open the gate. I’m on a hair trigger. If they so much as breathe on us, I’ll bloody their eardrums with my screams. I stop and wait for David to walk through the gate, then follow him to our bikes.

  The farmers are at our heels.

  “That darkie your boyfriend?” one of them asks to a burst of snickers. I pull my bike upright and wheel it forward so David can get his.

  “No, he’s my brother.”

  They crowd around us.

  “What, your momma git knocked up by some Detroit nigger?”

  There’s a shuffle of dirty laughter and the runt leans forward, his pimpled jaw working up and down. He hawks a glob of chew into the dirt, narrowly missing David’s sneakers. I glare at him and he throws his shoulders back and grins proudly, a string of spittle stretching from his pink face to the dust. David contemplates the lump of brown slime at his feet with knitted eyebrows, as if it were the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Don’t you freeze up on me. Don’t!

  “Let’s go,” I order David, elbowing him in the ribs.

  “Yeah, you’d best skedaddle,” the tall one says.

  As we mount our bikes, they watch with crossed arms and slit eyes. We’ve got enough fear ricocheting through us to propel ourselves all the way home without stopping. We ride in silence, cringing and waiting for the gunning motor, the flash of red behind us.

  Only when we bump down the gravel lane to our house do I notice the trembling cottonwoods, the frenzied chirruping of sparrows, the dirt devils churning across the back field. On the horizon, heat lightning dances along a column of towering thunderheads. The air is suddenly sweet and cool, refreshing. It’s perfect weather for a tornado.

  Down in the basement, I fling myself belly-down on the cot and stare out the window at the trees pawing the green air. David’s out there somewhere, walking Lecka before supper.

  Neither of us uttered a word about what happened. We never do. But I can’t smudge it from my mind. The farm boys’ sneering red faces. The runt shaking the fence. The brown lump of spit tobacco. The anguish in David’s eyes. They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.

  The first time I felt surrounded by such hate was in 1977, when we were ten. We were driving down to St. Simons Island, Georgia, for vacation and stopped at a roadside diner in Birmingham for supper. David and I were cranky with hunger because we’d stuffed the liverwurst and lettuce sandwiches Mother passed out for lunch under our seat cushions in the van.

  Dad led us to a round table at the back of the restaurant that was big enough for the eight of us, then David and I busied ourselves with the game on our placemats as we waited for the waitress to take our order. This was in our dill pickle stage, and while we looked for animals hidden in a jungle on our placemats, we debated whether to share a side of the crunchy sour disks or order a bowl each. We knew Mother’s rule: We had to finish whatever we ordered, or eat it for breakfast the next day. We decided breakfast pickles wouldn’t be half bad and to order a side each.

  After a while, we noticed a silence and looked up. Our parents and older siblings—Deb, Dan, Laura, and Jerome—sat like statues, and beyond this familiar circle, the other diners glared at us with disgust stamped on their faces.

  I was used to the curious looks and occasional frowns David and I gathered as we walked down the streets of Lafayette—I assumed people were as perplexed by my brother’s skin color as I was when I first saw him—but I’d never seen anything akin to the contempt reflected in the eyes of those Alabama folks.

  Mother gazed down at her place setting with a clenched jaw, and my father’s cheeks burned red a
s he watched the waitress refill the coffee cups of the patrons at surrounding tables. David and I put down our crayons and focused on our parents, waiting for them to show us what to do.

  After several minutes of this silence, Father pushed back his chair and stood up. He nodded curtly at Mother, who swept her arms upward like the choir director signaling us to stand, then bustled us out the door.

  As we drove from the parking lot, I looked back at the diner. Through the window, I saw the waitress scrubbing our unused table with a rag and a spray bottle. No one mentioned what happened—not that night as we sat in the van, silent and hungry and searching for a drive-through—or ever afterward.

  “Learn to leave things be,” Mother likes to say when bad things happen. “Turn the other cheek.”

  And that’s what we try to do. Pretend these things don’t happen. But they do, again and again.

  Outside, the sky has dimmed to olive, and I hear Lecka bark playfully. David’s home safe again.

  I wonder what would have happened that night in Alabama, if, instead of walking out in defeat, our father had stood up and rebuked those people for treating a God-fearing family in such a shameful fashion. Our family was hungry just like they were. Didn’t we have a right to eat? Weren’t we all equal in the eyes of Jesus Christ? How dare they deny small children food? This was America after all, a country founded on the principles of Christian love and harmony!

  Maybe he felt the same way we did this afternoon—outnumbered and out-hated. Maybe it is better to turn the other cheek in certain situations.

  Reverend Dykstra often tells us that this world is not our home.

  “This place is merely a proving ground,” he says. “Our suffering shall be rewarded in Heaven.”

  But sometimes I think that I’d rather have less suffering now, even if it meant less glory in Heaven.

  The basement door opens and the brass bell clangs. Supper. I drag myself off the cot and climb the dark stairway. Mother’s in the galley kitchen, stirring a large pot on the stove as Rejoice Radio plays Christian pop music over the intercom. At her back, the long windows cast a murky light over the hardwood floor of the great room. The new, L-shaped sectional lurks in semidarkness in one corner of the large room, the television and card table in another. A couple of boxes listing next to the stairwell—marked “winter gear”—wait to be carried downstairs and unpacked.

  As I walk behind Mother toward the dining table—where David sits with his back to me—I inhale the sour steam billowing off the pot on the stove and grimace. Garbage Soup, again. I slide into the chair across from David, silently grabbing my neck as if I were choking. He smirks his agreement.

  Garbage Soup is Mother’s name for it, not ours. She makes it from old vegetables and plate-scrapings—flaccid celery and carrot sticks, chicken bones, potato skins, cheese rinds—that she collects in a mayonnaise jar and freezes. When the jar is full, she stews the contents in salted water for two hours, strains the broth, adds hamburger, and le voilà, Garbage Soup! She says it’s loaded with vitamins, one of the most nutritious meals ever. But it tastes just like its name, sour and dirty and old. It’s summertime, the air con is off to save energy, and I’m damp with sweat, but the mayo jar was full, so it’s Garbage Soup for supper. Waste not, want not.

  Mother grew up poor and takes pride in her penny-pinching talents, which include an apple pie made entirely from saltine crackers that costs only three cents a serving. We eat this stuff despite our sprawling ranch house and the Porsche Dad drives to work every day.

  “You forgot the beverage,” Mother says wearily to David as she sets the rust-colored soup on the table. She stoops her shoulders as she ladles the broth into our bowls, making herself look more frail than she already is. Steam billows onto her glasses and into the tight light brown curls of her hair. I wait for her to raise her head and look at me, but she doesn’t.

  David returns with a pitcher of Carnation instant milk, which he pours into the glasses. As it swirls watery gray into mine, he smirks at me again.

  After Mother blesses the food, we eat in silence as she leafs through Christianity Today magazine at her end of the table. She’s in one of her moods; we knew it as soon as we returned from our bike ride. She was in the kitchen, ripping coupons from the newspaper, her lips smashed into a hard little line. She didn’t say hello and neither did we. We took one look at her and went downstairs; it’s best to fall under her radar when she gets like this.

  The wind moans against the side of the house woo woo! and rushes through the open windows, fluttering the napkins in their stand. Outside, the trees dance at the edge of the back field as Sandi Patti sings “Yes, God Is Real” on Rejoice Radio. Mother lifts her spoon and blows across it without taking her eyes from the magazine. I stare at her and wonder what set her off this time. Maybe she got news of Jerome. Or she’s peeved that Dad’s late for the third night in a row. She glances up to see me staring and draws the magazine closer to her face, blocking me out completely. I look at David, and he shrugs whadda ya gonna do about it? Sometimes it seems the smallest signs of our existence— our laughter bubbling up from the basement, a book left on the couch—irritate her. She often tells us that she looks forward to the day we all leave home.

  “God will be my family then,” she’ll say.

  God and her missionaries. She’s got missionaries around the globe. Sends them letters and packages, birthday cards, chewing gum, $10 bills. Pins their photos to the bulletin board over her desk. White couples, posing with mud huts and dark children, their locations jotted on the back of each picture: “Loving the Lord in Laos.” “Coming to Christ in Colombia.” “Giving God to Ghana.” It all sounds vaguely pornographic to me, although I know they’re working hard to save souls.

  She and Dad go on medical mission trips from which she returns giddy with enthusiasm. They make us sit through slide shows that document their god squad adventures. Look at this football-sized tumor. Here’s a gangrenous spear wound. We brought these loin-clothed pagans to Jesus, healing bodies and souls at the same time.

  “Such gratitude for Christ, such a hankering for The Word!” Mother will gasp, shaking her head at the wonder of it.

  Sometimes they show movies about missionary martyrs after Vespers, projecting the film onto the back of the church while we sit in folding chairs in the parking lot, drinking Kool-Aid. Mother holds these people in high esteem. Says she would have been a missionary herself if it weren’t for meeting our father.

  I used to wish she’d show the same enthusiasm for us, pin our family photographs to her bulletin board. When I was in third grade, I poked all her missionaries’ eyes out with a thumbtack in a fit of jealousy. She paddled me for it.

  I excuse myself to fetch the salt shaker from the kitchen and glance down at her magazine as I walk behind her chair. “God Is Everything” is the title of the article she’s reading. When I sit down again, David crosses his eyes and bares his teeth at me. I roll mine. Dweeb. He hooks his front teeth over his bottom lip and slits the corners of his eyes like a Chinaman. I shake my head and trace figure eights in the pool of fat skimming my soup, ignoring him. He knows I’m in a foul mood after the run-in with the farmers and is trying to cheer me up.

  He wriggles his fingers in front of his bowl, insistently, and I lift my head. He flares his nostrils and pokes out his lips like those Africans you see in Cartoon Classics, the ones with the bones in their noses who dance around boiling cauldrons of white tourists. I snort despite myself—I don’t like it when he pokes fun of his features, but he’s trying so hard to distract me—and Mother lowers her magazine. Her bifocals flash as we quickly spoon soup into our mouths. When she lifts her magazine again, David flips up his eyelids, exposing the pink undersides, and rolls his pupils skyward so it looks like he’s got white marbles for eyes. He taps his fingers along the edge of the table, a blind man, finds his spoon and jabs it at his soup bowl. Ting! It collides with his milk glass instead.

  “What in Heaven’s name?!”
Mother exclaims.

  David slowly turns his marble eyes in her direction as I tug on my milk, trying not to laugh.

  “That’s ridiculous!” she sputters. “David! Put your eyes back, now!” Milk sprays out of my mouth and across the table.

  “Julia!”

  And then David’s doubled over and I’m doubled over and we’re both convulsing in our high-backed chairs. And we can’t stop no matter how much Mother shouts for us to stop or threatens to tell Father or bangs the table.

  For a few moments, there’s nothing but us and our laughter, the soaring joy of our laughter, our laughter crashing through us like tidal waves and raining down our cheeks as tears.

  My parents didn’t set out to adopt two black boys.

  They wanted the white kid on my sister’s pediatric ward. Laura was born with spina bifida, and she spent much of her childhood in hospitals, being repaired and recuperating from repairs. During one month-long stay, she met an orphaned white boy, and they became fast friends. In the desperate manner of lonesome, suffering children, they clung to each other like family. My parents inquired after adopting him, only to learn he was taken.

  But the adoption agency persisted. There were scads of other children who needed homes, they said: black children.

  It was 1970, and America was scarred by racial violence. Civil rights leaders had been gunned down in the streets, and communities across the nation were smarting from race riots. My parents’ own state, Indiana, had once been a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and was still a haven for backwater bigots.

  To reject a black baby would have been un-Christian, a sin. God was testing them. This was a chance to bear witness for Jesus Christ, to show the world that their God was not prejudiced and neither were they. Red and yellow, black and white, they’re all precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world. They would take a black baby home and call him son.

  Such was the theory.

  Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared “the black would rub off on her hands.”