Donna M. Johnson - Holy Ghost Girl: A Memoir

Table of Contents

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a
religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to
make individuals exceptional and eccentric.

William James,

I understood the stillness behind the sky

But never the words of men.

Friedrich Hlderlin,

In My Boyhood Days

DONNA, I DONT KNOW IF YOURE COMING TO THE FUNERAL, BUT I HEARD Daddys gonna try to raise Randall from the dead. Call me.

My sister left the message as my husband and I stumbled into our darkened kitchen hauling groceries, deli takeout, and briefcases. We had finished another twelve mind-numbing hours at our marketing firm, making deals, finessing budgets, and placating clients, employees, and sometimes each other, racing toward every deadline as though it were life or death. The red light of the answering machine winked at us from the counter. My husband flipped on the overhead light.

That preachers going to resurrect his son? Were going, right?

I shook my head no and said yes. Randall Terrell had been dead twenty-four hours. I was still deciding whether to attend his funeral and everyone else had moved on to resurrection. Even Jesus stayed in the tomb three days, but my family had not followed convention, not in life and apparently not in death.

Randall, his sister Pam, and my brother Gary and I spent our formative years traveling the revival circuit known as the sawdust trail. Our families formed the inner circle of a Holy Roller tribe that preached, prayed, and scared sinners into the fold under giant gospel tents that eventually included the worlds largesta red, white, and blue canvas almost as long as two football fields. I was three and Gary was one when my mother signed on as organist for Randalls daddy. She sold everything and joined the caravan of eighteen-wheelers, faded station wagons, leaky campers, and other gimpy vehicles that limped and lurched from one breakdown to the next. In later years a fleet of Mercedes and a small jet would join the convoy, churning a wake of suspicion that eventually led to the downfall of Brother David Terrell: healer, end-time prophet, and as close to a father figure as I would get.

We descended on towns like a flock of magpies, our public-address system crackling and squawking with cries of Repent and Be Saved, Jesus Is Coming Soon and Be Healed, the phrase that drew multitudes. When Brother Terrell asked those in need of prayer to come forward, most of the congregation rushed toward him. The lines looped around the tent in a human labyrinth of suffering. Strangers pressed against one another, sweat and breath mingling in a collective desire to be touched by that hand. As believers passed under him, they were caught for a moment in a fierce blue gaze just before he squeezed his eyes shut, rolled his head upward, and slapped his right palm on their foreheads. In the name of Je-sus. They reeled and hit the ground as dead weight. They threw down their crutches. Praise God. They didnt walk, they ran. Hallelujah. The deaf heard. Glory be to God. And the dumb spoke with the tongues of angels. Amen.

I had not seen Randall or his father for more than twenty years. It had been longer since I had stepped inside a tent. During the intervening years I had indulged in the posthippie haze of the seventies well into the mideighties before finally graduating from college. Like the woman at the well, I had married and divorced more than one man and lived with several who were not my husband. I had written reams of advertising copy, attended my daughters graduation from college and graduate school, and married a poet who was also a successful entrepreneur. Somewhere along the line, I had become a semirespectable, doubt-ridden Episcopalian with Buddhist tendencies.

My sisters message on the answering machine brought it all back: blond pine shavings covering the dirt floor of the tent, feathered and piled one upon the other, each singular as a snowflake. My brother and I bedding down with the Terrell kids on that field of sawdust, wrapped in a nest of quilts while the adults paced the tent, praying into the early hours long after the crowd melted away and the last amen was uttered. The warmth of the cannon-shaped kerosene heater roaring beside us on teeth-chattering cold nights, its red tip glowing in the darkness like the all-seeing eye of God.

That November evening as my husband and I stood, mouths agape, in the white-tiled kitchen of our urban home, I felt the past rise up and move toward me like some long-slumbering, pitifully deformed creature. It smelled of pine shavings and kerosene. Its rough, dense texture moved in and out of memory like a tent flap blowing in the breeze. My mother pulsed out a familiar melody on the Hammond organ:

Somewhere a tambourine kept time.

THE TWILIGHT SOUND OF CICADA

SINGING OF A DAY

ALREADY GONE BY.

Dgen

THE TENT WAITED FOR US, HER CANVAS WINGS HOVERING OVER A FIELD of stubble that sprouted rusty cans, A&P flyers, bits of glass bottles, and the rolling tatter of trash that migrated through town to settle in an empty lot just beyond the city limits. At dusk, the refuse receded, leaving only the tent, lighted from within, a long golden glow stretched out against a darkening sky. She gathered and sheltered us from a world that told us we were too poor, too white trash, too black, too uneducated, too much of everything that didnt matter and not enough of anything that did. Society, or at least the respectable chunk of it, saw the tent and those of us who traveled with it as a freak show, a rolling asylum that hit town and stirred the local Holy Rollers, along with a few Baptists, Methodists, and even a Presbyterian or two, into a frenzy. Brother Terrell reveled in that characterization.

I know theys people call me David Nut Terrell. Im not ashamed of it. He bounced up and down the forty-foot-long platform with the pop and spring of a pogo stick. Im crazy for Jesus, crazy for the Lord. The crowd was on its feet, pogoing with him.

The tent went up in all kinds of weather, but in my memory its always the hottest day of summer when the canvas rises. A cloud of dust hangs over the grounds, stirred by the coming and going of the twenty to thirty people it took to raise the canvas. Local churches sent out volunteers, but most of the work was done by families who followed Brother Terrell from town to town, happy to do the Lords work for little more than a blessing and whatever Brother Terrell could afford to pass along to them. When he had extra money, they shared in it. He had a reputation as a generous man who pinched the buffalo off every nickel that passed through his hands. He employed only two to four professional tent men, a fraction of the number employed by organizations of a similar size. The number of employees remained the same over the years even as the size of the tents grew larger. Worlds largest tent. World smallest tent crew, was the joke.

The air smelled of grease and sweat. Men dressed in long pants and long-sleeved shirts (the Lords dress code) ran back and forth, calling to one another over the gear grind of the eighteen-wheeler as it pulled one of seven thirty-foot center poles into the air. I held my breath as the men wrestled the poles into place, praying that a pole didnt fall and knock a couple of men straight to glory, but making sure I didnt miss it if it did. With a couple of center poles secured, the men broke for lunch, mopping their faces with red or blue bandanas or an already soaked shirtsleeve. Pam and I brought out the trays of bologna sandwiches our mothers had made and walked among them passing out the food. I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the greasy imprints their fingers made in the white bread or the sour hugs that accompanied their thank-yous.