Diary of a Misfit, page 16
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go to the bathroom.”
She pulled me down the aisle, and I felt like I was underwater. We squished into a stall. I could hear Cheryl singing in the distance, and eventually her voice gave me the courage to frame my pain as a hunch, a feeling that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t tell my mom about Ellen or the kiss, and I didn’t tell her I knew I would never love a man. I told her the same half-truth I’d told Lizz and Sadie, even though I knew the label was wrong.
“I’m bisexual.”
My mom told me she knew. She said when I was younger, back when every boy in our neighborhood was Black, her friends had asked her what she’d do if I married a Black man. Thirty-five years had passed since Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage, but in the South, white people still looked down on it.
“I told them I wouldn’t care,” she said. “I’d just learn to braid Black babies’ hair.”
I scrunched my face in confusion. Maybe my mom didn’t understand what bisexual meant.
“What I’m trying to say,” she said, “is if you’re going to be a lesbian, then I’ll just learn to buy yeast infection cream for two.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d seen The Whole Lesbian Sex Book tucked into the sociology shelves at Barnes & Noble, but I’d never been brave enough to open it. I didn’t know what lesbian sex entailed, or if it would lead to yeast infections. I looked at my mom. I waited for an explanation, but she pushed the stall door open and told me we were leaving church.
We drove away without my dad or brother. We went to Walmart, and my mom bought me a giant box of tampons, then she told me I needed to head back to college. She said she loved me. By the time I made it to Jackson a few hours later, though, she’d changed her mind. Sometime while I was driving east, she booted up the gray desktop computer she kept on our kitchen table, then she emailed me to say my professors had brainwashed me. She told me she wished I’d never moved to Alexandria, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met Sadie’s gay dad.
“I think of you, and I want to throw up,” she wrote. “Even ‘Shout to the Lord’ is ruined.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT WEEK, my family went to church without me. They sang the songs I loved and talked to the people I missed, and when the preacher asked if anyone needed healing, my parents walked toward him, desperate to rid themselves of my secret. The preacher turned off his microphone. He always turned it off when people made their prayer requests. Though the altar was at the front of the church, the preacher believed there were things only God and a pastor should know. He put his hands on my mom’s head, and she bent toward him as she whispered her need. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what the pastor heard, but my parents told me later that after my mother said the word “homosexual,” the preacher fiddled with his microphone, then his voice filled the sanctuary.
“Satan’s got ahold of Casey,” he announced. “We’re going to pray right now. God save her.”
My parents told me they closed their eyes and repeated the pastor’s words: “God save her.”
“Save Casey’s soul. Save her and take her life immediately so she can make Heaven her home.”
My dad told me he opened his eyes. He stepped away from the preacher.
“Take her?” my dad asked. “Did you just pray that our child dies? That she’ll be dead?”
“Dead to this world,” the pastor clarified. “But she’ll live eternally.”
My dad backed up, but my mom stepped forward, still praying. “God save her,” she repeated. “Take her.”
Chapter Eight
(April 2011)
WHEN LYNDA DESCRIBED the Delhi Pentecost Tabernacle, I’d imagined a holy fortress, the kind of vast complex I’d attended growing up. Family Church’s parking lot had been as sprawling as a Walmart Supercenter’s, but I could see, as I pulled close, that the tabernacle’s lot was only big enough for a dozen vehicles. I steered my rental car into a space, then Aubree, Aaron, and I stepped out into the slanting sun.
I hadn’t been to church in nine years, not since my Easter Sunday confession. I’d been so scared at eighteen that the pastor would cast me or a demon out, and I’d worried that Pamela and the youth pastors would stop loving me if they knew I was gay, so after the pastor asked God to take me, I made up my mind to stop loving them first. I didn’t answer when Pamela called, and I threw away all my Christian CDs. My mom was right: Even “Shout to the Lord” was ruined. Eventually, I stopped praying, and I stopped feeling all wrong inside when I woke up and did nothing on Sunday mornings. I started reading The New York Times every weekend instead.
Aubree and Aaron circled the tabernacle with video cameras, and I leaned against the rental car. The building was tan with white trim, as generic as a dentist’s office or an outlet mall in the suburbs, but that kind of facade had once seemed holy to me. Family Church was built from the same tan brick. Standing in the Delhi parking lot, I almost felt as if I were a teenager again. I still remembered the words to all the songs we used to sing, and I could hear Cheryl’s voice echoing through the years. My stomach knotted up. I had told myself for nine years that God could not hurt me, but as I stood there, surveying the brick, I realized that losing church had been the most painful thing I’d ever endured. I closed my eyes. Diesel trucks and John Deere tractors motored along the highway behind me, but their rumble faded as I whispered the opening bars of “Shout to the Lord.”
I’m sure I was a little dewy-eyed when Aubree and Aaron returned to say they’d captured enough. I twisted around and into the rental car, then I spent the whole drive back to Poverty Point talking about Lynda and the Bible verses that ban women from wearing pants. I still didn’t understand how Christians could love a God who would condemn people for cutting their hair or loving someone, but something in me wondered if Lynda was right. What if I’d just read what I wanted to see in Gomes? What if the Bible condemned people like me?
I have tried my entire adult life to stop believing in Hell, but something always stops me. My mother used to tell me that blasphemy is the only unforgivable sin, and sometimes, when I allow myself to think that Christians have misinterpreted the Bible, that Hell isn’t a place where fire burns eternal, something inside me shakes. Blasphemy. I can still hear the way my mother dragged out the syllables, letting the middle s hiss the way I imagined the serpent did in the Garden of Eden. I asked her once what the word meant, and she told me it’s when you tell yourself that God and Hell don’t exist. “Even if you think it only once, you’ll spend eternity on fire,” she said. “And you’ll never burn up, you’ll just feel the flames licking at your skin, and it will be so hot you’ll beg Satan to just go ahead and kill you, but he won’t, and you’ll never fall asleep, and you’ll never feel relief, and everyone you love will forget you, so they won’t know you’re crying, and you’ll beg God for mercy, but he won’t hear you anymore, and the pain will go on forever.”
I’ve given up so much that I held on to as a kid. I don’t go to church, and I don’t eat TV dinners. I walk if my destination is anywhere within a mile. But no matter how much I transform myself, this early fear of eternal damnation has remained stitched into my essential makeup. I want to stop believing, but my mother’s words slink back: Even once, and the pain will go on forever. I tell myself her vision sounds ridiculous, but then a lower, more assured voice inside me whispers back: But what if she’s right?
I parked the car in front of cabin 7, but I didn’t want to go inside yet. I sat on the deck for a while and watched birds dive into the lake. The bugs buzzed louder as the sun sank, but all I could hear was Cheryl’s voice ringing in my head. My mom’s brother still attended Family Church, so I knew, from seeing his Facebook photos, that everyone I used to know still attended every Sunday. Pamela still sat in the far left corner. The pastor still moved across the same stage wearing the same expensive suits, and Cheryl still sang in the choir. Who would I be if I’d never left? I loved getting up and reading The New York Times every Sunday morning, but I didn’t feel rooted the way I had when I was young.
The sun slid down the skyline and melted into the lake. I waited until the sky was dark and the boats across the water turned on their headlights, then I stepped inside and told Aubree I thought we should go to church in the morning.
“Roy’s church,” I said.
I wasn’t ready to face the tan brick or the songs I assumed they sang at the Pentecost Tabernacle, but I needed to see the church that accepted Roy after Lynda’s preacher kicked him out.
* * *
—
THE CHURCH OF CHRIST was on Delhi’s main drag, just a few blocks from Hell Street. It was a split-level building with a pitched roof and a covered walkway. The tiny parking lot was jammed with pickup trucks and SUVs when we arrived at 10:15, so I parked down the road on a gravel patch in front of a house that looked vacant. I normally walk so fast that my friends beg me to slow down, but that day, I took my time strolling toward the church. My legs stung with fear. My mom used to tell me if we didn’t ask forgiveness for all our sins before walking into church, God might strike us dead right there in the doorway. I didn’t want to believe that was true, but as we drew closer to the building, I whispered, “God, please forgive me for all my sins.”
Just before we made it to the door, I saw myself in the reflection of a dark-colored pickup. My hair was a mess, and I hadn’t worn a dress in years, so I’d shaken out a pair of black dress pants and a wrinkled button-down shirt that morning. I saw now that I looked conspicuously gay. I gulped three breaths, then prayed again: “Please don’t let them kick us out.”
The door to the sanctuary was propped open, so we slipped inside, then found seats in the back pew. I looked around. The Church of Christ had the same blue-floored, water-filled baptistry that Live Oak had had when I was young, and the cherry-stained pulpit looked just like the one at Family Church, but Lynda had been right: This church was different. I didn’t see instruments anywhere, and the pews were all wood with hymnals tucked into the back. Both Family Church and Live Oak had had plush rows. We never used hymnals.
At the front of the sanctuary, a sign noted that twenty people had attended last week’s service, and those twenty people had contributed more than a thousand dollars to the offering. I worked the numbers in my head. Each person must have given at least fifty dollars.
Most everyone there that Sunday was old, but the couple sitting in front of us was young, and they had what looked to be a newborn baby sleeping between them in a car seat. Another young family sat just left of me, and they nodded as they sat down right at 10:30. Someone coughed, as if on cue. An assistant pastor walked up to the pulpit, then read off the prayer list, a dozen names of people afflicted by things the assistant pastor didn’t mention. He prayed in the name of “our most righteous heavenly father.” He asked God to grant us all everlasting life, and I thought of the mansion my mom used to tell me I’d receive in Heaven.
“Now y’all open your hymnals,” the assistant pastor said. “We’ll do the first, second, and fourth verses.”
Everyone around us began to sing, atonally, without melody. They went in rounds, the men first, then the women right behind them. They sang about surviving through God, then they shifted to another hymn, a song so slow I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics until I grabbed a hymnal myself. It was erudite but plaintive, full of phrases like “ebon pinion” and “brooded o’er the vale,” and as everyone around me sang, “Let this cup of anguish pass from me,” I wondered if Roy had ever sung that line.
None of the songs moved me. They didn’t have the pop of “My Redeemer Lives” nor the swelling, soul-filling key change that made me cry halfway through “Shout to the Lord.” The songs the Church of Christ members sang that day just droned. I wondered how anyone ever found God in those notes. The assistant pastor prayed a second and third time, again in the name of our most righteous heavenly father, then an old man with loose jowls and a hang-dog expression climbed the carpeted steps toward the pulpit. He had a bald head, a red face, and big ears that stuck out past the few tufts of white hair he still had. I realized he was the preacher.
“The lesson today is about truth and love,” he said, “two of the most important words in our language.”
His name was Wilford Burgess. He’d been the minister there fifteen years. That Sunday, Pastor Burgess wore a mint-green shirt under a suit the color of a latte, and he preached in a slow bass that put Aaron to sleep. I kicked Aaron and he woke up, then started snoring a few seconds later. The preacher didn’t seem to notice. For thirty minutes, he read scriptures and marveled at how great love is.
“I guess you can say God thought love up, because he invented it.”
It was a humble sermon, very unlike the ones I grew up listening to. Pastor Burgess didn’t talk about demons, and he didn’t preach about sin. He just went on and on about love.
“If you don’t have love, remember what Paul says in First Corinthians? ‘If I have not love, I am nothing. If I have all the wisdom and all the knowledge and don’t have love, I’m nothing.’ What is true love anyway? That is one of the hardest words to define, to give scripture to. When you have love, it takes on its own personality. It shows. It’s like the light. You can’t hide it under a bushel.”
My chest relaxed, and my legs stopped stinging. Of course this was the kind of man who’d accepted Roy. Pastor Burgess wasn’t charismatic, but he did seem kind, and maybe Roy needed that kind of person in his life. Maybe I needed that kind of person in my life. I so rarely told people then that I loved them. I spent my time working or reading, and I never went to see my family unless I was in Louisiana working on this documentary. I didn’t know how to open myself to love, but I wanted to.
“Paul says examine yourselves,” Pastor Burgess said. “Do you ever give time to meditate on who you really are? What you’re doing, where you’re going? Do you ever look deep down in your heart and say, ‘Who am I? Why am I in this world?’ Look to yourselves.”
He lumbered down the carpeted steps, then the congregation stood and sang another song about suffering. They did all four verses. Afterward, they tucked the hymnals into the backs of the pews in front of them, and they embraced each other. I half hugged the young couple sitting next to me, then I followed a line of people toward what they called a fellowship hall. It was just one room, a kitchen with linoleum floors and six long card tables set up with casseroles and canned vegetables. Someone had brewed a big pitcher of sweet tea, and someone else had baked a pineapple upside-down cake. An ancient-looking man who said he owned a store in Tallulah called Crazy Bob’s handed me a Styrofoam plate. He told me to fill it up. I spooned out some green beans and a Velveeta-covered noodle dish my mom called chicken tetrazzini. I’d gone without canned vegetables almost as long as I’d gone without church, but I took a bite of green beans, and the limp legumes tasted like every dinner my mom had ever made. I peeked at my cell phone, hoping she had called. We were supposed to meet back in Monroe later, maybe for dinner, but I didn’t want to wait until nighttime to tell her that some foods would always remind me of her. My cell phone screen was blank, though. She hadn’t tried to call. I put the phone back in my pocket, and I turned to Crazy Bob.
“You know,” I said, “I grew up eating at potlucks like this every Sunday.”
Crazy Bob faked a wide-eyed surprise. “Now you ain’t telling me you had food as good as this before.” He forked a big mouthful of chicken-and-Ritz-cracker casserole into his mouth. He winked at me and licked the fork clean.
“Hey,” I said in a coy, teasing tone, “you haven’t had my mom’s manicotti.”
My tape recorder ran out of batteries halfway through the meal, and nearly a decade has passed since that Sunday, so I don’t remember what we talked about as we ate. But I remember I felt happy. Sometimes, when I’m around other Southerners, my good grammar gives, and I talk the way I used to talk when I was little. I say “tooken” instead of “taken,” “seen” instead of “saw,” and I add an extra “them” before nouns, as in “Can you hand me one of them pickles?” I’m sure I did so that day, and I’m sure I felt relieved to talk the way my brain naturally works. I know I was still smiling an hour later, because Aubree and Aaron filmed me interviewing the pastor and a woman who knew Roy.
Her name was Ann Kimble, “used to be McVay,” she said. She was the older sister of Tommy McVay, the skinny man I’d interviewed on the first trip with my mother. Tommy had died a few months after I interviewed him, Ann told me. He was sixty-five. Ann didn’t say why Tommy died, and I didn’t ask. She sat on the front row next to the preacher, and I sat next to them.
Ann had on a yellow jacket over a yellow shirt, and her electric-blue skirt had yellow accents in it, too. I knew, from Tommy, that the McVays had grown up poor on Hell Street, and I didn’t think she was rich now. She didn’t talk the way I thought rich people talked, and she was missing her first left molar, leaving a hole I thought no rich person would let go unfilled. But she was wearing a pearl bracelet, pearl earrings, and a matching necklace, accessories that suggested some sort of ambition, even if the pearls were fake. She was heavyset, and her hair was short and curled the way I now realized all middle-aged women in the South wore theirs. I asked Ann what she remembered about Roy. She leaned forward and shrugged.
“Well, mostly, the only thing that I knew about her was she sat on her front porch and played her guitar.”
I said I’d noticed they didn’t play instruments at the Church of Christ, and the pastor shook his head in affirmation. He told me theirs was a fundamentalist congregation.
“We get our directions,” he said, stumbling over his words. “If the Bible speaks it, we speak it. If the Bible is silent, we’re silent. We partake of Communion every Sunday because we have a biblical illustration of that. We don’t sing with instrumental music because it doesn’t say anywhere in the New Testament. There’s no illustration for that. There’s no precedent for instruments.”
