Invisible Boy, page 5
Truthfully, I didn’t mind the closet. There was no one to talk to but neither was there anyone to tell me I was misbehaving. No one was upset with me. No one seemed unsure of what to do with me. No one worked to protect the others from me. It was a safe space.
Miss Kruger didn’t miss me either. Every morning I assumed my time in solitary confinement was through, only to learn I had not yet demonstrated the humility required to rejoin my classmates. I imagine they all found my absence refreshing. Day after day, I returned to the closet to learn independently. Things could be worse.
When I finished the worksheets, I wandered off to the school library. VCS had just one young adult collection: the Trailblazer Books, a series of short Christian novels in which children encounter the great missionaries of history. In Trial by Poison, the scariest one, which I read several times, the mother of a young West African girl is imprisoned by savages, and condemned to eat a deadly poison bean. So the little one turns to the Presbyterian teacher Mary Slessor, a wise and compassionate Scottish woman who is famed for adopting six African children. Only the white missionary can save the girl’s mother. The African people are monsters—superstitious fools who embrace ignorance as a cover for their cruelty. They have no regard for human life; they are charlatans, cannibals, witches, slavers, and baby-killers.
But this was the case for the African characters in every book I’d ever read, with the exception of Curious George.
All of these books had it backwards, but I didn’t know that then. I only knew what I was told and shown while I was reading, so I was frightened by the extremity and inhumanity of my heritage, and relieved to have been kept from such an awful, godless place.
Better alone in Abbotsford than surrounded by Africans in Africa, I thought.
But it was a mistake to enjoy my seclusion.
The faculty began to wonder why I was so happy, alone in my nook, and moreover, why my own mother had permitted them to leave me there. Not long after bringing me back, Miss Kruger asked: Harry, how often are you punished at home?
Every time my mother speaks with you, I explained. The spankings are daily. The spankings are bottomless.
My hope was that Miss Kruger would see how her system caused me nothing but abuse, and why my banishment became a welcome week away from everyone.
Instead, it prompted an investigation. The VCS faculty imagined the worst: that they were bound to punish me daily out of love, because my mother was punishing me daily from malice. The parents’ council volunteered to look into the matter, as the Christian school had no formal system for probing suspected abuse.
The scrutiny was very distressing to my mother, who felt unfairly targeted as an American.
Canadians looked down on Americans, she explained, which was why everyone assumed the worst about her now. They prejudged her the moment she walked into that school to register me for kindergarten. One person said it was wrong to adopt me at all, because she was white. And they think Americans are the bad guys? How could it be wrong to love your son?
I had not considered the pressure that I put on my mother just by existing, and I struggled with shame over making her life so distressing. In my interview, I swore that I was only ever spanked, and that these punishments were painful, but deserved.
Corporal punishment was a wedge issue in Abbotsford. Children’s rights advocates had been loudly insisting that spanking a child was the same thing as hitting a child, what with how spanks are the same thing as hits. In 1973, the Ministry of Education banned the strap in BC public schools. But private schools like VCS resisted the new rules for years, holding fast to the old rule from Proverbs, which instructs: He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly. Principal Solomon still practised corporal punishment on occasion, and the school had briefly considered it for me. There was concern, however, that it might get out and hurt their accreditation case. But spankings were more than okay in the home. I was not being abused. I was being disciplined according to the Bible. My mother was acquitted, with apologies.
Still she blamed me for the whole ordeal. When she hung up the phone, she congratulated me on very nearly talking my way into the foster system, just like my birth mother. I was ashamed, and I went away thinking that I might be cursed. It was as though I was being inexorably drawn to repeat some Black woman’s mistakes, swimming against an invisible current. I tried to stay out of trouble, and it found me. I tried to fit in, but something was off, and there appeared to be no natural explanation.
At year’s end, Miss Kruger called my mother with good news: I was not invited back to her class in the fall. After marking all my busywork, the teacher realized that I had inadvertently graduated from the third grade as well as the second. I could skip to Grade 4, if I wanted. This was great news to my mother and me. She proudly accepted on both our behalf, and at the graduation ceremony, I appeared twice, like a cell in mitosis, at the top of both classes, suggesting that someone was raising me right after all.
If ever I was arrogant, it was the night I collected two diplomas, and my mother was exalted.
The feeling was short-lived, however. After the ceremony, Miss Kruger pulled my mother aside to offer a dire warning about my future: I would be a year ahead of my classmates, perhaps, but socially I was years behind. No amount of scholastic achievement would teach me to fit in, or cure my bad attitude. Her abiding hope in advancing me to the fourth grade was that I would be intimidated by the older boys and finally learn some humility.
It seemed, to me, a uniquely dispiriting kind of goodbye, and I spent the break afraid of going back to school.
But I never returned.
That summer, the schism that shook APA made its way to Central Heights Church. The new radicals argued that the non-denominational megachurch, founded decades earlier by ex-Mennonites wary of labels, should adopt a more radical theology. More dancing. More tongues. No translations. But they were rebuffed and several folks, including the church bass player and the man who ran the sound booth and his wife, who ran the overhead projector, left for the pink megachurch up the road.
The biggest losses were at the elementary school downstairs, which suddenly found itself without a principal and several teachers. It was a troubling setback. The school barely had enough personnel to handle the first five grades, so any outgoing staff, Principal Solomon especially, was a problem.
Neither had the school secured a permanent building or government certification—the student body was technically just two hundred children homeschooling together in a basement. That made the transition to proper homeschooling a relatively easy one for VCS families, and parents often threatened to remove their kids if they were not appeased.
These threats increased when the school announced the new acting principal, Everly Kuhorn. The woman was perfectly qualified—she was pursuing a master of education degree from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver—but this was not a community wowed by degrees from liberal schools in cities by the sea. How could someone steeped in secular education serve families that did not support the practice? Rumours abounded that the new principal was a humanist, a postmodernist, a Unitarian at best, doubtless influenced by worldly teachings in direct defiance of 1 John, which warns believers thusly: If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Sure enough, the acting principal tried to replace several textbooks.
For years, VCS had been married to the Abeka Homeschool Curriculum, written and distributed by Southern Baptists based in Florida. Abeka taught Biblical values and was built upon a solid, Christian worldview. But that wasn’t enough for Mrs. Kuhorn. She argued that Canadian children were not well-served learning American history—and a one-sided version at that. Her argument sounded suspiciously liberal and supported my mother’s contention that Canadians are bigoted against Americans.
When Mrs. Kuhorn went on to suggest a Canadian history textbook that touched briefly on Indigenous issues, an explicit attempt to replace Christian teaching with lies of the world, the knives came out. The acting principal was diagnosed with a Jezebel spirit, a particularly nasty demon that latches onto women who are ambitious and difficult, or maybe it makes them that way. It’s unclear.
The Bible hates Jezebel more than anyone. Few deaths are covered as gleefully as that of the idol-worshipping queen of Israel, who is defenestrated and eaten by dogs, in the end. But even that couldn’t destroy the demonic attachment. The spirit of Jezebel remained active, sowing division and disunity in the body of Christ, and several VCS families, including my own, wanted no part in any of that.
So we left, and we never looked back.
* * *
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My new Grade 4 class was delivered by Canpar Express, the Canadian courier service. The full Abeka homeschool kit was a massive shipment, with textbooks, workbooks, quizzes, exams, and answer keys for every subject, along with dozens of VHS tapes, each containing a week’s worth of classes, recorded live from real classrooms at the Pensacola Christian Academy.
It was a seamless transition. Attending class remotely was not unlike attending VCS, but invisibly, which was preferable by then anyhow. Both schools opened class with prayer, much of the curriculum was the same, and if there were other Black students enrolled there, then they were invisible too.
But there were some striking differences. The Academy’s footage appeared to be from another era, judging by the way everyone was dressed, and it was unmistakably from another country, precisely as American as Christian. At the beginning of each class, students recited two pledges of allegiance: one to the flag of the United States, and another to the Christian one, a mostly white flag with a little red cross in a royal blue square in the corner.
And they never forgot to pray for the president.
It’s a little weird, since we’re Canadian, I said once, but my mother reminded me that I was technically just as American as I was Black, which was half, because of her.
Here, she was wrong. My Abeka curriculum made it quite clear, and I showed her the passage to prove it: Mankind can be divided into several large groups called races. The people of each race differ from those of other races in the color of their skin, in the size and shape of their head, in the kind and color of their hair, and in many other physical features.
The same could not be said for Americans. I was only American inasmuch as I was being raised as one.
Whatever. American education is better, she said. Canadians act all high and mighty, but their textbooks are full of liberal crap. I tried to read a Canadian book on adoption. Do you know what it said? That adopted kids get sad around their birthdays, every year. They said it reminds them of something they’ve lost. But that’s ridiculous. You love your birthday, don’t you?
Of course, I said. I get so many presents. That’s ridiculous.
See? Canadians don’t know what they’re talking about.
Within a few weeks, I was so settled into my virtual school environment that I could name several students who sat by the camcorder serving as a stand-in for me. Tyson had big metal braces. Beside him was Aaron, whose shirt was untucked in the back. These kids were my neighbours, in some sense. I liked to imagine that they were my friends. I even developed a crush on a girl. Brooke wore a bright-pink beret. She said one day during a presentation that her hobbies were shopping and boys, which piqued my interest, because I was a boy, and I’d been smitten ever since.
But it was no use. She didn’t even know that I existed.
Sometimes I wondered if anyone did anymore. Being invisible had been a refreshing change of pace at first, but as time wore on, the isolation wore me down completely. We stayed home most days, with no church and no school. My best friends might have been actors for all I knew.
So I was delighted when the Gazettes came to live with us while they hid from child protective services.
The twins had been at each other’s throats during a road trip, Mrs. Gazette explained, and they had directly defied her demands to quit horsing around. Somehow, her son stabbed his double with a multitool, and that was the last straw. So she did what any good, Christian mother would do: she flicked on her hazards, pulled the car over onto the shoulder, and spanked them right there on the side of the freeway.
Some busybody saw her. The passerby took down the vehicle’s licence and reported Mrs. Gazette to the proper authorities. The family returned home to a message from a social worker asking to come by the house for a wellness check. The Gazettes were convinced that the liberal, Canadian government was eager to persecute them for living Biblically, so they fled, and for roughly six months they lay low at our house, with their car hidden in the garage.
Mrs. Gazette believed the devil had orchestrated the fiasco on the freeway, and she was hardly the only Prayer Warrior being tormented. One night at care cell, the enemy attacked Tilda Eubanks.
The unmarried woman had once been a witch. Since reformed, she remained vulnerable due to her sinful, occult past. Apparently, Tilda Eubanks had once pledged her life to Satan, performing rituals, casting curses, and burying sacred objects in the woods behind her home to consecrate the land for wicked purposes.
But then she got Saved and renounced all that. Now, she was a sanctified Prayer Warrior who danced, waved flags, and made strange whooping sounds during prayer. So when she suddenly went silent and still in the middle of our living room one Saturday night, the group assumed a demon, lying dormant, had awakened to possess her. Soon, the deliverance of Tilda Eubanks was the only show in the house.
The battle dragged on for hours, long after midnight, with the revivalists encircling the erstwhile witch and laying hands, in shifts. Sometimes it seemed as though they were winning, and the woman would stand upright, breathing softly through her mouth. Sometimes, when it seemed as if they were losing, like when my mother took a break, Tilda Eubanks would hunch and huff and grunt.
Then it happened: all of a sudden, the woman let out a hideous, high-pitched squeal, like a teakettle at full boil, as though she had exhaled the evil spirit like a lungful of smoke, and she collapsed so heavily that the family cat fled to high ground. The animal leapt from its bed of fake grass in the antique mahogany cradle at the base of the stairs, sprinting up and away to its hiding place under my bed.
I was horrified.
When I replayed this moment in my head, the cat was recast as the migraine baboon from Mrs. Gazette’s night in Marysville, and every night for weeks, I had bad dreams. In my recurring nightmares, I was chased by a witch in my backyard. I would wake up outside, turn around and she’d be there, staring through murderous eyes, inescapable, three times my size. Some nights I could run, but I couldn’t get back in the house. The witch had done something. Other times, my legs were made of sand, and she would stand above my body, shouting incantations, doing spells to me.
One night, I dreamt that I almost got back inside safely. That was the night that I first saw the Scary Man. I located myself at the front door, on the wrong side, locked out after everyone else was asleep. Terrified, as usual, I crept around the house to the garage. It was open, and I made it past the van to the top of the landing by the button that brought down the door. Still no sign of the night witch. I looked back to be sure she wasn’t after me.
The Scary Man was sprinting up the driveway. He wanted to come inside, and he was moving so quickly, his body was behind him, somehow, and his legs were—where?—beside me, all together now. He was wearing a black ski mask, black turtleneck, and black gloves, and he reached for me, both hands outstretched. I stared into his eyeholes to plead with the man underneath, beholding not eyes, but the absence of eyes, and that’s when I woke up, mid-gasp.
The Scary Man lived in the house after that. One night, I felt him beside me. Another night, I saw him in the hallway, on the ceiling. I woke up once to see him sprint into my bedroom, in pieces again, and before I could make any sense of him spatially, he turned into bats and flew into my mouth, and I woke up, for real, with strep throat. I told my mother how I got it—the Scary Man came back—and she asked me how often I saw him and said that he might be a demon.
The next time you see him, she said, you rebuke him. Don’t be afraid. If you call on the name of the Lord, he’ll protect you. The most powerful Man of God ever, Smith Wigglesworth, once woke up to find the devil sitting on his bed, Satan himself, just to scare him. Do you know what he said? Oh, it’s just you. And he rolled over and went back to sleep. So if you see a demon, just remind him that your God is bigger.
I didn’t want to have to rebuke any demons. But only a week or so later, I woke up in the hallway and saw him coming up the stairs. The Scary Man was hopping, but he didn’t make a sound. And then he lunged at me, still silently. I threw up both my hands and screamed: I rebuke you in Jesus’s name!
It worked. He yelped and ran past me, right into the Big Room at the end of the hall, where we kept the Nintendo, and he dove behind the sectional, unnaturally fluid. I wouldn’t see the Scary Man again for many years.
But warding off this one evil spirit did not make me feel any safer, and neither did waking up. I’d already seen an angel, and I shuddered at what else could appear to me in the dark, now that I knew about what else was out there. By then, I was bound to a reality in which anything, literally any object, could be a vehicle for demons. The whole house was haunted; there were stimuli everywhere. And everything threatened to come to life, suddenly, menacing me out of nowhere.
I learned how to move through the hallway without opening my eyes for any reason. I memorized the number of steps to the bathroom. I knew that the creak meant that I was too close to the stairs. I couldn’t see clearly without my glasses anyway. Why even risk seeing anything? So every night, I took them off like taking out my eyes, and I stayed that way until the sun came up.
