Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (4 page)

For a full year before we joined that Apostolic Pentecostal congregation, my parents had been on a spiritual search. My mother, who was raised Baptist, and my father, who grew up United Methodist, never told me what prompted their exploration—but I think it was a spiritual hunger.

Around that time, my family moved from our trailer to a newly constructed three-bedroom town house in another part of Severn. Months before the move, my parents got to pick out the interiors—a red shag carpet, a red and black fireplace, a washer and dryer off the kitchen, a backyard, and sidewalks out front; Dad said I’d be able to ride my bike.

“We’re even going to have a foyer,” Mommy told me.

“What’s a foyer?” I asked.

“It’s a section at the front of the house before you go into the living room,” she explained. As it turned out, the “foyer” was really the tiniest linoleum-lined area right at the front door—but that didn’t make me any less excited about our new home. I didn’t know it then, but I’d experience some of the pivotal moments of my girlhood in that house.

Once we moved into that neighborhood, what was happening there certainly encouraged my parents’ spiritual quest. We got used to hearing a knock at our front door and opening it to find a Muslim, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even an Avon rep; during the seventies, it seemed like everyone was passing out religious pamphlets, salesman style. On weekends, our family began visiting all different kinds of services, from Catholic to Muslim. The Muslim guy who sold bean pies to my parents stopped by our house often; the three of them would get into long, intellectual conversations in our living room. A similar thing happened when my parents considered becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses—people were constantly dropping in to talk with my parents about crosses and constellations. In the winter of 1974, my parents finally chose Pillar of Truth as our church home. That choice would have lasting consequences for all of us.

Bishop Scurry, our church’s leader, was an attractive, heavyset, fair-skinned black woman who was probably in her midsixties. Her husband had a limp because one of his legs was shorter than the other. Through my seven-year-old eyes, the bishop seemed like a grandmother—she had a calm and nurturing presence, and she wore gold metal-framed glasses and a white hat affixed to her head by a black bobby pin on each side. And she led a church with very strict rules.

As members of the church, in addition to wearing only skirts or dresses, the women and girls had to “cover their nakedness” by placing a hat over at least 75 percent of their heads. Every Sunday, the church ladies would show up in hats that looked like the kind Elijah Muhammad wore, minus the tassel; the men wore gentlemen’s caps. According to Bishop Scurry’s interpretation of the Old Testament, it was a sin to bare too much of the body, including the arms and the legs above the knees. In fact, my mother stitched extra fabric onto her hemlines so that they’d fall below her knee. And here’s the part that really doesn’t make sense: Ankle-length formal dresses were banned.

Even during the muggy summer months, all the women wore full stockings. A watch was the only piece of jewelry allowed. Makeup was completely prohibited. If you disobeyed any of the rules, you were completely ostracized. And if the rapture came while you were in this phase, you wouldn’t make it to heaven.

Did I mention several of my family members thought that my parents were crazy? Once when my aunt Earthaleen came to visit us, she and Mommy got into it. “Ain’t you tired of wearing all these dresses?” she snapped. She and Aunt Nita couldn’t believe that my parents would get involved in this kind of church—one that didn’t even allow us to celebrate Christmas or put up a tree. During our first year at the church, my older cousin Kimmy, then ten, came to live with us for a few years until her own family could sort out some issues—but she sometimes still went home on the weekends to be with her mom. I felt jealous that Kim got to wear pants and listen to secular music.

During our first Christmas at Pillar of Truth, I really wanted a Baby Alive, a battery-operated doll that I could feed. “I can’t get it for you, Toni,” my aunt told me. “Your mother is going to be upset.” Even still, I begged Mommy to let Aunt Juanita get me the doll. “We don’t celebrate no
darn
Christmas,” said Mommy, who often used the word
darn
to keep from cursing. In fact, we didn’t acknowledge most holidays in our church—no Thanksgiving, no Easter, and especially no Halloween. According to the bishop, these were pagan holidays. Even still, I prayed very hard for my doll—and I felt so guilty that I did.

You may find this hard to believe, but I was excited the first time Mommy told me I could only wear dresses. By first grade, I’d already become a girly girl—pink and lavender were my two favorite colors, and my closet was filled with frilly pieces. Before school, Mommy would lay out the dress she’d selected for me, along with a pair of ruffle socks and black and white oxfords from Kinney shoes. Yet after months of sashaying around like an African-American version of Shirley Temple, the day arrived when I craved something different. I wanted to wear pants.

One morning, I spotted the taupe dress with a navy blue vertical stripe in the center that my mother had placed on the red chair in our upstairs foyer. A moment later, I dashed to my bedroom to dig out an outfit I’d tucked away—a pair of chocolate corduroys and a soft pink sweater.

“You have to wear a dress,” Mommy said when she noticed the corduroys I’d pulled out.

“But why, Mommy?” I protested.

“Because dresses are for girls and pants are for boys,” she said. That was the only explanation I received.

We practically lived at church. Once we entered the brick building that had the steepest cement stairs I’d ever climbed, the service would go on forever. After Sunday school at nine
A.M.
, the main service at eleven carried on until the last tambourine had gone silent, which was usually around two
P.M.
Afterward, the members gathered for a meal. The church leaders sold plates of fried chicken, potato salad, and collard greens for $1.50 each, and lemon cake with chocolate icing, which I still call “church cake.” The proceeds went to the building improvement fund or to the sick and shut-in fund. As our family grew and Dad’s budget tightened, we’d often leave the church and drive to the supermarket to purchase our own lunch—baloney, mayo, and cheese on white bread. “Don’t make a mess back there,” Mommy would warn Kimmy, Mikey, and me from the front seat of our Bonneville. In the middle row of the backseat, I balanced a paper towel on my lap to catch the crumbs. Our day didn’t end there: After lunch, we returned for an afternoon program at four, followed by evening service at seven. Then on Tuesday and Thursday nights, we went to Bible study—in addition to the weeklong revivals we often attended. By the time we drove the forty-five minutes back to our house from all of these services, I was usually fast asleep.

The week we arrived at Pillar of Truth, Bishop Scurry introduced me to her adopted daughter, Penny—newcomers were usually assigned to a member in the church. Penny was a light-skinned tall girl who looked like the bishop, so it wasn’t until later that I realized she was adopted; I remember saying to myself, “Wow, her mama is old!” Though Penny was four years older than me, we clicked right away. So one Thursday night after we’d been at the church for a few months, I let her in on some exciting news. “My dad is buying me some clogs,” I whispered to her in the pew we shared. “He’s getting them in navy—my father loves me in blue.” For the following three weeks whenever I’d see Penny, she’d ask, “So did you get the shoes yet?” I shook my head from side to side. On the Sunday morning when I finally showed up in the shoes, Penny was sitting in the pew behind me. “Let me see!” she begged. I beamed as I scooted my right foot back toward her. Penny’s eyes widened. “Ooooh, you’re going to hell!” she said. Her words stunned me. What was she talking about?

Penny later explained why I was in trouble: “You can’t show your feet.” The clog covered most of my foot—except for the bottom part of my heel beneath the back strap. After service, when my parents went up to shake Bishop Scurry’s hand, I went with them. “Is it okay for me to wear these?” I asked, glancing down toward my shoes. She eyed my clogs for a moment, then looked over at my parents. “She can wear them to school until they’re worn out,” the bishop said. “But she can’t wear them into the house of God.” Each time I slid on my clogs in the following weeks, the initial joy I’d felt was eclipsed by fear; apparently, the God of the universe would send me to eternal damnation in a blazing inferno for something as minor as an exposed heel. That’s how I began connecting religion, God, and church with judgment, anxiety, and guilt.

EVEN IN SUCH
a restrictive church, there was one part of the service I always looked forward to—the music. Every time the choir sang, the harmonious gospel tunes lifted high toward the ceiling and then gently settled, like mist, over the congregation. “Mommy, can I join the choir?” I asked her when I was around seven. “You have to ask the bishop,” she told me. On the following Sunday when I made my request, the bishop grinned and kept repeating, “The Sunshine Band”—which was the children’s choir. In spite of how strict she was, she was also quite warm and engaging. Every time her lips spread into a grin, I was astonished at how white her teeth were—and this was long before Crest whitening strips.

I was way too young to be in the adult choir—one that sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” so beautifully. I joined the children’s choir instead. After just a few weeks of rehearsing with the other kids between Sunday school and morning worship (and by the way, we got two vanilla wafers to tide us over until lunch!), I began to love the Sunshine Band—especially once I was given my first shot at a solo.

If you think my voice is low now, it may surprise you to know that it was even
lower
when I was a kid. “You sound like a man!” my brother, Mikey, would tease me. So on the Sunday when I took the microphone to sing one verse of “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” the whole church discovered what Mikey already knew: I was the female version of Barry White. “A sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,” I sang, tilting my chin upward, as if that would somehow help me hit the high notes. “A sunbeam, a sunbeam, I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.” If my solo debut was
terrible
, you wouldn’t have known that by the congregation’s response: The crowd showered me and the rest of the choir with a round of
Amen!
s and applause. The truth is that no matter how a singer sounded, the members of the congregation were always very encouraging: “Yes, Lawd, that child can sang!”

During my year in the Sunshine Band, I slowly grew comfortable around the other kids—and yet I still never really fit in. We may have all shared the same religion and the same pews every Sunday, but my parents were far more strict than the other parents in the church. In part, that’s because they became engulfed in their study of the Old Testament. “The devil is always lurking,” Mommy would often say. My mother was more vocal about her beliefs than my father was, but Dad was also 120 percent into it—he eventually became an associate elder at Pillar. Our family would go out into parks and testify, trying to convince people to come to Christ; we were constantly quoting scriptures. Our lives were stripped of anything that could somehow lead us away from God or tempt us to do wrong. Let me explain.

Secular music was considered too “worldly”—we couldn’t even sing along to the opening theme song from
The Jeffersons
. Going to see a movie in the theater was a sin (but watching a movie on TV was okay because it had been edited). We also couldn’t go roller-skating—the music was evil. Once, my aunt Nita, who saw how music lit me up, offered to play an Al Green record for me on her new hi-fi stereo. Before I could nod my head yes, Mommy gave me a look that said, “Don’t even think about it.” One thing we were allowed to do was go to amusement parks, like Kings Dominion in Virginia—and these trips were usually fund-raisers for the church. Because there were so few other opportunities for fun, I always looked forward to that.

When it came to all these rules, there were plenty of contradictions: We were allowed to eat grapes, but some of the old-school apostolic church bishops didn’t allow their members to do so because the grapes could ferment and become wine; in our religion, drinking any wine or alcohol was considered ungodly—but how could that be true if Jesus once turned water into wine? None of this made sense to me when I was a child. It still doesn’t.

The list of restrictions left me and everyone else in the church with basically nothing to do—almost everything fun was off-limits. That might be one reason my parents had so many children—in addition to the fact that women were actually discouraged from using birth control; only the rhythm method was permitted. “God determines birth,” Bishop Scurry would remind the adults once the kids had been sent off to the multipurpose room. “Man has nothing to do with it.” Though my parents clearly lived by this principle, there were times when my father seemed a little embarrassed to have so many children. When anyone would mention how large our family was, I noticed that he often averted his eyes.

But my parents wanted all of us to go to heaven—and following a set of legalistic rules was how they believed they could make that happen. If we lived a structured life on earth, we would live a better one in eternity. They taught us that the rapture could come at any moment, and if we weren’t living right, we would all go straight to hell. The goal was to be “saved” and to stay that way by staying obedient. And being saved involved being baptized and speaking in tongues—you had to do both. Our bishop often quoted Acts 2:38: “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Another passage we often frequently heard was Acts 2:4: “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Speaking in tongues was considered evidence that you were truly a Christian and on your way to heaven—because you were already speaking the heavenly tongue. That guaranteed your seat in the kingdom.