A Backslider's Tale
Growing up Pentecostal.
Bernice Martin
June 15, 2009
Diane Wilson's Holy Roller is a memoir of a Pentecostal childhood in the tough shrimping community of Seadrift on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but it is also a true-life murder mystery and, as the subtitle says, the record of growing up to "quit loving a blue-eyed Jesus." Wilson may have left the church but she did not leave the community. The publishers tell us she is a fourth generation shrimper, mother of five, and a celebrated environmental activist whose first book, An Unreasonable Woman, was the story of her successful pursuit of Formosa Plastics, who were dumping toxic waste in the Gulf Coast shrimping grounds.
She is not only a determined and courageous woman but also an exhilarating writer who somehow must have found time to read books in that busy life of hers. Her story is dramatic and uproarious but never overwritten. Even the violence threaded through it is presented without prurience or embellishment: shooting yourself accidentally with your first gun is just what happens if you are seventeen and careless like Mom's brother Delbert; so too losing your little brother, as her grandfather did, when he fell into a beach fire because Daddy had left and Mother was too harassed to be there with the kids. "Little brother Sand Dune" stayed where he fell on that barren island when the fatherless family decamped to the mainland.
There is a lot of humor in the book, but it is never patronizing or malicious; Wilson's wit is interwoven with intimations of the dark aspects of life in such a hardscrabble community. And the dialogue is utterly convincing. Once begun, Holy Roller is as hard to put down as any whodunit, though not because there is ever any doubt about the identity of the murderer (an out-of-control game warden whose own appalling story is finally disclosed in the testimony of his sibling, Brother Dynamite, an ex-convict who becomes a born-again preacher and snake handler). You simply don't want to leave this richly re-imagined world and the resilient little girl who already has the imagination of the writer she eventually became.
The dedication and the epigraph of Wilson's book are eloquent clues about what is to come. The epigraph is taken from Antonio Machado's "Proverbs and Songs": "Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it." This suggests not only a certain literary taste but also a teasing indirection. Related passages in the Machado oeuvre tend to contrast living and dreaming with a third and better thing: awakening. This would fit nicely with a coming-of-age memoir. On the other hand, the author seems to have spent much of her childhood in a visionary state between waking and dreaming— going to the moon, attending her own Last Judgment, scratching gnomic letters to Jesus on her windowsill and receiving messages back, lying in the road or hiding in the chinaberry tree in a state of suspended animation. Moreover, the hero of Wilson's book is her grandfather, "Chief." This patriarch, "part Cherokee or Blackfoot (he never said which)," though he "would sooner take a blunt end of an ax to his head then go to church or associate with any of the practitioners of such," nevertheless "talked minor talk to the dead" (including "little brother Sand Dune").
Chief has regular visions and gets messages from the other side—crucially for the story, from his son Archie Don, whose murder he enlists "Silver" (as the tenyear- old Diane is known) to help him solve. So perhaps the term we are to guess is visions rather than awakening. Take your pick. The dedication, by contrast, is entirely unambiguous: "To Chief, Billy Bones and Archie Don. Wherever you are." These, we soon discover, are the "backslidden" men of the family who were regularly threatened with hell and damnation by their believing womenfolk. Billy Bones is Diane Wilson's father under the piratical pet name by which her mother called him when she first fell for him, and Archie Don, his unmarried younger brother, is the murder victim. These men, whose trade Wilson followed, are her chosen genealogical line rather than the believing women of the maternal line. There is her pretty, timid mother, Goldie, forever anxious in case the Rapture catches her with the washing and cleaning unfinished, or her Aunt Silver, who outdoes the male preachers at their own game. The strongest personality among them is Wilson's grandma, Rosa Belle, perpetually "on the warpath for God," who finds all the churches too milk-and-water for her fierce theology but plays a particular radio evangelist at top volume all day long to keep the devil and the backslidden on their toes—and sends him most of her meagre earnings.
Wilson's publishers advertise this book as "the portrait of an activist as a young girl." It is undoubtedly that, but it is much more. It is that rare thing, a non-ideological memoir of a poor-white, evangelical childhood which is also a considerable literary achievement. Although Wilson now aligns herself with the "backslidden" men, her childhood identification was with the women and the church: her affection for her family and their whole way of life is palpable. Until the mystery of the deaths of Archie Don and his colleague Sambo gives an urgent shape to the story, the first part of her book mostly deals with the life of the women and children, and the church of Jesus Loves You.
The women and children do the backbreaking and filthy work of cleaning the shrimp catch as it comes off the boats, and Silver is an exception in also going shrimping with both her father and her grandfather, as if she were a boy. She is the fifth of her parents' brood of six, sandwiched between two sisters, worldly Shenna, "Queen of the Jungle," and baby Pill. It is Silver who takes the church seriously, so seriously that Sister Pearl has her picked out as a future missionary and probable martyr in the Congo. She loves the church, and "next to Abraham Lincoln and Jesus" she loves Brother Bob, the preacher who has a mission to shrimping folk, and even goes to the beer joints to preach to the men who won't come to church.
But Brother Bob is trounced by Brother Beller, who detects no evidence of the Holy Ghost in the church, no tongue-speaking, no prophecy, everything lukewarm, all the signs of occupation by devils who FAKE a good church. In turn, the arrival of Brother Dynamite is a challenge even to Brother Beller. Dynamite is a snake-handler, convertedin jail by the appearance of Jesus' face on a bologna sandwich just as he was sharpening a screwdriver with murderous intent. His appearance hots up both the church scene and the murder mystery. It also coincides with ten-year-old Silver's realization that the screen actor Anthony Perkins is her alter ego, even if he may be demonic. Her disenchantment with the Pentecostal world is barely hinted, but the signs are there to read alongside the clues to the murder.
We have too few memoirs of an evangelical upbringing of this vividness and excellence. Diane Wilson is a sad loss to Pentecostalism but a real literary find. It has often been noted that religion has far less to fear from science than from the seductions of the imaginative arts. Perhaps that is the real significance of Anthony Perkins in Wilson's story. If so, the term we are to guess in response to Machado's tantalizing challenge must, alas, be "the arts."
Bernice Martin is emeritus reader in sociology at the University of London.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture
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