Just Trash a Dissertation SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of THE

Just Trash

A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Ashley Renee Campbell

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Katherine Scheil

May 2020

“Four O’Clocks” was originally published in an earlier version in Newfound Journal, 2015; “Being a Child” was originally published in an earlier version in Salt Hill Journal, 2018.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ii

Acknowledgements iii

Author’s Note v

Introduction 1

Four O’Clocks 37

Being a Child 55

A House Full of Roaches 74

Through a Glass Darkly 87

Autopsy of a Service 100

Epilogue: Refuse of Things Lost 110

Bibliography 122

List of Figures

Figure 1 20

Figure 2 37

Figure 3 55

Figure 4 74

Figure 5 75

Figure 6 82

Figure 7 86

Figure 8 87

Figure 9 88

Figure 10 102

Acknowledgements

There are so many people to acknowledge with a project like this. I would first like to thank Garrard Conley for helping me to believe that I could be a writer again after years of me believing I couldn’t, and then helping me develop the tools I needed to embark on this project. Without Garrard, I would not be the writer I am today.

Katherine Scheil, my advisor, was so important for helping this project become a dissertation, from her initial suggestion that I pursue this project to being such a huge support through all of this. John Watkins, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Melissa Sellew all were very supportive and helpful throughout this process.

Several grants have been important for me to be able to complete my project, including the Edward M. Griffin Fellowship and the Marcella DeBourg Award, the support of which enabled me to develop as a scholar and writer.

I could not have made the progress I needed to without my fellow classmates

Marc Juberg and Amy Bolis, who read many versions of my chapters and helped me to get a sense of my possible readers. Their comments and feedback were indispensible for this project.

Julia Kidwell, my current therapist, has helped me so much over the last few years to be able to process my trauma and find my voice—without her this memoir would not have been possible. Anna Greene Stanley, my first therapist, helped me start on the long road of processing everything I’ve been through—I can never thank her enough. All of my therapists have been important in this journey and have helped me heal.

My sister April has been supportive throughout this process and has often read multiple drafts of an essay and gave honest feedback. Along with April, my sister Amber

iii

has been one of the few family members I could confide in about my sexuality, and I appreciate that immensely. As much as this dissertation has been hard to write, my family has shown their support in the ways they could.

A support system is necessary for any artist to complete their work, and I have been supported by numerous friends throughout the years, including Shelby Johnson,

Emily Fritze (whose lovely illustrations appear in this book), Erin Holt, Rachel

McWhorter, and Heidi Rimpila. From providing support when I was panicking, to helping me make difficult decisions in regards to my project and my life, these friends were there for me.

To all the professors who have inspired me, I am immensely grateful, but particularly for Eric Daigre, Jason Tucker, Eloise Whisenhunt, Dan Thornton, Paula

Backscheider, and Anna Riehl Bertolet.

I also want to thank BECAUSE, the Bisexual Organizing Project, and Camille

Holthaus for their role in helping me embrace my sexuality and find my community.

Finally I need to thank the queer and feminist icons who have empowered me through this project, particularly Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints), whose fierce artistry continues to inspire me; and the Dixie Chicks, whose music video “Gaslighter” gave me the final push to finish my dissertation.

Author’s Note

Firstly, though I attempt to be as accurate as possible, the chronology of events is not always clear in my memory and therefore the sequence of events may be out of order, even when that was not my intention. Also, the conversations and details of many of the events were reconstructed from memory to the best of my ability, and at times, augmented by the memories of my mother and sisters. However, most often, I have chosen to rely on my own memory as much as possible—and when possible, documents saved from the time, such as photos and letters. Also, many of the names of people and places have been changed to protect those depicted in the memoir, as well as myself— though my name remains the same.

Introduction

All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me—there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory—but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.1 —Lydia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

My dissertation, Just Trash, is comprised of four personal essays that take on various questions of identity and empathy that arise when a non-binary bisexual woman grows up in a Southern evangelical, working-class home, an environment that is politically, religiously, regionally, and culturally so different from the one I currently inhabit. This introduction explores the purpose of the memoir as a whole, as well as its origins; the functions and import of each chapter and the place of my memoir within the larger genre through looking at four key types of memoir with which it is in conversation:

Southern memoir, trauma memoir, religious memoir, and queer memoir.

When I first started conceiving of Just Trash as a memoir, I called it

Refuge:Refuse because of the ways in which notions of home were in conflict, and because of the play on words of refuse as noun and verb, suggesting both the refuse in which I grew up and my refusal to accept others’ often harmful understandings of my identity. However, one day when talking about my memoir, I jokingly said it was “just trash,” and immediately I knew that had to be the title. I let go of the original title with little regret, because while some of the wordplay of the original title was lost, there was

1 Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water, (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2010), 28.

plenty in Just Trash to satisfy my punny sense of humor, while retaining enough seriousness to give readers a sense of what they might find in my memoir. As “just” can mean both “only” and “right,” it has the sense that the book might just be sensational or that it might be an assertion of what is morally right. Pairing that with “trash” means that whatever follows deals with perceptions of what might be trash, from the class-based

“white trash” in the South, to the literal trash that filled the home I grew up in. It also suggests the ways people minimize others’ trauma when it is not convenient for their own narratives or political aims. Surprisingly it has long been acceptable on national progressive television programs to belittle the South in ways that were harmful for the people in the region, particularly children who internalized these message about

Southerners as stupid.2

Just Trash began as a direct response to Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased (2016).

Conley’s memoir tracks both the time he spent in a conversion therapy facility in

Memphis, Tennessee, and the experience of his childhood in a Missionary Baptist family in Arkansas. Conley’s memoir does the difficult work of humanizing the people in his life who caused his trauma, regardless of their later roles in his life. Through this work, he uses what might be considered a cultural studies lens to construct the “structures of feeling”3 of the evangelical South, interrogating the various aspects of Southern masculinity through the images of his father, the men in his church, and the counselors at

2 For instance, take the segment from the popular kids’ variety show on Nickelodeon, All That! (1994- 2016), called “Hillbilly Moment” in which two characters with ridiculous Southern accents act incredibly stupid. Not only that, some of my favorite pundits have taken shots at the South, for instance Jon Stewart’s segment on The Daily Show called “South Parked,” in which he asks, “Is that what happens when the South is confronted by something not specifically mentioned in Revelations?” While this occurred after I had been living in Minnesota for a little over a year (1/30/2014), I continue to feel the shame and stigma of being from the South. I still love Jon Stewart, but the joke irked me, because it relied on the old trope of Southerners as backwards and ignorant. 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 132-134.

Love in Action, a conversion therapy program based in Memphis. In Just Trash, I ask similar questions. How much do traditional (as well as less traditional) masculinity and femininity inflect our lives and our traumas? What roles do (and should) religion and faith play in the construction of our ideas of family, connection, and home? And what are the limits of empathy?

My particular experience of being a white bisexual Southern non-binary woman who grew up in an evangelical family and later became agnostic can shed light on the way these various intersections play a role in politics, family, relationships, and sexuality.

“Chosen family” has become a catch-all term for the deep connections we make as adults outside of our biological or nuclear families of origin, primarily queer, though not necessarily so. My dissertation navigates the process of ‘choosing’ a family, while considering such questions as whether or not one can ‘unchoose’ one’s family of origin, and how much this choice is dictated by a broad array of social, psychological, and personal factors.

In doing so, my project explicitly takes on the question of empathy—its depths, its limitations, and its pitfalls. Empathy has long been touted as one of the justifications for reading literature.4 The idea that we can gain empathy for others through reading is certainly a popular one, and has been explored widely. Susan Lanzoni, in her book

Empathy: A History, writes, “From the time of the coining of ‘empathy,’ empathic practices have coursed through a stunning number of fields from aesthetic psychology to

4 See Michael Fischer, “Literature and Empathy,” Philosophy and Literature 41, no. 2 (2017): 431-464; Christine Jarvis, “Fiction, Empathy, and Lifelong Learning,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 31, no. 6 (2012): 743-758; and Christine Jarvis and Patricia Gouthro, eds., Professional Education with Fiction Media: Imagination for Engagement and Empathy in Learning, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

social work and psychotherapy, to politics, advertising, and the media.”5 My project can serve as a case study for the way empathy can and can’t work within networks of shared and overlapping trauma.

Many memoirs have addressed the question of empathy, and I hope that my particular story can help bring a queer Southern light to the topic. Having inhabited the perspectives of both conservative and liberal/progressive mindsets, as well as some points convoluted and in between, I have access to insights that people who have never crossed a political, religious, or social divide may not be able to provide.

Queer Memoir

Having a multiplicity of queer stories is essential in a landscape so often barren of anything queer. The task of simply telling a queer story is a necessary project in a society where few people realize that they may already know a queer person. Queer writers leave a record for other queer people to find and a signpost for straight, cisgender people to see, and their works fight against the waves of erasure that continually assault queer existence.

Authors such as Edmund White, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Gore Vidal have crafted memoirs that not only shed light on queer experience, but also add to the craft of memoir itself.6 Both Edmund White and Gore Vidal have been foundational queer writers in fiction and nonfiction. Edmund White’s numerous memoirs depict his early loves and his

5 Suzan Lanzoni in Julianne Chiaet, “Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy,” Scientific American (October 4, 2013): n.p. 6 Edmund White, My Lives: A Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s, (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2010); Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1996).

life in Paris in My Lives (2006), his life in New York in City Boy (1999), his reading life in The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (2019), in addition to his pseudobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982), which recounts the experience of an unnamed narrator growing up gay in 1950s America. Needless to say, Edmund White has influenced a generation of queer writers, particularly gay male writers with his vast body of work. One might consider Garth Greenwell’s autofictional novel What Belongs to You (2016), as being in this lineage, in its lyrical prose, its literary intertextuality, and its vibrant embrace of sexuality.7

Gore Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest (1996) represents an experimental work with an incorrigible narrator (which readers may love or hate), as he moves back and forth in time across the span of his life. His voice is memorable for sometimes being antagonistic to his potential readers but also gossipy and lurid. His work recounts a wide range of experiences with the environment in which he wrote the memoir. His memoir does the work of refusing to be any one thing for the sake of a straight reading public, but rather challenges readers to see his experiences as they flow between past and present.

In the epigraph cited at the beginning of this introduction, Lidia Yuknavitch queers the concept of time, or rather illustrates the way memory is itself queer, rarely linear or reliable, even without trauma. Her Chronology of Water (2017)8 takes on the question of how trauma is experienced in time, the way it can sharpen some memories and blur others, and the way we approach trauma in our daily lives. Her memoir forcibly takes the reader through the ways survivors of trauma often relive their trauma—the action of reliving trauma is far different from merely remembering trauma. For me, until I

7 Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You, (New York: Picador, 2016). 8 Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water, (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2010).

had been in therapy quite awhile, and until I had written the essay “Being a Child,” I relived the memory of my uncle tickling me each time I thought about it. I was basically experiencing in realtime what I experienced then—the sense of shame and powerlessness, and the inability to see myself in the present moment when I was reliving the memory.

Now I can think back to it from a distance and consider the ways in which it caused me pain without reliving it each time. Nevertheless, I’ve found that trauma can reassert itself at strange times and force me to relive a memory that I thought I had completely processed and put behind me. It is why my therapist and I have done EMDR (Eye

Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which the EMDR Institute defines as

“psychotherapy originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories” that “facilitates accessing and processing traumatic memories and other adverse life experience to bring these to an adaptive resolution.”9 It basically enables the survivor of trauma to escape the cycle of remembering and reliving their trauma, and is an intensive therapy that requires a lot of mental and emotional effort on the part of the patient. I have gone through several runs of this to address various traumas, some that appear in my memoir, and some that do not. Like Dorothy Allison’s narrator in

“Deciding to Live” from her short story collection Trash (1988), I felt that “[p]utting those stories on paper took them out of the nightmare realm and made me almost love myself for being able to finally face them.”10

Both reflection and craft are essential for my memoir to achieve its aims—to understand the social context of my life and the political and existential import of that

9 “What is EMDR?”, EMDR Institute, Inc. (https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/), accessed March 31, 2020. 10 Allison, Trash, (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 3.

experience. Though political in intent, my work diverges from more overtly political works such as Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (2014),11 and instead functions as a case study for the role of sexuality, region, and class in identity formation. In many ways, my experiences disrupt dominant queer narratives in that my story does not follow the typical arc of discovery and repression as a child, resistance and rejection (or acceptance in some cases) as an adolescent/young adult, and final liberation from oppression through education or other means. While my story definitely includes aspects of these tropes, they deliberately appear out of order. My story is not an easy one of recognition and liberation. These seem to be the stories many in the queer community want, understandably. But, I would argue that there are other stories that many in the queer community need—and much of that is so we can process the many traumas we’ve been through.

Trauma Memoir

As with Southern memoir, the number of memoirs that deal with trauma is enormous, so I will have to narrow the scope a bit. As my memoir deals with trauma that mostly occurred or originated during childhood and resulted primarily from psychological and emotional abuse, with a small portion of physical abuse, I include memoirs where the trauma somewhat lines up with my own. However, as each person experiences trauma differently and in response to different stimuli, the alignment between my own memoir and other memoirs that deal with trauma is only approximate.

Nevertheless, my work is in conversation with any memoir that attempts to deal with the

11 Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).

types of complex trauma a family and/or church can cause an individual. Again, Boy

Erased (2016) is central to the origination of my own memoir, for the kinds of questions it asks about family- and church-inflicted trauma, are the very questions I most want to understand in Just Trash. However, the majority of Conley’s family trauma stemmed from one major event—conversion therapy—and that is where my memoir departs from

Conley’s in its treatment of trauma. His discussions of faith and religion primarily explore the complex trauma that systemic homophobia can give rise to. While he does address other aspects of the feeling of oppression that often come with being a part of a faith with a strict, unbending set of doctrines, sexuality and gender are, of course, at the center of his memoir about undergoing conversion therapy.

Other memoirs that deal with family trauma include Alan Cumming’s Not My

Father’s Son (2014), Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), and Jeanette Winterson’s

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) (though her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), perhaps, speaks more directly to my project, in its consideration of the child psyche in the face of oppression).12 My memoir follows the long tradition of trying to work out how, as Wordsworth puts it, “The Child is the father of the Man.”13

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) to Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son:

A Study of Two Temperaments (1907) to Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010), memoirs and autobiographies have been addressing this question for hundreds of years.14 Part of the

12 Alan Cumming, Not My Father’s Son, (New York: HarperCollins, 2014); Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (New York: Grove P, 1989); Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove P, 2011) and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove P, 1985). 13 William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, by William Wordsworth, ed. William Knight, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan & co., 1896), 292. 14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, translated by Angela Scholar, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907); Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010).

import of my memoir is that it is being written now, in the twenty-first century, and the particularity of experience is what separates any memoir from another. In addressing trauma, my memoir fixates on the way trauma is inflected by the intersections of society, and refuses simple blame for the traumas inflicted by my family and church. By ‘simple blame,’ I mean blame without regard to context. Also, blame in my case is perhaps the least useful thing for a survivor of child abuse, as it fails to erase any of the pain that comes with surviving this type of abuse and does nothing to help to repair relationships.

Rather, the narrativization of such abuse is what often leads to a sense of understanding that breaks the chain of blame and allows me to reframe the experiences of my childhood in ways that hopefully get at bigger questions than whether or not my parents were at fault for their behavior, and allows readers to glean from a perspective that comes with changing time, place, politics, and religion. The intersection allows for a unique cross- section of American culture that another writer may not perceive as I do.

When one considers memoirs about trauma, it is important to remember the difficulty of writing about one’s own trauma. Roxane Gay articulates the difficulty of writing about her rape in the memoir Hunger (2018).15 In the book Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (2014), Jessica Gildersleeve writes,

“Writing trauma is always already constituted by survival: learning to live, learning how to survive.”16 This relates to my own process of working through trauma. Many of the essays I’ve written have helped me live better with the trauma from my past, by allowing

15 Martha Reilly, “Roxane Gay Addresses Difficulty of Writing About Truama, Need for Inclusive Campuses,” UWire Text, February 8, 2018, Gale OneFile: Educator's Reference Complete (accessed February 27, 2020), https://link-gale- com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/apps/doc/A526701988/PROF?u=umn_wilson&sid=PROF&xid=a62bd1ee); Roxane Gay, Hunger (New York: Harper, 2018). 16 Jessica Gildersleeve, Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 1.

me to identify patterns and behaviors to avoid, both for my own actions and when making connections with others. For example, the process of writing my essay “Being a Child” allowed me to forgive my younger self for not seeing earlier the way the relationship with my uncle harmed me. It also helped me to see how that relationship made me more vulnerable in a later relationship in which similar abuse was repeated.

Part of what is difficult about writing trauma in literary prose is that the aim of the author often goes beyond working out the trauma for themselves. Nearly everyone who writes about their own trauma asks something along the lines of “What does the trauma mean?” But the scope of the meaning changes based on the writer’s goal. It is well known that writing—or at least narrativization—is a therapeutic tool for processing trauma.17 In fact, more than one of my therapists have recommended that I write about my trauma, but the goal is not generally for clients of psychological practices to make art or even to attempt it. Rather, it is about trying to gain power over their story, by taking the narrative back from the abuser (if the trauma is the result of abuse) or merely to fit it within the scope of their lives so that they can move on and fully process the trauma.

One reason therapists use writing as part—and generally no the whole—of treatment is that the process can, and often does, retraumatize the writer. Without the help of a therapist, such retraumatization can overwhelm the patient, leaving the writer feeling worse than when they were avoiding the trauma. Without guidance, some people can feel—indeed, I have felt even while in therapy—that their trauma is a narrative they can’t escape. It pulls them forcibly back into the past at often unexpected stimuli. Octavia

Butler, in her novel Kindred (1979), narrativizes and literalizes this for Dana, the main

17 Denice M. Sloan, et al., “Efficacy of Narrative Writing as an Intervention for PTSD: Does the Evidence Support Its Use?” Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 45 (2015): 215-225.

character of the novel. Dana keeps being pulled back to the past because of the trauma of her ancestors, especially her white ancestor, Rufus. To escape the past, she ends up killing Rufus and thereby loses her arm. However, even after she’s fairly certain she won’t be physically pulled back into the past, the experience haunts her.18 However, it was Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1989) that first helped me to understand intergenerational trauma, as I reasoned that to write the story in 1989 meant that it was still affecting people to this day.19

I am not the first in my family to experience trauma, and every generation of women in my family has experienced significant trauma. For their part, I believe each generation of my family has attempted to stop the cycle of abuse (with varying levels of success, as my memoir illustrates). My mother’s treatment of me was much gentler than her father’s treatment of her—she unwittingly engaged in emotional abuse, and, when she was very depressed, physical abuse (for which I’ve long forgiven her), but she never threw me around the house as her father did all throughout her childhood until he became a Christian. My grandmother may have engaged in emotional abuse and some intense spanking with switches and sometimes unusual forms of punishment, such as biting me when I bit my cousin or literally washing my mouth out with soap, but she did not beat with me chains as her father did to her, nor did she make the children wait to eat until the adults had been fed, nor did she make me work long hours in the field from the time I was a toddler. Part of why I know these stories is that my parents and grandparents often told them to me to remind me how lucky I was and how good I had it. No matter what they did, they believed it was better than how they had been treated. And perhaps it was.

18 Octavia Butler, Kindred. 19 Toni Morrison, Beloved.

All I can do is process how I experienced my childhood regardless of theirs, but also recognize the way that theirs informed how they parented me.

One series that has been influential for my understanding and representation of trauma is The Hunger Games (2008-2010), particularly the final volume in the series,

Mockingjay (2010).20 Though the main thrust of the series focuses on an oppressive regime and the way power works, it also deals with the different and lasting ways trauma affects people, from Katniss’s mother descending into a deep depression after the death of her husband, to Katniss’s screams that wake her from nightmares even before the games, to Peeta’s persistent need to reorient himself to a reality that no longer feels stable, and perhaps never will again. This series spoke vividly to me about how trauma appeared in my own life, which has been plagued by nightmares, depression, and a similar need to reorient myself to my reality. Katniss and Peeta both experience complex trauma, which is the term for trauma that is repeated over long periods of time and may not be tied to one single event. Even Katniss’s time in the games could be considered complex trauma, as no one event in those games (with perhaps the exception of Rue’s death) is singularly traumatic. And in Mockingjay (2010) we see her mental breakdown— she is finally physically safe, so her mind turns to the trauma she’s endured in a very short space of time, and we find her wandering, dazed, throughout District 13’s underground facilities. Trauma often feels like a persistent drumbeat in one’s mind that one can ignore if other things are more pressing, such as financial instability, food insecurity, or threats to one’s life, all three of which Katniss experiences. Though I did not experience threats to my life (at least not from outside sources), I have endured

20 Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games, (New York: Scholastic Inc., 2008) and Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010).

financial insecurity and food insecurity. Nevertheless, for me, it less the type of trauma

Katniss endured than the way she copes with it that I identify with as a reader.

To return to the work of the memoirist, the act of crafting one’s experience for readers can also be traumatic in itself, as sometimes we envision unsympathetic readers who will believe our trauma is insignificant, not worth writing about, or meaningless. The idea of such a reader can derail a memoir in a heartbeat. In combating this, when I write,

I imagine that I’m telling the story to a friend, one who will see my story and its flaws without judgment. At the same time, I attempt to see myself as a friend would—another practice my therapist has encouraged.

Nevertheless, the memoirist seeks not just to understand an experience for themselves but also for others, in that they often address the context of their traumas, seeing how their experience fits within the broader tapestry of our society. We ask, to what extent is our experience singular or shared? What societal forces and institutions perpetuated the culture that allowed the trauma to happen? To what extent did communal values permit or even encourage the occurrence of the trauma in the first place? These are just some of the questions I explore in my memoir.

Books like Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased (2016)21 and Jeanette Winterson’s

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)22 have been essential for me in their representation of trauma specifically related to queer and religious experience and identity because they allowed me to know that I was not alone in my experience, that trauma could be transformed into art, and that insights originated in trauma could be transformative for other survivors, as they were for me. Even so, survivors should

21 Garrard, Boy Erased. 22 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

approach my memoir with caution, aware of the vast array of potential triggers it contains.

I used to be resentful of trigger warnings because I knew that my own triggers were many and unpredictable, like ramen noodle soup, the smell of Pinesol, or the use of the imperative mood. Of course, I don’t expect anyone to know or avoid my potential triggers, but I was frustrated that there were triggers that others could avoid or be prepared for. However, my view has shifted over time, because I realized I was being selfish by holding back something that could be truly helpful for some, even if it wasn’t particularly helpful for me.

Southern Memoir

The Southern memoir comprises a diverse field, spanning race, class, religion, nationality, gender, and sexuality. Because of this breadth, I will discuss the most relevant memoirs, including Tena Clark’s Southern Discomfort (2018) and Garrard

Conley’s Boy Erased (2016).23 Conley’s depiction of Arkansas brings the rural South to life in all of its complexity. In his memoir, we get a sense of the intersections of class, region, race, gender, and sexuality that structure his life before conversion therapy. Most palpable are his depictions of Southern white masculinity and the toxicity often implicit in the enactment of Southern manhood. In a similar way, my memoir takes on the question of Southern white femininity and how that femininity paradoxically supports and breaks Southern women.

23 Tena Clark, Southern Discomfort: A Memoir (New York: Touchstone, 2018); Garrard Conley, Boy Erased (New York: Riverhead, 2016).

In the subset of the Southern memoirs are memoirs and biographies specifically set in Alabama, where I grew up. Some of the most famous autobiographies to come out of Alabama are Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901), Helen Keller’s The

Story of My Life (1903), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974).24

More recent memoirs from Alabama include Melissa J. Delbridge’s Family Bible (2008),

Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ (1997), Judith Hillman Paterson’s Sweet Mystery:

A Book of Remembering (1996) and Trudier Harris’s Summer Snow: Reflections from a

Black Daughter of the South (2003).25 Of these memoirs, Judith Hillman Paterson’s

Sweet Mystery speaks most directly to my own experience in Alabama, despite the difference in age between us.

Judith Hillman Paterson’s memoir Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering26 presents a lyrical, sorrowful depiction of her childhood in Alabama, particularly in regard to her mother who died when Paterson was nine. The fact that her mother’s death happened when she was so young meant that many memories only returned to her later in life, reappearing only after the birth of her own children. She traces the trauma of forgetting an imperfect mother, and the trauma of remembering that loss. While her memoir’s subject does not speak directly to mine, I can identify with its exploration of loss in childhood and the trauma of imperfect parenting, particularly in Alabama. Her

24 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901); Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903); Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1975). 25 Melissa J. Delbridge, Family Bible, (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2008); Rick Braggs, All Over But the Shoutin’, (New York: Vintage, 1998); Judith Hillman Paterson, Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering, (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2020); Trudier Harris, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, (Boston: Beacon P, 2003). 26 Judith Hillman Paterson, Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering, (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2020).

careful exploration of mental illness certainly resonates with my project, although such exploration isn’t my primary focus.

Toni McNaron’s memoir I Dwell in Possibility (1992)27 also focuses on her childhood in Alabama. Its lyrical reflections on the relationships between family members and its attention to the social fabric that makes up Alabama in many ways relates to my memoir, but ultimately her experience is largely outside the scope of mine, despite also growing up in a working-class family. It was a different decade in a different part of the state and with a different family history, as my family had been poor for several generations. According to the genealogy I had worked on, this was not always the case, but in living memory, my family had always been poor or at least not wealthy.

Nevertheless, McNaron’s work is important in the way it tracks her growth over time in a changing culture.

Tena Clark’s Southern Discomfort (2018) is a memoir that tells the story of Clark growing up gay in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. However, it is drastically different from my own work in its context, as she comes from a much wealthier family, and stricter than my own. Although her life does not seem as much pervaded by religion as mine, nevertheless, her account is an important addition to the history of queer people in the South.

A couple of influential fictional texts that focus on Southernness include Dorothy

Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Trash (1988).28 Dorothy Allison’s novel

Bastard Out of Carolina portrays the ways in which Southern expectations of women and

27 Toni McNaron, I Dwell in Possibility: A Memoir, (New York: The Feminist Press at the City U of New York, 1992). 28 Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina, (New York: Plume, 1993);

Southern masculinity play essential roles in how abuse is recycled in families. Like my memoir, her work is interested in the way children often get caught up in the trauma of their parents. Trash, Allison’s collection of short stories, she addresses abuse and trauma directly, and the stories reflect an understanding of the way trauma often inflects identity formation, as well as mental health. She writes, “Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.”29 This line was a gut- punch to someone who has felt this time and again through my childhood and my adult life. Her work on trauma directly relates to the project of my memoir in its careful examination of trauma over time.

Religious Memoir

Many memoirs recounting salacious and extreme cults populate the field of the religious memoir, including accounts of escape from such cults as Scientology, doomsday cults, sex cults, and sects of Mormonism which still practice polygamy. These stories bear little resemblance to my own story, for though the church of Christ has often understandably been called a cult, it lacks the central leadership many consider essential to an organization’s culthood. Not only that, but because the churches of Christ operate independently of one another, and keep their operations very quiet in general, they have often been overlooked in mainstream society and within mainstream Christianity. My memoir thus brings to light this little-studied but pervasive organization.

29 Dorothy Allison, Trash, (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 2.

It might be useful to provide a brief discussion of the church of Christ for those unfamiliar with its doctrines. The church of Christ30 is a denomination of Christianity which believes itself to be the one true church—and, therefore, not a denomination— believing that even slightly different denominations are apostate and that they, along with complete nonbelievers, will spend an eternity in hell.31 From the time I was little until my late teens I had no notion that there was a history of our denomination. No one talked about a history of the church except to point directly back to Christ and the New

Testament church. However, in my late teens, I went to a large, one-day youth bible study where a relatively famous local preacher was giving a series of sermons, one of which talked about this history directly. This was not to challenge the idea that the church of Christ was the one true church, but to point to how it was simply a return to a tradition that already existed, according to the preacher. This history begins with Alexander

Campbell (no relation, as far as I know) and the Restoration movement. The

Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement refers to Alexander Campbell as the

“[f]ounder in 1809 with his father Thomas Campbell of a movement to unite Christians on the basis of the restoration of primitive Christianity.”32 According to the

Encyclopedia, “restoration does not bring the ‘true Church’ back into existence, for it has always existed by grace and not by human engineering.”33 What this means for the present day iterations of the church of Christ is that members try to worship and follow

30 When I refer to the church of Christ, I am referring to the hardline versions which don’t allow women to speak in services (even to make announcements or pray), and which don’t believe in fellowship halls or using church funds for charitable donations. 31 Because of the terrifying power that hell had over me as a child and young adult, I do not capitalize it unless it is capitalized within quoted material. 32 Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers, Anthony L. Dunnavant, and D. Newell Williams, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 112. 33 Ibid., 640.

Christ in a way that matches the early church as closely as possible, relying only on the

New Testament for guidance on how to achieve this goal.

However, from the beginnings of the Stone-Campbell movement there were several splits in the Restoration movement. The Stone-Campbell movement was a nineteenth-century religious movement aimed at restoring the church to its original doctrines and practices as outlined in the New Testament.34 In fact, a recognized split within churches of Christ would not be readily apparent to outsiders---as the two groups continue to go by the same names and the differences would seem insignificant to outsiders, such as whether or not a church had a fellowship hall or if the church gave to charitable organizations. I grew up in the more hardline version of the church of Christ, and many of the materials concerning the history are largely produced by what members of my former church would refer to as “liberal” churches of Christ. For instance, in the book The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History, the contributors include ordained ministers from the churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, many of whom hold doctorate degrees and have attended seminary, qualifications that would have largely alienated them from our church. In the church I grew up in there was no formal process of ordination, nor any ties to a presiding organization such as the National

Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. However, some of the churches we labeled as

“liberal” churches of Christ also did not have ordained ministers or such ties, but rather diverged on issues as simple as whether to have a fellowship hall or to eat in the church at all (other than for communion or in the case of snacks for small children). For instance,

Mayfair church of Christ in Huntsville, Alabama,35 was considered “liberal” because of

34 Ibid., xxi. 35Mayfair Church of Christ, (http://www.mayfair.org/), Accessed 17 February 2020.

its facilities and its fellowship hall, whereas the Allison Creek36 church of Christ37—the local congregation I grew up in—definitely had no physical space or supplies that they did not consider essential for worship and bible study.38

Figure 1 Allison Creek church of Christ Exterior39 The churches of Christ adhere to a largely literal version of the New Testament with one significant exception—the book of Revelations, which they believe to be a figurative prophecy referring to the early church (they are preterists in this respect, though they wouldn’t label it that way).40 They also do not believe in following the laws in the Old Testament, including the Ten Commandments (though the principles, they believe, are largely reiterated in the new testament). They do not, however, believe that the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day are the same day, but rather only refer to Sunday as the

Lord’s Day, not as the Sabbath. The methodology they have for interpreting the Bible is

36 The real name of my home church has been changed throughout this introduction and the memoir to the fictional “Allison Creek church of Christ.” 37 Allison Creek church of Christ (website credit omitted for privacy), Accessed 17 February 2020. 38 For an example of how much thought goes into what’s necessary for worship, see Michael Cole, M.D., “Worship,” West Ark Church of Christ (http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/library/topic5.htm), 17 February 2020. 39 Allison Creek church of Christ, (website credit omitted for privacy), (accessed February 17, 2020). 40 For a thorough discussion of preterism, see Thomas A. Howe, Daniel in the Preterists’ Den: A Critical Look at Preterist Interpretations of Daniel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 34-36. The church of Christ is also preterist in regard to Old Testament prophecies.

comprised of “search[ing] the scripture daily, whether those things were so.”41 This translates practically into making sure each component of their beliefs is supported by specific passages, with many demanding “book, chapter, and verse”42 for each belief.43

Others refer to this as respecting the “authority” or “silence” of the scriptures, or as turning only to the Bible for the source of all beliefs.44 The practice of having a book, chapter, and verse for every thing applies not just to large doctrinal issues such as baptism and salvation, but also to smaller issues such as whether to use instrumental accompaniment in worship, how long one’s hair should be, or if one’s hair should be covered when praying. It should be noted that, for members of the church of Christ,45 no issue is considered a small issue, and eternal salvation is on the line for every single detail.

For an earnest young girl like me, this principle caused a great deal of inner turmoil, as I believed that each action must be aligned with a clear scriptural reference,

41 Acts 17:11. Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture is from the King James Version of the Bible. 42 To see how prevalent this is, one can look at Prospect Church of Christ’s “Book Chapter & Verse” radio program in West Baden Springs, IN, (http://www.prospectchurchofchrist.org/sermons/book-chapter-verse- radio-program), accessed February 16, 2020. The phrase appears on many other websites of local churches of Christ including Monroe Valley Church of Christ in Monroe, WA. (http://www.mvchurchofchrist.org/blog/2016/03/03/book-chapter-verse), accessed March 8, 2020; College View Church of Christ in Elizabethtown, KY, (https://www.collegeviewchurchofchrist.org/about/what-are- you-seeking), accessed March 8, 2020; Fountain Head Church of Christ in Portland, TN, (https://fhcoc.com/about-us/what-we-believe), accessed March 8, 2020; Timberland Drive church of Christ in Lufkin, TX (https://www.timberlandchurch.org/goodnews/establishing-authority-in-religion), accessed March 8, 2020; and St. Augustine Road church of Christ in Valdosta, GA, (https://www.staugustineroadcofc.org/), accessed March 8, 2020. 43 For insight into how thorough members of the church of Christ are in their book, chapter and verse documentation, see this bible study by Ron Turbow at Eagle Park Church of Christ in Midlothian, TX: “Give a Defense” (http://eagleparkchurchofchrist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Give-a-Defense-Ron- Turnbow.pdf), accessed March 8, 2020. In the 50-page study, Turbow gives precise verses for each belief associated with atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, and humanism, in addition to sections on developing one’s ‘apologia’ for their faith. 44 See, for example, The Dassel Church of Christ in Dassel, Minnesota (https://www.dasselchurchofchrist.com/), accessed March 8, 2020. 45 While the phrase “members of the church of Christ,” may seem clunky there’s no other good way to distinguish them from other Christians, the other term they prefer, as they don’t accept any other names for their membership as do Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, etc.

or, at least, not in conflict with scripture. So many hours were spent analyzing my feelings to see whether they fit the feelings I believed were demanded by the Bible, and then avoiding the feelings I believed were condemned by the Bible. This meant carefully obeying my grandmother and mother even when their commands conflicted. It meant trying to convince, one by one, my friends to come to church. It meant trying to figure out what “praying without ceasing”46 really meant. It meant that any mistake, uncorrected, or unforgiven meant certain damnation. I remember praying for forgiveness every time I went one mile over the speed limit, fearing that I might die in a crash and go to hell if I did not immediately seek absolution. One can imagine how any recognition of my own sexuality would have caused serious fears for a young girl in the church. In fact, before I was thirteen I realized I might be attracted to women, but I denied the thought that I could be gay or bisexual (even though I did not know the term at the time), and instead shifted my energy toward liking boys and making long lists of the boys I liked.

Part of the significance of understanding more about the individual experiences of those who have been raised in the church of Christ, especially the hardline versions, is its quiet pervasiveness in certain areas, particularly the American South. While members of the church of Christ made up only 1.5% of adult Americans in 2015,47 in Alabama, members of the church of Christ made up 3% of the adult population.48 According to 21st

Century Christian, Alabama has the third most number of churches of Christ (838),

46 1 Thessalonians 5:17. 47 Pew Research, “America’s Religious Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow,” Pew Research (May 12, 2015), (https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/), accessed February 17, 2020. 48 Pew Research, “Adults in Alabama: Religious Composition of Adults in Alabama,” in the Religious Landscape Study, Pew Research, 2014 (https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape- study/state/alabama/), accessed February 17, 2020.

following Texas (1,904) and Tennessee (1,403).49 However, both Texas and Tennessee have significantly higher populations than Alabama.50

A handful of memoirs about growing up and then leaving the church of Christ have been written in the last couple of decades, including Susan Campbell’s Dating

Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl (2009), Mike S.

Allen’s Growing Up Church of Christ (2011), and Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Pastrix: the

Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint (2013).51 I have found one other memoir that details growing up in the church of Christ, but not leaving the church. The book, Loves

God Likes Girls (2013) by Sally Gary, recounts the childhood of the author in which she

“deals” with the “sin” of same-sex attraction. The book, like many others like it, is harmful in its assertion that acting on same-sex attraction is sinful and therefore should be managed or mitigated. In Bobby Ross Jr.’s article “How to Keep LGBTQ People from

Becoming ‘Spiritual Orphans,’” Gary is quoted as saying, “You can hold to those traditional sexual ethics . . . You don’t have to change those to love people well and include those people in fellowship.”52 While Gary’s goals may be to reduce harm for

LGBTQ people within the church of Christ, any adherence to an idea that acting on same- sex attraction is sinful for oneself or others is harmful for LGBTQ individuals, as it does

49 Carl H. Royster, “Churches of Christ in the United States: Statistical Summary by State/Territory,” 21st Century Christian (https://www.21stcc.com/pdfs/ccusa_stats_sheet.pdf), accessed February 17, 2020. 50 Alabama, 4,903,185; Tennessee, 6,829,174; Texas, 28,995,881. “Release Tables: Resident Population by State, Annual,” FRED Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2019, (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=118&eid=259194), accessed February 17, 2020. 51 Susan Campbell, Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl (Boston: Beacon P, 2009; Mike S. Allen, Growing Up Church of Christ (Self-published, 2011); Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, (New York: Jericho Books, 2014). 52 Bobby Ross, Jr., “How to Keep LGBTQ People from Becoming ‘Spiritual Orphans,” Christian Chronicle (October 16, 2018), (https://christianchronicle.org/how-to-keep-lgbtq-people-from-becoming- spiritual-orphans/), February 18, 2020.

not embrace them for all of who they are, something essential for true equality. And hardline churches of Christ still regularly preach against homosexuality.53

My memoir’s purpose is diametrically opposed to the goals of Gary’s book.54 In contrast the memoirs of Susan Campbell, Mike S. Allen, and Nadia Bolz-Weber all recount the stories of people who grew up in the church of Christ, left, remained

Christian, but practiced their faith in other ways, whether by joining a church of another denomination,55 going to seminary and becoming a pastor of another denomination, or worshipping independently of any denomination. While my memoir cannot be primarily construed as a religious memoir, religion is central to much of what happens in the memoir.

Nevertheless, the religious part of my story departs from these memoirs in that it depicts my conversion from evangelical56 Christianity to agnosticism, with a brief stint as

53 Lowell Sallee, “Marriage and Fornication,” Anderson Church of Christ in Anderson, AL (http://www.anderson-church.org/bible-study/articles/2019/08/01/marriage-and-fornication), accessed February 18, 2020; H. E. Phillips, “Does God Approve of Homosexuality?” Beulah Church of Christ in Vinemont, AL, (http://www.beulahchurchofchrist.org/about/news/2015/06/30/does-god-approve-of- homosexuality), accessed February 18, 2020; “Our Beliefs,” Old Hickory Church of Christ in Old Hickory, TN (https://www.oldhickorychurchofchrist.com/our-beliefs/), accessed February 18, 2020; “Do You Accept Homosexuals?” Pepper Road Church of Christ in Athens, AL, (https://www.pepperroadchurch.org/about/do-you-accept-homosexuals), accessed February 18, 2020; Phil Williams, “Homosexuality,” Mooresville Church of Christ in Mooresville, NC, (https://www.mooresvillechurchofchrist.org/news-articles/24-ibs-tracts/40-homosexuality.html), accessed February 18, 2020; Jacob Rutledge, “The Biblical View of Homosexuality,” Dripping Springs Church of Christ (https://dschurchofchrist.com/sermons/the-biblical-view-of-homosexuality/), accessed February 18, 2020. 54 Sally Gary, Loves God Likes Girls, (Abilene, TX: Leafwood Publishers, 2013). 55 The church of Christ refuses to see itself as a denomination, believing itself to be the one true church. However, as it functions as a denomination in the broader landscape of American Christianity, I will refer to it as a denomination. For more information about this belief, see Robert Dodson, “Is the church of Christ a Denomination?” Northwest Church of Christ in Fort Worth, TX, (https://www.northwestcofc.org/roberts- blog/is-the-church-of-christ-a-denomination), accessed February 18, 2020. 56 The Stone Campbell Movement: A Global History states, “Another area of fruitful study has been the debate among scholars from Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and Churches of Christ over whether their streams legitimately qualify as ‘Evangelicals’ in the American Protestant context, even amid the larger dispute over the usefulness of term,” D. Newell Williams, Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers, general eds., (St. Louis, MO: Chalice P, 2013), 6.

an Episcopalian on the way there. While these memoirs certainly offer insight into the practices and doctrines of the church of Christ, they do so from within the viewpoint of

Christianity rather than from outside. My perspective allows me to consider the church from a much different, if not unbiased, vantage point, given that I no longer adhere to any religious interpretation of the Bible. While my memoir does not always address the tenets of the church of Christ in every scene, the church’s influence affects every scene, whether visible to the reader or not. Nearly every member of my close family either is or was a member of the church of Christ, or was raised in it. Both my grandmothers, my parents, my mother’s sisters and one of her brothers, and my uncle are all members. My grandfathers before they passed were members. My father’s sister was a member until she quit (and was withdrawn from). My sisters aren’t technically members, though my middle sister, Amber, still goes to church with my parents. When my grandmother celebrated that I had learned to shut my mouth, as she put it, she felt that her child-rearing had raised someone ‘right,’ and that sense of right was heavily informed by the doctrines of the church of Christ. Every conversation I have with a family member includes the imperative that I could come back, or reconvert.

Other religious or conversion memoirs from other denominations and faiths align more closely with my project, in that they often offer the outsider’s view of the writer’s previous faith. For instance Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son details the journey Gosse took as a child through the strict version of Christianity that his father believed in.57

Gosse’s memoir has long been seen as one of the seminal early memoirs that anticipated the memoir in its modern form.58 Its scope is narrower than my memoir both in its

57 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907). 58 Alex Zwerdling, The Rise of the Memoir, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 34.

limitation of the account to Gosse’s childhood, and its intense focus on religion. Jeanette

Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the memoir counterpoint to her autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, both of which strongly resonated with me as I read them, as they both recount a childhood trying to live up to the expectations of parents and church.59 Like Gosse, she shares neither place nor denomination nor timeframe with me, but her experience nevertheless resonates because religion infiltrated every part of our lives. That she is also queer only adds to the resonance.

More recent memoirs that deal closely with religion include Garrard Conley’s Boy

Erased (2016),60 Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of My

Hasidic Roots (2012),61 and Amber Scorah’s Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and

Finding a Life (2019),62 which address related concerns that are more timely than Gosse’s or Winterson’s works. All of these memoirs discuss the ways in which religion, spirituality, and faith can change the way we see ourselves, and the way leaving a toxic faith can liberate us. I have been careful not to use the term “lose” or “loss” when referring to leaving a faith tradition or changing one’s view of the world, because for many, walking away is not primarily a loss, but a gain, as it was for me. While grief has certainly been (and continues to be) a part of that journey, it is not predominant in my relationship to my beliefs about the universe. What is central is a sense of hope and

59 Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove P, 2011) and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove P, 1985). 60 Garrard Conley, Boy Erased (New York: Riverhead, 2016). 61 Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 62 Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, (New York: Viking, 2019).

curiosity that was often stifled in my childhood. In any case, my memoir fits alongside these memoirs in many ways, though religion is only one part of my story.

Two novels that have been influential not only in the choice to write my memoir but also in the concerns I address are Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only

Fruit and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.63 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit portrays the religious consciousness of Winterson’s childhood. In the novel, the main character initially embraces her mother’s religion much in the same way I did as a child, and like me, the main character slowly begins to question her experiences with the church. While her experience is often more dramatic than my own (it includes a several- day exorcism in which she is given nothing to eat), the narrative nonetheless delineates the way religion can capture a child’s imagination. Though my religious experience is often more subtle in this memoir, Winterson’s novel depicts a realistic (although she uses magical realism from time to time in the novel) version of the kinds of thought processes that I went through as a child. For a book set on a different continent many decades earlier than my own experience, it has been one of the books I have most identified with in terms of its portrayal of a religious childhood.

Darker in its portrayal of religious childhood, Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the

Mountain captures the sense of scrutiny and self-doubt that often accompanies the conservative religious childhood. Like Winterson’s novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain is pseudobiographical. It tells the story of John, the son of a preacher who subtly entertains the possibility of his own queerness. He struggles with the strictures of the religion, while being fully afraid of the hell that his father describes from the pulpit. This book hit

63 Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain, (London: Everyman’s Library, 2016).

perhaps a little too close to home, as when John in the end decides to get saved (this is a complicated scene, which can hardly be seen as a simple affirmation of the abusive doctrine he’s been taught), I was strongly re-traumatized. Just as Sue Bridehead’s experience in Jude the Obscure scared me, John’s experience in Go Tell It On the

Mountain absolutely terrified me, as I read it from the vantage point of having already left religion altogether. The novel also does a wonderful job of interweaving family history and depicting the the way family history and religious experience relate and sometimes contradict one another. Other than Conley’s Boy Erased, these books represent the most visceral and authentic pictures of the kind of pervasive religiosity that

I grew up with.

What Just Trash Does

“Four O’Clocks”64 is perhaps a fitting essay to begin this memoir, as it tracks the idea of growth in hard circumstances and the way that growth inflects the relationships between women in my family. In this chapter, my grandmother and my mother struggle over their relationship with me, as well as with the environment of our rural Alabama homestead. In doing so, they reveal competing values of safety, loyalty, and beauty, in the midst of a thoroughly working-class context. As my grandmother tries to claim my loyalty and assert her own supremacy over her land (on which my mother resides), she mows down my mother’s four o’clocks, and forces my mother to take up other methods to solidify her presence on this land. The second part of “Four O’Clocks” takes up the question of how these relationships have developed in light of my queerness, and the

64 The title refers to the flower commonly known as four o’clock (Mirabilis jalapa).

ways in which violence and silence repeatedly threaten to obliterate my identity in a culture that is still largely hostile to queer people. People often say, “But surely it’s better now.” And my response is still, “Yes. But not nearly enough.”

Ultimately, though, “Four O’Clocks” is about the way we build tools to deal with an oppressive climate, and the ways in which those tools can be turned against us, in so many ways. Both parts demonstrate the way the women in my family have attempted, time and again to grow into themselves in places and times that did not want them to be who they were. I include my mother and grandmother in this, not just myself, for though they do not identify as queer, their strength as women has been something society has tried to tear down repeatedly. In “Four O’Clocks,” I say, “I couldn’t have known then, when my mother picked up trowel and cultivator, watering can and seeds, that I would imitate her, lay out the tools, set up the design, only to watch my plans wreak havoc on the small peace they’d given me.” And this line is the one that defines the essay, as it encapsulates the way escaping oppression is always an imperfect task, not least because society doesn’t hand over the tools willingly, nor does it show us how to use them to escape oppression. What I mean by this is the strategies for fighting or escaping oppression nearly always leave scars and make living outside of that oppression hard in unpredictable ways (if one can ever truly escape). Part of the reason for placing this essay first in the memoir is that it prepares the reader for traumas described in later chapters.

Though “Four O’Clocks” definitely contains trauma and oppression, comparatively it is the least focused on the trauma itself, but instead is concerned with the means of fighting or escaping it, and defining oneself in a context of oppression.

“Being a Child” is the essay in this memoir that interrogates most closely my relationship to toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. The first part examines my complicated relationship with my uncle, the problematic role model of my childhood.

Here, I examine the shame that permeates and, at times, originates in this relationship. In the second section, I examine an episode that is paradigmatic of the way the shame of my childhood continues to inflect my way of seeing the world. In this section, I accidentally find myself on a date with a convicted pedophile, where I pose the question of how the shame surrounding sexuality has caused, or at least widened, the gulf between me and my family.

The essay “Being a Child” interrogates how time and trauma function, especially in relation to education in the broadest sense. It traces how the ideas instilled in our minds during childhood become stubborn occupants of our adult minds and appear unexpectedly and regrettably at the worst moments, and sometimes threaten to ruin some of the best moments as well. I explore the power of adults over children and their ability to leave lasting marks on the mind, as well as the way the ideas impressed on us as children can split our mind into two, and make it difficult to see ourselves or others.

“A House Full of Roaches” is perhaps the most experimental of the essays in the memoir, as it tracks my relationship to a nonhuman entity that infiltrated my childhood— the massive roach infestation that persisted for my entire youth, despite many attempts to wipe them out. The essay goes on to question the terms of such relationships driven by disgust, fear, and a lack of—and even a resistance to—empathy. I implicate myself (and others) in my search for answers about connections across space, time, and

consciousness. I ask the question of how to connect across vast differences of knowledge, compassion, and context.

“A House Full of Roaches” was heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida’s book

The Beast and the Sovereign, which concerns structures of power as filtered through the lens of animal studies and literary and mythological depictions of animals.65 Derrida’s exploration of power asks many of the questions I return to in my essay, including to what extent there is a divide between the animal and the human, how much our culture is informed by notions of human superiority to animals, and the ways in which power is defined in insidious and often invisible ways. Take for instance, a passage in the second volume: “What the dove’s footsteps and the wolf’s footsteps have in common is that one scarcely hears them. But the one announces war, the war chief, the sovereign who orders war, the other silently orders peace.”66 Though my concerns take us from the extremes of peace and war and into the daily experience of a roach, in many ways, my goals are similar, in that the relationship between animals in my chapter becomes a metaphor for the power elsewhere in my work. I can hardly read Derrida’s words about the silent footsteps of wolves and doves and not think of the power relationships that define so much of my memoir, as one of my goals is to make visible the way invisible power structures inform and structure our lives, both between each other and between humans and the other life that occupies this planet. While this essay, perhaps, stands out in terms of tone and structure when compared to the other essays, it starts from the same

65 Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, 2 Vols. (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2009-2011). 66 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1:4.

considerations of relationship—how did a relationship in my childhood continue to influence me throughout my life?

In “Through a Glass Darkly,”67 I track the networks of trauma within my family, particularly the traumas the women in my family have experienced, most often at the hands of men. The essay explores the ways in which these traumas often make empathizing more difficult regardless of whether the traumas are similar or even shared.

Complex trauma, or the type of trauma that occurs over longer lengths of time and is more diffuse than a single trauma, is perhaps even more difficult to empathize with. In many ways, this essay takes up the theme of E. M. Forster’s Howards End,68 a novel that recounts the attempts of the Wilcoxes to connect across class and experience to the Basts, a task not unlike my own in “Through a Glass Darkly.” In my essay, I explore my relationship with my sister and my mother and how those relationships have been affected by our shared and overlapping traumas, particularly the traumas endured as a result of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. Interrogating the metaphor of sight as a means of understanding, I interweave my family’s history of blindness with attempts to understand each other across difference and trauma.

My final section, “Autopsy of a Service” addresses how I navigated a typical church service toward the end of my membership in the church of Christ. However, it begs the question of what members of Allison Creek church of Christ will think if they read my memoir. Most likely they will not object to any of my portrayals of them---they do not hide the way they approach the Bible, nor the conclusions they reach as a result of

67 The title of the essay refers to 1 Corinthians 13:12, which says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known.” 68 E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Alistair M. Duckworth (Boston: Bedford, 1997).

that approach. What I’m more afraid of is the reaction they will likely have to a book that openly embraces behaviors and ideologies that they see as sinful. In the letter to the

Romans, Paul states,

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.69

This is one of the passages that is labeled a “clobber passage” in Boy Erased for its potential reading as a verse condemning homosexuality.70 I’ve included this passage at length because I wanted to address the broad impact on my life of my decision to write this memoir. That I am “worthy of death” because I have not only “given in” to my

“lusts” but I have “pleasure in them that do them,” because not only do I not deny my own sexuality, but I rejoice wholeheartedly when anyone can accept their own sexuality without shame. My whole project is a slap in the face to the literal reading of this scripture because I deny “the natural use of the woman” in everything I do, regardless of my sexual orientation, because I don’t believe there is a “natural” way to “use” a woman.

They will see me as one given “over to a reprobate mind.” They might even see me as

69 Romans 1:24-32 70 Garrard Conley, Boy Erased, 20.

one of the “inventors of evil things.” This is incredibly difficult to write, as it forces me to remember the mindset I have left behind, and threatens to engulf my mind in a dangerous battle with the thoughts from my childhood.

My fears are twofold: one, that I will be sucked back into a mindset I find intolerable; and, two, that the church may officially decide to withdraw from me, something I’m not sure they ever did. Withdrawing is a formal use of church discipline that demands social ostracization until the backsliding member comes back into the fold.

I am not afraid of losing connections I already lost to my decision to leave in the first place—those are sacrifices long made. I am afraid that my family will decide to follow suit with the church should it decide to formally withdraw from me. As for my first fear, I feel that Thomas Hardy’s depiction of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure best encapsulates what I fear. Because of unspeakable trauma, Sue Bridehead, a beautiful, kind, and thoughtful person, returns to a faith that she never really believed in (that’s where she and I differ—I did believe in mine), and to a husband she detests in honor of that faith.71 I like to think that I would never return to my ex-husband, but I also realize that were I to be pulled back into this faith, I wouldn’t know what I was capable of. I think back to the mindset of my childhood when I feared that I would be led away from the church, but never really believing I could be. Nevertheless, I left the church.

While my fears center around my church’s reaction to my open embrace of my sexuality, their potential reaction to my sexuality is not why I left the church. I left the church of Christ out of neither anger nor fear. It wasn’t in rebellion against their views on sexuality, or out of some sort of hard-won self-affirmation. Rather, it was a slow, heart-

71 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), 458.

wrenching decision reached after years of consideration and “work[ing] out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”72 I include an account of this journey as my epilogue, following my description of a typical service I attended in the months leading up to this decision. My ex-husband identified as a United Methodist, but had grown up in the

Church of the Nazarene, in which his father was a pastor, and, initially he was supportive of me in my deliberation over whether or not to leave the church. After months of my indecision and wavering, he became frustrated and angry, even though my decision was life-changing and potentially irrevocable. This final chapter gives the reader some sense of the environment in which I worshipped and the difficulty of leaving such an institution, one that pervaded every aspect of my life, from how fast I drove to what I wore.

One might wonder why sexuality does not come up in my description of why I left the church of Christ in the epilogue. Simply, it wasn’t a factor. I had come to terms with the fact that I was bisexual, and mostly felt comfortable with it because I had no intention of acting on it. Of course, now I know how harmful that line of thinking was, and how such thinking has, often unwittingly, reinforced narratives that support the harmful practice of conversion therapy. Or, at least, that’s the way they’ve been used by ex-gay ministries. When I was in the church of Christ, I had no knowledge whatsoever of conversion therapy—no one I knew had ever been sent to conversion therapy, and no church of Christ congregation that I knew of had a particular ministry devoted to the practice. In any case, the reasons I left the church were about much larger issues that had nothing to do with my bisexuality and everything to do with a sense of intellectual

72Philippians 2:12

integrity and the love I had for my friends at Bagby College. But it was leaving that eventually allowed me to fully embrace my sexuality and my gender.

Ultimately, the epilogue is an important document that reveals just how difficult the struggle of changing one’s worldview can be, especially if where one starts is an extreme position with very high stakes, such as the potential loss of family and community or eternal punishment in the afterlife. Many casually deride people who ever believed the way I did, and they think of that life as unfathomable.

Overall, my memoir functions as a coming-of-age tale, as I hope the arrangement of these chapters reflects. I’ve organized the chapters to follow the trajectory from relative naïveté to experience (though not necessarily wisdom), and from a relative rejection to an acceptance of the self I was and have become. Though my narrative does feature a sense of liberation, the focus is largely on the introspection necessary to understand both the trauma I’ve experienced and the way forward in connecting with family, friends, and society at large.

Figure 2 Four O’Clock Flowers73 Four O’Clocks

The four o’clock, a flower that blooms with the dying light of late afternoon, is a hardy species: easy to grow, hard to kill. Perhaps this is why one spring my mother planted her four o’clocks around the disintegrating porch of our double-wide, a porch so

73 Illustration by Emily Fritze, Commissioned for “Four O’Clocks,” 2020.

rickety my mother had once fallen through it. My family belonged to a house that seemed to accumulate trash without any sign of stopping, the corners filling with dirty t-shirts, old Wal-Mart receipts, discarded change and candy wrappers, food molding on dirty dishes scattered in the unlikeliest of places (beside the fireplace, on top of a video game console, resting against a broken vacuum cleaner). The four o’clock blossoms, bright yellow and fuchsia, seemed designed to distract us from the dangers of our home and transport us into some kind of Southern pastoral. They were part of a larger losing battle to make our home look presentable, at least on the outside, amidst crumpled Coke cans and other random debris that made it from inside to outside our home.

My mother never was much of a gardener, having killed various house plants throughout our childhood. I remember the withering vine of philodendron hanging limply over the toilet lid and the aloe that had browned slowly in our kitchen window, the sickly twin of the one in my grandmother’s kitchen. Somehow, the four o’clocks survived my mother’s care and thrived beside our front porch. Maybe it was the extra sunlight or the welcoming Alabama clay that had helped her out. But the flowers lived.

Though I was already a teenager when my mother planted the four o’clocks, I would often stop short on the steps of the trailer to look at them, sometimes returning to feel the soft blossoms, sometimes plucking one to put behind my ear. I would gather the seeds and separate them by color, keeping them in Ziploc bags in case these perennials didn’t re-emerge the next year.

My mother had bought the seeds and a large, green plastic watering can from the local Dollar General. She had even bought a small gardening set, which included a green metal trowel and matching hand cultivator. I’m not sure she even used them, but they

were essential to the idea of the project she’d set forth and so they, along with the watering can, decorated the edge of our porch nearest the four o’clocks. When she first bought them, I thought these supplies would, like her Avon kit and her knitting needles and her oil paints, become part of the general chaos of the house rather than tools for creating some kind of order in the mess.

I hadn’t seen it at the time, but I wasn’t that unlike my mother. When I went to college, I’d wanted to believe that with the right tools I could get out of Alabama, out of a life I neither understood or wanted. I collected theories the way an artist collected brushes. I would grapple with the newfound tools, letting the splinters into my hand as a way of connecting to the brushstrokes. And I would marvel at the way the world looked different, how “Frankenstein” or “The Incredibles” looked so different from a Freudian or feminist perspective. Each set of tools made me intensely aware of the gaps, of what I couldn’t see. With these theories, reading had taken a turn for me, thrilling me as I saw the connections, the power struggles, the places of resistance. I wanted so much to be able to see it all and thought it was possible to leave no theory unturned, no book unread.

I stepped out of my seemingly ordinary life—the way I saw it, in which no amount of dysfunction would make it seem other than normal, what I deserved—and into a world that could continually be deconstructed, overturned.

It wasn’t long before I turned these tools to my own life, uncovering each piece of the puzzle that made up my social anxiety, my failed relationships with the boys I thought could save me or, at least, know me. I couldn’t have known then, when my mother picked up trowel and cultivator, watering can and seeds, that I would imitate her, lay out the

tools, set up the design, only to watch my plans wreak havoc on the small peace they’d given me.

My grandmother had started the assault on my mother’s four o’clocks at the weekly Sunday dinner at her house when the house was filled with my aunts and cousins, eager for my grandfather’s homemade cornbread and the fresh garden vegetables that always seemed to appear at Sunday dinners. My grandmother sat in her chair, the Sunday paper spread across her knees.

“You need to clean out those flowers on your front doorstep. They’re snaky!” she said, as my mother walked in the room with her plate. Unlike my mother and me, my grandmother imagined the four o’clocks’ sprawling leaves and blossoms as the perfect hiding place for rattlesnakes and copperheads. Looking back now, I can see that a younger version of my grandmother, having spent years picking cotton, clothed in burlap and shoeless, and guarded only by collies, probably knew something of snakes hidden in the grass.

And snakes really were a threat in northern Alabama. We’d had a copperhead on the front porch and a rattlesnake in the backyard, each dispatched by the men in our family with a garden hoe or a twelve-gauge shotgun. From time to time, whenever my family caught a glimpse of a snake in the field or dead on the road, they would again remind us to watch out for snakes. “The rattlesnakes are crawling,” my grandmother would say.

My mother responded to my grandmother’s assault by creasing the sides of her mouth and saying nothing. She set down her plate, crossed her arms, and then lightly

tapped her finger against her elbow. She hummed a few notes to herself, but the tune was unrecognizable to me.

“When you get out there and have to mow around them, you’ll understand,” my grandmother said when it was obvious my mother wasn’t going to respond to her first comment.

“I like them,” my mother said. Her voice was barely audible in the din of Sunday dinner. She smoothed her denim skirt and smoothed down her graying hair. She and I practiced similar rituals in these situations. Keeping our voices calm, low. Looking my grandmother in the eyes to let her know we weren’t scared, but with the head tilted slightly forward to let her know we knew she was queen—at least while we were in her house. Most important, though, was to never let her see us cry, defeated. The words “cry me a river” and her hand lifting my face to force me to look at her, still make me shiver.

Later she would tell me that the reason she liked me was because I’d learn to keep my mouth shut. And she was right; I had.

“Shit,” my grandmother said, stretching the word into two syllables. Her voice carried through the kitchen and the poolroom, a den-like room where the kids ate and named for the pool table that had once occupied the space. It was where we generally hid out on Sunday afternoons, unless we were called.

My mother retreated into the kitchen to place her empty plate by the sink.

My sisters just sat there picking over cornbread and pinto beans, knowing better than to get involved in the dispute. With my grandmother’s gilded Ten Commandments plaque and faded still-life print hanging overhead, my dad would just shovel his ketchup-

slathered macaroni and cheese into his mouth and keep quiet. He would not dispute his mother.

“Just let it roll off your back,” he’d tell my mother and me when we later complained at home. It was his response to everything my grandmother said or did, no matter how offensive or intrusive. He would sometimes add, “And then, go do what you want. You’re going to do what you want anyway.”

This kind of silence my father suggested was the same kind that would later rest between me and my divorce, a similar creasing of the lips, a similar downward cast of the eyes as words of opposition formed around me, as my husband’s eyes shone with mirth at the silliest line possible, Why aren’t you in the kitchen? A line spoken by his best friend, a line that would have been impossible to laugh at had I not still believed in my husband.

A line I would let roll down my back many times before I finally spoke out. In the midst of this silence when I set out to save the remnants of our marriage, I’d set out the tools: a cheesy book engineered by well-meaning Evangelicals to subdue a wife and entice a husband, a well-calculated list of all our problems, and a phone number for a marriage therapist. I had thought if the tools were there, I could follow through. I believed that, like my mother, I could distract from the devastation so obvious to everyone else.

The four o’clocks were not the only dispute my mother and grandmother had.

They would sometimes argue over me, sometimes jokingly, sometimes with ire.

“You threw her in. You know you did,” my grandmother would sometimes say, referring to rose bushes that grew just off her mother’s porch that had belonged to her

parents’ house, which she would eventually decide to tear down, leaving the roses growing in a row by themselves away from any house.

“I did not,” my mother would say earnestly, like we believed she’d actually thrown me in the rosebushes. Her mouth would turn down slightly at the edges as though she was trying to keep from smiling.

“I saw you do it. She was standing on the porch one minute, and the next you’d thrown her in.” My grandmother would then bring her arm down heavily on her overstuffed recliner for effect. Framed as she was against the big picture window in her living room, we could believe she really had seen everything, would see everything.

“I was trying to pull her out,” my mother said. The embarrassment of having to defend herself against what seemed a ridiculous accusation crept into her voice.

“No, you threw her in.” My grandmother would set her jaw, and I could see the slight twinkle of what at the time had seemed humor. I now recognize it as triumph—the same look following me as my marriage disintegrated and my grandmother kept insisting even after it was all over that she’d tried to stop it, that I’d just been too stubborn to see.

I would sometimes join in this little banter about the rose bushes, always joining my grandmother’s side.

“Yeah, you threw me in the rose bushes, Mom. You just didn’t care about me.” I would sometimes give my mother a playful push on the shoulder at this point.

“I did, too,” my mother would say, slightly wounded. She would hug her arms around herself and lift her head a little as though our accusations couldn’t touch her.

I can’t remember falling into the rose bushes. My knowledge of the story comes only from the voices of my grandmother and my mother. I can see it though, imagine my

golden, board-straight hair collapsing around my face as I land among the blossoms and the thorns, shrieking the way only a toddler can, my hands flailing as my mother lunges for me. And then my grandmother behind her, saying caustically something like “if you can’t do it any better than that, let me do it,” a phrase she’d likely turn into a joke at

Sunday dinner. It seems the kind of thing my grandmother would do.

In the arguments that followed, my grandmother would end the argument by saying, “Well with your kind of care, I think I might be better off without it.”

My grandmother would then pull me into her lap, even when I got older, and I would smile, feeling like I was a prize my grandmother had won. I thought about how I was the favorite, how she wanted me more than my sisters or cousins, often taking me to town and showering me with new coats and shoes, occasionally even jewelry.

While I basked in this affection, my mother would retreat to the kitchen. If I had cared to turn to her, I might have seen the hurt that probably stole across her face when my grandmother “won” the rosebush argument, when my choice was so obvious.

Weeks passed, and my mother watered her four o’clocks daily. It was a hot summer with little rain. Drought often cooked through even the most humid Alabama summers. My mother worked the day shift at a local factory, and so she sometimes got home when my grandmother, who worked the night shift, was mowing. One day, still wearing her white smock and name tag from work, my mother stepped out of the car to see my grandmother mowing over those four o’clocks. It was summer, so I was home.

And I saw the flowers go down.

And I saw my mother’s face, the two tears crawling down her face. She went into the house and said nothing, seeming to do as my father had said and “letting it roll off her back.” As she passed me on the porch, I whispered, “I’m sorry.” I don’t know if she heard me. Later I would hug her, and she would say, “I just wanted something of my own.”

The next Sunday, my mother still went to Sunday dinner, the incident not breaking the habit of eighteen years. I suspect she didn’t want my grandmother to think she’d gotten to her. It was something I understood, not wanting my grandmother to think she’d won, not giving into the tears when her words were meant to cut you down to size.

“You like what I did to the front of your house?” my grandmother said. You could hear the swing in tone as she reveled in the last part of the question.

My mother, standing on the threshold that separated the kitchen from the living room, said nothing.

“I had to clean it out. It was getting too snaky.” My grandmother’s words weren’t defensive. They were more the words of a young mother explaining to a three-year-old child the necessity of looking both ways before crossing the street.

My mother said nothing and turned back to the kitchen to fix her plate.

“You’d have copperheads hiding in there in no time if you left it like that.” No one was sure whom my grandmother was really talking to. She didn’t sound even a little bit sorry. Just like she knew she was right.

“You want snakes on your front porch? Grow your damn flowers then.” We all knew she didn’t mean it. I retreated to the poolroom, carrying my plate with me.

“Don’t listen to her,” I told my mother, repeating my dad’s sentiment.

When my mother decided to leave, my grandmother said, “I know you’re angry at me for killing your flowers.”

“I’m not angry,” my mother said.

“Shit,” she said, stretching the word into two syllables. With that, my mother left.

Unfortunately for my grandmother, four o’clocks could grow from either tubers or seeds, and getting rid of them would not be as simple as mowing them down. They dropped seeds in dozens, and she had neglected to pull the flowers up by the roots.

I laughed when new sprouts peeked out of the ground, when the shortened stalks still managed to bud. When my mother saw them, the smile spread across her face. I knew she was glad that the four o’clocks themselves were standing up for her, when she didn’t feel she could. She had to pick her battles with my grandmother, and the battle over the four o’clocks wasn’t one that she needed to win.

After the initial reappearance of the four o’clocks, my grandmother continued to mow them down every time she mowed our yard. Each time, the four o’clocks refused to disappear completely, and weeks later they would again be thriving.

I wish it could end there with my grandmother in an endless battle with the four o’clocks, but eventually my grandmother realized sheer willpower and persistence were not going to work for her this time as they had with other gargantuan tasks, as in the case of a massive tree stump she’d managed to move when several much younger men hadn’t be able to, or when she’d managed to put out a fire in the field with only her John Deere mower and the meager help of my sisters and my cousins beating the edge of the fire with dampened blue jeans. And even though it was really evolutionary adaptations that were

triumphing over my grandmother’s desires, my grandmother saw the four o’clocks’ refusal to die as a personal affront from my mother. And I’m sure she probably caught the mischief lurking in my mother’s smiles at Sunday dinners when neither my mother nor my grandmother would mention the four o’clocks.

One morning when my grandmother didn’t have to work, she came down to my mother’s house wearing her usual work gear, a t-shirt and jeans and a floppy hat to keep off the sun. She had taken my sister with her, and they got on their knees and started pulling up the four o’clocks. By the time my mother woke up, the flowers had been thrown into my grandmother’s utility cart that attached to the back of her John Deere mower. The flowers would be taken to the brush pile and burned with the rest of the debris from my grandmother’s efforts to keep her land cleaned up.

I remember the wind sweeping my mother’s graying hair into her face as her cheeks reddened. Again she said nothing and retreated into the house.

As I followed my mother into the house, I heard my grandmother turn to my sister and say, “If she had any sense, she’d know better than to put snaky flowers in front of the house.”

Our houses had been separated by a mere hundred or so yards and a tiny country road. At some point in my teenage years, I moved across this space to my grandmother’s house, occupying a room my aunt had in her childhood. And it would have seemed to anyone on the outside that my grandmother had won my teenage years, but the closing of that proximity had led me to see what I hadn’t been able to from across the road, the cruelty that came with approval.

The flowers never came back, not really. A couple of shoots would appear from time to time, but after my grandmother’s last assault, weeds overtook the area. I never used the seeds I’d collected.

One image still stands out to me—that of my mother laboring over some summer squash she’d planted in the backyard. The plants were as hardy as four o’clocks, and they thrived in our yard. She was likely wearing her bright pink T-shirt and black, water- resistant capris or some other such ensemble for dealing with Alabama’s humid heat. I could see her salt-and-pepper hair shining in the sun, the green watering can hovering benevolently over her newest project. It was clear that this was a project that she’d finish, if only for the aroma of fried squash in an iron skillet.

I wonder sometimes if she planted them in the backyard so my grandmother couldn’t see them from her big picture window, or maybe because they were vegetables and since my grandmother grew vegetables too, she knew she could win.

II.

When I was thirteen, the bloom of a handprint appeared on my face twice in the space of a few months, once from my mother and once from my grandmother. I don’t remember what I said to elicit such flowery responses from the women in my life, but I do know that it effectively cut off all real communication lines between us for many years, starving our relationships to the point of extinction. It has only been through careful cultivation that the relationships have not died altogether.

In the months that followed these slaps, I became quiet—I had always been a quiet child, often rising before dawn to secure some quiet for myself, and even as a

toddler, waking only to watch television or play by myself before my parents awakened, only rarely disturbing their morning sleep. But the quiet of my thirteenth year was a prohibitive quiet—I no longer wanted my parents and grandparents to have access to who

I was.

“I can read you like the back of my hand,” my grandmother often said throughout my teen years, while I often fought back tears of rage, knowing how little she knew me, that the signs she read rarely signified what she thought—she could tell I was upset, but never why. Sometimes her words made me doubt myself, and left me half believing that she had some secret key to who I was that could only be viewed from the outside—my uncle would be far more effective in this move, but the women in my family made it impossible for me to talk to them and tell them my own secrets—secrets of sexual harassment, fears of hell, and what I wanted out of life—and while I was never able to be fully open with my uncle, he at least invited a confidence that their slaps had prohibited.

I know now that all physical punishment (whether considered abuse or not) leaves children with long term, if not lifelong, psychological damage. If I had a child, and part of me is too afraid of repeating the patterns of abuse I experienced even to attempt parenting, I know I would not want to use any form of physical punishment, and perhaps avoid the notion of punishment altogether, as many studies have shown that it is not an effective parenting strategy, that as I did with the slaps, children rarely remember the reason for the punishment, only the punishment itself.

One of the hardest moments of my life was telling my mother that I had left the church of Christ for the Episcopal church. In the brief eternity that sat across the table from her waiting for a response, a previously unimaginable punishment came to mind—

that my mother might never talk to me again. I had imagined her being sad or mad, but not silent. And her silence terrified me.

When I think back to the care my mother had for those four o’clocks, I wonder that I never took up the literal trowel behind her. I was always a few steps away from the heart of the gardening that took place in my family—I never planted. Sometimes I weeded here and there—sometimes I was called upon to pick okra or beans, to silk corn or snap peas, but I was never invested in taking the garden from start to finish, from seed to bloom, from root to harvest. Instead, I looked on as others did the main work, rarely getting pulled into the beauty of cultivation that they must have seen, the feeling of accomplishment that came from ensuring the growth of so many lives.

As an adult, my distance from cultivation has only grown. I have never planted flowers, or bought living plants, with the exception of one tiny succulent, afraid that I might kill them. Instead I’ve bought the already dead cut flowers, and tried to help them last as long as possible before they inevitably withered, assured by their harvested state that I had not dirtied my hands in their deaths.

And perhaps, that is how most of my relationships have been, cutting myself away from any ties that could prevent their deaths. With very rare exceptions, I’ve held back the heart of who I am from many of my closest friends over the years. And when necessary, I’ve uprooted myself from entire communities to protect my sense of self, however elusive that sense might be, as I did when I left the church of Christ, holding onto only a handful of relationships with my closest family—many relationships with family members did not survive the culling.

Those closest familial ties have been fraught with difficulties—a grandmother who hates queer people though she doesn’t know I’m queer, a mother who can’t seem to reconcile her faith with who I’ve become, and a sister with whom I’ve shared so much trauma that, at times, makes it difficult to see each other in the fullness of who we are.

I’ve not come out to my grandmother, nor do I intend to—our relationship is not so much based on lies, but absence. I love her despite this aspect of her, and she loves me, not knowing how much I hide, and perhaps relishing this fact, as she seems to prefer my silence to disagreement with her. Instead I attempt to maintain the relationship based on the things I can share.

With my mother, it is a tense battle of maintaining my identity without destroying hers. Or at least it feels like that. She keeps suggesting that the reasons for my behavior— leaving the church, getting divorced, being queer, drinking—all stem from my connections to other people, entities. She has in turn blamed my undergraduate institution, my ex-husband, my drinking for anything from leaving the church to getting into a relationship with a pansexual, nonbinary transfeminine person. She believes, at times, that I have been seduced, or that my thinking has been clouded by a number of influences, and never attributes my decisions to who I am. This, I think, is the primary threat to our relationship—not that she overtly disagrees with my decisions for my life, but that she can’t seem to assign me agency over any of them. Because, this too, is a way of silencing me. For her, though, believing that I have chosen any of these things is tantamount to her believing that I have chosen hell, which is unfathomable to her.

Though my mother has not, since my childhood, resorted to physical violence to silence me, the fact that she has been complicit in trying to quash my voice in a society

like ours is not lost on me. The visceral image of the four o’clocks being mown down reminds me that beauty and love are so often deliberately misinterpretted, as with the

Pulse shooting, when 49 of our number (the queer community), were mown down simply for being queer. They were killed, eternally silenced, because they loved people in a way that society keeps mowing down through conversion therapy, obliterations of our images in many forms of media, and denial of basic human rights, over and over again.

When the Pulse shootings happened, I nearly killed myself. The same week I also finished the third season of Orange Is the New Black where Poussey, one of the most beautiful depictions of a queer woman I had ever seen was killed, this time not because she was queer, but because she was black and a prisoner in an overwhelmingly injust system. The fact that the show was at all fictional did nothing to mitigate its impact, because I knew that, ultimately, this was real, that things like this were happening all around me, all the time. That, with her death, one of the most beautiful, hopeful queer voices of color I had ever seen depicted had been silenced violently and irreparably, and for a moment, I believed that if this was what the world was like, I didn’t want to be a part of it.

I survived that round of suicidal ideation—some of the worst I’ve ever had— largely because I couldn’t bear to contribute to lessening the number of decent people in the world and thereby increase the percentage of shitty people in the world, the people who let hate or greed or fear consume them, which leads to their oppression of people for things beyond their control.

I don’t think my family—not my mother nor my grandmother—are ultimately shitty people—they have been cultivated by a society that doesn’t want a place for them

either, and they have painstakingly carved out places for themselves—places I wouldn’t want to occupy. I’m not letting them off the hook, not really, because with each attempt to silence my voice, I am that much louder in my struggle to cultivate my place in a queer movement that is always under existential threat, because people want us silent or dead.

And as difficult as it is to advocate for myself directly with my family, I do not stay silent when they deliberately misunderstand queerness, or when they attempt to erase the people I love. My mother has since she found out about my queer partner attempted to misgender her over and over, and I have not allowed that to go unacknowledged or unreprimanded. I want to save my relationship with my mother, though I am not so foolish as to believe I can do that without her. And because my mother, and my grandmother, for that matter, have, in their lives, done more good for more people than many of the progressives and liberals I have met since my childhood. My mother has rescued women from abusive relationships, stood up vocally for minorities in her workplace, helped people in dire poverty. She is not perfect because her cultivation has been imperfect.

I have perhaps felt that I was like the bonsai tree, that only careful pruning would help to thrive, as though too many hands upon my heart would kill it. When I was a child, it seemed that everyone wanted to prune away things—my intense investment in books, my voice, my questions and individual responses to faith, my pride, really everything that seemed important to me, and the only answer seemed to be isolation within my books, and only the most careful divulgence of secrets to would-be friends and lovers. But now,

I can see that I’m choking on my own self-protection, that perhaps I am not like a bonsai tree at all, but perhaps like the kudzu that threatened to suffocate plants and trees

throughout northern Alabama, that I’m too expansive to be constrained by even the most restrictive pruning regime. Or, maybe, I’m more like the four o’clocks my mother used to grow—resilient, but not invincible in the face of persistent attacks on who I am and who I want to be.

Figure 3

Being a Child

The angle of light is impossible to remember. In my memory, it seems diffuse, an ungodly rendering of grace. At least grace as I then understood it: selective, only the perfect survived.

And part of me didn’t survive that moment. Time and distance are the only gifts I have from that moment. People want there to be hope in every story—a silver lining. But that moment had no such lining, only my uncle using his weight, his age, his power to hold me down, and tickle me, while my little sister looked on, joined in. I know she could

not be aware at that time what that moment would later mean to me. I know now she felt powerless too—with me and our other sister always winning the sibling games. How could she not be defiant? How could she not take advantage when, at the time, she was nobody’s favorite?

I rarely dream about my uncle. I often dream around him with figments that seem like him or with themes conveyed through my ex-husband, clearly an echo of that father- like relationship, or I dream about my aunt and my cousins in impossible situations because of him, who fail as often in real life to leave the boring nightmare they inhabit, boring because it has become so habitual after these thirty years.

When I think of him now I think first of the bad memories, the ones that justified the need to cut off all contact with him, the need repeated with my ex-husband, in which I find myself, Sisyphus-like, repeating fruitlessly the same action, trying to justify myself to myself, often using others as sounding boards, only to feel more guilty and less justified than before, because in the anger at the past I catch myself worrying that my emotion has overcome my logic, even as I know very well that is not true. Who was my uncle in this? I honestly don’t know. Who is he now? I know even less.

He had the most books of anyone in the family. Sure, my mom had tons of

Harlequin romances, none of which I had any interest in, and my grandma had encyclopedias and dated medical guides assuring us that menstrual cramps were all in our heads. But he was the only one with textbooks and literature. I would pick up one of his anthologies, and flip through the thin pages, and select random pieces to read. This was

how I found Paradise Lost for the first time. My uncle would talk about Satan being struck down from Heaven, and I would listen, hoping to learn something. I’d always wanted more than my high school could give me. I read haphazardly, not knowing what I might need, what I might want. I read a book on cosmology after a field guide on spiders, followed by 1984 and Machiavelli’s The Prince. When I was in his office, with his heavy oak table, my reading was no more organized than in the library at school. I’d pick up textbooks on data management alongside Spanish textbooks and literature anthologies. It wasn’t the books themselves that made me feel so free, it was the access they gave me.

My parents and grandparents read the Bible more than they read anything else. I would often see my mother and my grandmother with their Bibles spread across their laps and their lessons in hand. Throughout my childhood, I mirrored them. I was devout, after all. The Bible was talked about in every household. But I always wanted more.

Sometimes I felt guilty when I spent more time reading fiction than the Bible, when I read more science than the Bible. Not that my family cared one way or the other about science. They weren’t the avid anti-evolution crowd, but they wanted me to believe in creation. They weren’t likely to protest it as a social issue, though. The issue wasn’t with the state, but with the individual, and how they responded to state-given temptations.

One October, my uncle and I watched Silence of the Lambs. It was one of our pastimes, watching movies bordering on horror, sometimes eclipsing horror. Salem’s Lot.

The Fog. Eight-legged Freaks. Inevitably, at some point, I would turn inward, unable to deal with the tension on the screen. Only Silence of the Lambs really kept my attention.

He pointed out the obvious, that I am like Clarice, that I too am “two steps above white trash.” And he quoted Lector to me: “You covet what you see every day.”

My body was always under scrutiny. Whether it was my teeth, my hair, or my feet, my uncle would always point out something about me that made me feel less than.

He’d call me Bucky, or monkey toes, and I’d try to laugh it off, to ignore it, as my awkward adolescent body was simply trying to grow into its adult form. I took it in though. I’d feel shame in the pit of my stomach, and I’d feel anger, but only a little, because I could see that what he said was true—I did have big feet with long toes, and I did have an overbite. I’d try to go along with the joke sometimes, to take some ownership of it, as though it didn’t bother me one bit that he found me ungainly, that he thought it funny enough to point out in front of my aunt, my cousins, and my sisters. I wasn’t the only target—he’d endlessly make fun of my sister’s speech impediment. I would try, as I did at school, to act as though it didn’t matter because my brains were what I valued.

But my intellect too was under scrutiny.

I could never touch a candle without my uncle commenting, “Freud would have a field day with that.” When he first started saying this, I would crinkle my eyebrows, not knowing what he meant, and ashamed of my ignorance. I valued—still value—knowing things, really knowing things. I was afraid to give proof of any gaps in that knowledge, but he knew I didn’t know. And he was enjoying himself, making me feel little with

Freud. Freud would have a field day with that, I think, looking back, at this man, who then explained, about the shape of the candle resembling a phallus, and my eyes widening, and my shame deepening, and his enjoyment at my discomfort. He thought he

was teaching me something. And he did, that even the minutest tactile experience, which for me was anything but sexual, could be interpreted by the world at large in ways that I neither wanted nor intended. It made me even more afraid to speak than I was, and more desperate to know everything.

My uncle once caught me watching kittens copulate—a brother and a sister, Leo and Oreo, an orange tabby and a black and white. I was eleven, and sex was a topic my family both avoided and harped on. Details were what was lacking, and of course, what I wanted. My uncle, knowing full well that my curiosity wasn’t purely intellectual, told me he wouldn’t tell anyone. I blushed a deep scarlet and waited for the moment to be over. I squeezed past him in the doorway and made my way through the living room of his squat ranch-style house, where my cousin was rewinding her VHS tape of the Backstreet Boys to focus in on Nick Carter’s face, and to the kitchen, where my aunt was making sweet tea. There were apples, recently picked, on the table, and crab apples. My aunt saw my face and asked “What is it?” I said, “Nothing.” And she laughed and went back to making the tea. My uncle would not be kept waiting.

Looking back, my thoughts turn maudlin. I get lost in the details of youthful hope.

Thinking that one day I’d get out, that one day I’d stop having to wait for everything that meant anything to me. For others to appreciate that in me. I had shadows of that appreciation in my uncle. He could point out what was like him in me. Even if that was flawed, he was the only one that said that to me, that I was like him. My mother would say I was like my grandma, and my grandma would say I was like my mother. My dad

would say I was like either of them, depending on the circumstance. But no one seemed to think I was like them, other than my uncle. And I saw it too—the flaws and the good intertwined, formed out of the harshness of a world who didn’t understand us. That was how I saw it at the time. I longed for knowledge like he did. Like him, I always kept pushing at ideas, turning them over and over to understand them and their logic. And I too felt the hubris along with him, when I knew things others didn’t. At school, I’d be demure, as though embarrassed to be smart, and part of me was. But by myself, I knew what I felt—happy that I had more knowledge than others, that I could figure things out quicker, that I could please the teachers without even trying.

My uncle was the only one to call me Ren. I’d tried multiple times throughout middle school and beyond to get people to call me Renee, only he ever came close to using it. He’d compare me to Ren from the show Even Stevens, a high-strung overachiever. In her I saw a travesty of myself, and I’d try to draw a line in my mind between me and her. I didn’t want to be a type. He always tried to read me, like a simile in a poem, as though my theme and form could be recognized by merely seeing the surface of my life.

But then, he saw more than the surface, as much as I let anyone see. I thought he understood me. Though I never thought of it this way at the time, he was a stand-in father figure for me. My father, quiet but kind, never really connected with me. We just didn’t understand the world the same way. To him, it was a clear path. To me, it was nothing but tangles. But I am reducing my father to an abstract image, and I don’t know him well enough to sum him up. I certainly didn’t then.

My uncle and I would sit on the futon, analyzing TV shows, talking about literature, the Bible, tax codes, and information management systems, discussing future career options for me—dermatologist, teacher, lawyer, information analyst, accountant, geneticist. Unlike the rest of the family, he saw a future me that wasn’t simply the model

Christian housewife or a laborer at the factory. I don’t think my family actually saw me that way, but they never talked about it. They never even talked about college. The only source of information about my dreams in my family was my uncle. When I talked to him, I could see myself going to college, though it was hard to believe it was real. It always seemed a faraway fantasy. A life I couldn’t really live.

I wanted so bad to get out of Alabama, to see the world. I dreamed of France for its culture, of Switzerland for its chocolate, of England for its books. When I told him about these dreams, it made them feel just a little bit real. I believed that if I followed the right steps I’d get what I wanted, which was to escape by any means necessary.

But he was also the one who questioned my dreams the most, and ridiculed my meagre attempts at knowledge. When I told him I was trying to develop my own writing style, by which I meant my handwriting, he said, “You don’t even know what writing style is.”

The one thing that drove me forward even as it shamed me, was when he said to me that I’d be pregnant by eleventh grade. He’d walked around saying, “What a shame, what a shame.” And when I’d asked him what he meant, he’d laid out a trajectory for me that made me tremble.

The day it happened was like any other day. My uncle, my sisters, and I had a game of “rib-tickling.” We would try to catch each other off guard and tickle the most sensitive spot under the ribs. It was a never-ending cycle of pre-Oresteia Greek-style vengeance, with one act of revenge necessitating another. My sister was looking to get me back. She was just five at the time and I was twelve or so. I walked into a bedroom—

I’m not sure whose—all were fair game in that house—sat down, and I think I had a book in my hands. Suddenly, my uncle and my sister were there, on top of me. They tickled me hard and long. I cried for them to let me up. My sister thought this was just normal revenge—sister’s revenge, but for me it crossed the line from game to terror, from safe and harmless to damaging.

As soon as they let me up, my anger flared, and I made my way to the kitchen.

The only thought on my mind was getting a knife. I wanted to stab him. By the time I’d gone down that long hallway and around the corner to the kitchen where my aunt was busy making sweet tea, I was livid. She again saw something in my face to make her ask

“What?” and I told her what I could and that I wanted a knife. She laughed at me. My uncle was a 290-pound, army-trained man, and I was a twelve-year-old girl who weighed not even a hundred pounds, soaking wet.

Every time I recount this event to friends, I feel a wave of shame wash over me, as though I’m making too big a deal out of it. I think they will think that it was just tickling, no more than what people do with their children all the time. And perhaps it was a mistake, he didn’t realize the trauma I felt in that moment, the violation. Even now, I feel ashamed to label it trauma, knowing as I do that, even in my own family, people

have faced much worse. And what is my miniscule trauma against that? Against anyone’s?

But then I think of what it meant to me, a twelve-year-old who already felt so powerless.

Whenever my uncle criticized me or made fun of me, it felt as though my very worth were on the line. I sensed that he knew me in a way the other adults couldn’t, and though he was often wrong about what I thought and felt, I trusted him so much, I doubted my own thoughts and feelings—as though his words had the power to sear through the mess I felt I was and get to the truth of me. This was what I held on to for so long. Looking back, it seems like such a small piece of my childhood, the decision to leave his protection, his understanding, but it changed the course of a lot of my later relationships. Time after time I found myself searching for that clear voice that could untangle the broken pieces of me. My ex-husband had made me feel as though he cut through the crap to the real me—to another existence that was better, purer than other people’s. With what I saw around me in my family and friends’ relationships, it was impossible to realize that I’d entered yet another broken relationship like the one I’d had with my uncle.

The last time I went over to my uncle’s house, I don’t know why he had the gun.

He didn’t shoot it, just sat there with the 12-gauge shot gun languid in his lap. I froze in the doorway, the message from my grandma on my lips—the reason I was even there. He looked at me and smiled.

“Are you afraid?” He said with a laugh.

“No,” I said uncertainly, feeling the increase in my pulse, even though he didn’t move the gun. He just sat there with his hand resting on it, like it was beneath his notice.

I left, shaking, never to return.

II.

The problem with trauma is that walking out a door or cutting someone out of your life does not mean that the trauma doesn’t follow you.

When I was an adult I started using dating apps—Tinder, Okcupid, Bumble, etc. I would often go on dates without really vetting a person and without asking them too many questions about who they were. I refused to have my actions censured by the patriarchy, or the guilt that followed me from the church, and so, often I would walk home alone at 2 or 3am, as if daring the world to punish me for acting out. I was angry that it was less safe as a woman, and particularly a bi woman, to do what I wanted in the world. And often, I put myself in situations that led to danger or even harm. I didn’t care.

I was too lonely and too depressed to care. The repetition of difficult or uncomfortable situations didn’t make me learn my lesson, or turn around and think, oh, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. No, what eventually made me stop was realizing I didn’t want this, not because it was wrong or shameful or dangerous, but because it simply wasn’t fun, to go over and over again into places where I was risking so much just not to be lonely for a few moments. Only to find that those moments were even lonelier than when

I was alone.

It was during this period of serial dating that I accidentally ended up on a date with a convicted pedophile. I should say, at this moment, that he did nothing wrong to me

in this date, nothing that directly harmed me or conflicted with what I wanted. In fact, he did not even touch me at all. Nevertheless, meeting him awakened trauma from the past that I could not forget, and would make looking past his history impossible.

His profile on Tinder had seemed normal—I believe it even had some buzz-words that made me feel safe—sex-positive, consent, poly, bi. I’ve long deleted the profile, so I can’t be sure. These words gave me a sense that this date might be a date that was better than most during this time, one where I didn’t have to worry about someone doing what they wanted without asking, or being raped, or any other potential terror. So, I decided it would be fine to go to his house, skip the preliminaries. He had wanted me to be able to come when his nesting partner was there, but our schedules didn’t really line up, so I came to his house anyway. I was in a poly relationship myself at the time, with a long- term partner who I loved, who had quite a few partners to juggle, as well as a toddler that took up much of her time. So, it wasn’t surprising that I was still lonely, still looking for a way to escape that loneliness. And besides, not going out to a coffee shop or a restaurant avoided the need to budget for a meal or do the dance of who might pay, which I was often eager to avoid.

The house was medium-sized. It was evening in the winter, so it was already dark, and the porch lights allowed only the vaguest sense of what the house must look like in the day. I texted to let him know I was there, and I could hear him get up to answer the door, the sound of four sets of paws trailing in his wake. I’m not sure if I knew there would be dogs, but I got very excited by their presence. I have loved dogs all my life, and while I know some terrible people have owned and continue to own dogs, they still functioned for me in that moment as a sign that this would be okay. That their owner was

safe. I believe the dogs were Weimaraners, and I was excited to meet them—they were sweet, affectionate dogs, who wanted all of my attention (and I was tempted to give it to them, and ignore my date altogether).

I sat on the couch next to one of the dogs, while my date sat on the floor next to the coffee table, on which he had placed his laptop. He said that he typically didn’t have sex on first dates, in part to get to know the person first. He asked if I would like to go through a list of sexual preferences (we had spoken in part because of potential for shared sexual interests), and I nodded. He then went through quite an exhaustive list, which may seem odd outside the poly or kink communities, but for me, it made me feel even safer to know someone cared to get it right. That I wouldn’t have someone’s hands where I didn’t want them, that I wouldn’t have to say no in the moment to things I didn’t want and have to trust that they’d listen, or that I’d even be able to say no in the moment. So often, things had happened because the word would not travel the space from my mind to my lips and out of my mouth. Sometimes I could feel the word on my tongue, and feel so afraid, so ashamed that I didn’t want what my partner of the moment wanted that I shut down, and shut out the world. So, to hear this exhaustive list felt like a safeguard against those situations, and that because I had articulated my desires beforehand, I could maybe re-articulate them in the moment.

After this, we began talking of other things. About how the reason he owned the house, and didn’t have a job, was because of a settlement that came out of a motorcycle accident—something he referred to as the best thing that could have happened to him. I was curious about life without a job, but our conversation moves in and out of focus in my memory, so I’m not sure what all we talked about.

“There’s something you need to know,” he said.

“What?” I wondered what revelation could carry such gravity. I know when I said similar words, it was about trauma I’d experienced, and so I wondered what he might have gone through. I had long carried the weight of trauma and what it meant to tell people who might not understand, and so my instinct was that he was going to tell me something that had happened to him, not something he had done.

“I’m a convicted sex offender. You can ask me whatever questions you like, but you should know that I have a therapist who now believes in me, even though she didn’t always—she thought I was in denial. But she realized I was committed and serious about the therapy.”

“What happened?”

“I was in a relationship with an underage girl.”

“How old?”

At this question, he flinched, and put his hand on his face.

“Eleven.”

“Eleven,” I parrotted back. All I could think from that moment on was what I was like as an eleven-year-old girl. How vulnerable, how excited about life, how scared, how naïve, how eager. I could only think that she was only a child. I stammered on this thought. I thought of how at eleven, I’d climbed in my mother’s lap in an attempt to assuage my fears of hell. I thought of when I misspelled the word “molasses” in a class spelling bee, and was so distraught that I wrote the word a hundred times for my teacher.

As I reeled from these thoughts, he said, “She was sexually mature. I really cared for her.”

“How old were you?” I said. I hoped that he was very young at the time.

“26.” Again I reeled. I considered the people who had been 26 when I was eleven, and I was grateful none of them had, to my knowledge, thought that I could be in a relationship with them. I wondered what he meant by “sexually mature,” but it made me sick. I had not gotten my period until I was 12, but my sister’s had come when she was ten. Neither of our shapes had filled out till we were much older. Only my youngest sister had seemed much older than her age when she was eleven, but I still could not have imagined her with a 26-year-old at that age. I shuddered inwardly, though on the outside,

I seemed calm, maybe even curious. And, perhaps I was curious how a grown man could think a relationship with a child was okay. I felt a bit sick, but too shocked to express my discomfort. I then looked at his dogs and wondered if they were okay, not really believing that he had done anything to them. With his revelation, I had lost my moorings.

I couldn’t tell what was true. So, I asked the one question he would, of course, have no access to:

“Is she okay?” He looked pained, and said, “I don’t know.”

“Oh, of course not.”

It wasn’t the best question, but I wanted to know. Not that knowing would exonerate or damn him—that reasoning didn’t occur to me. But I wanted to know if she’d made it out of such a situation into some kind of stability. I just wanted her to be okay.

“My girlfriend has written a letter so that potential partners can see me through her eyes. Will you read it?”

“Sure,” I said. Part of me wanted to get out of the situation, but I felt compelled to listen. And I was still largely in shut-down mode, all obvious actions I could take blurred by a quiet panic.

I don’t remember exactly what the letter said, but it disturbed me. His girlfriend described their BDSM relationship intensely, in ways that felt like that maybe she’d been groomed. I couldn’t tell what was honest pleasure in the sub/dom relationship, and what was terrifying internalization of toxic relationships between men and women in this society. It also felt especially crass that a pedophile took on the role of the dom. If it had been the other way around, perhaps, I would have found the letter more reassuring. As it was, the letter detailed how much she admired her dom, and how much her entire life was devoted to pleasing him, and how much she wanted him to punish her when she acted out of accord with their contract. She said that it made her feel okay in the world. She said that he had made her a better person. I could tell how desperate she was for the person reading this letter to believe her. It was that desperation that made me feel sick inside.

I have myself experienced various types of BDSM, but never the full-time sub/dom relationship. I often wondered how that was managed between partners to ensure consent at all times, but I had never, since I embraced my queerness, thought of judging it. All I cared was that consenting adults have the freedom to engage how they wanted. But the letter had me conflicted. The tone read as fawning, and I couldn’t be comfortable with it. I knew with perfect clarity at that moment that I would never want such a relationship that extended beyond the confines of discrete sex acts. I couldn’t handle the idea of framing an entire relationship around pleasing a man. But because I was vulnerable, I said nothing. I just read the letter and didn’t really discuss it. I’m not

sure how I evaded giving a response, only that I didn’t respond genuinely, felt that I couldn’t in this moment.

Shortly after reading the letter, I said I was tired (I was) and wanted to go home. I called a Lyft, and tried to process what had happened.

Down the long carpeted hallway of my grandmother’s ranch-style house lay the room I lived in for the last few years of high school. The room had belonged to my aunt, my father’s sister, and the room carried a sense of the relationship with it. I could lock it, but I rarely did, as I knew I would open the door to my grandmother when she wanted.

No lock would keep her out if she wanted to come in.

It was in this room that I hid when my uncle came to my grandmother’s, as he sometimes did, to help my grandmother with something or to use her computer. From my room, I would hear his voice, and I would do anything I could not to hear what he said, so afraid was I of what he might say about me. For the words of others often infiltrated my consciousness and became the standards by which I judged myself, whether I agreed with them or not. The words became a liturgy that appeared in my mind whenever any similar incident arose. Like when my uncle had said, “It’s such a shame. You’ll be pregnant before you get out of high school.”

Whenever I found myself with a boyfriend, kissing him or whatever, I would find those words haunting me, as much as the words from the Bible warning against ‘sexual immorality,’ without being explicit about what that might mean. So my uncle’s words filled in some of the gaps—I could not ask questions to figure out if I had done anything wrong, because even asking the questions would have implied my guilt, and I know now

that at least part of my teenage horny self didn’t want to know. There’s such a long way between kissing and having penetrative sex that was never even hinted at (with the exception of dancing) in church or in my family. Which meant that I was left alone in my head to figure out what sexual immorality might entail.

When I cut off my uncle from my life, I cut off one possible source of information, though even him I couldn’t ask. Sex and sexuality outside of marriage

(heterosexual, of course) was too wrapt up in shame to ask about, to feel comfortable confessing, even to my then role model. But he often shared things that I would not have otherwise known.

“Do you know what this is?” he once said, holding up an unopened condom wrapper.

“A condom,” his son, my cousin answered.

“Do you want to hold it?” he said to both of us.

I shook my head, blushing and feeling my stomach turn in discomfort. I know my uncle laughed, but I can’t remember what else happened, if anything did. I knew then, that agreeing to touch the condom would mean admitting some unknown sin. And my uncle’s asking the question implied the shame he likely thought I already had.

Sometimes, I think of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” and wonder if I’m “the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread.” Spending a life divided into two completely opposed paradigms means that sometimes meaning collapses within me, and shame is a double-edged sword that threatens to cut me away from myself and my past.

But even as I try to write this narrative of how I got to where I am from my childhood, I

struggle to make sense of a narrative in which I must represent the varied consciousnesses I’ve experienced through the lens of my current self. Though many theorists have argued against the reality of a coherent self, it’s a fiction that helps me move through life, a fiction I’ve tried to explain as a metaphor of a rope—that the rope itself is what constitutes my identity, but the composite strands stretch across different portions of the rope, each strand representing the continuities and discontinuities of my identity. This rope is how I hang on in the midst of depression, anxiety, and revived and recurring trauma.

So, in many ways, the date with the pedophile was meaningless. It said nothing about who I was. But, in it, I felt, and still feel about it a sense of shame inflected by a range of voices from the church to feminists and society at large to any little thing a friend or family member may have said about dating or safety or sexuality. Most frustratingly, it was that the relationship with my uncle had followed me into that room with the pedophile—that the silence I had learned when I wasn’t sure in the presence of a man meant that I shut down in front of the pedophile. It was something I had experienced many times before, but in the presence of ordinary men. All of these voices, regardless of their intent, make me feel like the person I am shouldn’t exist in the world, that what I bring to the world is shameful, and that the only way to continue is in silence.

My work with my therapist focuses on the overwhelming sense of shame that I have yet to shed. In writing this memoir, I have hoped to become, as Maggie Nelson says,

“post-shame.” But that state still eludes me, and shame threatens to flood every corner of my life. It infects even my closest relationships with a sense of dread that I will be found wanting, and that everything that my loved ones say is a potential judgment, a denial of

who I am or want to be. In many ways, it is the doctrine of shame I was taught as a child that continues to divide me from others, but most palpably my family, who cannot embrace who I am for their own sense of shame that I have become what they consider sinful, other, especially since I was such a quiet, zealous child, devoted as I was to the letter and spirit of the religion they had taught me.

My family haven’t turned away completely, likely because they don’t know the full extent of this change in me, or because they actually love me beyond what they’ve been taught, but the fear of losing everything of the relationships I grew up with keeps me from trying to connect across this wall. I can’t say what it means that they won’t look at me fully and think they’re so glad to see what I’ve become.

Figure 474

A House Full of Roaches

My room is a penetrable fortress. I clean every edge. I wipe down the dresser with the squeaky drawers and spotty mirror. I dust my TV, I make my bed, stuff what I can’t manage to organize in my closet. Once the room is clean, I lay on my bed agonizing over whether I’m done. I see a string on the carpet, a spot I missed on the TV. Part of me wants to give in to rest, because I’m overwhelmed. Maintaining the border between my

74 Illustration by Emily Fritze, Commissioned for “A House Full of Roaches,” 2020.

room and the chaos without is hard. Especially when I try to tackle the chaos.

Just as I’m about to give up on cleaning, that’s when I see it—the roach making its way across my wall. Within seconds, I’ve grabbed up my Dollar General flip flops (or better yet my sister’s), and I’ve smashed it.

And then I’m not done. I wipe down the remains of the roach. I pick up the string and dust the TV, only then sliding back into my bed, checking between the sheets for roaches, praying they don’t cross my lips in my sleep.

Since my childhood in a house full of roaches, I’ve come to an awareness of other species as having rights and deserving some kind of respect. But I’ll still smash a roach if

I see one in my house. Especially German roaches, the type I grew up with. When I heard that roaches could express affection, I squirmed inside, both at the thought of roaches, whom I’d still smash, and the fact that I’d killed anything capable of affection.

Let’s imagine together a roach. We’ll call her Mary. She is part of an ever present, ever growing family of roaches. 10,000 and growing. Of course, she can’t know all her mates, much less her friends. She carries an egg sac on her back, because that’s the way of things. And she seeks any food source—leftover candy, the back of a postage stamp, a crumb from my morning toaster pastry. In our house, it is a smorgasbord for her. At our house, she has the choice of the human equivalent of a four-course meal. She enjoys crawling inside warm things, such as TV screens and light fixtures. She is not afraid of the ceiling, from which she catapults, occasionally hitting humans, whom she knows can kill her, and will, if they have the chance. She also knows that there’s a small chance they won’t notice her amidst all her enormous family, and so she crawls on.

Figure 5 German Cockroach with Ootheca75 Yep, little roach Mary, pregnant Mary, was the bane of my existence from the time I was old enough to understand that the roaches were here and that they weren’t going away. Like tiresome relatives. Like the friend you feel bad for, but would rather not hang out with. Like taxes.

Before I was born, my parents bought a double-wide trailer, brand-new. I assume it started out roach-free. Sometime between my birth and my first memory of roaches, the infestation must have started. But it may have well begun before my birth, though my parents only had the trailer a year before I was born, having lived with my grandmother the first year of their marriage. My grandmother, I know, did not have roaches. She was adamant about keeping them out, and fighting them off whenever her house was infiltrated. My parents were not so vigilant. But my mother had neither the harshness nor the tenacity of my grandmother. And so the roaches came.

My father did not clean enough. That I know from years of seeing his plates of

75Pest Control Technology Staff, “NC State Study: ‘Bug Bombs Are Ineffective Killing Roaches Indoors,” (January 30, 2019), photo by Matt Bertone at NC State University, Pest Control Technology, (https://www.pctonline.com/article/nc-state-bug-bomb-study/), accessed March 12, 2020.

ketchup and macaroni on countertops and tables and his many Pepsi cans scattered throughout our house, collections I would later replicate in the form of Vanilla Coke cans lined up on the desk in my dorm room. My mother, frustrated at my father’s lack of help, often gave up. I remember her feebly sweeping trash in the midst of chaos. It was like trying to sweep the sand away from a beach. And so it became a true mess sometime around the time I was born, or shortly thereafter.

I remember the trash from my earliest memories of the trailer. I remember the shame of bringing any friend over to see it, praying they were close enough to me not to call DHR. Praying I wouldn’t be taken from my family. I wasn’t happy with them, but the unknown was far scarier. And my mother scared us with the idea frequently. She would say, “You don’t want someone taking you away to something worse, do you?”

And we imagined a home of constant beatings and never being allowed out of the house.

My mother had such stories of her father. My grandmother had such stories of her brothers. We knew things could be far worse. So, we kept quiet and kept our secrets from anyone we thought might betray us.

I remember emptying out a basket of toys at my grandmother’s much cleaner house, and divising new ways of organizing them as I put them back. It was one of my favorite games when I was alone. I also loved to organize the M & M’s by color, and I wanted all of my posters for school to be perfectly aligned. I had no idea that this might be in reaction to the mess in which I lived, but now it seems relevant, even telling that I had such preoccupations. Eventually I became so obsessed with perfection on my posters that I intentionally made them imperfect so as to follow my design perfectly. Perfection was key, perfection followed me.

In church, we knew that perfection meant heaven. “Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Yes we knew. We knew all too well. But our house was not perfect. Anything but. I can still see the way roach fecal matter, eggs, and wings became tessellated on our off-white cardboard-thin panel walls, the way that such constellations of detritus got denser in the corners, the way if you removed a piece of the baseboards, all you’d see was a dense configuration of roach parts. Perhaps, our house was a perfect shrine in praise of roaches. Perhaps, it was just the perfect habitat.

The roach infestation affected every part of our lives. Even when the messy house was under control (rarely), the roaches never went away, not with bug bombs and fogs or roach motels or glue traps. We might catch a few. Or decimate a generation, but there they were the day after the fog, brazenly jumping from ceilings and skittering across our televisions. And so, my grandma would always ask when we came by her house, “Did you make sure that doesn’t have any roaches in it?” That was whatever had been in or near our house—clothing, backpacks, radios, boxes, toys. My grandma knew the extent of the infestation, and she kept her house barricaded against it.

We, kids, couldn’t escape the shame, though, when a roach crawled out of our backpack at school. I don’t know what my sisters did when this happened, but I always pretended that it was the school’s, that it originated in the school’s walls or even from outside. I never owned the origin of a roach at school, praying fervently that no one saw it crawl out of my belongings.

Or better yet, when one became enmeshed in between the pages of a library book.

I’d do my best to get it out, but there were always remains, and I prayed the book was checked out again before the librarian saw the evidence.

Mary sometimes thinks it’s a good idea to cross my plate, while the canned spinach or creamed corn is still steaming on the translucent paper plates we use while the dishes are stacked high in the kitchen. And sometimes it is a good idea. Really, who wants to eat frozen-dinner style Salisbury steak again? That canned spinach is not a treat on the worst days. So, run Mary run. Get me out of this terrifyingly sodium-filled (as I know now) dinner. Get me away from the bland foods that my mom has the time and energy to prepare, nothing like the Chicken and Dumplings or Pancakes she sometimes makes on weekends, from scratch. Then I would not dare let Mary step near my plate, if I can help it. Then, I hold the plate away from the table, near my mouth. I might even wash one of the real plates to ensure my food makes it to my mouth and not to the floor, as it might when the translucent paper plate bends with the load of whatever food I’m cradling near my face.

Okay, so I never named a roach Mary. I never named any of them. If I focused on them long enough, I’d kill them if I could. Sometimes a primal rage would stir up in my tiny body, and I’d smash it with the wrath of some long-dead Celtic warrior, simultaneously enjoying and squirming at the crunch of Mary’s cousin, brother, or son.

And I’d feel that I’d made my house better. That we were one step closer to ending the perpetual roach invasion. But I was wrong, it lasted my whole childhood. There was never a reprieve, not until I left to live with my grandmother across the street. Then, only then, did I realize how sickeningly sweet the smells were in my mother’s house. Only then could I not tolerate the sight or smell of them.

I remember clearly Mary’s egg sac—the ootheca—an oblong rectangular prison, a shade of brown slightly lighter than its mother. I remember the way the ootheca would

eventually detach. Hundreds of oothecae littered our house on any given day. Fifty roaches might be born of one ootheca. The little Marys and Antoines that might come into the world, shaking their antennae at the uncertainty of their situation, when a tennis shoe might spell their death before they reach the size of a jelly bean.

I wonder what life was like for Mary. I didn’t think about it then. She must have wanted food and warmth and apparently shelter. She must have looked at our house as a veritable smorgasbord. What I saw as devastation she saw as opportunity. The scraps I refused to eat were her boon, her livelihood. It sucks we can’t live in peace. My sister was allergic, and we were all afraid of them on our skin, waking or sleeping. When one got on us, we angrily brushed it off us and smashed it. We committed as much roachicide as we could.

One night when my sister was just a toddler, she saw a tiny roach we couldn’t see in her bath water, and she screamed bloody murder any time we tried to put her in the tub. We laughed mercilessly at her, but eventually gave up and emptied the tub to start the bath again.

One of the crimes I’m most ashamed of from my childhood is the killing of butterflies. I would let them die in a ziplock bag in the fridge so I could preserve them, imagining myself as a budding scientist. When I told my former roommate this, she snapped, saying, “I can’t believe you would do that.” And I said, “Geez, give me a break,

I was just a kid.” She wouldn’t let up and I said, “If I see a roach, I’m going to smash it.”

She said, “Ashley,” her tone contemptuous. I shrugged and repeated it matter-of-factly.

Without this story, she couldn’t understand. She might not, with it.

Sometimes now, when I see an insect and think of killing it, I imagine myself as

the insect, and what it would be like to have my life suddenly snuffed out. Of course, true empathy is impossible, as the brain, senses, and experience of insects are too vastly far from our own to understand with any kind of real knowledge, that is, beyond the science we can know. But still—to go from having a life to not having one seems universal among creatures, not something that can be reduced—that second from life to death. I know, again, this is folly even as I write it. Perception is everything after all. And if you die without any awareness of death other than instinctual bodily reactions against it, what can it mean? But what if Mary is there as the shoe is descending, having the roach equivalent of an existential crisis in those mere seconds before her life comes abruptly to an end? There is still the expiration of energy, a cessation of the senses. It is an oblivion, not unlike the one I look forward to sometimes with hope, sometimes despair. Kafka’s

Metamorphosis only makes more sense, the older I get, when he conceptualizes a human becoming a cockroach. And in naming and attempting to empathize with Mary, I conceptualize a cockroach becoming human or at least humanlike. Critics like to scorn anthropomorphism of animals, because it makes them feel superior—both to the animal and the humans who love animals as anything other than animal, that is, entirely opposite to humans. Humans: reason, love, knowledge, language. Animals: instinct, drive, information, communication. Humans: abstract. Animals: concrete. For some—Humans: eternal. Animals: ephemeral. As humans, we love our dichotomies, our binaries that tell us who we are and who we are not. I know I do. I am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist when it comes to language. I am a morning person, not a night owl. I’m smart, not dumb.

I’m a woman, not a man. I’m liberal, not conservative. I’m a Southerner, not a goddamn

Yankee. How the fuck would I know who I am without these dichotomies, however false

they are, however problematic?

Cockroaches are the being I’ve probably hated the longest. It is rational and irrational. It is rational in human terms. They are invading our space, making it unsafe.

They are unknown, unknowable, and therefore not worth living. They are pests, reduced to an epithet that kills them, creates businesses to kill them. Irrational in broader terms.

They inhabit habitats as we do. They are animals, as we are, trying to survive as we do.

I’m not calling a truce here. Their survival in my house endangers my survival and that of those I love. And so, Mary must go.

Figure 6 German Cockroaches76

What happens here stays here. What happens here is everywhere. What happened to a childhood encrusted with roaches and encapsulated with faith?

76 Rebecca Smithers, “Coffee Bug: Could Your Machine Get Infested with Cockroaches?” The Guardian (January 27, 2018), (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jan/27/coffee-machine-cockroaches- delonghi-repair#img-1), accessed March 12, 2020.

When I was a child, no one but me could really see me. The going theory of epistemology of identity rested in my grandmother’s ability to read faces “like the back of her hand.” I could not escape being read, misread. And my Grandma rendered my inscrutability as a known entity when she told me how much she enjoyed my silence. A grandmother who could not herself remain silent or even quiet, the tenor of her voice stretching and morphing to fill rooms and even fields, the echoes reverberating far beyond her small body.

Roaches were what I could not help but see, but as a species they are inscrutable, unknowable to me. I can never ask them what they mean. They don’t speak the language.

We no longer believed in the idea of unclean animals, thanks to Peter. So were the roaches then clean?

I need to know what life means to make an ascertation of whether to approach the roach as a figure. Whether pain or cognition or love matters. Whether it matters where they fit in an ecosystem. Whether our ecological relationship matters to the earth as a whole. Whether the spark of life they carry, their capacity for evolution matters.

Saccorhytus Coronarius is possibly a common ancestor of all humans, as well as all vertebrates. Alive hundreds of millions of years ago, it’s not surprising that its resemblance to us is hard to see. But that something could so evolve as to become human means that we have to consider all the possibilities of life when we determine meaning.

I recently was sitting in a bar where a sports program was playing on one of the televisions in the bar. I briefly, out of the corner of my eye, saw someone who I thought resembled the drag icon Ru Paul. And for a second I believed the person was Ru Paul, but then, thinking what would Ru be doing on a sports program, I turned for a closer

look, only to see what anyone would expect, a panel of people who were definitely not

Ru Paul. But then occurred to me, a possibility for society that did not yet exist—a society where someone like Ru Paul could contribute to, direct, or produce a sports program that is nothing like what we see on mainstream sports networks like ESPN. That what existed was a mere fragment of possibilities, if not probabilities.

We can’t guess what a roach might become.

It is in uncertainty that so much prejudice begins, but also where the potential for change lies. People who have never met queer people imagine us as other, bad, beyond saving, sinners to be loved, among many other things. Whether or not people see us as roaches or other vermin, does not preclude their hatred. While queer people are not roaches, some roaches have been queer—this is, of course, to anthropomorphize the sexual relations of roaches who have exhibited homosexual behavior. In fact, along with other animals, the fact that roaches have done so even contributed to the overturning of sodomy laws in the United States.

It can feel like an assault, though, when cockroaches like Mary helicopter from the ceiling onto my paper plate, thin as it is with canned spinach and frozen Salisbury steaks, the kind of food my mother imagined was healthy. Certainly it was better than the

Mountain Dew I’d drunk in sippy cups and the peanut butter and syrup sandwiches that I frequently had for breakfast. But my mother could only know so much, and she only had so much time to make us fresh food. It seems odd now that I had access to so much fresh food grown on our own land that we rarely took advantage of—or that we fished without ever eating the fish we caught (we always released them back into their muddy waters).

So many Minnesotans I know would kill for such fresh produce, especially as late as we

could get it in the year, and yet our lives demanded that we waste it in exchange for shitty processed food. Why didn’t I eat more of the grapes, apples, peaches, and cherries that were there for the taking, for free?

As an adult, I have come to realize just how animal humans are—not in a pejorative way, but in a way that makes me judge us less even as we work so hard to bring about our own demise on this planet. I see the way biological drives and coping mechanisms consistently make us turn in on ourselves. My depression certainly has. I have often felt guilty for my inability to conquer my symptoms, symptoms that are ultimately a response to the environment I grew up in. I pursue treatment the way an animal pursues food in a hostile environment, and I find myself trying to avoid dying of soul starvation, in a world where intimacy and friendship can be so hard to find or hold onto. Maybe the roaches who can express affection are better than we are, or maybe they are responding to the environment in the best way they know how.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 977 Through a Glass Darkly

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall I know even as I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12

I used to be afraid of going blind, as my mother likely will, as my maternal grandfather had before he died. I would wake up and find the nearest source of light to

77 Illustration by Emily Fritze, Commissioned for “Through a Glass Darkly,” 2020.

prove to myself I could still see. Retinitis Pigmentosa runs in our family, and so, for some of us, it’s only a matter of time until the light winks out.

It was only as an adult I started to see blindness as anything other than a terror. I rode a public bus in Minneapolis with a class of children who were visually impaired, and likely taking advantage of Minneapolis’s wealth of resources for the blind. One child had struck up a conversation with an elderly blind man, and the man talked about the trials of being blind. And then the child responded, “I’m proud to be blind.” The thought had never occurred to me. Multiple members of my family were directly affected by a condition that causes blindness, and all I’d ever thought was “I hope it doesn’t happen to me.” The idea of being proud of an identity other people don’t understand makes sense to me—the idea of being deprived of the light I so dearly love does not.

“How could anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind too?”—St. Vincent,

“Los Ageless”

I know St. Vincent here refers to youth, not sight, but it seems all too relevant.

When you’ve seen and enjoyed the way the curvature of light on a round object splays the colors in subtle shades, when you’ve seen the pop of pink, the allure of a perfect

Meditteranean blue, the erotic passion of a deep purple, and then lose it, how could you not lose your mind? Of course, people do it all the time. Retinitis pigmentosa affects around 1 in 4000 people. So, my grandfather wasn’t the first to lose his sight to it, and my cousin and my mother aren’t the only ones waiting to be affected by its reach. It’s rare to most, but to me it’s all too relevant. And though, given my eye exams, and all the signs

I’ve seen so far, I’m unlikely to have it too, I am not unaware of its ability to skip generations, its ability to seem to have gone, only to appear in the child of a parent with no signs of it.

Sight is a common metaphor for understanding, but it seems strange to make the connection here, where I know sight has no hidden keys to help us understand one another.

I watch my sister, April. She is smiling, putting makeup on me as we laugh.

Abruptly, she tells me something more of the torture she experienced with her ex- boyfriend and our smiles falter. I am taken aback, but I don’t have time to recover before she’s shifted to the way the bronzer highlights my cheeks. I don’t know how to respond to her trauma. I don’t know what to make of her experience.

Two years in a row we had to make the trek to Alabama from Minnesota at the beginning of the year—once to see my paternal grandfather after he’d had a heart attack, and the next to attend his funeral. These were long, grueling trips, driving the 18 hours to

Alabama. The first time we drove through the night trying hard to keep up our stamina as the journey seemed endless. The second time we stopped at a friend’s along the way, indulging ourselves in corgi cuddles. We cried during both trips. We fought during both trips. And we certainly laughed. As much as we respond to tragedy and trauma in our own ways, we have places that overlap, places where we can hold each other.

I’ve loved my sister for a long time. Since she was born? Before? I really don’t know. I remember when she was born, how awkward I felt holding her. I was not comfortable with her as an infant, though really, I’ve never been comfortable with any infants, staunchly refusing to hold anyone’s baby.

I do know that I wanted to protect her from the world—from our family. I wanted her to be able to get out, and I thought my path was the only path for a long time. Of course, I was just thirteen when I told her that if she got a B she’d be a disgrace to our family. Of course, I was just a child when I told her to read books she wasn’t ready for. I was so desperate to save her, I couldn’t see the damage I was inflicting. I couldn’t see how insecure my assertions made her in a family that struggled with her existence, a family who constantly compared her negatively to one of our cousins.

“You’re just like Sarah,” they’d all say. And Sarah’s had her own slough of troubles.

From a once-addicted father to an absent mother to strained relationships with nearly everyone in our family. But now she’s an adult, the weight of the past threatening to overwhelm her in the home she makes of her mother’s old trailer, a mother who lives within walking distance in a house easily worth half a million dollars.

I once asked my therapist to name anyone in my family with whom I had a purely good relationship, and, for once, she looked uncomfortable, and said, “I don’t think I can answer that.”

When I was a child, I made some of my closest friends by comparing emotional scars. But then, I knew I still had to keep things back, to protect the family, to protect myself from what I thought for sure would be the death of a friendship. So each revelation was a searing trial, a guess of the worth of the friendship. And I could feel similar feelings in their disclosures, the flick of the eyes away and down, the slim laughter that said that it wasn’t that important, that I could ignore it if I wanted to, but please, please don’t reject me for it. I felt these feelings so many times as I relayed trauma to the friends I was making.

April, just three years old, once took a crowbar to our other sister’s head. At the time, it had been both terrifying and hilarious. Once we knew Amber would be okay, it became a legend of April. When April was very young, she was everyone’s darling. She was bright, fearless, funny. She would sing the Scooby-Doo theme songs on rollercoasters. At five, she could identify all the states. She once headbutted a TV screen (the old glass kind), and laughed. The list goes on.

Then, something happened. I’m not even sure what. When she transformed from a cute, precocious child to a child no one seemed to be able to or even want to understand.

From her reluctance to go to church to her many secrets, and her tendency to sneak out and act out in ways I had never even contemplated, she became someone I no longer understood. She was so smart—I knew that—and yet she often made mediocre grades.

She was passionate, but she had no passion for the God I had grown up loving.

When I was eleven, I found Harry Potter, who in the first book also turned eleven.

I was lucky that my iteration of evangelicalism did not police fantasy books the way so

many other denominations did. No, my parents didn’t blink an eye when I picked up a book about a boy wizard from Little Whinging. But what they had no idea of, what might have been threatening, or disheartening, was the fact that Harry Potter’s magic, though fun and dark at times, didn’t have me seriously considering trying to take up magical arts.

What the book did, however, was to help me imagine a life in which I escaped so much of the dysfunction that my family harbored. It helped me imagine a time and a place where my friends might become more important than my family, where I could craft my own story, thrive in an environment they neither knew nor cared about. There was a brief time when I started my PhD program in Minnesota that I tried to share my studies with my mom and my grandma. This was when I was still focused on eighteenth-century women, and I thought they could relate, at least a little, to the plights of the eighteenth- century women I studied—women whose voices were consistently quashed in the patriarchal world they lived in, women who endured all kinds of abuse just to survive— not to thrive. I thought if I could tell them about these women, they might be able to start journeys like I had already embarked on—a journey that challenged, if not escaped, the patriarchy we so clearly lived in. But, my mom found the work confusing, and my grandma said simply, “I don’t want to hear about that.” And with that, a small door of connection closed. But my connection to books, and particularly Harry Potter remained open. And that imagined family had already begun.

II.

The steps my sister and I have taken to mutual understanding seem simple from the outside. We’ve reached out to each other when we’ve needed to, and we’ve backed each other when it seemed like no one else (at least in our family) would. We’ve both

cultivated families of choice, but they aren’t the same people. The overlap is slim, but these families of choice have often meant the difference between overwhelming each other with past and present trauma and giving each other the support we both need.

“I may have accidentally outed you to Mom.” I’m not sure if those were her exact words, but they were words April told me immediately after she had talked to Mom. She, too, was bi, and couldn’t throw me under the bus, without also throwing herself there.

“I didn’t know Ashley was a lesbian,” my mother had told April.

And April had responded, automatically, “Ashley isn’t a lesbian—she’s bi.”

And shortly thereafter, “And I am too.”

Though the call came as somewhat of a shock, it wasn’t without some warning.

The previous month my mother had met my nonbinary partner, who was then only using they/them pronouns, a concept my mother found difficult.

“Is Kay in transition?” my mother had said.

I nodded.

“Is Kay a he?”

I shook my head.

“Is Kay a she?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then what are they?”

“They are a they.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they don’t identify as either a man or a woman.”

“That doesn’t make sense to me.”

That conversation wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the harbinger of doom I’d long expected from such a conversation—it wasn’t that I thought that my mother would disown me—I’d put her through the ringer with a similar (in her mind) revelation a few years back, when I had told her that I was leaving the Church of Christ for the Episcopal

Church. The admission had tested our relationship, but ultimately, she wanted her daughter more than she wanted a fight, and so, she reluctantly accepted me, but with caveats—that she might get silent at any discussion of religion, or she might bring up the church at the most inopportune moments, or she might attribute my choice to anyone or anything else but me.

So, when I was outed, I had a good idea of how it might go. That she would ultimately accept me, but with exceptions. She’d love the parts of me she could and ignore the parts she couldn’t, or reinterpret them the best she could. If this love seems threadbare, it’s because it often feels like that. I know some of the threads of this love are strong, capable of healing very deep wounds, but at the same time, some of the threads are so thin, I think they’d snap if I tugged just a little more. But my mom has continued to surprise me, even with her lackluster reactions. Neither dramatically awful nor surprisingly loving, they’ve left me in a peculiar position. I don’t know how to navigate this love. And since I was outed, I’ve been irritable. I talk to my mom now, again. But it took months to reinvigorate that conversation, mostly revived because of my own financial need. It sucks to say it. It sucks a lot, and I know if she reads this or hears of it, it will hurt her, but it is because of a deep hurt I don’t know how to address that it happened in the first place—not a lack of love, but a love that didn’t fit right, that didn’t

cover all the gaps between us. And I know it’s not my fault. And I’m not sure how much is her fault.

After all, the women in our family know something about being broken down.

Mine was just the gentlest of them, really. My aunt, whose hair was forcibly cut by my uncle; my mother, who was thrown across the house by her father; my grandmother who watched her sister being beaten by chains; my great-grandmother who twice carried a dying child on her hip because her husband would not let her go to the hospital; my other great-grandmother who was forced to live with her husband’s mistress in the house, even as he threatened her life; my sister, who was tortured by her boyfriend to confess an infidelity that she’d never committed. The list is too long. Nevertheless, some of us have chosen to stay, because we know no other home, or we want so much for the future that isn’t going to happen to somehow materialize, as if by magic. I know that’s why I stayed so long with a man who neither respected me nor cared what I wanted. He only put his hands on me once, to push me out of a room, but he never hurt me, not physically. It’s a strange guilt that attends a lack of experience in physical domestic abuse—though my life hasn’t entirely escaped it—previous boyfriends pinching me when I didn’t do as they asked, or convincing me to let them keep giving me a handjob long after it was pleasurable and long after I was dry, because they wanted to be able to make me orgasm.

The whispered words of witnesses and confidants relayed these stories to me.

Sometimes the women themselves told me, seemingly out of earshot of the men (I’m not sure, to be honest). But the stories weren’t for them. They were for the young women in the family. They were the histories of the women in our family that seemed likely to fade with time, without the repetition. And some were repeated endlessly. Some were told

rarely. I’m not sure if the lesson was supposed to be to avoid these men at all costs, or to see what happens when you’re a woman.

One might imagine that these relations would typically be accompanied with tears, but more often than not, we laughed in fear. The manic laughter of shared experience of seemingly inescapable patterns—that if we hadn’t experienced that kind of pain yet, we would, living as we did in a world of men. The many steps I’ve taken away from what felt like hell have been lessons in new hells. When I left my husband, I thought I’d never again be gaslighted by a partner, only to find a new partner who thought he was a feminist and practiced even subtler gaslighting than my husband had ever done.

My husband was practically cliché in his misogyny, saying, “You can’t take a joke,” when his friends would say to me, “Why aren’t you in the kitchen?” But my subsequent partner spent hours trying to convince me that the Pulse shooting was “about all of us,” and being outraged when I suggested that his words sounded a lot like “All lives matter.” Or when he spent the entirety of the women’s march bragging about his anti-war protests over a decade ago, as though centering himself in this way wasn’t an affront to me and any other women subjected to his harangues. His ‘woke’ misogyny threatened to make me feel as though I didn’t know anything about a subject I’d spent over a decade studying—gender and sexuality. And worse, to make me feel like I couldn’t trust my own brain, a feat that no man had managed since my uncle with his demeaning speeches and rhetorical acrobatics explaining how I did not know my own mind.

It is in walking these patterns again and again, that the women in my family feel connected and disconnected, isolated and in community with our mutual loss. I can see just how much like my mother and my grandmother and my sister and my aunt I am through these reiterations of pain. But I know the strange guilt that is neither helpful, nor kind, that makes me feel bad for not having had worse. That I can’t know what my mother or my sister or any of the women of my family have gone through. I ask myself what I want from people who have never experienced my grief, my pain, the emotional or physical abuse I have. And it is simple: that they stay with me and listen to my pain, even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s both terrible and wonderful when they can truly understand, because it is so wonderful to feel understood, and so terrible to imagine what they must have gone through to be able to understand.

Interlude.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. –Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost

There is a dark room inside your mind. It is small. It is locked. It is hell. Or rather, Hell.

Capital aitch. Spell it out. H-E-L-L.

It begins in a church—a white room where the colorless, sightless room develops in your mind. Part of the room’s terror is not that it deprives you of all the senses, just one. You can smell the sulfur, you can taste the smoke, you can feel the burning radiance of a

lightless fire. But you see nothing.

And you can hear your embedded screams. But no others. You are alone in this Hell created for yourself. Because you can’t tell anyone you’re in a place you’re not supposed to be. That you’re supposed to be avoiding. That the blood is supposed to have wiped away in a single sweep. That your prayers-without-ceasing should block like a shield spell against the devilish creatures that spawn like Murlocs in World of Warcraft.

You curl up on your mother’s lap. You curl up on your bed, an image an imagination a delusion of your mother’s lap. An egyptian cotton 500-thread-count womb that neither nourishes nor increases your weight or mind or heart. The half-light of the fading computer screen is locked on some safety blanket program, a clichéd arc of a story in sitcom bas-relief, predictable and warm and empty. Your only escape from hell, a training of the mind to follow the predictable arc and to feel comfort at just the right moment, to feel moved at just the right moment, a simulacrum of putting your mind at ease.

And when the program fails in its intended effect, which it will inevitably after repeating each of the two hundred episodes at least two hundred times, the unease, the terror causes you to dig your fingernails into your palms until your life line is covered with tiny apocalypse-red crescent moons, and you take the trek to the fridge repeatedly just to escape the ceaseless pinprick of your mind. What if I am going to Hell? You stick cookies and popcorn and chips in your mouth bite after bite after bite after bite, obsessively

avoiding the word, it slipping in between every idle thought that today just might be your last and that you might end up endlessly in hell, the hell in which you already live.

You even try at times to resign yourself to this Hell. This eternity. The thought that’s set on repeat is that you can get used to anything after a while, but the thought of omnipotence obscures even this comfort as you imagine a god turning the dial up each time you manage to come to terms with the hell you’re living in. The dial seems to have no highest setting, infinitely turning up the heat, each time you move to have half an ounce less of the pain you feel night after night.

If you drank, you certainly would at this point. Anything to numb the feeling that sugar highs and sitcoms can’t cure. The caffeine even hypes up the hellish illuminations your brain insists on repeating. But you don’t. Drink, as you’ve been taught your entire life, is a sure path to hell, as sure as dancing and cursing and copulating. You take a swig of

Vanilla Coke and drink it down as though you’ve been in a desert twenty years without a drop. You fight a stubborn chip bag or pickle jar and curse at their refusal to engage in your warfare on Hell. And you cry as the chips fly suddenly across the room, and your knees hit the floor, praying violently that you won’t go to hell, that there’s anything you can do to escape the hell you’re living in.

III.

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I don’t know if my mom sees hell like this. But I know too well the image of hell in my own mind to judge anyone who really believes in it too harshly. But then, that belief causes all kinds of hell here on earth.

Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people.” But I really think with Milton that

Hell is our own minds.

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Figure 10 Allison Creek church of Christ Interior78 Autopsy of a Service

Men’s voices rumble through the hallway, as they carry on their business meeting.

The only voices of women trickle in from the other direction, near the nursery. It isn’t time for the service to start, but some families have only one car and so the child-laden women arrive along with their husbands, but can only mingle quietly while their husbands take on the duty, the weight of the church.

As these segregated melodies continue, car doors add a percussive element, as early arrivers secure their favorite parking spots. The service would carry an indomitable irritation for them, if this were not the case. If they could not park just to the right of the entrance, or near the exit, the world would not be right. They sigh (with relief?) as they

78 Allison Creek church of Christ (website credit omitted for privacy), Accessed 17 February 2020.

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make their way through the double white doors. White doors, surrounded by nothing but red brick—none of that idolatrous gold trim or crosses to be found at highfalutin churches like the ones with the gays. No, this church, even the building, aligns itself literally with the black and white print in its sacred books. Every cushioned pew had at least one— most have three, at least until the members arrive with their own copies, often emblazoned with personalizations and red and gold bookmarks, not to mention their own embellishments through highlighting markers on the passages they really loved. I’ve placed the bookmarking ribbon at one of my own favorite passages, Romans 8:18: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us.” It is a verse I will likely copy out in my notebook during the sermon.

Finally, the business meeting has adjourned, and the men’s voices spread through the hallway before we see them. They are tall. They are white. They are middle aged.

Some are bald. Some wear glasses. They all look as though they have been jurors at a capital murder trial. As they see the women, slow smiles engrain their face with Christian welcome, and each wears his smile like a cross, his eyes betraying the sacrifice of the gesture.

My smile isn’t much warmer. It is ice, glazed over my real face, which is tired and worn. But I am silent, as they approach. I look down at my shoes, and tug the edge of my blue cotton skirt to make sure it reaches just below my knees. I hope the heels aren’t too high, that the hem doesn’t ride up too much when I sit down. I see a couple of the men glance down at my knees, but they say nothing. My skirt must fall within the hems of their approval—barely. I think of my hands trailing over the selection of dresses in my

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grandmother’s closet—I often wear her old dresses to the services because of their vintage look. But today I have chosen a tiered denim skirt from Tommy Hilfiger, a questionable choice in itself because of his support of the gays. Luckily the label isn’t visible. My shirt is a non-offensive vintage plaid blouse buttoned nearly to the top.

“How are you, Sister?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Doing well. We missed seeing you at church last week.”

I knew this would happen. The moment when they would remember that I hadn’t come last week. The moment when I’d have to explain, again.

“Um, yeah. I was sick last week. Feeling a bit under the weather still.”

“Glad to see you could make it out.”

“Yeah.” I almost say “me too” but I dare not lie here or anywhere. I feel the eye of God on me as I turn, blushing, to my pew.

I walk quickly to my seat, clutching my Bible to my chest, hoping to avoid further inspection. I have my notebook and pen. There are no nooks, no side wings or balconies as you might find at larger denominational churches, only two rows of pews on either side of the church, a wide aisle leading to the front where the communion table and the pulpit comprise what little furniture there is in the room, standing directly in front of the chartreuse curtains hiding the baptistry.

My mother, near me, takes out a lace coverlet and places it on her head. It looks like a doily perched on her graying hair. Normally my mother would sit at the front with my father, but he is working this morning, and she’s chosen to sit with me and my sister

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at the back. Normally, though, people sit in the same pews every week, with few people—usually young people—changing their minds about where they want to sit.

I have stopped wearing coverings. No one questions this decision, except my mother when she thinks of it. Corinthians 11:5-6 is after all a very difficult passage to interpret correctly: “But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head; for that is even all one as if she were shaven. For it the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn, but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.” I cough in my sleeve, avoiding my mother’s sidelong glance.

The low murmur of conversation comes to a stop, a middle-aged white man with glasses—an college-educated engineer—walks up to the front. He has the first prayer.

Henry Johnson has been at the church as long as my own family, and his daughter, Lisa, and I are in the same Bible class. He often stands at the back, glaring when I doodle in my notebook, or quietly reprimanding my sister for laughing during the service. He even once, when teaching a Bible class, forbade anyone from doodling during the class.

He prays, “Dear heavenly Father, Thank you for this day, and for allowing us to come here together again. Thank you for all our many blessings, and help us not to forget that all our blessings come from you. Please help those of us struggling with secret sins, and help us to change our ways. Please bless those who are sick, especially Earl as he goes through surgery, and Rick as he struggles with his illness, and I just want to thank you again for all the many blessings that we have been blessed with. In your Son’s name we pray, Amen.”

With that, the service begins.

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Ezekiel Hale—also around my age and in my Bible class—opens a songbook. It is blue with gold lettering, Hymns for Worship. I had a crush on him from around the ages of eight to fourteen. I remember I had written his initials on my palm in a tiny heart, and I had shown them to the other girls at church. They had even dared me once to kiss him in a game of Truth or Dare, but I had refused, long knowing I never wanted my first kiss to be for the sake of a game. But now, I am long past my first kiss, having gotten engaged to someone who was not a member of the church, but rather a Methodist. People rarely mentioned it, but I assumed they thought I would convert him, eventually.

“Please turn to Hymn number 345- three hundred and forty five. ‘All Things Are

Ready.’”

Ezekiel blows into a pitch pipe, and we begin.

For the first time, female voices flood the sanctuary—but they wouldn’t call it that. Auditorium, yes, that’s it. The voices, unaccompanied by any instrumentation, call out strongly, louder than the men’s voices, though to recognize the fact, to say this to any woman would be to silence her. A friend of mine, a bit younger than I, even told me that her father didn’t permit her to sing in parts where men weren’t singing along, as though the woman’s voice alone in the service was enough to usurp a man’s place, even for a moment.

My voice is loud among them. Unlike them, I mostly ignore the meanings. My mind cannot stay within them. Instead, I focus on the notes, the sounds of the words. I cringe when my mom sings off-key. Nevertheless, I feel the music. And I sing, loudly, clearly, like a bell. I’m not sure it’s a pretty bell, but it’s the only time I’m allowed to speak in the service, and so I want to make sure my voice is heard.

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The songs come to an end, and I secretly, silently thank God for the ability to write, so that I can do something with my hands, my mind during the sermon. I laugh to myself—They would likely never pray for that, not here.

Andrew Hale, another engineer at a tech company, begins the sermon by reading a verse: “2 Peter 1:20 says, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.” We are going to take each word and slice it from the next and the next and the next. We are going to show how our interpretation is the right one. I’d mistake it for formalist close reading if it weren’t for the insistence on the one true meaning that can only be deduced by humans by conducting this scriptural autopsy. I barely stifle a yawn, and listen for the gaps in the words, in the meaning.

Pen to paper, I begin a drawing. It’s a horse, and has nothing to do with the sermon. I’m still listening, but I remember the words of the man standing at the back. You shouldn’t doodle during the sermons—it’s distracting for the other people. And how can you pay attention while you’ve got your mind on what you’re drawing? Those weren’t his exact words, but they were close enough. The impression of them makes my arms tense before I tell myself, again, that I concentrate better with the doodles, and the only one who seems to mind is him. But still, he is a man, and that holds a lot of weight here.

I clutch my pen tighter. My horse has grown a horn and wings and other creatures have sprouted by its side. Verses are scrawled in between and across the details of my doodle, the numbers sticking in my head where the words aren’t sticking. I haven’t heard the last five minutes of the sermon. But it wasn’t the doodling that got me off track. It was the probability of what comes next.

The words become the incisive kind I only wish I could ignore.

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Andrew continues the sermon, saying, “Be careful when you talk about following the Bible. Don’t say ‘I think’ the Bible says this or that. That suggests that it’s your interpretation. But there is a clear message, written in black in white, for those who honestly read the scriptures without any biases or preconceived notions of what it says. If you just read what it says, you will find the truth. For the Bible says, ‘There is no private interpretation.’” His tone is funereal. It is the same tone used in nearly all the sermons preached at Allison Creek church of Christ, and the same tone used at so many other churches of Christ.

Again these aren’t the exact words. Except for the verse. I know that, because it is read from the King James Version, and quoted exactly.

On hearing these words, I stiffen. I know that the words don’t make sense. How can we read the Bible at all without thought? And how could everyone come to the same conclusions without discussion? I burn inside. Andrew is the father of one of the strictest families in the church, a family of ten. His words reflect this strictness in his condemnation of all of my friends from Bagby College to hell. The Southern Baptist college I attend is three hours away, and as a denomination the entire college will follow my friends into the pit—all of the members of the church of Christ spurn the idea of denominations. I know Andrew wouldn’t put it that way, that he would say that they are self-condemning heretics. Okay, he wouldn’t say “heretics”—he would probably just say,

“They are condemning themselves to hell if they don’t follow the Bible.” He would say that without having seen the Bibles beside my friends’ beds as I have, without seeing the highlights that look so much like those in the Bibles here, without seeing an ounce of their devotion.

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And I can’t say a thing to him. “If I have any questions, I should go home and ask my husband.” “Rebuke not a man publicly.” “Women are to keep silent in the church.”

By this point, my notebook is a patchwork of doodles and scripture references, the sermon is over, and I am seething. My face must be red—I can feel my cheeks burning.

The song leader’s eyes pass over my face, but his glance doesn’t stop there. My sister is sitting beside me, in a top my mother told her not to wear, showing an excess of cleavage—my sister April was always the rebel, and even I would have been uncomfortable in that top. She just stares back brazenly at my mother, while I look down at my notebook, then my shoes. But the song is coming, my time to shine.

Ezekiel Hale is back at the front with his pitch pipe. He says, “The invitation song this Sunday evening is ‘Jesus is coming soon,’ number three-eighty six. Three. Eight.

Six.” I want to cry. I hate this song, the way it rejoices over the “many” who “will meet their doom” and the way “the trumpets will sound” as though it’s a party. I sing the words

I can agree with. But only half-heartedly. My voice will be misconstrued if I sing this song too loud. If I sing the words I don’t believe. My heart flickers like a candle and goes out, because I can neither fully join in, nor can I be silent with the scrutiny of my mother beside me and the other members around me.

Finally, it is time for the announcements. Henry Johnson says, “Sister Eva Wright is sick. The Hales will be travelling this week. The Jordans are going through some financial difficulties and have asked for our prayers. There’s a gospel meeting at

Somerville church of Christ next week with Jack Stilton and they’d all be happy to see you out there.” I don’t remember exactly what might have been said, but these were the types of announcements made on a typical Sunday night.

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Then come the minutes of the business meeting. I don’t really listen, but the list is a monotonous repetition in form:

Decision, come to by the men, without consultation of the congregation that will affect everyone.

Finally, Henry Johnson says, “If anyone has any questions, please come to the front after services.”

I know no one there would really answer my questions. I know they will answer with evasions, which they believe are truths.

Finally, it is time for the closing prayer.

I don’t listen, so I can’t tell you what is said.

I sway in self-doubt, saying my own prayer, manically repeating, “Please God, just let me out of this service, this place.”

I don’t even finish the prayer as I’m supposed to, with the customary “In Christ’s name, Amen.” Instead I just hug my arms to myself, and hope no one will notice my tears, that I won’t have to explain the overwhelming sorrow I feel. It is the sorrow I feel when I turn my anger from its source and turn it on myself like an autopsy knife, dissecting my own thoughts rather than the problems with the doctrines in the church.

When the Amen is said, I rush to the door, and to the car. I drive away, crying. I am home from college for a long weekend or else I wouldn’t be at a Sunday evening

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service at all. I wouldn’t be here crying in my car, wanting to leave early to get back to school.

Then I thank God for allowing me to leave, to have the relief of leaving. Maybe

I’ll go to hell for the heresy of merely wanting to leave a church service. But I can’t stay here anymore.

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Epilogue: Refuse of Things Lost

My relationship to the church of Christ, even now that I’ve left filters through every chapter of this project. Because of that, I believe it’s necessary to describe the journey of my questioning and finally leaving the church, a journey that overlaps the other narrative strains, sometimes visibly, and at other times invisibly. What I gained and lost in that journey still overwhelms me at times, from the many friends and mentors I left behind in order to leave the church, to the sense of peace that has come with a new, far more generous understanding of humanity than that of the church of Christ.

My decision to leave the church of Christ was a long time coming. It certainly did not happen overnight, and I wasn’t sure until the end that I would leave. It really started when I was a child, though I didn’t think of it that way then. In the church of Christ, there is a strong emphasis on searching the scriptures for yourself and coming to conclusions based on the scripture alone. Though there is an unspoken consensus about what you should find there, the implication is that there is room for questions—and for some particularly ‘difficult’ scriptures this continues to be the case, as in the decision women make about whether to wear a head covering when “praying or prophesying.” However, nearly every time I had what I considered to be a reasonable question—or even an objection—I was either immediately shut down or my question was evaded altogether.

I once asked a question in Bible study79 about whether dancing was ever okay.

Tim Sutton, the teacher of the Bible class and preacher for the congregation, said, “Well,

I suppose, if a husband were to dance alone with his wife, it might be okay.” We moved on from this question and I kept my objections to myself.

79 Women were allowed to speak in Bible study, but not in worship services.

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The reasoning for the prohibition of dancing comes from various lists in the Bible condemning “lasciviousness.”80 However, the Bible has no verse specifically banning dancing, and there is even an account of King David “dancing before the Lord.”81

Because of this, I thought some dancing could be distinguished from lascivious dancing.

However, most believed that even if all dancing wasn’t sinful that one should still avoid all forms of dancing to avoid the possibility of lasciviousness.82 Some also want to avoid even the appearance of sinfulness.83

The insistence seemed overzealous to me and neglected the kinds of dancing that could just be fun and didn’t involve close contact between members of the opposite sex or involve movements designed to arouse lust in others. Some church members took the position to an extreme as when I was at a sleepover with the girls of my church at

Andrew and Sheila Hale’s house. The Hales—a family of ten at the time—were one of the strictest families in the church. They believed the verse that said that women should be “keepers at home”84 meant that wives should stay at home and take care of the house.

They believed that women should grow their hair extremely long and never wear pants.

When I went to church there, most women wore dresses or skirts to church but often wore pants outside of church (this has changed somewhat since I left, with pants, particularly pantsuits becoming more accepted for women in church). At the sleepover, we were having fun, playing games and listening to music. At some point we started

80 Mark 7:22; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 4:19; 1 Peter 4:3. 81 2 Samuel 6:16. 82 For example, an article at Cedar Park church of Christ says about dancing, “If it even looks like it could be sinful, don’t do it”[emphasis in the original]. Gary Richards, “Should Christians Dance or Even Go to Dances?” 83 1 Thessalonians 5:22: “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” 84 Titus 2:5. There was some flexibility in what this meant as nearly all of the women in my family worked, as did many of the other women in the church.

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square dancing with each other to some country song we all really liked. While Sheila and Andrew’s two sons were home, they were in their rooms, so it was just us girls dancing. (This is important as we were, of course, presumed to be heterosexual, so it was thought unlikely that we would arouse each other). When Sheila Hale saw us dancing, she said, “I’m so disappointed in you girls.” All of us stopped immediately, shame spreading around the room. Maybe some of the girls were also angry, but most blushed at

Sheila’s words.

It was perhaps this moment that led me to question the church’s stance on dancing. I’m not sure, but I know I carried that shame around with me and that I didn’t agree with Sheila’s condemnation of our lighthearted fun. Later, I would dance in the school play in a way that I didn’t believe was lascivious. When Sheila heard about it from her nephew, she confronted me about it, saying, “I heard you were dancing in the school play,” to which I responded, “It wasn’t lascivious.” She never raised the subject with me again.

It was moments like these that started the long journey to questioning the church and its doctrines. At the time, I believed I was just trying to understand the scripture better to avoid sin and serve God. Interactions like I had with Tom Seaton and Sheila

Hale, among others, led me to question individuals within the church, not the church itself or its doctrines, and certainly not God. My belief in God, specifically the Christian

God, was at the heart of everything in my life—my fear of him, and my attempts to believe he loved me, doubting not his capacity to love, but my own worthiness to be loved, and trying to feel his love for me. And sometimes I did. I remember, at times, feeling homesick for Heaven. I most often felt his love, though, when I sang. I loved

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singing, and still do. “Love Lifted Me” and “I’ll Fly Away” were a couple of my favorite hymns that consistently made me happy when we sang them because they spoke of both my love for God and his love for me.

The next step began at college, which I feared would lead me away from the church. We had been warned about atheist professors who would try to make us doubt our faith, but I was going to a Southern Baptist College. We were also warned about the

Baptists, as we were about every other denomination. I was excited about college, though, because my high school really hadn’t challenged me and I so wanted to learn.

Bagby College awarded me a full tuition scholarship, and while Agnes Scott College had technically awarded me more money, the overall cost at Bagby was lower, and that factor ultimately determined my choice. So, with the same excitement and fear many students face when going off to college, I went. I should say, at this moment, that my relationship with my family then was tense, in part because of a boyfriend I had at the time, and in part because of my attempts to assert my independence. I packed up my car with everything I owned when I left for college, and I seriously considered never coming back.

But this had nothing directly to do with the church.

When I began college, I was worried about a rule they had about no hats or headscarves in chapel, which we were required to attend every Tuesday. At the time, I believed in wearing a head covering when I worshipped, and so I emailed them about the rule. They emailed me back, granting me an exception I never took advantage of, so afraid I was of standing out. I justified this choice to myself by thinking that it wasn’t really worship if it was following Baptist doctrines, because Baptists weren’t really

Christians. So I sat quietly in chapel, refusing to sing with the organ and listening, often

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quietly raging about what I thought were incomplete, willfully ignorant readings of scripture. I did listen though, and sometimes the sermons seemed harmless, and did little to flap me. At others, I raged inwardly, rarely letting my friends at Bagby know just how upset the sermons made me.

I did talk about my faith with my friends at Bagby. While the school itself was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, women from many denominations attended, including Pentacostals, Methodists, Presbyterians, nondenominational

Christians85, and even Episcopalians. At times, conversations were charged with anger and fear. I once told one of my classmates that I had doubted my salvation, and she snapped at me, saying that I wasn’t saved if I had ever doubted my salvation. Most conversations, however, were thoughtful and amicable. I saw my friends’ devotion, how they highlighted their Bibles and tried to live godly lives. I saw their generosity and kindness. It was seeing my friends’ zeal and love that, more than anything, made me start doubting the church I had grown up in. The thought that friends who were as devoted as I was to studying and following the Bible could be destined for Hell, just because they reached different conclusions than I did began to bother me, and over time, the more I loved my Bagby sisters, the more repugnant the idea became to me until I had to give it

85 Nondenominational Christians are distinct from the church of Christ, which claims to be nondenominational, in that they represent a wide swath of beliefs and practices and do not typically take on the name “church of Christ,” or specifically adhere to the doctrines of the church of Christ. Examples in Minneapolis include Sojourn Campus Church (https://sojourncampuschurch.org/), Cross Culture Community Church (https://crossculturemn.org/), and The Urban Refuge Church (https://www.theurbanrefuge.com/). Examples in Alabama include Cornerstone Word of Life Church in Madison, Alabama, (https://cwol.org/); Desperation Church in Cullman, Alabama, (https://desperationchurch.tv/); and The Rock Church in Pelham, Alabama, (http://www.rockofshelbycounty.org/).

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up altogether. I had never faced this situation before because, although many of my friends from school went to church in a variety of denominations, none of them seemed particularly zealous or interested in studying scripture. Whatever their actual faith was, I didn’t see my zeal reflected in them as I did with my Bagby sisters.

The realization that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in a God who would condemn my very passionate, God-loving friends to Hell, made going to church back home very difficult. Not every sermon at Allison Creek church of Christ focused on how other denominations were wrong, but most included negative asides about and comparisons to other denominations. However, I was still afraid I could be wrong—that I was endangering my friends’ souls, my own soul, by not telling them they were wrong in their different conclusions—that something as simple as worshipping with instrumental music could send them to Hell. But my doubts never overcame the sense I had that a God who would punish people for getting such petty details wrong could not be the God I prayed to, that such a God would be unjust. I remember thinking about the large swaths of time when most Christians in Europe were Catholic, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that God would consign hundreds of years of Catholics to Hell.

The question of God’s justice toward people sincerely following his word wasn’t the only reason I was questioning the church of Christ. In my first year of college, I was required to take Old Testament 101 and New Testament 101. Before I started the class, I thought it was going to be a giant waste of time, as I had spent my whole life studying the entire Bible in depth. I knew the Bible quite well, and didn’t see the point of spending a year studying a Baptist perspective of the Bible. However, the class was transformative for my understanding of scripture. Little things like the fact we didn’t know who wrote

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the fact that they had been written long after all of

Paul’s letters were things that were entirely new to me. The idea that priests had edited the works of Isaiah and Jeremiah and even Genesis was startling to someone who had believed that we knew all of the authors of the books of the New Testament except for

Hebrews, and that each book had been directly inspired by God. The idea of someone editing direct inspiration shocked me, and it destabilized my understanding of the book I had so long studied. It also troubled me that Allison Creek church of Christ had largely accepted without question the belief that Matthew had been written by Matthew, even though the title had only been added much later. If they had accepted the current version without question, what if they were wrong about how to read it as well? That the canonization of scripture was a question largely believed to be divine providence, despite the fact that there was clear evidence that the canonization of certain books of the Bible and not others had been influenced by human rather than divine motives, troubled me greatly. What if there were books I hadn’t read that were essential to following God?

What if the books that were included weren’t divinely inspired at all? I don’t know that I formed these questions in full at the time, but I know there were aspects of them in the thoughts I was having about the church of Christ, and that further destabilized the idea that they were the one true church and that all other denominations were going to hell.

I knew that to voice my thoughts in the church of Christ would result in them telling me, “God’s ways are higher than our ways,”86 and expecting me to step in line. Or,

86 This refers to Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

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I would be invited to study with someone on the topic until I was brought to believe as they did or expose myself as someone questioning the core of their (our) belief system.

So, I said nothing of my doubts to anyone in the church. I went on worshipping with them as though nothing had changed, while inwardly questioning all of it. So, I decided to take steps to determine if my feelings were just about Allison Creek church of

Christ, or if there was some personal ill will fueling my doubts. I had had issues with various people in the church like the tiff with Sheila Hale over dancing, or the feelings of being left out by the other young people in the church, but I wondered if it was bigger than that, if the problems I was encountering with the church of Christ’s doctrine were pervasive across all congregations of the church of Christ. My first year at Bagby, I attended a small church of Christ near the school. I had heard similar things in that congregation, so I decided to try another church some twenty minutes away from Bagby

College. And after about six months, I found that I was having the same issues with doctrine despite members being nothing but kind to me. And after that, I tried another church of Christ for about three months with the same result. It was then that I knew something had to change, but I was still afraid—afraid of losing my family, my friends from church, and of being left moorless in my faith. So, I stopped attending any church of

Christ when I was at Bagby, but still attended Allison Creek church of Christ whenever I went home. I started attending St. Etheldreda’s Episcopal Church at the invitation of a friend. My advisor in the English Department was also the priest at St. Etheldreda’s, and two of my other English professors attended there.

At first, I was completely overwhelmed by the extreme differences in the way the service was conducted in the Episcopal Church. From the kneeling to the shared cup for

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communion—and using actual wine!—to the use of a scripted liturgy and instrumental music to the very short sermon compared to what I was used to, I found the service a lot to take, as it went against almost everything the church of Christ taught, from the use of a

“man-made” creed like the Apostle’s creed to women speaking in the service to the veneration of saints like St. Etheldreda. However, the Episcopal church turned out to be one of the few denominations that took communion every week—something I still believed I must do. Many of my beliefs on entering the Episcopal Church had honestly not changed that much. I still held to so many of the things that the church of Christ had taught, but I found that the Episcopal Church didn’t pressure believers into any particular set of beliefs as the church of Christ had done. So, I felt free to work out my faith in a space where I could worship and be accepted without much scrutiny. I cannot thank the

Episcopal Church enough for their role in my journey. The open acceptance was what allowed me to continue questioning my own beliefs and figure out where I stood without an overly literal interpretation of the Bible. But during this time when I went home, I would attend both the 8 a.m. service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church and the 10 a.m. service at Allison Creek church of Christ. Needless to say, this was an exhausting and terrifying time in my life, in part because of the stress of attending a church I no longer really believed in, and trying to understand my place in a new church, and figure out if it was even the right church for me. I was afraid that people at Allison87 would see through my attempts to blend in, to appear unfazed. Like the service I described in the final chapter of my memoir, I spent entire sermons scribbling furiously in my notebooks to avoid hearing the sermon—though this never fully worked—and I often would copy out

87 “Allison” is the shorthand members often use to refer to the congregation at the Allison Creek church of Christ.

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my favorite Bible verses when merely doodling didn’t work to tune things out. All during this time, I kept going back and forth over whether to leave. I knew the stakes—though I wasn’t sure how they’d play out. To what extent would my relationship with my family change? I had seen two different aunts be withdrawn from88 (the form of church discipline used to bring backsliders back into the fold) and while there was certainly tension, my family never strictly carried out the measures. Nevertheless, I knew my mother was the strictest in the family on this, often not eating with her own sister when my aunt was withdrawn from, though she did still talk to her. Would it be better to stay and try to effect change from within the church? Would I go to hell for leaving? Would I go to hell for staying?

I asked these questions for months, all while trying to maintain the appearance of being faithful to one church, not dividing myself and my mind between two churches and ways of thinking. My fiancé at the time became increasingly frustrated with my indecision. One might wonder why I wasn’t interested in joining his church—the United

Methodist church—and it was primarily because of its stances on communion (it didn’t take communion weekly) and baptism. It didn’t hold that baptism was required for salvation, although he had been baptized for “the remission of his sins,” as he had told me, which had assuaged my fears about his salvation—I had told two previous boyfriends

I thought they were going to hell, but only after immense pressure to let them know what

I really thought. So, we had both agreed that the Episcopal Church would be a good

88 The idea of withdrawing from members comes from the church disciple laid out in 2 Thessalonians 3:6: “Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.” As for not eating with a member who has been withdrawn from, members of the church of Christ refer to 1 Corinthians 5:11: “But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolator, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.”

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compromise, a place where we could explore our beliefs together. However, that dream never really came to fruition, as Nathan wasn’t nearly as interested in actually working together to figure things out as I was, but rather doggedly pursuing his own understanding of faith to the end. It was one of many dreams of marriage that fell apart shortly after our wedding.

Finally, there came a moment that pushed me over the edge. I was at a service very much like the one I describe in the final chapter of this memoir, and it had been a particularly difficult service for me as the sermon directly addressed the idea that people of other denominations would be condemned to hell. I remember getting angrier and more distressed as the sermon went on, until I was praying for it to be over while trying to resist praying for it to be over, when it was finally done. It was then that the collection plate was passed around. As the men passed the golden looking collection plates from aisle to aisle, I imagined cutting my wrists into the collection plate. The image was so palpable and frightening I could barely breathe. When the service finally ended, I rushed out to my car, and swore to myself I would never set foot in another church of Christ and

I haven’t, not once, since that day. I knew that to continue going to the church of Christ would mean giving up my life in one way or another—I would likely end up committing suicide or becoming a shell of the person I wanted to be.

Of course, the aftermath of leaving has been a tough row to hoe, as they’d say in my family. Leaving has meant developing new, precarious ways of interacting with my family, and often keeping them from really knowing me or trying to bridge those gaps. It has meant seriously considering cutting off all ties, though that has seemed too large a sacrifice—that the love they offer now, and the love they might offer in the future is

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worth working towards, is worth keeping. Their love isn’t something to be thrown away, even if it is incredibly hard to keep trying across the difficulties. I know many queer people have walked away from such situations, and I know those decisions were no easier than my own, and that there is no end to the effects of such a decision, even when we’ve made peace with it.

I have not yet reached that peace myself, but I know I’m on my way. Each time I connect with my family despite the differences, each time I place a necessary boundary between us, I am closer to knowing how to navigate these relationships. In any case, I know the difficulties and questions will return, but each time I will have more tools to help me understand and handle these relationships with empathy and grace.

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