giving and receiving Christmas presents, eating turtle soup at my grandparents’ house. Anything that didn’t fit in with the life I was supposed to live. Anything that prevented me from getting closer to God.
Usually running late, which my father blamed on my mother, we piled into one of the rotating, fixer-upper, ancient Cadillacs and drove past weathered barns and billboards that urged us to “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco.” Stacked on top of one another in the car, we grumbled and complained. We were bored. Jim took up too much room; Ed was deliberately bumping his legs up and down, causing Liz, who was seated on his lap, to lunge forward almost into the front seat. Wanda wanted the window rolled up because her AquaNet-ed hair was getting messed up, and Paul was sure that I had deliberately elbowed him. Within minutes my father yelled, “Would you kids PIPE IT DOWN!”
It was an hour and a half drive to Evansville, where we attended church services at a seedy gray building that the church rented from the Order of Owls, a fraternal society founded in South Bend, Indiana, in 1904 open to white men only. The church had no connection to the Owls, except to rent “The Owl’s Home” on Saturday afternoon. The church did not build or own houses of worship. This would have cost money and deprived it of money needed to preach the gospel to the world. Instead, rented movie theaters, Masonic lodges, auditoriums, and various other public spaces served as our “church” for Saturday services.
During the long ride, my father railed against the evils of drugs, miniskirts, evolutionists, and women’s libbers, all of which seemed to have overtaken America like a scourge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the time of Woodstock, the Summer of Love, the long-haired Beatles, and women burning their bras.
Incensed that women no longer knew “their place,” Dad made his case: “God created a role for everything in the universe. Just think what would happen if a river thought it could be a tree! God is not the author of confusion, it says that in the Bible, and women are confusing the way God intended them to be. They’re so mixed up these days that they’re mixing everybody else up. A wife is supposed to submit herself to her husband, for he is her head even as Christ is the head of the Church.”
The ministers often quoted this verse from the book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, to justify why wives should neither make decisions on their own nor work outside the home if their husbands didn’t want them to. In all things, one’s husband had final say.
“And Mama,” my father continued, “you should know that. It won’t work, with you pullin’ gee, and me pullin’ haw.” I imagined my father hitched to the plow, calling, “Haw!” while my mother shook her head and pulled in a different direction, “Gee!” He often accused her of deliberately undermining him. Which she did: covering for my older teenage siblings when they went out on Friday nights, the Sabbath, and turning a blind eye to my older sisters rolling up the waistband of their skirts to shorten them when they left for school.
I tuned out my father’s loud, tiresome, and contentious diatribes that made my heart jump and immersed myself in a word search puzzle or reading Trixie Belden. With books, I learned the useful art of tuning out things I didn’t want to hear.
When I was in my teens and the 1970s women’s movement—Ms. magazine; Roe v. Wade; Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem song “I Am Woman”—was in full swing, I challenged my father on this sexist and patriarchal attitude that I thought all religions should have long abandoned. While I still believed the Bible was God’s sacred word and contained laws that regulated how we should live, I thought the Bible could be interpreted in more than one way. I questioned why things had to remain the same.
I argued, “Daddy, I don’t believe that God created men and women unequal, or that one of us is supposed to serve the other. We’re all the same in the eyes of God.”
“Tater Doll,” my father literally threw up his hands and said, “you’re so stubborn, a team of twenty mules ain’t gonna change your mind. You would argue with the devil if you thought you were right!”
I took that as a compliment.
When we arrived at church, a deacon—maybe Mr. Davis or Mr. Cooper—stood at the door and greeted us with a big smile and outstretched hand. “Mr. Himsel, Mrs. Himsel.” Close to 200 people attended services with us every Saturday. They came from the tristate area: southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and northwest Kentucky. Until the mid-1970s, they were all white. Growing up, I was oblivious to the lack of racial diversity in the church. Though why would any black person wish to join a church that stated dogmatically that blacks were intended by God to be slaves because their ancestor, Noah’s son Ham, was cursed to be “a servant of servants unto his brethren”?
My mother greeted other women warmly by their first names, while my father offered a formal handshake and addressed everyone by “Mr.” and “Mrs.” We walked down the aisle to claim a row of hard metal chairs, where we would sit for the next two hours. Wanda, eight years older than me, and Mary, four years older, often sat with friends they’d made. My older brothers, Jim, Ed, and Paul, sat with us. Sarah, the youngest, sat between my parents and occupied herself with her coloring books. Abby, Liz, John, and I—all of us a little over a year apart in age—were clumped together, and we shared a hymnal, passed notes, and poked each other if someone was yawning loudly or if a whisper had become too loud.
In the back was a soda vending machine. The deacons had placed a piece of paper over the coin slot so we could not buy soda on the Sabbath, as we were forbidden to shop or spend money. While we were, of course, not allowed to work on the Sabbath, the church shifted its position on what exactly constituted “work” whenever “new truths” were revealed to Mr. Armstrong. At one point, we were not even allowed to buy gas for the car to drive to services; later, a new truth emerged to allow us to buy gas if it was an emergency. It was difficult to keep track of the ever-changing rules, and just as I’d figured something out, it was altered. It felt like walking on spiritual quicksand.
I liked to turn around in my chair and look at all of the other church members. I had yet to learn that staring was rude. There was a pale, emaciated woman with jet black hair. She fascinated me because she looked so different than everyone else. Only many years later did it occur to me that she was anorexic. Her best friend was one of the heaviest women in the church, a nice lady who would host us in her home when we needed to stay close by to attend church socials on Saturday night or church softball games on Sunday.
I remember being mesmerized by a woman scratching her elbow back and forth in an almost hypnotic way. White flakes fell from her elbow onto her black dress, like stars against a night sky.
Another couple, who had two sons, sat with each other during services, but didn’t live together. Though married, they had been forced to separate because she was previously divorced. According to church doctrine, anyone who got divorced and then remarried must leave his or her current spouse and either return to the one they’d divorced or remain unmarried.
I never knew how the family felt about the rule. If anyone disagreed with church doctrine, they didn’t dare verbalize it. Otherwise, the minister would show up at the house unexpectedly and give them a talking-to. He would remind them that Herbert Armstrong was God’s appointed one. If we wanted to grumble and complain like the Israelites had in the desert to Moses, then, just as the Israelites didn’t make it into the Promised Land, we wouldn’t make it into the World Tomorrow when Jesus returned. Church members lived in fear of those surprise visits.
The ministers had dropped by our house unexpectedly a few times. I never knew exactly why. My oldest sister, Wanda, who was more keenly aware of what was going on, thought it was because they wanted to remind us that they were in control. Or they wanted to make sure our parents were accurately tithing. Wanda surmised that the minister had told my parents not to have more kids, or maybe he was concerned about
