Finding a Church

My brief encounter with the Baptists didn't make a Baptist, but it did show me that attending church was possible.  Now, to find a church that fit my taste.

My next door neighbors were Catholic.  Actually, the mother was.  The father converted to Catholicism I suspect because he knew it was more trouble than it was worth not to.  Their children were kinda sorta Catholic.  The older daughter was mostly interested in pissing off her mother, and church being her mother's thing, she broke all the rules as a point of honor.  The younger daughter went along with it, especially since the swag was so nice.  She was Catholic in the way that most white Americans are, a family habit, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving.  When she married, her mother made sure it was to a good Catholic boy with a big church wedding in a Southern belle-esque dress made by Mom.  I think after that, the Catholic dragon-mother could draw a quavering breath and die having accomplished her essential life's work of organizing the perfect Catholic wedding.

The mother spoke sweetly and lovingly of her faith.  Pictures of Jesus and Mary, with their tender hearts exposed, had pride of place in the spotless mobile home.  I was invited to attend church one fine day, and while there, asked the priest what was necessary to join the church.

He gave me a look of utter consternation.  In orthodox Judaism, a rabbi has a duty to make three vigorous attempts to dissuade anyone who seeks conversion.  I think this priest had the same mandate, because he informed me of the many obstacles to membership, and concluded with, "Do your parents know about this?"

I was too embarrassed to tell my parents about this fiasco.  There was no way they were going to attend that many meetings with the priest, bring me to catechism, and sign off on the arduous process of me becoming a Catholic, a faith that my mother considered as alien as Mars and my father considered a silly superstition of his youth.  So I signed off on the idea of being Catholic, though I liked the stateliness of it, the claims to ecclesiastical authority, the authenticity of the first church, the one the others came from.

Country Life

My mother had had it with the barrio.  She gave my father an ultimatum, and we moved to the 'burbs.

These were not the 'burbs of clean, cookie cutter houses, at least not completely.  Those are the planned development suburbs.  We moved to the exurbs, rightly speaking, what used to be rural.  Developers had built some subdivisions, but there were swaths of land with either nothing on them, or small, rural homes or mobiles.  We moved into a small house a man had built for himself and his family that had odd dimensions and crooked stuff, a house that was an admirable first effort at building a house by a person who never had and never would again.  I got the unfinished attic, with nothing between me and the ground but some boards so flimsily applied to the framing that I could have easily fallen out of the house.  My father had it jacked up three feet and had us shoveling dirt underneath for a quarter a load.  That's how my ambitious, athletic sister got her allowance.  I merely skipped lunch and used my lunch money for my own affairs.

I had reached puberty, the time when young people strive to do something.  As I mentioned before, my longings went in the direction of religion, and I began to look around for some kind of instruction.  This being the rural southeast, there was a church on about every other corner:  an Assembly of God, a Pentacostal church, several Baptist churches, a Methodist church.  The biggest, most luxurious church in our town was called the First Baptist Church, situated near the corner of a farm-to-market road and the highway, walking distance from Dairy Queen.  This was the first church I attended as a youth.

I had all but forgotten the bible school mandate to find a church.  What I found was that on Sunday morning, a church bus drove throughout out neighborhood picking up whatever kid wanted to get on it.  One day I got on the church bus and went to church.

It was a nice, big church, with nice pews and a lot of people.  There were a lot of lights and windows, so it was bright inside.  The preacher gave a noisy but kind-hearted sermon, at the conclusion of which he asked if anyone wanted to be saved.  I was the first one up.  I'm not sure I wanted to be saved so much as I wanted to belong to something in this new town, but saved I was.  They all welcomed me into the church and took my picture, which hung on the bulletin board for some weeks.  I was wearing a dark paisley dress with a large white pointy collar and had my long hair pulled back in a ponytail.  I looked not so much happy as eager.

I think I might have gone back twice.  Other than talking about Jesus, the church didn't seem to *do* anything.  Today I would say that it lacked a sense of cohesion.  In the 1970s, the culture wars had not heated up to the extent that the Baptist church was punching social issues--that has a lot of energy, and cohesion, though of a kind I am glad I got to avoid.  In the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was mostly a large, nice church of the Southern variety.  After church, we ate fried chicken after church, drank iced tea, and gossiped about the townspeople.  It was mostly just a Sunday go to meeting social event.

I was too Hispanic and too educated to feel that comfortable at the First Baptist Church.  My friends from school who were in this church were the pillars of society, the solid, reliable sorts, people who were acquaintances but with whom I did not have any real connection.

It just wasn't for me.

Bible School

Three blocks from my home was a Baptist Mission, set as a light to the moral darkness of the Mexican neighborhood.  It was run and, I suspect, largely financed by a family that owned a bakery.  The treats they gave out were whole cakes and packages of sweet rolls.  I suspect some of the kids came expressly for the pastry.  I know I enjoyed taking home those pink, coconut-covered confections, tasteless but for sugar.

The meetings were twice weekly, I think, after school on Wednesdays and on Saturdays.  First a preacher, Brother Something or Other, would give a sermon about accepting Jesus into your heart.  We would sing some Baptist songs, often with hand movements.  I remember "His Banner Over Me Is Love," our hands making a banner over us.  There were some good songs, and unlike the Catholic church, these were meant to be sung with gusto by the congregation.  I liked that.

After the initial program, there would be some classes.  We would be taught things I can't remember about Jesus and stuff.  I do remember the crafts: God's eyes, plaques, various flowery things.  We got to use glue and fire and scissors.  We took things home.

One day, frustrated that no one was accepting Jesus into their heart, Mrs. McQuorter reminded us of a boy who had been hit by a car and died.  To her knowledge, he, too, had not accepted Jesus into his heart.  He was in hell now, we were told, sadly.  I thought that wasn't fair.  I didn't know if he was in hell.  I kind of doubted it.  But I didn't like the idea that she would know the eternal destiny of a nine-year-old boy simply because he didn't do what she said, or what the Baptist Mission into the Mexican neighborhood said.  I wasn't sure I believed in hell anyway, or heaven, though I kind of did believe in Jesus.  Pictures of him were so compelling.

I remember sitting on the stairs next to a girl from around.  One of the boys stopped by and reminded her of what the group of boys had done to her.  She just nodded and looked away passively.  One afternoon as I was walking home, a boy named Tony tried to grab me for a gang rape.  I kicked him in the groin and ran.  The older boys laughed at this.  None of the others pursued, and Tony was doubled over in pain.  I forgot to tell my mother, who was lost in her depression anyway.  The incident didn't seem particularly noteworthy, since girls were raped all the time in the barrio.  Escaping rape was something you did, until your ticket got punched.

Summer brought vacation bible school.  We were bussed out to a camp near Katy.  The girls stayed in girl shacks and the boys in boy shacks.  There was a swimming pool where we spent much of the day.  In the mornings and evenings there were sermons and crafts, and after dinner a G-rated movie.  It was at vacation bible school that I had my first kiss.  Victor.  He was a perfect son of Aztlan, with the noble profile, long black hair, and the body of a young warrior.  He was sixteen--I was twelve at best.  I was honored that he chose me when there were so many other prettier girls who would have liked to kiss him.  I was later told that Victor wanted my virginity.  He was too nice to break me without my consent, and it never occurred to me to have sex at the age of twelve.  My father had already explained to me that sex was something you did after you graduated from college, so naturally, in my mind, my sex life would begin once I had a college degree, a professional job, and my own apartment.  I saw myself taking a lover in my own apartment, not in the woods at vacation bible school.

I was a suckup and accepted Jesus into my heart.  I've done it several times.  The whole thing is set up that way, with the sermon, the songs, and the big lead up to the popcorn explosion of on-the-spot conversion.  The Protestants have got this thing down to a fine art.  In the Chicano mindset, this was not a big deal, and it wasn't expected to last beyond vacation bible school.  My special spiritual counselor was named Gail.  She was unusual in my world in that she had short hair.  Plus, she was in college, which would be a selling feature with my father, who was always talking about college.  The next step after vacation bible school was to find a Protestant church you felt comfortable in.  Gail was a Methodist, so I thought I'd be a Methodist, too, except there was no Methodist church in the Mexican neighborhood, and I didn't feel particularly inclined to spend all day some Sunday on the 20 Canal city bus looking for a Methodist church that I knew didn't exist.

I just went to the Baptist Mission, and got free cake.

Little Brown Souls

In today's world, adults control all real-time interaction between middle-class children, from their artificial "play dates" to the various school, club, and team meetings.  Children are managed like executives in the board room.  The only freedom children have is on electronic devices where adults cannot literally see the person at the other end of those pixels.  All my mother needed was one look, and if she didn't like what she saw, we didn't get to play.

In the 1970s, children went outside and looked around to see who else was outside playing and went over. It was usually physical, even for girls, and involved complex negotiations, hierarchy, the gives and takes of clans, alliances and enemies, the rules and rituals of games, and the pair bonding of best friends.  It was rich.  I regret that the culture of childhood is being co-opted by the corporate buy buy buy world and the "fear the child molesters" world of helicopter parents to maximize profit.  It is a real loss.  

Immediately next door to us was a widow named Concha who didn't like us climbing her magnolia tree, but we did it anyway.  Her house was a rose velvet museum, everything in perfect order, smelling of old age.  I think I was allowed in once.  Next door to her was a house full of girls born at one-year intervals ranging in age from slightly older than me to the same age as my younger sister.  

We had entered heaven.

They were Catholic, of course, though they seldom went to church.  Their mother was not very mobile, and their father didn't want to spend his one precious day off at church.  Somewhere in the wreck of a house was a rhinestone tiara with a white veil for someone's first communion.  I remember it being passed around and tried on, someone being slapped, someone crying, someone laughing and running out of the room, the veil being ripped, and the bauble being tossed who knows where on the floor until the next episode.  Whose tiara it was is lost in time, one of the younger girls's I think, but when there are six girls in a small house, nothing really belongs to anyone.

Sunday morning in the barrio was calm.  The men had exhausted themselves from the riotous drunkenness of Saturday night, and were home with hangovers.  Mass was held every hour on the hour until about eleven, and the respectable folk could be seen walking to church in the morning.  My best friend Linda and I went a few times.  Immaculate Heart of Mary on 76th street.  We didn't have any fancy clothes.  Linda was Catholic, but had only had the barest instruction on what to do.  It was a strange world to me, bowing and dabbing holy water on yourself.  I didn't dab any water on myself, but I envied her the water, the knowing of stuff I didn't know, stuff that carried a numinous promise; I envied her for belonging to this large and opulent thing.  We saw and listened, knelt and sat, sang.  A nun sang by herself from behind.  Afterwards, people spilled out into the street.

Then came the real fun: the bakery.  I don't know where I got the money, but there was always money for Mexican pastries.  My favorites were the crumbly polverones with some kind of jam on them.  We stuffed our faces on the walk home.  

I went to confession with her once, and tried to confess some stuff, but didn't know how to do it or what to do with the instructions I was given.  I had to get the priest's hints as to what I'd done that was a sin, because there was no such concept in my home, just the vague sense that not doing what your mother says would bring serious consequences in the here and now, not in the world to come.  About seven "Our Fathers" and two "Hail Marys" was my penance.  The D. girls knew the Hail Mary, so we said that a bit.  We saw girls on the terrace in white, with their white dresses and tiaras, adoring family nearby taking pictures.  Latinos love girls in pretty dresses.  I suspected this "first communion" thing was just an excuse to put a bunch of beautiful girls in puffy dresses and adore them.  In a few years, the dresses would be brightly colored, only this time the celebration would be called the "Quinceanera."  

I lost interest in the Catholic religion, though I loved the trappings.  The sermons were not very engaging, and the pastries really weren't worth getting up that early in the morning.

Artificial Emotion

Ophiel, that great holy fool of 20th century occultism, stated that emotions are harder to control than thought.

Though I agree with most of what Ophiel says, and wish to God I had been around to edit his work when it was first published, I am going to disagree with him on this one.

Thoughts are harder to control than emotions, at least for me.

I came to hoodoo through an offhand reference by John Michael Greer in one of his articles or books, perhaps a tome on natural magic, in which he praised it and gave some suggestions for baths and floor washes.  The first time I did a quasi-hoodoo floor wash, an amazing thing happened.  It became impossible not to control my thoughts.  I lay in bed waiting for my demons to assault, and nothing happened.  I just lay there, happy as a clam, while my impervious-to-demons husband snoozed at my side.

I was hooked!

I began making up tinctures according to European natural magic correspondences, and consecrated them with Cabalistic ritual.  This worked well--and still does, especially for elemental and astrological condition products.  But I had a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the European herbology for general spell work, and began looking into hoodoo.

American herbology.  I think my deep bodies wanted an American witchcraft.  I am only half European.  Those European witchy vibes don't entirely suit me.  As I began getting into hoodoo, I found that the "vibe" just worked.

I discovered that any product is like a mini-spell that lasts for about a day, or as long as the product is on the body.  So I began dousing myself with mini-spells to get myself to do and create and be what I wanted.

I have a special oil made up for love, to support the energetic health of my relationship.  It contains a number of ingredients: rose and lavender for love; ginger for passion; coriander for fidelity; rosemary for female spirituality; and a lodestone named "marriage" to draw.  The other night I put some of the oil on my body and lay in bed reading.  My husband was downstairs on the sofa with the dog and iPad.  The oil began to work very powerfully on ME.  I felt almost like I was being pulled down through the bed, through the floor, through the ceiling, through the world, down to him where he lay.  I recognized it as an artificial emotion, one created by the oil, and wondered.

Do I really want this artificial emotion?

I already love my husband.  Do I need to love THAT much more?  I remember thinking that I loved him so much, so terribly much, that I couldn't imagine life without him.

I can't imagine life without him, but if he were to be hit by a falling piano, I'd have to be able to go on.

I can see calling on artificial emotion when things get "off" just to tide us over, or to create long-lasting change, but--wow!--it has to be done judiciously.

The East Side

Coming from an Anglo neighborhood to a Mexican neighborhood was not easy at the age of seven. Back in the Anglo 'hood, our next-door neighbors the Torres children were Mexican-American, and Catholic, and they spoke Spanish to their parents, but the culture was contained within the precincts of their severe but brightly colored home. Theirs was a home of rectitude. Everything was right, according to the tradition of Mexican order. Father sat at the head of the table, but the real power, we all knew, was Mamá, and her children were her kingdom. When she announced dinner, they ran calling, “Mandé!” I asked my father what “mandé” meant. He corrected their pronunciation—it should be “Mande Ud.” and said, “It means command me.” Command me! A child asks his parent for an order. My father never made me ask him to command me, and while my mother was clearly the boss of me, she would have been offended at the suggestion that this relationship be framed into language. But they were speaking Spanish, where hierarchic relationships are openly expressed. They were truly “a good family.” If the barrio had been peopled by their sort, there would have been no shock for me but the strangeness of eating candy made of cactus or milk.

But this was not the case.

Most of the children and the families we met were good Mexicans, bounded by Church, family, and the opinion of the neighborhood. But those few who weren't were feral in ways that my mother couldn't have predicted and my father couldn't have dealt with in the funk he was in. We kids were on our own.

Girls followed me home, asking to fight. Boys followed me home, asking to fuck. At ten, I escaped gang rape by kicking the initiating boy in the gonads and running. “We'll get you next time!” They never did, but I knew girls they did get. They laughed about it and teased the girls. We were all in the social soup of the barrio, with no penalties within the law for such offenses.  In the seventies, crimes against women were seldom dealt with in the criminal justice system.  The only—and real—penalty was within the community.

When I was eleven, a boy named David took a shine to me and began to call me on the phone. My father had awakened by this time, and knew what this meant. He went over to David's house and told him not to call. I have no idea what threat was implied, but my father was a large man for the 1970s, six foot tall with an enormous muscled torso, which was almost unheard of for a Mexican--he had a very imposing presence, even menacing. He was a war veteran with the crazies of a person who has been trained to kill, faced death, and come back home.

David never called me again.

God in the Barrio

When I was seven, my father called a family meeting in the den of our house on Howard Drive. He had just gotten back from a two-month trip to San Jose to bury his father. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while, and despite the brill cream he always wore, his hair was sticking out somehow. He was seated at the head of our formal dining table. My mother hung back, letting him speak. She had given us a baby brother a month earlier, and had dark circles under her eyes.

“We’re moving,” he announced. It was the middle of my third grade school year. I did the calcs quickly in my head and said, “At the end of the year?” He pretended to consider my position, paused, and said, “No. Now.”

I was bewildered. This must have something to do with Death, whose giant claw had reached down and scooped him from us, the old him, the regular, almost unnoticeable him, and returned to us a disjointed likeness of him, eyes too bright, lacking in all the customary comings and goings, listening to an inner melody at once more dissonant, more tempting, and more dangerous than the tidy humming of our domestic world.

On moving day, he drove us to a house that would have fit inside our living room on Howard Drive. I suspect this was the first my mother saw of it. They set up their queen-sized bed in the front room, and put all three kids in the bedroom. Most of our stuff didn’t make it into the house. I’m sure the idea was to put it somewhere else for a while, but I never saw much of it again: my Japanese dolls, my mother’s china, the yard tools.

My mother withdrew into the baby as much as I’m sure she could. We felt odd walking down the new street, as a dozen predatory eyes appraised us from every porch. On Saturday night, the barrio rioted. Music with a pounding bass, trumpets, and accordions poured from houses and bars. Men screamed, trilled, and laughed. Gunshots sounded. Sunday mornings the detritus of Saturday night muggings littered the ditches.

My father converted the front porch into two rooms, and in one he set up a business like his father’s: income tax, immigration, notary public. During the day he met customers, mostly men who looked hard at me for reasons I didn’t really understand but didn’t like. At sundown, after the evening meal, the shopkeepers in the barrio would close the doors, bolt the iron cages, and pull the goods out of the windows. Children would be called inside. Women would retreat into the hintermost parts of the houses. At this point, my father would get up from the dinner table, take out his car keys, and leave with a slam of the door. He would stop on the front steps, clear his throat, and spit. He was surveying the street, perhaps even smelling it. He was wondering what to do, what to have. Maybe he was never consciously aware of what he was doing. Maybe it was always a perfect surprise to him that he ended up at Merino’s Bar every single night. That other world, the night world, with its population of drunks, prostitutes, dealers, cons, and men with wives back home, that became his principal world, his topsy-turvy home, and our world was a place he visited when the stupid sun was up.

I’d never had a particular interest in God when we lived on Howard Drive. I liked the look of the kids in Sunday School the time or two we’d been taken to the church down the street, but it was a social instinct. I had wanted to join in the churchy games.

Now, however, when I lay in bed at night after our crazy days, a prayer took shape on my lips. I didn’t know what a proper prayer was shaped like, but here goes: “God, I know you exist. Send help.” I said it every night, through the whippings at school, playground taunting, playmates who didn’t speak English, my mother’s post-partum depression, fistfights, head lice, near escape from gang rape, shootings on the street, missionaries who declared they loved our little brown bodies but didn’t, and just plain living through the seventies in Chicanoland.