“Sinners go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN,” a sign near Julia Scheeres’s childhood home in rural Indiana reads. “The end is near: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND.”
Scheeres documents a hard childhood under the eye of her born-again, strict protestant parents in her memoir Jesus Land. Her father was a surgeon, while her housewife mother spent her days writing to various international Christian missions and sending them money, while she scrimped at home: Julia recalls being told that they could only use two squares of toilet paper at a time, and being served what her mother called “garbage soup”, made from a week’s worth of frozen plate scrapings and hamburger.
The Scheeres raised their children – Julia and her adopted brothers Jerome and David – according to “biblical” principles. These included monitoring what the children read, listened to and watched on television, and their mother installing an intercom system so that she could listen to her children’s conversations.
And beatings. Julia’s father returned from work every day and punished the kids with clockwork regularity, citing Proverbs 13:24 (“spare the rod, spoil the child”) as justification. The primary victims of her father were her two adopted brothers, Jerome and David, who were both African American. While Julia was disciplined for infractions of the multiple strictures that her unfeeling parents imposed, she does not recall being touched. Jerome and David were beaten, often severely: in one sickening episode, Julia recounts how her father broke David’s arm with a 2x4.
While Jerome ran away and was banned from the house, David and Julia engaged in everyday acts of resistance and rebellion under their parents’s noses. Their greatest acts of bravery were the times they laughed at their mother behind her back, blasting Christian music in their rooms to fool the intercom while they held private conversations. Rather than open defiance – which frequently resulted in David being whipped – the two found other ways to subvert their mother’s rules.
But if they found ways to laugh at things at home, the Indiana heartland was not a laughing matter. As one of the few black kids in that part of rural Indiana, David was subjected to racial slurs. Julia veered between being his protector and ignoring him, trying to melt into the white crowd where, without David by her side, she was invisible.
After a terrifying encounter with a car full of racists, Scheeres uses the environment to show their terror without spelling out how scared she and David had been.
Only as we bump down the gravel lane to our house do I notice the trembling cottonwoods, the frenzied chirruping of sparrows, the dirt devils churning across the back field. On the horizon, heat lightning dances along a column of towering thunderheads. The air is suddenly sweet and cool, refreshing. It’s perfect weather for a tornado.
Eventually, their parents send them to Escuela Caribe: a Christian “re-education” camp in the Dominican Republic, one of several that exist to break the free will of Christian teenagers. When they first arrive, Julia and David are not allowed to use the toilet without someone watching them. They must ask permission to sit, stand, eat and speak. Only by conforming to the rules do they gradually gain privileges. “Jesus is always watching and listening and knowing. You can fool us, but you can’t fool Jesus,” David and Julia are told.
While Julia observes students giving themselves to Jesus during sermons and complies with rules, she stays inside her own world. Her body conforms, but her mind remains rebellious. She and David support each other, even in moments when they are not allowed to speak to each other, and they develop a secret body language for private communication.
Reading Jesus Land reminds me that defiance doesn’t have to be as loud as a trumpet blast to bring down the walls of the oppressors. The love between David and Julia fortified them against their Christian captors in the Dominican Republic, and their faith in each other was enough to withstand the appalling treatment they received at the hands of people who insisted that God’s love demanded a beating.
Defiance comes in many forms. As a US citizen considering life under Donald Trump for the next four years, I know I do not have to be out in the streets demonstrating every day. I can find other ways not to conform with the demands of the new government while maintaining an illusion of participation. Resistance does not have to be a surface activity in order to thwart the demands of power.
