Getting Honest: A Memoir of a Spiritual Journey

By Volina Cross

For the young Volina, there are worlds she reads about in the magazines her mother brings home - beyond her own world filled with domestic violence, frightening racism, and poverty. Volina will escape from Mississippi. But will she escape from her past, from who she really is? "Getting Honest" is the compelling, poignant memoir of Volina Cross, a w

• Language: English
• Publisher: SKR Books
• Release date: Dec 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781939288882

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Getting Honest: A Memoir of a Spiritual Journey

Getting Honest

A Memoir of a Spiritual Journey

Volina Cross

F  I  R  S  T    E  D  I  T  I  O  N

Print ISBN: 978-1-939288-87-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954300

Copyright © 2014 by Volina Cross

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission from the publisher.

Published by SKR Books,

An Imprint of Wyatt-MacKenzie

Surely you desire truth in the inner parts;

you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.

Psalm 51:6 (NIV)

Dedication

To my father and mother.

For their strength.

For doing the best they could with what they knew.

Dedicated as well to the thousands of battered women.

May you find strength and peace. May you find your voice.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Maria, my granddaughter, who never ceased reminding me, Grandma you should write a book, every time I shared a story or an incident from my life. Sincere and warm thanks to my daughter Kathy and son Shaley, Jr. for their unwavering support and encouragement. Thanks to my niece Piccorar Johnson who willingly accepted the challenge and responsibility to be my front line person in Mississippi, which made me feel safe as I spent many, many days there to get this work off the ground. Thanks to my nephew Anthony Johnson for his support with the many details that always seemed to need attention. My heart will forever cherish the gratitude shown me by Debborah Stewart who opened her doors to me at a crucial time in this process. Sincere thanks to Bob and Nancy Clemens for their faithfulness in keeping things together on the home front.

Table of Contents

Prologue

C H A P T E R   O N E

Pages from the Outside World

C H A P T E R   T W O

The Way Things Were in Mississippi

C H A P T E R   T H R E E

The Great Light

C H A P T E R   F O U R

Moving Away

C H A P T E R   F I V E

Indecision

C H A P T E R   S I X

On the Move

C H A P T E R   S E V E N

As a Piece of Steel

C H A P T E R   E I G H T

Russell

C H A P T E R   N I N E

Understanding

C H A P T E R   T E N

Kicking and Screaming the Whole Way

C H A P T E R   E L E V E N

The Reverend Dukes

C H A P T E R   T W E L V E

I Give

C H A P T E R   T H I R T E E N

Going Back

C H A P T E R   F O U R T E E N

Full Circle

Epilogue

Prologue

He was holding a singletree yoke, a wooden bar off the wagon that the mule’s harness would be hooked to, and he was beating her with it. I could see her body reeling from side to side as she tried to keep her footing and her balance and evade the blows.

What’s the earliest recollection you have of your mother?

On the surface, the question, asked as part of an assignment in my first class – Introduction to Ministry – at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary to get me to begin the process of looking more deeply inward, seemed pretty straightforward. For most students, maybe it was. But for me, I would soon come to learn that memories didn’t come easy. The transforming process I was to undergo at Garrett would be grueling, and often painful, an education unlike any education I had ever received. Previous scholastic work was easy by comparison. You read, you memorized, you regurgitated. At Garrett, the answers were expected to come from within.

For weeks I held the question in my mind, unable to uncover the first memory of my mother. Some memories came to mind – memories of my father, memories of games played with my brothers and sisters, memories of our little four-room house that sat in the middle of a clearing in the woods. Two of the rooms were used for sleeping, the boys in the back room and the girls in the same room with my parents, a room with two double beds and a fireplace. That room also served as a living/sitting room. There was a kitchen and off the kitchen was a room toward the back of the house that we called the dining room, where mother kept her many jars of canned goods for the winter months, jars of tomatoes, beans, yellow peaches – all stacked on shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

I remembered many childhood days from that house. But the first memory of my mother stubbornly remained hidden.

Finally, it came to me. And when it did, it all flooded back at once. I was watching from the porch of our little home, watching my parents in the front yard. My father was wielding that singletree and brutally beating my pregnant mother. I could see myself standing there, a little four-or five-year-old girl, with a horrified look on my face, wondering why my father was doing this. I think I concluded that my mother must have done something wrong. After all, that was what parents did to children during the era in which I grew up. When the child misbehaved or failed to do chores the child was punished by being whipped. Mother must have done something very wrong.

I carried that assumption with me through many years of adulthood. It would later influence my choice of a husband and have a devastating effect on my marriage. But of course I was not consciously aware that I carried that memory of my mother or held that assumption. At Garrett, the inward journey would help me face this kind of thing head on. It was not easy.

After that question – asked, and now answered in a most unexpected way, – I would continue the difficult process of awareness. I would look back and come, in time, to contemplate the force that had been, perhaps all along, pushing me forward, at times protecting me, at times guiding me, moving me improbably out of rural Mississippi, paving the way to Garrett and beyond, and – somewhere along the way – forcing me to get honest.

C H A P T E R   O N E

Pages From the Outside World

My mother and father fought often. The sudden memory of the beating was a dramatic example of a constant tension in the house. It was surprising that the memory had been hidden for so long, pushed back into the recesses of my mind, but I had always remembered the tension. As a little girl I didn’t always understand what it was about. Looking back, it seems likely that a lot of it must simply have been the manifestation of the unrelenting strain of raising fourteen children in the penury of Mississippi. As I continued through Garrett and beyond, I would remember other things as well. My childhood would return to me.

My father worked the forty acres that his father helped him purchase as a wedding present, along with an additional sixty acres my father ultimately acquired, and we grew cotton, sugar cane, corn, and potatoes. My father worked hard. To make ends meet, we all did. We lived in a poor, rural area about ten miles from the nearest town, a place called Kosciusko with a population in those days of just a few thousand.

Though we lived in depressing poverty, I didn’t know that then. That’s something I wouldn’t learn until years later when I attended college and listened to lectures and would read about poverty in my sociology textbooks. In those lectures and books, I would learn that I was supposed to be miserable and unhappy, which came as something of a surprise to me. As a child, I knew no other way of living than the way in which we lived. Our farm and the area around Kosciusko was my life. And I don’t remember thinking it was an especially unhappy one.

But the tension in the house was palpable. The stress on my parents from raising all of us kids and making sure there was always food to eat had to have been suffocating. But there was even more. I would hear my parents arguing about many things but I distinctly remember one recurring argument about the death of a twin boy that occurred early on in the marriage. This was the subject of discord that I remember most vividly. It was the second death of a child within a short span of eighteen months for my parents, the first death as a result of yellow jaundice. This second death, according to my mother, was caused by my father, albeit inadvertently. With the newborn twins, my parents slept head to toe with a child at either end of their bed. There were no cribs or bassinets for the babies. I would hear my mother tell my father that he had slept one night with his foot on the one twin. By morning, the child had stopped breathing. The loss of both children, the second death resulting in blame for one spouse from the other, placed a strain on the marriage that seemed to pushed aside the love my father and mother had for each other as a young couple.

The grief and heartache produced a persistent sadness in my mother. With her inability or unwillingness to completely forgive my father for the loss of the second child, she seemed to carry with her a sense of profound disappointment as the marriage, and her life, unfolded. At times this disappointment manifested itself as unexpected anger, spilling over on to us kids. She could be mean, even hurtful, and we never knew from one moment to another if it was safe just to ask her if we could go out and play. I found myself always working, sometimes futilely, to get her approval and to stay in her good graces. Often, however, our mother would single out a child and create an us versus him/her mentality, sometimes for the whole day, and I was the one on the outside more often than not. Partly this was because, for whatever reason, I was something of a daddy’s girl, and this was not a good thing to be in the eyes of my mother. And so she’d get even by purposely and blatantly sharing her attention and affection with the others, ignoring me for the day, or ignoring whomever else she may have decided to strand on the outside.

It was all fuel for a toxic atmosphere in the home and it was hard to escape it. There was no privacy for a little girl in our house, even in the big house, as we called it – the house my father built on the main road that we moved into when I was seven. The big house was a six-room shotgun house, long and narrow, and with three fireplaces. There was a room for my mother and father, a room for the girls, a room for the boys, a kitchen, dining room, and living room. The bathroom was an outhouse. With such a large family, the house, despite its appellation, always seemed too small. Everything was shared. Even drawers were shared and my socks and underwear kept company with my sisters’ socks and underwear. There were eight girls and eight boys and I was the fifth and most all of my clothes were hand-me-downs. I would be thirteen before I got my first new coat, a bright little orange coat, and I remember wearing it with great pride.

What privacy I could find came when I sought refuge in, of all places, the outhouse. I would spend hours in there, with its stench and maggots, safe from the disquiet of the