Shaky Egg

mama’s bible

When we were living in Hill Country Population 767, Texas I was between six and ten years old.

Back then we got S&H green stamps at the Superette.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&H_Green_Stamps

I guess mom got sick of fooling with them. And I guess that’s what they depended upon to happen. But S & H didn’t count on me. I licked them and stuck them and counted them and saved them up to get a Bible with a white imitation leather cover. I probably had to save my pennies to pay the shipping and handling, too. I had to have it. It zipped shut. I think it probably took a while. We were educated, but we were damn poor.

I made my Dad, who was an angry atheist thanks to his tour in Viet Nam (and I don’t blame him one f-ing bit), sign it for me on the This Holy Bible Presented To page opposite the picture of the Dead Sea at Sunrise inside the front cover, as if he and Mom had given it to me. 7/10/78. He did it. I was eight years old.

I trace the roots of my bizarre, at least bizarre for such an agnostic, deconstructed, materialist, women’s studies corrupted, call-it-the-Universe type belief system, ability to quote just the appropriate scripture, to that time. I was a GA (shudder). I won a prize (probably a large quantity of Super Bubble) one summer at Vacation Bible School for reciting the name of every single book from Genesis to Revelation.

Mom and I went every week to hear Brother Gary Buckner, a round faced blond man who was probably younger than I am now, preach at First Baptist. I got saved and ‘warshed’ there when I was eight or so, dunked by Brother Gary in the big baptistry with the heavy clear glass panel on the front. This means I perceive that I have not only my salvation, just in case it’s needed when the book of life is opened, but also the insider’s right to question and even tear down the belief system of my childhood. It’s easy to say all these things that I do, from the inside. What about those who don’t have that assurance, and can’t muster enough belief to go and get it done, but continue to worry– what if?

And what do those people think, whose livelihood it is to ’save’ people and dunk them year after year? Do they think something really happens?

Dunno. But I certainly marched out as quick as I could to get the cross marked in holy water on shaky baby’s hairless pate in front of various loved ones and my church congregation. I didn’t even wait around for her to choose for herself. Now she’s in too– what she chooses to do with it is up to her.

Anyway, last night I was looking for the context for the title of a book I am reading– Like Trees Walking, a fictionalized story about the last lynching in Mobile, in 1981.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdonaldD.htm

[watch out, upsetting picture here, but also a good account and some thoughtful writing quoted]

You know, the case Morris Dees used to break the Klan? I don’t think they mention Morris in this novel, and I’m still not sure what as trees walking means in the context of the book, although the words standing free of the Biblical context remind me of that chilling moment in Macbeth, when Birnam Wood moves on Dunsinane.

The narrator in Like Trees Walking talks about his anticlimactic experience with water baptism.But that’s a side note.

So I was scanning the shelf downstairs and I couldn’t find my white leatherette zipper Bible. First I panicked. All I could see was the NIV my aunts gave me when I graduated college. Did they think I’d read it more if it was in more accessible language? Please.

Lord, let there be a King James here somewhere, I thought. Did I throw it away? I’ve certainly been in a purging frenzy over the last few years, wanting some control of what my children learn about me after I am gone.

But my little childhood Bible, that I saved up S&H Green Stamps to get?

Why wouldn’t I pass that on to my baby?

Then I found my other King James, a big red plastic leather bound from my high school friend Nikki, dated 1993. I guess she thought I didn’t have one. Sigh. Never mind. That was the time in my life I was really churchgoing constantly, as an adult– where I became an Episcopalian. Almost fifteen years later I still have my membership in that little mountain church, that little den of intellectual questioning and historicist, deconstructionist, feminist analysis of our faith and our scripture. Anyway.

Whew! Crisis averted. I could look up my verse in King James. Cause everybody knows, if it ain’t King James, it ain’t Bible.

* * *

As a girl, my mother used to sleep on the floor instead of in the bed, so that she wouldn’t get too comfortable and could get up in the morning to study. I’ve always wanted to know that steadfast little girl. Course, each week she also took her 35 cents allowance and bought seven chocolate bars and sat down and ate every single one right then. What a mix!

Anyway I always wanted to know that little girl. I haven’t thought of it in years but I remember so clearly now how I wanted to connect with the part of my mother that was once little like me. And wouldn’t my little girl want to know me? Wouldn’t she want at least the chance to touch and hold that beat up old white Bible that her mommy used to carry faithfully to church each Sunday morning when not much bigger (and definitely less smart) than she? It’s not about passing on a family faith. Lord (yes I still feel free to call on the Jesus of my childhood) knows it’s not about that. It is about letting her connect, if she wishes, with that little girl in ways I wished I could connect with my own mother.

I have it in my hand. I waited until just this precise moment to face the task of either finding it, or not. It was on the shelf here in my little attick hideaway.

The zipper has long since been broken. The white cover is cracked and dirty. I can’t tell if it is thin leather, or if it is a leather pattern painted/stamped onto heavy paper. There are a couple of places marked with torn paper bookmarks or underlines, and there’s a thirty-year-old Lift High the Cross sticker from a long ago revival, but there’s not much else there. When I was really going to church, I used the big red plastic Bible Nikki gave me, I guess– easier to see and read.

Still, it’s here in my lap, and I’ll probably print this little story to put between its pages, in case I die before the occasion comes up for me to explain to her where it came from, what it means and what it doesn’t.