WEST VIRGINIA PRESBYTERIAN (1952)

The tired old Presbyterian Church at the top of the dirt road is the only church here. A girl of four, neat as a pin, sets off from her house at the opposite end of the road to walk the 200 yards or so to the church. Her mother stands in the middle of the road watching her, until she is greeted on the porch steps by an elderly woman. The mother feels that, since the priest comes only once every two months to say Mass, it’s all right to send her daughter to Presbyterian Sunday School. God is God, after all.

The girl listens with rapt attention to the Bible stories. She gets along well with the other children and likes seeing them because she doesn’t usually get to play with them. Mama won’t let her run barefoot, or wade in the coal mine run-off creek, or catch insects and pull their wings off. And she isn’t allowed to say words like “piss” and “shit,” which are everyday words to the other kids.

At the end of the lesson today, the minister comes in. They have been learning the Lord’s Prayer, and he wants to check on their progress. The children stand up and all recite together: “Our Father, which art in heaven…”

The little girl knows it by heart already; she learned it long before she began coming to this Sunday school. “… but deliver us from evil. Amen,” she finishes. But the other kids say more.

The minister glares at her and says, “Why didn’t you learn it, like you were told?”

“Oh,” she says. “I already learned it.”

“But, you didn’t learn it all.”

“Oh, yes,” she smiles. “I know the whole thing.” She repeats it.

“No, that’s wrong,” the minister insists, “you must say the whole prayer. Now, say it the right way.”

She says the prayer again, exactly as she was taught it by her Catholic parents.

The minister raises his right hand all the way back, above his head, and slaps the child hard on the left side of her face. “Now,” he says, “say it again, the right way.”

“I don’t know the way they say it.” She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears, and she won’t be pushed by any means to say something she doesn’t think is right.

“Daddy says some people say extra words that people added a long time after Jesus said it first. I know it the way Mama and Daddy taught me. I know ‘Hail Mary,’ too,” she added proudly, “And ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear’.”

The minister begins to mutter words she doesn’t understand. He closes his huge hands around her upper arms and plucks her out of the group of children. Still muttering, he drops her on the church steps. “Go on, get yourself home,” he thunders.

“Mama said to wait for her to come and get me. Ten o’clock she said. I have to wait for her.” By now she is not only in pain; she is getting mad, very mad, at the minister. But she controls herself. She knows Mama will fix it.

As soon as the man slams the door, the girl allows herself to cry. She sees blood drops on her front and cries harder because this is a new dress.

Her mother, walking up the road to get her, sees tears and blood and breaks into a run.

The girl is bleeding from her mouth, because the blow forced her teeth into the inside cheek. Her eye will swell shut by the end of the day. She has marks on her face and her arms which will finally fade after two days, to be replaced by bruises in the shape of the minister’s fingers.
As the girl sobs broken sentences into her shoulder, Mama gets madder and madder.

The girl has seen Mama like this before, when things happened to her or her brother. Mama always says, “Ignorance never excuses brutality.” The girl doesn’t know exactly what the words mean, but she does know they mean Mama’s gonna do something about it.

The service is going on, but Mama doesn’t care. She takes the girl’s hand and marches right up the middle aisle to the minister, who, astonished, stops his speech mid-sentence.

She turns the girl around to face the congregation, bloody rivulet down her chin, welts rising on her face and arms.

Mama is brief: “That man did this to my daughter.” She stops for breath.  “And you call him a Christian.”

Mama whispers to her, “Stand up straight.”

Embarrassed coughs and shuffles follow them as they walk away.

Mama never sent me to Sunday School again.

©2008, Ramona K. Silipo. All rights reserved. (Note:  Earlier  versions of this story have appeared online.)

McKellen, de la Tour and the ex wife

Theatre, for me, has often been a spiritual exercise. Even in the midst of real life turmoil, there’s theatre. Most of my enduring friendships began in the theatre, as did this one.

Date: Fri, 02 May 2003
From: Ramona Silipo
To:  Cheski
Subject: Re: Give an Actor a Chance…

Things are going well here in most ways, but I. has had to get a solicitor involved in order to get to see his children. We are, at this point, waiting for his ex wife to reply to a letter from I’s solicitor. In a last ditch effort, after about half a dozen requests, I. proposed again that they go to mediation. If she refuses again, then he goes to court. We really wish she would just stop all the animosity and avoid the tremendous COST of going to court. But she is one of these short sighted women who is so vengeful she will shoot herself in the foot if it means making more trouble for her ex.

We saw [Ian] McKellen and Frances de la Tour in Dance of Death last night. Amazing stuff. McKellen has changed radically since Richard III and Enemy of the People. This is the first time I have seen him allow a role to inhabit him, instead of imposing himself on a role. Do you know what I mean? It was brilliant.

And I am now a real fan of Frances de la Tour. Her Cleopatra is the only one of about half a dozen I’ve seen that I believed every moment. She was hysterically funny in Fallen Angels. If I were 30 years younger, I’d be writing her a fan letter. God, she’s good. There was a moment last night, a gesture or inflection or something, when she reminded me of you… a kind of vulnerability with huge depths of strength underneath.

The Wedding, the Ex-Wife and the Kids

Lately I’ve found myself– sometimes standing in the living room, sometimes during a walk, sometimes while reading, sometimes lying in bed late at night– I’ve found myself reflecting on the happiness of my life, the contentment I feel, and the fact that every single day I feel a deeper connection to and love for my husband. Does this come with age? With experience? With a spiritual (as opposed to romantic) understanding of love? With unconditional love?

A second chance. It can and does happen. We had it, and we took it. And we’ve never regretted it. There have been times of deep and grinding pain caused by my husband’s former wife and his children. There have been deaths in the families. There has been a serious illness that threatened to cripple. So we have known sadness and frustration and challenge. But we feel more connected, move loving and more supportive after each of these times than ever before.

I was in my fifties when we met; he was in his forties. A life well lived always leaves marks; not all baggage is heavy. But second love is more realistic, deeper, more aware of its rarity. It requires patience, forgiveness and tolerance. And acceptance of what cannot be changed.

Curiosity, I supposed, and nostalgia, no doubt, led me to read some of the e-mails between my friends and me when my husband and I first got together.  Here is one of them, from me to a friend of over 30 years.

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003
From: R K Silipo
To: “DuRand, Le Clanche”
Subject: From the wilds of suburban Surbiton

Dear Che,

Been ill the past few days with a mystery illness that required sleeping
all day,  moaning at intervals, the sleeping again. Feeling marginally better today,  going to hear Jill Purce, a healer who uses sound, speak tonight at the Siddha Ashram.

We’ve been going to satsang at the ashram on Saturday evenings. It’s very interesting how they have structured the satsang like a Protestant church service, presumably to make uptight English people more comfortable. It begins with chanting, has a little reading and talk, then more chanting, and finishes with food being passed around. One time it was home-made Turkish delight, another  chocolate brownies. Just small bites, but more body than the traditional Host. It’s a nice way to spend two hours, and the young (he looks like 15 to me, but is probably something between 30 and 40) leader of worship is very open and friendly, and a transparently sincere and earnest seeker.

On their altar, covered with beautiful silks, are pictures of their teachers, going back several generations, various Indian deities, Jesus, something vaguely Muslim (no graven images), ditto something Jewish– very ecumenical. In their garden there is a lovely BVM statue, not sentimental or prissy like so many of them are. I quite like her. Other holy people’s statues in the garden, as well.

Don’t know if I told you anything yet about the wedding. We kept it very small, so it was just I’s  father and step-mother (his mother died about 6 years ago) and sister, and my friends Rachel , Julian and his long-time woman friend. We wanted the children there, and they were looking forward to coming, but their mother had other ideas.

The ceremony was very sweet and very brief, about 10 minutes. The
registrar had a great sense of humour, so we were chuckling a lot. But
the actual words we said with such depth and in such a reality as I
have never known before.  We were in the registry office, but I definitely felt the movement of the Spirit shoot through me as we said our vows. It was pretty amazing.

Afterward we went for tea at a place called the Original Maids of Honour tea room, in Kew Road, directly across the road from one of the main entrances to Kew Gardens. The place has been there, in one form or another, since Henry VIII’s time, and ‘maids of honour’ are a pastry created  especially for the old libertine himself.  The current owner of the place inherited it from his father, who inherited from his father, and so on, since 1868.

The weather  was uncharacteristically sunny and warm for the afternoon. The goddesses and gods were smiling on us, I’m certain of it.

Things go well here. Got my passport stamped a few days after the
wedding, so I can work here;  so have been poring over ads and sending
out resumes. The only fly  in the ointment is, of course, I’s former
wife, who uses her children like clubs to try to manipulate him. The
only comfort I take is that someday they will be very angry with her
because she kept them from the wedding and is currently keeping them
from seeing him on any regular basis. She allows an hour here or there
on a Saturday .

The courts here are at least 25 years behind California courts, where they automatically would be granted joint custody, barring any verifiable reason that one parent should be in control. I see a court battle in the future, but not very soon. We must settle into a house big enough to have the children with us first.
–
Neither charm nor patience nor endurance has ever wrested power from those who hold it. — Frederick Douglass

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been. . .

PRENTER,  APPALACHIAN WEST VIRGINIA. 1950. A young, pregnant woman sits in the living room of her home, one of only five houses in the county with indoor plumbing and electricity. She is a registered nurse; her husband, company doctor. Together they make  house calls, keep office hours and manage the practice. “The company” is a coal mine.

The doctor’s house is the second largest in the row of the privileged five. The other houses that have light and sanitation belong to the company manager (the largest house), the two school teachers, and the Presbyterian minister. His church sits at the top of the dirt road. The road turns right abruptly towards the two-room schoolhouse a few yards beyond the doctor’s place.

Across the dirt road,  running parallel to it, the run-off from the coal mine makes a filthy black creek in a roadside ditch. Beyond that, again parallel, is the county road– one  paved lane lined with huge old magnolia trees on one side and a hill on tbe other. The narrow bridge from “the main road” crosses the ditch up near the church.

The woman, Ann, sits on a bright yellow, leather-covered hassock about four feet in diameter, watching the only television in the county, its nine-inch screen flickering black, white and grey. Today, she is wearing a green maternity blouse with a white collar over a white skirt. Her red-brown hair is swept up in a curly ponytail, tied with a narrow white ribbon.   She holds a baby on her lap.

The baby, a girl, is just under two years old, alert and wide-eyed. She is as fascinated by the box as her mother. She sees the little hammer. She hears the Clack! Clack! Clack! and the  men’s voices, shouting at each other– all coming from the box. She feels her mother’s frustration, her anger, her rage. Now Mama talks to the screen, furious with the shouting men. The baby feels her mother’s passion, absorbs it, learns it, right there, in that moment.

In 1976 the baby, now grown up, is a publicist at the University of California. She writes a press release for Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, a play about the House  Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which began in the 1930s and did not end until well into the 1960s. The dialogue is taken word-for-word from the records of the  hearings. She looks at production photographs, reads portions of the play. She interviews  the director. During this conversation, in a sudden, blinding flash, the detailed memory of  sitting on her mother’s lap, watching the proceedings on television, springs forth. It  remains her earliest childhood memory over 50 years later.