Episode 3: No Safe Place
no where to stay
We moved to another house in Violet, located right next to the levee and the Mississippi River. It had three bedrooms and a backyard with a big oak tree, a drive way and a nice front yard. My parents had sold the trailer but we still had a van, which my dad mostly used for work.
Dad’s painting business wasn’t cutting it, so he found work sorting sea food at a sea food plant for minimum wage. He worked long hours almost every day of the week. When he came home he was always sullen and cross. Yet, he always sat down with me and my brother, Tony, before bed to help us learn to read.
By the age of four, I could read fluently. I was proud of myself for the first time because I could read better than other kids my age, or so I was told, and I proudly began taking my turn reading aloud during “Devotions” each day. Devotions was a required daily ritual of reading “God’s Word”—our daily dose of propaganda sent to us each month by the cult leadership.
My oldest brothers and sisters were between the ages of 10 and 15 now and my mother, having only an eighth grade education, meant homeschooling a bunch of teenagers was rather unrealistic. But my parents still wouldn’t send them to school. They were scared that we would be indoctrinated by “the system” if we received a normal education.
The “system” is the term coined by the Children of God, which later rebranded as The Family of Love, to describe society outside the cult. Joining the cult offered desperate people a way to escape the realities of life.
So mom outsourced the younger kids’ education to the older ones while she cooked meals and took care of the household. During our daily “school time”, my brother Daniel, who was 13, taught me arithmetic and writing. I remember the first time I proudly wrote my name on the chalk board in tiny, neat letters.
My older brother, Tony, who was two years older than me, was my only friend. People always thought we were twins because we both had red hair and brown eyes and we stayed about the same height until he turned 10 and hit his growth spurt.
Not to mention that we shared many of the same clothes. People often mistook me for a boy with longish hair. His hair was a little long for a boy too so we looked almost exactly alike. Hand-me-downs were the standard in our family and if the kid older than you was a boy, tough luck.