Jesusland by Julia Scheeres

This is yet another one from Mer A's pile. This is a very sad book. Scheeres' memoir depicts a childhood both unusual and terrible.

Scheeres grows up in rural Indiana in a strictly Calvinist home. Her parents adopt two black children because circumstances make it seem that it is the "Christian" thing to do. However, their town is completely white and the boys' seemingly lucky addition into Scheeres' family ends up being nightmarish for them. The first half of the book focuses on this early childhood, from elementary school through early adolescence. Her upbringing is shameful and strange: her (doctor) father drives a Porsche, but the family eats table scraps for dinner; her mother pipes Christian pop music into the entire house through the intercom system; her black adopted brothers are beaten and live in the basement but she is not and does not.

Her writing ranges from good to superb. She is wonderfully self-aware and extremely descriptive. One of her best qualities as a writer is the ability to connect her individual experiences with familiar archtypes, as well as with each other. In talking about her brothers, she says, "As we've gotten older, and Father's beatings have become more frequent, their [her brothers] blackness has finally united them. They are the outsiders, the basement-dwellers, Mother's failed mission to Afrrica. The black boys who get whipped by the white master."

Later in the book, I caught her describing her life at church with a similar theme: "When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an usher like my brothers but was sent downstairs to the nursery instead. That's where the women work, in the basement--changing diapers, organizing potlucks and teaching sunday school. In the basement, out of sight."

The second half of the book is where her story really gets strange. Scheeres' brother David is sent to a Christian reform school/boot camp in the Dominican Republic called Escuela Caribe and she soon follows. What she finds there (understandably missing from David's censored letters) is a nightmarish caste system coupled with ridicule, manual labor and physical abuse. She is able to outsmart the system over time, but her time spent there (over a year) is fascinatingly horrible. I had no idea that environments like this even existed today.

As she says upon arriving, "I want to focus on my misery. I want to roll around in it like a dog in a pile of shit. I want to claim it as my own. Right now, it's all I have. I still can't believe that a place like Escuela Caribe exists, and that I find myself enrolled in it."

Despite the many hardships she faced growing up, her tone is never one of martyrdom or self-pity. The story is more of a confession or a therapeutic exercise than it is a purposeful indictment of Midwest Christianity. Scheeres says she wrote the book to honor her relationship with her brother. However, it is nearly impossible to read this book without forming a critical opinion of (at the very least) the fundamental Christianity that her parents followed and that spawned Escuela Caribe. I see this book both as a memoir as well as the work of an activist.