Mark’s much older half brother, Winston Van, moved to Baton Rouge in 1972, after the end of his first marriage. Mia Park Harris, his Korean first wife, is an interesting minor character in this story. He devoted all of three sentences to her in his letters to Dina Williams: “Anyway I fell in (what I thought) love and got married. Brought her back to the States and stayed married for the next 3 years. She mainly just wanted her citizenship.” Mark remembers a little more about Mia. Winston Van came back to the United States with her in 1969, when Mark was eight years old. That was when the family was still living in the trailer and motor home parked in the backyard of Royal’s parents’ house in Tyler. Van and Mia initially settled in Dallas, not quite two hours’ drive away.

  Mark recalled that “Mia divorced him because she had a problem with Edith.” Mia saw the tyrannical control Edith had over her family, and she hated her. She often got into nasty conflicts with her mother-in-law, from which her husband was powerless to protect her. After three years of enduring Edith, once she had gained her citizenship, she left her husband. From the tone of his letter, Winston Van seems to have concluded that she was cynically using him to get her foot in the door of US citizenship from the beginning, but Mark isn’t totally convinced of that; Mia’s surreal nightmare of a mother-in-law would have driven any sane woman away from that family.

  Mark remembers a time when he was out with Mia in Tyler and he saw a toy he wanted in a storefront window, “some cheap robot doll,” and convinced her to buy it for him. Later, his parents saw him playing with it, and his mother flew into a fury at the unsanctioned secular object in his hands. She snatched it away from him and demanded to know where he’d gotten it. He told her that Mia had bought it for him, which spurred a “huge, huge confrontation about it—about her buying me things that they didn’t want me to have.” Mark doesn’t remember if it was over this incident or some other infraction sometime later that Edith declared Mia “anathema.” As Mia stormed out of the trailer, “she hollered out, ‘I will see your bones, Edith Harris.’ And basically that’s one of those mean things that Koreans say, meaning that they are going to outlive the other person.” So Mia matched Edith’s pronouncement of anathema upon her with some dark folk poetry of her own—“I will see your bones”—and the curse deeply disturbed Edith and stayed on her mind for what would be the last few years of her life. “My mother was so paranoid and concerned about that that she insisted on not having a gravestone—so that Mia couldn’t find her body and somehow surreptitiously dig her up, break into a concrete vault, open it up, and look at her bones.” Sitting in that Panera in Georgia fifty years later, Mark rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “What the fuck is going on with that? How crazy is that? She was steadily degrading in several ways, including her mental capacity, her ability to think rationally.”

  Mark believes that his mother essentially committed a sort of slow, passive suicide. Between the angina pectoris and the chronic pneumonia, she was always in ill health and physical pain, abetting the damage the diseases were doing with her nightly ingestion of enormous amounts of vodka, and she was becoming ever more untethered from reality. “I am convinced she willed herself to die,” Mark said, “because I believe that she realized, unconsciously, or subconsciously, that it was going to be revealed that these events she foretold would not happen, and rather than face that and be abandoned by everybody, or perhaps be committed to a mental health facility, she really wanted to die.”

  Edith Harris died of congestive heart failure in 1976 at the age of fifty and was buried in a cemetery in Baton Rouge without a gravestone. “I think my brother finally got her a stone,” Mark said, “within the last five years or so. Long, long time afterwards. I didn’t pay much attention to it. My brother cared about it. I didn’t want anything to do with that family anymore.”

  After Mia divorced Winston Van, he moved to Baton Rouge and for a while dated Suzette, who by then was a member of his parents’ church. The relationship between the two must have been fairly brief, because he married his second wife, June, in 1974, the same year he began working as an assistant bookkeeper for Lynch Trucking, a ground freight company based in Baton Rouge (he also worked part-time as a karate instructor).

  While still exercising terrifying power over the people who were now the regular congregants of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc.—Royal, Van, June, Mark, Suzette, her future husband, Larry Freeman, Johnny Stablier, and another couple whose names Mark can’t remember who later left the group—Edith, increasingly mentally unhinged as her physical deterioration accelerated, was drinking herself to death. Suzette married Larry in 1976, the same year Edith died of a heart attack.

  During the last few years of Edith’s life, the church had established a routine for their meetings. The services were more or less ordinary evangelical Christian Bible study and prayer meetings, usually held in Royal and Edith’s trailer, spiced with the spooky weirdness of glossolalia and its prophetic interpretation. Royal was the pastor of the church, and he would usually open the meetings with some improvised remarks. The congregation would read a passage from the Bible together, and then Royal and Edith would lead a discussion about it. Then sometimes they would sing hymns. Mark remembers “Trust and Obey,” written in 1887 by the American Presbyterian minister and prolific writer of Christian hymns John H. Sammis, being a particular favorite they often returned to:

  Trust and obey, for there’s no other way

  to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

  Then, often, after the pastor’s opening remarks, the Bible study and discussion, and the singing of hymns, they would speak in tongues. Glossolalia these days is particularly associated with Pentecostalism, but it has been practiced by various Christian sects going back to the very beginning. It comes from the Book of Acts (Acts 2:1–4, KJV):

  And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

  “Speaking in tongues is mostly babble,” Mark says. “You learn to do it. It’s hard to say how. Repeated phrases are important. Anybody with a rational mind would think it’s just a bunch of crap, people deluding themselves. It’s very easy to interpret such things in ways such that you take what you want from them, that confirm what you want to believe.”

  After Edith died, “Suzette became much more powerful,” Mark said. His memory confirmed the change in social dynamics within the group that I had suspected. Although Royal was the pastor and official leader of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., he was a gullible and suggestible person, easily manipulated—even into believing that he was the “leader.”

  “He always went along with everything that [Edith] prophesized,” Mark said of his father. “Of course she would insist that he was the head of the household, just like the Bible says, but in reality she was the one in control. She was extraordinarily powerful in ways of convincing people that she had a red phone direct to God.” An important element of the dynamic between Edith and Royal was that she had him convinced that she had this “red phone direct to God” and he did not. Before she died, she conferred the direct line not on Royal but on their son, who had, naturally, inherited the gift of divine communication from her (Royal was not a carrier of that gene). And Edith trained her son in prophecy, trained him to hone the gift. Beginning when he was twelve years old, his mother “taught” him to listen very hard in his right ear for a voice; her encouragement, his wanting to please her, his own psychological priming and imagination worked in concert to create auditory hallucinations. He still doesn’t know if he actually heard voices or not; with the weight of all the social pressure being put on him, he can’t separate reality and fantasy in his memory. After all, shortly before she died, his mother had somehow convinced him that he was gay when the thought had never occurred to him, and furthermore that it was a black mortal sin of which his soul needed washing clean. She had convinced her son that he could hear the voice of God if he listened hard enough in his right ear, and had her husband convinced of it, too. And she died leaving a fifteen-year-old boy who felt enslaved to the cult; the only one among them with a “direct line” to God, with the whole group bound together by him, standing in the shadow of her dominion. The cult was primed for someone to take her place—the social structure was there—and Suzette Freeman nimbly stepped into it.

  After Edith died, Suzette “was every bit as fanatical and domineering as my mother had been,” Mark said. And not long after Edith’s death, Suzette dubbed herself with an official title and role in the church’s hierarchy: the “Interpreter.” Now Royal was the pastor, Winston Van was the assistant pastor, Mark was the prophet, and Suzette was the interpreter. Mark would listen hard in his right ear for the voice of God, and would tell the others what it said, and Suzette would “confirm” the prophecies through interpretation. Or Mark would go into a trance and speak in tongues—improvised babbling that came from somewhere at the crux of imagination and the actual belief that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him—and Suzette would then “translate” what he was saying into English. Sometimes Suzette would speak in tongues and then translate what she had just said. Either way, she assigned herself a job in the church that stood on a rung technically below the more earthly administrative positions Royal and Van held but partook of the magical, divine power that Edith and Mark had and that held the others in thrall. The position Suzette carved out for herself was really the most powerful one: the intermediary, the point of connection between the invisible world of the spirit and the visible world of matter and flesh.

  Interpretation. There is scripture—a motley patchwork of contradictory texts—but the real power rests with the interpreter. The interpreter remakes the story without rewriting it: changes a talking snake into Satan, changes the cryptic phrase “a time, times, and an half” (Daniel 12:7) into John of Patmos’s “a thousand two hundred and threescore days” (Revelation 11:3), changes “nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom” (Matthew 24:7) into nuclear war. The agency of religion lies not in the text, but in its interpretation.

  Susan Sontag in “Against Interpretation”:

  The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.

  I believe this word, interpretation, lies at the heart of what happens whenever a religion transforms from a socially useful collection of fables and folklore and, most important, the pragmata and physical sensations of ritual that bond a tribe together into something much more dangerous: something claiming a “higher” or “deeper” second-order layer of meaning. In the particular case of “interpreting” glossolalia, the interpreter isn’t twisting one meaning into another but rather bestowing a first meaning upon meaningless babble—creating something, that is, ex nihilo.

  The year after Edith’s death in 1976, when Suzette stepped in to claim the position of “interpreter” and thus became the primary author of the cult’s beliefs from behind the curtain, was when twenty-year-old Lucy Clark, who had a daughter less than a year old, abused and abandoned by her husband, broke and desperate, walked into an employment agency in Baton Rouge with a soul already whittled weak as a matchstick, looking for temp work—and there she met Suzette Freeman and her employee, Van’s wife, June. Suzette placed Lucy in a couple of jobs, and also invited her to join her church.

  Meanwhile, the Tribulation was coming, and they would need a refuge. Winston Van Harris had attended Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, for two years before he had dropped out and joined the army. Searcy lies at the edge of the eastern foothills of the Ozarks, and he was somewhat familiar with the area. He had also served honorably as a platoon leader and reconnaissance ranger and had led miliary exercises in Korea and missions in the Demilitarized Zone that, while nowhere near as hazardous as the combat duty many of his fellow enlistees had seen in Vietnam, had given him real survival training and military experience that no doubt would have come in useful if an apocalypse really were on the horizon. So that became his job in the church: drill sergeant, commanding officer. “We spent two years every Saturday listening to him tell us how to survive in a nuclear war,” Mark said, rolling his eyes. “How to survive in the wilderness.”

  Winston Van consulted maps and determined that the north-central Arkansas Ozarks would be a good place to be when nuclear weapons rained down on all major populated areas, well outside the radiation damage radius of thermonuclear warheads if Little Rock, Memphis, or even Fayetteville got hit. The Upper Buffalo Wilderness would also be an ideal place to ride out the three and a half years that would follow, when roving bands of survivors would comb over the devastated earth, squabbling over scarce resources.

  So around New Year’s Day 1977, the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., liquidated all its assets—which didn’t amount to very much—except for several vehicles and the trailer, which they towed up to Springdale in Northwest Arkansas, where its members would gather their resources and prepare for the sign to “let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains” (Matthew 24:16).

  For the next sixteen months, the church members lived in Springdale and Rogers. Royal, Mark, Winston Van and June, and their toddler, Matthew David, lived in the trailer parked at Midway Trailer Park in Springdale; Lucy and her young daughter, Bethany, stayed in a camper parked next to the trailer; Larry and Suzette Freeman, Suzette’s daughter, Desha, and Johnny Stablier lived in the apartment in Rogers. Lucy worked three jobs—one at the Tyson poultry plant, another at a Long John Silver’s, and a third as a waitress at a diner. Winston Van also worked at the Tyson plant. Mark had dropped out of school (not much point in graduating from high school when the world is about to end) and worked part-time in the mornings making deliveries for Daylight Donuts. Royal and Suzette did not work, and if Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier had jobs, no one I spoke with could remember. Everyone who worked turned all their earnings over to the church.

  As to what brought matters to a head after the year and a few months the cult spent in Northwest Arkansas preparing for the Tribulation, several people’s memories somewhat conflict. In Jerry Patterson’s telling, the moment that spurred everything else into motion was that Mark or Suzette or both had prophesized about some sort of treasure buried in a grave on some mountain in Tennessee and that Suzette had sent Larry and Johnny to go out there and look for it. When they returned from the mission empty-handed, Suzette decided that the reason they had failed to find the buried treasure was because three-year-old Bethany Alana Clark was contaminated with the Devil. But Mark does not remember the buried treasure episode; it could be that Jerry misremembered, or that Mark wasn’t around for it or doesn’t remember it because it didn’t involve him directly. He does not remember what exactly provoked the incident wherein someone held the three-year-old Bethany’s hand over a fire in a coffee can until the skin cracked and blistered. “My memory of the incident is fuzzy,” he said, “but essentially it was Suzette’s idea of ‘scaring Bethany straight.’ I am not sure, but I think it was Larry who held the child’s hand over the fire. Suzette yelled at Larry to do that.”