Angel Eggs

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, West Virginia was culturally isolated, and much of my family was part of the underclass. Some were outright rednecks. I’ve seen what multigenerational poverty can do to a family. No one could remember a family member who had any education beyond high school. Most didn’t even graduate high school. No one read books aside from the Bible. No one had been outside the U.S. except to go to war. Few had traveled outside the state. Some had never left the county. Most lived in small, dilapidated houses and drove old cars that broke down regularly. Life was always a struggle, and many died young. Most died penniless. My mother came from a family of nine children. Six of them are already gone. Only one so far has lived to see her 70^th birthday. Neither of my mother’s parents lived to see 70.

It’s a complicated situation and there is no easy explanation for it or an easy solution. Lack of opportunities, lack of role models, lack of wisdom that comes from higher education and travel, all of that played a part. So did expectation. Someone who has never seen a family member get ahead might be less inclined to believe it’s possible for them to have a better life. And if you live among neighbors who believe no one in your family will ever amount to anything, that will have an impact, too. Teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, anxiety, fatalism, criminal behavior… It all takes its toll. And it all has a way of being passed from parent to child so that the pathology repeats itself.

I’ve been thinking about how fundamentalism might play into this soul destroying rut. This country was founded by Puritans who believed in predestination. The way you knew you were part of the elect was by your ability to live an upstanding life. Those who followed the rules and lived the way they were told were thought to be blessed. The people of West Virginia abandoned that idea, but they quickly adopted an evangelical version of Christianity with it’s heavy emphasis on the idea that some are “saved” and others are not.

My father’s family did a little better. They had a slightly higher standard of living, and they were emotionally more stable. Many of them were religious. They went to church and quoted the Bible regularly. Their modest homes were always clean. Every time they left the house, their clothes were clean and their hair was combed. They smiled and shook hands with everyone they saw, and they never swore. A fellow Christian was often referred to as brother or sister. Some might conclude that churchgoing had improved their lives, but I’m not so sure.

There was a divide between those who went to church and those who didn’t, and there was an ever present pressure on those who had resisted to break down and join a church. Any low point in a nonchurchgoer’s life was an opportunity for someone to evangelize. Give your heartache to Jesus, and all would be fine, or so the story went.

Some might assume that those who didn’t go to church, like most in my mother’s family, weren’t believers. This is not so. They believed the same things my father’s family believed. They knew no better. They weren’t aware of alternative worldviews. It might be that they actually had more faith than the churchgoers, a more idealistic expectation of how a Christian was supposed to live. And they couldn’t imagine living up to it. They knew they’d always want a drink occasionally, or smoke, or have sex with someone they weren’t married to. They knew their first instinct would be to fight back if someone hurt them, not turn the other cheek. So they couldn’t imagine being good enough to be a Christian, and this caused them to live their lives as outcasts.

I never noticed any significant difference in the inherent goodness of those who were “saved” and those who were not. And I lived among these people long enough to know that the “saved” sometimes did things they weren’t supposed to do, according to their professed convictions. One of my mother’s sisters had a baby when she was a girl back in the 40s, and she refused to tell anyone who the father was. She also refused to give the baby up. My cousin Tommy was a grown man by the time I came along, and I heard the adults around me repeatedly say that Garnet had never married Tommy’s father. Everybody knew this already, but they kept saying it. They never stopped saying it. It was a way to keep them both in their place. Another relative got pregnant when she was a girl in the ’50s, but her parents were churchgoers, and she was sent away for several months. When she returned alone, everyone acted as if she had been on vacation. No one ever spoke of that, and I didn’t hear about it until I was an adult.

My Aunt Patsy, another one of my mother’s sisters, has never been religious, but she remains one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. My Uncle Richard, one of my father’s brothers-in-law, decided to become a self-ordained minister back in the ’80s. He took to lecturing us about the demons that always surround us and how deviled eggs should be renamed angel eggs. He insisted that Jesus did not turn water into fermented wine and that it was really “rich” grape juice. He became so tedious that I could hardly stand to be in the same room with him. But the fundamentalist culture in which I was raised would have you believe ego driven hypocrites like my uncle were “saved,” but my funny, gregarious, generous aunt was not.