Original essay for Powells.com
Here's an essay I recently wrote for the fabulous independent bookstore's website:
essay
GHOSTS OF MY BROTHER
by Julia Scheeres
Is it possible to capture a life in a book?
That's what I set out to do when I wrote my memoir, Jesus Land. I was weary of mourning my brother David in silence. Even after 20 years, the merciless fact of his death stabbed my heart like a steak knife whenever I thought of him. I felt compelled to record his footprint on this earth, his fleeting, tragic, graceful life. What better way to immortalize him than in a book?
I knew David better than anyone. From the time he was adopted at age three until he died in a car crash at age 20, we were in constant contact. We were the same age. We shared classrooms, church youth groups, even a reform school. It fell on my shoulders to keep his memory alive. This was a heavy burden.
My family is Teutonic, stolid, Midwestern. We do not emote easily. We avoid squirmy topics of conversation. We bury painful events under layers of silence, avoidance, and belittlement. When David died, this approach no longer worked for me. I went from the relatively carefree life of a college sophomore to utter devastation. I wrote bad suicidal poetry and was plagued by chronic migraines and a budding stomach ulcer. I dulled the ache with valium mixed with cheap whiskey and cigarettes. On weekend nights, as my classmates engaged in youthful bacchanalia at parties and clubs, I got hammered in my car, then took my place among the ranks of the defeated — the homeless, the schizoids, the misanthropes — in the periodical room of the local library, hiding in literature, unable to stand anyone who so much as appeared happy. I was miserable and wanted everyone else to be, too. Camus, Sartre, Kafka — these were my dark companions.
Eventually, I outgrew the bad suicidal poetry and wanted to write down the truth. I thought recording David's life in vivid detail would help mitigate the pain of his death. Indeed, it has. But when I first sat down to the task, I was emotionally paralyzed. How do you translate someone's life into words? Was it possible to capture both the hard facts of a person's reality and the essence of their humanity? Was it presumptuous to even attempt to do so? What would David think of my undertaking? For several agitated days, I stared at my blank computer monitor, these questions seething inside me.
Finally, in an effort to get something on that screen, I jotted down a few physical facts of David's life:
1. He weighed 2 lbs. when he was born.
2. When my parents adopted him at age 3, he still could not walk or talk.
3. He was one of only a handful of non-Caucasians living in Lafayette, Indiana.
4. He was thin, unathletic, and wore thick glasses.
5. He was on his way to see me when he crashed his car on August 1, 1987.
Then I added some emotional facts:
1. He was frequently harassed by racist bullies.
2. My father, a respected surgeon and church deacon, beat him.
3. He had an irrepressible sense of humor.
4. Like any kid, he craved affection, encouragement, attention, a sense of well-being.
5. He was my best friend.
There is a blur between the physical and emotional facts of David's life, and this is where his story lies. He wasn't all saint. He wasn't all victim. If I had to select one adjective to describe him, it would be hopeful. Hopeful that people would love him back. Hopeful that he would be accepted. Hopeful that things would get better when he turned eighteen and was in control of his own life.
I have a box marked "David," where I keep everything related to my brother. His life, in mementos. These include yellowing letters. A lifetime of photographs. A cassette tape of the '80s new wave band A Flock of Seagulls. A Purdue Boilermakers jersey. His National Guard manual. The green notebook in which he'd started his autobiography. His death certificate.
Combing through these physical artifacts and dwelling on the significance each one held, I fashioned a narrative. As I immersed myself in his life, I began to dream about him on a regular basis. He'd appear randomly — as a colleague at the newspaper where I worked, offering to make a few phone calls so I could meet a deadline, as a customer in line behind me at the grocery store. I'd be ecstatic to see him, but he'd shrug off my excitement as if nothing unusual had happened. As if he weren't dead, and had as much business going about his worldly affairs as the next person. I got the feeling that he approved of my writing endeavor.
I tried my best to make him a whole person in my book, to create a nuanced and complete portrait. By the time Jesus Land went to press in Fall 2005, I felt I'd accomplished this goal. I had managed to create, so I thought, the definitive account of my brother.
But then the emails started coming. People who knew David and had read my book sent me their own recollections of my brother. These, by turn, baffled and thrilled me. How could I possibly be learning new things about my brother two decades after his death?
A few examples:
A neighbor girl — now woman — wrote that David used to leave notes on her towel when she sunbathed in her front yard, waiting until she ducked inside for a drink or to use the toilet to deliver his missives.
What am I to make of this? I picture my brother hiding behind a tree, watching a girl in a bikini and must remind myself that he was not a creep. He was an awkward, lovesick teenager. That he was Black in rural, snow-white Indiana, and more than a little gun-shy from a long line of unrequited crushes.
An email from my former pastor addressed the same topic. Over lunch at a pizza joint one day, "David wanted to talk about his feeling that he never seemed to fit in with other people," my former pastor wrote. "He was black, but he didn't talk and act like black people. He didn't want to....When he started thinking about dating and girls, he said 'who would ever want me? The black girls will think I'm too white and the white girls will think I'm too black.'"
It was the conundrum of his life. Never being enough of one thing, always being too much of another. Black, adopted, beaten down. All those squirmy topics we never discussed — and I so wished we had.
"I lost touch with Dave after he started doing things I didn't want to get involved in," wrote one of his high school chums. Repeated emails asking the sender what, specifically, he was referring to went unanswered. Drugs? Street theater? Plasma donation? (I know David did sell plasma at one low point.) And the message brought up additional questions: Did I have a right to know anything about my brother that he didn't reveal to me himself? Was this a post-mortem invasion of his privacy?
Another reader said he met David shortly before his death. He had purchased the house in town that we abandoned upon moving to the country. One spring day, the man wrote, David drove up with a couple of young men and rang the doorbell as his friends waited in the car. "He wanted to prove to his friends that he had indeed grown up in a magnificent, grand house," the man wrote. (Indeed, the house was a lovely, windowed, three-story affair.) Reading into the tone of his message, I suspected the new owner didn't quite believe that a black youngster ever lived there, either. It was something David ran up against every day of his life, people's assumptions based solely on his surface color.
These emails made me realize that there is no way to contain a person in a book. David's life was much too far-reaching and intricate to be summed up in 350 tidy pages. But by writing down my best recollections of him, I believe I gave him depth and soul.
Since Jesus Land was published, I have received hundreds of emails from readers around the world saying they feel as if they knew my brother, and mourn his death. This is the greatest response I could hope for. David is cherished by more people than he could ever imagine. He would be flattered.
essay
GHOSTS OF MY BROTHER
by Julia Scheeres
Is it possible to capture a life in a book?
That's what I set out to do when I wrote my memoir, Jesus Land. I was weary of mourning my brother David in silence. Even after 20 years, the merciless fact of his death stabbed my heart like a steak knife whenever I thought of him. I felt compelled to record his footprint on this earth, his fleeting, tragic, graceful life. What better way to immortalize him than in a book?
I knew David better than anyone. From the time he was adopted at age three until he died in a car crash at age 20, we were in constant contact. We were the same age. We shared classrooms, church youth groups, even a reform school. It fell on my shoulders to keep his memory alive. This was a heavy burden.
My family is Teutonic, stolid, Midwestern. We do not emote easily. We avoid squirmy topics of conversation. We bury painful events under layers of silence, avoidance, and belittlement. When David died, this approach no longer worked for me. I went from the relatively carefree life of a college sophomore to utter devastation. I wrote bad suicidal poetry and was plagued by chronic migraines and a budding stomach ulcer. I dulled the ache with valium mixed with cheap whiskey and cigarettes. On weekend nights, as my classmates engaged in youthful bacchanalia at parties and clubs, I got hammered in my car, then took my place among the ranks of the defeated — the homeless, the schizoids, the misanthropes — in the periodical room of the local library, hiding in literature, unable to stand anyone who so much as appeared happy. I was miserable and wanted everyone else to be, too. Camus, Sartre, Kafka — these were my dark companions.
Eventually, I outgrew the bad suicidal poetry and wanted to write down the truth. I thought recording David's life in vivid detail would help mitigate the pain of his death. Indeed, it has. But when I first sat down to the task, I was emotionally paralyzed. How do you translate someone's life into words? Was it possible to capture both the hard facts of a person's reality and the essence of their humanity? Was it presumptuous to even attempt to do so? What would David think of my undertaking? For several agitated days, I stared at my blank computer monitor, these questions seething inside me.
Finally, in an effort to get something on that screen, I jotted down a few physical facts of David's life:
1. He weighed 2 lbs. when he was born.
2. When my parents adopted him at age 3, he still could not walk or talk.
3. He was one of only a handful of non-Caucasians living in Lafayette, Indiana.
4. He was thin, unathletic, and wore thick glasses.
5. He was on his way to see me when he crashed his car on August 1, 1987.
Then I added some emotional facts:
1. He was frequently harassed by racist bullies.
2. My father, a respected surgeon and church deacon, beat him.
3. He had an irrepressible sense of humor.
4. Like any kid, he craved affection, encouragement, attention, a sense of well-being.
5. He was my best friend.
There is a blur between the physical and emotional facts of David's life, and this is where his story lies. He wasn't all saint. He wasn't all victim. If I had to select one adjective to describe him, it would be hopeful. Hopeful that people would love him back. Hopeful that he would be accepted. Hopeful that things would get better when he turned eighteen and was in control of his own life.
I have a box marked "David," where I keep everything related to my brother. His life, in mementos. These include yellowing letters. A lifetime of photographs. A cassette tape of the '80s new wave band A Flock of Seagulls. A Purdue Boilermakers jersey. His National Guard manual. The green notebook in which he'd started his autobiography. His death certificate.
Combing through these physical artifacts and dwelling on the significance each one held, I fashioned a narrative. As I immersed myself in his life, I began to dream about him on a regular basis. He'd appear randomly — as a colleague at the newspaper where I worked, offering to make a few phone calls so I could meet a deadline, as a customer in line behind me at the grocery store. I'd be ecstatic to see him, but he'd shrug off my excitement as if nothing unusual had happened. As if he weren't dead, and had as much business going about his worldly affairs as the next person. I got the feeling that he approved of my writing endeavor.
I tried my best to make him a whole person in my book, to create a nuanced and complete portrait. By the time Jesus Land went to press in Fall 2005, I felt I'd accomplished this goal. I had managed to create, so I thought, the definitive account of my brother.
But then the emails started coming. People who knew David and had read my book sent me their own recollections of my brother. These, by turn, baffled and thrilled me. How could I possibly be learning new things about my brother two decades after his death?
A few examples:
A neighbor girl — now woman — wrote that David used to leave notes on her towel when she sunbathed in her front yard, waiting until she ducked inside for a drink or to use the toilet to deliver his missives.
What am I to make of this? I picture my brother hiding behind a tree, watching a girl in a bikini and must remind myself that he was not a creep. He was an awkward, lovesick teenager. That he was Black in rural, snow-white Indiana, and more than a little gun-shy from a long line of unrequited crushes.
An email from my former pastor addressed the same topic. Over lunch at a pizza joint one day, "David wanted to talk about his feeling that he never seemed to fit in with other people," my former pastor wrote. "He was black, but he didn't talk and act like black people. He didn't want to....When he started thinking about dating and girls, he said 'who would ever want me? The black girls will think I'm too white and the white girls will think I'm too black.'"
It was the conundrum of his life. Never being enough of one thing, always being too much of another. Black, adopted, beaten down. All those squirmy topics we never discussed — and I so wished we had.
"I lost touch with Dave after he started doing things I didn't want to get involved in," wrote one of his high school chums. Repeated emails asking the sender what, specifically, he was referring to went unanswered. Drugs? Street theater? Plasma donation? (I know David did sell plasma at one low point.) And the message brought up additional questions: Did I have a right to know anything about my brother that he didn't reveal to me himself? Was this a post-mortem invasion of his privacy?
Another reader said he met David shortly before his death. He had purchased the house in town that we abandoned upon moving to the country. One spring day, the man wrote, David drove up with a couple of young men and rang the doorbell as his friends waited in the car. "He wanted to prove to his friends that he had indeed grown up in a magnificent, grand house," the man wrote. (Indeed, the house was a lovely, windowed, three-story affair.) Reading into the tone of his message, I suspected the new owner didn't quite believe that a black youngster ever lived there, either. It was something David ran up against every day of his life, people's assumptions based solely on his surface color.
These emails made me realize that there is no way to contain a person in a book. David's life was much too far-reaching and intricate to be summed up in 350 tidy pages. But by writing down my best recollections of him, I believe I gave him depth and soul.
Since Jesus Land was published, I have received hundreds of emails from readers around the world saying they feel as if they knew my brother, and mourn his death. This is the greatest response I could hope for. David is cherished by more people than he could ever imagine. He would be flattered.
posted by Julia Scheeres at 4:33 PM
23 Comments:
Ms. Scheeres,
I haven't read your book as yet. I have been aware of it owing to its success, but just haven't got there yet.
I have been reading Sam Harris' and Richard Dawkin's recent books.
I am also hoping to see the "Jesus Camp" film that has made some news of late.
I am not sure of the overall thrust of your book, but I assume that it deals with abuse by christian oriented "tough love" camps.
As it happens, I am from Indiana as well. There was a fundamentalist group here that was housing a number of mainly Russian orphans (and children effectively orphaned by the incarceration, and/or addictions of their parents) at the former Stouffer's Hotel on north Meridian St. in Indy and the former Julietta Home on the far eastern edge of Marion County.
Via a roundabout means we were contacted by the group at Julietta to see if their kids could come to our home to pick apples. At the time we had seven apple trees and no means to utilize the overwhelming crop they produced.
So one sunny September afternoon we had a group of around 25 to 30 kids ranging in age from 6 or 7 to late teens come and pick our apples. They wound up hauling out perhaps fifty or more bushels of apples and we also allowed them to pick grapes from our small arbor. Few of the kids spoke any English, and ostensibly for that reason, we were discouraged from making any serious attempt to communicate with them, which at the time seemed a bit strange. But, overall, it seemed to be a happy experience for all. Perhaps it was just the effect of being outside on a lovely late summer day.
However, a few weeks later news hit the airwaves regarding this group and its heavy handed tactics at disciplining their charges. The name of the group escapes me at this writing.
Some of the kids were reported to have been isolated in lightless rooms, trussed up in blankets sometimes for days. They were often harrangued for their transgressions - whatever they may have been - in interrogation sessions reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps. A number of other accusations were leveled at the group. I don't know if there was any other alleged physical abuse, and I don't believe there were any accusations of sexual mis-conduct on the part of the overseers.
The end result, though was that the Russian government quickly pulled the plug on the group and whisked all of the kids back to the motherland.
This revelation put a damper on our enthusiasm. What had seemed so blissful on "apple day," turned to a sense that we had abetted forced child labor.
The puritan ethic which still holds fast in this country often leaves one dumbfounded. The misery that is brought to bear against people of all ages, but most painfully, against children in the name of religion is despicable. The supposedly protective umbrella of religion provides a font of hate and self loathing that gives license to all manner of abuse and, as we are now witnessing, mass murder.
TLS
BTW - I read your book.
TLS
congratulations on your success! i'm in total awe of you. i just finished writing a non fiction memoir and im in the middle of writing the second. when you write about the people you love and the emotional turbulence, it is really hard work. but i believe these stories help ppl and touch us all in so many ways. you give me hope.
JULIA! Please please write to me...do you remember be? We were friends at Calvin College...the few outsiders. I went there from 1986-1990. Remember the spring/summer of 1990? We had that fun picnic in my backyard (of the house I was renting) in Grand Rapids, with Ghennet and your then boyfriend, Zane of the 101st airborne? (How did I remember his name?!)
Priya
peteandpriya @ sbcglobal.net
Dear Mrs. Scheeres,
I have just finished reading your book. It is hard for me to write this email because the tears are dripping on a keyboard. I feel so bad and sorry for your loss. You are an amaizing person.
I do feel like I know David and my heart is broken that he had to die.
I wish you and your lovely family all the best,
I am looking torward to reading more of your books.
You are such a strong person.
Again, all the best
Anna Z.
Thanks for the wonderful book! I wondered as an adult have you been able to sit down with your parents and confront them with all the abuse? And did Jerome every get his life together?
Nancy
P.S. You will be happy (or maybe not) to know that Sandi Patti is still singing - I will hear her in concert this Friday!! : )
Your book was so riveting that I resented everything that took time away from reading it---work, sleep, what have you. Congratulations on your success, and for making me care so much about David.
I can't really say I enjoyed your book. It was very disturbing. I consider a book a success if the characters (real or fictional) live on in my head after I finish the book. In this, you have succeeded.
I still do not understand how come so many Christians believe that mindless conformity is somehow Christian, when Jesus was the ultimate non-conformist. So much so that a group of conformity minded legalists petitioned the Romans to have him killed. If he showed up at Escuela Caribe, I am sure he would be body slammed a few times.
The saddest line of the book was that the only comment your father made regarding your brother's death was "Figures he wasn't wearing a seatbelt - rebellious to the end." It seems like he could have found something nice to say. Really, what parent would say something like that!
Write something happy next time :-)
Dear Ms. Scheeres,
I just finished reading your book and I am in a state of awe.
wow.
And I believe you have immortalized your brother in "Jesus Land". I'm wondering how you survived your childhood. I'm thanking God that you wrote this wonderful book, for allowing the world to meet your beautiful brother. I dont understand why you didnt just run away from Escuela Caribe when you had the chance. I dont see where the hell your older brothers and sisters were when you needed them the most. I wonder about Jerome.
I cannot believe that reform school is open to this day. wtf.
And I thank God that you survived all this -and that you have this blog for readers like myself.
i'm going to share this book with everyone I know.
I'm eighteen and as I complete my freshman year at community college I've quickly come to the understanding that most adults are just as emotionally unstable as most children, that most adults never fail to grow out habitual temper tantrums. And as i lose respect for those adults who seem to fail at "maturing with grace", You stand on the other side. like Hope.
In many ways you're my hero.
Thankyou.
Zeina
may 07, 4:06am
WOW! What a tome!!! I have so much to say and yet I am touched...your strength and David's lineage of being so strong too...amazing!!! You both knew more about love then a whole body of Christ could ever contain...I hope you know that the pain you suffered is similar to a zillion others out there like me...spiritual, sexual, emotional, physical abuse has left me scarred for life, even though I keep on keeping on...I have DID and I feel like it is God's gift to me to survive and to keep me in touch with my heart...you keep your voice out there for the rest of us survivors...because not everyone gets a chance to have a voice...
I wish you were here so I could give you a big hug...I am soooo sorry about your loss of David...he sounds like the best brother anyone could ever of had...
Love, Kayhay
you can write me if you wish to;
kayhay2@yahoo.com
here is my blog site...
http://kayhay.blogspot.com
kayhay...
1252643803
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
I finished your book today. I am 28 years old and have been an avid reader for most of my life. Before today, I don't recall ever having cried over a book, but I could not stop crying after reading your epilogue. I cannot explain the emotion except to say that I felt as though I had just learned about the death of someone dear to me.
Of the hundreds of books I've read in my lifetime, this is only the second time I've ever felt compelled to contact an author. I can't thank you enough for sharing David's story with a world that will undoubtedly be better for it.
Julia,
You are such an amazing writer!
Thank you for allowing me to step into your memoir and become a person who cherishes David's memory.
Your story will always be in my heart.
Great Article! Thank You!
Thanks to author! I like articles like this, very interesting.
nice blog!
nice blog!Nice information
:-) ochen\' zaebatyj blog!
Keep up the great work. It very impressive. Enjoyed the visit!
I just finished your book and am crying like a baby. I am a 35yo mom of two precious little girls and all I want to do is mother you and your brother. I am so sad that his life ended so tragically and I wish I could have been the one to have adoptd him. Do you still speak to your parents? What was their reaction to your book? I am so sorrowful for what can happen in this world and I hope you can have much peace and happiness from now on.
Post a Comment
<< Home