Mississippi Pews and Moon Pies

Religious trauma is real, but so is love and community. It's complicated.

My early childhood was chaotic and poor…and hungry. Before anyone starts on my parents, they were 16 and 18. They were babies raising babies. They were poor and hungry too.

My mom and dad split early on and my sister and I lived with our dad. He was in the Navy, a Seabee, and he built custom furniture on the side—mostly cabinets. We lived outside of Gulfport, Mississippi in a single-wide trailer. I don’t remember much of the place, but I do remember sleeping on not one, or even two mattresses on the floor, but three. I suspect it was to keep us high off the ground, and away from the night-time varmints, but I can’t say for sure.

Besides the side carpentry work, daddy also raised hogs…they lived in a pen in the front of the trailer. There’s a term for folks like us, and it’s okay. I made peace with my heritage decades ago.

During our time in Mississippi, we attended a church regularly and I assume it was Pentecostal because I remember folks speaking in tongues and a very active service each week. When I say active, I mean the women started to dance and sing and be taken over by the Spirit. The men weren’t usually quite as active, and most of the time, the children were shooed up to the Sunday school room in the attic of the building. It was set up more like a barn…we climbed the stairs, hands and feet, to the loft. I loved that space, with the felt board and the biblical characters we could stick on the board— I especially liked to look down through the floorboards at the adults in the pews and the ones dancing between the pews.

Daddy played guitar in church. He was raised a Baptist because of his father, but his mother was from Kentucky and raised in the Pentecostal, or Holiness, church. She told me stories of her uncle who was a pastor of a church that handled snakes. I guess daddy preferred his mom’s roots to his dad’s. So, the little Pentecostal church it was.

I talk about religious trauma often, but I have to say that not much, if any, is related to that little church in Gulfport. Maybe it was that I was too little to remember the sermons, and I imagine they were filled with hellfire and preaching about submissive women who should grow their hair out and wear skirts, but never makeup, but I can’t recall any of it. That religious trauma would come later from the churches I attended in my adolescence and from my grandpa, who was a strict Baptist. He quite literally put the fear of God in me.

To put it simply, we were hungry in Mississippi.

Neither my sister nor I attended school—we were too young. Our babysitter would likely have had authorities called on her today, but back in the late 70s, a chain-smoking, always-pregnant young mom who locked her wards out of the house for a few hours a day to clean her house wasn’t necessarily unheard of. She didn’t hit or hurt us and she fed all of us sandwiches on the back porch — but there wasn’t always food in our own home for supper and sometimes we went to bed hungry.

Not dying, but not comfortable. Not always hungry, but enough that it stuck.

But, I have a memory that will go with me to my grave…Daddy took us to town one evening to do laundry. It took a few hours to get it all done, but we finally finished the last of the folding and walked out to the van with our clean towels and clothes. My dad didn’t have laundry baskets, so our arms were full up to our chins. I waited for Daddy to open the door for me and when he did, I saw three grocery bags. I told him we must be getting into the wrong van. He looked in and said, “Well, I guess someone put their groceries into the wrong van. Get in.”

I was upset. I started to cry on the way home. I was worried that someone else was going to be upset when they realized they didn’t have their groceries. I begged Daddy to turn around and try to find the people probably looking for their groceries. He assured me it would be okay and told me I could look in the bags and get something out if I would just quit crying.

The paper grocery bags were overflowing. There was bread, eggs, milk, cereal (sugar cereal, not corn flakes), lunch meat, sardines, and Moon Pies. I don’t know if I’d ever tasted a Moon Pie before, but every time I’ve had one since, I can taste clean laundry and a VW van with a door that had to be opened from the inside. It still makes me smile.

You’ll not be the least surprised to hear that the groceries did not in fact belong to someone who accidently put them in the wrong van. The groceries came from church members who knew we were struggling, but also knew daddy would never accept money or food from anyone. They knew he would have to accept them if the groceries just appeared in his van and that is exactly what happened.

I asked daddy about the groceries a few years before he died…he acted like he didn’t remember the incident, but he did say, that little church was filled with the best people he’d ever known in his life.

I think I agree with daddy. I bet they don’t know that three bags of groceries delivered 45 years ago still live in my memory and serve to remind me that though I have left the church, I still remember the love.

And the Moon Pies.

~Jess