Hungry for the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

longbow, Fey Morgan
. I learned that the Eskimos wear boots called
mucklucks
, that Nez Perce ate
pemmican
made from venison and the boiled berries of
kinnikinnick
.
    I was teased by peers and berated by uncles for burying my nose between pages. My poor eyesight was blamed on too much reading, as were my allergies and pale skin—all that lingering over the impossible, all those daydreams and big words that put even bigger ideas into my head. But it was my father who encouraged and challenged me. “Look it up,” he would say. “Find out for yourself.” From him I learned the nuance of language, how each phrase could be read and reread, each time different. Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.
    I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy.There were doors that must not be opened, passages that must be foregone. Satan lurked there, waiting to snag the wayward traveler, to lure him away with the promise of wisdom, knowledge—the fruit of the tree that Eve could not leave be.
    B Y THE TIME I was eleven, the easy companionship my father and I once shared was gone. My sudden maturation had caught us both by surprise. I remember one evening near the end of my fifth-grade year, lying back in the tub so that my mother could rinse my hair. The Prell shampoo, stringent as paint remover, got into my eyes, and I let out a howl of pain that reached my father where he sat in the living room, reading his Bible. He thundered down the hall and swung open the door, thinking only of injury. The sight of my unclothed body froze him where he stood, and I saw the look on his face turn from alarm to embarrassment and then to anger. This intimacy was not to exist between us, and I, through my babyish caterwauling, had forced him to see what should remain hidden. For days afterward, I believed it pained him to be near me, so shamed was he by my nakedness.
    I was no longer that little girl he’d once led through the dark, my fingers wrapped around his thumb. I was an
early bloomer
, my grandmother said, and I cringed with the words’ connotations: images of flowers and creepers and verdant grasses sprouting from the sleeves of my blouse, the waistband of my skirt. I was too aware of my body’s sudden transformation, my need for bras and deodorant and feminine hygiene—all “private things,” my mother whispered, and I cringed yet again, unable to disassociate the word
private
from the parts of myself that most humiliated me. The chaos of my own body became unbearable, and I welcomed the long skirts and high necklines, the coverings that kept me concealed and contained. My full-immersion baptism in the frigid current of Reed’s Creek was a blessing—the water that set my teeth to chattering pure forgiveness, purging me of all sin, washing me clean.
    T HE WORDS MOST OFTEN USED to describe the religion of my childhood—charismatic, evangelical, Pentecostal—indicate little other than its particular theological concerns. The fact is that we believed in the physical existence of Satan and angels, believed that the skies would break open and God would return to gather His chosen ones home, and that we were those chosen few. We listened to the missionaries tell of dark heathens who practiced the Devil’s art, casting spells and bedding witches. They ate the flesh of white babies. They could assume the shape of any man or animal and speak with honeyed voices. We practiced our own small exorcisms, commanding Satan to leave, and I watched those who