Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story Read online

  “How’s it going, Mitchell?” Dad said, stepping out of the car. “You remember your niece, don’t you?”

  The two of them talked for a minute. Then Dad turned toward me.

  “So, Ingrid, I’ve decided I’m going to let you visit with Uncle Mitchell and your cousins for the next couple of weeks,” he said, acting like it was a special treat for me. “I know your aunt could really use the help with your cousins and it will be a nice visit.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He couldn’t be serious.

  “No!” I yelled, panic sweeping over me. “Dad, I want to go with you! You promised!”

  There was no way I was going to let him dump me off at my uncle’s mobile trailer in the middle of nowhere.

  “Ingrid, I want you to listen to me,” Dad said, his voice suddenly firm and impatient. “It’s too hard to have you on the road with me. I want you to stay with your uncle and I want you to listen to him and be good. I’ll be back to get you in a couple of weeks.”

  That’s when I noticed that my uncle was holding my polka-dotted suitcase. I burst into tears.

  My uncle grabbed my hand.

  “Now, Ingrid. It’s going to be fine,” he said.

  Dad was back in the car and already starting to drive away. I broke free of my uncle and started running after him. Dad just drove faster. I could hear my uncle yelling for me to come back. I was sobbing, frantically calling after Dad to stop and come get me.

  Dad’s car tires kicked hot dry dust into my tear-soaked face and mouth. But I kept on chasing after him. I ran until I couldn’t see his car anymore and then sat down on the road and sobbed. A minute later my uncle caught up to me and offered me ten dollars if I would please just stop crying and come back to the trailer with him.

  I had hated every second of those two weeks and had sworn then that I would never let Dad pull something like that on me again. Now here I was, stuck on some stranger’s floor—once again tricked, ripped off and humiliated.

  UNTIL THE SLEEPOVER at Patricia’s house, I thought our new life in Mississippi was going great. Dad still came home only once or twice a week, but it was much better than the once-a-month visit we had when we were living in Utah. And moneywise, things seemed to be looking up.

  The house Dad rented for us was small, only about 900 square feet, and the front yard was noisy because of all the cars and semi-trucks whizzing by on the four-lane highway next to it. But it was new. And compared to our ancient, rundown house in Utah, it was luxurious.

  The minute we pulled up to the curb in our dirty, rusted brown Buick, I sensed things were improving. I raced into the house with Connie to check things out.

  The first thing I noticed was that the narrow, closet-sized kitchen had its own dishwasher, which meant Connie and I didn’t have to scrub dishes anymore. The eating nook next to the dishwasher opened into a family room with new cream-colored, wall-to-wall carpet.

  “Connie, you have got to come here and check this out,” I yelled. “It’s got a fireplace!”

  I had always dreamed of a fireplace and I loved the way my feet sunk into the soft plush carpet. At home, our carpet was so old that some areas were worn bare to the plywood floors beneath it. It was like walking on cement.

  The other side of the kitchen led to a small, rectangular living room, which featured the same cream-colored carpet. At the end of the living room was a short hallway that opened to three small bedrooms, with a bathroom sandwiched between the first two. Mom and Dad’s bedroom had its own bathroom.

  “This is great!” I squealed as I examined the kids’ bathroom. “It even has a shower in it!”

  Connie and I equated having a shower and two bathrooms to being rich. Our house in Utah had only one bathroom and an old claw foot tub that looked like it belonged in the 1800s.

  The two of us quickly staked out the room we planned to share, the one located in the corner at the front of the house. That left Heidi and my brother, Jacob, with the smallest middle bedroom next to Mom and Dad’s.

  Mom didn’t seem nearly as excited when she walked through the house. Later that afternoon, when Dad headed across the border to Memphis to meet up with his sales crew, she started to cry.

  She called us all into the room with the fireplace for a talk.

  “You have to be very careful whenever you are outside,” she told us, her eyes swollen. “You can’t go into the street. It’s too dangerous. And your dad says the swamp next to it has alligators in it, so don’t go near there.”

  Mom was desperate to find a Mormon church. We didn’t have our phone connected yet, so we all piled into the car in search of a payphone. After driving around for a while, we found a 7-Eleven.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Mom said, stepping out of the car. “I don’t know if it’s safe here so roll up the windows and keep the doors locked while I’m gone.”

  We watched her walk across the parking lot and enter the phone booth stall. When we left Utah the week before, there had already been snow on the ground. Here, it was still warm and humid, even though it was the first week in November. With the windows shut, the air in the Buick was suffocating and smelled like dirty socks.

  Heidi and I decided to pass the time by covering Jacob’s head in tiny ponytails that stuck up everywhere. He wasn’t even four yet and could be talked into almost anything.

  Connie, as usual, was quiet and serious. She sat straight as a board in her privileged spot in front passenger seat, her carefully brushed auburn hair tucked neatly behind her ear as she watched Mom through the windshield.

  “Here she comes,” Connie announced after about fifteen minutes. “She doesn’t look happy.”

  I glanced up from the makeover I was performing on Jacob just as Mom opened the car door. She looked like someone had just died.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said, her voice shaking as she spoke. “The nearest church is across the border in Memphis. That’s thirty miles away.”

  By the time we got back to our new house, Mom was crying again and shut herself into her new bedroom to pray.

  At home in Utah, there were two Mormon chapels within a four-block radius of our house. It was weird to think we would have to drive to a new state just to go to a church meeting. I was secretly glad to have a little distance. But I knew it was a serious blow to Mom because the church was like her family.

  Mom had told us her conversion story more times than I could remember. I wasn’t crazy about the religious part. But I was so fascinated by her childhood that I never got tired of hearing her talk about it.

  Mom had told us she was born in Graz, Austria, in the fall of 1940, just when World War II was really getting started. She was the only child of a police officer, whom she loved dearly, and a mean stepmother who hated her and made Mom sell her only doll to get money for alcohol.

  The reason her stepmom hated her so much is because Mom’s real mother had fallen in love with her dad while he was married and had gotten pregnant with Mom.

  “I don’t know if I was wanted,” Mom had told us, the sadness blanketing her voice when she spoke. “My father was silent about my birth and never said anything about my blood mother, not a single word. But the story I heard from my stepmother was hurtful. She would say, ‘Your mother is very, very bad and you are going to be as bad as your mother. She forced your father to have a baby and now we have you―an ugly little disgrace!’”

  As a child, Mom said she had no idea that her blood mother was only seventeen when she had given birth to her, and that when Mom was still a baby, she had been working for the Resistance Movement and had been captured by the Nazis. It wasn’t until Mom was an adult that she’d learned the truth.

  “It turns out that during the first five years of my life, my biological mom had been locked up at Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women,” Mom told us, pausing to explain that concentration camps were horrible prisons where Hitler sent millions of people to be killed or to work as slaves. “My mother nearly sta
rved to death in there, and she was so sick and weak that her body was full of worms. Right before the Americans came to liberate the camp in1945, she was taken on a death march. The prisoners walked for miles and if they couldn’t keep up, they were killed by the guards. My mother was so weak, she started having a hard time moving and was stabbed with a bayonet and left for dead.

  “She was thin as a skeleton when a Red Cross doctor found her, and though she was only twenty-two years old, all of her hair had turned white from malnutrition. It took nearly a year before she was healthy again. At that time, she was given a choice. She was told she could go back to Austria or start a new life in France. She chose France.”

  Had Mom known the truth about her blood mother, maybe she wouldn’t have felt so alone and unloved as a child. But all she was told was that her real mom didn’t want her. And though her stepmother was occasionally kind to her, she got so mean when she was drunk that she sometimes locked Mom in a room and threatened to kill her with a knife.

  “Along with selling my toys and being forced to go to the taverns and beg them for liquor for my stepmother, my earliest memories are of sirens, bomb shelters, and dead bodies,” Mom had told us, continuing her story. “When I was four, I remember running into a bomb shelter with my dad, my stepmom, and another family. There was a big explosion and we were all knocked out. When I woke up, I saw that the other family was dead. And when we came out of the shelter, there were dead people everywhere and the apartment we lived in was just a pile of rubble. Everything we had was gone.”

  Mom’s dad, who had worked as a police officer and then a security guard, contracted tuberculosis when she was still a young girl and spent most of Mom’s childhood sick in bed. Mom kept to herself at school and often just sat and cried at her desk. Because she was poor, the other kids teased her. And even if she had wanted to have friends over to her apartment, her stepmother wouldn’t allow it. So Mom would stand by the window of her third-story apartment and watch other children play.

  Mom told us the only time she felt loved and happy was at church. She was Old Catholic and loved the rituals. She also craved the peace she felt on Sundays, sitting in the chapel. Once a week Mom was allowed to attend religion classes and the vicar paid special attention to her. He became Mom’s best friend and confidante. Recognizing her passion for religion, he even talked to her about going to a school to teach religion.

  Teaching religion was Mom’s dream, but her stepmother wouldn’t allow her to pursue it because her family needed money. After finishing school at fifteen, she was forced to find a job at an engraving shop. That was Mom’s life for the next year, until one day her stepmother surprised her by saying that Mormon missionaries from America had stopped by for a visit and that she had invited them back to meet Mom.

  “I was sixteen at the time and felt like I knew all the answers,” Mom said. “I had read the Bible from the beginning to the end, so I felt like I had sufficient knowledge of religion and was prepared to defend my belief.”

  Mom planned to put the Mormon missionaries in their place. But as soon as they told her about the Mormon religion, she said she felt in her heart that they were speaking the truth. She was also struck by the fact that the elders were so sure of their testimony and of the truth of the Mormon religion.

  The only thing Mom struggled with was the Joseph Smith story—about how Heavenly Father talked directly to him, and had chosen him as the prophet who was to restore the only true church, which had been lost over the centuries.

  “I felt that if Heavenly Father truly lives and he actually talked with Joseph Smith, then he would also speak to me,” Mom explained stubbornly. “I mean, why not?”

  On the advice of the Mormon missionaries, Mom had read the Book of Mormon, gave up coffee and tea because it’s against the Mormon religion, and started praying nightly for an answer. On her third night of praying, she said she finally got the affirmation she needed.

  “Suddenly I felt a burning sensation and indescribable joy in my heart, and I knew without a doubt that God lived because I felt his presence. So now I could ask him the question about which church was true: was it the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or was it the Catholic Church?

  “Then I received the answer—it was a voice coming from across the room where the elders had taught me the gospel. The voice quoted a scripture from the Book of Mormon, and in that moment, I knew God had answered me. I couldn’t deny it.”

  THE DAY AFTER arriving at our new house, Mom and Dad went to a second-hand store in Memphis and bought mattresses, metal bed frames, and dressers for us. The rest of the rooms were left bare until my uncle could bring out some of our junky, mismatched furniture from home. I preferred it this way because I didn’t have to be embarrassed when I had my new friends over. At least for a while, I could make up some excuse about Mom not having the time to go furniture shopping.

  There wasn’t much to see or do in Walls. It was flat with a lot of big cotton fields and swampy areas—not at all like the mountains that surrounded Logan. Mom loved the rugged Wasatch Mountains at home because they reminded her of the mountains in Austria. But I was fine with our new surroundings. I could just stay inside and enjoy our fireplace and dishwasher.

  After giving us a few days to adjust, Mom took Connie and me to enroll in our new school. Heidi, who had just turned six in early September and had started first grade at home, wasn’t even allowed to attend school in Mississippi because she missed the first grade cut-off date by a week and they didn’t have kindergarten.

  At home, we could walk to our elementary school. Our school in Walls was five miles away from our house and was so big it looked like a high school. It was two stories tall and took up nearly an entire block.

  Mom sighed as she parked the car.

  “Okay, stay close to me,” she said as we headed into the building.

  It was in the middle of the day and the halls were empty. We found the school office and met with the secretary, who gave Mom a stack of papers to fill out and told her important information about which school bus Connie and I would need to ride.

  Then she directed her attention to the two of us.

  “Our school goes from first grade to eighth grade,” she said in a slow, lazy drawl. “You two are still in elementary school so ya’ll will stay on the first floor.”

  I was fascinated by her accent and mimicked it all the way back to the car.

  “Stop it right now!” Mom barked, looking like she was ready to lose it. “When you talk like that, it makes you sound stupid.”

  I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. Mom never used words like “stupid.” To her, that word was as bad as swearing.

  The next morning Mom drove Connie and me to our new school and told us to go to the office so they could walk us to our new classes.

  This time, the halls were crowded. That’s when we noticed all the black kids.

  I had only seen one or two black people in my life. Though Mom taught us to be kind to everyone, we believed that black people were cursed because they had sided with Satan during a war with Jesus in the spirit world. That’s where we believed all of us—Satan and Jesus included—lived as spirit children before coming to Earth.

  According to Mormon belief, God punished Satan by casting him out of the spirit world without a body. Then he punished his followers by turning their skin black when they were born. As a result, black people were banned from entering the Mormon temple and black men couldn’t hold the priesthood. It would be two and a half more years before church officials would lift the ban, citing a new revelation from God.

  “I’ll bet we’re the only Mormons,” Connie whispered as we made our way to the principal’s office.

  Connie preferred to keep to herself and didn’t like being put in the spotlight. I knew she was nervous about starting a new school because she kept fidgeting with her glasses. But I couldn’t wait. It was my chance to become someone different.

  The office secretary walked us through
the crowded halls to our classes. She stopped at mine first and opened the door.

  “This is I-n-g-r-i-d,” she announced in her slow drawl. Then she left.

  I did a quick scan of the room and noticed what seemed like an invisible line dividing my new classmates. All of the black kids sat on the left side of the class; all of the white kids sat on the right side. They were all staring at me. And no one said a word.

  There was still about five minutes before the opening bell and my new teacher hadn’t yet arrived. I had to do something to break the ice.

  “Bet none of you know how to spell ‘Phyllis,’” I announced from the front of the room. Phyllis was my best friend in Utah and I was proud to know the secret trick to spelling her name.

  “Can too,” several of the white students yelled.

  “Okay, let’s see it—write it down, but don’t show each other.”

  I waited a minute and then began making the rounds from desk to desk in the white section, checking my classmates’ work and gleefully announcing that they were wrong.

  “It doesn’t start with an F,” I finally revealed. “Phyllis starts with a ‘Ph.’”

  Just then my teacher came in and called the class to order. I felt happy and relaxed as I sat down at the desk he assigned me amid my new white friends. This was going to be fun.

  The only bad part about my new school was that the teachers hit kids when they misbehaved. I’d seen it happen in the hallway my first day there. That same day, I noticed that the principal had a wooden paddle sticking out of his back pocket.

  “It’s got nail heads hammered into it so it stings more when he hits you with it,” one of my new friends warned me at lunch time. I decided I didn’t want to find out if they were telling the truth, and vowed then and there to always call my teachers “Ma’am” or “Sir” and follow every class rule.

  After school ended each day, Connie and I met in front of the building and caught our school bus home. In Utah, Tuesday afternoons were reserved for Primary, a church meeting for kids. But since the nearest church was so far away, Mom couldn’t get us there in time, which meant that we got a break from any weekday church activities. Mom still made us get up at six most mornings to read scriptures, but we didn’t have a piano so we skipped some of the hymn singing. And when Dad was home, we sometimes skipped our morning church sessions altogether. Mom also let up on homemaking projects such as sewing and bottling fruit for food storage when Dad was around. We still had our chores, but those weren’t bad because having a dishwasher made cleaning the kitchen a piece of cake. With no furniture and only a few toys to deal with, the rest of the house never seemed to get messy.