My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir (Hardback)

Chapter One

My grandfather, my Pake, on my mother's side, was Wytse Benedictus, a peat farmer and a Mennonite. He lived near a small village called Rottevalle, which lies in the center of Friesland, the northernmost province of the Netherlands. While Friesland is indeed a province and not a country, its people know that they are a race and culture apart, with their own language and their own history, the fiercest warriors of all the Gauls, according to Julius Caesar, who knew what he was talking about. But since then, according to Baedecker, the travel guide man, they have produced nothing more interesting than an uncommon lot of schoolteachers; he said it in mild derision, but most Frisians would have taken it as a fine tribute. It was here that the forebears of the Frisian Mennonites had settled after their flight from persecution by the Swiss Reformers.

The Benedictus family had been Mennonites from before the time the Mennonites named their movement after the converted priest Menno Simons, the greatest of their leaders. They were a peaceable people, these Mennonites, radical children of the Protestant Reformation whom the Calvinists and Lutherans contemptuously called Anabaptists (ana being the equivalent of "again") because they baptized adult converts by immersion even though they had already, as newborn babies, been baptized by sprinkling in the Reformed Church.

The Swiss Calvinists, in the words of a contemporary wag, figured that if these Anabaptists wanted so badly to be immersed, the Reformers would accommodate them by drowning them.

By the seventeenth century, the Mennonites in Friesland had begun to prosper, mostly because the land was ripe with peat, which was used as fuel and sold mainly to Germany. By the early sixteen hundreds, the Benedictus family had become wealthy owners of a considerable peat estate and by 1620 had built a modest manor on it. Pake Wytse is in his early forties - the year being uncertain, but sometime in the early 1880's - when we come upon him in the Benedictus manor, unmarried and apparently destined to remain so, a man highly regarded among the faithful for both his Christian character and his worldly goods.

Not far from the Benedictus estate, in a hovel near Rottevalle, lived a dirt-poor Frisian by the name of Reinder van der Bij, not blessed with any land but well cursed with many daughters - seven of them. Reinder could see no future in daughters, certainly not in seven of them, so, as most serfs in his circumstance did, he shipped all but the oldest out to work as virtual slaves on richer people's farms. One of the sisters was my grandmother Tjitske, who was sent off at age twelve or thirteen.

For Tjitske's fourteen hours of daily labor she earned two and half guilders (roughly four dollars) per year as a supplement to the food she consumed and the space in the barn that she occupied. She served one farmer until she was nineteen, when she was seduced and made pregnant by a roving carpenter. As soon as her belly betrayed her condition, she was pointed to her master's door and told to carry her baby along with her shame back to her father and home.

Reinder van der Bij, however, was not a man to be publicly shamed by a harlot daughter, and so, with a proper Old Testament curse, he sent her packing. No other Frisian man was likely to open his door to a fallen woman, and she took to begging in the streets. Her weeks or months on the streets are blacked out; we know nothing of her until she is rescued by Wytse and installed as a servant in the Benedictus manor. However she came to the manor, Wytse provided her a place to care for her newborn daughter and then left her on her own to keep house in a manner proper for a pure-of-heart Mennonite bachelor.

Sometime after he took her in from the streets, Wytse discovered that she could be of even more help to him in business than she was as a housekeeper. The trade in peat was carried on by spoken words, a handshake, and an exchange of cash. It was the spoken-words part that gave Wytse trouble. He stuttered. He stuttered even more than usual when he had a deal to make. So he was not offended when the servant girl he had taken in off the street offered to help him.

"Why don't you write your words down and let me speak them for you?" she asked.

Good idea, he said, and so it was that the two of them became working partners. Wytse swiftly became dependent on Tjitske, who gradually took over the peat negotiations as well as the management of the manor. Their working partnership flowered into personal attachment, and on the 26th of July in the year 1884, Wytse and Tjitske - destined now to be my grandmother, my Beppe Tjitske - were married. Both the Calvinists and the Mennonites assumed that the obedient bride would convert to the religion of her benefactor husband. But it was Wytse who pulled up his Mennonite roots and replanted them in his bride's Reformed faith.

Wytse knew the Mennonites well. A single Mennonite would never raise his hand against anyone, but a community of Mennonites could make a person's life miserable simply by ignoring her. So Pake Wytse and Beppe Tjitske left the Benedictus manor in the hands of a caretaker and moved into a smaller and rougher farm house that Wytse owned at the edge of a Protestant village called Ureterp, where their graves are still marked. Here the couple created a family of six children. Renske, the third born, would one day, in another world, give birth to me.

When we pick up the story again, Pake Wytse was sixty-four and, on this particular day, was ice skating, probably on a canal that edged the farm. He fell and broke his hip. He did not mend; he got rapidly worse, and he died, in agony it is said, within a few weeks of his fall. The widow Tjitske, braving Mennonite rejection, moved her seven children back to the great house in Rottevalle. She inherited all of Wytse's assets, land and cash, and managed them as well as she was able.

Being lady of the manor and manager of the peat farm was, however, a tough task for a novice widow with seven children. But an offer of help came soon in the guise of a charming widower named Wiebe Geksma. Wiebe, who posed as a man with the most honorable intentions and with money enough to care for both their families, offered himself to Tjitske, and Tjitske took him in. Wiebe promised to take care of her and seek her happiness, so they were soon married.

Wiebe waited no more than a few months after the wedding to show his hand. He told Tjitske that, since he was now the head of both the house and the wife, it was her duty to transfer the entire estate to him. Tjitske balked; the money was meant for Wytse's children, she said, and only his children were going to get it. Wiebe then tore the cover of charm off his pathology and his demons flew free. The children were his first victims, especially the girls; the boys he terrorized, the girls he assaulted. My future mother, the teenage Renske, was, I learned many years later, his favorite victim.

Wiebe tyrannized Beppe's family until, one Frisian winter night, he went one step too far: he threw Beppe Tjitske and her children out in the cold. When morning came, she went to the village police and begged them to come and rescue her brood. They went, evicted Wiebe and his children, and provided the Benedictus family with police protection. Tjitske obtained a legal separation and, soon afterward, spurning the shame of both the Mennonite and the Reformed camps, arranged for a divorce.

The Benedictus manor was, like all things Frisian, plain and rough. Barn and house were under one thatched roof, separated by a kitchen door that hung in two sections so that the woman of the house could open the upper half, speak to laborers and yell at the animals, while the lower half stayed locked against invasion by livestock. One Sunday morning at Beppe Tjitske's Reformed church, with the dominie well into his sermon and the congregation already smelling their Lord's Day coffee, the custodian rushed into the sanctuary yelling: Vuur bij Benedictus!! Fire at Benedictus - words dreaded by every farmer more than a prognosis of his own imminent death. And words that emptied any packed church in two minutes flat.

By the time the men of the congregation could get to the farm, the entire building, house and barn and every living thing in it, was aflame. The next day the villagers came with butchers' knives to slice off prodigious chunks of barbequed pork and beef, enough to provide them with a month of feasting. The ancient manor was gone.

Meanwhile, Beppe Tjitske's single source of income dwindled as coal began to replace peat for use as fuel in Europe. To make matters sadder, her first daughter, the carpenter's child, had married, and her husband had swindled Beppe out of a large amount of cash. So by the time the manor burned, the Benedictus estate had already been drained.

My mother Renske had by this time sailed off to America with her new husband, Melle Smedes, a village blacksmith, the son of generations of blacksmiths before him. In 1932, Beppe Tjitske died a few minutes after whispering her favorite verses from her favorite psalm:

The Lord preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me. Thou hast delivered my soul from death, Mine eyes from tears, My feet from falling. (Psalm 116:6, 8)

Later, a money-order for two hundred dollars signed to my mother came in the mail from Rottevalle, and the last of Beppe Tjitske's modest fortune was spent to pay for a new roof over a new set of Frisian heads at 774 Amity Street in Muskegon, Michigan.

I think of Beppe Tjitske's and Pake Wytse's mixed marriage, a rare and suspect thing in their time and place, as a parable of the religious mix in my own spirit. I like both ingredients in the mix. I like the tough intellectual side of the Reformed faith. And I like the gentle affections of the Mennonite faith. I share the Reformed wariness of radical piety. I share the Mennonite suspicion of rigid dogmatism.

Chapter Two

My father's Frisian name was Melle and the name-changers at Ellis Island let it stay that way. He built our house on Amity Street in Muskegon during the fading hours of daylight after he came home from his nine- or ten-hour shift at the foundry. He had never built anything before; the only use he had ever put a hammer to was nailing shoes to horses' hooves.

The front porch of the house he built for us was studded with pink and white Kelly stones, which, I always felt, gave it a touch of distinction in our plain neighborhood. The porch was almost as wide as the house and deep enough to hold the army surplus cot that my brother Peter had found at the junkyard where he scavenged regularly for stray items that might come in handy around our house. At the other end of the porch was our one conspicuous luxury, a two-person swing hanging uncertainly from hooks in the ceiling.

If we walked straight from the bottom porch step, we would run smack into the finest maple tree on our maple-lined Amity Street. Its trunk was almost four feet through the middle, and its full-spread branches shaded our entire porch, making it bearable for us to sit on the swing and dream through the hottest of summer afternoons. The few moments that I would spend alone with my mother during the week were on late Sunday afternoons swinging cool in the shadow of our maple and greeting the neighbors finishing up their Sabbath walks; they were the happiest moments of my childhood.

The rest of the house, to be honest about it, was not the work of a craftsman. Window sills and door frames were not plumb, and, except for a flushing toilet, it lacked all the amenities normal for the time. But we did have one luxury in our living room that only a few houses could boast of - a pump organ, the kind that depended on a robust pair of legs to fill the bellows. I do not know how we came to have such an instrument in our house. None of us ever had an urge to learn to play it, and it came to a bad end. My mother decided that it was doing none of us any good and was made of good wood, so, short as we were on kindling for starting our fires, she had us lug the organ down to the basement, where Peter hacked its panels apart and chopped them into slender sticks that got the fire going in the coal stove in whose oven we warmed our feet before putting them into our socks and shoes.

Being but two months old when he died, I have no memories of my father, but he stands handsome on the one or two snapshots my mother saved, a strong angular face, thick black hair, and a Ronald Coleman mustache. My mother did not speak much about him, but more than once I heard him called a rolling stone; he evidently had a penchant for taking on more than he could handle, dropping it, and moving on to his next dream.

My mother used to deplore his initial decision, before Amity Street in Muskegon, to settle the family in a "one-horse town" called Reeman, which had almost enough horses to provide him with one day's work every week. How could he feed his growing family on that? The only other occupation available around Reeman was farming, so he rented a piece of ground, bought two pigs and a few chickens from a land-rich neighbor, and tried farming for a season, keeping the smithy as a sideline. But he was no farmer, and he gave it up. He gave up Reeman, too, and moved his family to Muskegon, a bustling foundry town a morning's wagon ride away. There he worked himself to an early death in a foundry designed to crush the dreams of all who labored there.

My father was not what you would call a practical man. He and my mother had what was supposed to be an untouchable three hundred dollars salted in the bank for a rainy day, a good-by gift from Beppe Tjitske. But, while they still lived in Reeman, he took a shine to an electric automobile - an original O'Henry - owned by an itinerant physician, and when he was given a chance to buy it for three hundred dollars, he hustled off to the bank, took out the family funds, and bought the car.

He loaded his family in for a trip to Grand Rapids, a good forty miles from Reeman, to show their Henry off to another immigrant Frisian family. A few miles out, the engine stalled. So Melle sent Renske to the rear of the car to push until she got tired enough to risk setting her behind the wheel while he got in back to push. With his head pointed downward between his shoulders, his frontward vision was blocked by the car, and he could not see the valley directly ahead of them, nor the downhill track of the dirt road. Renske and the car started coasting down the hill before Melle had a chance to stop it. He yelled at Renske to step on the brakes, but she had no idea of what a brake was or where it was or how she was supposed to step on it.

Continues...