Jesus Land: A Memoir
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Rebecca Adler, Kendra Anspaugh, and Julie.
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Book Details
Written by Julia Scheeres.
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($23.00)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
One of the most compelling, page-turning memoirs to come along in years-by turns jarring, shocking, and funny-a keenly moving ode to the dream of perfect familySinners go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN. The end is neer: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND.
Julia Scheeres stumbles across these signs along the side of a cornfield while out biking with her adopted brother, David. It's the mid-1980s, they're sixteen years old and have just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees and trailer parks-and a racism neither of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close relationship with David, who is black, makes them both outcasts. At home, a distant mother-more involved with her church's missionaries than with her own children-and a violent father only compound their problems. When the day comes that high-school hormones, bullying, and a deep-seated restlessness prove too much to bear, the parents send Julia and David to the Dominican Republic-to a reform school there.
In this riveting memoir, first-time author Scheeres takes us with her from the Midwest to a place beyond our imagining. Surrounded by natural beauty, the Escuela Caribe is governed by a disciplinary regime that demands its teens repent for their sins under boot-camp conditions. Julia and David's determination to make it through with heart and soul intact is told here with immediacy, candor, sparkling humor, and not a note of malice.
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Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Excellent.
Jesus Land is a memoir about Scheeres' experience growing up in a mixed race family. Her family being all white except for two adopted black brothers. Her youngest brother, David, is only about four months younger than her and they think of themselves as twins. One of my favorite lines from the book is right after she and David are attacked by a bunch of hicks in their new hometown in Indiana. When they get home Julia says "It's just because we're black." Although she's white, Julia was always confronted with the same racism as her brother because they were always together. Instead of being a "nigger" she was a "nigger lover," which was just as bad in Indiana in the late 60's.
The Scheeres family is devout Calvinists and the parents are constantly telling the children to turn the other cheek instead of reacting to the racism of the time. But even in their own home racism is seen. Julia sees it in the way her brothers are beaten for minor trespasses while she is merely grounded or sent to her room. For such beatings her older adopted brother begins punishing her, but she never tells because she doesn't want to be responsible for another of his beatings. The parts about her being molested by her brother and later set up by him to be gang raped was really hard for me to read, but the rest of the book was exactly what I'd hoped for when I picked up the book. Especially the second half of the book, which is spent at Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic.
The second half of the book shows how religion can be contorted to mean anything the purveyors of said religion want it to mean. The children at the reform school are beaten and humiliated because they haven't found Jesus, yet those who have see nothing wrong with their actions. The saddest thing about this book is that it has done nothing to get this school closed down. The school is still running, more than twenty years after Julia Scheeres and her brother attended. The whole time I was reading this all I could think was that the people running that school were never going to turn these children toward religion, rather they were teaching them to hate everything about it. I really recommend this book. It's an amazing story.