Irony And Recompense

Raisin' Up Catfish: Forty-one

Undated Journal Entry, Summer, 1972

My Lord,

Why do I always mess up the Sabbath? The day when I need to be refilling my wells of strength, I never seem to. Satan always seems to turn the Sabbath from a joy to a burden. Something always seems to go wrong.

Why, God?

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I surprised myself by voluntarily attending church most Sabbaths. Surprised, because in just one brief year I had somehow grown comfortable, even fluent in the world of sermons, piety and hymns. How was it that I felt more at home there among the pews of my natal and newly reclaimed Seventh-Day Adventism than I did at Mom’s?

Of course, there were times after a brutal week of seventy-plus hours in the wackamole, hard labor throes of a catfishery when I would easily have preferred to sleep in until noon and laze away the afternoon on a recliner by the pool. But Mom didn’t have a recliner …or a pool, and my little sister, Bonnie, who awoke quite reliably before anyone else in the house, simply could not bear to let me sleep after she was awake. My role as the jungle gym she loved to jump on and climb over at daybreak was a profoundly mixed blessing.

My sleeping quarters, such as they were, consisted of the tattered, old, canvas and flannel sleeping bag I’d left behind when Mom sent me off to live with Dad, rolled out in the middle of the living room floor with my suitcase and laundry bag tucked over in the corner. This makeshift bedroll was easy to fold up and hide behind the sofa while I was away during the week, which restored the living room’s more formal and seldom used, visitor-friendly status as well as its early morning, playground possibilities for Bonnie, since it was far enough away from Mom’s bedroom to avoid disturbing her sleep.

Secretly, I liked the fact that Mom had to get up on Saturday mornings to drive me to church because it meant she had to arrange her schedule around mine for once, a thing she was far more willing to do after my year away, and thus its own reward. And then there was the sweet irony of having her deliver me, weekly to the doors of the very religion she had grown up hating and later, terrorizing her children with.

I loved going to church now and the fact that it had lost every bit of its power for her to intimidate and threaten me pleased the shit out of me. That was not, however, my primary reason for attending, I swear.

Most folks were reasonably friendly at Memphis First Seventh-Day-Adventist Church, and a few really were quite wonderful. Of course, every congregation has its pious windbags and creepy philanderers, its mean-spirited old bigots and dour-faced poops, and in that regard the religious flock that gathered weekly beneath this church’s vaulted roof was probably no better or worse than any other. But for the first time in my life those things didn’t really seem to matter. I attended church for myself alone, trying to feed an inner hunger that I had only become aware of during my year away at an Adventist high school.

All of this was still refreshingly new to me, attending church in search of spiritual companionship instead of showing up out of reluctant duty or to appease some misguided sense of guilt, which made it ever so much easier to not pay those attendant racists and windbags much mind. I was building my own relationship with heaven you see and was hungry for fellowship. I didn’t much care about anyone else’s judgement of it.

Occasionally some family in the congregation who had been friends with Dad and my stepmom before they moved out west invited me home after church to share in their Sabbath dinner, a delightful and time-honored, Adventist tradition. But, of course I never felt free to accept. Mom had begun doing her weekly grocery shopping and errands on Saturday mornings while I attended church, then returned for me at about twelve-thirty. Under those circumstances there really was no way for me to let her know ahead or ask permission. Cell phones, not yet invented, were still just impossible figments of Dick Tracy’s cartoon imagination and I certainly could not put either my would-be hosts or Mom on the spot by asking them to wait with me in the parking lot until she arrived. Good Lord, would that have stirred up a shit storm!

Church usually let out at about noon unless the preacher droned on or got carried away, which happened sometimes, so Mom deliberately showed up later, just to be safe. She’d usually pull into the far end of the parking lot around 12:30, thus avoiding a homebound dissemination of ‘believers’ and an inevitable barrage of pious and accusing stares.

I awaited her return in the shade, sitting unobtrusively on the curb.

It was clear to me that this whole ‘drop your kid off at the church you most abhor’ program was a serious pain in the ass for Momma, and maybe even a form of penance, but I didn’t let her off the hook once she’d offered. I believed God wanted me there in church no matter what, and weirdly enough I wanted to be there. All the other stuff was just timing and logistics, and I let that be her problem.

Since the gossip grapevine worked as well in that church as any other, I felt certain everyone had heard the stories of my mother’s wicked escapades and the absolute tabloid circumstances surrounding little Bonnie’s illegitimate birth. It takes a special kind of heartlessness and cruelty to put your remarried, ex-husband’s name on your newborn baby’s birth certificate more than four years after emptying all the bank accounts and running away with a traveling salesman, and more than two years after the guy you had three kids with and then dumped, managed to fall madly in love again and marry an absolutely wonderful woman in the church you so defiantly left.

Both Dad and my new stepmom had been beloved members of that very same church congregation I was now joining on Sabbath mornings until just months before Bonnie was born, when they’d sold their house and packed up everything, including the three oldest of their combined, five kids, leaving all the chaos and heartache of Memphis behind, moving to a much kinder, quieter place with better schools and an associate professorship in the biology department awaiting Dad at Walla Walla College.

Dad had been a youth leader and sabbath school teacher there in that Memphis church and Joyce, my stepmom, whom I adored, often played the organ for church and sometimes sang in the choir.

Who possibly can know what Nancy Jones (Mommy Dearest), was thinking? Did she give Bonnie-boo Dad’s last name in some preposterous attempt to offer her illegitimate child, legitimacy, or was it just another fuck-you to Dad and his pretty, new wife; Mom once again imposing her miasma of ill-will into Dad’s world? Surely God knew if anyone did, that this was my mother’s bullying way, relying on Dad’s decency while cruelly poking him in the eye and taunting the sanctity of his new marriage.

Putting my father’s name on Bonnie’s birth certificate was a cruel, goddamned lie.

Needless to say, when Dad first got wind of Bonnie’s existence and then of his recorded paternity on her birth certificate he howled in protest, though to absolutely no avail. Mom simply told him she was making sure that if anything ever happened to her, he would be responsible for Bonnie too, then slammed down the phone.

Funny how things work out.

Dad was too afraid to fight her. She had broken some part of his spirit years before with all her bullying and lies, and sleeping around, and had been counting on his emotional paralysis to keep him off balance. Such was the nature of the woman who’d abandoned him years earlier to run off with some married, slimebag salesman, headed for New Orleans, dragging us kids with her. This was the woman we still loved and needed, and couldn’t help but call Momma. Crazy.

It requires no immense stretch to imagine that if the details of Bonnie’s birth certificate were exasperating to my father, they were doubly exasperating to his new Christian wife, who’d had her own lying, bullying, cheating spouse to survive and move on from. Quite understandably then, she sought counsel and solace from her church sisters. And so, in one indignant, tearful flash the whole, sordid story was out and virtually everyone at the church I was attending had heard it.

Three years later, back in Memphis for the summer after my first year of high school and most of those church women still could not help wrinkling up their noses and catching their breath when they spied “that evil hussy” dropping me off, or waiting for me in the car with her adorable little girl.

From their protective and prejudiced vantage Mom was the reincarnation of Jezebel herself (or would have been if they’d actually believed in reincarnation), all painted up and ready for wickedness, that proverbial, prodigal sinner who deserved every bit of God’s judgement and punishment; the painted slattern thrown to her death from a window, according to biblical lore and then devoured by a pack of wild dogs.

So it suited me just fine when Mom showed up so long after church let out. I didn’t like their ugly stares any better than she did. And yet, no one on Earth knew better than my sisters and me that the woman we called ‘Momma’ had earned every damned one of them.

©2026, David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

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When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi for the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm, where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.

If you would like to read more of the forty, previously published chapters from this unfolding coming of age memoir please click on Raisin’ Up Catfish in the menu bar at the top of my Substack home page. And if I haven’t said it recently or nearly often enough, thank you, truly for being part of this family. Your participation and your presence here means the world to me.

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