ReadingGroupGuides.com - Holy Ghost Girl by Donna Johnson

Holy Ghost Girl
A Memoir
by Donna Johnson

List Price: $26.00
Pages: 278
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781592406302
Publisher: Gotham

At seventeen, Donna Johnson fled Brother David Terrell and his Holy Roller crew to seek “the world with its … terrible beauty” (p. 236). But after decades of running, Donna still felt the pull of her past. So when circumstances summon her back to Terrell’s revival tent, she finally confronts the conundrum of miracles and hypocrisy, faith and corruption that encompassed her young life.

Donna’s mother, Carolyn, was a disgraced divorcee when she first heard the charismatic evangelist preach. Terrell “was a twenty-seven-year-old six-foot looker with black hair, blue eyes, and a smile that flashed Holy Ghost charm” (p.25). He offered her redemption, and she became his organist.

His ministry lived on the road, crisscrossing rural America’s “sawdust trail.” Exemplary behavior was expected from everyone. Even three-year-old Donna sat quietly while Terrell healed the sick, the lame, and the blind under their huge tent. But between revivals, she and her younger brother, Gary, ran wild, and played games like “husbands and wives” and “sinners” with Terrell’s own children.

The faithful gave Terrell what scant cash and valuables they possessed. Still, their operation was expensive to run and “the situation was always dire” (p. 66). If it wasn’t money troubles, it was the Ku Klux Klan threatening Terrell for preaching to un-segregated audiences, or the mainstream church condemning his heresies. He begged for money, exorcised the devil, and endured beatings and life-threatening fasts with the same righteous conviction.

Terrell’s ministry steadily grew famous worldwide, and his new tent “accommodated anywhere from five to ten thousand people” (p. 141). Yet, success meant that the children were often shunted off with erratic caregivers for indefinite periods without explanation. Donna “figured that’s how life was. Things happened, and then they were over. No hard feelings” (p. 155).

Then, Carolyn became pregnant with the first of her three illegitimate children with Terrell, and the true nature of their relationship became clear. She confided to Donna how “she believed [Terrell] would “do right” by her. All she had to do was pray and keep the faith” (p. 231).

As the 1960’s gave way to the 1970’s, Carolyn and thousands of others kept the faith. “Love offerings” (p. 241) bought Terrell vast estates and luxury cars, while also sustaining his multiple secret families. When he predicted the coming, apocalypse his followers poured into makeshift shantytowns and prepared for the end of the world --- until the man of God went to prison for tax evasion.

After college, motherhood, and years of middle-class respectability, Donna had become a “doubt-ridden Episcopalian with Buddhist tendencies” (p. 4), but when she learns that Terrell’s son, Randall, had died --- and that the preacher planned to resurrect him --- a lifetime’s worth of buried memories came tumbling out.

Packing a wallop as powerful as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, Donna Johnson’s Holy Ghost Girlis a haunting chronicle of childhood that illuminates the ultimate unknowability of the world and the harsh beauty of radical faith.

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1. How much did you know about tent preachers before reading Holy Ghost Girl? What was your opinion of them and how did it change --- if at all --- over the course of the book?

2. Have you ever attended a revival meeting? How would you categorize your own spiritual beliefs?

3. Have you ever witnessed something that you couldn’t explain? Did you let it sway your beliefs or did you dismiss it?

4. What does Johnson seem to be saying about the nature of belief when she discusses how her personal miracle came and went?

5. Why would Brother Terrell risk his personal safety defending blacks from the Ku Klux Klan while he “told racist jokes in private” (p. 55)?

6. A United Nations report indicates that the Pentecostal movement has "been the most successful at recruiting its members from the poorest of the poor.” How would you explain this? What does this movement offer the poor that others do not?

7. It’s always a little jarring when one begins to see a parent figure as a fallible human rather than a perfect being. Did Johnson’s recollections of Carolyn resonate with memories of your own mother or father?

8. In what ways did Brother Terrell anticipate the broader, more mainstream evangelical movement? Are any of his teachings reflected in today’s mega churches?

9. The idea that wearing Levis indicated that “Donna has been taken over by a lesbian spirit” (p. 234) seems preposterous today --- and even to Terrell in the 1960’s. Can you think of anything considered taboo today that might be accepted unblinkingly twenty or thirty years from now?

10. Johnson opens her book with news that Terrell plans to try to raise his son Randall from the dead. How did this prepare you for the story that she was about to share?

11. Compare Holy Ghost Girl to other coming-of-age memoirs you’ve read and enjoyed. Is there a common thread that draws you to these stories?

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"Sensitive and revelatory…an impressive achievement of perspective and maturity…a haunting and memorable book."
— Bookpage

"Compulsively readable"
— Texas Monthly

"A trustworthy narrator, Johnson is consistently funny, poetic and remarkably devoid of bitterness."
— Kirkus Reviews

"What a life! Holy Ghost Girl takes you inside a world where God and sin and miracles and deceit and love are so jumbled together you can’t tell them apart. Donna Johnson sorts through her story with great insight, compassion and humor, giving us an indelible portrait of a charismatic preacher and the faithful who so desperately believed in him."
— Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses

"This is a thoroughly provocative memoir. Memoirs don’t usually resist the obvious. This one does. You won’t find Donna M. Johnson dithering in anger, cynicism, or self-pity. Holy Ghost Girl is a sensitive exploration of the power that inheres in faith communities, however flawed."
— Rhoda Janzen, author of New York Times bestseller Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

"Holy Ghost Girl is a wonder of a book. Chief among its marvels is how clear-eyed and deeply compassionate Johnson is as she recounts what it was like to grow up believing all things are possible and how hard it was to leave that harsh and deeply flawed paradise to become a part of the world in all its ‘gaudy glory.’ With evocatively precise details, fond humor, and an utter lack of scorn or cynicism, Johnson accomplishes the camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle miracle of rendering the world through the eyes of a young child. Arriving at a time when the war between fact and faith is escalating, Holy Ghost Girl is a book that people will be talking about."
— Sarah Bird, author of The Gap Year

"A wrenching and extraordinarily beautiful memoir. If you're a fan of The Glass Castle, you'll be mesmerized by Donna M. Johnson's true-life tale of how her young life was upended by her mother's love affair with an infamous charismatic preacher."
— Lisa Napoli, author of Radio Shangri-La

"Donna M. Johnson's memoir captivated me from the first page. Vividly written and richly detailed, it evokes a curious subculture that few Americans are familiar with --- that of the Pentecostal revival tent, with all the spiritual and carnal ecstasy that simmer beneath it. Holy Ghost Girl is also a cautionary tale of preachers whose followers elevate them to a godhood then blind themselves to their leader's often extravagant sins."
— Julia Scheeres, author of New York Times bestseller Jesus Land

"A brilliant and beautiful story of people who passionately loved God and broke his commandments in almost every way possible. The kind of story the Bible is full of, told with rare compassion and grace."
— Christine Wicker, author of Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead and God Knows My Heart

"I read this gorgeous book with a hand to my throat, at once drawn to and repulsed by the story of Donna Johnson's coming of age underneath a revivalist tent. Hers was a bizarro world, and yet her voice is lush and clear and full of compassion."
— Karen Valby, author of Welcome to Utopia

"Johnson spent her childhood in the 1960s and 1970s traveling the America’s South with revivalist preacher Brother David Terrell, a hugely popular Holy Roller who brought thousands to his raucous tent sermons. But life under the tent --- and under Terrell’s control --- was far from easy, and Johnson eloquently recounts this uncommon upbringing shaped by constant upheaval and her increasingly fraught conception of faith. Leaving the tent circuit for good at 16 gave Johnson the perspective she needed for this fascinating tale of life with a “con man, a prophet, a performer."
— Publishers Weekly

"Donna Johnson grew up amongst the wood chips and giant circus tents of a traveling preacher and faith healer. Her mother played organ for the last of the sawdust preachers, so she sat through each sermon, travelled the country, and lived a life that few have ever experienced, let alone recounted. She was there for the highs, lows, and the ultimate downfall. This is an eloquent memoir, both funny and moving, a highly unique perspective on an experience that all but vanished with the advent of mega churches. A great read."
— Flannery Fitch, Bookshop Santa Cruz

"Donna Johnson's unapologetic treatment of her childhood immersed in the Pentecostal tent-meeting movement is flawless. She is honest in her retelling of events, yet her tone is even and sympathetic. The author’s focus is on David Terrell, charismatic leader of a traveling group of believers, her mother who is dedicated to his cause, and the myriad other children and adults who are a part of her extended family. Terrell is weak of flesh but strong in will-power --- a popular preacher and healer who is on the rise in religious circles. His tent meetings are huge and as donations begin to flow in, excess and the downfall of his ministry soon follow. With a background similar to Johnson's, I can attest to the familiar, authentic Pentecostal content in her story. This is an excellent book for those wanting to know more about the Pentecostal faith of the mid-1900s and the beliefs that kept them going in the face of spiritual disaster."
— Linda Bond, Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane, WA