fury on anyone, not even my sister-nemesis—but I had to protect us. These people were evil. No one outside of Westboro cared about us. They were always and only after the church. Everything always came back to that.
* * *
Westboro Baptist Church sat on a quiet street lined with trees and ranch-style homes, many of which belonged to my aunts, uncles, and cousins. An eight-foot-tall stockade fence ran around the block’s perimeter, enclosing our common backyard and cutting inward to exclude the two houses that didn’t belong to church members. The whole setup had led many a contemptuous reporter to call our block a “compound”—implying some sort of spooky, David Koresh–style cult scenario—but my mother always cut them off when they spoke in such terms. The fence was originally built when the pool was put in, she’d tell them, back in the seventies. “You’re talkin’ to a bunch of lawyers,” she would chide, “and that pool is called an ‘attractive nuisance’ in the law. If that fence weren’t there, and some child wandered over off the street and fell in, we would be liable for that. It’s that simple.” People were always acting like we were crazy, like there must be some sort of nefarious scheme being hatched and meticulously cultivated behind our fences at every moment, but “we’re just people!” Mom would insist.
Unless you counted the various plots hatched by quarreling children, the block had never been a place for nefarious schemes. It was a place for us—for pool parties and trampoline jumping and tennis playing in the summer, and for football and snowball fights and sledding down the little hill behind our garage in the winter. It’s where I’d sit on the white porch swing with the big canopy, rocking gently with a paperback and a baby sibling propped in the crook of my left arm, the perfect excuse to sit and read for as long as it took Mom to realize that the baby had fallen asleep and tell me to come inside and put him down so I could help clean the kitchen or do the laundry, of which there was no end. It’s where Dad had taught us how to ride bikes and play croquet when we were kids. He and the uncles had even built us a BigToy when I was about three, with a rope bridge, scratchy wooden monkey bars that always gave me splinters, and, at the end of the big blue slide, a sandbox we’d once forgotten Isaiah in when he was a toddler. Mom had driven a van full of us noisy kids all the way to the family law office before we realized he wasn’t in his car seat—and then sped home only to find him busily digging away with his plastic shovel, safe and blessedly unaware of any drama.
More and more as the years had passed, I’d come to see our block in just that way: safe, secure, shielded from anything bad that could possibly happen. A refuge. Here there were no counterprotesters to steal our picket signs, no angry passersby to drive their cars at us, no jackboot cops to threaten arrest, and no one around to yell at us except our relatives. Here there was just same: heat and sticky humidity, the scent of newly mown grass, the insistent buzzing of cicadas, and kids biking around the track I’d been walking laps on since my legs were too stubby to keep up with Mom and her power-walking sisters. The familiarity of the scene could be like a sedative, and there were times when I’d be hurrying out our back door and just stop in my tracks, staring out into that wide-open space, stalled by the sense of comfort and calm that washed over me.
I felt that calm on the Sunday of my baptism, too.
Among the many mainstream religious traditions condemned by Westboro Baptist Church, infant baptism was a particular iniquity. Without any hint of hyperbole my grandfather likened it to burning the child alive in sacrifice to a pagan god. Only believers could be baptized in our church, following the examples of the adults baptized in the New Testament. The Ethiopian eunuch professed his belief before he was baptized, as infants cannot. The masses baptized by John the Baptist confessed their sins, as infants cannot. Even Jesus Christ Himself was baptized as an adult. Baptism, then, was not a rite of passage at Westboro. It would only take place if a believer felt called to ask