many of our core doctrines, lent our pastor a substantial new credibility to my mind—and at age fifteen, I found myself newly humbled by his knowledge and understanding. I had always believed him to be intelligent and guided by God, but youthful condescension had led me to underestimate him. He was an old man, had trouble understanding technology, frequently slept with the news blaring all night long, and generally smelled of a potent mix of tea tree oil and the cloves of raw garlic he began consuming in copious quantities after watching a segment about its health benefits on one of the television morning shows. Jesus said, No prophet is accepted in his own country, and that rang true to me; it’s easier to accept a human as divinely ordained when you’re not intimately familiar with the mundanity of their daily life and the eccentricities of their personality. Church members also actively denied that my grandfather’s history mattered at all, except insofar as it reflected the path on which God had led him; because God had predestinated all things, nothing about our pastor’s life or decisions could be attributed to him or his influence as an individual. For a long time, both this perspective and the quotidian realities I witnessed caused me to largely dismiss the complex history of a complicated man—a history that multiplied questions like a hydra, each answer producing twice as many curiosities as the one it sought to address.
* * *
Instead of replacing her surname with his, my mother combined the two when she married my father in 1983. It would be the name they gave to their eleven children: Phelps-Roper. “We wanted you kids to have the Phelps name. That name means something around here. It’s part of your legacy.” When my mother made this comment, I presumed she meant the legacy of the picketing; it’s what we were known for, and what was getting us ever more attention in the press. Later, though, when I heard her telling one of my siblings the same story, I realized the obvious: that if the picketing didn’t begin until after her sixth child was born, there must have been another part of this legacy. What had it been? “Oh, honey,” my mom said, “long before this city hated us for picketing, they hated us for defending the rights of black people.”
As the stories were told to me, my grandparents moved to Topeka with their young son in the spring of 1954, when the city was at the heart of a nationwide civil rights battle. Their arrival coincided with the publication of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Court had ruled against the city, overturning the previous “separate but equal” standard and banning racial segregation in state-run schools, which Topeka had fought all the way to the highest court in the land in order to maintain. Born in 1929, Gramps had grown up in Meridian, Mississippi, in the deep South—a place where first slavery and then segregation had had roots sunk deep. “He saw the way those black people were treated,” my mother told me, “and by the mercy of God, he knew it was wrong.” She quoted to me and my siblings the same verses that her father had quoted to her and her siblings: One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you, because God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. In the eyes of the law, all must be equal.
But the ministry brought my family to Topeka, not the civil rights movement. In spite of his father’s best efforts to prepare him for a career in the military, my grandfather had become a preacher instead. He grew up a quiet, studious child in a highly respected family, and was a high achiever. He graduated high school at sixteen, sixth in his class, an Eagle Scout, Golden Gloves boxer, recipient of an American Legion Citizenship Award, class commencement speaker, and the best-drilled member of the Mississippi Junior State Guard. His father worked hard to help him secure a principal appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but because candidates must be at least seventeen years old, my grandfather had to wait several months before he would be able to matriculate. During those months, he attended a tent revival meeting at