The following is an abbreviated excerpt from a larger work representing my experiences at a small performing arts school. Many facets of that experience, I have found resemble the narratives of survivors of many high control religions (colloquially, “cults.”)
The past few years of my life have consisted of research, asking fellow students about their experiences and listening to the stories of cult survivors.
In the coming weeks, it is my hope that readers will not only learn about Jubilee Performing Arts Center or “JPAC” but the nature of this life which sometimes seems so much bigger than itself.
Deep Roots
One does not simply stumble into a cult. Rather, a person is conditioned, enticed. Most often, a promise is made to some searching for hope.
Long before JPAC, I had been a grounded girl – at least in the eyes of the world around me. My grandfather had been a deacon in the Southern Baptist Church before I or any of my cousins were ever a thought. I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and my father was a coffee salesman. He traveled all over the state in a big red truck that smelled like cardboard and chewing tobacco. When I was a little past four, we moved to Progress, Mississippi. Dad had gotten transferred, and my maternal grandparents had retired there.
Progress was a sleepy little town that didn’t have a grocery store but did have a barn to buy milk and butter from. We had a library the size of a middle-class living room and a gas station that stopped selling gas in 2010. There was a church around every corner though.
We went to Silver Springs Baptist Church, less than five minutes from our home. As a child, a homeschooled child in the country, church participation was my primary form of fun. We were there – whether it was Wednesday, or Sunday, or Saturday.
Looking back, my own involvement in JPAC was more than a simple stumble into a cult. I had been primed for this – I already knew how to be rigidly devoted, how to argue the “truth” I had been taught to defend, how to internalize harsh “facts” about myself and human nature. I already knew how to be blind.
Because I was blind, I was teachable. When my principal, “T.” we will call him, said that listening to him would open our eyes to the Truth, I believed him. In my framework, there were certainly a thousand secrets that only blessed people like pastors could understand. When T. fed us lies, it made sense to me. Someone who has never seen clearly doesn’t know what they are seeing is wrong.
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In JPAC there was a term for describing T. 's favored students: the “True JPAC Student.” It was a high term of endearment for T. to call you that. To be a “True JPAC Student” was to fully succumb to his teachings, hang on his every word. Only then could you be fully invested in The JPAC Way and Culture. He told us that it would happen like that. At first, we would be lost, confused by our new school environment. We would think that he and everyone there was crazy and then one day it would all make sense, and we would see what he had been trying to make us understand. He only had our best interest in mind, and we had a greater, more spectacular destiny than our frail minds that had been dimmed down by the Mississippi mud and riff raff could fathom.
Whenever a new student would arrive at JPAC, T. would introduce them at the beginning of what we termed “Morning Meeting.” He would tell what their major would be, how wonderful an addition they were to the school and tease about the selective process they had been through prior to admittance.
In our choir rows we would nod, offering polite smiles. I was always skeptical: could there really be another one of us? It was always said that if a student came too late in their education, there would be no time for them to become a True JPAC Student. Typically, someone needed 3-5 years in JPAC to become a True JPAC Student.
Of course, T. knew that we were thinking these things – after all, it was he who told us to be cautious of the outside world.
“Don’t worry,” he would tell the newcomer, “I know you’re sitting here thinking ‘I have no clue what this crazy man is talking about’, but just hang in there and one day you’ll understand like the rest of these folks did.”
When I tell this story, it often gets brushed off as comforting a child acclimating to a new environment. And yes, that is what it is intended to be perceived as. But the truth is that T. began priming us to completely alter our ways of thinking and living the day we enrolled. By dismissing our stressors and discomforts as the side effects of adjustment, we were forced to remain in a constant state of adjustment. Any anxiety I ever felt about JPAC, I automatically categorized as a need to further conform because someone older and wiser than me had suggested it so many times. It was a tactic of manipulation that could hold power for months after its utterance.
Morning Meetings were for repeating things like this, for making sure that we understood everything that The JPAC Way entailed and for T. to tell us what God had revealed to him about the school and about us in the brief hours of our separation. If JPAC was a religion, then Morning Meetings were our Bible study. Of course, I was the perfect subject for this, because I had already spent my early adolescence praying every time I had an “impure thought.” I was used to examining the way I thought about men – pastors, celebrities, boys my age – why not examine a bit further, and submit to holiness in every area of my life? “Flee from me, Satan – I belong to Christ!” If to be a JPAC student was to be a child of God, then I could make this school thing work. Even if I failed socially, I would always be good at religion.
I wasn’t marked a “True JPAC Student” until my second year. I was with my parents on the coast of New Orleans when my mother showed me a picture of what seemed to be the school building crumbling down, debris and dust covering the street below. Beneath the post were comments of prayers and blessings that no one had been harmed.
That building had lived a long life. Before housing the school, it had been a JC Penny, a skating rink, and a beer distillery. The imprints of all these former lives were emblazoned at the top of the building in faded white paint. All those existences had collapsed into one another. The building was furnished with a choir room with wooden rows, an art studio with a window that looked out over Main Street and one thousand nooks and crannies that are now covered with dust, decay, and mold. At the very top floor there was a room large enough for a song to echo through with a small stage for concerts and polished flooring smooth enough for our dancers to sail across.
It was the first week of July 2017 and the roof of the building had collapsed from what we can only assume what was old age, spewing bricks onto the street below, smashing the hood of a red car parked alongside the building that belonged to a student who had arrived late to join the carpool for a choir trip.
To be continued