I was a black child raised in a white supremacist cult. When doomsday didn’t come, I had to learn how to live
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When Jerald Walker was a boy, his school principal called him into his office and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “My answer was: ‘A god,’” Walker recalls, laughing. “He thought I was kidding but I was serious. When he asked again I said: ‘Captain Marvel.’ Because I thought about comic book heroes. I couldn’t think ‘doctor’ or ‘writer’ or any of those things. I had never once given any thought to what my adulthood would be.”
Walker wasn’t even sure he’d have an adulthood. He grew up convinced that the world would end in 1972, when he would be eight years old. According to the prophecy, fire and brimstone would rain from the skies, people would be running in the streets in panic, covered in boils, their faces melting. But as members of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG), Walker and his family would be saved – and magically transported to a place of sanctuary, probably Petra, in Jordan. “The bad news was that there wouldn’t be a future, but the good news was: ‘You don’t have to worry about it. Everything is laid out for you.’”
It took Walker, and many others, a while to realise that the WCG was the textbook definition of a doomsday cult. And a white supremacist one at that – which, somehow, his black parents seemed to be fine with. It took even longer for Walker to get over his upbringing and become the writer and professor of creative writing he is today. The experience “ruined my youth”, he says over video call from his Boston home. “We thought we were chosen for salvation, but we were chosen for ruin.”
Walker knew his family was different from the start. “We didn’t celebrate Christmas or Halloween; we didn’t celebrate our own birthdays. Most people we knew went to church on Sundays; we went on Saturdays. We weren’t supposed to socialise with people who weren’t in the church,” he says. “We tried to keep it concealed as much as possible, but it came out in ways that we simply couldn’t prevent.” At school, when other kids were making Christmas decorations in class, Walker and his twin brother James would have to sit by themselves doing something else. “We would say: ‘It’s against our religion,’ which was the phrase we used all the time.” Most children assumed they were Jewish, he says, which was easier than having to explain the truth.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/10/i-was-black-child-raised-in-white-supremacist-cult-doomsday-didnt-come-learn-how-to-live.
