It’d take him half a dozen tries before he was certain a faucet was shut, he’d rinse over and over again in the tub, and he’d pull a cow’s teats long after the animal had run dry.
It became a vicious cycle that only made matters worse. The more he’d repeat himself, the more people would watch and the madder my father would get. The more my father punished him for his actions, the more he’d do it.
Watching how my father treated my mother—and his children—gave me a jaded sense of family and marriage. Especially the latter.
The Amish believe—implore, really, with binding mandate—that their people should stay married for life. And there is a stigma attached to those women who never marry. They are considered old maids.
Some Amish women would rather get married and be unhappy than be old maids. But I decided early on that, given such a choice, I never wanted to get married. I never wanted to walk the valley that was my mother’s and father’s relationship.
Four
Last Sunday evening, as I was walking home from the singing, I just simply couldn’t keep from crying. Oh, the empty spot you have left behind you! It seems I can’t start a song in the singing because I am afraid I can’t finish it.
—LETTER FROM BENEDICT MILLER (BROTHER)
The commercial, widely accepted, modern-world notion of femininity—the essence of womanhood and sexuality—is nowhere to be found in the Amish culture.
The dour dress has something to do with that, of course. There isn’t a spot of bare skin to be seen, save for the hands and face, and the bare feet in summer. Makeup is forbidden. Amish women shave neither their armpits nor their legs. There are no fancy hairdos, no elegant shoes with high heels, no glittering jewelry hanging from the neck and wrists.
There is also little recognition that boys and girls might be attracted to one another. To the contrary, they are encouraged not to mix and are, in fact, segregated. They sit separately in church—just like the men and women—and do not often spend time together outside the church or home.
Even when the children get older, their commingling is so regulated, it’s a wonder any of them develop intimate relationships. They are not permitted to hug, kiss, or hold hands. To this day, I’ve never seen my parents hug or kiss.
Dating, which is permitted only after children turn eighteen and have previously joined what is called a young folks group, usually occurs after Sunday night singing. A boy will take a girl to her home in his buggy, and she will choose a snack. Popcorn and juice, perhaps.
The two of them will talk and eat for several hours, always by candle or lamplight, for they are prohibited from spending time with each other in the dark. They won’t touch and they won’t discuss carnal matters.
Truth be told, they probably wouldn’t know what to do anyway. Sex education is virtually nonexistent. There are no discussions with parents about how it’s done—or what it might lead to. If a child musters the courage to ask about sex, he or she will likely be told: “Wait till you grow up.” Which in an Amish parent’s mind means something approaching never.
Approved leisure-time reading materials also offer no clues. Popular Amish magazines like Young Companion and Family Life carry frothy, harmless stories about the seasons, building homes, settlement histories, swimming, obedience, teaching, and the like. They’re also real keen on recipes and poems.
Some settlements have wild periods in which teenagers go out into the English world and sow their oats—the broad path—before being expected to return to the narrow way of the Amish church. Such was not the case in Kalona, however.
My mother did hand me a pamphlet when I was about thirteen that informed me in very clinical terms about the female anatomy, particularly the onset of periods. But there was nothing dealing with the passionate elements of relationships.
We didn’t even flirt. If you flirted, people would say you were boy crazy, and being boy crazy was a disgrace, especially among poor or middle-class Amish. It suggested a young woman was desperate to get married.
People would visit from other Amish communities and, upon seeing the boys and girls in Kalona, remark: “Man, they look like they’re gonna bite each other.”
I can honestly say I never looked in the mirror and wondered if I’d be attractive to a boy. For the longest time, it never even dawned on me that an intimate relationship with someone was possible.
My mind and body were simply not equipped with the same social conditioning—and that must be what it is—that compels young people in the English world to experiment sexually. I didn’t even explore my own body, believing instead that it should be hidden—even from me.
Some Amish women reinforced this notion by sewing bras so they would diminish, rather than enhance, curves. No points, no uplifts, no extra padding.
My father also influenced me. When he’d see a well-endowed woman, he’d remark, “Man, she’s as big as a cow,” which I took to mean that big-breastedness was something to be embarrassed about. It wasn’t until later that I realized—guessed, anyway—that my father was probably attracted to busty women but was trying to hide his interest.
Everything else aside, I had one strike against me from the start in the femininity department. I was a tomboy, and I was competitive, and that usually meant going head to head with the boys.
In softball, I relished hitting the ball over the fence—just like the boys—or at least hitting it far enough that they’d have to run after it. Just seeing them back up in the outfield when I came to bat was a thrill.
I was just as determined playing carom, and I even won a school tournament with my cousin.
Carom is played on a square board that has pockets, much like a pool table. There are twelve plastic green checkers and twelve plastic red checkers that look a lot like donuts. Four players, two to a team, use white shooters—cue balls—and sticks to put the checkers in the pockets. First side in wins.
I was equally adept at spelling and won several German and English spelling bees.
I also loved to ride horses and ponies—and we’re not talking gentle gaits. I’d take them out on the farm and spur them to a full gallop. How I loved the sensation of speed, the rush of adrenaline. It was like flying. Like being free.
The boys probably didn’t appreciate my zeal. After all, I was supposed to be submissive. And my father eventually told me—when I was eleven—that I should stop riding horses, that it wasn’t ladylike.
That was a twist, certainly. We were made to look like hardy European peasants, but riding horses was a no-no.
I didn’t argue, though. Not then. I found other ways to express my competitive fire, my individuality.
Even today, I remain a tomboy, with my alternately wavy, frizzy auburn hair, cherubic, rosy-cheeked face, sturdy hips and thighs, and strong hands.
But I have come to appreciate a modicum of makeup—little accents of mascara, lipstick, and blush—and I will experiment with different attire. Colors I couldn’t wear when I was Amish. Skirts that are a tad shorter than the ones I used to wear.
When Glamour magazine came to do a story on me after I’d left the farm, they spent two hours doing a makeover, arranging my hair, and putting more makeup on me than I’d ever had in my life.
I liked the pampering and I liked the new look, but I’ve never tried to duplicate it. If anything good has come from growing up Amish, it’s that I appreciate what’s on the inside of a person, not just what’s on the outside.
Too much makeup can be unappealing. Likewise, I’m not a fan of women who bare too much of their bodies. A little left to the imagination is not a bad thing; sometimes when you don’t expose everything, you’re prettier. Like Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Mask of Zorro or Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man.
I can’t say I’m a raving beauty as they are. But am I unattractive? No, I don’t think so.
There’s this saying that some people can be as ugly as a mud fence on the outside, but they can have beautiful personalities on the inside. And I’d like t
o think that I have a good personality.
Just like my mom. She has a good heart, and she would do anything for anybody. I don’t think for a minute she would be writing what she does to me—saying what she says—if she weren’t under the watchful eye of my father.
I think she once had a free spirit as I do, and I think she would have done so much more with her life if she could have.
Like me, one of the things she loves is traveling. But my dad rarely takes her. His idea of traveling is to visit other Amish—to boost his stature in social circles. My mother’s idea of traveling is to sightsee, but my dad says that’s a waste of time.
Mom once said she didn’t want me to fall in the same rut she was in. Stuck and unhappy, a spirit in shreds. A life that plods along one day to the next. A life always on the edge of fear.
I hope one day she will come to know the glow that dwells within me—the smile I carry in my soul and wear on my face every day.
My mom doesn’t smile much, but when she does, she’s beautiful. People at my new church say I’ve got a smile that will melt a rock, and I guess in that way I’m beautiful, too.
In any event, I don’t want to be anyone else. I’m perfectly content with what I am, and excited about who I will become.
Thanks, in no small part, to Ottie Garrett.
Five
Ottie, do you remember the times we visited on different trips we took? The one question that I ask you [is] if someone was in the Army if they could ever be kind again? For someone had told me that once someone is in the Army they take all the kindness away.
—LETTER FROM MOM
Ottie Garrett rolled into Kalona in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. He was among hundreds of English people across the country hired by the Amish as drivers for up to sixty-five cents a mile, and he was in town bringing relatives from Indiana and Illinois for Thanksgiving.
I was a naive fifteen-year-old who had recently graduated from the one-room Centerville School, a half-mile up the road from our farm. He was a forty-year-old man of the world, married three times, about to get another divorce, and more boisterous than anybody I’d ever encountered before or since.
He was the first person I’d seen who was unafraid to speak his mind among the Amish, and his views often challenged the community’s befuddled elders. He was also playful and gregarious, traits both foreign and troublesome to the Amish.
Everything about him was big—from his 450-pound frame to his sleek, fifteen-passenger Ford van, complete with snazzy running lights, loud glass-pack mufflers, CB radio, and radar detector. And he loved to drive fast, with a Diet Coke in one hand and the wheel in the other.
My grandfather on my father’s side, Tobias J. Miller, is the one responsible for Ottie staying on in Kalona. He asked Ottie during his visit if he’d like to be his driver. Over time, Ottie developed that initial offer into a thriving taxi service for my family and other Amish. He also began producing Amish calendars depicting their buggies and horses, and later several Amish-related books.
He became the talk of Kalona—from its tiny, throw-back business district of antique shops and hardware stores to its robust farms spread out along miles of hilly dirt roads. He stood out for his free spirit and humor. For his zest for life. For the magic tricks he’d do for the children.
I’d watch young children giggle with delight when he’d will an invisible ball to smack the inside of a paper bag, or make a cigarette vanish then reappear, or turn a single kernel of corn in his mouth into five or six.
I’d watch other Amish my age stare in amazement when he’d roar through town in that spiffy gray van of his, or maneuver it to do circles in the snow.
And to hear him talk was like nothing we’d heard before. He had a saying for anything, a bravado that was as large as he was.
One of my favorite stories is the time Ottie exited the van to let out an elderly female rider. When he opened the side doors and she stepped out, it was the first time the woman had seen him standing. She was startled by his imposing stature.
“My goodness,’’ she said. “I didn’t realize you were that big. What do you eat?”
“Little old Amish ladies like you,” he replied, smiling mischievously. “And I haven’t had my lunch yet.”
The woman abruptly turned and walked away. Briskly.
Some people might say Ottie’s got a line of bull a mile long—he might say so, too—but it all comes from a good heart. Some people also might say he’s a bit unattractive, what with his stout girth and crippled right leg, fused stiff at the knee after a construction accident while working as an architect for the U.S. Department of Labor.
But I saw beneath his flaws. More to the point, I didn’t see them at all.
To me, he was the most refreshing thing I’d encountered in my fifteen years. And although I didn’t fully recognize it then, he was ample proof that not all English people were bad.
This was a concept I had always wanted to believe, despite the gloomy bias of the Amish that, early on, had me feeling sorry for the English and their supposedly depraved ways. I had wanted to believe otherwise because God’s good graces told me there simply had to be good people in the outside world. Jesus, after all, had no hidden agenda. His was a ministry of sincere caring—for everyone, not just a select few. Not just for the Amish.
Psalm 33:13 says: “The Lord looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men. From the place of his inhabitation he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth. He fashioneth their hearts alike; he considereth all their works.”
God, without question, then, was an advocate of inclusion, not exclusion. And that meant Ottie Garrett, size and all, was one of God’s children.
For two years, I dreamed of the day that I might ride in Ottie Garrett’s van, to do more than merely glimpse this man of mirth. It was not a lustful desire; I didn’t have such feelings. I just wanted to be a part of his joy, to savor his good nature and independence.
My chance came in the spring of 1991 when my grandfather planned a trip to Canada to see relatives and friends. Benedict and I were invited because we’d struck up a friendship with three Canadian children our age when they’d visited Kalona.
Benedict had begun corresponding with the boy, Danny, and I had exchanged letters with the girls, Ruth and Fannie May. Benedict was twenty and I was seventeen when we stepped into Ottie’s van for the first time.
We sat in the back because we’d heard that was the best place to feel the power of a van. Besides, the grown-ups wanted to sit up front—to talk to Ottie and keep an eye on him. I could never figure out why they subjected themselves to such torture, because Ottie would invariably engage them in debate about their religious beliefs, and they would by turn wilt under the persuasiveness of his logic.
One of his biggest sticking points was the fact that the Amish choose to be conscientious objectors when it comes to serving in the armed forces. The Amish believe war is something to be detested. That’s why they prohibit mustaches; they consider them a violent sign of masculinity, a symbol of the warrior, perhaps harkening to the days of Hitler’s Third Reich or the Civil War.
The stubbornness of the Amish to take any responsibility for the freedom of their adopted country infuriated Ottie to no end, and he would pull no punches in taking them to task.
“So in other words,” he once told an Amish bishop, “what you’re saying is: You want everyone else to go die for you so you can sit back and tell us English how wrong we are.”
“Well, the Constitution says we don’t have to fight,” the bishop replied.
“That Constitution wouldn’t have been worth the paper it was written on if Hitler had gotten to us,” Ottie fired back. “That piece of paper doesn’t save you. It is the blood of other men that saves you. Just like the blood of Christ saved you.”
It was at this point that the Amish elders usually became tongue-tied, determined to win the war of words but suddenly unable to articulate their position.
“Well, w
e’re not going to fight,” the bishop insisted.
“That’s your constitutional right,” Ottie said. “But at the same time I find it really rough that you people look down on us, condemn us to hell, and tell us how bad we are—but you live by our Constitution.
“I have a question. How do you feel about the woman down the street whose son has just been killed in the war defending your son?”
“They’re not Amish and we’re not English,” the bishop said. “We’re from two separate worlds.”
On another occasion, smack-dab in the middle of Desert Storm, an Amish bishop told Ottie: “Because of the war, we have grown in strength because our young men have seen the light and come back to the church.”
“No,” Ottie said. “They’ve come back because they’re cowards.”
Ottie, a former U.S. Army infantry soldier who served eighteen months in Wildflecken, Germany, would later tell me such conversations diminished his respect for the Amish.
“When they have Veterans Day, the Amish could care less,” he would complain. “They don’t even honor the flag, or all the men who sacrificed for them.”
This, of course, was the Ottie I didn’t yet know as we headed north to Aylmer, Ontario. What caught my attention during that first drive were things far less weighty.
The speed with which he drove, sometimes as fast as eighty-five miles an hour, appealed to my thirst for adrenaline and competitiveness. It beat the pants off our horses and buggies, which clip-clopped along at a leisurely five to eight miles an hour. And it was thrilling when we’d pass other cars, rather than them passing us.
The music he played on the van’s tape deck was another eye-opener. The words—in this case those of the Statler Brothers—were accompanied by instruments.
In the Amish church, everything is sung a cappella. Ottie says my singing voice sounds like an angel, but this addition of instruments was glorious—and in keeping with my impression that God intended for music to be grandiose.
Crossing Over Page 3
