Crossing Over (10 page)

Eighteen

(Lasz das blut Christe dich reinichen als der schnee. Wir hoffen der feind sein macht wird genommen und dasz du zurück kommst.)

Let the blood of Christ cleanse you like the snow. We hope the devil's power will be taken so that you come back.

—L
ETTER FROM
D
AD

I
'm not sure our lives ever really slowed down after the first year. There were breaks along the way. Very short ones. Then things would speed up again.

The rhythm had nothing to do with the letters from Iowa. They remained constant and nagging, and over time began to chip away at the euphoria I felt after the ban was lifted.

For the moment, though, we were too busy with other things to dwell on the negative.

Ottie and I were about to become stars. Public figures, anyway.

A conversation with a former Amish woman in Kentucky gave Ottie and me the idea of compiling a book of true stories about people who had left the Amish. Because the Amish are a people of few words, we thought these testimonies would be enlightening to others in the outside world. And though our intent was not to condemn the Amish, we hoped it might give people thinking of leaving the fold the courage to fulfill their dreams.

We formed a corporation (Neu Leben, Inc., which means “new life” in German), got the names of former Amish through groups that annually hold X-Amish reunions, and traveled to Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Missouri, and Iowa to conduct audio and video interviews.

Not everyone we contacted wanted to participate; even ten to fifteen years after leaving, some X-Amish were concerned their comments might adversely affect relationships with family members still among the Amish.

But we gathered about twenty-five testimonies, returned to Kentucky, winnowed the list to ten, and hired Western Kentucky University students interested in being published to help do the writing.

The result was
True Stories of the X-Amish,
a 124-page series of essays about real people. It was accompanied by forty-three of Ottie's photographs.

Rev. Bettermann wrote the introduction, which served to set the tone for the book:

There is one word which serves as the linchpin, connecting all of these stories of the X-Amish, one word which weaves through each account as a thematic backdrop. The word is freedom. Freedom to choose where to live and how to live, freedom to choose what to believe and what to reject. Freedom to make the basic decisions of life.

While most of us take such freedom for granted, the stories that follow describe people who longed for yet lived without the fundamental right to choose the course of their living. . . .

Ottie worked the network of distributors to get the book in stores and on-line. We also contacted media outlets far and wide, seeking stories on the book—the most inexpensive advertising one can acquire.

The response was overwhelming. Not for the book, much to Ottie's chagrin, but for our own story of struggle and success. Every newspaper in every city we went to for book signings did a story. Local television affiliates also jumped on the bandwagon, and later the TV news magazine
Extra
and a French TV station.

Then
Glamour
magazine called. A senior editor said she was interested in having someone at the magazine do a story on me.

“What about the book?” Ottie asked.

“Oh, I'm not interested in the book,” she said. “I'm interested in Irene.”

Poor Ottie. It was a pattern that would continue for months.

As always, he would keep a game face on and try to find humor in the situation.

At one book signing, he found himself leaning against a wall beside the bookstore's manager, watching as people crowded around me.

The manager asked him: “What do you think about taking a backseat to all this?”

“Well, I don't really mind,” Ottie replied, “as long as it's a Lincoln.”

Glamour
's story would bring him little consolation. The senior editor decided to take the assignment herself, spent three days at our Horse Cave home, then sent a photographer, photographer's assistant, and makeup artist to do the photo shoot. The ensuing four-page spread didn't say much about the book, but it said a lot about our lives.

It was part of a series called “Wow Women,” and ran in August 1999 under this headline:

“Escaping Amish Repression. One Woman's Story. Fearing a future of near slavery, Irene Miller fled her family and a sequestered life that forbade her an education, a career and marriage to the man she loved. Here's how she's dealing with her new modern world.”

The reaction to the article was almost instantaneous.
The Nashville Tennessean
did a big story on its “Living” cover under the headline:

“An individual is born. Kentucky woman casts off conformity of Amish life, gingerly enters modern world.”

Next came award-winning movie producer Beth Polson inquiring if we'd be interested in giving her rights to do a CBS-TV movie based on our lives. Loosely based, it turned out.

Once again, Ottie had to swallow his pride.

“Did you like the book?” he asked her.

“What book?” Beth said.

“True Stories of the X-Amish.”

“I haven't even seen the book,” she said.

Ottie sighed.

In the end, we sold the movie rights to Beth, even though several other film companies also came calling. Beth's credentials were simply too sound to ignore. Her Pasadena-based Polson Co. had produced numerous heralded TV movies, including
The Christmas Box, Go Toward the Light, This Child Is Mine, Not My Kid, A Place to Be Loved,
and
Going Home.

We expected a close rendition of the story we gave the screenwriters, who were two Mennonites from Goshen, Indiana. But when we read the shooting script for “This Side of Heaven,'' we were shocked. The locations and most of the names had been changed; I was now Rachel Beachy and Ottie was Jack Dunbar. Even more alarming, the script took great liberties with the facts.

We were concerned my family might think we hadn't told the truth to the screenwriters. We also worried that some of the changes might put the Amish in too kind of a light, perpetuating the warm and fuzzy stereotypes portraying them as unfailingly righteous.

But eventually we grudgingly accepted Beth's explanation that the movie would be an entertainment vehicle, not a documentary. And we recognized that the name-altered script, which focused on the love story in the context of “independence versus convention,” offered a lot of advantages, most notably protecting, at least for the moment, my parents' identities.

It was also Beth's belief that the movie would not tread lightly on the Amish, but instead provide “an interesting way to look at a simpler life and realize that that's not perfect, either.''

That would put
This Side of Heaven
a notch ahead of another Amish film,
Harvest of Fire,
a 1996 TV movie about barn burnings that starred Patty Duke Astin and was filmed in Kalona. Some of the portrayals of Amish life in that movie were simply laughable.

Whatever the outcome of
This Side of Heaven,
the Amish will probably dismiss it as nothing more than English fancy, much the way they dismissed
Harvest of Fire.
The Amish have a decidedly jaded view of film and TV, believing neither can be believed, that shows are made up to sway people in one direction or another, and that there is an evil attached to all of them.

The antenna on the roof is the devil's tail, they say, and the TV in the living room is his tongue.

This ominous tone was conveyed in a letter my father wrote:

Irene, I so wish that movie would be stopped, which you probably could, right? Wilbur's neighbor said, “There's a black person in every movie and this time it will be your Dad.” I'm not acquainted how these go, but if this is true, I just want to keep apologizing and ask to be forgiven.

I'm reasonably certain the word “black” means a “bad” person and does not refer to race, although many Amish do hold deep prejudices against blacks and discourage any kind of interracial contact.

“Ever seen a sparrow with a robin?” they'll ask. “Ever seen a bluebird with a cardinal? Well, if animals are smart enough to be with their own kind, humans should be, too.”

It's not exactly a ringing endorsement for equality.

Nineteen

Still praying that some way, somehow, the family may be united again, for this is hard to go on.

—L
ETTER FROM
M
OM

T
he best part about all the media attention was not our fifteen minutes of fame. It was the people who, through familiarity with my story, came to terms—or at least tried to—with crises in their lives.

There was the attractive middle-aged woman who came to a book signing and told how she had been harangued by family members her entire life because she had been born out of wedlock. She had been constantly reminded that she was a mistake.

I listened, which is all people really want anyway. Then I tried to help her in my own small way. In the only way I knew how.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “God doesn't make mistakes, and he made you, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can't be a mistake.”

Tears of joy filled her eyes and the years of torment washed down her face.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You're welcome,” I said. And I smiled.

There were letters, too. From all over the country. Not only from X-Amish but from English people who'd struggled with their faith to make a go of it in this life. Some of them had even read Ottie's book.

One woman wrote:

 

Reading your husband's book reminded me of what I went through when I left the Jehovah's Witnesses. I was one for seven years and when I tried to leave, it was very stressful. They also keep to themselves and tell members not to mix with the world, not even family members who are not JW.

When I left, my ex-husband found out where I was living, even though I was hiding. Then he and an elder came and talked to me, trying to get me to see the error of my ways. But I wouldn't go back.

I had it easier than the X-Amish because I didn't have a van load crying and pleading. But it was bad enough. After that, I had a twitch in my eye for several months because I thought God was going to destroy me because Armageddon was going to be here surely any minute now.

Religion and spirituality are not necessarily the same thing. And now I'm happy and free. I bet you are too!

 

A husband and wife wrote:

 

Some time ago your story was featured in a Nashville paper, and my husband and I read it with interest. Maybe it caught our interest more so because of our past experiences, as we also grew up in a very conservative church where a lot of emphasis was placed on being ‘separated' from the world. . . .

The day came, however, when we felt that we were in bondage and we longed for liberty. Our bondage was the prison house of sin, self, and self-righteousness, wherein Satan had taken us captive. God was so good. In his word he showed us that there is deliverance, freedom, victory if we come to him with all our heart, confessing and forsaking our sin, giving our life completely in his control, believing that Jesus died for such repentant sinners, and through his blood he will set us free. . . .

I love you and want you to have a heart-happiness that is real and lasting. . . .

 

A twenty-three-year-old woman wrote:

 

I left the Old Order Mennonite faith a little over three years ago. The question you said you asked yourself—“Am I going to hell?”—is still a question I ask myself every day. It's so hard to get past those feelings of guilt and condemnation that were instilled in us from an early age. I am very angry and upset that my parents put me through that kind of mental hell. . . .

I am so glad to see you were able to go on, be strong and be an encouragement to others that need deliverance from a life of bondage by man and not a life of living for God. . . .

 

The woman went on to say she had recently wedded an English man, and that she had put off marrying him because she was worried about the complications it would cause with her family. I couldn't help but think about my own situation.

One of the more heart-wrenching letters came from a forty-one-year-old Tennessee woman who'd recently left the Amish. She had never been married and possessed only an eighth-grade education, but she was valiantly trying to better herself.

She wrote:

I'm not a good educated writer but I hope you can understand my writing. I enjoy do [sic] the G.E.D. schooling. I learn a lot. I have come a long way since I start [sic] going to the adult education classes. Lots of the English people around here attend the classes. The classes are given in a.m
.
and p.m. twice a week. I mostly study at home. I go to class when I need teachers [sic] help.

That one made me just a little bit angry.

Here we were at the dawn of the twenty-first century and we still had people in dire need of education, in desperate searches for healthy balances in their lives.

For these people, the clock had, at least for a time, continued to march on without them. National unemployment was on the verge of reaching a thirty-year low, John Glenn had just returned to space aboard the shuttle
Discovery
, and Doctors Without Borders had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping the world's sick, injured, and impoverished.

Yet right in our own backyards, we had people being smothered by tradition, doctrine and bias.

What was wrong with us? I wondered. How was it that we had arrived at this point in the road?

That we could help some of these people was great solace, and some, upon hearing our story, arrived at our door seeking assistance. We didn't go looking for them, mind you. We merely made ourselves available.

And we went right to work when an Old Order Amish couple and their eight children came calling. They lived in squalor in a tin-roofed, two-room house on an English farm in Kentucky. The father made three dollars an hour (never more than eight thousand dollars a year) working the land, which isn't anywhere near enough to support a family that large. Worse, he had gotten himself in some kind of trouble with the Amish. They had punished him for using electricity in the home; had unplugged a freezer, spoiling all the family's food, and had wrongly accused him of drinking alcohol.

When we first encountered the family, we were horrified at their living conditions. They slept on mattresses on the floor, or sometimes on the very floor itself. Their clothes were so soiled that even several washings could not remove the stench, and the children were covered with lice.

To help them leave the Amish, we knew we'd have to find accommodations in another state. So, Ottie called one of the subjects of
True Stories of the X-Amish
who now ran a metal fabrication plant in Alabama, and the man graciously bought the family a mobile home and hired the father on at the factory for eleven dollars an hour.

That was several years ago, and the family is adjusting well. One of the girls even became homecoming queen.