Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
—Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY JULIA SCHEERES
A Thousand Lives
Jesus Land
Copyright © 2005 by Julia Scheeres
Preface copyright © 2019 by Julia Scheeres
Hardcover first published in 2005 by Counterpoint
Paperback first published in 2006 by Counterpoint
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scheeres, Julia, author.
Title: Jesus land : a memoir / Julia Scheeres ; with a new preface by the author.
Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051329 | ISBN 9781640092167
Subjects: LCSH: Escuela Caribe (Dominican Republic) | Scheeres, Julia—Childhood and youth. | Escuela Caribe (Dominican Republic)—Students—Biography. | Problem children—Education—Dominican Republic. | Christian education—Dominican Republic.
Classification: LCC LE17.D65 S34 2019 | DDC 373.7293—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051329
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR DAVID
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
—JOHN 8:32, ESCUELA CARIBE HANDBOOK
CONTENTS
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIA SCHEERES
READING GROUP GUIDE & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
When we were kids, my brother David and I hunted box turtles in the woods of our small Indiana town. We played hours of Monopoly and War in our blanket fort under the Ping-Pong table. We crossed the frozen Wabash, gripping hands as the ice fissured beneath our moon boots. We traded silly faces during tedious Sunday sermons, summer beckoning through the stained-glass windows.
And we encouraged each other with a single word: “Florida.” When we were in fifth grade, our family began vacationing in the Sunshine State, and it was there that we stumbled upon a kind of utopia: kids of every color forming fast friendships around the kidney-shaped pool. Back in Indiana, David and I were often marginalized because our family was different: my white parents adopted David, an African American, when we were both three years old. At the neighborhood pool, a gang of siblings once jumped us as we left the locker rooms, angered that we had “polluted” the water. But in Florida, skin color felt as inconsequential as eye or hair color. What mattered was fun, your ability to spout Michael Jackson trivia, the size of your cannonball off the stiff tongue of the diving board.
In Florida, our minds were opened. There were other ways of being. “Florida” became our password for hope, symbolic of an Eden we’d enter after crossing that magical threshold into adulthood. “Remember Florida,” I told David after a redneck kicked him in the crotch on the first day of high school. “Remember Florida,” he’d say when I ate lunch locked in a toilet stall to avoid bigots in the cafeteria. David would crack a corny joke or persuade me to go on a bike ride, and soon we’d be laughing, feeling powerful, feeling, in advance,