Beware the Grace of God
Missionaries at a Baptist home for troubled boys so loved their young charges that they chained them to beds, kept them in leg-irons, and locked them in stocks.
will says: i was one of the boys they were talking about in this story. (June 25th, 2009 at 10:50am)
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Later that month, Matthews wrote the Provorses a letter, stating that in his opinion, they were running an unlicensed child care facility. He sent them a license application; the Provorses did not respond. Matthews notified his DHS superiors, but the matter was dropped. For the next fourteen months, the state, for all practical purposes, forgot that the Provorses existed.
ON JUNE 11, 1991, A HEAVYSET thirteen-year-old boy named Stephen got his first look at Texas when he stepped off an airplane and into the Corpus Christi airport. In recounting his ten weeks spent at the Grace of God Boys’ Home, he recalled that waiting for him was a bald, paunchy man in overalls. “I hear you’re from California,” said Gerald Provorse to the boy. “Is it warm there?” Stephen said it was. “Well,” said the missionary, “it gets mighty warm here too.”
The boy knew only a little bit about the place where Brother Provorse was taking him. His mother, who would be paying the Provorses $350 a month for expenses, had told him it was a boarding school for boys with emotional problems like the kind Stephen displayed when he aggravated his teachers and hit his grandmother. But there was nothing to fear, the mother had assured her son. She had told Nancy Provorse over the phone that she didn’t want to send her boy to one of those tough-love camps she had heard about on Oprah Winfrey. And Nancy Provorse had assured her that the worst a recalcitrant boy could expect at the Grace of God was “a light spanking.” It sounded like the right place to send Stephen, who would have come sooner had the Provorses not urged his mother to wait a few weeks: They had outgrown their old trailer home on the Roloff farm and were in the process of relocating to a “wonderful new facility.”
Stephen and Brother Provorse arrived at 715 Yorktown Boulevard before dark. The new boy was led inside and into a dorm room, where his belongings were searched for weapons, drugs, jewelry, and pornography. Then his hair was cut short, and he was sent off to chapel and, afterward, to dinner. When bedtime was announced at nine that evening, two boys known as leaders, who seemed to command respect from the others, came into Stephen’s room. Stephen remembered that they ordered him to lie down on his bed. He did so, and the two boys chained his legs to the bedpost: “So you won’t run off,” they told him. Stephen swore he wouldn’t run. They paid him no mind and left him there, chained to his bed. The chains cut into his skin. Stephen did not sleep well that first night at the Grace of God.
The chains came off at five the next morning, which began as all others would. Stephen and the other boys climbed out of their bunk beds, shuffled into the recreation yard, and ran five laps—roughly a mile—through the darkness, without supervision but also without stopping. Stephen noticed that two of the boys were running rather stiffly. Looking closer, he noticed that they wore chains between their legs.
At six the boys went to chapel, then cleaned their rooms, and finally had breakfast at seven. The hours before lunch were spent doing chores around the home, ranging from cleaning toilets to working in the woodshop. After lunch came school and more chores, followed by a couple of hours in the recreation yard, chapel, dinner, and bedtime.
There was little to spice up the monotony. Caffeine and pork were for-bidden menu items; candy bars were doled out sparingly as rewards. When attending church services at People’s Baptist, the boys were instructed not to look at the females in the congregation. Once a month, each boy had to recite a Bible chapter he had memorized. Every Friday Brother Provorse rented a movie for the boys to see—usually a western—but the video would be shut off if a character cursed. This was life at the Grace of God for Stephen, each day blandly rolling into the next—until the day he reacted to a remark by exclaiming, “Oh, my God,” which was overheard by one of the leaders, who fetched Brother Provorse’s assistant, Brother Kurt.
The leader told Brother Kurt that Stephen had taken God’s name in vain and pointed to three other boys who had laughed along with the remark. Brother Kurt, wearing his customary feedstore cap and overalls, stood over Stephen. He slapped the thirteen-year-old boy in the face. Then he pulled out a bar of soap from his overalls pocket, and with his pocketknife divided the bar into four pieces.The leader distributed the pieces among Stephen and the three boys who had laughed.
“Chew for three minutes,” said Brother Kurt.
Stephen chewed. The soap stung his mouth. He felt like throwing up. One of the other boys did—a boy who had been there for sixteen months, longer than anyone else, and who would later write wearily in his state affidavit, “Life around here is too hard.” Brother Kurt waited patiently for the boy to finish vomiting. Then he handed him a fresh piece of soap and told him to start over.
Brother Kurt insisted on clean minds, clean mouths, and clean clothes. The latter was a problem for one boy, who had a weak bladder and occasionally wet his underwear. One day Brother Kurt told the others to strip the boy naked and have him submit to a “GI scrub”—that is, to scrub him from head to toe with Ajax, using toilet scrubbers and toothbrushes. The boys did as they were told and repeated the punishment when Brother Kurt announced one afternoon that another boy, Mitchell, could not keep his underwear clean. Mitchell was dragged into the bathroom and told to spread his legs. As with the first boy, a toothbrush was stuck up his rectum.
Mitchell had managed to stay in trouble since his arrival, when Brother Provorse declared, after the boy’s earrings had been removed and his hair freshly cut, “Now you look like a very nice young man.” Mitchell replied, “You’ve been here too long,” and was promptly shown the lap track and subsequently chained to his bed.
Mitchell professed to be a Satanist, but his real religion was rebellion. Back home in Pasadena, he often ran away, used LSD, and stole cars. Once he set fire to his mother’s apartment; on another occasion, he shot his little brother. He was a slender and bright but reckless boy running amok in a broken home, secretly searching, it seemed, for a worthy adversary, someone who could dominate him. In Brother Kurt, Mitchell met his match. When Mitchell ran away from the home, he would say later, the missionary dragged him back and fitted him with leg-irons. When he stole a postage stamp, Brother Kurt sent him out to the lap track to run five miles. When the boy talked back, Brother Kurt got out his wooden paddle and instructed him to hold on to a chair and bend over. Mitchell took his punishment, and when he came back for more, there stood Brother Kurt, ready to accommodate him.
One day, when Mitchell was writing a letter in his dorm room, Brother Kurt came in and sat down next to him. He took the paper and pen from the boy and drew a diagram. Knowing that Mitchell was handy with wood, he asked the boy if he would build the object he had drawn. Mitchell said he would and asked what the object was called. Stocks, said the missionary, adding darkly that some of the boys had been rather rebellious.
The next day, Mitchell and two other boys built the contraption. A few days later, Mitchell insulted Brother Kurt. The boy spent that afternoon in the shed, in a chair, with his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs locked by their ankles in the stocks that were his own handiwork. Directly behind him, above his right ear, a taped sermon by the late Brother Roloff blared from a speaker that Mitchell himself had installed a few days back. It was hot, and the mosquitoes attacked him relentlessly.
No one was permitted to visit Mitchell. But one boy, a quiet kid from rural North Carolina, took pity. He sneaked over to the shed, hammer and nails and a board in hand. After making sure no one was looking, the boy nailed the board across the two posts supporting the stocks, so that Mitchell would have something to scratch his nose against.
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE ANY CHOICE: either get punished or get saved,” Mitchell would say later. If a boy could convince Brother Kurt that he had suddenly, somehow, between bars of soap and licks and laps and duck walks and hours spent in the stocks, seen the light of Jesus Christ, then for that boy the punishment would come to a halt.
DHS officials found dozens of letters in the files of the Yorktown facility, written by the boys to Brother Kurt, begging his forgiveness and pledging that they were now good Christians. A number of the boys would later admit that these were hardly sincere testimonials. Their sole purpose, as one boy put it in an affidavit, was to “brownnose Brother Kurt.”
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