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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The task was not as hard as it might have seemed, for the missionary wanted very much to believe that his boys could be saved. A few were elevated to the rank of leader, joining Thomas and Frank, who had lived with the Provorses for more than a year and were fanatically devoted to the missionaries. Being a leader meant that you had the right to be called Sir by the other boys, and that you shared a bathroom and a dining room table away from the rank and file.
But leaders were also required to snitch on the others to Brother Kurt, or they themselves would suffer punishment. Not wanting to fall from grace, one new leader expressed his faith as demonstratively as he could. He wrote his parents—knowing that the Provorses read all incoming and outgoing mail—and instructed them to destroy all of his rock records and posters.
The leaders were Brother Kurt’s lieutenants, for better and certainly for worse. “As I was in a position of being a leader in the home,” one boy wrote in his affidavit, “I had to lock these people in stocks, chain up there [sic] feet in shackles, handcuff them and beat people around the lap track with sticks and willow branches off the tree. I didn’t enjoy doing these things, but I had to because I didn’t want to find out what would happen to me if I told them no.”
As hopeful as Brother Kurt was that a boy would see the light, his eyes were just as alert for signs of transgression. During the summer of 1991, when the Grace of God’s population swelled to 22, the stick seemed to come down more swiftly than before. There were more boys to manage, so many souls to save, and the summer heat threatened to sap them of their discipline. The Gulf Coast air was pungent with salt and sin. Perhaps, as some parents would later suggest, things simply got out of control at the Grace of God: There wasn’t enough time for traditional measures, and Brother Kurt—“a stickler for time-saving,” according to one of the boys—found himself relying on the most radical forms of punishment available.
None of the methods were his invention. The duck walks, wall sits, laps, licks, being told to keep silent for weeks on end, having mail censored and calls monitored—most of these were staples of the Roloff method, practiced for years under Roloff’s approving eye and later imitated by the various managing conservators who followed in Brother Roloff’s footsteps.
The handcuffs, leg-irons, and chains were something else again, new features far afield of Roloff’s strict vision. But the devices, according to one of the boys’ earlier caretakers, had been in Brother Provorse’s possession, available for use, before Brother Kurt ever arrived on the scene. A former People’s Baptist Church associate would also claim that, before moving to Yorktown Boulevard, the Provorses “tried using stocks on the Roloff property, but Brother Cameron put an immediate stop to it.” (Wiley Cameron acknowledged in an interview that he had discussions with Brother Provorse along these lines.)
No, Brother Kurt was merely the enforcer—a man who, in his footrace with the devil to claim the souls of the wayward, found himself cutting corners. So it was that when a fourteen-year-old boy could not finish his laps, Brother Kurt urged the leaders to “provoke” him. The leaders chased the boy around the track, beating him with tree branches. The boy fell to the ground, gasping, unable to continue. The other boys dragged him inside the dorm, where Brother Kurt swatted him with a paddle, then sent him back outside to finish his laps. The boy could not and was dragged inside again and swatted again. In all, he was swatted 32 times and might have received more had he not finished his laps with the help of boys who dragged him around the track. After the final lap, Brother Kurt told the boy to take a bath with Epsom salts to heal the bruising.
Said Thomas, a loyal leader, “If you got paddled and that didn’t work, if you got laps and that didn’t work, if you got soap and that didn’t work—if you got everything and that didn’t work, the final thing was stocks.”
As the summer advanced, it seemed that no daylight passed without one of the boys being confined in the shed. A new boy tried to run on his first day and was immediately brought to the stocks. Another tried to saw his way out of the stocks with a pocketknife he had stolen from Brother Kurt. He was caught early by the leaders, who handcuffed his arms behind his back and added a few chains around his legs. Some boys spent two hours in the shed, others five, others eight. They were returned to their dorm before dusk—except for Stephen, who had an eight-hour sentence in the stocks stretched to twelve when the leaders forgot about him until late in the evening. When they ran to the shed, there was Stephen, right where they had left him, asleep.
One day, a fifteen-year-old Georgia boy called a leader a liar. Brother Kurt was brought to the scene. He moved to slap the boy, who in turn put up his hands to deflect the blow. Brother Kurt called for the handcuffs. The boy’s hands were cuffed behind his back. The missionary raised his hand again. This time the boy fell to the floor, curling himself up to protect his face. Brother Kurt ordered the leaders to grab the boy’s legs. They did, and Brother Kurt got a few clean shots at his face before sending him off to the stocks, where the boy spent his sentence listening to Brother Roloff rail against the wages of sin while mosquitoes buzzed in his ears.
For all the retribution inflicted by Brother Kurt, Stephen would remember a point when the missionary’s methods seemed to lose all reason. That was when Brother Kurt turned the full force of his righteous rage on Mitchell, the rebel. For a period of a week, the boy who had built the stocks spent eight hours each day confined to the shed. He was beaten around the track for up to nine-mile stints. For an entire month he wore leg-irons throughout the day and was chained to his bed at night. Finally, in August 1991, Mitchell cratered. He apologized to Brother Kurt for all that he had done. He said that he was saved.
“I wanted to get out bad,” he later explained. “Everybody wanted to get out.”
But the Provorses and Brother Kurt were not letting anyone leave the Grace of God anytime soon—not with so much evil left to purge. A new boy arrived in August, and on one of his first days he was paddled in the chapel by Brother Kurt for not putting his name on his towel before throwing it in the laundry basket. Later in the month, a boy failed to clean the kitchen and was thereby made familiar with the taste of soap.
On Thursday, August 22, Brother Kurt told a boy to pull down his pants and hold on to a chair. With the others gathered around, Brother Kurt reared back and landed the paddle twice against the boy’s bare backside.
“That’ll fix you,” declared Brother Kurt. “Or do you want more?”
The boy, whose name was Nash, did not want any more. But Nash would not wait for the day when he would see the light. Instead he waited until the night of August 23, and into the darkness he and his three friends ran.
AFTER SERGEANT ANGELA HORN DROPPED off the four boys at La Raza Runaway Shelter, she stood in the parking lot, anticipating Brother Provorse’s arrival. She did not have to wait long.
The missionary was in a foul humor. Where are my boys? he wanted to know. The Nueces County officer informed Provorse that he could not have them. They were in the shelter, she said, and as a result of allegations of child abuse, DHS would have to investigate. Provorse erupted. The boys were his, he yelled. Their parents had turned them over to him because no one—not the parents, not the state—had been able to do anything with them. “Sure, I chain ’em!” he roared; chaining was what they needed. “You’re trash!” the missionary bellowed at the officer. “The state is trash! You don’t care anything about these boys!”
His words fell on deaf ears. The law had caught up with the Grace of God. Four of his boys were lost to the state.
Two days later the state came for the rest of the boys. They were in the recreation yard, playing volleyball and throwing a Frisbee, when a procession of sedans and police vehicles pulled into the circular driveway. As television crews drove up in their vans, more than twenty DHS caseworkers, along with several law enforcement officials, approached the property. They knocked on the front door, and Brother Provorse answered it. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.
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