When the Secret Keepers are Gone
By Crystal Hawkins
A Review by Dwight A. Moody, PhD
“I never meant to write a book.”
So asserts Crystal Hawkins on page 203 of her memoir. She got into it through therapy, which is a good thing considering all the drama and trauma she endured growing up. Reading this book will remind you of how bad some people have it.
And it was bad. In California before and after they moved to South Carolina. Drugs and jails, debt and danger, poverty and flight, foulness of all kinds. Hawkins describes it all in stunning detail and shocking summary:
Even though I was in constant battle with my mother, it was actually my father who pushed me to my breaking point. Not only had he abandoned me, but he morphed into a complete monster in the five years we had been in Greenville. Maybe he had always been a monster, but I had been too young and naive to recognize it. Maybe the heroin had made him fun, and without it he could not hide his true self. Or maybe the recognition he was receiving fanned the flames of this beast and made it worse (91f).
And this beast, her father, was a preacher, the son of a preacher man, both of them false to the core and failures as humans and ministers.
Or so this book reads, largely because it recounts only the dark side of life: the violence, the desertion, the vulgar talk, the bitter spirits of people living without love and kindness and gentleness, all the things that form the core of the religious life, the spiritual life, the Christian life.
Which raises the question: How did Hawkins grow up and out of this darkness? How did Hawkins find the sunshine that has made her life a beacon of hope to her children and to all the children she has taught?
Here and there in the book, Hawkins alludes to, almost in passing, these flashes of sunshine that touched her soul with the possibilities that have made her such an exceptional person: music, academics, books, achievement, friendships, love, marriage and family, even a college degree, and a career in education.
Where did this come from? How did she survive and thrive? What were the episodes and who were the people that made it possible? I want to know more, and I am sure I write for others who will read this book and ask these questions.
Maybe Hawkins doesn’t mean to write another book, but here is one reader who says: this woman can write and this woman needs to write. People need to hear the other side of her life story, how hope overtook despair, how victory surpassed defeat, how life flourished in her and through her in the midst of so much disease and death. How did all this happen, for her good, for the good of all those around her, and for the glory of God?
Write another book, Crystal Hawkins! I will buy it I will read it. Hell, I might even publish it.
