All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

The eight members of Moore’s family, the Greens, were “river people” from Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Located at the foot of the Ouachita Mountains, Arkadelphia is where the Ouachita and Caddo rivers converge. When Beth Moore was six, her father, Major Albert Green (called Dad), purchased a Volkswagen bus and took the family on a camping road trip to visit cousins in north Florida.

Dad and his wife, Aletha Green (called Mom), had five children. At the time of the road trip, Tony was four, Beth was six, Gay was nine, Wayne was 14, and Sandra was 18. Moore’s maternal grandmother, Minnie Rountree (Nanny), lived with them and also went on the trip.

The family stopped at the Fort Walton Beach campsite in Florida, where—after Dad struggled to set up the tent—they all piled inside.

Moore pauses the story to reflect on how separate each family member was despite their physical closeness and shared history. “All my knotted-up life” (14), she writes, she has longed for the “sanity and simplicity” of knowing who is good and who is bad. She wishes God would sort this issue out for her, but God remains “aloof.” Moore attributes her wish for clean-cut categories to the fact that most of her life has been a “slow baptism in the lukewarm waters of a silty gray Jordan” (15).

Moore returns to relating the adventure of the camping trip. A lightning storm terrified the family and caused the tent to collapse. They ran to the VW and spent the night at a diner. The subsequent visit to the cousins was a success. Dad returned the tent to Sears, and the family went home.

When Moore was nearly eight, the family moved to a new house called the “Ligon house” after its previous owner, and it was closer to the children’s school and activities. Now nearly 20, Sandra was married, and Dad had retired from the Army and begun working as the manager of a theater and a drive-in. The new home was bigger, and Moore was able to share a room with Gay instead of Nanny. The house also had a music room featuring a piano belonging to Wayne, a talented musician.

During the day, Moore loved playing with Gay’s makeup and reading the notes from her sister’s friends. At night, she had a recurring dream that a phantom called “The Shadow” made its way down the hall and toward her bed. It had a “strike of lightning” (35) on its head, like the white stripe in her father’s dark hair.

The Greens became regular moviegoers at the Royal Theater, where Dad worked. Although ten years had passed since the Supreme Court declared school segregation to be unconstitutional (making the year 1964), Black movie patrons were forced to enter a separate door and sit in the balcony. Arkadelphia public schools would not fully integrate until 1970. Moore recalled seeing a Black classmate enter the theater; both girls looked away. Moore sometimes sneaked upstairs to see what sitting in the balcony was like but decided that sitting in someone else’s seat didn’t tell her anything; she’d have to “sit in the same skin” (39).

The Green children watched the movies multiple times and worked in the concession stand. They also cleaned the auditorium between showings. As the children matured, they came of age at the theater by learning how to kiss and spying on their classmates and church members.

The only place where Moore spent more time than the Royal Theater was the First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia. The “palatial” building was more of a home to her than the Ligon house. The Greens attended long church services three times a week: twice on Sunday and all afternoon and evening Wednesday. Congregants prided themselves on outward displays of piety, such as singing loudly and placing their offering checks face-up.

Church was also a place to make public statements, such as Moore’s decision to be baptized via full immersion by Brother Reeves at age nine. The baptism was swift, and back in the pews, Moore contemplated the congregants. They include her church choir teacher, her Sunday school teacher, and her girls’ mission class teacher, who served the girls foreign food to talk about missionaries in a particular country. Moore says the best days of her childhood were spent in the church and the theater, but “best would soon become a relative term” (56).

Moore describes having seen the havoc a twister can wreak at the movies. Now, she says, she “lived it in [her] own skin” as madness “came for us” (58). She was eleven, had just received her first training bra, and would not get her period for another year. As she was coming back from the orthodontist in Little Rock, her father parked the car, told her to sit next to him, and then sexually molested her.

She could not name the abuse at the time but knew that “no kind of good dad” did what her father did to her (60). She wanted to tell her mother, but her mother became ill soon afterwards, falling into what seemed to be a depressive state. With Sandra off with her own family and Wayne in college, the three younger children felt abandoned. Occasionally, Mrs. Green seemed like her old self, doing household tasks, but she would then display signs of psychiatric disability such as writing on the wall or threatening suicide.

Dad became possessive of Mom, refusing entry to her room to Nanny and the children. When he was out of the house, the children formed a chain and walked into her room to wake her up. Mom believed Dad was cheating on her, while Dad said she was making the story up. Moore concludes that their mother wasn’t “crazy” but “caught.”

One night, Mom disappeared. Nobody called the police because they were an upstanding Christian family. The girls had been shielding Tony from the family’s dysfunction, but he had to be told that Mom was missing. Finally, Dad walked in with Mom, whom he found at the river. Moore concludes that they were a “different kind of river people” now (68).

As Moore entered ninth grade, she tried to pretend nothing was wrong with her family. She wore makeup and short skirts and had boyfriends but “no tools for handling them” (68-69). She began going out with Gay and was a “good girl doing bad things” (68).