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A rough draft of the spiritual autobiography of Joseph B Wilson. The history that lead to Toteg Tribe.
Copyright 2003 by Joseph B Wilson
In order to find work my parents moved from Tioga County, Pennsylvania to Clinton County,
Michigan in the summer of 1942. I was born on December 11th, 1942. I was raised just inside the
city limits of St. Johns, Michigan, a small town just 18-miles north of the state capital. In those days
my neighbors were mostly small farmers who were selling their land in lot sized parcels. Dad
bought three or four lots from his step-father-in-law's father, parked a trailer which was not much
larger than a camper on it, and over the years built a large cement block house while working full
time at the local Sealed Power Piston Ring factory. Until I became a teenager the area behind our
back yard was about 10-acres of overgrown woodland in which I used to enjoy wandering.
As far as I knew there were no other children in this neighborhood until I was about five years old.
Until I started kindergarten, the September before my fifth birthday, my major social interaction with
other children was with my cousins from Flint, about 50 miles away. We'd see each other about
once a month, either they would come to visit, or my folks would go there. My oldest cousin was
about a year younger than me.
My folks did not go to church so I didn't have any spiritual training at home. My only exposure as a
child came during our annual vacations when we would go to my parents´ old homestead in
Sabinsville (population 225 at the time), Pennsylvania. There we would attend church meetings
with my Grandmother Wilson and my father's brother and sisters. Their church is different from any
other I have seen. First, it has no name. The church has no official organizational status with the
government so marriages are performed by a Justice of the Peace rather than by one of the
ministers. It owns and rents no property, and has no bank accounts of any kind. The people meet
in worshippers homes for services rather than in a set aside building. Their preachers, whom they
call Workers, take a kind of a vow of poverty, since they only own their clothing and a few small
personal items. They remain unmarried and travel about the country in pairs -- an older and
younger man or an older and younger woman -- teaching in the various communities where the
church is established. They have no seminary so the older Worker teaches the younger one. They
claim their teachings are strictly Biblical (don't they all!) and they don't differentiate between the
Old and New Testaments. They take no collection or donations during the services although the
Workers are allowed to accept gifts of cash from the individual members in order to obtain food
and travel. They are an extremely strict group. No drinking, smoking, movies, television, radio,
fairs, circuses, card playing, jewelry, etc. The women never cut, color, or curl their hair (they usually
wear it in long braids wrapped in a kind of a bun on their head) and wear plain clothing. The men
are all clean shaven and have a clean cut 1940´s style haircut. They are pacifists, although they do
allow their men to serve in the military if they are drafted and it is in a non-combatant capacity. In
spite of their apparent lack of formal organization during the summer months they manage to have
large "conventions" (tent meeting, revivals) in the United States and Canada. Sometimes these
are attended by two or three thousand people.
This church has been labeled an evil cult by various authorities and the myth of it´s beginnings
exposed by the more orthodox churches.
I went through that kind of detail because this group of people had a lasting spiritual effect on me
and colored the way I thought a spiritual organization should be run.
Two months before my 8th birthday my brother, Richard, was born. Two years later he was
diagnosed as having polio. He was one of the lucky ones who recovered without being physically
paralyzed, though I think that the disease (or the pampering he continued to receive after recovery)
had a negative effect on his personality.
My sister was born four months after I turned 11.
I can't remember exactly when, but at around the area of puberty I was pretty depressed for no
reason that I can think of. I could see no point in life and on three separate occasions tried to
commit suicide. First I got into my fathers college chemistry set and swallowed the contents of a
test tube sized bottle labeled "poison". I vomited a lot that night, and was kept out of school the
next day, but that's all that happened. A week or so later I went to out back yard, put a ladder up
against the oak tree where our swing was tied, climbed up and tied one of the ropes around my
neck, then jumped. I wasn't high enough and landed on my feet. A week or so after that I loaded my
fathers old Ivor Johnson .22 pistol, put the barrel to my temple, and pulled the trigger. The gun
misfired. I unloaded the gun and put it back. At that point I decided that there must be some
purpose to my life, I just didn't know what it was. It obviously wasn't my time to die.
From the time I was about 9 until I was about 14 I spent one or two months of my school summer
vacation time in Sabinsville. It was there I had a breakthrough and actually learned to read well
(after all I couldn't play in the creek or on the farms all of the time, and television and radio was not
only out of the question but totally unavailable!) By the time I was 10 or 11 I had read all of Edgar
Rice Burrows Tarzan series.
