“I’ve done picked out the seven juiciest, most rancid skeletons in that walk-in closet and every week from now till I’m done I’m going to dissect a different one, bone by bone, and piece by piece”
MentalSlavery.com presents "Seven Skeletons" — a limited series art experience that includes essays, a podcast, paintings, poetry and videos.
It tells the story of a prominent family of Bahamian artists through the lens of their lifelong relationship with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Visit the Table of Skeletons page for the full ordered list.
It began with the assumption that the conflict was private.
If you read or listened to the last skeleton, “Bahamian Conspiracy Theory,” you know where we are now: on the doorstep of the NAGB, a national institution.
This is not a detour — it’s a continuation.
And it only gets bigger from here.
Before we dive into the next episode, though, I feel the need to catch my breath.
Maybe you do too.
If you haven’t started the series, this is a good time to rev up your podcast app and jump in.
If you’ve been following from the beginning, I’m prepping a quick review of Skeletons One through Five — pulling out some of what you may have missed along the way.
This year I released the first five of the Seven Skeletons — stories about family, faith, erasure, and survival. These pieces were never easy to write, but they were necessary to tell.
There are still more chapters to come: two more skeletons, an outro, and some bonus content that should pull everything into focus.
Some things still need saying.
I’m grateful to everyone who has walked part of this road with me.
My full (2 hour!) interview with ExJW Analyzer aka Jonathan Leger is up on his YouTube channel. We get into growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness in The Bahamas, whether or not I’m the first public Bahamian apostate, and the NAGB controversy and of course, we talked about the Seven Skeletons, plus a ton more! Please check it out.
Every body does like look at they shit. I don’t know why. I figure we does be admiring it. Turn round and stare watch it go down. Put it on your resume. Look what good work I do. I got my shit together.
We does think our shit is best. Only we can’t never smell it we does be too close.
When I was young used to call Mummy, “come Mummy look come see, I bumpee strong like lion!”
Sooner or later you find out no one into your shit but you.
I know them long time, them people is mine. The women they’re fine, as long as you stay in line. Ronnie Butler
If there wasn’t already a thing called reverse nepotism, then I would just have to invent it.
Family should beget favour, but in my case I get passed over for things that I actually qualify for. From a Jehovah’s Witness point-of-view, as a disfellowshipped former member and apostate, my family are commanded to shun me and so I must be excluded from their projects. The “Ting an’ Ting” documentary is the odd and singular exception where I want to be removed from something of theirs and they have decided to keep me in — but to keep me they had to cut out everything I said that went against their views.
When they have their family art shows, I am not invited to participate and I’m not there at the openings. I only exist as a loose thread on my father’s bio — that he has three children. I don’t even live in the country anymore, so ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The compound effect of these absences has led to the very common reaction — “I didn’t know that Eddie Minnis had a son”.
1.
The “Ting an’ Ting” documentary has a number of great examples of this “reverse nepotism” in action. One of which is “Der Real Ting,” a juke-box musical written by Nicolette Bethel and Patrice Francis, directed by Philip Burrows that premiered in 2018.
On the left: A scene from Der Real Ting musical as performed at Shakespeare in Paradise at the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts. On the right: Album cover from the original cast recording.
Now, I talked to my father about doing a play from his music while I was in grad school — in 2009. I even wrote my own treatment for this “Eddie Minnis Musical” in that year while I was working on my own play, “The Cabinet.”
I’m not trying to say that I’m some genius for having the thought, because let’s be honest, stringing his songs into a narrative is not a radical idea – it was even done by the late great Eric Minns from a far smaller catalogue of songs in 2015 with his “Island Boy” musical.
At one point my father brought up the musical’s rehearsal process to me. He had observed that a lot of the children of people who worked on his music in the 70s and 80s were involved in the making of this production. I could only roll my eyes and suck my teeth.
That I, his son, was a playwright who brought him the idea nearly a decade prior and was now cut out from the entire process never occurred to him as odd or as the knife in my ribs that I took it to be.
2.
At first glance the “Creations Grace” Minnis Family Retrospective, also featured in the documentary, and put on by the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB) in 2014 seems like more of the same reverse nepotism.
For one thing, it looked a lot like any of theshows that my family has put on recently, with the only difference being that it focused on past work instead of recent work. If you squinted, you noticed that there was also a son represented, but it was the son-in-law, Ritchie Eyma – who is an exemplary Jehovah’s Witness – and not me.
Catalogue from the 2014 “Creation’s Grace,” Minnis Family Retrospective.
Despite all these similarities to what happened before though, you will see that this retrospective was quite a different beast. For one thing it was put on by the NAGB — a national institution — not a Witness affiliate by any means. The idea of the show came from the great Stan Burnside, one of the seminal Bahamian artists who was chairman of the board at the time. He passed this mandate to Amanda Coulson, Bahamian art historian and critic with international reach who had recently returned home to take on the NAGB’s Director job. She then gave the assignment to chief curator, John Cox, another major Bahamian artist and my art professor while I was at COB.
If you look up and down the list of people involved in the project or at least those who got their name attached to the catalogue — the late greats Patty Glinton-Meicholas and Dr. Gail Saunders alongside cultural hero Pam Burnside — there is not a Jehovah’s Witness to be found, and yet the final product looks exactly as it would if it were put on by the Watchtower society itself.
Since a retrospective is “an exhibition … showing the development of the work of a particular artist over a period of time” you would expect an Eddie Minnis retrospective to showcase his visual art work through time – and even to have some examples of his cartooning and maybe even his musical practice. And this was the original idea that Stan Burnside had.
This concept was expanded upon by Coulson as we read in Burnside’s introduction:
In her wisdom she [Amanda Coulson] expanded the original idea of an Eddie Minnis retrospective to include his family members.
This is where expectations shift.
If the show became a family retrospective then wouldn’t you naturally expect that all of the family that are artists would be represented? And would that not also include me? You might say though that perhaps the powers at the NAGB did not consider me to be an artist and thought that I should not be included because of that. Well let’s continue Burnside’s quote:
[The retrospective] is certainly an incredible showcase of what is now a “Dynasty of Minnis” artists, which also includes the Minnis’ son, Ward.
This was my first of two mentions in the catalogue. The second is found in my father’s biography as penned by Coulson:
Eddie and Sherry have three children; daughters Nicole and Roshanne and a son Ward (who is also an artist and a writer).
Here we have both the chairman of the board of The Bahamian National Art Gallery and the professional curator of the exhibit and gallery Director, both aware of my existence and acknowledging that I’m also an artist.
But the plot thickens. The NAGB was not only aware of me and my art, at the time they owned three of my paintings! Most recently they brought some of them out of the National collection to display in 2023 and 2024 in an exhibition entitled “The Nation / The Imaginary”.
What’s even wilder, is that when it comes to Minnis family art, they ONLY own my pieces and some from my father. Yes, you heard that right. Neither of my sisters nor Ritchie have any work in the NAGB’s National Collection.
If that’s the case – how is it that mention of me does not appear anywhere else in “Creations Grace”? How is it that not a single canvas of mine, even the ones that the NAGB owned, didn’t make it through to the Gallery floor for the family retrospective? How is it possible that there is no mention of my other artistic output: my poems, my theatre work, my cultural criticism?
If, in her wisdom, Coulson expanded the scope of the exhibit to include my sisters and then even further to include my brother-in-law, what wisdom prevented her from adding me to that list? And further still, why is this decision not explained anywhere?
It boggles the mind to imagine that a national institution curated a show of this magnitude along religious grounds as if they were a branch office of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The evidence that we have though, is the finished product, which surely looks and quacks like a religious hit job.
What followed after the exhibition was a decade of silence — a quiet cover-up built on the hope that no one would notice, and that even if someone did, they wouldn’t say anything.
And guess what?
It worked.
Coming up next: “The Art of Erasure.” A conversation long overdue — and that no one wanted to have — about the NAGB, the Minnis story, and what went missing.
Leaving — or even questioning — the Jehovah’s Witnesses can feel isolating. To make that journey easier, I’ve put together a curated list of books, documentaries, support groups, and creators who help explain the reality behind the organization and offer tools for healing.
Whether you’re recovering yourself, supporting someone who is, trying to understand what this religion actually asks of its members, or simply hoping to better understand a loved one’s journey, these curated resources offer guidance, education, and community.
