The Lost Children of Scientology
A memoir by a descendent of black American slaves
THE LOST CHILDREN OF SCIENTOLOGY
A memoir by a descendent of black American slaves
Jamie Mustard
Editors’ note: Today, courtesy of BenBella Books, we bring you an excerpt from a new memoir, Child X, by Jamie Mustard. The memoir recounts his experiences growing up in and escaping from the cult of Scientology. The publisher describes it as “A universal story of resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, Child X celebrates yet transcends race—and is ultimately an uplifting story of rising out of adversity and building a life full of meaning and connection.” Enjoy!
Scientists argue about whether we can remember anything before we are two years old. For me, I have very clear memories of being just a few months old that come to me in vivid flashes. Caretakers
I have spoken to have confirmed these early memories, and now I have a difficult time discerning between what I remember and what was told to me.
A baby born in 1970s Los Angeles, I was whisked at birth from a medical facility on the wealthy West Side to a machine, a decaying tenement on the border of a dilapidated Mexican slum at the edge of Downtown Los Angeles. My mother handed me off to a man and woman dressed in naval uniforms. They gently laid me on a blanket and covered me in the back seat of a bone-white Pontiac GTO, then raced across Los Angeles drenched in oranged sodium-vapor light.
All of us babies were housed in an industrial room on Beacon Street, just behind the Original Tommy’s Burgers, its enormous blue and yellow and neon sign bleached by the sun. Muscle cars grumbled constantly rolling by, vibrating The Baby Factory with the bass of their engines. The expansive nursery was ripe with smells, peeling paint, and cracked linoleum floors caked in dust and slime. The crying and screaming of the other newborns in their rusted, 1970s industrial-steel cribs rang out constantly. Outside my barred windows, I remember beautiful, moon-filled nights with pungent, hot air that warmed and soothed the city. Inside, it was screaming, always screaming.
Aside from our caretakers, few parents or adults came to see us babies. One “nanny” cared for too many babies, who often left us lying for hours in bulging diapers and our own sick. I was a summer baby. In the heat of June, the rancid odor of the room—bodies, sweat, and waste—was over- powering. Our cries went unheard. There were constant illnesses, rashes and fluids—bathing was even rarer than human touch. When bathing did happen, they lined us up in a long, dark hallway in front of the utilitarian shower room. Our diapers, sometimes heavy with days of waste, were discarded. Then we were lifted up and dipped for a few scant moments into yellow bathwater where we were quickly splashed, one baby after the other. The water, odorous and stagnant, remained unchanged until our next scheduled cleaning.
Red is the only color babies can see while their eyes develop the cells to discern color. Through my chronically crusted eyes, I could see in this monochromatic glow one of the “nannies,” a White woman with big, curly 1970s locks and a red top, making her way through the rows of screaming infants. I couldn’t yet discern the apricot prism of the Los Angeles smog, or the exquisite blue of the California moonlight under which no one sang us to sleep. The nights were cold. There were no nannies at night.
My mother loves to tell a story of how one February morning, when I was six months old, an earthquake shook the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and rocked LA. The babies wailed as The Baby Factory shook. The green fluorescent lights hanging precariously above us swayed back and forth—if they fell, it could have meant death. Paint chips rattled off the putrefied tenement walls. The nannies tried desperately to open the room’s only door, which had jammed shut in the sagged frame from the earthquake.
Five minutes after the quake, when the “nannies” burst in, us babies’ wailing was loud. The caretakers checked the damage through the dust hanging in the air. Broken glass popped under their feet. The woman in red came straight toward me. I watched her face through the rust and worn paint on the crib’s bars. She covered her mouth in a show of alarm and startled amusement as she stared into my jet-black baby eyes.
“This one’s laughing,” she said. No one seemed to hear her over our cries. I smiled up at the nanny.
My mother likes to say that I was the only baby in the earthquake that thought someone was merely rocking my crib.
X
At eighteen months I took my very first steps in life along the nursery’s dusty linoleum floor. The building had likely been a slum for a long time since its turn-of-the-century construction. The dry oak planks were scarred with heavy use, and the adobe ceilings were covered in yellowed paint from years of desperation and cigarette smoke. I often walked through the rows of urine-soaked cribs to the mammoth window and peered out at a sun-bleached world of sky and gaseous bronze smog.
If Los Angeles is full of one thing that you can never ever fully remove, it’s what 1930s LA writer John Fanté described as its dust. Because of the water piped in by the aqueduct, people forget that all of the steel and concrete was built in the middle of a desert, so Hollywood’s early pioneers could shoot films all year round. I’ve heard stories from guilty caretakers about us never going out for months on end; when we did, we were afraid of the sun. When I wasn’t quite two, we were taken out on a rare excursion to see the decommissioned Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach. I didn’t understand at the time why the movement would take a group of toddlers to see a 1930s steamship. I had never been outside in an open space with so many people. The giant boat sat there like a gigantic spaceship.
When its steam whistle suddenly blew, I jumped, startled, into the arms of a seven-year-old girl assigned to watch out for me. She and her father left The Baby Factory right after this trip, but when I connected with her later, she said that I had stayed on her mind for almost a half century.
X
Everything beyond The Baby Factory overwhelmed my senses. I didn’t know it then, but two years before my birth, my older brother, Joshua, born in England, had been smuggled onto this very same gargantuan vessel without papers and brought to America by my mother. Joshua would spend the first twenty years of his life stateless, without a country. I believe that as he grew older, the fact that he never officially existed in his country weighed on him.
There is only one baby picture of me—a Polaroid taken when my grandmother, Dorothy, visited Los Angeles. The movement didn’t need pictures of me. I was secure in The Baby Factory. I have memories of the slum, so many memories, but very few memories of my feelings.
I was numb.
I was one of so many raised in a movement that saw us as property to be kept for their purposes.
X
The commander of our movement was a man named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. If you were to ever leave and speak out against Hubbard’s elite navy after signing his billion-year contract, even as a child, they would sever all your family ties and any relationship you ever had that was connected to his movement. Hubbard had a doctrine: anyone who ever left the movement’s elite spiritual navy was a dreg of humanity, a reduced form of life among humans, scum.
I didn’t know it then, but I had been born and taken away from my parents to be groomed as an asset with no name. I was being trained by the movement to be part of a machine determined for war. In the dorms, all of us kids were being kept in a holding pen until our bodies grew. I lived with a hundred other kids in makeshift barracks lined with World War II industrial bunk beds stacked three high. They could have been the taller cousins of the industrial cribs back at The Baby Factory. Because I was only three and too young to assert myself, I was always relegated to the third-tier top bunk, at least twelve feet off the ground. Getting up to my bunk was like climbing a mountain.
X
On an extremely hot day, when I was around the age of five, we were asked to go downstairs and stand in line. Before us stood adult Hubbard navy members with stacks of paper in front of them. I was completely unable to write, and as I got to my place in line, I was asked if I wanted to be like my mom and help save the planet. I missed her so much, so the opportunity to be anything like her meant the opportunity to maybe see her. I was excited to be connected to her, to be a part of her, like the kids before me in line, and the ones coming after me. I excitedly and slowly scratched an illegible scribble onto a contract, committing my service to the movement for the next billion years.
A private navy adult named Carl stood above the table with his wheat- brown hair and Monkees haircut. “What happens when we fix this planet?” I asked him, wide-eyed.
“We’ll go on to the next planet and fix everyone there,” Carl, in his quasi-navy uniform, answered.
X
“But how will we get there?”
“We’ll take spaceships to get there.”
Carl said it matter-of-factly, without ceremony.
I saw me and my mother in a big room on a spaceship on a giant bed
facing a giant window. Wrapped together in a blanket, she held me and I leaned into her as we sat on the soft bed, her back leaning against the gray wall of the ship. We looked out of a looming flat-glass window built into the spaceship’s alloyed hull, into radiant twin suns burning in the black of space. Before the suns was a giant blue and green planet, similar to Earth, shimmering against the stars.
My heart pounded with excitement for the adventure to come. For days I thought about being with my mom, spaceships, going to other planets, and the goals of the movement: helping people to stay rational, to not get sick, and to always be in control of their emotions.
For the first time, my isolation had a purpose.
Jamie Mustard is a conceptual artist, artistic director, culturist, and writer. His literary memoir, Child X, excerpted here, was released at the end of July 2025 to critical acclaim. Child X mirrors his graphic novel which is set in a future-adjacent Sci-fi Los Angeles reminiscent of the LA of his youth. His first graphic novel, HYBRED, will be released on November 18 of this year—it depicts a future-adjacent world written, conceived and art-directed by Jamie, with all images drawn and colored in a little stone town in Southern Italy with artist Francesca Filomena. You can get in touch with Jamie through his Instagram.
An incredibly sad and tragic example of what occurs when supposedly rational people pursue utopian visions. While we almost instinctively rise to oppose authoritarian movements of the Right, we are often blind to the horrors of those seeking to create a better, perfect world. Since we are all individually and collectively flawed, totalitarianism must always accompany such perfectionist enterprises.
Too much of this doesn't add up. How can you miss a mother you never had contact with since the day you were born? I have many other questions. I doubt I'll get an answer. Scientology bad, I know, but if you're going to make stuff up, make it make sense.