Strivers Row (13 page)

Then he saw it. What it was that made the cops so jumpy, what was making everyone so uneasy, even if they didn't know it. It was
how
the people were together, out on the stoops and street corners, outside the bars and barbershops, leaning against lampposts and parking meters. The people who were gathered everywhere, and who Jonah now realized had been there all along, partly hidden behind the shifting screen of servicemen, and excited Thursday girls hurrying along the sidewalks.

That was no thing, by itself. Harlem lived half its life out on the street, especially in the summer. People hanging out of windows, sleeping on fire escapes, drinking and roistering on the rooftops. Doing anything to escape the suffocating heat of kitchens, and the overstuffed railroad flats.

But this was different, different in a way that Jonah had never seen before and in a way that the cops, never being more than wary visitors to Harlem, could only sense unconsciously but would never put their finger on. He saw it clearly now. The little huddles of hustlers and numbers runners—sitting around in the barbershops with middle-aged workingmen who usually spent all their time complaining about their wives, or jawing over the relative merits of Satchel Paige and Martin Dihigo. Church mothers who could generally be found chatting in beauty parlors—sitting out on the stoops now with chippies and working girls, with their scarred faces and backless, stained satin dresses. There were race men with Holiness disciples, Seventh Day Adventists with Methodists, Garveyites with zoot suiters, Islanders with Southerners. All the impassable divides of Harlem society had been bridged almost overnight, as if by magic in these street-corner congregations, and Jonah felt bewildered and not a little chagrined that he himself, as their supposed shepherd, had not seen it before.

Stranger still, they all seemed to be gathered around some piece of paper, something written, whether it was a telegram, or a scrap of stationery, or a sheet of newsprint. Harlemites were always reading, of course, it was the only way to pass a life spent waiting on line, for the bus, the trolley, half a chance. Poring through paperbacks and library books and newspapers; copies of
Life
magazine, and racing forms and dream books, and the Bible.

But this was different, too. Now they were reading out loud, instead of silently to themselves. Jonah realized that he had been seeing that all spring and summer, one person reading from a paper while the rest leaned in, listening intently, sometimes taking the paper and reading from it themselves, as if they could not quite believe what they had heard. He sidled over to a stoop when he saw one young woman's lips moving over a leaf of ruled paper, as if from a child's elementary school notebook, and slowed his steps so he could listen to her:

“ ‘...we are fed only on cold cuts if we get that and kept completely cut off from the rest of the camp here. None of us colored soldiers are allowed to go to the hospital even for a social disease but are just given a shot and left to work in the kitchens,' ” the girl reading in a halting monotone, while the women on the steps all around her—church women, and laundry girls, and chippies with big gaps in their teeth—grunted and tsked, and shook their heads.

“Tha's not right!”

“They can't do that, not no more!”

“ ‘...our officers have been taken away and we are now under white officers from Southern colleges. So when we are right we are wrong. They tell us niggers from New York are too damned smart and don't know this is a white man's country. If you please can, I want you to bring these conditions to someone's attention and request that we be removed out of Georgia as soon as possible. I'm writing you at great personal risk, so act according'—”

“It's just like we been sold South again!”

“Who knows what can happen to them boys down there—”

The faces of the women twisted with anger, as they leaned forward to look over the paper. He had seen them before—the mothers and wives and girlfriends who had come to his church office with similar letters from their young men down in army camps in Georgia and Mississippi, and Louisiana. Their boys kicked and cursed in the South Pacific, robbed of their boots by white soldiers in London. Fed jam and bread, when they got any supper at all, forced to sleep on the floors, and in the baggage racks of troop trains—

He had sent each one of them on to the adjutant general's office in the War Department, as he had promised, along with a polite note—and with the signatures and any identifying salutation carefully sliced out, so afraid had the mothers been of retribution being visited upon their boys. After more than a year he had received a single, mocking form letter—almost more insulting than if he had heard nothing at all—thanking him for his interest in the welfare of the nation's troops.

But what will it do for us, now that we're all together? What did it do for those Jews in Poland?

He had seen, too, the graffitti on the alley walls:
This is a white mans government and a white mans war and its no damn good.
Had even heard about the late-night meetings in certain basement rooms, where hard-core race men, and mysterious visitors gathered to celebrate each new Japanese victory. Telling each other that this time the white man was finally finished.
Nonsense, to be sure, and most people knew it was. But still—

He pulled himself away from the women on the stoop, and continued on up Lenox Avenue to West 144th Street. There he turned the corner again, and stood across from his father's church in the fading light.

Everything, in that moment, was just as he had remembered it from when he was a boy, which was exactly what he had wanted. Smelling the pungent odor of the river, only a couple of blocks away. Listening to the crackle of somebody frying fish, the
blat!
of a clarinet warming up in one of the clubs.

And before him, the Invisible Institution. Made flesh by his father—

It was easily the least pretentious of all the great Harlem churches, even more homely than the ostentatiously humble St. Philip's. A massive, humpbacked structure, built completely out of redbrick, without any flourishes like the pearly white baptismal font at the Abyssinian, or the imperial green dome and beveled stained-glass windows of Mount Morris Ascension. Built from no real architectural style, with a simple archway for an entrance and one high steeple and bell tower placed over its west wing.

“It's got to have a steeple on it,” was all that his father had insisted on when it was built. “A church has got to have a steeple!”

But his first church hadn't had one. That had been long before his time, but Jonah had seen photographs of it, carefully preserved by the New Jerusalem church historian. It had been only one more storefront church, down in the old colored neighborhood on Minetta Lane—just like the small-fry cults that filled so many of the blocks of Harlem now, and which so many of his fellow ministers liked to mock with that sobriquet but which nearly all of their higher and mightier edifices had sprung from. After Minetta Lane there had been a converted stable in the Tenderloin, then a brownstone on Columbus Hill. Even when the congregation had first moved to Harlem, they had still been too few and too poor to do any more than rent a carriage house on West 135th Street.

It was his father who had
willed
the church into being. Conjuring it from the ground up, cajoling and browbeating it into existence. They had called it the Penny-a-Day church, after his father's insistence that every member of the congregation, including women and children over the age of five years, had to contribute at least a penny a day. Or their labor, or some
thing,
a nail, a brick, a twoby-four. No questions asked, in his father's eternally pragmatic way, about whether they had gotten it from one of the City's innumerable construction sites.

He had commanded it, and they had obeyed.
Why wouldn't they?
Jonah could remember the chill that had run through him when, still in short pants, he had sat in the first pew and listened to his father hammer at his flock from the makeshift pulpit in the old carriage house.

“This church will purify you as you build it!” he had told them, raising his fist high over the Bible. “Each one of you has a sin, a penny's worth of sin you can give up. Or if you do not—if you really are that poor—each one of you has at least an hour's worth of
sinning
you can give up for the Lord! Building this church will sweat the sin off you!”

—and then shifting just as dramatically. Not simply berating them but firing their imaginations, with not only what the church could be but what they could be as well—

“We can
do this thing.
There's many things in life that are beyond a man's power. There are things in this world, evil things, that even a mother can do nothing about, and that is the Will of God and why we need the saving grace of Jesus Christ our Lord.

“But this is something we
can
do, here and now. Something we can take hand to hammer, and brick, and
do right here.
We
will
do this thing, we
will
build this church to the glory of God. And people will look upon it, and they will know that our people can do anything in this world!”

He could feel it, too, only six or seven years old, sitting up in his hard wooden pew. Jonah could feel how he had them. The congregation standing and leaning forward, overflowing the sweaty, overcrowded carriage house that still smelled of horseflesh and dung, and old seat leather. Holding them so enthralled that had his father announced they were going to go forth that very morning, and march up to the weedy, dismal site a block from the Harlem River and erect the entire church before nightfall, Jonah thought that they just might have tried it.

If only he had ever felt a response like that himself—

He tried to dismiss the thought as one more vanity, but he couldn't help himself. Standing across the street from the church his father had built out of words—

What must it be like? That sort of power? And him not even truly a believer!

Jonah crossed over, and pushed open one of the heavy, oaken front doors—the sounds of the street banished instantly. Inside, he was hit at once with the familiar churchy smell of wax and flowers, paper and dust.

The sanctuary was nearly as simple as its exterior. The exposed crossbeams holding up a simple white ceiling and walls, the only color the stained-glass Bible stories in the windows, and the flowers piled up around the altar, tiger lilies and snapdragons, liatris and roses. The rounded, bowl-like nave lit solely by candles, all but obscuring the four or five worshipers scattered around the broad half circle of bare wooden pews, their heads bowed.

He paid no attention to any of that, though, but simply stood, listening, just inside the vestibule. Trying to hear
him
—the deep, raspy breathing that seemed to Jonah to fill the entire church, as if it really were just one great extension of his body—

“Good evening, Rev'rend Minister. It's good to see you home, sir!”

Henry Thigpen, the church usher in attendance, came walking quickly down the aisle to greet him. Carrying himself with immense dignity in spite of how heavily he was perspiring in his white gloves, and the formal frock coat with a bright purple usher's ribbon pinned to the lapel.

“I trust you and Mrs. Dove had a fine vacation, Rev'rend?” he asked, not taking Jonah's hand but folding his own gloved hands before him. Cocking his head slightly to one side in the solemn, deferential manner he had perfected as a banker's valet on Park Avenue.

“Yes, it was...fine, Brother Thigpen,” Jonah told him. His eyes sweeping over the dim church before him. Still listening.

“Not much of a turnout tonight, is there?”

“Well, it's the summer, you know...” Thigpen said, dropping his eyes to the ground.

“Yes.”

His father had always insisted on keeping the church open twenty-four hours a day and he had honored the tradition—an usher or a church mother always on duty, day and night, in case anyone might be troubled enough in soul to want him summoned.

Yet no one ever did. In all the time since Jonah had been ordained and pushed through the diaconate by his father to succeed him—nearly ten years now—he had never been called. Not even on a Saturday night, or a Sunday afternoon when, he had been told by his brother ministers, the claims of the Lord lay heaviest on a soul.

When his father had still been active, there had been dozens of worshipers in the sanctuary every night, even on a sweltering midweek summer evening like this one. The women—and yes, even the men—in the pews often weeping, or moaning aloud, so bestirred and troubled were they by the Spirit. Rarely did a night go by without his being summoned from their house on Strivers Row. An apologetic tap on the etched door glass, his father's solid bulk rumbling along the upstairs floorboards.

“Okay,” he would call softly down the stairs to the caller. His voice tired or bleary, but never angry.

“Okay, tell 'em I'll be right there,” he would call, already trundling down the stairs, pulling on his preacher's coat and collar. “Tell 'em to hold on, I'm comin'.”

Jonah had just turned thirteen when his father had first taken him with him on one of those midnight calls to the soul. Sitting straight up in his bed when he had stumped past his bedroom, knowing he would look in, as he always did, and grin to see his son awake.

“Lookit him, pokin' his head up like a ferret out of his hole. Well, c'mon then!”

His much younger wife, Jonah's mother, protesting, “Oh, no, Milton, the boy ought to be in bed! And you should be, too!”—but his father shrugged her off.

“It'll do him good to see what I do. It's not like I'm takin' him out dicin'!”