Devil's Night (16 page)

Little Rock is an impressive mock gothic building on Woodward Avenue, next to Northern High School. On an August Sunday morning, sunshine filtered through the stained-glass windows of its high-ceilinged chapel, and the polished wood pews were crowded with worshipers dressed in accordance with the church's informal summer dress code—jeans, sport shirts, jogging outfits and even work clothes.

After some gospel music by an excellent choir, Reverend Holley, dressed in a sparkling white robe, rose from his seat on the pulpit, prayed briefly, and then began the service by reading his personal want ads from a stack of three-by-five note cards. “Channel Two is looking for a television technician and a secretary,” he said, and shuffled the cards. “A lady's clothing store downtown is looking for a stock boy.” Shuffle. “The federal government is hiring air controllers. Say amen!” The congregation dutifully responded. “Now, you can get that job, church,” he said. “There are jobs out there, but it's a job finding a job. So while you're looking, touch up your skills. Out of eighty-five thousand pilots in this country, only two hundred are black. You can be a pilot. But you gotta get trained. Say amen. Now say amen again. If any of y'all are interested in applying for these jobs, you come and see me. I'm not letting anybody go out on any job interviews without getting past me first.” A laugh rose from the pews. When I asked him later what he had meant, he smiled and said, “Oh, it's just a charisma line.”

Satisfied, Holley moved on. “This winter we'll be giving out ten thousand pair of shoes,” he said. The announcement was greeted with silence. “Now, that's ten thousand
pairs
of shoes, church,” he
reminded them. “Y'all ought to clap or faint or somethin'.” The congregation laughed and applauded.

Riding the applause, Holley expounded his self-help vision for the black community. “We got to teach our children to read. Open up the school of Little Angels, teach our kids foreign languages, computers. We don't want them dancing da butt all day long. There's more to life than da butt. There's more to life than drinking, selling drugs and getting buried. We've got to teach them to appreciate the Detroit Symphony Orchestra [applause], the ballet [louder applause], the ah, ah,
opera
.” The congregation cheered at the prospect of their children's trading da butt for Debussy.

In an effortless transition, Holley went from the secular to the sacred, preaching on the story of Hosea, which he transformed into a dialogue between the prophet and God, with himself playing both parts. When the Lord (Holley) tells Hosea (Holley) to marry a faithless woman, Hosea protests: “God, you're tellin' me to marry a prostitute!” (“And I know a lot of y'all can relate to that,”) he added, to loud laughter.

The congregation grew silent again as Holley led to his dramatic conclusion. “God,” he screamed in anguish. “This woman has broken my heart. But she hasn't broken my love.”

“And that's the way it is with us, here in Detroit,” he said quietly. “God says, ‘I took black people off the plantation and gave them houses and cities, mayors and leaders. And now they're killing each other, hating each other. They broke my heart, but they haven't broken my love.”

There was a chorus of amens, and suddenly everyone joined hands. A young black man standing next to me took mine, fixed me with a sincere stare and said, ‘Brother, God loves you and so do I.” Surprised, I managed to murmur “Me too,” feeling foolish. He released my hand, the choir began to sing “The Old Ship of Zion” and the angels of Little Rock Baptist filed out into the street, where the sinners were just starting to wake up from another Motown Saturday night.

Jim Holley is one of Detroit's best preachers (the
Free Press
once ranked them, like college football teams), but his real interest is politics and community organization. He regards Martin Luther King as his “spiritual father,” and four years ago he headed the Jackson campaign in Michigan. He has obvious political ambitions himself, not an unreasonable thing in a city with so many divines in public life, and he uses his church as a base.

Like many fledgling politicos, Jim Holley is not averse to publicity, which is why he invited me to accompany him on his rounds one day. “We're glad to have you with us this morning, Reverend,” he said when we met at his church. Although I was flattered by the honorific title, I didn't want to mislead my host. “I'm not really a reverend,” I told him modestly. “In fact, I'm not even a Christian. I'm Jewish.”

Holley took the news with good humor. “I'm a rabbi myself,” he said. “A black rabbi. A Jewish rabbi serves only Jews, right? Well, my calling is only to serve blacks. We need to help ourselves.”

And yet, our first destination that morning was Temple Baptist Church, a wealthy white suburban congregation. Holley planned to ask its pastor for assistance in setting up several outreach programs. “They send missionaries to Africa, Reverend,” he said to me. “I want to get them to send a few to Detroit.”

Despite his prominence and his Ph.D., Holley seemed ill at ease when we arrived. We parked near the church, walked past its gleaming white pillars and entered the building. No sooner were we inside than we were startled by the loud ringing of a school bell. “That's the alarm for when niggers are in the church,” he told his driver, only half joking.

The church secretary, a crisp, smiling woman, greeted us with polite confusion. According to her calendar, the meeting was scheduled for the following day. She ushered us into an audiovisual room while she went to call the pastor, who was taking the morning off. As we waited, Holley spread out his papers on the desk. “I'm sure that meeting was for today,” he said, “but maybe I misunderstood.
I been in the battle for sixteen years and I still don't understand white people. No offense, Reverend.”

The lady returned, full of apologies for the mix-up, and promised to reschedule the meeting. Holley gathered up his carefully drawn proposal and put it back in his briefcase. He seemed more relieved than annoyed.

On the way out, we conducted a quick, nervous inspection tour of the building. Holley looked wistfully at the modern classrooms and the auditoriumlike chapel with its color-coordinated seats. As we reached the entrance, another school bell rang, and children spilled into the halls. They regarded us with total apathy. Holley's driver spotted two small black kids among the throng. “Hey, Rev, they got some of us out here,” he said in wonder.

Once this would have been a cause for rejoicing, especially for a man who regards himself as a spiritual son of Martin Luther King. But Holley is no integrationist. “It's just an admission that we don't have the ability to care for ourselves,” he said. “When we bus our kids to white schools, it just says we're not able to educate our own children. Education doesn't come by osmosis, it's hard work. Being around white people doesn't do it.”

On the way back to the city, Holley looked out the window at the green parks and neat homes and reflected on the lure of the suburbs. “Upper-middle-class blacks have the responsibility to reach back and help other blacks,” he mused. “They're gonna let the middle-class Negroes have Southfield, keep the poor Negroes in Detroit. I can move my body to Southfield but not my soul. Isiah Thomas, all these other sports stars—here I am, having to ask white people for help. Why can't I ask Isiah? He's making enough. Most of these Negroes don't even belong to the NAACP. They have moved body, soul and mind from the streets where they learned to play ball in the first place. This pisses me off to the highest pissitivity. They don't do anything, man, anything.”

“Why do you call them Negroes?” I asked.

“Negro is just another word for nigger, Reverend,” he said. “Now that I have a wider audience, I have to be more polite.”

I asked Holley what he would do with the money he wants to raise, and he spoke about establishing church-based institutions—health-care clinics, recreational centers and especially schools.

“Negroes know how to sing—that's nothing,” he said. “We got to teach our children how to play the harp, the violin. I want them to be cultured, to speak properly, to be able to compete. We in the church have a responsibility to them, but so far we're just not making a difference. We've got to give them the right skills, and the right values.

“If someone in a family tells a teenage girl that pregnancy is all right, then that person must be made responsible for the baby,” he continued. “I had a seventeen-year-old girl come to see me, with six children—two sets of twins. Teenage mothers have no right to their children. White folks can't say that, but it's true. They ought to be given to an extended family member or to the state. Those kids are nothing more than walking zombies.

“Two years ago, I took seventeen young men down to Alabama State University and I registered them personally,” he said. “Three are left. One got thrown out for rape. Two more got thrown out for jumping on the pizza boy. Some people we just can't change. We have to stop spending so much time on the generation we've already lost and put emphasis on those kids who are infants, the ones that can still be saved.”

As we talked, the car sped from the suburbs back into the city. We hadn't passed any checkpoints or border signs, but when we looked out the windows we saw another country of burned and blasted houses and knots of aimless-looking young men on street corners. Holley shook his head with sorrow.

“This is a strong city, although it appears weak,” he said. “The strength is in the spirit of the people. In the last few years, there has been a hairline fracture of the spirit, but not a break. The problem is, we lack community. No white man in America is smart enough
to do to us what we're doing to ourselves—killing, selling drugs, raping, not teaching our children, not helping one another economically—every process, social, political and economic. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can change things; the church can change things.” He was silent for a long moment, as he gazed at the city-scape, and then turned back to me. “Reverend,” he said, “if Dr. King could see this, he would weep, weep, weep.”

To many whites, all black churches seem pretty much alike, congregations full of ferver and rhythm. Within the black community, however, the differences—social, theological and ritual—are substantial. Jim Holley, with his burning social commitment, represents the activist wing; but at the Universal Liberty and Christ Temple, a small congregation on Detroit's east side, a more personal gospel of salvation is dispensed. Its proponent, the Reverend Ralph J. Boyd, doesn't mind rendering unto Caesar what is his, providing the rest is rendered unto the man known to his followers as “the Living Christ.”

Boyd is an elegant man in his late sixties who, despite recent heart surgery and the implanting of a pacemaker, fully expects to live forever. He came to Detroit from Alabama in the 1940s with his mentor, the estimable Prophet Jones, and he continues to preach Jones's doctrine of eternal life on earth and prosperity for the faithful of the Kingdom, as his congregation calls itself.

Prophet Jones confounded his own beliefs by dying in 1973. But at his height, during the 1950s, he held his services at a converted downtown theater and claimed several hundred thousand adherents across the country. The Prophet boasted that he could heal the sick, predict the future and talk directly to God. It was he who established the essential theology of the spiritual church in Detroit, which includes not only the doctrine of eternal life and prosperity but the dictum that “God don't like women.” Jones claimed that sexual intercourse with a female was a life-threatening sin; his detractors
said that he simply wanted to keep the young men of his congregation for himself.

Eventually Boyd split with Jones and established his own church. Soon after, Jones ran afoul of the city's morality laws and ended up in exile in Chicago. But his flamboyant style lives on in places such as the Universal Liberty and Christ Temple, and in other storefront sanctuaries throughout the city.

Boyd's church is more elaborate than most, but it is still a modest edifice for a man who claims to be in direct, personal touch with God: blond wood pews, a small altar and walls decorated with neon signs—
DIVINE GOD
and 7 (God's perfect number)—that look like beer advertisements. Adjacent to it is the House of Holiness, a combination sacristy, meditation facility and boutique where Boyd meets with congregants.

When I went to see him on a Saturday afternoon, there was a long line of people ahead of me. As I waited I browsed through the merchandise in his store, which runs to the exotic. Holy hyssop bath oil ($5.00), hyssop floor wash, Voodoo dolls ($3.25), Jinx Remover, Triple Strength Cast-Off Evil Incense, Holy Vision Bath Oil ($5.25), High John the Conquerer Soap (“It conquers all evil forces”), and cards inscribed with the Reverend Boyd's revelations (sample: “I am, I am in perfect harmony with the law of prosperity”) for $2.50.

The label on the hyssop bath oil advises, “Read Psalm 51.” The psalm says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” It was, I assumed, a figurative wish; Boyd's followers are all black.

Off the boutique there were prayer rooms equipped with meditation couches and brass stands, where people leave written requests. I opened one and read: “Help me get a high-paying job. Give me health. And help me control my son.”

An attractive woman who used to be a high-fashion model in Europe and now serves as the Prophet's secretary, informed me that he was ready to meet with me. She ushered me into a spare room where Boyd sat behind a desk, wearing an expensive-looking camel
hair sport jacket and a blinding amount of jewelry. When I complimented him on his diamonds, he beamed. “The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,” he intoned. “And we are each the Lord in our own world. The things that God put on earth, he put here for our use.”