Father Divine
by Deedee Agee
In our house no one could ever find anything. In the living room piles of records and their jackets lay scattered about, my father’s old jazz and classical 78’s. There were stacks of mail, opened and still sealed, photographic prints from famous photographers, magazines and newspapers, over-flowing ashtrays and food-encrusted dishes, wet diapers and baby clothes on the floor beside the couch, mounded baskets of laundry, clean and dirty. There were books stacked knee high on the floor in front of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves spilling over with books, unfinished papier mache animals, clay ashtrays, poker chips, and a sawed-off cast from someone’s broken arm that served as a holder for a spray of dried eucalyptus. In the hallways, balls of dust and cat hair floated by the baseboards like tumbleweeds on a prairie. The cat box was rarely changed, and the cats (we had 13 of them once) adopted the cardboard cartons of outgrown clothing and linens which my mother intended to give to the Salvation Army as their adjunct cat box. Inertia had such a hold on us that one year our Christmas tree was still up on Memorial Day.
Every weekday though Mrs.Hope, or Hope as we also called her, came all the way from Father Divine’s in Harlem to take care of us. I’d stand on landing and listen for her footsteps on the stairs, peer down to catch a glimpse of her hand on the banister as she climbed the five flights to our tenement apartment. I’d press my face into the plump softness of her body, breathing her in – cotton, freshly ironed with starch, and lilacs. Her navy blue woven straw hat with the white cloth gardenia was pinned with a pearl tipped hatpin to the braided white bun coiled at the nape of her neck. In her purse was a string grocery bag, a freshly washed smock apron, and the collapsible telescoping aluminum cup with a snap on lid that I adored.
Hope was old, the thin, pinkish skin of her cheeks smooth and pale, translucent white, her voice gentle as poured liquid. Hope knew how to do everything. How to get stains out with lemon juice and salt, whip up foamy eggnog from scratch with a rotary beater, dust it with freshly grated nutmeg. She squeezed orange halves in a tall silver press with a long handle, and grated the orange layer off the peels to use in baked custard. She could comb knots out of your hair without it hurting, turn a cornhusk into a doll, and make instant earrings from double-stemmed cherries draped over the tops of your ears. Hope baked and ironed, folded and swept, straightened and sorted. She held a tape measure up to my body, circled it round, and cut out newspaper patterns to make clothes for me. She sewed on a treadle sewing machine that she pumped with her foot, and made doll clothes from the scraps, decorated with sequins and tiny buttons from my mother’s button jar. Hope took empty soup cans and turned them into footstools. She stacked them side by side, two high, and wrapped cotton batting all around tied with twine and upholstered with left over fabric, sewed with invisible stitches. She even had a special dustpan and whisk broom she used to sweep up horse manure from underneath the pushcarts on Bleecker Street. She carried it up five flights to fertilize the geraniums in our window boxes. Hope said there was a use for everything under the sun – you just had to find it. My mother said Hope was old fashioned.
Sometimes I went with Hope all the way to Harlem to spend the weekend with her at the Father Divine Palace Mission. Hope lent me a little blue overnight case and I packed a dress or a skirt and blouse for each day – my “good” clothes – a nightgown and two changes of underwear folded into the elastic rimmed pockets. Girls never wore pants at Father Divine’s. The first time on the subway, I took off my coat and folded it beside me on the woven straw seat the way I’d done on the train to New Orleans to visit my grandparents; I thought of going to Harlem as a journey.
The Palace Mission was a building the size of a school. There were long hallways and communal bathrooms and small bedrooms for the followers who lived there, two to a room. On the main floor was a banquet hall with swinging doors to the kitchen, and a room called the parlor. Father Divine’s followers were mostly women, middle aged and older, and mostly Negro (Mrs. Hope being one of just a handful of whites who lived there).
Mrs. Hope said Father Divine was God. Father and Mother Divine would live forever, even once their physical forms weren’t there, and all Father’s disciples would live forever too so long as they followed his divine plan, because sickness and death were simply the result of living a life of sin. Father said not to swear, lie, or steal, to do an honest day’s work for a day’s pay, and to live a life of purity. That meant even married people who became Father’s children didn’t sleep in the same bed anymore.
Hope shared a room with Sister Pleasant May who stayed somewhere else when I was there. Pleasant May was a Rosebud chosen by Father to sing at the communion banquets. She wore the Rosebud uniform — navy blue skirt, white blouse, and a red bolero jacket with a “V” for virtue embroidered on the lapel. In Hope’s room there were two single beds with headboards and bumpy white chenille spreads tucked under the pillows the way they are in motels. There were two dressers, two bedside tables, two windows with shades that pulled down and billowy white curtains. I loved putting my toothbrush next to Hope’s on the uncluttered top of the bedside table beside her collapsible metal cup and her covered plastic soap box. Down the hall from her room were tiny rooms, one for the toilet, another for the bathtub. The sink was right there in her room.
I took a sponge bath before bed. Hope taught me the right order for washing yourself – first the face and neck, then the trunk and underarms, then the limbs, and the feet second to last, with “down there” dead last. I didn’t know how down there could be dirtier than my feet, but I could tell it was not something to ask Hope about. I loved hanging my white washcloth, worn smooth in the center, next to hers on the towel bar inside the closet door to dry. I laid my clothes for the next day out on a chair, underwear folded on top, shoes underneath. The sheets felt like they’d been ironed, and I loved the weight of the wool army blankets, the sound of creaking springs, loved floating in the luxury of feeling so safe, drifting off to sleep in the dim light while Hope knelt beside the bed praying. She’d crawl in beside me, her flannel nightgown and quilted satin bed jacket smelling of lilacs, and when the wake-up bell rang in the morning, I felt I’d been smiling in my sleep all night long.
Everything at the Palace Mission was ordered, cared for, clean. In the dining hall long tables draped with white clothes were laid with matching place settings, salad plates on top of dinner plates, cups on saucers, awaiting the communion banquet. Spoons and forks were lined up beside the plates, and there were two glasses, one for juice and one for ice water, and at each place, a little pleated paper basket filled with gumdrops. The waiters, chosen like the Rosebuds, were called Crusaders, They wore dazzling white shirts and green cut away jackets, and they carried tea towels, folded, on their arms, everything starched and pressed. The Crusaders floated through the room, oval trays balanced on their shoulders, delivering platters piled with covered silver dishes: pancakes and scrambled eggs, pitchers of orange juice and cocoa, baskets of buttery sweet rolls and warm crusted biscuits and jam in little bowls called “monkey dishes.”
Hope and I sat with our cloth napkins in our laps, the only white-skinned people in the room. She leaned towards me, pointed out an old man with white hair and a smile full of teeth moving through the sea of tables balancing his tray.
“See that man there?” she said. “That’s Brother Samuel, child. A hundred and four this year, praises be to Father.”
I didn’t know people could even get that old, but I knew it had to be true for Hope to say it.
“Still the best dancer in the house too, Brother Samuel is,” she said louder, and others at the table nodded and murmured, “True enough”, and, “Praise Father!”
Suddenly excited whispering rustled through the room: “Father’s here! It’s Father!” A round, light-skinned Negro man in a shiny suit entered the room surrounded by women in white each with a little pad and pencil. These were his secretaries who, Hope said, took down everything Father said and printed it up in a special newspaper called New Day. His head was bald, large and gleaming, and people called out greetings and praises to him as he strolled to the front of the room, Mother Divine in hat and gloves on his arm. Father Divine took his place at the center of a long table on a raised podium and spoke, and all around the room people turned to him intently, drinking in his words, big words I didn’t know, and some I did, like Alleluia.
The Rosebuds began to sing then, clapping and swaying, and on the chorus, the secretaries put down their pads, and the Crusaders put down their trays, and then the whole singing, clapping, foot-stomping room came alive, the mass of people singing and swaying together, and all at once I saw the shy me separate from my body like a ghost shadow, and float, just like that, out the window, and there I was, singing and clapping and swaying along, a different me, transformed, I imagined, by the same magic that kept Brother Samuel dancing at 104.
