II
The next day, a balmy churchgoing Sunday, the spirit of a woman named Fifi Mazzccua, as strong a spirit as there was in the desert of North Philadelphia, received yet another blow: today was Robin’s last sermon.
To the million and a half people who lived in the city, this meant nothing, particularly in the midst of the front-page giddiness over the convention center. But to the loyal handful who went each Sunday to Cookman United Methodist Church, putting away tears and tragedies and the onslaught of obliteration to find solace in its stone and brick, the loss was immeasurable. And as strong as Fifi was, as resolute as she had been in the face of tragedies that had left a son in prison for murder and a grandson dead in a shoot-out in the streets, given the rigors of days spent taking care of four great-grandchildren under the age of seven, despite diabetes and diverticulitis and complications from a hernia, how much more could she take?
“He’s been there spiritually, physically, moneywise, foodwise, because he literally had to feed us,” said Fifi of Reverend Robin Hynicka, or Robin, as she and just about everyone else called him. “I hate the fact that he’s leaving. I cried. I got angry. I wanted to hit someone, anyone.”
Sixty-one years old, short and sweetly plump, unabashed about wearing a shirt that said in bold letters on the front, WANTED: SUGAR DADDY WITH CONDO ON THE BEACH AND EXOTIC SPORTS CARS, Fifi had a face with the varied expressions of a summer storm. Kindness, mirth, the drains of sadness and memory, they moved over her rapidly, the hues changing like the shift of the clouds. Her voice had a similar quality. When she was feeling good, she said “hi, honey” as if it were the opening lines of a ’40s swing song, melodious and rich and full of smoky heart. When she felt stress, worrying about everything to the point of exhaustion, she spoke in a trembling whisper. She was smart and savvy, and she saw the changes that had taken place from generation to generation, with the traditional concept of family more fractured than ever. She had raised her children; she had raised some of her children’s children; now she was raising some of her children’s children’s children. “It’s just a vicious cycle,” she said in one of those moments when she seemed too tired even to move.
She had been born in 1932 in the grips of the Depression and grew up on Olive Street near Front and Fairmount in a section of the city called Northern Liberties, the daughter of Henry Sigler, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and was called Big Henry, and Susie Mae Sigler. The neighborhood was a true melting pot. Skin color and ethnic background didn’t matter, nor did one’s income, since everybody’s was just about the same. Rents were cheap, about eight dollars a month, and houses were small and humble, and Fifi remembered sleeping six to a bed sometimes. But no one seemed to care. As the Depression lifted, the fathers and uncles worked as longshoremen along the thriving wharves, and no one bothered to lock their doors. When it got hot during the summer, too hot to sleep indoors, everybody just piled quilts and army blankets on top of the sidewalk and slept outside. For fun, they went to the movies over at the Four Paws or took the train after church on Sundays to a park or snuck down through Slop Alley to the wharves where the men were unloading the produce and grabbed anything that had fallen off the trucks. “That was like our whole kingdom,” said Fifi of Olive Street. “We didn’t need anybody else.”
She was living now in a different part of the city, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, for the days of Olive Street were gone forever. The city had changed so much since then—in the way blacks and whites got along; in the way the young were yielded up in casual sacrifice; in the way crime and drugs owned the streets, providing temptation for those who wanted to take part and showing no remorse for those who wanted to stay away. Fifi had been affected by all of it, and sometimes she hardly had the strength to get out of bed in the morning. But she did, and her devotion to Cookman and to Robin Hynicka was one of the prime motivations. Robin restored her faith in religion after the Baptists had squeezed it out of her by one too many offertories. He taught her what it truly means to love God and offered support and advised her on the intricacies of matriarchy, trying to make her understand that her greatest gift—compassion—must somehow be tempered with an understanding of the stresses that it also produced. And now he was leaving, moving on after fifteen years to a better job within the hierarchy of the ministry. But as far as Fifi was concerned, he was leaving her behind.
“He called personally and told me, and I said, ‘Robin, why, why you? Is it something we’ve done?’ ”
She had first met him five years earlier, in the midst of planning a funeral for her grandson Keith. Since Keith’s father was in prison for murder (he had been there for much of Keith’s life), the responsibility for burial was left primarily to her, and in looking for a church, she discovered Robin and Cookman United. The church was just a few blocks from her home, around the corner, past Huntingdon and then two blocks up Twelfth Street in the desert of North Philadelphia, on the fringes of a section the police had appropriately named the Badlands because of its daily propensity for drugs and death. When she was younger, taking care of children and grandchildren by herself, she had walked to Cookman and had found some blessed relief in the quiet of its stone steps, but other than going to the basement to drop off various kids for day care, she had never been inside. She had gone instead to a Baptist church a couple of blocks away, where, like the wheel-of-fortune game at the casinos, you could get a five-dollar blessing, a ten-dollar blessing, or even one for twenty if you were feeling particularly lucky. That didn’t seem right to Fifi—to let the gas bill go so you could get a blessing for twenty bucks, particularly since there didn’t seem to be a heck of a lot of difference between any of the varieties anyway. She turned away from the church and did not find a suitable replacement until, out of necessity, she needed one to bury her grandson.
When she went to Robin and asked whether she could hold the funeral at his church, he agreed under one condition: “I will let you have the funeral here, but I will not glorify his death.”
She readily abided by that because she was not one to romanticize the killings over drugs and money that were routinely taking place around her, nor would she make excuses for them. She had loved Keith, as she loved the myriad of those who came under her crowded roof and beckoned for her help, but she also knew that he was living on borrowed time, with no one there to control him. Shortly before he died, he had bought a cross, and Fifi figured he had gone out and purchased it because he knew he was going to die, because he was irrevocably consumed by the fatal self-definition with guns and drugs that had already claimed the lives of so many young black men. She saw his temper, and she also saw the way he invariably chose to deal with it—with the barrel of a revolver.
Keith was killed in a gun battle over drugs and money in December 1988 on North Carlisle Street, not far from where she lived. He fired seven times and was shot at five times. He was hit in the throat, and blood gushed from his face like water from a running faucet, and he fell on the sidewalk next to a boarded-up home and a pile of trash. In the horrid spray of bullets, his eleven-year-old sister, Renee, got caught in the cross fire and suffered a bullet wound in the hip. Keith was rushed to the hospital, but the doctor said there were just too many bullet holes to do the patchwork necessary to keep him alive. He was seventeen when he died, which in the lifeblood of the desert of North Philadelphia was hardly exceptional. Some died older and some died younger, but they seemed to be dying all the time from illnesses everyone was familiar with but no one ever cured—hopelessness, inferior education, the sight of streets that had been left to putrefy, the ephemeral glitter of dealing drugs.
“They sell drugs around here like candy, like ice cream,” a Baptist preacher told the police reporter for the Inquirer. “Nobody wants to do anything about it.”
Keith’s murder had been the 350th to take place in Philadelphia that year. Ninety were related to drugs, according to the police.
Fifi could have succumbed to the obliteration. Her neighbo
rhood at best was vainly struggling to keep from drowning altogether. Right across the street from the solid stone of Cookman United, down the long finger of Twelfth Street in an unbroken line, lay the sockets of one vacant house after another. Several blocks from the church, on Lehigh, red graffiti snaked its way up dirty white columns of the local branch of the public library, making it look more like a shanty whorehouse than a place to read books. A little bit farther down, jags of barbed wire protected the little Mobil Mart. Her own street, Huntingdon, teetered according to the state of the drug trade. Two homes across the street had been abandoned. Cars got stolen, and the sound of gunfire filled the air with such regularity that few turned their heads to see where it was coming from. People young and old walked up and down the street hooked on crack, leaving their little vials behind on the sidewalk, and one of the great-grandchildren that Fifi took care of would play with the little containers the next day as if they were marbles. Dice games filled the monotony of the afternoons. Young teenage boys stopped Fifi on her way to church and tried to give her a few dollars to pray for them, as if they knew they were already dead. Young girls, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, dressed up in skimpy clothes and sequins sold three-dollar blow jobs for hits of crack underneath the bridge at Thirteenth and Cumberland, high heels and cheap perfume amid trash and muddy puddles. Fifi knew what the drugs did to them—how they looked in the mirror and saw something different and beautiful, someone they thought was worth something. She used to get on them, beg and plead with them to stop. But not anymore. After a while, it wasn’t worth it because it never seemed to do any good. “Now I just pray to God to forgive them,” said Fifi.
Then there were the older women, translucent apparitions at the age of thirty-five, with gaunt bodies and glassy eyes, flesh on the bone like bare patches of meat, stumbling to a well-known crack house for just another hit. “Why do you go over there?” she sometimes asked them.
“Well, Miss Fifi, I just need a little hit. I just got to cope.”
But as much as she could, she chose not to dwell on it, for the drug of hopelessness was more addictive than anything else, and she fought instead to cauterize the wound.
She had lived on Huntingdon Street since 1969 and in the same row house on the street since 1972. It belonged to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, a scattered-site unit, in the bland parlance of public-housing lingo, and she rented it for $179 a month. Even though she had had to wait eight years for a kitchen sink, she loved the house. It had become hers, a place to put things, and with the considerable help of her extended family she had amassed some strong and sturdy possessions—the couch, a comfy armchair, a dining room set. Like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the place was impossibly cluttered, thanks to Fifi’s love of flea-market bargains. She once bought a fish tank for three dollars. It then took another seven to get it to work, so it really didn’t turn out to be much of a bargain after all. But she loved staring at those fish. In her role as Mama and Grandma and Great-grandma and court of last resort to those who were both devoted to and utterly dependent on her, the slow shuffle of those fish through the water soothed her and was worth every penny. To be a fish in a fish tank in the desert of North Philadelphia—now that was a good life.
She still loved the street on which she lived, despite the social and physical changes. When she had moved to it, blacks and whites were still living there. People would get out their brooms for an equal mixture of gossip and sweeping. The uniform row houses had a well-scrubbed look, and none of them was vacant. But then a perpetual shadow formed over this part of the city. First it was the loss of factory jobs. Then it was the loss of population. Then it was the ceaseless onslaught of crack. “The older people have died out,” said Fifi, and those few who were left were often too scared to sweep and gossip anymore. “You’re in your house behind closed doors, scared to come to the windows or anything.” As much as she could, she refused to tolerate it, once chasing after a drug dealer with a machete.
People on the block, in a kind and admiring way, called her the crazy lady.
It was after the funeral that Fifi began to go to Cookman United every Sunday, and it wasn’t long before Robin became her spiritual soul mate. She confided in him, told him things that she could tell no one else. However strong the spirit, being in your sixties and taking care of four great-grandchildren under the age of seven was hellish. Their parents loved Fifi desperately and gave her financial support. But sometimes they treated her like the live-in sitter. They knew that she would take care of the kids, and when they got frustrated with their own lives and told the kids to shut up because they were crying or got in trouble and went off to jail, they knew that Fifi would take over. “You can see why I have a nervous condition,” said Fifi, and the demands placed on her, even though she had a job as a cook and companion to an elderly man who lived over in East Falls, were endless—the laundry in the basement that always needed to be washed, so much of it that Fifi used a shopping cart to get it from the washer to the dryer; the toys that filled the living room floor like weeds and always needed to be put away; the school programs and after-school programs that had to be arranged; the bouts of bed-wetting and hyperactivity; the different requests for breakfast. Budda, at six the oldest of the great-grandchildren, wanted Pop-Tarts and oatmeal. Three-year-old Kalih wanted a cheese sandwich. Three-year-old Susette wanted peanut butter and jelly. Two-year-old Tonya wanted cereal. Every day it was like that.
Every single day.
She loved the kids more than anything else. They sustained her and filled her with laughter when she was feeling pinned and desperate. But they also drove her crazy sometimes, the nonstop energy of them. She became strict, but they were always one step ahead of her. “I lay down rules,” said Fifi. “It’s like laying down spaghetti.”
She talked about the pain she felt for her son Tony, a smart and decent man trapped in prison for life for a stupid and impulsive grudge killing. She talked about the pain she felt for Tony’s three boys, so clearly affected by a father whose attempts at parenting from behind the gray walls of prison, his pleadings that they not follow his path, were of no use at all. Keith was dead before he was old enough to vote, and the other two boys, Cochise and Gino, had also gotten on the treadmill of crime and jail. Gino, the oldest, was in a detention center on a federal firearms charge, and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were passing pictures of Cochise around the neighborhood as they searched for him.
She also talked of the pride she felt for Posquale, the one grandson who seemed determined not to lose himself to the streets. He was going to the Community College of Philadelphia to get a degree and hoped to go into business for himself as a caterer. He felt he owed it to Fifi not to follow the same path taken by some of her other grandchildren, and he was striving to make good on that debt. She had raised him from birth until age eleven, and she had given him the “strong hand” of love and stability and discipline that all children need. He had had his bouts with selling drugs and playing dice, and he had risen above them. He was working to get ahead, and he was making steady and impressive progress, but his aversion to birth control had made him the father of eleven children out of wedlock, according to his own account, all but one of them by different mothers. Three of the children died of medical complications as tiny infants, but that still left eight children to raise. Fifi wasn’t sure that all the children really were his, and Posquale himself had questions about three of them. But he knew that word was out in the neighborhood that he was a good man to peg as a father because of his reputation for not running out. So he provided for all of them, by his own means and also with the help of public assistance. He was proud of the fact that he had been taken to court only once for failure to provide child support, and on weekends he frequently had all the children together. He loved them, but he also acknowledged that he would have done it differently had he been given the opportunity. “If I had a chance to go back and fix all my problems, I wouldn’t have any kids,” said
Posquale. “I would have learned about the condom.”
The more Fifi got to know Robin, the more she depended on him. When he said he was getting married, she didn’t understand it. How could he? How could he do this? What was wrong with him? “I kept asking, ‘Robin, why do you need a wife? We cook for you, we clean for you.’ ”
Robin tried to explain to her that it was about more than just cleaning and cooking.
Fifi sort of understood. She grew to accept the change in his marital status. She embraced Robin’s wife as she embraced Robin. And Robin was still there for her, to revel in her laughter and give sympathy during her bouts of pain and dispense practical advice when she began to sob from exhaustion and frayed nerves—custody hearings, doctors’ appointments, shopping, sandwich making, after-school pickups, so many piles of laundry that it had begun to smell, calls from prison, calls from jail, calls for money, calls for help. “Sometimes you feel like an octopus putting tentacles out,” said Fifi. But then the sobbing would pass, and the spirit would take over, prompted by a Mario Lanza song on the radio where she worked or a particularly good sermon or the Can-Can sale at Shop Rite or a flea-market spectacular or something the great-grandkids said.
“I’m gonna tell Grandma you were kissin’ all the girls today.”
“I wasn’t kissin’ all the girls. They were kissin’ me.”
A Prayer for the City Page 31