by Honor Moore
I had no idea what he was writing—he didn’t really talk about it, only mentioned that he was “doing a little writing about Jersey City,” but I was curious, and once in Indianapolis when he wasn’t home, I opened the door of his study, a tiny room under the eaves, down the hall from my bedroom on the third floor, and, looking at the papers on his big desk, found some pages. What I read was not something written by the father I knew, nothing like the stories he told when the little ones snuggled up with him on the big bed, or even the stories he told to make a point while preaching; these were something not written by a priest or a father, but by who Paul Moore was when he was alone. Typewriter print on white pages, words crossed out and corrected in his scrawly, crablike handwriting, something about a Negro boy in the city, a memory I know is accurate because I found the manuscript in a file almost fifty years later, a story titled “City Boy”: Stickball—the broom handle whizzes, the rubber ball zips to the sidewalk, and the boys run every way in their fedoras and double-breasted jackets flapping against naked chests. I put the pages down quickly, not then understanding what I read as an answer to any of the questions I’d had about my father ever since I’d followed him upstairs after joking about the war and found him crying. When his book came out, though, I did not find the Negro boys playing stickball in their fedoras, their double-breasted jackets flapping against naked chests, or any story that would help solve that mystery. The book, called The Church Reclaims the City, was something else altogether and had evolved from lectures my father gave in England.
The summer I was fourteen, my father taught for two weeks at St. Augustine’s College, an Anglican institute at Canterbury Cathedral. This was the occasion for our first family trip to Europe, the three oldest and a boy cousin to keep my brother company—we spent two weeks driving around France and wound up in Canterbury, living in a tiny row house across from the ancient cathedral. The text of these lectures, which led with the theological idea that Christ’s ministry to the poor and suffering required the church’s involvement in social action, attracted the Seabury Press, the publishing company of the national Episcopal Church. My father had imagined a book in which his ideas about the church and the city would be interwoven with “sketches or stories based on fact,” like the fragment I’d found in his study, but The Church Reclaims the City, which appeared in January 1964, the month he was consecrated in Washington and the month we left Indianapolis, was a manifesto, an analysis, and a guide—how might others go about doing what had been done in Jersey City and Indianapolis. “The title was NOT my idea,” I remember my father saying. “The church never HAD the city, and it still doesn’t.” He was disappointed that the book was not the literary project he had envisioned. The chapter my mother contributed, “The Clergyman’s Family in the Inner City,” was more in the vein of what he had wanted to write, and he was jealous of its success. It attracted so much attention my mother began to write a memoir, The People on Second Street, which she published four years later. My father was not fated to become the kind of writer he dreamed of being, not destined to articulate, with the intimacy fiction requires, the way he saw the world. That more personal voice would instead animate a half century of pastoral counseling and meditation guidance, and he would become a great, even legendary, preacher. With his ideas published and his election as a bishop with a mandate to address social issues in a poor and mostly black city at the moment the civil rights movement was engaging the nation, Paul Moore was set on the course he would follow for the rest of his life.
My mother’s letters that January were a frenzy of arrangements—who would stay where for the consecration, what needed to be done to the house bought for them by the diocese at 3400 Newark Street in Cleveland Park, near the National Cathedral where my father’s office would be. We would rent nearby until the house became available the following summer. As my mother packed up in Indianapolis that fall, a new concert hall opened, and there was a week of gala evenings—a round of concerts, guest soloists playing with the Indianapolis Symphony, performances by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. “The amazing and SAD thing,” my father wrote to me, “was the numbers of people we had come to know & love. I almost cried . . .” A planeload of those friends came to Washington for the consecration, wearing “Moore for Bishop” buttons.
The consecration was on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, January 25, as my father’s confirmation had been at St. Paul’s School thirty-three years earlier. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church made the trip out of love for my father, but he was so ill with Parkinson’s disease he could not speak, so his place as celebrant was taken by the bishop of Washington, who would be my father’s superior. Among the other consecrators were Bishop Washburn of the Diocese of Newark, who had confirmed me and ordained my father to the priesthood, and John Craine, the bishop who had brought us to Indianapolis. His presenters were Father Pegram and Father Bartrop, “Bear” from St. Paul’s. The cathedral, which can seat three thousand, was practically full, not only of the Washington powerful and Episcopalians eager to see their new young suffragan, but of priests from all parts of my father’s life who saw his election as a step forward for the new social militancy of the church, of friends from Indianapolis, and of people from Jersey City I hadn’t seen since we’d played in the street, walked together to P.S. 37 or taken the Hudson Tube to St. Luke’s. My aunts, uncles, and cousins were there, all of the family sitting in the choir up front near the altar, and, of course, Gami, devout and proud.
With a thundering blast of the organ, the procession began, daylight through the stained-glass windows splashing color on the white marble interior, the Indianapolis boys’ choir singing Henry Purcell as crucifers, priests, and acolytes moved down the aisle, and then the bishops, and finally my father, the tallest, his face lifted and solemn. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” the celebrant began.
I had left home, and also the solace of hearing those sentences over and over, words I had so often heard my father speak. Now we began to sing “In Christ There Is No East or West,” a hymn I had sung ever since childhood, which was now an anthem of the civil rights movement within the Episcopal Church. There was a silence when Father Myers, whom I had not seen since Jersey City, climbed the pulpit and began to preach. “Bishops must cast off their expensive clothes,” he declared, “and appear again among the poor, the first children of the church.” I looked at my mother, at my brothers and sisters, and I looked at my father, whose expression didn’t change. Since the days in Jersey City, Father Myers continued, he had prayed that Paul Moore would one day become a bishop, but now, now, he wept for him: “It is a dark world in which you are to be a bishop,” he said, looking at my father. President Kennedy had been assassinated, an Alabama church had been bombed, there were violent confrontations between demonstrators and police in the South. “But you are a strong man and filled with Christ’s love for men. I count it a wonderful act and a sign of hope for the church in this place to have called you to be one of its bishops.”
The attending priests dressed my father in his chimere, the long-sleeved white undergarment only bishops wear, and after my father recited the “Promise of Conformity to the Doctrine, Discipline and Worship of the Protestant Episcopal Church”; and after the celebrant spoke a prayer reminding us that the night before Jesus chose the twelve apostles, he had prayed until dawn; and after the celebrant asked, Almighty God, giver of all good things, to replenish my father with the truth of thy Doctrine and adorn him with innocency of life, that by word and deed, he may faithfully serve thee; after all that, my father himself put on the gleaming bishop’s habit and proceeded to the crossing, the place where the transept meets the nave, where each of six bishops, all at once, laid his right hand on my father’s head. Then, in the minor-key ninth-century melody “Veni, Creator Spiritus”: “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,” sang the bishops, and the congregation responded, “And lighten
with celestial fire . . .” By laying their hands on his head, the bishops brought my father into the apostolic succession, the line of Episcopal (from the Latin, episcopus, for bishop) descent that began with Saint Peter. Now my father was part of something that went back almost two thousand years, and he was part of it forever. On the same head from which his large ears stuck crazily out, the same head I’d held on to when I was little and riding his shoulders, my father now wore a miter, the pointed brocade hat bishops wear, and from those same shoulders flowed a cope, a white brocade ceremonial cape with a great gold cross across the back of it.
I don’t remember when I started to cry. Was it when we sang “In Christ There Is No East or West”? When I first saw my father in that procession, his face lifted? Or when Father Myers began to preach and I felt all the aspiration of Jersey City return to the present? And what made me cry? Was it the force of that past returning with all its unresolved power, or was it the confrontation with a life outside this family, my own unknown future?
There is a photograph taken that day, black-and-white, an eight-by-ten glossy shot by a public photographer after the service. I remember the coat I was wearing, wine red bouclé with a leopard collar. I was also wearing a black fake-fur pillbox and glasses with dark frames. The photo was not posed (like my mother, I never posed for pictures with my glasses on), and I don’t remember its being taken, only seeing it years later, the expression on my face driven, removed, not focused, as if I were being commandeered by something forceful and interior. My mother looked beautiful; somewhere there is a picture of her that day, too, wearing what seems in black and white to be black velvet, a hat, the tracery of its veil across her forehead, her smile radiant. She and my father and, I suppose, all of us were standing in the National Cathedral, greeting people. His vestments had been put away, but he was wearing his chimere, long-sleeved, white, and reaching the floor, and his face had the freshness of a bride’s. From a distance, I watched people greet him. Friends kissed him, others solemnly shook his hand; a stranger, a man, knelt to kiss the bishop’s ring that his mother had given him, big and gold and set with green onyx. (My father had never worn jewelry, not even a wedding ring.) I remember the white marble of the columns and the black wrought-iron gates, but I don’t remember being part of any constellation of people, and I was unable to stop crying. People I had known all my life were saying hello to me with a new formality—I was now the bishop’s daughter, and so, when I sensed someone might be looking at me, I tried to compose myself, and when that failed, tried to find an acceptable cause for the tears: happiness for my father, sadness at leaving Indiana, the power of the service. But really I was looking this way and that, searching without knowing it for the nonexistent person who might understand this weeping of mine and comfort me. I don’t know how I stopped crying because what I remember is that I couldn’t stop, standing there, attempting to recover myself in the cold marble terrain of the cathedral, wearing stockings and high heels and that ugly coat, my beautiful father smiling and greeting people, my beautiful father dressed all in white.
Like many cathedrals, the National Cathedral is not a parish church, so my parents decided to become members of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, an activist parish on Sixteenth Street at the edge of black Washington; they wanted to be part of the real life of the District of Columbia. St. Stephen’s rector, my father’s seminary friend Bill Wendt, had run a Grace Church–like parish on the Lower East Side in New York, and he had brought the model to Washington. St. Stephen’s would be a parish home, ballast for my father’s new life in which the task of navigating the split between his ministry and his privileged origins would become more intense than ever before. His job was to minister to the poor, to address social issues in the district, but he lived in a big Cleveland Park house. He was a radical, but because of the family he had come from, his wealth, and where he had been educated, he had natural access to the establishment, what he called “the power structure.” These contradictions confused social Washington. The wife of a prominent cleric confided to my mother that hostesses were mystified as to “where the suffragan Episcopal bishop of Washington fits in on the city’s political and social ladder,” but assured her that it was “‘a very low rung’—you’re way down, along with low judiciary.”
Weeks later, my father shared a platform with the high judiciary, speaking with Chief Justice Earl Warren at the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. It was his debut in the press. “In a blunt address,” Dan Morgan of the Washington Post reported, “Bishop Moore said that the main reason the courts, agencies and churches fail is that they are not honest with children . . . Children who come before the courts have been made cynical ‘by too many police [who] use the rubber hose first and ask questions later.’” The judges, my father explained, would do better if they separated themselves from law enforcement and aligned themselves with the people. Too often, he said, “the judges are remote, the police are venal, the churches are closed during the week, the teachers are too busy, and the parents are drunk.” No matter what his rung on the social ladder, my father would not restrain his politics as he had the first years in Indianapolis.
Of course this was a different time. Days before his consecration, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, upholding “the right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress” and outlawing the poll tax. And shortly after that, on February 10, the first civil rights bill, which struck down the Jim Crow segregation laws, passed the House of Representatives, triumphing over a Senate filibuster on June 10 and becoming law on July 2. By then my father had found his way into the local civil rights movement. At a rally at Howard University, he had heard a speech by Walter Fauntroy, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church and a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and weeks later, when Governor George Wallace of Alabama, as a segregationist candidate, began to rack up strong showings in Democratic presidential primaries including Indiana, Fauntroy invited my father to be the white cochair of the Coalition of Conscience, a new interracial group of clergy and community leaders that would address social issues in the District of Columbia.
A welfare mother found dead in the street with her children inspired the coalition’s first action: picketing Robert Kennedy, then still attorney general, to persuade him to reverse Senator Robert C. Byrd’s ruling that no household with a man in residence could receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The District of Columbia did not then have its own government, and Byrd’s committee governed the city. Robert Kennedy agreed to a meeting. The situation demonstrated the limitations of my father’s access to power—knowing the Kennedys socially was advantageous because, my father wrote, “it means you can usually gain access to them, but it makes one hesitate to question their sincerity.” In spite of Kennedy’s cordial welcome to my father that day as a man of the cloth, a brief acknowledgment of mutual friends, and a substantial conversation, the meeting brought no change.
In Cambridge I was reading my mother’s letters, bulletins from their new Washington life: “Poppy met Hubert at some Civil Rights do the other night and was mad for him.” She used Senator Humphrey’s first name for theatrical effect; what she didn’t let on was how challenging she found the formality of Washington dinner parties, how difficult it was to negotiate the subtle folkways of this complicated new world, to tolerate indifference in a dinner partner when she talked, for example, about liberalism in Indiana or sending her children to public schools. “My ogling at powerful figures turns to irritation when I am snubbed,” she later wrote. Actually, she and my father had not succeeded in finding integrated public schools, and after a term, my sister Adelia transferred out of the neighborhood to a more diverse high school: “It wasn’t real,” she said of the all-white junior high school she left. As always
, my mother was indefatigable in plugging her children into new lives. “Susanna is going to a nursery school three days a week in Potomac, Md.,” she wrote Pam, and when she realized I’d have some weeks in Washington before leaving for my second summer at Elko Lake, she arranged for me to work for Birch Bayh, the liberal Democratic senator from Indiana for whom I’d campaigned in Indianapolis in seventh grade.
The force of the civil rights movement continued to build. On March 30, 1964, Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, the white wife of an Episcopal bishop and the mother of the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, and Mrs. John Burgess, the wife of the Negro suffragan bishop of Massachusetts, were arrested in an antisegregation demonstration in St. Augustine, Florida; their picture, the Brahmin Mrs. Peabody, white-haired and dressed just like Gami, with her Negro friend, appeared in papers all over the country. In Cambridge, I heard upperclassmen at dormitory dinners debate civil rights; by May, several of them were packing for Mississippi, for the voter registration campaign the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was planning for the summer. My father wanted to go to Mississippi, but he hesitated because of the physical danger—you could see it on television, jerky images of police beating Negro men and women with billy clubs, terror on the faces of the demonstrators as they tried to flee, blood on their clothes and skin when they could not get away; “Bull” Connor directing firemen to aim hoses at protesters in a Birmingham city park, some of them children; policemen dragging young black people gone limp with passive resistance into paddy wagons, the implacable anger on the faces of the white people who stood by, giving the finger and shouting. My father was aware that in the South no one in favor of integration was protected by the law, and so he was torn, and more vulnerable than many because he had a wife and nine children. But this struggle had formed his adult life and his ministry, and he kept feeling he belonged there.