by Philip Smith
Anchoring the neighborhood was the lime-green Mount Zion Baptist Church, most of its windows blown out either from hurricanes or kids throwing rocks. Next door was Diamond Jim’s Pool Parlor, which was painted pink and featured an amateurish painting of a trapezoidal pool table on the side of the building. Down the block was the Sunshine Liquor Shop, with chain-link fencing for windows. Broken glass littered the deserted streets, along with empty Nehi and Orange Crush soda bottles. Stray dogs slept under low-hanging poinciana trees, and old black men sat on empty boxes, staring at the railroad tracks. Amid this desperation was an abandoned wooden warehouse built on stilts that had been transformed by Sophie Busch into her own personal church. The pulpit was nothing more than two sheets of dirty, warped plywood nailed together on two-by-fours standing about a foot off the floor.
The glass in the windows was deep cobalt blue, which was used during the 1930s to alleviate the harshness of Miami’s noonday sun. There was no air-conditioning back then, and this tinted glass bathed the interiors in a dark blue light that seemed almost holy and offered some relief from the oppressive oven-hot heat that was otherwise inescapable. The original solar panels still faced east on the building’s roof, which was a leftover from the thirties, when solar energy was used to heat most of the water throughout Miami.
Lit by two or three long fluorescent tubes, Sophie’s church was filled with an assortment of folding chairs that had been begged, borrowed, and stolen from all over Miami. On a good day, about sixty chairs were set out for the parishioners. By the time services started at four o’clock, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house. The late-afternoon starting time gave the regulars a chance to attend their usual Pentecostal or Methodist services before risking transgression by showing up at Sophie’s place.
Reverend Busch was a small, very old white lady who probably had been smoking Lucky Strikes since she was nine. She was the kind of girl you would imagine running off with the circus during the height of the Depression and getting by on her wits and sassy mouth. Now, stooped over and frail, she was the embodiment of a kind of harsh southern poverty.
Maya looked around the church with a bit of apprehension. This was not the kind of place or neighborhood for a nice Brazilian girl. Aside from the three of us, there were maybe five or six other white people in the place. The few white men present wore their hair slicked back in a greasy sort of way that was quickly becoming unfashionable. They had thick drugstore glasses and lightly patterned shirts usually finished off with a string tie or lariat. The women wore simple house dresses, the kind you might buy at the five-and-ten, and probably worked as waitresses at Smitty’s, a coffee shop on Northeast Second Avenue that catered to day laborers and overweight middle-aged secretaries from the tax department.
Two or three industrial-strength metal fans pushed the humid July air around while black women in straw hats hummed softly, slowly fanning themselves with pieces of paper. A few minutes before the Reverend Busch took to the stage for her service, slightly somnambulant assistants casually wandered among the parishioners, holding large rolls of adding machine tape and a couple of those small yellow pencils that you would find in the library or in the betting section at jai alai. I raised my hand. My father gave me a look of approval that I was participating in the service. A bent-over assistant shuffled over to me and tore off about six inches of paper from the roll. I signaled for him to give a piece of paper to Maya as well. He then handed me two pencils and walked away.
“Write a question that you want Reverend Busch to answer,” I said, initiating Maya into my Sunday ritual. “Actually, she doesn’t really answer your questions; the spirits do. They tell her what to say.”
“Like what? I don’t know what to ask.”
“Anything. She doesn’t care what you ask.”
“Do I have to raise my hand when she calls on me? Everybody’s going to look at me.”
“No, no, no, just write it down. You’re the only one who will know when she is talking to you. No one else. It’s okay, really. Just ask whatever you need to know, and she’ll tell you.”
“But what if she tells me something I don’t want to know?”
Her question made me realize how different I was from her and everybody else at school. I considered communicating with spirits a normal part of one’s daily routine. My father and I listened to them the way other people listened to the news. Whatever they had to say was a direct communication from God, not to be questioned but rather acted upon with all seriousness—or else. For me these spirits were like aunts and uncles. But Maya was scared.
“Look, I’m going to ask a question too,” I said, trying to encourage her. “After you write your question, you have to put your initials down. If you want, make up some initials so that even I won’t know Reverend Busch is talking to you. It’s like going to a psychiatrist, but you get all your problems answered in a few minutes. Just write it down. I won’t look; it will be fine. It’s good to get the spirits to talk to you. They can help you out.”
“But what if they—?”
“I promise, it’s all okay. It doesn’t hurt. I know you haven’t done this before, and it may seem a little weird, but I do this every week with my father.”
“Every week? So what do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Stuff. Stuff about my parents, stuff about you.”
“Stuff about me? Like what? What do they tell you?”
“I don’t know. Stuff.”
“No, like what? Tell me.”
“Look, you’d better write down your question; they’re starting to collect the papers now. I need a minute to write my question.” With that, we turned away from each other and started writing our secret questions. Trying to keep my father from prying into my business, I reversed my initials and signed the paper “SP” instead of “PS.” This way I figured he would not know that the question was mine.
I then rolled the paper back up into a little scroll, with the writing facing inside, and raised my hand for it to be collected by an assistant. When all the papers were collected, each scroll was inserted upright into one of the holes in a twelve-inch square of Peg-Board and placed on the pulpit in the middle of the stage. They looked like birthday candles atop a square wooden cake.
Moments later Reverend Busch clomped onto the stage. The plywood platform on which she stood reverberated and echoed as she walked over to the lectern. For such a fragile wisp of a woman, she made a hell of an entrance. Without so much as a hesitation or a greeting, she immediately began her service with “Lord, thank yew for our blessin’s today.” A small murmur of “amens” and “uh-huhs” rippled through the crowd. “Thank yew for the wisdom yew give to us. And thank yew, Almighty, for all yew have in store for yur beloved children.”
“Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. That’s right. Thank yew, Jesus,” the congregation responded.
Walking back and forth across the stage, Reverend Busch continued, “All of yew are here today to receive the blessin’s that only God can bestow upon yew.”
“Mmmm-hmmmm.”
“And God sees yew all…”
“Yes. Yes, Lord.”
“God wants yew to know…”
“Praise God. Thank yew, God.”
“Yes, God wants yew to know…”
“Yeah!”
“God says, He wants yew to know…”
“Amen.”
In her delivery, Sophie Busch reminded me a bit of Reverend Ike, the black television preacher. As a kid, on Sunday mornings I would watch Reverend Ike’s weekly broadcast, which started around six. My parents were still asleep. It must have been my father’s influence that encouraged me to watch charismatic religious programs instead of cartoons. Unlike Sophie Busch, Reverend Ike preached one main concept: magic prosperity. Read the Bible and receive your God-given abundance. Prosperity was available through the power of prayer and his ministry. By joining his ministry, you received a small square of red cloth, cut with pinking shears, that was blessed by the reverend and promised to br
ing an end to your money woes.
After my very own “Reverend Ike Magic Prosperity Prayer Cloth” arrived in the mail, I carried it around with me at all times. At night it was carefully tucked under my pillow to work its magic powers. Eventually it disappeared before I was able to claim my God-given millions. I guess my mom found it in my pocket when doing the laundry and, thinking it was a rag, tossed it out. There went my early retirement.
“And now God has a message for yew…”
“Praise God. Say it. Amen.”
At this point in the service, Reverend Busch’s three-packs-a-day habit caught up to her. All this incantation and preaching had her doubled over in a fit of coughing and wheezing that lasted several minutes. No one paid any attention to this alarming tubercular demonstration. It happened every week. I was hoping she wouldn’t die before she got to read my scroll. We all patiently waited until the reverend caught her breath.
Once she regained her composure, Miss Sophie walked over to the lectern, randomly picked up one of the tightly rolled scrolls of adding machine paper, and, without unrolling it, clenched it in her fist. She closed her eyes for just a moment to absorb the question written on the paper and then raised her fist above her head for all to see that her hand was still closed. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that it was mine. Then she called out the initials she had mentally read off the little scroll. It had remained tightly locked in her fist the entire time.
“J.T.!” she called out to the crowd. No one raised a hand or acknowledged that he or she was J.T. Anonymity was a key part of Reverend Busch’s service. She then began addressing J.T. with a specific message. “Your boy’s not doin’ too good. Doctor say he got the pneumonia, and you havin’ trouble meetin’ the bills. I cain’t help you none with the bills. It gonna be rough this year. No way fixin’ that right now. Ain’t no money comin’ your way. But that boy a-yours is gonna be okay, and that’s the main thing. He needs rest now. Don’t let him go back to that summer school. He’ll just up and get sick again. You keep him away from the other children. By August he’ll be just fine. And you tell the doctor about your difficulties, and he won’t charge you a thing.”
Scattered throughout the audience, several people acknowledged the reading with “Yes. That’s right. Jesus says. Thank you, Lord.” I didn’t feel that I had to amen like everyone else, because Sophie hadn’t gotten to my question. If and when she did, I would give her a big amen. But not until then.
Out of the twenty or so scrolls in the Peg-Board, she usually picked three or four during the course of the service. According to my father, God directed Sophie to pick the scrolls of those most in need. Even though I felt included in that group, there was a good chance that someone needed her more than I did. I was getting nervous that I wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones.
When she plucked the next scroll of paper from the Peg-Board, Reverend Busch called out the initials “R.K.” Holding the little paper scroll in her fist, the reverend began to speak with a certain tone of anger in her voice. “Now, R.K., yew listen to me, and yew listen good and hard. Yew need to stop, and I mean stop right now, all that runnin’ around yew doin’. Every night someone new. Lotta bad people round you. And then yew just go out and get that abortion one, two, three, like you goin’ out for a soda or somethin’. This just bad. Yew need to stay in one place with one person. Keep this up, and yew gonna hurt yurself and everyone around yew. And for what? Now, stop this carryin’ on. Yew hear me now? Yeah, I know all the reasons yew cain’t. Yew cain’t cause-a this and yew cain’t cause-a that. But forget all that. Yew know that what I see is nothing but trouble gonna keep banging on yer door unless yew stop, and I mean stop right now. Right this second yew gotta stop, all this here carryin’ on. Not tomorrow, not in ten minutes. I say yew stop this all right now. Hear? That’s all I’m gonna say. Rest is up to yew. I ain’t got nothing else to say on the matter.” The congregation remained stone still except for a couple of knowing uh-huhs that rippled through the crowd. These women had been there and seen those man troubles with their own eyes.
None of the subject matter delivered by Reverend Busch seemed to disturb anybody. The attitude was “we all have our crosses to bear, and no one is any better or worse than anyone else.” I looked over at Maya and noticed that her face was tight, pale white, and nearly frozen. Her jaw was clenched, and she was staring straight ahead.
“Hey, you okay? What’s wrong? You don’t look too good.”
“I don’t think I should have come here. I don’t like this stuff. It’s just too weird. I don’t want to listen to these people’s personal things; I think it’s wrong. And all these people here…I don’t know, it’s not my thing, I just want to go home.”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought you; I thought you would find it interesting. Yeah, I guess it can be a little weird. Just pretend you’re watching a movie. That will help. I do that all the time.” I knew it was a mistake to bring an outsider to something like this. I vowed never to do this again.
“I’m really upset right now.”
“Shhh, Sophie is starting again.” I reached out for Maya’s hand, but she pulled away from me.
Sophie caught her breath, picked another scroll, and called out “S.P.” I sat bolt upright. She had picked my scroll. I looked up at my father; he didn’t seem to notice that Sophie was talking to me. I was very nervous about what she would have to say about my question. From what I had observed at Sophie’s church, she spoke the hard truth to everyone and didn’t soft-pedal anything. No subject eluded her ESP.
With Sophie, you took her gospel straight. “I am sorry, but ain’t nothin’ yew can do about this. Ain’t nothin’ here for yew to fix. So yew might as well stop tryin’. This all whole thing started long time before yew was even born. This is their troubles to work out. Each one has to go their own way. Your mama and your dad can no longer be together. They got their own work to do. Yew just go and do the best yew can. Like I said, this ain’t have nothing to do with yew. This is their mess, yew need to find yur own way. And yew know what I’m talking about. I know this hurts, but that’s the way it is. You’ll be fine.”
This was definitely not what I wanted to hear, but I knew it was the truth. On my piece of paper, I had asked Reverend Busch what I could do to make my parents happy and get along. Ever since that night in the kitchen during the Cuban missile crisis, nothing had been the same around the house or between my parents. Pop was busy running around with his voodoo friends, and Mom was hiding in the bedroom waiting for everything to return to normal. She had a hard time understanding that the man she married was busy standing on his head and chasing the devil. This was not the marriage she had signed on for.
I wanted everything to go back to normal, before meditation, before the incense, and before exorcisms replaced going to the movies and spending Sunday at the beach with a picnic lunch. I wasn’t sure how to turn back the clock for all of us. Somehow I believed that if I could convince them to get back together, then we could be one big, happy, premacrobiotic family once again. But according to Reverend Busch, there was nothing I could do about it. The spirits had spoken. No matter how much I craved to live in a house with 2.5 children, a dishwasher, and remote control television, it wasn’t going to happen, not in this lifetime. What Sophie said made me so sad, I wanted to cry.
There was a time that my parents had been so happy, so in love, and so destined for a wonderful life. It started in 1950 when fate moved its powerful hand, and my father found himself decorating my maternal grandmother’s apartment in New York City. My mother could not help but notice this handsome middle-aged man tossing around bolts of brightly colored fabrics while proposing dramatic alterations in the existing decor. It was kismet—love fostered by the pursuit of beauty.
Falling in love with her mother’s married decorator is probably not the wisest choice for any woman of any age. But it was particularly not a good idea for my mother. For her, Pop was a kind of creative Clark Gable, a heaven-sent relief from
a house filled with four siblings and a single mother who had to scramble to feed and clothe them during the Depression. Mom’s father, who occasionally bootlegged bathtub gin, died of a stroke when she was only seven. Life became unspeakably hard. My father represented freedom from settling down with Mr. Nobody and life as a secretary. At twenty-four years of age, she had already been fired from her factory job assembling glass trinkets because she was Jewish, and her secretarial job at some developer’s office was going nowhere. No matter what it might be, Esther was ready for the next big thing in her life.
A glamour addict since she was a child, my mother lived in the movies, sitting through double, triple, and quadruple features again and again until she had memorized every line and nuance of the film. Taking her life cues from Hollywood, she imagined her days starting with “Lights! Camera! Action!” and ending with “Cut! That’s a take!” Standing before her was a man who had once been in the movie business and had worked with Charlie Chaplin, and who now designed furniture and jewelry, painted city landscapes with a palette knife, wrote epic poetry (which he regularly submitted to the Paris Review), created photographs that had been shown in Steichen’s New York gallery, and could make a New York City apartment look dropdead gorgeous. Perhaps, she thought, there was an opportunity here for a little lights, camera, action in her own life. She sensed in this man the promise of a life of style, glamour, and society.
Still married to his first wife, two-timing Lewie embarked on a whirlwind courtship of Esther with poetry readings in Greenwich Village, modern-dance recitals, and walks through the Metropolitan Museum of Art as if he owned the place. They frequented jewelry workshops on Eighth Street, where they designed matching silver rings with a hidden ruby that glowed through an opaque moonstone the color of fresh milk. He seemed to know everything—and she was willing to let him be her guide.
Their love thing was too much to bear. Finally my father got a divorce from Mrs. Smith numero uno. Mom found work to pay the alimony, while Pop headed down Miami way as the advance scout to seek and claim new territory where they could share their lives. His brief stint in Hollywood had already taught him the year-round pleasure of living in sun-drenched heat. With no money to find food or shelter, the Miami beaches became his open-air bedroom. He survived for months on nothing but wild coconuts, drinking their milk and eating their hard white meat. As a midcentury Tarzan, he wrote passionate love letters to his Jane, begging her to come join him in his tropical jungle paradise. While it may seem romantic, it could not have been an easy life change for him at forty-seven.