Only the Strong Survive
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Through the years, one thing did not change about the black and his church. The preacher remained the dominant figure, as he had since the first conversion of a voodoo priest to a Baptist pastor. He was usually “called” to his ministry through a personal experience that indicated God had chosen him as a leader. It helped when God chose a man who had a deep, powerful voice, who could sing like the angels, and who had an intimate knowledge of the Bible. Most important, he had to communicate with rather than to his congregation—to preach, not instruct. He had to transmit feeling, emotion, and authenticity about the most fundamental concerns (salvation, sex, prison, loneliness, money, illness, death).
Because he was the figure in the black community, possessing both soul and responsibility, the preacher lived by different rules. If he held the church together, he was permitted to almost anything—a nicer house, a better car, finer clothes. Most important was that he look respectable and prosperous not only in the black community but also among the whites downtown.
Imagining the Reverend Charles Jackson without his brown silk suit and silk shirt with initials on the cuff and pocket, his silk tie, blue-suede shoes with translucent aqua-tint heels, and dark orange Mercedes sedan is like trying to picture Karl Marx without a beard. Jackson is the pastor of the Fifth Ward’s largest church, the 5600-member Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist, and today he is buying cement for his new sanctuary. All of the estimated $2.6 million construction costs are “coming from the collection plate,” says Jackson.
The new church is part of the “Pleasant Grove Way.” “I call it the ‘Pleasant Grove ions,’” explained Jackson in his office. “First will be the church for inspiration, the playgrounds and swimming pool will be for recreation, the hospital for medication, and the senior citizens’ home for relaxation. But they will all spin, like ions, around the church, because all business, all wisdom, all solving and answering of any problem comes from God through the Church.
“We’re building it ourselves because Fifth Ward is a red-lined area. Businesses can’t get insurance or credit or mortgages because folks downtown have drawn a red line around Fifth Ward and refused money to anyone inside the line. So we are doing it from offerings.
“It is important to go first class in the ghetto. Anyone can drive big cars. Pimps, dope addicts, whores, gamblers, the average man can drive a Cadillac or Mercedes. But it is important that people in this ghetto see that me, a tenth-grade dropout, can build a two-million-dollar church, wear fine clothes, drive a fancy car. You got to get the man’s mind off poverty so he thinks, if that fool, Jackson, can do it, so can I.”
When Jackson dropped out of school for the street he also left Pleasant Grove, where his uncle was pastor. “I hit Lyons Avenue and learned about life. I did it all down there. Then I wised up and decided to make something of my life, so I worked up to running a Texaco station over on Eastex freeway for seven years. God taught me business sense and how to deal with whites at that Texaco. Then, sitting on the back of a dump truck, I got a call from Jesus to come back to Pleasant Grove and help people in Fifth Ward. That was ten years ago. We now have a day-care center, three acres instead of just a church, fenced playgrounds to keep the children off the streets, and a future. When I go fishing, I hope to catch a whale, not a minnow.”
Acquiring the three acres got Jackson embroiled in controversy. About fifty residents claimed that he had their gas and water turned off and served eviction papers with only 24 hours’ notice. Jackson denied it, saying the residents had known for months they were going to have to move and were not paying their bills. “The church had been paying their bills for months because we owned the land. Finally, we had to stop. They weren’t fit for human dwelling and should have been torn down years ago,” said Jackson.
On Sunday, Pleasant Grove is packed, with people standing outside to listen. The huge choir sways back and forth, filling the sanctuary with husky-throated voices, the music drenched with feeling, bringing the congregation along with clapping hands. Jackson begins, moving as deftly as James Brown from one side of the stage to the other, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite prayer: “Lord, we ain’t what we ought to be, and we ain’t what we want to be, we ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God we ain’t what we used to be.”
Like King, Jesse Jackson, and Adam Clayton Powell, Charles Jackson is a spellbinder. He changes approaches effortlessly, intertwining the logical portions of his sermon with more emotional, old-time religion.
“For Jesus says, ‘I’m going to cry like a woman in travailing,’ a pregnant woman, a woman in labor, like a woman delivering a child. I know I’m right! Now, what was He talking about? He didn’t say He was pregnant, but He was going to cry out like a pregnant woman. Now, let me tell you, the ministry has the same system that a pregnant woman has. You don’t have any business hollerin’, talkin’ about the Lord, hollerin’ and preachin’ and teachin’, if you haven’t got something on the inside. I know I’m right! Somebody around here sayin’, ‘He hollers too much.’ Yes, I holler. I got something on the inside, praise the Lord!
“Now you gotta pray with me that the Lord will help me to explain what I’m tryin’ to say. And not only that, but when a woman gets pregnant, her eating habits change. She has to change her diet when she got with child. Same with a preacher. You can’t lead folks out of darkness into light, eating the same foods you did before you were regenerated. My reading habits got to change to the work of God. Those Playboy magazines, I got to put ’em up. I know I’m right! You can’t get no sermon out of a Dick Tracy funny book or True Confessions magazine. And look, you can’t teach your Sunday school class watching soap operas all week.
“That pregnant woman go to walk carefully and act carefully, she’s cautious of things she does. Same way with the ministry. Why? Because I’m carrying something and I gotta deliver it! I must deliver it! I know I’m right! You gonna help me today? I have one other point to make, and then I’m gonna close, and that is joy to a pregnant woman. Although she may cry out with her labor pains, although she might be hard to get along with, although she might have to walk and be careful, when she hears the cry from that baby, that cry, she’s happy, she’s joyful. You gotta cry out like a pregnant woman, you oughta cry like a travailing woman, cry…holler it out!
“Cry it out that He died till that moon dripped down blood. Cry it out that He died one Friday and was led up to Calvary, but early, early Sunday morning He got up. Didn’t He get up? And went back to heaven. Do you ever feel Him put prancing in your feet, joy bells in your heart, tears in your eyes, happiness in your soul? Cry it out if He did! We come here Sunday after Sunday and we get no better. The talent you have, the gift you have, God gave it to you and He wants you to stand and cry like a travailing woman. He wants to give you something that you can carry so you can deliver somebody from the dungeon of life to the ceiling of life. Thank you, Jesus!”
The End of the Line
There are two things to remember about the ghetto. One, evil often triumphs over good. Two in spite of that, most of its residents retain a goodness that proves indestructible. No matter how ill the world treats them, they remain good in the deepest sense—charitable, honest, forgiving, compassionate—not gloomy and full of foreboding like Job but buoyant and full of hope, like the astonishing products of Wheatley High School.
Poverty is what ulcerates life in the Fifth Ward. It is the sure path to humiliation, resignation, and bitterness; it settles like a locust on the warm, generous spirit of the people, eating away their hope and love of life, darkening their vision. The cyclical plague of the welfare check. Few jobs. Drugs. Alcohol. Crime. The conventional racism, expressed in outright exclusion and overt brutalities, such as lynchings and beatings, has disappeared only to be replaced by a new racism that still largely excludes blacks until they meet polite, well-mannered white standards.
After midnight, only the siren wail of the ambulance and the whistle moan from the Southern Pacific freight train split the night of Fifth Ward. The street dance has quieted to a slow strut; whores still walk Jensen Drive, their pimps patiently waiting nearby to collect the proceeds. Deep in Pearl Harbor, near Tamborello’s grocery, an old wino leans on a building with both arms, heaves and bows and retches. He straightens up and bows again as his vomit flows down the wall.
The residential streets are as silent and deserted as in other Houston neighborhoods. But there are differences: cars parked in front yards, nosed into shotgun houses; groups of bone-thin road dogs, rooting and pawing trash piles; still-smoking barbecue pits; refrigerators in a vacant lot between modest homes looking in the moonlight like tossed ivory dominoes. At the end of the block, freight cars move slowly past the pendulumlike red eye of the railroad signal. Pulpwood cars, flatcars, tank cars. Great Northern, Burlington Northern, Cotton Belt, Pacific Fruit Express, all passing symbols of great industry leaving the ghetto.
If the Fifth Ward is at once the most vicious quarter of Texas, a brutal, alcohol-sodden, desperately poor jungle where killing is done with no compunction, rape with no seduction, and a man’s pocket is picked seconds before he swings into eternity, it is also an area that is larger than life. Here people live with immense gusto and appetite for life, bearing the blows of fortune with stoic fortitude. Most spend their lives, amid the crime and poverty, working hard for not much, hoping for the best—a decent income, a good and loving wife, a sober husband, the respect of neighbors.
After my three-month stay, I felt that Fifth Ward’s most haunting quality was the frequency of lurking disaster that awaited all men and women there, the certainty that no life, no matter how virtuous, would escape the pain, misery, and degradation caused by poverty, racism, and prejudice. And until the politicians and financiers sitting two miles away in downtown Houston smell self-interest in the winds blowing from Fifth Ward, this will not change.
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