Common Ground (83 page)

Above his bed in the residence hung a painting of outstretched hands, a souvenir of his fervent send-off from Brownsville, when a thousand Catholics ran across the tarmac to bid him farewell. It was perhaps the last time he had felt truly appreciated.

Across the room was another painting—a suffering Christ on the Cross—reminiscent of the mural he had painted years before in Fall River. At times Medeiros seemed obsessed with his own martyrdom. He often spoke of his “crown of thorns,” his “torments,” his “agony,” his “cross.” In 1976, asked in an interview whether he could ever win Boston’s affections, he said, “I am not here to be loved, I am here to speak the word of God. Nor am I a leader…. If I were they would pay attention to me…. Our Lord was no leader to those who killed him, which was almost everybody at the time, who called for his death.” Meanwhile, he refused to enter South Boston and Charlestown for fear of being stoned—the other biblical means of execution.

The Portuguese vision of Christ is a grim one: Christ humiliated, Christ scourged, Christ bloodied and pricked by thorns. In some Portuguese colonies, the faithful celebrate Good Friday by lashing themselves with bamboo-tipped whips, then dousing the cuts with vinegar to intensify the pain. At the great feast of Santo Christo in the Azores, statues of a tortured Christ, often in blood-soaked capes, are carried through the sorrowing crowds. Humberto Medeiros had always felt his priesthood as a painful burden, but in Boston his personal metaphor became explicitly Christ on the Cross. If years before he had feared to enter the Garden of Gethsemane, now he suffered in terrible isolation on the hill at Calvary.

T
here was nothing otherworldly about Bobby McClain. No Negro preacher out of
Green Pastures
invoking a New Jerusalem to lead his people through the Vale of Tears, Union Methodist’s zealous young minister concentrated on the here and now. “For too long we have overspiritualized the gospel,” he told his congregation one Sunday. “We have been drilled in the virtues of poverty and patience…. We cannot leave the present injustices fatalistically for history to correct. The stimulus for our action can come from the future which God promises, but always we must call into question the present order of the world. Our future is not an opiate, but rather an active and militant one.”

From her pew, Rachel Twymon stared at the figure in the pulpit, his sculptured Afro a dark halo against the altar. For years she’d listened to sermons and hymns admonishing her to endure this world’s sorrows in expectation of a reward somewhere beyond the Pearly Gates. She was tired of enduring, weary of waiting for her just deserts. Bobby McClain’s urgency swept her along. Let’s get on with it, she thought, we got a bill here that’s long overdue!

Since succeeding Gil Caldwell at Union Methodist in 1968, McClain had preached a theology in which Christ was not only the Son of God and Prince of Peace, but the “Great Liberator.” The freedom he sought was temporal as well as spiritual, essential to the souls of his oppressed people, but also to “the physical needs and outer environment in which the body that houses the soul must live.” Even before the first tenants moved into Methunion Manor in May 1971, McClain announced that his church would “fill another major void” in the South End. It had embarked on “a new and comprehensive Black Economic Development Program, designed to provide the black community of Boston with the needed services and facilities which it must have to survive.” Union Methodist was “committing itself to getting Boston’s black community into the American economic mainstream.”

The program was less grand than it sounded, its principal resource 9,260 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor of 465 Columbus Avenue, one of Methunion Manor’s four buildings. McClain proposed to develop that space as a “neighborhood shopping center” to meet the needs of Methunion’s tenants and others nearby. But unlike conventional commercial ventures, Methunion’s center would accept no applications from the whites—generally Jews, Lebanese, and Syrians—who ran most stores in Boston’s black community; the church’s project would be a prime example of the “black capitalism” then being promoted by the Nixon administration—black-conceived, black-owned, and black-operated for the benefit of black businessmen and their black customers.

The plan called for a “local development corporation” to funnel loans from the Small Business Administration to the six stores that would occupy the space. The corporation would also provide the stores with legal, financial, and management assistance, including a security system under which all cash would be whisked through vacuum tubes to an upstairs cashier/accountant who would make any necessary change, then enter the transaction in the company’s books. In February 1972, two spaces were quickly allocated to church members wanting to operate a dry-cleaning establishment and a beauty parlor, and the corporation began seeking tenants for the four other units: a grocery, a women’s boutique, a drugstore, and a restaurant.

For a time, the center’s prospects looked promising, but the Small Business Administration required local corporations to provide 10 percent of development costs themselves. The money wasn’t forthcoming and the project languished. Meanwhile, other potential tenants were turned away. In March 1973, a Montessori school wanted to lease the entire ground floor, but the board said no. A white congressman seeking a storefront for his campaign headquarters was also rejected. The Codman Company, Methunion’s managing agent, repeatedly warned McClain that the housing project’s deficits were growing, due in no small part to “the absence of income on the commercial space since inception of the project,” yet firm in his commitment to “black economic development,” the minister went on rejecting tenants he found unsuitable. The most persistent applicant was Melsha Blake, a black West Indian who wanted to open a restaurant, but for some reason McClain didn’t approve him either. When the board rejected his application, Blake filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, alleging that he had been turned down because he was West Indian (the commission found no merit in his charge). When the cleaner and the beauty parlor failed, all 9,260 feet of commercial space remained vacant.

By then, Methunion Manor’s financial crisis was of pressing concern to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had assumed the mortgage in May 1973 after Methunion defaulted on its payments. Union Methodist Church, through its housing corporation, retained control of the four buildings, but HUD grew increasingly impatient with the mounting deficits. In December 1973, it addressed the corporation in a stern letter: “The
leasing of the commercial space has never been accomplished, which means that approximately $30,000 is being lost per year. We understand that a lot of businesses have expressed an interest in renting this space, but all have been refused. This commercial space must be rented. Without the income from that space, the project will be unable to operate and we will have no alternative but to foreclose.” McClain conceded that only half his plan was how realizable; the other half of the space would now be rented conventionally. But it was too late. Lack of commercial revenue was only the final blow to a project already reeling from three years of deficit. In June 1974, the government went into Federal District Court seeking authority to foreclose Methunion’s mortgage and sell the buildings to the highest bidder.

Methunion was by no means alone in confronting this fate. Across the country, hundreds of housing developments built under the subsidy programs of the sixties had been unable to meet their mortgage payments and had gone into default. Dozens had already been foreclosed, sold at auction to landlords who, deprived of government subsidies, had no choice but to raise rents, forcing all but the most affluent tenants into the streets. In Boston alone, seventy of seventy-three 221 (d) 3 projects were in default, many of them approaching foreclosure. Some Boston projects, locked deep in the black ghetto, might have difficulty finding buyers, but not Methunion Manor. Just across the railway tracks from the Back Bay, Methunion was convenient to downtown offices, stores, and restaurants; the sixty-floor John Hancock Tower soared overhead. Methunion Manor would win no architectural prize, but with a few structural changes, paint, air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting—and a new set of white tenants—it might soon take its place in the “New South End.”

Faced with this prospect, Bobby McClain and his colleagues on the board of the Columbus Avenue Housing Corporation grew curiously passive. Discouraged by the collapse of their economic development scheme, daunted by massive debts, offended by persistent tenant complaints, they decided not to contest the government’s position. The church’s lawyer didn’t even appear in court, and in January 1975, Judge Walter Skinner ordered Methunion sold to the highest bidder on February 25.

Methunion’s tenants hadn’t paid much attention to the legal maneuvering, but the newscasts of January 16 delivered a message so stark that few of them could ignore it: within a month or so, the project would have a new landlord who would almost certainly raise rents so high they would be forced to find new homes. Among those listening that night were Ray Diggs, a Boston bus driver; Adrian du Cille, a Welfare Department social worker; and Mark Manuel, an electrical engineering student. On February 2, they called a meeting in the church basement, attended by nearly a hundred other tenants. From this gathering grew the Methunion Tenants’ Council, dedicated to preventing foreclosure at all costs.

At first they tried publicity. Assisted by several black professionals, they drafted a statement arguing that foreclosure was more than a fiscal strategy, it was a political decision reflecting the low priority America gave to housing for
the poor: “The Department of Housing and Urban Development has completely surrendered to the betrayers of the people.”

They tried the law. Aided by poverty lawyers, they went into federal court seeking a temporary injunction to halt foreclosure, arguing that if black and Hispanic tenants had to leave Methunion, they would be unable to find other suitable apartments in the South End. Forced out of that integrated community, they would be pushed deeper into the ghetto in search of affordable housing.

But before the suit could come to trial, they made the right political connections. Senator Edward Brooke, the only black in the Senate and the ranking Republican on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, brought influence to bear on Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, who virtually ordered HUD Secretary Carla Hills to put the foreclosure on ice. In June 1975, Diggs, du Cille, Manuel, and their professional advisers met in Washington with H. R. Crawford, HUD’s Assistant Secretary, who granted them another six months’ postponement. For the time being, at least, Methunion was safe. When she heard the news from Washington, Rachel Twymon crossed to the church and said a silent prayer. She thanked God for rewarding them in the flesh as well as in the spirit, for keeping a roof over their heads as well as a watch over their souls.

By 1975 Methunion was more to Rachel than a place to live. When the federal court took jurisdiction over the project, it appointed David Dretler, a Boston lawyer, as “receiver in bankruptcy.” For a time, Dretler managed Methunion through a resident superintendent and a secretary, but in August 1975, convinced that the pair had been renting apartments for their own benefit, he fired them. Urgently needing a secretary who knew the ropes, he turned to Rachel, who had occasionally served as a volunteer for the old management company.

Rachel hadn’t worked steadily since her specialty shop closed in May 1969. In 1972 she had joined a “work incentive” training program operated by the State Department of Employment Security, but once again her lupus forced her to drop out. Later, she enrolled in a real estate course, but gave that up too. For a few months she worked as a matron at the Charles Hayden Goodwill Inn for Boys. Through those years, she remained on welfare, receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children as well as food stamps, but her funds often ran short. When Richard was about to graduate from Boston English, she bought him a black suit for the ceremonies, but her welfare check was late, the store refused to relinquish the suit until the down payment was made, and Rachel was distraught until Bobby McClain loaned her fifty dollars out of church funds. She resented her dependence on the welfare checks, which sometimes came on time and sometimes didn’t. But her lupus wouldn’t let her travel very far to a job, so she sat alone in her apartment, watering the plants, sewing clothes for the kids, and brooding on the lousy cards life had dealt her. She ached with unrealized possibilities. She could feel the potential within her, the energy which might have been harnessed to a thousand undertakings, but the world didn’t want what she could give.

When Dretler offered to put her to work, it seemed like the perfect solution and, for a time, it was. The project office was just a few doors down the hall from her apartment, so she could leave a casserole in the oven and still get back to check on it. The office windows faced Columbus Avenue, so she could wave to friends while keeping an eye on her children. She brought in a few of her beloved plants to decorate the office and installed a television set so she could watch soap operas and quiz shows while she worked. Most of her duties were relatively easy: accepting rent payments, paying bills, keeping books, handling routine correspondence.

Unfortunately, she was also responsible for receiving tenant complaints. Dretler spent most of his time at his downtown law office, remote from the endless litany of tenant grievances. Rachel was readily accessible all day in the project office and even after hours tenants didn’t hesitate to bang on her apartment door to report a faulty lock or a backed-up toilet. As lawsuits and bureaucratic infighting dragged on that year, she was besieged by inquiries: Was HUD really going to foreclose? Would rents be raised? By how much? If tenants had to move, would HUD find them a place to live? What was the church doing?