Devil's Night (17 page)

Judging from the note I found in the meditation room Boyd's followers—who include prosperous professionals as well as domestic workers and welfare women—want pretty much the same things as the Reverend Holley's. But unlike the city's more mainline pastors, Boyd doesn't believe they can be obtained through works. At one point he considered opening his own school, but funds were not forthcoming. “I just brought my mind in instead,” he said. Communication with the holy spirits, prayer and the proper use of roots and herbs are his prescription for the social ills of Detroit.

Reverend Boyd, like his mentor, Prophet Jones, claims to be psychic. According to him, he can see, feel and sometimes hear the voice of God. “In Detroit people know of prophecies I have made,” he told me. “Sometimes it's frightening. I fell out during a trance one time. My spirit went to Russia, to a very beautiful place where men were in conference discussing the world. A man at the head of the table said, ‘We'll release an object that will give us up-to-date data.' I came back into my body, and that night I prophesied that the Russians were going to put an object in space. The church was packed with people that night, dear. And the next week it was up there—Sputnik.”

The prophet didn't have much time for me that Saturday, but before I left he offered to tell my future. He closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated. “You are a wonderful and beautiful person, dear,” he said. “You're going to have great success. Amen.”

This sort of perceptive genius has won Boyd a large following in Detroit. Two hundred or so of the faithful, mostly well-dressed women and a smattering of men, were in church on a Sunday night in October. When I arrived, about eight o'clock, they were singing
gospel songs and dancing in the aisles as they waited for the arrival of their leader.

After about half an hour Boyd entered from a rear door, wearing a vicuña topcoat over a splendid white silk robe. The singing and clapping rose to a crescendo as he was assisted out of his wrap by Angel Bishop Dorothy, a teacher in his College of Higher Wisdom, and assumed his seat, a thronelike chair that seemed entirely appropriate to his regal manner.

A few minutes later, the singing was interrupted for a reminder that the Kingdom's Christmas would be celebrated on November 14, Reverend Boyd's birthday (participation fee, one hundred dollars). Boyd smiled at the assembly with benign modesty. Then the church band, which included electric guitars, tambourines, drums and an electric organ, struck up “I'm a Royal Child, Adopted into a Royal Family,” and the dancing and singing re-commenced.

Finally, Reverend Boyd took the rostrum to announce a collection—the first of four during the service. Many of the people there made offerings all four times, and some had done the same that morning. Eternal life does not come cheap on the east side of Detroit.

After the collection, Reverend Boyd introduced Prophet Dawson, his ‘spiritual son,' who was to deliver the evening's main message. Dawson acknowledged the honor gratefully, telling the worshipers that “spiritual bread is baked by God, but delivered by the King,” and then launched into his sermon. A small, dynamic man with the stage presence and intensity of Wilson Pickett, he half sang, half preached his gospel of salvation through Reverend Boyd. There were no want ads, no admonitions about community solidarity, no calls for a new board of education from the pulpit—just straight, old-time religion, interrupted by an occasional commercial.

Dawson's text centered on immortality: “The King teaches that it was not the plan of God for man to die. The Bible says, ‘The wages of sin is death, but the gift of me is eternal life.' If you think you can live and you qualify, then there ain't nothin' you can do but live.” People cheered, shouted amen and beat on tambourines.

The primary qualification for immortality is the ability to call on spirits. Sometimes this is done by Boyd himself, sometimes on a do-it-yourself basis by the congregation. That night Prophet Dawson hollered and danced, cajoled and thundered in an effort to summon them, and as the service progressed, more and more people joined in.

After a time, Dawson paused to ask for a second offering to buy Reverend Boyd a new Mercedes Benz. “He's a king,” he said, “and a king needs a chariot.” White-robed ushers passed buckets through the crowd, and women with callused hands snapped open their change purses to contribute to the royal transportation fund.

Following the second offering, Dawson stepped up the intensity another notch, and people began to fall out. A fat woman in a white pleated skirt and middy blouse danced up the aisles in total ecstasy, eyes closed and feet thudding on the threadbare carpet. She was quickly surrounded by other women who held their arms out to keep her from crashing into a pew. A young girl no more than seventeen, dressed demurely in a suit and small pearl earrings, stood rigidly at her seat and howled. Nearby a tall man in a black pin-striped suit began to chant “Thank you, Jesus; thank you, Jesus,” a mint Lifesaver bobbing on his tongue throughout the incantation. Ralph J. Boyd surveyed the scene with great equanimity, but a woman in a white hospital uniform and nurse's cap peered closely at the congregation. From time to time she descended from the pulpit to lead one of the more emotional worshipers to a seat.

In the midst of all this frenzy, I was forgotten, although earlier I had been the subject of considerable curiosity. White visitors to the Kingdom are rare, and when I first came in, the congregants—perhaps mindful of Prophet Jones's problems with the law—regarded me with a circumspect interest. Blacks are expert at looking at whites without seeming to, and I had felt, rather than seen, their scrutiny.

Now, however, transported by the music and the dancing, they were no longer concerned about outsiders, or about the outside world. They were applying medicine to wounded spirits, stoking
their emotional fires for another long, hard week. One song led into another, the tambourines and drums providing a steady beat. People sat passively and then were suddenly ignited, like the houses I had seen go up in flame on Devil's Night.

Prophet Dawson allowed the frenzy to continue for almost half an hour before he calmed things down again. He produced a white garment and a pair of scissors, and told the congregation that he had decided to cut up his robe (“blessed by Reverend Boyd”) and sell the pieces for five dollars each. Once again purses clicked open, and a number of people came forward to buy a patch of the garment.

No one seemed uncomfortable with this blatant fund-raising. At one point a visiting soloist told the congregation that Reverend Boyd was the first man she had ever seen wearing a full-length mink coat. The congregation shouted ‘Amen' and Boyd himself smiled, taking the remark, correctly, as a tribute. “You have inspired me both spiritually and materially,” the singer told him.

It was nearing midnight, and although Dawson had issued mock warnings (“The spirit is in here and we just might stay all night”) things began to wind down. People were spent, and they sat quietly while Reverend Boyd addressed them in a surprisingly low-key manner. He talked about the need for prayer all through the week, not just on Sunday; reminded them again about Christmas, and prayed for the ill and shut-in.

When the prayer was concluded, the band struck up a tune that sounded very much like “Mamma's Little Baby Loves Shortnin' Bread” and the congregation began to sing—“Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, a whole lot of money is coming my way.” They sang it over and over, while about thirty people lined up at the side of the church, each with twenty dollars in hand. One by one they approached the altar, handed the bills to the white-robed church ladies, and paused in front of Reverend Boyd, who cupped his hands over their right ears and whispered a brief, personal message to each one. It was a simple, practical benediction
from the Living Christ on Earth—the lottery number for the week.

Later I discussed what I had seen at Reverend Boyd's church with a friend. She is a woman of great sophistication, intellect and social consciousness, and I expected her to be outraged by the blatant materialism and egocentricity of the Living Christ and his doctrines. But she herself was raised in a holiness tradition, and she was surprisingly sympathetic.

“There are all kind of people in the black community, just like in the white community,” she said. “Not everyone can relate to a Martin Luther King, or the intellectual approach of some of the ministers here in Detroit. They need something, too, and they get it from the Reverend Boyds. When they give him money, they're really just supporting their church. It's basically no different then paying dues or a tithe to any other church; they feel that they're getting something for their money. And besides,” she added with a mischievous smile, “you never know. Somebody's liable to hit that number.”

Over the years, the essential religiosity of the black community has made Detroit a fertile ground for sects and doctrines of all kinds. Some, like the spiritual church of Prophet Jones and Ralph Boyd, have been introverted and self-centered. Others take a broader, harsher social view. The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit by W. D. Fard in the summer of 1930; Temple Number One, ministered by the brother of the late Elijah Muhammad, is still located there. And, in the late sixties, the Reverend Albert Cleage established a nationalist denomination, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, as a militant alternative to traditional, white-oriented Christianity.

Cleage was deeply influenced by Malcolm X, and his church reflects the black nationalism and racial separatism of the Muslims. Its chief theological tenet is that Jesus was a black political figure; its main social doctrine, that integration is a pipe dream and that blacks must gain economic and political power to liberate and defend themselves
from white oppression. Following the riot of 1967, Cleage terrified whites with talk about burning down the rest of the city; but, in recent years, he has toned down his rhetoric, if not his basic message, and his adherents have become a part of Detroit's establishment.

Cleage, who Africanized his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, has a significant national following. The sect does not divulge membership figures, but it has major churches in Atlanta and Houston as well as Detroit, where the membership of the Shrine of the Black Madonna is estimated in the thousands.

Most suburbanites (and some Detroiters) have never heard of it, but the Shrine is a powerful force in the city's political life, a place where church and statecraft intersect. Its Black Slate endorses candidates, and sometimes runs its own. In the summer of 1988, in the Thirteenth Congressional District's primary, the Black Slate put its muscle behind one of Jaramogi's most faithful followers, Barbara Rose Collins.

At first glance, Collins seems like an improbable militant. She is an ample, almond-eyed woman with a round, pleasant face and a cheerful manner. But, despite her jovial appearance, she is, in her own words, the political creature of Jaramogi and his church. Professionally she uses her American name, but at the Shrine she is known as Makunda Najuma Fela. “That means daughter of a king, lovely to behold, and violent,” she explained. “I chose that last name—violent—because the time may come when we have to defend ourselves. The people who call me Makunda are the older ones, the ones who came through the struggle with me.”

In 1973, the Shrine and the Black Slate played a key role in the election of Coleman Young. Now, they were hoping to accomplish the same thing for Collins against one of the mayor's closest allies, George Crockett. Young, who is politically indebted to the church, was officially neutral; but even with the mayor on the sidelines, few of the city's political pros thought that Collins had a chance. Crockett was the incumbent and incumbents are rarely beaten in general
elections, let alone primaries. It would take all of the Shrine's energy and commitment to defeat him.

The Thirteenth District is a mixed bag. It is about 75 percent black and includes the WASP suburb of Grosse Pointe; neat, working-class neighborhoods, once known as “the black suburbs,” in the southwest part of Detroit; and the city's east side, perhaps the poorest urban area in the country. On the Saturday before the election, I accompanied Collins to a settlement house meeting there, not far from the neighborhood where she was born and raised.

“Most of this city is like a national disaster,” she observed on the way to the meeting. “Drugs, crack, assembly lines shutting down—it all comes here first, the good and the bad. Whatever happens in America happens here first—Detroit is like a laboratory for the rest of the country.”

Collins was especially upset by the absence of black-owned stores along the crumbling business streets. “This is a phenomenon of the black community in Detroit,” she said. “It's really a question of racism. Businessmen have learned that the blacks will go where they are—to the suburbs.”

Black economic self-sufficiency is one of the basic teachings of Jaramogi. The Shrine runs cooperative ventures based loosely on the Israeli kibbutz model, and it encourages its members to go into business. “We thought we could get it through political power, but we've learned that we need economic power, too,” Collins said. “Anytime you don't have a major department store in a city this size, you know you're oppressed.” It was a strikingly American criterion for oppression—the absence of a downtown Macy's—but not a frivolous one; a great deal of the money earned by Detroiters is, in fact, spent in the suburbs.

There is a strong strain of Calvinism in the Shrine's doctrine. “Jaramogi says that blacks have a different mind-set from whites because of slavery,” she explained. “When you work for massa, you work slowly, and that's not good if you're trying to hold a job. White people declared blacks to be inferior—and when we act it out, we
turn that myth into a fact. If you are willing to work hard, you can accomplish anything you want. And if you have a black city administration, it's our fault if the city deteriorates.”