The Hustle (19 page)

The gentrification of the Central Area presents a different problem. Many Central Area black-owned businesses have shuttered as their customer base has left. Those that have remained have adjusted to serve the more affluent newcomers, or, like Williams's, have clients who are willing to drive in from the suburbs. The developer who owns the empty lot up the street has approached Williams about buying her out—he tells me he thinks it would be a great place for a restaurant—but she bristles when I ask her if she's considering it. “This is prime property here,” she says. “I'll go down with it.” But when I ask how she sees the future of the neighborhood, Williams tells me, “In twenty years, it's going to be all high-rise places, I would imagine. And whoever can afford to stay. Race is not what it is anymore. It's called money. And so race is money now. If you got money to stay in a place, you can stay.”

The implications of gentrification on what was once a geographically cohesive black community can be glimpsed on Sundays. One day, when I attend Mount Zion Church, the large, gravel parking lot is perhaps a quarter full. Inside, a few hundred people sway to the gospel choir. Samuel McKinney, now pastor emeritus, sits in a pew next to his wife. The congregation, almost all black, is well dressed. The average age looks to be about sixty.

At the same time, twenty miles to the southeast, between the towns of Renton and Kent, the Reverend Leslie Braxton preaches to a younger flock at the New Beginnings Christian Fellowship. In 1999, Braxton, who is African American, had become pastor of Mount Zion after McKinney's retirement. Six years later, members of the church began a drive to have him removed; when they listed their complaints, they objected to everything from his sermons to his leadership style. Braxton left and founded New Beginnings, taking several hundred of Mount Zion's members with him. Striking out in a different direction, Braxton has embraced the racial mix of the new suburbs, hiring a white executive pastor—the person who runs the church's daily operations—and making a special effort to reach out to mixed-race couples as well as the area's growing Hispanic and Asian populations. The church, as he sees it, has to embrace the new reality—it can no longer afford to be an exclusively black institution in what is becoming an increasingly jumbled culture.

The two churches straddle a generational fault line: on one side, an older black population that commutes back to the Central Area to maintain its tradition; on the other, a younger one moving on to a future in the suburbs that now surround a wealthier, more exclusive city. Looking at it over the course of decades, the move to Seattle's southern suburbs is another step in the still-unfinished black migration from the South, with the grandchildren of African Americans who came up in the 1950s and 1960s exiting the city, pushed by economic factors as their elders once were from places such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

When white people talk about the gentrification of the Central Area, a common refrain is, “It's not race, it's economics.” “People wanted to sell and move to the 'burbs,” the developer seeking to buy DeCharlene Williams's property tells me. If anything, he says, Williams just “hates” that white people are moving in. “A lot of black people think there's a conspiracy to freeze people out,” he says. “That might have been the case thirty years ago. If anything, it's the opposite now.”

Of course, for many black people, thirty years is not that long ago. They remember when the Central Area was left to fester—black homeowners were unable to get loans, their children had to attend substandard schools, and racial discrimination in employment was open and obvious. Those factors created the depressed real estate prices in the Central Area that developers, now that the neighborhood is seen as a desirable place to live, have capitalized on. Given this, it's easy to see why a woman like DeCharlene Williams, who has fought her whole life to make a place for herself, isn't going to easily roll over and sell out.

If there's a tragedy to it, it's that African Americans happened to be sitting on an inadvertently created gold mine—the Central Area—that will now only increase in value. In essence, individual African Americans took one-time payouts to sell their property and moved out. The real value went to the people who bought the land, knocked down the old houses, and built town houses and luxury apartments in their stead. If anything, the people who suffered discrimination for so long should have had a way to pool their resources and somehow profit from the redevelopment. When taxes and the other costs of moving to the southern suburbs are figured in, the reality is that, for the people who sold, very little lasting wealth was created.

Instead, the black community now maintains a mostly emotional connection to the Central Area. When I ask the Reverend Samuel McKinney what the dispersal from the neighborhood means for African-American identity, he responds with a query of his own: “The question is, can we have community without proximity?”

This comes home to me one day when JT and I head to a Starbucks at Twenty-third and Jackson, the area that was the epicenter of the city's rowdy jazz and speakeasy scene from the 1920s to the 1950s, a past alluded to by black-and-white photos hung on the walls. JT's mom grew up nearby in the Yesler Terrace housing projects after her family came up from Louisiana, and JT spent his first few years there as well. The coffee shop, at the southern end of the Central Area, remains a gathering place for African Americans—many drive up from the South End to meet friends there or just to hang out. During the twenty minutes we sit at a table, a number of black people—ranging from teenage to elderly—either wave to JT or come up and say hello. Of course, the African Americans who make it up to Starbucks represent a small percentage of those who either maintain a toehold in the Central Area, or have cars and the time to drive up.

JT tells me that many more people he knows now live in the suburbs south of Seattle, places such as Renton, Kent, Des Moines, and Federal Way, all the way to Tacoma, thirty miles down Interstate 5, working in service jobs such as clerking at Wal-Mart and loading luggage at the airport, if they have work at all. They are not coming up to the Starbucks. When JT thinks about the loss of the Central Area he grew up in, he says, he hurts. “Your family, friends, everyone used to be right around the corner. Now you don't see anyone anymore,” he says. “Your roots are gone, you know? It feels like you've lost your life.”

Saved

Damian Joseph's church, the Greater Glory Church of God in Christ, is in South Seattle, on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Arriving from the north, you pass a car-repair shop, some Vietnamese and Cambodian restaurants and grocery stores, and a McDonald's. The recent opening of a light-rail line along MLK has helped to kick-start gentrification—one of the newest additions to the neighborhood is a drive-through Starbucks. The church's beige steeple rises over a U-Haul lot. A cyclone fence topped with razor wire separates the church's property from the trucks and trailers next door.

Sunday services start at eleven thirty. As you enter through the glass doors, a male usher in a black suit hands you a program. Two rows of electric chandeliers cast a bright, almost harsh light. About 150 people are spaced out in fifteen rows of blue-upholstered pews divided by four isles. Most people wear black or navy suits or dresses. A few are in jeans, and one woman has on a black satin jacket with the words
GOODWRENCH SERVICE PLUS
embroidered on the back. Mothers hold their babies, and kids wander in the aisles. Everyone is black.

The music starts within a few minutes. Up on the low platform behind the wood-trimmed glass altar, the two men and three women in the choir begin a call and response.

“Woke up this morning with my mind,” the choir sings. “STAYED ON JESUS,” responds the congregation.

“Singin' and prayin' with my mind”…“STAYED ON JESUS.”

“Hallelu … Hallelu … HalleluYAH!” shout the chorus and the congregation together.

The choir sings into microphones amplified through speakers hung on the walls. A drummer and an organist accompany the singers. In the pews, people clap, stomp their feet, and sing. A woman shakes a tambourine. The noise reverberates and seems to rattle the building at its foundations.

Damian, a minister in the church, stands on the stage, in front of the choir, in a black suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. He holds his arms above his head, his hands splayed, mouth open in song. Occasionally he fires off a volley of claps that sound like crisp rifle shots and then raises his fists, pumping them in the air.

Before long, Pastor Sam Townsend enters. A trim man in his late fifties, with high-and-tight hair and a brushy mustache, he wears black vestments with gold trim and has a white towel draped over his left shoulder. Townsend paces the floor in front of the congregation, shooting phrases into the wireless microphone in his right hand.

“Do you
feel
God's
presence
?” he asks.

A burst of organ. The drummer brushes his crash cymbal.

“Can you
feel
God's
presence
?”

The music begins to pick up again.

People sway from side to side, their hands held up in the air.

“
Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus
,” a woman chants.

A large man in a blue suit begins dancing, drops to the ground, shakes for a moment, and then springs up with his hands in the air.

A young woman falls to her knees, crying, and presses her forehead to the floor. A female usher rushes over and holds a sheet around her for privacy.

Townsend begins to preach. “I remember when you were hurting, when you were struggling, when your homes were torn apart. Come on, people! You still have an enemy! We still need God, more than we did before. The world is coming to an end. Prophesies are being fulfilled. The only thing that's going to help you today is this altar,” he says, striking the pulpit with the palm of his hand. “Do you know who's going to survive the terrorist attacks? It's going to be the black people. We were born where they put us, down at the bottom. We're used to sifting rat droppings out of our food.”

As Townsend speaks, Damian crosses his arms and cradles his chin in his right hand, a look of deep concentration on his face. The service ebbs and flows for three and a half hours, hitting emotional peaks, settling down, and then rising back up. Finally Townsend calls forward everyone who feels down, sick, weary, tired, ready for a change. The organ hums. Young and old trickle from the pews until there are ten people in front of the altar, kneeling, heads down, tears flowing as Townsend lays his hands on each one and leads the congregation in prayer that God will give them the strength to find a new path.

The roots of Damian's strand of Christianity go back just one century, but in those hundred years, the Pentecostal faith has grown at a staggering speed. The most influential early proponent of the religion, William Joseph Seymour, was born in 1870 in Centreville, Louisiana, the son of former slaves. In his twenties, Seymour lived in Indianapolis, where he worked as a waiter, moving later to Cincinnati. During that time, he was “saved” by a revival group that believed Christ was soon to return to Earth and that believers should abandon their old churches to form a new, racially inclusive one to be ready for God's kingdom.

Seymour moved on to Houston, where, during a service in a black church, he saw something that amazed him: a woman entered a trance and began speaking in phrases he could not understand. Seymour was touched by what he thought was a depth of spiritual feeling he could not attain. He had never seen anyone speak in tongues before, but he knew it to be a sign of the Apocalypse.

The phenomenon appears in the Bible in Acts, book 2, which tells of Christians gathering to celebrate the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. Suddenly, a sound “like a mighty wind” comes from heaven, and each feels the Holy Spirit rush in. They begin to speak with “tongues as of fire.” Though they are from different nations, they suddenly understand each other, as if the curse of Babel has been lifted. When people passing by think they're drunk, the Apostle Peter stands and announces that it's the fulfillment of prophesy. The Holy Spirit is pouring out into the world, heralding the coming of the Last Days and the return of Christ.

Almost two thousand years later, in Houston, Seymour questioned the woman about her gift. She introduced him to her former employer, Charles Fox Parham, a white preacher who ran a Bible school. Seymour asked to study in the school, but Parham, being a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, wouldn't let him in. The two agreed that Seymour could sit outside by an open window and listen.

While Seymour prayed to be granted the gift of tongues, he also preached to black congregations in Houston. A woman visiting the city was taken by his sermonizing and invited him to preach at her church in Los Angeles. Seymour borrowed the train fare from Parham and set off, arriving on the West Coast in 1906. When he got there, he found that the congregation was turned off by his message, so he began to preach in living rooms. His first congregants, all black, were domestic servants and laundry women.

Los Angeles was fertile ground for a new religious movement. The city—hyped by boosters and developers hoping to make a buck by luring more people west—was promoted as a kind of utopia, a land of milk and honey offering opportunity and the chance of riches. In a strange twist, the city, settled by blacks, Indians, and Spanish, was sold as a place of racial purity, where Anglo-Saxons could escape the immigrant hordes of the East Coast. In reality, Los Angeles was then—as it is now—a diverse place, with large racial and class divides. Many people on the bottom were primed for a new religious message. As word of Seymour's powerful preaching spread, pilgrims, black and white, sought him out. On April 9, 1906, a number of congregants were stricken and began speaking in tongues. The crowds grew, and the congregation rented a vacant building at 312 Azusa Street—which had last been used as a stable—and began a movement that quickly radiated out.

The Azusa Street Revival ran for five years, with thousands making the pilgrimage from across the nation. Services were held three times a day, with up to eight hundred people inside and several hundred more overflowing outside. Seymour offered a way to directly encounter God without the interference of church dogma. Mixed in with apocalyptic feelings—an earthquake leveled San Francisco a few days after the revival began—and entrenched social inequality, the movement attracted mostly working-class and poor people of all races. “The baptism of the spirit did not just change their religious affiliation or their way of worship,” writes religion professor Harvey Cox in his history of the Pentecostal movement,
Fire from Heaven
. “It changed everything. They literally saw the world in a whole new light.” Pentecostalism was an equalizer, a religion not dependent on textual interpretations or centuries of doctrine. Anyone—rich or poor, black or white, educated or not—could experience the gift of tongues and a connection with God. All you needed was a Bible and belief. “The New Jerusalem was coming,” writes Cox. “Now the rich and the proud would get their just deserts. The destitute, the overlooked, and the forgotten would come into their own. Even more central for Seymour, in a segregated America, God was now assembling a new and racially inclusive people to glorify his name and to save a Jim Crow nation lost in sin.”

Seymour saw the interracial quality of the Pentecostal movement as a sign that it represented a coming together of tribes as described in the Bible. But as revivals sprouted around the country, the movement splintered. One of the main drivers was racial, as white preachers broke away to form their own congregations. But Pentecostalism was well on its way to becoming the fastest-growing religious movement of the past century; there are now an estimated 400 million Pentecostals around the world, and the religion has been particularly embraced in poor countries. In June 1907, Charles Harrison Mason, a black southerner, visited Azusa Street. When he returned to Jackson, Mississippi, he began to preach the Pentecostal faith. His church, the Church of God in Christ, now headquartered in Memphis, is the country's biggest predominantly black Pentecostal church, with more than five million members in congregations spread from Alaska to West Africa. Damian's is one of them.

“Most of the individuals in our church, almost everybody in our church, came to me with nothing. Zero. From the streets. Prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, thieves, murderers—now, they all did their time!—but they all came to me that way,” Sam Townsend tells me early on a Sunday morning before services. “And all of them, probably eighty-five percent of them, have good jobs now. Homes. Families. They didn't have to resort back to street life, drug-selling, those things, to get ahead.”

We meet in his office. Townsend sits behind his large desk in a padded leather chair, in front of a bookcase built into the wall. With his tailored black suit and easy smile, he is a charismatic man—you could imagine him preaching on one of the religious stations on cable on a Friday night—and he is quick to make a personal connection. He peppers the several conversations we have with references to my profession and the old basketball team. His speech is sprinkled with both biblical references and jokes.

Born in 1948, Townsend grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his dad worked for General Motors, and came to Seattle after a stint in the army brought him to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma. After his discharge, he joined the Seattle Police Department. “I was about twenty years old when I came on the police department,” he says, “straight out of the military and into Seattle and involved in all kinds of behavior—drugs, you name it, I lived the life.” In 1973, Townsend wandered into a Central Area Pentecostal church, where he knelt at the altar and was saved. In 1980 he founded his church in the basement rec room of a Central Area rental house with a $1,000 loan from his father. The congregation grew from its original six members and, in the late 1980s, Townsend bought the current location (Damian's mom, Helen, joined the congregation at that time). Besides its religious services, the church runs a daycare center and an adoption agency for African-American children.

Money is always tight. The church is funded by tithes collected from the congregation of three hundred, at least those members who can afford to pay. Townsend receives no salary. His wife has taken a part-time job with H&R Block to help make ends meet. Though Townsend wears sharp suits that look quite expensive to my eye, he tells me he shops at secondhand stores. The secret, he says, is to have a good tailor. He pulls up the sleeve of his suit to show me a monogram on his white dress shirt. “This shirt looks pretty good,” he says, “but it's not my initials on the bottom of it. I don't know who that guy is!”

“Nothing's in my name,” Townsend says when I ask who owns the church. “Everything belongs to the parishioners. If I die today, this belongs to the people. It doesn't go to my wife, my kids, or anybody. Again, you're looking at a guy who came off the street, a guy who preaches the basic tenets of the Bible—nothing coming out of the sky, I don't see angels, I don't see nobody—but I read, and I follow the directions of the Scripture.”

Townsend often preaches about the divide between the spiritual and secular worlds. Life here on Earth is fleeting, he says, but eternity lasts forever, so you should keep that primary in your mind. Still, he tells his congregation, you've got to get by while you're here. For many of the church's members, Townsend acts as a middleman between them and Seattle's mainstream institutions, helping them to navigate banks, social service agencies, landlords, and prospective employers. Sometimes he also jibes the congregation for what he sees as its desires to partake in the upper-middle-class good life. At one service I attend, he brings up the automated checkout registers that some local supermarkets have installed. A lot of people just view them as signs of technological progress and speed, he says, but he looks at them and sees members of the church losing their jobs.

Townsend rejects the “prosperity gospel,” an idea popular in many churches both black and white, which holds that living a holy life will lead to material rewards. “It's not a biblical teaching. It would be unfair for us to take a Scripture and to say, ‘God wants us to prosper and be in health even as our soul prospers,' and then you see the difference in economic levels of people in the church,” he says. “We're not coming to God to get anything other than some stability in our life. And we say that if we get some stability in our life, then we can accomplish things, then we can go to college, then we can do whatever, but it's not necessarily a divine principle that if you come to God you're going to get off welfare, if you come to God you're going to get a new car, you're going to get big money, something's going to fall out of the sky.”