Dominion (104 page)

Ollie and Manny walked the back parking lot of the Taco Bell on MLK, Ollie chomping on a Double Decker Taco Supreme. When he finished, he opened the dumpster and dropped in his trash. He got down on his hands and knees to look under and behind the old brown dumpster, its paint scratched and peeling. Then he joined Manny in studying the old wooden fence, top to bottom.

Most of the graffiti was typical, the same stuff all over North Portland—tags from various Blood and Crip sets. “What’s with these?” Ollie asked, pointing to a couple of Hispanic gang tags. “This isn’t Latino turf.”

“Hey,” Manny said. “It’s Taco Bell. TB’s like the Mexican embassy.”

Ollie and Manny ended up studying the same piece of dark-blue graffiti. It was only five lines. The letters intersected each other, beautifully, but they were unintelligible, except the fifth line, which appeared to be a backward P-187.

Manny tried to translate, while Ollie went back inside.

“Herb, when was that back fence last painted?”

“We spray it over every couple of months to discourage all the taggin’. Let’s see, I’d have a copy of the work order in my files. You want the exact date?”

“Yeah, please.” Ollie eyed a stray burrito sitting on the rack.

“Help yourself,” Herb said, tossing him the burrito and heading to the back room. He reappeared as Ollie took his last bite. “Last painted August 28. We’re overdue. I’ll have to get on it.” He got Ollie a large Diet Coke.

“Thanks, Herb. Hey, hold off a little on that repaint for me, would you?” Ollie asked. He went out to his car, pulled a kit from under the seat, and took out his 35 mm Nikon along with a Polaroid. He shot a half-dozen pictures of the wall with the Polaroid, a dozen with the Nikon, most of them of the blue five-lined tag. As he and Manny drove off, Ollie picked up the phone and called gang enforcement.

“Lenny? I want the best, most experienced tagger you’ve got. Preferably a Crip. I’ve got some hieroglyphics I want him to translate.”

Clarence saw the light on in Jonah’s room and knocked on the door at ten-thirty in the evening. He heard a muffled voice and stuck his head into his son’s room.

“What are you reading, Jonah?”

“
Huckleberry Finn.”

“Read it aloud to me. You can work on pronunciation.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re a good reader. I want to hear you.”

“I don’t think I like this book,” Jonah said.

“Why not?”

“Huck keeps trying to decide whether to turn in the runaway slave.”

“Jim?”

“Yeah. Jim. He says he thinks if he turns him in he’ll go to heaven, but if he helps him escape he’ll go to hell. That’s what his Aunt Sally and the church people told him.”

“Well, they were wrong, weren’t they?”

“I guess.”

“Here. Let me just pick a section and you read it. Okay? I want to hear you read.”

“Okay.” Jonah began to read, reluctantly at first, but his voice got more and more animated as the story picked up. He read a couple pages before coming to Huck telling his aunt Sally about a steamboat accident:

“We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious. Anyone hurt?” Aunt Sally asked.

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well it’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Jonah stopped. “Daddy, why does it say that?”

“You mean nigger? That’s what they called blacks in those days. Huck was just ignorant. He shouldn’t have said it, but back then people just did.”

“But what about Aunt Sally? What did she mean? A black person got killed, but she says it was lucky nobody got hurt.”

“Well, I guess she just didn’t think of black folk as people.”

“But Aunt Sally was a Christian. That’s what the book says. We’re Christians, aren’t we Daddy?”

“Yeah, Son. And many of the slaves were Christians too.”

“But if she was a Christian, why would she say that?”

“Well, not everybody who claims to be a Christian is. And not everyone who is a Christian thinks the right way. Why don’t you just keep reading?”

Jonah put down the book. “I don’t want to read anymore.”

“As you know,” Cairo Clancy said to his congregation, “this morning our guest speaker is Pastor Ben Schaffer from First Church, just a mile and a half down the road from us. I’ve told you before I’ve been meeting weekly with Ben for nearly a year. We’ve talked about things that, very honestly, I’ve never talked about with a white brother before. I’ve invited him to speak in our pulpit this week, and he’s invited me to their pulpit next week. Please give a warm welcome to my friend and brother, Ben Schaffer.”

The two men embraced long and hard, and as the embrace lingered, the applause intensified. Clarence sat between Geneva and his father. Next to Obadiah on the other side sat Harold Haddaway.

“It’s a great privilege to be in this pulpit,” Pastor Schaffer said. “I can’t express what my friendship with your pastor has meant to me. More about that later. I want to start with Ephesians 2:13, where God is talking about the racial divide between Jews and Gentiles. He says, ‘Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.’”

“Uh-huh!”

“Say it now.”

“Hallelujah.”

Pastor Schaffer looked surprised but energized by the commentary from the congregation. “Folks, the biggest racial divide in history was between Jews and Gentiles. And if that barrier is broken down in Christ, so is
every
racial barrier. This passage says that because of Christ’s work on the cross, we’re all part of the same family. Like it or not, we share the same Daddy, and that means we’re family. Now I, for one, like it. I like it very much. But it’s something we have to think through because this verse tells me that if I stand at arm’s length from brothers and sisters of another color, I am opposing nothing less than the finished work of Christ.”

“Amen.”

“Yessuh!”

“Preach it, pastor.”

“God’s Word tells us nations and people reap what they sow. Well, this country sowed a poisonous crop called slavery, and we’re reaping the consequences even today. Look at verse 15. It says Christ’s ‘purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace.’ He has made Jew and Gentile one man, and he has made black and white one man. Now, I’m going to ask you something I’ve already asked my own church. I’m asking you to please forgive me for my ignorance and silence on matters of racial justice. Please forgive me for never having asked your pastor to lunch until a year ago. Please forgive me.”

The congregation was suddenly quiet, at a loss, taken aback by Pastor Schaffer’s directness. But one deacon sitting toward the front said, “We forgive you,” and one by one people across the congregation echoed the words.

“Look at our two churches,” Ben Schaffer said. “Our facilities are only a mile and a half apart. But we’ve been
worlds
apart, haven’t we? I’ve been a pastor at First Church for fifteen years, and I’d never been inside this building until ten months ago. Your pastor hadn’t been in our building until that same day. See, that day, after having lunch, we took each other on tours. And we met each other’s staffs and some church folks, and we walked in each other’s neighborhoods. And that’s when Ebenezer Church became real to me—something more than just a name on a sign—a real part of the body of Christ. It’s like I was the left arm becoming aware of the right arm for the first time.”

“Glory.”

“Well, well.”

“Hallelujah.”

“See, Cairo and I got to talking one day. Turns out both of us had been to huge Promise Keepers events. I’d attended one in Portland with thirty thousand men. And he’d gone up to Seattle a year later where there were sixty thousand. He told me how much it touched him to see black speakers along with the white and to see all those white men applauding blacks—not just black entertainers and athletes, but black spiritual leaders. To hear resounding applause for the idea of racial reconciliation moved him. Then he told me Promise Keepers sponsored a racial reconciliation seminar in Portland and only twenty-five men showed up, eight blacks and seventeen whites. It was a powerful time, Cairo said, but the tiny numbers reminded him how distant the dream still was. Well, both of us have been praying that we can move closer to that dream.

“I’ve got something more to confess to you. I’m part of a denomination that, like many others, once supported segregation. I’m ashamed to say I went to a seminary that in those days, the early sixties, didn’t allow black people to attend. Over the years I’ve bragged about that seminary, given it credit, and there were many good things I learned there, many things I have reason to be proud of. But for its decades of practicing segregation, I only have reason to be ashamed. Racial prejudice is a contradiction to the gospel of Christ. It’s heresy. So I ask you to forgive my seminary.”

“My Lawd.”

“Yes, we forgive.”

“Glory.”

“In the last number of months, God has broken my heart over this. And I’m convinced there can be no revival until we’re broken about the racism that has been a cancer both in our country and our churches. It gets even closer to home. Six months ago Kathy Ward, our church historian, was doing some research for our hundredth anniversary. She discovered a piece of history that some of you at Ebenezer may not know. I certainly didn’t. In its early days, at First Church colored people were allowed only in the balcony. They couldn’t mix with whites on the church floor. And there were two separate drinking fountains, yes, even here in Oregon. Finally, since they were being treated like second-class citizens of God’s kingdom, the black Christians left and started their own church down the road. I sure can’t blame them for that. Back then the new fellowship was called Second Church. In 1920 the name was changed to Ebenezer.”