The Cross and the Switchblade

When I told him about the two gangs I had met within an hour of setting foot in New York, Miles had the same fantastic thought that had come to me.

“You realize, of course, that you’d never have had a chance with them if you hadn’t been thrown out of court and got your picture taken?”

We drove downtown, and this time we went in person to the D.A.’s office, not because we were under any illusions about our reception there, but because the only route to those seven boys in prison lay through that office.

“I wish there were some way,” I said, “to convince you that I have no other motive than those boys’ welfare in asking to see them.”

“Reverend, if every word you’re saying came straight from that Bible of yours, we still couldn’t let you see them. The only way you can see those boys without Judge Davidson’s permission is to get a signed permission from each of the parents.”

Back on the street I pulled the now tattered page from Life out of my pocket. Here was the name of the leader of the gang: Luis Alvarez. While Miles stayed with the car, I went into a candy store and changed a five-dollar bill—it was almost our last money—into dimes. Then I started to call all the Alvarezes in the telephone book. There were over two hundred of them in Manhattan alone.

An offended silence. Angry words. A receiver slammed in my ear. I had used up forty of the dimes, and it was clear that we would never reach our boys this way.

I went outside and joined Miles in the car. We were both discouraged. We didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do next. There in the car, with the skyscrapers of lower. Manhattan towering over us, I bowed my head. “Lord,” I prayed, “if we are here on Your errand, You must guide us. We have reached the limit of our own humble ideas. Lead where we must go, for we do not know.”

We started to drive aimlessly in the direction the car was headed, which happened to be north. We got caught in a mammoth traffic jam at Times Square. When, finally, we extricated ourselves from this, it was only to get lost in Central Park. We drove round and round before we realized that the roads there form a circle. We took an exit—any exit, just to be out of the park. We found ourselves on an avenue that led to the heart of Spanish Harlem. And, suddenly, I had that same incomprehensible urge to get out of the car.

We pulled into the first empty space we found. I got out of the car and took a few steps up the street. I stopped, confused. The inner urging had gone away. A group of boys were sitting on a stoop.

The boys stared at me sullenly and did not answer. I walked on a way, aimlessly. A young Negro boy came running up the sidewalk after me.

I felt bumps form on my flesh. I pointed at the old tenement house in front of which I had parked. “He lives there?” I asked, almost in a whisper.

The boy nodded. I have questioned God sometimes when prayers have gone unanswered. But answered prayer is still harder to believe. We had asked God to guide us, and He had set us down on Luis Alvarez’ doorstep.

The name “Alvarez” was on the mailbox in the dingy vestibule, third floor. I raced up the stairs. The third floor hall was dark and smelled of urine and dust. The deep brown walls were made of tin into which a waffle design had been pressed.

Someone called out in Spanish from the interior of the apartment, and hoping it was an invitation to come in, I pushed the door open a foot and peered through. There, seated in a red overstuffed chair, was a slender man, dark-skinned, holding a rosary. He looked up from his beads and his face lit up.

“I want to, Mr. Alvarez. But they won’t let me in to see Luis. I have to have written permission from you and from the other parents.”

“I give that.” Señor Alvarez got out a pencil and paper from the kitchen drawer. Slowly he wrote that I had his permission to see Luis Alvarez. Then he folded the paper and handed it to me.

“No,” said Luis’ father, and he turned his head slightly. “You see, that’s the trouble. I don’t keep so close touch on my son. God He brought you here, He will bring you to the others.”

So, just a few minutes after we had parked at random on a Harlem street, I had my first signed permission. I stepped out of Mr. Alvarez’ apartment, wondering if it was possible that God had literally steered my car to this address in answer to this father’s prayer. My mind grasped for another explanation. Perhaps I had seen the address in a newspaper somewhere and retained it in my subconscious.

But even while I was brooding over this, on my way down the dark, tin-lined stairs, another event occurred which could not be explained by subconscious memory. Rounding a corner, I nearly collided with a young boy, about seventeen, who was running full tilt up the stairs.

The boy looked at me, mumbled something, and started to run on. But as I passed beneath an overhanging light, he stopped and looked at me again.

The boy thrust out his hand. “Well, I’m Angelo Morales, Rev’run. I’m in Luis’ gang. You been up to see the Alvarezes?”

“Yes.” I told Angelo that I needed their permission in order to see Luis. And then, suddenly, I saw the hand of God on our meeting. “Angelo!” I said. “I have to get permissions from each boy’s parents. Mr. Alvarez didn’t know where the other boys live. But you do, don’t you ... ?”

Angelo drove all over Spanish Harlem with us, locating the families of the six other defendants in the Michael Farmer trial. As we drove, Angelo told us a little about himself: he would have been with the boys that night they “messed Michael up,” except that he had a toothache. He said the boys had not gone into the park with any particular plan in mind: they had just gone out “rumbling” (looking for trouble). “If it hadn’t been Farmer, they’d of been jitterbugging.”

Jitterbugging, we discovered, meant gang fighting. We learned a lot from Angelo, and we confirmed much that we suspected. The boys in this particular gang—were they all like this?—were bored, lonely and smolderingly angry. They craved excitement, and they took it where they could find it. They craved companionship, and they took that where they could find it.

Angelo had an amazing way of making things clear. He was a bright, appealing boy and he wanted to help us. Both Miles and I agreed that no matter what happened to the rest of our plans, we would keep in touch with Angelo Morales, and we would show him another way.

We said good-bye to Angelo, after getting his address and promising to keep in touch with him. We drove back downtown. Our hearts were singing. In fact, we did sing as we struggled once again through the traffic snarls of Broadway. We rolled the windows up tight and shouted out the good old Gospel songs we had learned in childhood. The undeniable miracles that had taken place within the last hours gave us a fresh assurance that, when we stepped out on Christ’s promise to lead, doors would swing open all along the way.

How could we know, as we wove our way downtown singing, that a few minutes later the doors would slam shut again with a thud? Because even those signatures did not get us in to see the seven boys.

The District Attorney was very much surprised at seeing us again so soon, and when we produced the required signatures, he looked like a man who beholds the impossible. He called the jail and said that if the boys would see us, we must be allowed in.

It was at the jail itself that a strange and totally unexpected block was thrown in our way, not by the boys, nor by the city officials, but by a fellow clergyman. The prison chaplain who had the boys in his care apparently considered that it would be “disturbing” to their spiritual welfare to introduce a new personality. Each of the boys had signed a form saying, “We will talk with Reverend David Wilkerson.” The chaplain struck out the “will,” and wrote in “will not.” And no amount of pleading would persuade the city that his decision should be overruled.

Once again, we headed back across the George Washington Bridge—very, very puzzled. Why was it that we had received such dramatic encouragement only to have the road end again at a blank wall?

It was while we were driving along the Pennsylvania Turnpike late that night, about halfway back to our little country town, that suddenly I saw a ray of hope in the darkness around us.

The ray of hope was in the form of a man, a remarkable man: my father’s father. The hope was that he would let me pay him a visit, to place my puzzlement before him.