The Cross and the Switchblade

So if these boys were going to change dramatically, the transformation would have to come about in their hearts. I knew I could never bring this about: it would have to be the work of the Holy Spirit. But perhaps I could act as a channel through which the Spirit could reach these boys.

There was one way to find out. So far, I had only walked and listened in the city. Now I would make a move. I would speak to these boys, trusting the Holy Spirit to reach them where I could not. I started making inquiries around New York: what were the toughest, hardest gangs in town? Time and again two names recurred—the Chaplains and the Mau Maus. Both were in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

These gangs have their turfs in one of the world’s largest housing developments: Fort Greene Projects. More than thirty thousand people live in these towering apartments, most of them Negro and Puerto Rican, and a heavy percentage of them on relief.

The fighting gangs that have been spawned in this area are segregated: the Chaplains are Negro boys; the Mau Maus, Spanish. The two gangs do not fight each other, but join together to protect their turf against outside gangs. And now they had declared war on the police.

The boys had a rather original method of attack. They waited on a rooftop with a sandbag balanced on the ledge. When a police officer passed below, they tried to drop the eighty-pound bag on him. Their timing was not yet perfected and so far they had missed. But they were getting closer. The police in retaliation were using their night sticks at the slightest provocation, and prohibiting more than two or three boys to gather together at a time.

I decided there could be no more telling testing-ground for the Holy Spirit than Fort Greene. Early one Friday morning I picked up a friend of mine, a trumpet player named Jimmy Stahl, and the two of us drove over the Brooklyn Bridge and into the teeming brick and glass jungle called Fort Greene Housing Project. We parked our car near the public school on Edward Street, and began our experiment.

“You stand here near this lamp post,” I told Jimmy, “and start blowing. If we get a crowd, I can step up on the base of the post and talk to them.”

“What do you want me to play?”

“Why not ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’?”

So Jimmy began to play “Onward Christian Soldiers” on his trumpet. He played it over and over. He made it lively and he made it loud.

Windows of the walk-ups across the street flew open and heads popped out. Then children began to swarm out of the buildings. Dozens of little children. They were excited by the music and kept asking:

“Is a circus coming, mister? Are we going to have a parade?”

I told Jimmy just to keep blowing.

Next, the teen-agers began to arrive. They all seemed to be in uniform. Some of the boys wore brilliant red jackets with black armbands and the two letters “MM” sewn boldly on the back. Others wore tight tapering trousers, bright shirts and continental shoes with thin soles and pointed toes; these boys carried canes. Just about every teen-ager there wore a sharp-looking Alpine hat with a narrow brim; just about every one also wore sunglasses.

“Lord,” I said to myself, “they’re reaching for something fine here. They all want to belong to something bigger than they are. They all want not to be alone.”

After Jimmy played his piece fifteen or twenty times, a crowd of perhaps a hundred boys and girls had gathered. They milled about shouting to each other and to us, obscenities mingled with the catcalls. I climbed up on the lamp base and began to talk. The uproar increased. I didn’t know what to do next. Jimmy was shaking his head. “They can’t hear you!” he formed with his lips.

And at that moment the problem was taken out of my hands. There was a sudden lull in the shouts from the kids. Over their heads I saw a police car pull to the curb. Officers stepped out and started working their way through the crowd, poking fiercely with their night sticks.

“All right. Break it up. Move on.”

The youngsters parted to let the police through but closed ranks again behind them.

“Get down from there,” one of the officers said to me. When I was facing him, he said, “What are you trying to do, start a riot?”

“I’m preaching.”

“Well, you’re not preaching here. We’ve got enough trouble in this neighborhood without having a mob scene on our hands.”

Now the boys and girls got into the act. They shouted that the police couldn’t stop me from preaching. It was against the Constitution, they said. The police disagreed. Before Jimmy and I knew what was happening, we were being shoved bodily through the crowd toward the police car.

At the station house, I picked up the theme the kids had used. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Isn’t it my right as a citizen to speak on a public street?”

“You can,” admitted the police, “as long as you speak under an American flag.”

So half an hour later Jimmy started to blow “Onward Christian Soldiers” again. This time we had an enormous American flag floating behind us, borrowed from the sympathetic principal of the school. And this time, instead of preaching from a lamp post base, I had a piano stool.

Jimmy blew to the north and to the south, to the east and to the west. Again windows flew open, and small children swarmed around us. And again we were faced, a few minutes later, with a hooting, catcalling mob. The only difference was that now we were heroes, because once again we had been tapped by the arm of the law.

Our new popularity, though, did not improve the manners of our audience. I stood on my stool and once again tried to raise my voice above the din.

“I am a country preacher,” I told them, “three hundred miles from home, and I have a message for you.”

Nobody was listening. Directly in front of me a boy and girl were doing the Fish, the grinding hips that brought whistles and clapping from onlookers. Others picked it up, cigarettes hanging sideways from their mouths, bodies quivering with excitement. It was hardly the setting for a sermon.

In despair, I bowed my head.

“Lord,” I said, “I can’t even get their attention. If You are doing a work here, I will have to ask You even for this.”

While I was still praying, the change began.

It was the smallest children who settled down first. But when I opened my eyes I noticed that a lot of the older boys who had been leaning up against the school fence, smoking, had straightened up, taken their hats off and were now standing with heads slightly bowed.

I was so startled by the sudden silence that I was at a loss for words.

When finally I did begin to speak, I chose John 3:16 as my text: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I told them that God loved them as they were, right then. He knew what they were. He knew their hatred and their anger. He knew that some of them had committed murder. But God also saw what they were going to be in the future, not only what they had been in the past.

That was all. I had said what I had to say, and I stopped.

A heavy, eloquent silence hung over the street. I could hear the flag flapping in a light breeze. I told the boys and girls then that I was going to ask for something special to happen to them. I was going to ask for a miracle, that in the next moment their lives be completely changed.

I bowed my head again and prayed that the Holy Spirit do His work. I raised my head. Nobody moved. I asked if there was anyone who wanted to come up front where we could talk. No response.

It was an awkward situation. I had made an experiment in letting the Spirit lead, and He didn’t seem to be leading anywhere.

And then suddenly I heard myself saying, without any intention on my part:

“All right, now. They tell me that you’ve got a couple of pretty tough gangs here in Fort Greene. I want to talk to your Presidents and your Vice-Presidents. If you are so big and tough, you won’t mind coming up and shaking hands with a skinny preacher.”

I still don’t know why I said it, but as I look back on it now, it was perhaps the best thing I could possibly have said. For a minute, nobody stirred. Then from the rear someone called,

“What’s the matter, Buckboard? You scared?”

Slowly a big colored boy left his station at the rear of the crowd and started to work forward. A second boy followed. This one was carrying a cane, and both were wearing sunglasses. On their way through the crowd they picked up two more boys and all four grouped themselves in front of the piano stool.

The big one stepped forward another few inches.

“Slip me some skin, Preacher,” he said. I’m Buckboard, President of the Chaplains.”

I was still innocent of the slang of New York, and when he held out his hand I tried to grasp it. “Just slip it, Preach,” said Buckboard, and he slid his open palm along mine. He stood for a minute, examining me curiously. “You’re all right, Preacher. You really bugged me.”

Buckboard then introduced me to his Vice-President, Stagecoach, and to his two War Lords.

What was I going to do now? With my heart pounding, I nodded to Jimmy, and we walked with the four boys a few yards away from the crowd. Stagecoach kept saying that our message was “coming through.”

“You know, Davie,” he said, “there’s a little old lady comes around here with a black cape and a basket of candy bars, and she’s always after the boys to stop bopping. She’s okay but she never comes through.”

I told the four boys it wasn’t I who was coming through but the Holy Spirit. I told them He was trying to reach inside their pride ... “and your arrogance, too,” I said, looking directly in their eyes, “and your complacency. That’s all just a shell to hide the real, scared, lonely you. The Holy Spirit wants to get inside that shell and help you start all over again.”

“What we supposed to do, man?”

I looked at Jimmy, but his expression didn’t help me. In a church I might have asked these boys to come forward and kneel at the altar. But how could you ask anyone to do that on a public street, in front of friends?

Still, maybe it was just such a bold step that was needed. The change in their lives that we were asking was drastic, so maybe the symbol had to be drastic too.

“What are you supposed to do?” I said. “Why, I want you to kneel down right here on the street and ask the Holy Spirit to come into your lives so that you will become new men. ‘New creatures in Christ’ is what the Bible says: this can happen to you too.”

There was a long pause. For the first time I was vaguely aware of the crowd that was waiting, very quietly, to see what was going to happen. Finally Stagecoach said, in a voice that was strangely hoarse:

“Buckboard? You want to? I will if you will.” to

And before my astonished eyes, these two leaders of one of the most feared fighting gangs in all of New York slowly dropped to their knees. Their War Lords followed their lead. They took their hats off and held them respectfully in front of them. Two of the boys had been smoking. Each took his cigarette out of his mouth and flipped it away, where it lay smoldering in the gutter while I said a very short prayer.

“Lord Jesus,” I said, “here are four of your own children, doing something that is very, very hard. They are kneeling here before everyone and asking You to come into their hearts and make them new. They want You to take away the hate, and the fighting, and the loneliness. They want to know for the first time in their lives that they are really loved. They are asking this of You, Lord, and You will not disappoint them. Amen.”

Buckboard and Stagecoach got up. The two War Lords followed. They did not lift their heads. I suggested they might want to get off by themselves for a while, maybe find a church somewhere.

Still without speaking, the boys turned and started to make their way through the crowd. Someone called out,

“Hey, Buckboard! What’s it like when you got religion?”

Buckboard told them to lay off and he was taunted no more. I suppose if someone had really rubbed him the wrong way, he wouldn’t have been saved enough to take it non-violently.

Jimmy and I left Fort Greene with our heads swimming. The fact was that we had not expected God to answer us in quite such a dramatic manner. Buckboard, Stagecoach, and two War Lords falling to their knees on a street corner: it was just too much to believe.

Frankly, we’d been better prepared for the reaction of the Mau Mau leaders. They were there in the crowd, too, watching the transformation in Buckboard and Stagecoach with mingled contempt and fascination. After the Chaplains had departed, the crowd began to call for them.

“Israel! Nicky! You’re next! Come on, them Niggers weren’t afraid. You going to chicken out?” Such shouts urged them forward.

Israel, the president of the gang, was as nice a boy as I’ve met: he stuck out his hand and shook mine like a gentleman.

Nicky was something else. I remember thinking, as I looked at him, that’s the hardest face I have ever seen.

“How do you do, Nicky,” I said.

He left me standing with my hand outstretched. He wouldn’t even look at me. He was putting away at a cigarette, shooting nervous little jets of smoke out the side of his mouth.

“Go to Hell, Preacher,” he said. He had an odd, strangled way of speaking and he stuttered badly over some of his sounds.

“You don’t think much of me, Nicky,” I said, “but I feel different about you. I love you, Nicky.” I took a step toward him.

“You come near me, Preacher,” he said, in that tortured voice, “I’ll kill you.”

“You could do that,” I agreed. “You could cut me in a thousand pieces and lay them out in the street and every piece would love you.” But as I said it, I was thinking: and it wouldn’t do a bit of good—not with you, Nicky—there’s no love on earth that could reach you.

Before we left Brooklyn we put Buckboard and Stagecoach in touch with a local minister who could follow their spiritual growing pains. “But I think,” I said to Jimmy, “we’d better check in on them from time to time, too.” To be perfectly honest, neither one of us could rid himself of the suspicion that the boys were having some fun with us.

But when I intimated as much to Gwen, on my return home, she scolded me.

“David Wilkerson,” she said, “don’t you realize that you got exactly what you wanted? You asked the Holy Spirit for a miracle and now that you’ve got one you’re trying to argue it away. People who don’t believe in miracles shouldn’t pray for them.”