Chapter Sixteen

THE PREACHER MAN

THE PREACHER IS THE MOST UNIQUE PERSONALITY DEVELOPED BY THE NEGRO ON AMERICAN SOIL. A LEADER, A POLITICIAN, AN ORATOR, A “BOSS,” AN INTRIGUER, AN IDEALIST—ALL THESE HE IS, AND EVER, TOO, THE CENTER OF A GROUP OF MEN, NOW TWENTY, NOW A THOUSAND IN NUMBER.

—“Of the Faith of the Fathers”

I don’t know religion from Adam. My parents both left the Catholic church shortly after they were married, and my birth mother, Tess, was always more inclined toward nobility than religion. By the time I was thirty, I had been to exactly one church service, some sort of Easter service at the Episcopal church of a friend in middle school, although, well into my adult life, I had heard stories from friends and peers and colleagues about the black church experience. Certainly, I understood the significance of religion in African American history, and it made sense to me that religion, faith, and so on would play a strong role for black people who suffered through slavery. But I preferred to credit their survival more to individual will and tenacity than to guidance from God.

Aside from a general lack of interest in religion, the black church—black churchgoing folk and prominent black figures in the church community—seemed a business not to mess with, a matter inappropriate for experimentation. So I kept my distance from it until a boyfriend of mine, a white boyfriend, suggested we go to see the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir one Sunday morning.

“You’ve seen them, haven’t you?” I told him that I hadn’t. “Well, you’ve heard of them, right?” It rang vaguely familiar, yes, I said. He insisted we go.

The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir performs at the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, not very far from where I was living at the time. When you go, it seems that in general you have to stand in line or take a number or watch a closed-circuit broadcast from the street. In any case, they don’t perform right away. First, a sermon is given. I don’t remember the name of the preacher giving the sermon on that day, but he rose to the microphone and asked us with clear and vigorous intent to “Praise Jesus!” Bodies rose up around me, and in less than a minute, the whole congregation was standing, echoing the preacher’s words, waving gloved hands, nodding hat-adorned heads, eyes closed—a faith supreme. I looked over and saw that my boyfriend was standing, too, all six white gangly feet of him, swaying smoothly within the heat and murmur and energy of the crowd.

I stood reluctantly, hands in my pockets, self-conscious, trying to be cool. I stood like that for maybe fifteen minutes before I realized that nobody was trying to look at me. It was not about what I was doing or how I was responding or what I looked like if and when I was striving to feel God’s presence. It was about faith and trust and celebration, led by a man whose voice provided a well-lighted tunnel through which people could travel to where they needed to go. He was, of course, preaching God’s word, but he also appeared to be holding the hand of everyone in that congregation, holding it tightly, and showing people a way. Not the way, but a way.

Du Bois’s sense of the Negro preacher as “the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American Soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist” is perhaps among the more accessible of his prophetic observations that still hold up today. There are few people in America who don’t like, or who aren’t at least in some way drawn to, a black preacher. The characteristic style of a historically traditional black preacher, which downright lifts, tells, and chants—does everything short of physically giving God’s word—evokes a trust that goes beyond common faith and worship. The black preacher’s confidence is palpable, his mission unwavering.

The Reverend James Forbes, who is the Senior Minister of Riverside Church in New York, gives sermons that transport you back to a time you can’t remember being in but where you know you’ve been. His sermons rich with allegoric references and gentle, humanistic values, the Reverend Forbes embodies the spirit of the legendary black preacher while also engendering a kind of innovative spiritualism not just for black people but for an entire populace.

The Reverend James Forbes

To my mind, the black preacher is born out of the African figure known as the griot, a figure who served in African communities as the expression of the continuity of things eternal. In contemporary terms, I don’t think very many people understand that historic influence, and so they are not aware that whatever a black preacher is doing at any given time cannot be extracted or excerpted from the consciousness of the community he is serving. It’s like when you see someone give someone else a kiss— you focus on that gesture, but you know nothing about the history of their relationship or their struggles. Anyone who looks at preaching primarily as a moment of verbal exchange misses out on what is really going on. It is also among the surest kind of evidence that black Americans are ahistoric.

We became ahistorical when we were taken from the shores of Africa and learned how to escape the brutality of slave consciousness by allowing for the erasure of our past. Although there are conversations about Africanism today, back then we did not cultivate the consciousness of our relationship to Africa. Rather, we tried to place roots in the unwelcoming terrain of America, so fixed on what might be beyond this veil of tears that the roots were not sunk deep enough to take hold even had the terrain been welcoming. We wanted to survive. We didn’t want to think about what came before, what we had left behind and were forced to endure—an experience that has since been influenced by the suggestion that we were being done a favor by being brought over here. So you see that any lingering sense of our past has been contaminated.

Without a continuous historic consciousness, preaching, like our culture, also becomes ahistorical, and participates in the escapism so frequently experienced in the black church. Somewhere along the way, the art of preaching became the facilitation of denial, if only for the thirty minutes the preacher preaches. Let’s say that after you have an operation, the doctors let you punch the medication, but only while you’re in the hospital, because they know they can detoxify you fast enough if need be. But if when you go home, you ask for your own bag of morphine to take with you, they’ve got a junkie on their hands. A deadening of the senses so that the pain is endurable is fine, but when that begins to reprint itself on a form such as preaching, which was originally as expansive as time and eternity itself, anytime you administer palliatives, you are cheapening the experience.

The black church in America started out as an alternative island of consciousness for pain. And when anyone is in a situation of agonizing pain, it’s not for those of us who have some relative comfort to deny them that which at least sustains them. But the horror is to have a regimen for sustaining a state of being in pain when you are called upon to move toward wholeness. So, then, the black preacher has to make a decision: Does he want to equip people for the real world, or does he want to help them endure to the point of escape to a world that is yet to be?

Many years ago, Ossie Davis wrote a play called Purlie Victorious, and in it, the main character, Purlie, says, “Ain’t no promise, no pie in the sky, no life ever after right after we die. I have a different banner to wave … you and me we do the best we can … make way for a new fangled preacher man.” The challenge was to say that this preacher stands in contrast to those who emerged to provide escapism during the nightmarish horror of slavery. This is not to say that those earlier preachers did not serve a purpose—had they not existed, maybe we would not have come forth to imagine that there is a new way that preaching might serve the community.

I cannot afford to underestimate the power of stress reduction that is administered by the church. We now know that whatever we are struggling through, stress exacerbates it. So I say that if the only thing I do is to render a season of stress-reduced euphoria, then that is enough. That is as valuable as aspirin. And that is why we need to celebrate the black church, and to see it as lifesaving, while still being able to ask whether it is possible to become habituated to methods that were designed to sustain us only until we believed we could walk again. The black church provides a place where we can sit outside of the negation of who we have become, and it forces us to create an alternative against what is offered by the majority culture. It is the recognition that what is good news for the oppressor cannot be good news for the oppressed. It is the recognition that there had to be a homegrown variety of biblical interpretations.

The image of the black preacher that is strongest for me is one that comes from a Gullah folktale that appears in the 1950s Negro folklore collection by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. It starts like this: “Once all Africans could fly like birds.” In the story, a slave woman has just given birth and is beaten down and beaten down by the overseer, when an old black man says the words “Kum Buba Yali,” which means “Let them go up on high,” and she, with the baby at her side, flies off into the sky. When the overseer discovers what is going on, he says, “Get that black devil, he’s the one who’s causing us to lose all our slaves!” The old man turns to the rest of the black people in the field and says something that the overseer does not understand, because he is speaking to his people in the language of their mothers and fathers, and they all fly away.

That is what the preacher does. He speaks the language of our mothers and fathers, in the field, in solidarity with the slaves, in anticipation of being asked whether it is time for strategic planning in regard to the eventual revoke that a spirit has in mind. Preaching is a message of liberation or it is a message of sustenance. But it is damnable to be primarily a preacher of patient endurance when the prospect of liberation is present. To be a preacher is to be given a gift.

Afrocentric religion does not have the tradition between sacred and secular, and therefore, all of life is sacred. During summers in West Africa, where I spent some time as a young man, the village would have a yam festival to celebrate harvesting the yams. This was a religious expression. They did not have to go to church. You went to the yam festival and you heard the griot tell the story of how he dare not take the first harvest of the yam without remembering that the harvest is not automatic, that it is because of the ancestors, those who came before. The griot tells of the many times of droughts and famine throughout the years, but that because people have lived in conformity with the principles of the elders, this year we have been blessed. The griot is the lead teller of the story, but the rest of the people are singing, praising, and nodding along as he’s telling it, so that it is not his story alone, but the community’s story as a whole.

And so African religious expression has always been participatory. Some black people think that the worst thing Du Bois wrote in Souls was about the “frenzy of a Negro revival”—the dancing, the shouting, and the catching up into ecstasy. They think if white people or Europeans read that, they would get the sense that we are victims of uncontrolled excess. I think that when I get touched by the spirit, my traditional rules and motor actions are transcended and a new freedom comes.

As a culture, I think black people are lost. We have been granted the illusion of power and incorporation into the benefits of power, and we have bought into that illusion. Rather than Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” we now have what I call cognitive dissidence. Somewhere inside, we know that the trophies offered to us are hollow, and yet we go for them anyway, because of the power of manna. And this brings us right back to where we started—erasing our history, and trying to plant roots into infertile terrain.

The black church today will tell you that, yes, you need to survive, but you also need to preserve the riches of your heritage. Riverside Church in New York, where I preach, is an integrated church, which can introduce problems—white people do not need someone to say “Kum Buba Yali.” But I am convinced that we need not be reductionist about spiritual growth, because we’re all bound now.