Missionary in the Ghetto
CHAPTER FIFTEEN from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Missionary in the Ghetto
15
Contrary to her protestations, and in direct opposition to her basic instincts, she sold all her belongings and boarded a plane to Southern California. One thing she could say about Lou, she had never turned her away when she needed a place to crash. The last time she visited, on the occasion of her mother’s third wedding to Ed, she was living in a posh townhouse in Orange County. Petra was a bit surprised when they pulled into a run-down apartment complex in West Covina. Lou was the property manager, and Ed was the maintenance man.
It was a decent gig with rent included, which freed up a sizable chunk of their income to spend on food and drink. As heavy drinkers, they funneled an enormous amount of money into bars and restaurants. Astonished by the sheer magnitude of what she considered wasteful spending, coupled with a junkie mentality, always on the lookout for the most bang for the buck, she observed their behavior with horror, shock and amazement.
Lou and Ed’s drinking started around the breakfast table and ended in the bedroom watching late-night television. In between, they indulged in daily outings to well-trodden dining establishments. As regulars, pretending to be better off than they actually were, the staff welcomed them with open arms. Petra, well aware of their actual living conditions, winced as they threw away hundreds of dollars on top-shelf liquor, a classic component of the alcoholic “big shot” performance.
They, no doubt, felt an off-putting uneasiness around her unfamiliar and intolerant “Christian” persona. How could she blame them? Her mind, obsessed with their idiotic behavior and well-trained by narrow-minded right wing evangelicals, created a constant, albeit silent, playlist of revolving critical judgments and harsh condemnations. Fortunately, they were always drunk, allowing bothersome intuitions to roll up and over them.
As the child of alcoholic parents, Petra felt most comfortable amid unpredictable chaos. However, she had yet to develop the muscles necessary to remain clean and sober under such an emotional avalanche. It was only a matter of time before her hand reached out, without her consent, and threw back one of the many cocktails being dangled in front of her. It was a constant barrage. Lou and Ed were insistent and unapologetically polite with their generous offers to buy her a drink.
“Come on. What’s gotten into you?”
“You’re no alcoholic,” said Ed. “Have a drink!”
Whatever their motivation, one message was crystal clear. Consequences be damned. Addict or no addict, she, like a thorn in the side, was raining on their parade and a drink, like always, would solve the problem.
Sensing an unavoidable relapse, she sent out resumes to every church with social programs within a sixty-mile radius. She received two requests for an interview. The first was a salaried position from a well-to-do white church in Temecula. The interview went off without a hitch and they offered her the position.
“May I have a couple of days to think it through?"
The second was a missionary position with a Church of God in Christ in San Bernardino. She pulled up to the address on G Street, in the heart of a predominately black ghetto. Petra, a white woman driving a lipstick-red Volkswagen Bug, stuck out like a sore thumb. An old familiar feeling, fear mixed with excitement, lit her up with a surge of adrenaline. It reminded her of trying to score dope on Avenue D, back in the day. The glare of what should have been a bright midday sun diffused and darkened as it struggled to press through a thick gray blanket of smog. This was a Southern California version of Alphabet City.
The neighborhood, impoverished, depressed and dangerous, seemed haunted by the living, as well as the dead. A heaviness hung over its inhabitants as if demons rode their chariots upon the polluted air. There she stood, in the center of another dirty, seedy hellscape. It taunted her, lured her in and called her to action. How could she resist such an invitation?
Pastor McKinney, a licensed clinical social worker, and CEO of The Samaritan Social Services, interviewed her. The organization had a homeless shelter for women and children, a prison ministry and an extensive feeding program. Sister Mary McKinney, the pastor’s wife, took her out to their home in Colton, a suburb well outside the city limits. She had purchased the property decades earlier and, as the first Black person to move into the all-white neighborhood, had experienced all the expected racial slurs and prejudices.
“Sit, you go ahead and sit, that’s right. I’ll fix you a nice hot lunch.”
“Can I help?”
“Girl, you just relax and let me do what I do best.”
Petra, seated at the kitchen counter across from the stovetop, marveled as she whipped up a fabulous soul food lunch.
“Pastor says you used to be addicted to drugs.”
“Yes, is that a problem?”
“Good Lord, no! Besides, you got off of ‘em. It’s been over three years, right?”
“Yes, I can barely believe it.”
“He says you know the street, and that’s what I need. Someone who can empathize. Someone who came on up out of that mess. Everyone in the neighborhood’s trapped on those drugs. The little children are suffering. They need love. The parents too. Even those first of the month welfare check baby daddies. Love and understanding. Are you ready to be the face and hands of Jesus Christ?”
Her words, packed with the power of conviction and purpose, captivated Petra. The intensity of her charisma was unparalleled. Sister McKinney was a force of nature.
Observing her from a superficial point of view, none of it made sense. Although petite in stature, she had a strong muscular physique, a commanding presence and boundless energy. Her full face, with its broad nose, piercing black, almost angry eyes and wiry afro, which she tried to tame with a Jheri curl perm, was not what society at large would consider beautiful. Rather, it was the light that poured through her, a captivating radiance that transformed her most unconventional features into a new standard, an elite, heightened definition of beauty.
She had an assertive directness that invited you in and kept you off balance at the same time.
“Look, there’s no money. Everything that comes in money wise, goes back out to pay the rent and keep the lights on at the shelter. We can offer you room and board. Let me show you the guest room.”
“Are you inviting me into your home?”
Sister Mary later admitted that she had never in her life entertained such a proposal. Her home served as a refuge, and except for the occasional traveling evangelist, they protected their privacy. Inviting someone to stay for an indeterminate length of time was out of character.
“This is the Lord’s doing.”
Decades later, Petra would comprehend the command, “Go home to your mother,” as referencing Sister McKinney rather than her biological mother. Without a hint of hesitation, she accepted the position and moved in the following day.
Unprepared for the unique cultural immersion and rapid spiritual growth coming her way, she was unexpectedly well-equipped. Living in Brazil and Africa forced her to learn how to adapt and become a sanctioned part of a resistant culture, while her skin color distanced her. Her studies in Cultural Anthropology taught her to listen and observe, to take her time, to resist the temptation to force or manipulate her way in, allowing acceptance to occur along more natural lines. A decade as an addict in New York City had gifted her a unique, insider empathy and understanding of the thought patterns and compulsions of the people she was about to serve.
The severity and depth of American racial discord and prejudicial hatred presented many obstacles, both emotional and physical. For that, she was ill-prepared. She was often embarrassed, or the opposite, oblivious to her white entitlements. Just as Sister Mary was the first Black person to move into her neighborhood, she became the first, in her denomination, to invite a white person into her home and onto her religious platform. This was racial integration in reverse.
“Well, I never!”
“Can you believe she went and invited that white woman into her home?”
“She’ll be in bed with the husband in no time at all. Mark my words.”
“Look at her up there on that stage. Little Miss, prim and proper. Who does she think she is?”
Pastor McKinney placed Petra on staff with the title of “Missionary.” In the few years she spent working with them, she was the only white face in the inner-city ghetto and on the circuit at the Southern California Church of God in Christ conventions.
The denomination was strict and had even more rules than the church she came from. Sister McKinney would often joke that she was her little white, heathen daughter.
“Sit with ankles crossed while seated on the platform.”
They always seated Petra in front of the congregation, on stage, as her position required.
“No crossing of the legs.”
She was a fidgety leg-crosser.
“For heaven’s sake, no bare arms.”
Are armpits sexy?
“Modest dress at all times.”
That meant dresses below the knees with high necklines.
“Panty hose required.”
Most of the churches they frequented lacked air conditioning. Nylons and long sleeves exacerbated the sweltering conditions. Petra had moved from Hawaii and that was the explanation given to the church mothers when she ran off stage, ripped free from her strangling pantyhose, and returned to the platform bare-legged.
“Well, that’s a white woman for you. They got no tolerance for pain.”
A few months into her employment, she approached the Pastor.
“Pastor McKinney, I’m almost out of money.”
She thought she had proven herself enough to earn a small stipend. Sister Mary overheard the conversation.
In that direct, almost condescending tone, she made an inquiry.
“Didn’t you have a job over there in Hawaii?”
She knew Petra had been a teacher.
“Why haven’t you filed for unemployment?”
“What?”
Had no one stopped to consider that she had very few life skills? What did she know about unemployment? She didn’t know that she was unemployed. She thought she was working full time. In an insightful flash, Petra realized she was a volunteer.
The angry internal adolescent, not used to the fact that Petra could suddenly hear her when she spoke, had several opinions on the matter.
“Look at you, working your ass off for free. This is some fucking loser bullshit! What are you, a four-year-old baby looking for your mommy? Get a real life, why don’t you?”
“Shut up, shut up! Stop attacking me.”
She filed the next morning. Unemployment required her to look for jobs.
“You go right ahead and apply for all the jobs you want. You don’t need to accept any employment that pays less than your last job,” said Sister McKinney.
Without a teaching certificate, she would be hard-pressed to find comparable employment. She was, either, over or under-qualified. Even though viable employment was not working out, she never missed an opportunity to mention her volunteer work and rounded up a respectable number of new supporters. With her financial autonomy intact, at least by ghetto standards, and since, she was not being paid by the church or The Samaritan Social Services; she enjoyed the freedom to choose her place in the ministry, which was, of course, at Sister Mary’s side.
For two to three hours, in the middle of the night, every night, Sister Mary McKinney prayed and meditated in her study, which was right next to the guest bedroom. Petra, a light sleeper, would crack open her door, sit on the floor in the doorframe, with her knees pulled up, and listen.
There were alternating cycles of weeping and laughter and “YES, Lord!”
A heaviness filled the air as if enormous angels had squeezed themselves into the tiny space. For all she knew, her mentor was in the next room levitating. Here was a woman who knew exactly who she was. She understood her divinity; she embraced her humanity, and she was at one with her Creator.
Sister McKinney had three passions. She loved talking about God. She was a soul food chef, and she enjoyed feeding hungry people. At least three days a week, they filled the back of her Toyota pickup truck with food and drove to a local park. Everyone knew her and her little white truck. In less than thirty minutes, a crowd would form. Everyone knew the drill.
Sitting on the tailgate, she would preach whatever secrets God had told her, in meditation, the night before. People would weep as a palpable sense of love and compassion flowed from her and penetrated their hearts and minds. Unmistakable joy and camaraderie, relief from their cares, an offer of salvation, acceptance, surrender, a sweet momentary reprieve, a taste of what was possible, a delivery of hope; these were the gifts she gave, the heart of her mission.
She presented the onlookers with a priceless treasure, a powerful belief that divinity and purpose are inherent in all human beings. All that was required was a willingness to look inward and seek. She ministered Spirit to Spirit while she cared for the physical man, who, seeking food, had brought his divine self to the meeting. With love, she distributed whatever provisions they had collected the day before.
Sometimes they fasted before a mission. Such instructions came during Sister McKinney’s prayer time.
She would say something like:
“We’re going on a three-day fast. I can’t tell you why.”
Well, she could have, but Petra was on a strict need-to-know basis.
“Let me repeat myself. No food, three days, got it?”
Most of Petra’s understanding from her time as Sister McKinney’s sidekick had to be discovered in hindsight. She needed to grow in spiritual understanding if she wanted to comprehend what she had seen and heard. In those days, she was much closer, in her spiritual development, to the people they ministered to, than to her teacher. Unlike the people they helped, she was in constant proximity to Sister McKinney; gifted with the opportunity to experience the miraculous daily.
On the morning of the fourth day, they pulled up in front of a dilapidated motel.
Grabbing Petra’s hand, she pointed at the building.
“That’s a crack house. Room 109. We’re going in.”
There was no time for fear. Sister Mary knocked out of politeness and walked right in.
The interior comprised four consecutive motel rooms with the adjoining walls knocked out. At the far end, a closed door concealed a makeshift office for the dealers. Mothers and their children sat on the floor along the perimeter wall. They formed a line that began to the right of the office door.
The silence was unnerving. No one spoke. It was the first of the month. With welfare checks in hand, the women waited for the man to open up. They were stone-cold sober and had been for several days. Petra had seen nothing like it. All these mothers waiting to score and their terrified children, right there next to them. It was obvious by their expressions that they understood what was happening. Anxiety among the little ones mounted in slow steady intervals not from their surroundings but from the knowledge of what would happen later, after the drugs had kicked in.
Sister McKinney broke the silence.
“Listen closely and hear me. You have a choice to make. Will you choose life or will you choose death?”
Her words carried that feeling, the one where the angels occupy the air, where your hair stands up on end and energy flows in and through your body, giving rise to goosebumps. She preached for less than ten minutes.
Appealing to them as mothers, she spoke of the eternal consequences for their children. First one, and then all the children left their mothers and crossed the room to her, and to Petra, by default. They clung to their arms and their skirts. When she finished speaking, she knelt down to embrace them and encouraged Petra to do the same. She returned the children to their mothers in a gentle, loving, and accepting manner.
Weeping inside, she smiled a broad, beautiful smile, took Petra’s hand and walked the two of them out onto the street, into the sunlight and back to the truck.
Petra asked, “That’s it?”
She could see her heartbreak and her faith.
“It’s all we can do. God will do the rest.”
Later that day, one mother and her three children knocked on the shelter door. She handed over her welfare check and her food stamps for safekeeping. Sobbing, she fell into Sister McKinney’s arms.
“Life, I choose life.”
They often visited the neighborhood prostitutes in prison. Sister McKinney always knew where everyone was. Incarceration was a welcome relief, and the ladies referred to it as “vacation time.” It provided an opportunity to heal and gain back the weight they had lost smoking crack. A much needed break from the traumatic impact of hustling on the street; a time to address the psychological and physical wounds they suffered by placing themselves in the arms of dangerous, depraved men. It offered a period of reflection and, if you were from the neighborhood, it guaranteed a visit from the Lord, in the humble form of Sister Mary McKinney.
They visited Queenie many times. She had earned her name by her command of the street and her power over the Johns. Here was another amazing human being dragged down into the underworld by a desperate need for drugs. Her addiction and her life choices stemmed from a trauma-ridden childhood too horrible to face. Unconscious psychological patterns of abuse drove her. Uncontrollable anxiety and self-loathing became her primary motivators, leading her into self-destructive cycles, over and over, ad infinitum.
When Petra looked into Queenie’s eyes for the first time, it was like looking in a mirror. In a strange supernatural twist, their faces juxtaposed on to each other.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
Queenie saw it too, but shook it off.
The waiting period for a jail visitation was three weeks. It was based on common sense. The mind needed an opportunity to clear and become coherent. The body required time to respond to nutrition. At each visit, Sister McKinney ministered love and hope. She never judged. There was never even a hint of condemnation. She saw and spoke to Queenie’s divinity. She ministered to the wounded child deep inside her and gave her the Mother’s love and acceptance she longed for.
During one anointed visit, something shifted. The three of them, all at once, without a doubt, knew that this would be her final incarceration. Sister McKinney had known Queenie since she was a teenager. She was in her mid-thirties. That is a long time to turn tricks out on the street. Petra remembered seeing her one late afternoon, hustling on the corner as they passed by in the truck. She remembered her face lighting up and her wide smile as she waved and shouted, so happy to see Sister Mary. It didn’t matter that she was busy prostituting or addicted to crack.
Who could hide from that kind of love? Witnessing and taking part in the slow methodical deliverance of Queenie gave Petra hope. For the first time, she became willing to confide in an adult. The next day, she sat down with Sister McKinney and told her everything she knew about what had happened to her in Liberia.
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.