Mukiya Baker-Gomez, a veteran Democratic strategist and now chief of staff for state representative Gloria Fox, sees Jubilee as typical of black churches that no longer pursue one of their traditional missions. “Jubilee doesn’t do community organizing. Instead, there’s a lot more attention to individual development, but I don’t think individual development relates to responsibility to the community. When I was coming up, most every church in Boston had a social action committee that engaged people in their community and trained them in political and civic action. That doesn’t exist anymore.” Although Baker-Gomez characterizes Bishop Thompson as “a star supporter of Romney,” she’s inclined to view him as largely apolitical. Judged by her standards, “he’s been somewhat conservative about getting into politics.”
But the nature of a megachurch’s mega-ness—the sheer numbers of citizens and dollars and square feet involved, the emphasis on growth as a cardinal virtue—tends to thrust its leader into the public sphere (and, often, to blunt the more uncompromising edges of his theology). Thompson’s achievements as a religious leader have pulled him deeper into politics. As president of the Black Ministerial Alliance, a position he has held since 2004, he must get a theologically and politically diverse group to speak with one voice. Charged with representing mainline liberals as well as the conservative evangelicals like himself who have begun to supplant them, the master congregation builder has to match his signature forcefulness with tact.
“The whole Northeast is just beginning to deal with the fact of large numbers of evangelicals. They’re not tremendously powerful yet here, but their power has been increasing, and in 25 years they will be even more so,” says Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary. The flourishing of New England’s first cohort of megachurches has special significance in an era when conservative evangelical credentials command particular political respect. Campaign consultants, the media, and grant-making government agencies all pay serious attention to a minister who can influence several thousand motivated, upwardly mobile, committed voters. And Thompson’s coziness with Governor Romney will gain him even greater clout if Romney makes a credible run for the White House in 2008. Put that together with the emergence of the so-called New Boston as a majority-minority city and the decline of entrenched religious powers, and you begin to appreciate how expertly Thompson has picked his way through a social landscape in upheaval.
With his purchase of Our Lady of the Rosary—which is getting an upgraded sound system and rows of folding chairs to replace the pews, thereby nearly tripling its capacity—Thompson seized on an opportunity decades in the making. Though linked in the public mind with the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, the closing of parishes can actually be traced to the suburbanization and increasing prosperity of white-ethnic Catholics after World War II. James O’Toole, a Boston College historian and former archivist for the archdiocese, says, “Like most American dioceses, Boston put off for as long as it could facing this problem of big church ‘plants’ built by and for immigrant populations that had long since moved away.” This failure to face demographic facts had political consequences. “The church here did have real influence in the early twentieth century, and could sway voters and turn them out for the polls, but starting in the ’50s and ’60s, the church doesn’t try the direct political approach as much, and it doesn’t work as well when it does.”
Entrepreneurial Protestants like Thompson have begun to fill the power vacuum. As he makes his move, Thompson has kept in mind the example of his father, who imbibed the bootstrap philosophy of Booker T. Washington as a student at Tuskegee. Like his father, Thompson has made sure whenever possible to own the land he’s standing on, which makes the footing a lot less precarious. “Real estate, real property,” he says, “is like a part of my DNA.”
By carefully attending to worldly as well as spiritual business, Thompson has built an institution on a scale to match his ambitions. His legacy, he hopes, will be “a church without walls,” a phrase he says he “heard” years ago while praying. “It starts with the spiritual,” he says, “and then out of that comes economic development, social and political strength. Now, I’d part company with my liberal Democratic brethren on how to do it. They look to the government, but I think African Americans need to build strength for themselves, the way the Koreans, the Chinese, the Jewish did it.”
In the course of elaborating this vision during the conversation in his office, Thompson brings up two popular movies that, taken together, say a great deal about him. One is Field of Dreams, in which a man of stubborn faith heeds a disembodied voice and ends up meeting a need felt so deeply by so many people that he causes a traffic jam not unlike those you’ll find on Blue Hill Avenue on Sunday mornings. “If you build it, they will come,” says the bishop, smiling a little. The other movie he mentions is The Godfather. “When they come to the wedding, they all bring money,” and he smiles a little when he says this, too.
* * *
Original publication: “The Kingdom and the Power,” Boston, August 2006.
A History of Violence
“THIS IS KEN-GAR,” SAID George Pelecanos. We were sitting in his car on a quiet, green block of Plyers Mill Road. Bright sunlight warmed a row of modest, well-kept houses facing the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks.
Pelecanos, one of the most respected crime writers working today, was telling me a story. In the summer of 1972, three white teenagers riding around in a car went looking for trouble in Ken-Gar, a black enclave between Kensington and Garrett Park in Montgomery County, Maryland. “They threw a firecracker” at a group of young people in front of a grocery store. Also, Pelecanos said, they probably shouted a racial slur. “They were blue-collar kids. They’d heard about other people doing it, but they didn’t know you were supposed to do it on the way out.” Big mistake. Ken-Gar, a seven-block triangle bounded by the tracks, Rock Creek Park, and Connecticut Avenue, is a warren of dead ends. By the time the kids in the car realized that Plyers Mill Road was the only way in or out, they were trapped. Angry residents blocked the street. One of them had a gun.
“One kid jumps out of the car, books off down the tracks. He gets away,” Pelecanos said. The other two tried to talk their way out of the jam. “The kid who tries to reason with them gets shot in the back and dies. The other kid gets beat up pretty badly. The police locked down the neighborhood.” The gunman was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Pelecanos based his fifteenth novel, The Turnaround, which arrives in bookstores next month, on the incident. He read court documents and interviewed longtime residents, gathering material that lent itself to his favorite themes: place, local knowledge, and community; the interwoven dynamics of race and class; masculinity’s rites and burdens; and the near infinite resonance of an act of violence. The peculiar geography and history of Ken-Gar, which was settled by former slaves at the turn of the twentieth century, shaped what happened on that August afternoon 36 years ago, and the shots fired and the blows given and taken in the space of a few overheated seconds changed forever the lives of four young men and their families.
Pelecanos, who grew up nearby in Silver Spring and lives there with his wife and three children, was fifteen that summer. “I remembered it vaguely,” he said, “and I did my research, and I was interested in what it was like to live there back then, but I didn’t want to learn too much about the case itself. I wasn’t writing journalism. Having too many of the facts of the case would have gotten in the way.”
He went on to explain that The Turnaround owes a significant debt to another source that has nothing to do with the Ken-Gar incident. “It also comes from the last scene of Josey Wales,” he said, referring to Clint Eastwood’s post–Civil War western The Outlaw Josey Wales. “‘We all died a little in that war.’ It’s about forgiveness.”
There wouldn’t seem to be much room for forgiveness in hardboiled crime stories or the westerns they descend from, but emoti
onal complexity and understated resolutions enjoy a rising presence in Pelecanos’s work. He has wearied of climactic shootouts, blind vengeance, and other stock formulas of retribution. “I’ve been struggling with that,” he said. “You want to deliver the genre goods, but in the last few books, I’ve been delivering them more sheepishly. The Turnaround isn’t even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don’t know any other way to do it than crime.”
Pelecanos is not the kind of crime writer who sets up a series hero and then regularly cranks out comfortable variations on the same book. He has been described as not only the Raymond Chandler and the James Ellroy of Washington but also its Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser. His fans include the distinguished novelist Jonathan Lethem, who has described Pelecanos’s prose as “full of music and pain,” the horror titan Stephen King, who has called him “perhaps the greatest living American crime writer,” and Michael Connelly, a best-selling writer of psychologically textured mysteries, who has called him “the best-kept secret in crime fiction—maybe all fiction.” Pelecanos’s books sell steadily to a loyal audience, but his publisher keeps pushing to raise his profile, to turn a writer often described as a cult figure into a mega-brand like Connelly or Elmore Leonard. There are other ways to measure success, though. Pelecanos enjoys the respect of peers and critics; he played an important part in creating the wildly acclaimed HBO show The Wire; and he has branched out into side pursuits, such as writing a war drama for HBO and editing collections of stories set in Washington—the second of which, D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, due out in September, features the work of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Edward P. Jones.
Pelecanos, who is 51, told me, “Sometimes I think The Wire said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels. I can feel my energy beginning to dissipate. One thing I didn’t realize about this business when I started was that it could be my job to write a novel a year, but it’s also my job to take a walk and think.” He owes one more book to his publisher, and the contract specifies that it be a crime novel and that it be delivered by the end of the year, but he’s not sure in what direction his writing will go after that. Working in the overlap where the crime novelist meets the literary novelist, Pelecanos has always been willing to push his heroes, his city, and his storytelling craft through difficult changes.
In the summer of 1968, when Pelecanos was eleven, he went to work as a delivery boy at his father’s diner, the Jefferson Coffee Shop at 19th Street and Jefferson Place NW. He dreamed up serial westerns in his head to amuse himself as he made his rounds on foot. Two months before, the death of Martin Luther King Jr. had sparked riots in Washington, as it had in other American cities. There’s a scene in Hard Revolution (2004), Pelecanos’s novel about that time, in which eleven-year-old Nick Stefanos, who will grow up to become an alcoholic private eye, comes out of Sunday school at his church and hears King’s amplified voice, preaching. “That was me,” Pelecanos said. “March 31, 1968. I was coming out of St. Sophia, and they had hung speakers outside the National Cathedral, across the street, where he was preaching.” King would be murdered in Memphis four days later.
We were standing on the corner of 14th and U Streets in Northwest as Pelecanos, an upright, chesty fellow with a deep voice and a manner composed of equal parts reserve and dry good humor, told the story. “Fourteenth burned from all the way down there to all the way up there,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with one arm. “Fourteenth, Seventh, H Street, all burned. I took the bus every day down Georgia Avenue, and I could see the ashes. It still smelled of fire, and you could feel that people had changed. It felt like this thing had been lifted. I could see how people treated each other. They were thinking, ‘How do we talk to each other now?’ There was a lot of tension. Black people were less deferential toward whites, and, at the diner, white people treated the black employees with more respect.”
Looking back on that summer, Pelecanos sees himself launched down the path to his calling. “Working at my dad’s diner, that was the most important thing. That summer, the first summer—the riots, the young ladies wearing miniskirts, the music on the radio, it was all there. That’s what made me a writer.”
Of course, it took more than this original inspiration. For one thing, he had to learn more about the city that would serve as his subject and setting. There’s a tendency to assume a mystical connection between a crime writer and “his” city, but close-grained knowledge of a place comes not by inheritance or sentimental osmosis but from curiosity, attention, and sustained effort. Working for his father took Pelecanos down Georgia Avenue into Washington, and, later, so did sports. He played pickup basketball in playgrounds around the city, and he played second base on a rec league baseball team that won the District title in 1973, he said. As he entered adulthood, his interest in punk and go-go music and his appetite for movies drew him to clubs and theaters offering cosmopolitan attractions unavailable in Silver Spring. Then there was work: tending bar and selling shoes, stereos, and appliances in the District gave him copious opportunities to catalogue the speech and manners of Washington’s citizens.
Getting to know the city was half the equation; developing the technique to render it in prose was the other. Unconsciously at first, then with a growing sense of purpose as he sharpened his focus on writing crime stories, Pelecanos stocked his authorial toolbox by assimilating various influences.
His earliest appreciation of the storyteller’s craft came from the movies. He said, “I had this book, The Movies, a big book full of pictures, and I just studied it obsessively when I was eight, nine, ten.” Steve Rados, an old friend of his, told me: “When we were just getting into our teens, I’d sleep over at his house, and we’d maybe steal a little liquor and watch movies all night, and he would know the director, he would know where this movie fit into the history of Hollywood. He was already getting more than face value out of watching a movie.” Pelecanos ate up the standard guy pictures of his youth—The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation movies—and they penetrated into his storytelling DNA. (He listens to Ennio Morricone’s operatic movie soundtracks while he writes, and he drives a limited-edition 2001 Ford Mustang GT based even down to its exhaust note on the car Steve McQueen drove in the chase scene in Bullitt.) But he also extended his interest into the more eclectic fare offered by the Circle Theatre and other DC repertory houses: classical Hollywood films, European art movies, Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.
He majored in film during an on-again, off-again college career at the University of Maryland, but he had no prospects in the business. “I was just a Greek guy from DC who didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I wasn’t going to make movies.” In his senior year, he wandered into a course on crime fiction taught by Charles Mish, who introduced him to a trade he could pursue and master on his own. “I said to myself, This is what I really want to do. I could go sit in a room and do this. I didn’t have to ask anybody for anything; I didn’t have to sell myself. It changed my life.” Pelecanos kept the epiphany to himself. “I was a quiet guy in class. Years later, I wrote to the professor after my first novel came out, and he wrote back, ‘Congratulations; I don’t remember you.’ But I can still tell you what we read: Red Harvest; Lady in the Lake; I, the Jury; The Blue Hammer; Call for the Dead; The Deep Blue Goodbye.”
After graduating in 1980, he “read for the next ten years, just to catch up. Crime fiction was changing then. The traditional private eye novel was dying out.” He went back to Horace McCoy, Edward Anderson, and other pre–World War II masters of social-realist crime fiction, but he also took note of contemporaries who were stretching the genre. “James Crumley, Kem Nunn’s surf noir Tapping the Source, Newton Thornburgh’s Cutter and Bone—they took the form and did something different with it,” Pelecanos said. “It wasn’t police fiction. It wasn’t the detective with the bottle of whiskey in the file cabinet. There wasn’t a mystery to solve.
It was about people out there, kind of lost after the Vietnam War, a generation knocked off center, and it dealt with that through the crime novel, exploring that world at a street level. I started thinking maybe I can just write about what I know. There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.”
He needed a push, though, to make the jump from reader to writer. He got it from the DC punk scene that flourished around hardcore bands such as Fugazi, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains. He said, “The whole idea was you didn’t have to be a musician, you didn’t have to have ties to a record company, you didn’t have to be somebody’s son. You just picked up a guitar and made something—maybe it was art, maybe not.” DIY, as the punk motto puts it: Do It Yourself. So, Pelecanos did the writer’s equivalent of picking up a guitar and making something.
He worked day jobs and wrote on his own time. In Pelecanos’s first novel, A Firing Offense (1992), Nick Stefanos, advertising director at an electronics store called Nutty Nathan’s, searches for a missing stock boy, a metalhead who has sunk deep into trouble over drugs and money. Pelecanos, who had no agent at the time, sent the manuscript to a single publisher, St. Martin’s Press, which bought it and the four that followed. The advances were nowhere near enough to live on: $2,500, $3,000, $3,500. During the 1990s, Pelecanos worked for Jim and Ted Pedas, who had owned the Circle Theatre and other movie houses but had moved into production and distribution. While helping to produce the Coen brothers’ early films and distribute John Woo’s Hong Kong crime classic The Killer, among other tasks, Pelecanos honed his novel-writing chops and began to build a loyal audience. He switched to Little, Brown and Company, receiving a $45,000 advance for King Suckerman (1997), a 1970s tale that features a hotly awaited but uniquely disappointing blaxploitation movie. When Miramax bought the rights to the book and hired him to write the screenplay, Pelecanos took a chance and quit his day job. “I told my wife, ‘I think I can make a living at this.’” The movie was never made, one of several near-miss attempts to adapt his novels. Unmade screenplays and elapsed options don’t improve book sales, but they do produce welcome infusions of Hollywood money.
Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories Page 9
