Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Day by day, the number of calls increased. In a couple of years, Hall was getting around seventy-five a day. He was overjoyed. From 6 A.M. until 7 P.M., he sat beside his telephone, going out to preach in the streets only at night. ‘Things went along real smooth,’ he says, ‘until the Monday after Pearl Harbor. That day I preached until my jaw got stiff. There wasn’t a moment’s letup. The instant I put the receiver down and caught my breath, the phone rang again. I preached I think it was eighty-three sermons in a row, some over five minutes long, and then my head began to swim. I took the receiver off the hook and went in and flopped down on the bed, all wore out.’ Presently an investigator from the telephone company knocked on the door, aroused him, and told him that scores of people had complained that they got only a busy signal when they dialled his number. Hall sighed, went to his telephone, and started in again. In the morning he summoned to his apartment six of his disciples, all elderly women who make a practice of handing out his tracts and all lay preachers; they agreed to come to his rescue and take turns on the telephone.

  Nowadays, Hall seldom preaches on the telephone more than a couple of dozen times a day; he saves his energy for his saloon harangues and his nightly journey down Broadway. His disciples, who model their sermons on his, handle most of the calls. In return, he gives them carfare, an occasional grassy meal, and his blessing. The most zealous is an Englishwoman named Frances Woodcock. She comes in from Queens each day and preaches from around 8:30 until 11:55 in the morning. Then she hastens around the corner to the Gospel Tabernacle, a Fundamentalist, nondenominational mission on Eighth Avenue, in whose work Hall is a believer, and plays the organ at the noon meeting. Frequently she returns in the afternoon. The sole male helper is Joseph Serafin, an elocutionary Rumanian, who is renting agent for an Eighth Avenue loft building owned by the Tabernacle. He drops in whenever he has an hour or two to spare. Calls are answered constantly from 6 A.M. until midnight, when the receiver is removed. Hall says that more than a hundred and fifty thousand sermons have been preached over his telephone since December, 1939. He estimates that around one-fourth of the callers are curiosity seekers, practical jokers, or the victims of practical jokers. Many of these victims are under the impression that horse-race bets are taken at Circle 6-6483. One practical joker spoke double-talk. After listening to him for a few moments, Hall exclaimed, ‘Speak out, man, speak out! What are you, anyhow, a Mohammedan?’ Finally he summoned Serafin, who was in the adjoining room, eating a head of cabbage. ‘Come here, Serafin,’ Hall said. ‘I think I’ve got a poor Mohammedan brother on the wire. He seems to be in sore distress.’ Serafin, who is more worldly, listened for a moment or two and then explained double-talk to Hall. ‘I fixed that brother,’ Hall says, cackling. ‘I interrupted him and shouted at him in Latin until he got mad and told me to go to you know where.’

  Hall quizzes his callers, and has come to the conclusion that the majority are repentant backsliders. ‘They had the old-time religion,’ he says, ‘but somewhere along the line they lost it. The war makes them ache to find it again. ‘Turn over a new leaf,’ I tell them. ‘Repent. Pray. Read your Bible. Find an old-time church and go to it. Don’t go to one of those Fifth Avenue churches that all they have is weddings.’ The most of them are hungry to confess. Oh, my! Some confess to sins I never even heard of before. I hear things I wouldn’t discuss with anybody, not even another preacher. Some call from saloons; while I’m exhorting I can hear the racket from one of those monstrous nickel phonographs a-coming over the wire. Some are lonely, some have sons fighting across the water, some have consciences that hurt and hurt, some are unwed girls that got in a family way after heeding a rascal’s promise, some are booze-fighters, some are studying suicide. Oh, I get more people now days that are studying suicide.’

  Some of Hall’s more desperate callers insist on conferring with him face to face, and most mornings there are a few sitting in his living room, waiting to be admitted to his study. Hall lives in a cold-water tenement at 360 West Forty-fifth Street, paying $30 a month for five small rooms. He has been there for twelve years. He has one of those rear flats whose entrance is through the kitchen and whose windows overlook a blind court with a single, sooty ailanthus tree in it. His telephone has nine feet of cord; in winter it is kept on a stand near the coal range in the kitchen and in summer it is moved to a desk adjacent to a window in the living room. The telephone costs him only $3.54 a month; since he is a clergyman, he gets a reduction of twenty-five per cent below the basic rate. Hall’s study is cluttered. In it are an enamelled iron bed, a radio, a bureau, a couple of straight-back chairs, three tables, and a pigeonhole cabinet which holds bales of tracts. Leaning against the wall in one corner are three collapsible cots. Hall is acquainted with scores of itinerant colporteurs and evangelists, and when they are in New York they sleep in his flat. Sometimes he has so many guests that there are not enough cots to go around and he has to spread pallets on the floor. There is a typewriter on one table, and a great rat’s-nest of correspondence and manuscripts. Hall is editor of a tiny monthly magazine, the Church Militant, which sells for a quarter a year and has thirteen hundred subscribers. The policy of this paper is extraordinary – it favors prohibition, savings banks, osteopathy, and women preachers; it opposes church suppers, vaccination, bingo, and aspirin tablets.

  Under the iron bed is a pile of newspapers, mostly tabloids. Hall rarely buys a newspaper; these were picked up by his disciples off subway seats. He says that when the pile gets large enough to bother with he goes through it and clips out stories proving that the wages of sin is death, such as stories about women suicides and electrocutions at Sing Sing; he has two bureau drawers full of clippings. One wall is covered with snapshots of Hall converts. On another wall are two oilcloth signs. One says, ‘LOST: A HUMAN SOUL OF UNTOLD VALUE. ANYONE BRINGING SAME TO CHRIST WILL BE RICHLY REWARDED.’ The other says, ‘CIGARETTE SMOKERS WILL PLEASE CRAWL INTO THE STOVE AND OPEN THE BACK DRAFT.’ Hall is an enemy of tobacco. ‘My daddy was murdered by the tobacco trust,’ he says. ‘He was a cigar smoker and he dropped dead long before his time.’ Hall occasionally marries couples in his study, most of whom came to know him by way of the telephone. The study is cleaned for weddings, but not often otherwise. A disciple once pointed at one of the windowsills, on which grit and dust was half an inch thick, and said, ‘That’s a mess if ever I saw one. Why don’t you dust it off?’ ‘I don’t dust off windowsills,’ Hall said indignantly. ‘I dust off human souls.’

  Hall’s outlook on life is a product of the grayness of the Reconstruction period in the South. He was born in 1864, during the winter of the fourth year of the Civil War, in Greenville, Alabama, a small county seat. His family has been in the South since pre-Revolutionary days. His father’s forebears came from Scotland, his mother’s from Holland. The family, once affluent, was impoverished by the war, in which Hall’s father, Dr James Woodward Hall, served as a Confederate Army physician. ‘I had a real stony childhood,’ Hall says. ‘I was one of eleven children, and there was never enough to go around, duds or vittles. I didn’t wear shoes until I was eighteen, except Sundays and cold spells. I went through the fifth grade, living on grits and greens, and then I had to stay home and plow cotton. I plowed with an ox. There weren’t any mules in that country when I was a young un; the Yankees had shot them all to entertain themselves. We had a hard, hard time.’ Hall was tutored at night by his mother, who had what he calls ‘a rock-bottom Latin and Shakespeare education.’ When he was twenty, he quit the cotton fields and became a schoolteacher.

  In Anniston, Alabama, in 1888, he had his first memorable encounter with sin. ‘I was teaching in a boys’ school and rooming and boarding at a hotel, the finest in town,’ he says. ‘Some show people by the name of Graw’s Dixieland Grand Opera Company came to Anniston and put up at my hotel. I had never been to the theatre and I took a foolish notion to go. I don’t know what possessed me to do so. I’m not what you’d call narrow, but oh, my! I was shocked! And that night
, back in the hotel, those strutty show women were up and about until fully 2 A.M., a-giggling and a-carrying on. I suspect they drank. I looked out my door and saw one a-tiptoeing down the hall in her nightshift. Her hair was down. It was long, yellow hair, more gold than yellow. I believe until this day that she was on her way to some man’s room. I still pray for her; I do hope she reformed. Next morning I got on my knees and asked God to forgive me for going to the theatre, and I asked Him to make me a preacher, so I could go forth and fight such wickedness.’ Hall says that he has never been in a theatre again. He takes great pride in this. Recently, on the Forty-second Street crosstown trolley, he heard one woman say to another, ‘I haven’t been to the theatre in months.’ Hall leaned across the aisle and said, ‘Sister, I haven’t been to the theatre since 1888.’

  In 1892, when Hall was twenty-eight, he took his school-teaching savings and entered the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. Four years later he became an Episcopal priest. He started out with churches in two Alabama small towns, Troy and Union Springs, which are forty miles apart. ‘I preached one Sunday here,’ he says, ‘and the next Sunday yonder.’ He received $50 a month. In 1904 he was appointed Episcopal chaplain for Pratt City and Flattop, two convict camps on the outskirts of Birmingham, at a salary of $1,000 a year, which is the most he has ever made. Flattop was a Siberia; only the worst criminals were sent there, to work in a coal mine. Hall prepared men for the scaffold, and he has since used his experiences to illustrate many a grisly sermon. He says he converted hundreds. ‘The best time to convert a convict,’ he says, ‘is directly after there’s been a hanging. One Good Friday I walked to the scaffold with three train-robbing brothers, and each time the trap was sprung there came forth a certain sound. Ka-chug, crack! Ka-chug, crack! Ka-chug, crack! I went straight from the hanging yard to the cell occupied by Tom Fay, a new convict. Tom was a real boa constrictor; he was the crown prince of the Miller Duncan gang of highwaymen, and he was feared by the whole of Alabama. I described this certain sound to Tom, and I chatted with him on the subject of hell. Lo and behold! Not only did I convert him, but a few months later he became a preacher himself.’

  Hall’s work with convicts got to be well known among evangelists all over the country, and in 1908 he was invited to Philadelphia to take charge of Galilee Mission, on Vine Street. Galilee is a meeting hall and dormitory, supported by Episcopalians, for down-and-outs. It is patterned after the rescue missions on the Bowery. The job paid only $900 a year, but Hall took it. ‘The main thing I learned at Galilee,’ he says, ‘is that the scourges of mankind are adultery, drink, drugs, and doubt. Every night of the year we held a three-hour meeting and the derelicts you might call them stood up, one by one, and testified. They came from every walk of life, even the ministry, but there was a sameness about their confessions – adultery, drink, drugs, or doubt, night after night. Among the derelicts I ran into were sixty-one of the reverend clergy, all sots. I’ll say this for the preacher sot. When he hits the bottle, he doesn’t do any jackleg, halfway job. He puts his mind to it. He works at it. An awful, awful thing to see!’ After twelve years as superintendent of Galilee, Hall resigned and became a street preacher. He wandered for four years, seldom staying in one city longer than a couple of weeks. ‘One night in Los Angeles in 1923,’ he says, ‘I decided that I was about ready to unpack my grip and stay a while somewhere, and I asked myself a question. “Brother Hall,” I said to myself, “which city is the most wicked city, pluperfect and parboiled, you’ve ever been in?” Without a bit of hesitation the answer came forth, “New York, N.Y.” Consequently, I got on a train and came here and took root. If you’re determined to fight the devil, you might as well get right up in the front-line trenches.’

  Hall differs from other street preachers in that he never takes up a collection. If he is offered money on the street, he accepts it, but this happens infrequently. ‘When it comes to religion,’ he says, ‘the common run of New York people aren’t stingy; they just don’t believe in giving anything away.’ His preaching has been subsidized, ever since he came here, by a succession of old, wealthy, Fundamentalist ladies, most of them of Southern birth. One, for example, the widow of a real-estate man, gave him $75 a month for more than five years, asking only that he preach at noon in front of J. P. Morgan & Company as often as possible. Another, also a widow, who lived at the Plaza, used to hand him an envelope containing from one to five $10 bills every time he went to call on her. In 1930 she gave him $500 and sent him to London to attend the Lambeth Conference. ‘Once I dropped in on this lady and found her taking a glass of wine,’ Hall says. ‘She turned it off by saying it was doctor’s orders. Except for wine, she was a good old soul.’ Since 1933, when Hall reached the retirement age, he has been receiving $50 a month from the Pension Fund of the Episcopal Church.

  Among themselves, street preachers are a squabbly lot. Hall is atypical in that he has never fought with his colleagues on matters of doctrine or dogma. ‘I have preached side by side in Columbus Circle with unknown tonguers, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Salvation Army soldiers, and Pillar of Fire women, and Father Divine angels, and Happy Am I shouters, and with brothers that had one-man theologies that they thought up for themselves,’ Hall says, ‘but I never had any back talk with any of them. Take the matter of baptism. Way I figure, you can sprinkle a man, or you can totally immerse him face forward, sideways, head first, or feet first, and it’s all the same, so long as the water is pure and he doesn’t drown.’ The one street speaker with whom Hall has fought a feud is Charles Lee Smith, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. Smith is also a Southerner. Hall refers to him as the Atheist Pope and has shouted him down in Wall Street, in Union Square, and in the Circle. ‘It’s not so much that he’s an atheist,’ Hall says. ‘I could overlook that. It’s that middle name of his. He was named for Robert E. Lee. Said so himself. How a man named after that great lion-hearted Christian hero General Robert E. Lee could turn into a common, street-corner atheist is more than I can understand.’ Smith, on the contrary, is fond of Hall. ‘Next to W. C. Fields,’ Smith says, ‘I don’t know any man I’d rather listen to than old James Jefferson Davis Hall. I’d pay good money any day to hear him preach his sermon on the D.T.’s. I must’ve heard him preach that sermon a dozen times, and I’ve never heard him preach it the same way twice. He digresses quite a lot, and I do enjoy his digressions. They can be really wild.’ This sermon, ‘Cases of the D.T.’s I Have Known,’ is Hall’s masterpiece. One of the cases he takes up in the course of it is that of Bobcat Jones, an old song-and-dance man.

  ‘Mr Jones was a derelict, an old vaudeville actor,’ Hall says, ‘and I converted him at the Galilee Mission in 1917, but he backslid. He went on a bat that lasted for weeks, and one day he showed up, a-muttering and a-raving. He was holding his head with both hands; said he was afraid the spiders would crawl in his ears. “Repent, Mr Jones!” I said to him. “Repent!” He began to duck and dodge; said that Old Scratch was throwing a spear at him. I took him up the stairs to the dormitory on the second floor, and no sooner did I get him in bed than he cried out, “There’s an old goat a-coming through the transom. It’s the devil. His horns are on fire. Get back there, goat! Don’t let that goat butt me!” “Why, Mr Jones,” I said, “I don’t see any goat. Repent, repent, and ye shall be saved.” He leaped out of bed and tied three neckties together and he cried out, “I’m a-going to lasso Old Scratch. I’m a-going to lasso him and tie him down and kick him.” I got him back in bed, but I had a struggle doing so. There was an electric fan in the room, and next he took a notion that the fan was the devil. He picked up an alarm clock and chunked it. It hit the fan and began to ring. And Mr Jones was a-howling all the time. Oh, my, what a racket! Then he ran over and tried to take hold of the fan, and it scraped his hand, and he leaped backwards about fifteen feet and howled out, “Old Scratch bit me! Let me out of here!” He shot out of the door, and next thing I knew he fell head over heels down
the stairs, hitting every step on the way down. As my good old grandmother a long time ago way back in Alabama would’ve put it, “Ass over teakettle,” and it was perfectly all right for my grandmother to use that kind of language, nobody looked down on her for doing so, good old sanctified cow-milking butter-churning biddy-hatching bee-keeping huckleberry-picking hickory-nut-cracking pole-fishing catfish-catching rabbit-trapping snuff-dipping cotton-picking hardworking old countrywoman that she was. She was a living saint, but she was very plainspoken and she was known far and wide for some of her sayings. “Ass over teakettle,” she used to say about almost anything that happened accidentally. “Butt, behind, bottom and all!” she used to say. “Gut, gallus, goozle and all!” So I stood there at the head of the stairs and looked down at Mr Jones all sprawled out on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and I was just so afraid that he had hurt himself severely – a broken hip at the very least. He might never walk again! Permanently crippled! Or ruptured on both sides! Ruined! Done for! But nay, nay, in a minute or two the D.T.’s took control of Mr Jones again, and he got to his feet and began to do a skippy little dance and he sung a song called, “Cut a Watermelon on My Grave and Let the Juice Soak Through.”’ At this point in the sermon Hall slowly shakes his head, and a deeply mournful look comes on his face. ‘Whiskey! Whiskey! Whiskey!’ he exclaims. ‘I don’t even believe in ginger ale!’