My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  “I’m going to drive the devil out of Harlem and I might just as well give you people hell to start with,” said the Elder.

  “I bet we catch hell now,” shouted a small, uninhibited worshiper in the second row.

  “You done said something, brother,” replied Elder Michaux. “Everywhere I turn I see people gobbling up whiskey and beer, and the men they leave their wives, and the streets are thick with gamblers. They got slot machines in all the hangouts.”

  Behind the evangelist sat sixty members of the “Happy Am I” choir. The self-conscious women members in the front row were dressed in olive-green uniforms with starched caps. The Elder’s wife, Mrs. Mary E. Michaux, known as “the silver-tongued soloist,” was also on the stage. She helped the choir sing “The Devil’s on the Run” and other Michaux spirituals.

  Immediately before beginning his sermon the forthright churchman instructed his ushers to go through the crowd and sell copies of the songs at 30 cents apiece. They sold hundreds of them. All the benches in the Palace were occupied.

  In the rear of the hall there is a barroom, but it was boarded up when the Negro preacher leased the Palace for a week. When he was younger, Elder Michaux was a bartender in his father’s saloon, but now he looks on alcohol in all its forms as a snare and a delusion.

  “I see I got work to do up here,” said Elder Michaux, who delivered his sermon beneath a great electric sign in which his name was spelled out in red, white and blue letters. “I got to find out where you people expect to go for the duration of eternity. I mean, heaven or hell, what’s it going to be?

  “And that brings to mind a problem that has been worrying some of the women I see out before me. I mean a woman marries a man and he dies, and she marries another man and he dies, and that keeps up until she’s buried as many as five husbands. Well, whose wife is that woman going to be when she gets to heaven? She’s got five husbands waiting for her up there, and which one is she going to mate up with for eternity?

  “That’s liable to cause trouble of a widespread and deep-seated nature in heaven. It would even cause trouble here on earth. That is just one of the problems I am going to take up and examine during my revival. Hear, ye.”

  The Elder preached until early in the morning. He chased the devil so hard he was exhausted. When he cooled off I asked him to give me some facts about himself.

  He said he was born first in Newport News, Virginia, where his father kept a saloon. In 1917 he was born again. At that time he was selling seafood to the government for the mess at Camp Lee, Virginia. One day he was driving a load of shad to the camp and he felt a call to preach. That night he got some friends together and established an undenominational church and called it the Church of God.

  There are seven branches of this church now. The principal church is in Washington, which is also headquarters for his newspaper, Happy News, and his spiritual eating-house, the Happy News Café. He has a low opinion of Major J. Divine, a Harlem evangelist, who calls himself God.

  “I am going to preach against Father Divine,” said Elder Michaux. “I know he tells the people he is God, but I think he exaggerates a little. Why, he hasn’t got any theology in him, that man. All he has is a lot of put-on. I know he takes in a lot of money, but I don’t want money. What I want is some cabbage.”

  The Elder brought sixty-nine of his followers with him in a bus. He said that none of his followers drinks or smokes, and that he has taught them to avoid “rum, rowdy women, slot machines and big talk.” At this moment one of his followers came into the room with a cigarette in his hand.

  “I had two grips, and they got mislaid,” said the follower, snapping the ashes off the end of his cigarette. “Any of you all seen my grips?”

  “What are you doing with that cigarette?” asked Elder Michaux.

  “Oh!” said the startled follower, gazing at his cigarette. “I was just holding it for James outside. He told me to hold it for him just a minute.”

  “Well, throw it down and stomp on it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The follower threw the cigarette on the floor and stamped it thoroughly.

  “I don’t care if you didn’t have that cigarette in your mouth,” said Elder Michaux. “I don’t even want you to sully your fingers with nicotine. Your body is a temple; it’s not a furnace.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the abashed follower.

  2. DON’T TALK WHEN THE RED LIGHT IS ON

  The Reverend G. Spund makes his living marrying people ceremoniously. He calls himself “New York City’s most famous marriage performer.” The business is carried on in an establishment he calls “my million-dollar nuptial palace” on the ground floor of 130 East Third Street, one of the units in First Houses, the municipal low-rental housing development off Avenue A.

  “When a couple books by me I give them something nice and refined, not like in a hall or a restaurant,” said the Reverend Mr. Spund. “I give them a marriage they will remember, with a gold pipe organ, with an orange room and a gold room and a silver room, with a public address system, with bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley, with changing lights like in Radio City. It is a special proposition.”

  The Reverend Mr. Spund opened his “milliondollar nuptial palace,” for which he said he paid out $10,000, in 1936, but he has been one of the city’s most accomplished Jewish marriage performers for years. He estimates he has performed 10,000 marriages. He has been seventeen years in the same block and everybody in the neighborhood knows him. In addition to marriages he superintends confirmations or bar mitzvahs, and he is a hospital circumciser, a graduate mohel of the Board of Miloh.

  “They come to me from all over,” he said. “From the Grand Concourse they come, from Flatbush. By me a marriage means something not to forget. When a couple gets married by the Reverend Dr. Spund it does not slip the mind. Only don’t write me down Dr. Spund without the Reverend before. People see that they say, ‘I should be married by a doctor, no, no, no!’ I am also a cantor, and I am hired by synagogues for the holidays.

  “The competition is fierce in my line. In the old days when money was plenty I went to a hall and I did the marriage and for me it was $50, maybe $75, for a big wedding maybe $100, who knows? Racketeering ended that.

  “It was racketeering by the big halls. A couple, maybe the parents of the couple more likely, go up to the hall to see the hall-keeper to make arrangements. Right away, of course, they start to talk prices. The hall-keeper says, ‘Why should you bargain with me? For a special proposition I tell you what I’ll do with you. I’ll furnish the rabbi and the music with the hall.’ So it is arranged.

  “The hall-keeper has his own rabbi. For the marriage he hands him three dollars, five dollars. So you see where we used to get from the parents $50 now we don’t get nothing, and it is all arranged between the hall-keeper and the cut-rate rabbi. So for protection we arrange our own marriage parlors, like mine here, like many big ones on the Concourse.”

  In 1929 the Reverend Mr. Spund established his own marriage parlor in the apartment house in which he lives, the Ageloff Towers. When the city erected First Houses across the street with federal funds he decided to rent one of the stores. In quarters originally planned for a grocery he established what he calls, according to his mood, “my wedding temple” or “my nuptial palace” or “my marriage salon.” He installed an amplifying system and through it speeches and musical selections are broadcast from his little office to the wedding room. A red light goes on when the system is in use and a sign says “Don’t Talk When the Red Light Is On.”

  Marriages are performed in the gold room. In this room is an altar beneath a canopy and 100 gilt folding chairs. Around the walls are 300 electric bulbs and during the ceremony the lights are changed from blue to red to pink to orange, etc. There are two spotlights above the altar, and they are focused on the bride and groom when they make their entrance.

  “It is beautiful like a dream,” said the Reverend Mr. Spund. “Everything is modernistic. My son, J
ackie, aged seven, is the page boy. My daughter, Millie, she’s seventeen, plays the gold organ. Also from the public address system comes music, played from records and transmitted to the wedding room. The orange and silver rooms are for the guests during the reception before and after. I don’t do any catering, but there is a sweet table. They bring cakes and schnapps themselves. The whole marriage can be done for maybe $25.

  “It is arranged this way. A few weeks in advance the couple comes here and sets a date by me. It must be booked in advance, like a hall. Then they go to the Municipal Building and get a license, naturally. Then the day comes, the great day, and everything is ready here. The ten witnesses, the minyan, arrive and take their places. By Jewish law there must be ten men for witnesses. Then the guests come. Then I put on my costume, and we go through the ceremony. Afterwards maybe telegrams come or somebody wants to make a speech. So that is broadcast over the amplifier.

  “Then the whole party goes to a reception room. They have a glass of schnapps and wish good luck all around. Then the whole party goes to a banquet in a hotel or a hall, or the bride and groom goes right away to the honeymooning. I keep this place holy. No banquets here, no synagogue, no meetings, no catering, only this holy thing.”

  The Reverend Mr. Spund—his first name is Gustav—came here in 1913 from Stanislaw, a town then in Galicia but now in Poland. He is a good-natured person who wears a tiny Vandyke on his lower lip, which he strokes negligently during a conversation. He wears big nose-pinch spectacles. A black ribbon droops from them to his waistcoat.

  His father before him was a rabbi, and he hopes his eldest son, Abraham, twenty, will also become a rabbi. The Reverend Mr. Spund is a member of the Cantor’s Association of the United States and Canada, and a Zionist. He likes the marriage performance business.

  “It is a holy business and to perform for the public such an important service in a nice way is all I ask,” he said. “Such a tremendous expense I have I don’t expect no fortunes, naturally. With electric bills, with rent, with polish for the floor, with a stack of bills right on time every month, I hope to make the ends meet and not much more.”

  3. “PEACE FATHER FRESH VEGETABLES”

  The biggest businessman in Harlem is the bald, squat mulatto evangelist who calls himself, according to his mood, Father Divine, the Reverend M. J. Divine or God.

  Figures concerning Divine’s enterprises are apt to be capricious, but it is safe to say that he operates at least six grocery stores, ten barber shops, ten cleaning and pressing shops and a score of pushcarts selling “Peace Father fresh vegetables.” He operates at least three apartment houses and ten lodging houses and is a furnished-room magnate. He also operates restaurants in which meals are laid out for 15 cents.

  Some of the eggs, chickens, vegetables and potatoes sold in his restaurants and groceries and pushcarts are raised by his followers on the farms he owns in Walkill Valley, out from Kingston, New York. In the future, perhaps by next summer, he expects to supply all his followers in New York with “strictly Father Divine poultry and vegetables in season.” Already trucks make regular trips to two of his four farms.

  For example, each morning a battered truck from Harlem leaves the highway and clatters up a steep, stony lane to old Hasbrouck Manor on the outskirts of Stone Ridge, a village approximately twenty miles from Kingston. Painted in red letters on the body of the truck is this legend:—“Peace. Father Divine Is God.” The truck chugs up to the farmhouse, an ample stone building of three stories, which was erected by one of the original Dutch Huguenot patentees. It is one of the oldest dwellings in the United States and an Ulster County landmark. Like most of the old Dutch colonial houses in the valley, it was once painted a creamy yellow, but now it is painted gray with red trimmings and the window screens are gilded.

  The driver stops in front of the house and a Negro woman, plump Mother Divine, comes down the stairs and gives him his orders. (Father Divine calls this woman “my so-called wife,” insisting that only a spiritual relationship exists between them, a condition he would like to establish in the homes of all his followers.) She tells him how many eggs and chickens he can take back.

  He drives to the chicken farm, a short distance from the manor house. There a crew of angels helps him pack the eggs and crate the chickens. They load the truck with bushel bags of potatoes, with vegetables freshly dug from the gardens. Perhaps one of the angels has prepared a box of strawberries or raspberries for Father Divine. Each truck takes back a gift for Divine—a dozen roasting ears, or a spring chicken for frying, or a dozen Plymouth Rock eggs. When the truck is packed the driver climbs immediately into the cab.

  “Peace,” he shouts, turning the truck into the lane, jubilantly steering it toward the “Peace Father” restaurants on 115th Street, on Lenox Avenue, in the heart of Harlem. “Peace. It’s wonderful.”

  The angels go back to work. There is plenty of work to be done in this “extension of heaven.” There are 145 acres on the Stone Ridge farm, and Divine is using the manor house as an office for his other farms. He has 1,500 chickens laying eggs in a row of coops, and his angels are canning raspberries and sweet corn and sowing winter roots and greens. When Divine rolls up in his blue Rolls-Royce, for which he paid $150 cash, the angels knock off work and spend as many as four hours for lunch, a meal during which they persistently announce that Father Divine is God.

  After dinner Divine likes to go out and shake himself down what he calls “a bait of mulberries” from the old mulberry tree near the chicken coops. However, when his automobile vanishes down the rocky lane the followers go back to work, hitching horses to plows and chopping weeds out of the corn with the same energy they would show if they were working out a day for one of the Dutch farmers in the neighborhood. Divine is careful not to send angels to his farms unless they are handy with hoes.

  Lately he has been forced to move in secrecy in acquiring farms, but lawyers and real estate dealers in Kingston agree that to date he has purchased at least 1,000 of the best acres in the fertile valley; that he paid cash for most of it; that he is in the market for more farms; that he is also dickering for a brickyard and a furniture factory.

  His four farms are all within twenty miles of Kingston. He owns 145 acres in the hills of scrub oak and sumac a mile west of New Paltz. He calls this farm “the Promised Land.” It is watched over by Sarah Love, a capable Negro woman, who is assisted by Dear One and Thankful Kindness.

  Near High Falls he owns 165 acres and at Krumville 518 acres are to be used in the construction of a Divine city. The Sheriff of Ulster County has no idea how many angels are living on the farms, and an accurate check is impossible, as busloads come out each Sunday from Harlem and sometimes the buses return with more persons than they brought.

  Divine has announced that he intends to buy up the whole valley and turn it over to “thousands and yea, millions” of his followers, an announcement regarded with apprehension by officials in Kingston.

  “I will give the lots absolutely free, and if a person desires to build he can build and own his own property,” Divine told one inquirer. “I mean to give you a deed for every piece you receive. That is what I am speaking of. We don’t wish to have anyone involved in litigation.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  Divine has ordered the people who tenant his Ulster County property to give out no information to strangers. A reporter tried to find out how many angels lived in the Chapel Street establishment. A Negro got up from the front porch where he was painting the floor green and came to the yard. He was asked a few questions.

  “I don’t bear witness,” he said, shaking green paint off the brush. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Couldn’t you just tell me the number of people living here?” the reporter asked.

  “All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in heaven, and I think he’s in New York City right now,” said the painter. “Peace. It’s wonderful.”

  4. EXCEPT THAT SHE
SMOKES, DRINKS BOOZE AND

  TALKS ROUGH, MISS MAZIE IS A NUN

  She is known as “Miss Mazie” by the blighted men who exist in the walk-up hotels along the Bowery. Her real name is Mazie Gordon, and she is a blonde with a heart of gold. Her clothing is flamboyant, and she uses cosmetics with abandon. Until midnight she sits in the cramped ticket booth of the Venice Theatre, which she owns, at 209 Park Row, with a Pomeranian dog named Fluffy in her lap.

  She feeds the dog farina in hot milk, and talks to it with gruff baby talk. On cold nights she covers the dog in her lap with a blanket. She is a good business woman, and she owns the theater, a few tenements, and a few concessions at Coney Island. A chauffeur calls for her at midnight with a Stutz. She used to work in one of the burlesque houses of Hurtig & Seamon in Harlem, but she will not talk about it. She says, “I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing.”

  Mazie sits in the ticket booth with a green eye-shade pulled down low over her wise, pleasant eyes. The admission to her theater, an aged moving picture house, is one dime during the day, two dimes at night. Sometimes a bum goes in at 10 o’clock in the morning, and at midnight he is still there, sleeping in his seat, snoring as if he owned the joint. Mazie does not mind, but if one begins to yell derisively at the actors on the screen, giving them good advice, she goes in and pulls him out by the slack of his worn pants.