Eddie James has just left the pulpit and is dancing like James Brown--on one leg, arms extended.
He arrived at this church an hour ago. He drove past a knot of men on the corner of Pima Street and 13th Avenue. One of them made a smoking gesture--crack for sale. He drove past a group of men just outside the church, one carrying a baseball bat.
He seated himself behind the pulpit while the Sunday afternoon service proceeded. He listened to a young man report on a youth retreat. He watched while the congregation filed to the front of the church in two lines to drop dollar bills into two pots. He sat while ladies fanned themselves with the cardboard fans black churches supply, while the ever-present babies were passed back and forth across the pews. He waited while he was introduced, then mounted to the pulpit and began to talk.
Quietly at first, stating his point: God is Light. First Epistle of John, he said, pronouncing the "t." He asked the congregation to bear with him because he was nervous.
Eddie James is only 20. His mother is here today.
"This is the message, which we have heard of Him and declare unto you: God is light."
Eddie began in a conversational tone, explaining that the epistle was addressed to the church at large, explicating the ideas the Apostle John wished to convey. But soon he picked up speed, and a rhythm began to assert itself. Soon he picked up speed, and the rational discussion of ideas fell away, leaving only the skeleton of rhythm. Soon he picked up speed, and Eddie James and the congregation of St. John Institutional Baptist Church fell into a pattern.
"Once we fix the fellowship problem . . . "
("There you go!")
"Then the joy supply will be enough!"
("Yeah!")
"The preacher is nothing more than a mouthpiece!"
("Tell us!")
"He is God's vessel!"
("All right!")
"He is God's answering service!"
("Come on now!")
"Can I get a witness to this?"
("Yeah!")
"You can call me in the midnight hour!"
("Yeah!")
Eddie said a line, punctuated it with a grunted "Huh" at the end.
"God is light--huh!"
"God is faithful--huh!"
Now Eddie James was almost singing, singing the praises of the Lord.
"You can call Him, He's a heart-fixer!"
"You can call Him, He's a burden-bearer!"
"You can call Him, He's a heavy-load-sharer!"
"You can call Him, He's joy and sorrow!"
"You can call Him, He's hope for tomorrow!"
Eddie James worked toward a crescendo, the congregation keeping emotional time with him. He was out from behind the pulpit now, tossing a microphone from one hand to the other. People were standing, swaying and shouting.
"This is the message!"
"This is the message!"
"This is the message!"
"God is light!"
"God is light!"
"God is light!"
Eddie James did his one-legged dance, and two women fell on the floor of the church in a swoon of ecstasy, as if Eddie James had caused the gates of paradise to open before them and they had been stricken by the light streaming through.
IT'S 11:45 ON a Wednesday night, and Eddie James is standing behind the counter at a 7-Eleven, making change for a guy buying a turkey sandwich and a Snickers. On a shelf behind him is a nightstick, and a series of slots and holes into which the clerks shove the money so there won't be more than $30 in the register.
The graveyard shift is the most dangerous. It's also when the most employee thefts occur. That's why the owner of this branch hired Eddie. The owner had been suffering losses, and wanted someone he knew he could trust. He asked around at his church--a natural social center in the black community--and a friend suggested Eddie.
His first week on the job--on Thanksgiving night, in fact--a woman got belligerent when she felt she wasn't being waited on fast enough. When she opened her purse to get out her money, Eddie saw she had a gun. "Because I was nervous, I shorted her $2," he says. "She pulled the gun out of her purse and pointed it at my head. I just began to pray on the inside.
"I said, `Ma'am, I'm very sorry, here's the $2.'
"Then this week's episode--stay tuned!--there's this business where guys who work in Circle K or 7-Eleven, they let people steal things in return for cash. A guy came in and offered me that kind of a job.
"He wanted to take a bunch of beer to some Mexicans, four or five cases.
"I told him, `I'm a person who loves the Lord and a young minister of the Gospel. I would disrespect myself and my church by doing that.'"
But that wasn't all. Eddie also asked the man, "Why do you disrespect yourself by doing that?" and suggested he turn his life over to Jesus.
EDDIE JAMES IS SITTING in the living room of the apartment he has lived in for the past few months, the first months in his life he has lived by himself. The place is on Adams Street a few blocks west of the Capitol, and although it has a couch and a chair, some decorative plants and a large entertainment center--television, VCR and tape player--it still manages to look somehow bare and impersonal.
Eddie James doesn't spend an awful lot of time there.
For the past three years, he has been the director of the Phoenix Mass Choir, a group of 90 people representing a number of different congregations around the Valley. He founded it while he was still a student at South Mountain High School. He is also the director of the Arizona Mass Choir, made up of singers from around the state. And although he is not a minister of a specific church, Eddie preaches on a freelance basis almost every week.
It is this kind of energy that won Eddie the Young Man of the Year Award from the Phoenix Rotary Club in 1989.
In the pulpit, he is ageless. In person, he's a husky 20-year-old kid, who pads around his apartment in his socks and who'll put his hand over his face when he's embarrassed. Eddie James is poised on the brink of manhood. He's grappling with the usual decisions of kids his age--college, premarital sex--and with problems that are uniquely his own. His parents divorced earlier this year, and his father just moved to Seattle with Eddie's four younger brothers. He's living alone for the first time, paying rent for the first time and trying to figure out how to swing payments for a car.
He is also, as he says, an answering service for the Lord, a conduit through which the word of God is passed to His children on Earth. This is not a role Eddie selected for himself. Ministers of God are called, and men who are hounded by heaven have no choice but to come.
His impromptu sermonette to the man in the 7-Eleven was a rarity for him. Although Eddie wears his religion as a shield against the world, he is loath to impose it on others. He laughs when he talks about guys "in black suits with a big Bible," and says, "Because you're a Christian doesn't mean you're above everyone else."
Eddie's style is a black baseball cap with the brim flipped up in front--cool!--and a black tee shirt with the words "Prayer Warrior." He'll wear it to the park to shoot baskets, and maybe someone will want to talk. He would like, he says, to be a "light" to people in trouble. Having grown up in South Phoenix, near 19th Avenue and Roeser, he has seen more than his share of that. There were drugs and stabbings at South Mountain High School, and a guy he knew was shot in front of Eddie's house. Eddie's brother saw him die.
But Eddie knows the temptations of the ego to which preachers are prey. He looks more worried than pleased when he's told how members of his choir look up to him, and he talks frequently about how the message, not the man, is important.
Eddie could hardly escape the ministry. His father is a minister. His mother was a choir director and is a teacher at her church. And her father was a preacher as well.
Nor could he escape music. A woman in Eddie's congregation makes a rocking motion with her arms to indicate how old Eddie was when he was first brought to church. The sounds of gospel music were in his ears before he could walk.
He could carry a tune before he could even understand the words. Eddie was about 5 when his mother heard him singing one day. "I was shocked at his tone quality," Naomie James recalls. "He was not picking up the lyrics real good, but he was not flat or off-key. He had perfect pitch."
The church to which Eddie belonged as a child--"grew up in," as he says--was the Emmanuel Church of God in Christ, where Bishop Felton King has been pastor for 52 years, and where Eddie's family has been worshiping for four generations. The Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal denomination founded in 1906, is among the most musical of the black churches, and has long been associated with such gospel luminaries as the Carter Sisters and the Winans. A few years ago, COGIC, as it is called, published a collection of songs. Bishop King smiles as he picks up the book and explains that no one ever uses it:
"In our church, we don't use hymn books too much. Some people compose their own songs, or we sing songs that other churches sing, but we don't use music."
Eddie's mother was the choir director at Emmanuel, and since he was her oldest child, she took him with her to church for rehearsals. She also played gospel at home, and even today, Naomie James leaves gospel music playing out loud when she is away from her studio apartment in Glendale.
"When we woke up it was gospel music, when we lay down it was gospel music, when we got in the car it was gospel music, when we were in church it was gospel music," she says with a laugh.
This is how Eddie learned to sing; this is the musical tradition that formed him. Even today, Eddie James can scarcely read music. He has performed with the Phoenix Mass Choir at churches in the Valley and Tucson. He has recorded an album with the choir; he wrote every song on the record. As a child, he sang on radio broadcasts and in front of national gatherings of church members. He won talent shows at school. He's even sung at Chuy's with a couple of choir members, three songs he wrote himself. He has done it all by ear.
"The melodies and music come to my head and the words come with it," he says. "I can write a song in ten minutes. I just hear it in my head and sing it forth."
When Eddie got to high school, he was already well-known as a talented singer, and it was only natural that he would form a gospel music group. South Mountain is the magnet high school for the arts in Phoenix, and has jazz bands and even a mariachi ensemble. Stuart Bailey, band director there, remembers Eddie James as the most talented student he'd seen in gospel music. Still, he says, Eddie's single-mindedness concerned him.
"I tried to expose him to other kinds of music," Bailey remembers, "but he didn't want to do that. He's into his gospel music and he does it very well."
"He is profoundly good," says Bert Russell. He's a personal injury lawyer, the choir director at the First New Life Missionary Baptist Church and a member of the Arizona Mass Choir. "He's had no formal training. I don't want to say it's innate, but it is."
But that innate ability, in a young man of 20, is still in a raw form. "I hoped he would have gone to college," Bailey says. "I thought not going was a waste of his talents."
In fact, Eddie James did have a chance to go to college. He was enrolled at Oral Roberts University, had even been assigned a dorm room. He came back to Phoenix before classes started because, he says, he wasn't ready to give up the choir, and because he wasn't ready to be away at school. He just wasn't ready.
"I got out of there," he says.
While he's talking, the telephone in Eddie's apartment rings. It is the mayor's office, asking Eddie if he will sing the national anthem at a mayor's breakfast on January 17 in connection with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He is thrilled, and he paces the living room, hands over his face. "I'm juggling the keyboard in my mind," he says. "Let's see, it starts off low and ends up high."
The Eddie starts to sing. He's just worked all night, and his voice isn't warmed up.
"O-oh say can you see . . . ." He hits the "by" a little hoarsely, but is adding a dramatic vibrato here and there. His voice runs warmly over the word "gleaming" and slides jazzily across "air" and "night." Eddie gives the song a very, very emotional treatment, one that brings out the meaning of the words and the sentiment behind them.
BISHOP FELTON KING has an office at Church of God in Christ local headquarters and an oil portrait of himself on the wall. He drives a Lincoln Town Car, and wears a suit and tie to work, but like many older members of Phoenix's black community, Felton King paid his dues in the fields. In the days when Phoenix was more recognizably a farm town, and its residents lived closer to the land, Felton King's family picked cotton, much as Eddie James' grandparents did.
As a young man, Felton King was a member of a gospel quartet. The group was performing in Flagstaff one time. Young Felton thought he might go squirrel hunting rather than attend the 9 a.m. prayer meeting. When it started to rain, he went to church after all. As he stood on the stage singing with the members of his group, he recalls, "I was knocked down by the spirit. I couldn't get up 'til I said, `Yes, Lord.'"
Eddie James was not knocked down, but he was called nonetheless. He was 8. "I heard a voice that said over and over, ~`I want you to preach,'" he remembers. His reaction was, "Preach? Give me a break."
Still, on September 12, 1986, at the age of 15, Eddie James preached his first sermon in public. It was shortly after he had been baptized in a ceremony of total immersion at Canyon Lake. It was shortly after he had done what is called "sending out a fleece"--asking God for a sign.
The first song Eddie had ever written was called "Have Mercy on Me, Oh Lord." It was inspired by Psalms 51, and he intended the text to be the subject of his first sermon--if he truly had a calling. He bargained with the Lord: "I want you to show somebody what my first message will be."
"I never told a soul," he says, about the sign he waited for.
A little while later, Eddie's aunt approached him and said, "You know, I hear the Lord saying, `Lord Have Mercy.' He told me to tell you that. Is that a song or a sermon or something?'"
Eddie James was not knocked down, but he was called nonetheless.
THE REVEREND D. PREVIN CARR is the assistant pastor of St. John's Church, where Eddie James preached the previous Sunday afternoon. Carr is explaining what happens to a black preacher when he addresses his congregation. Although all preachers prepare remarks, at some point they begin to extemporize. They enter a trance, and the words they speak are divinely inspired.
"You can get the message together as far as an outline," Carr says, "but as far as the outcome, that's strictly up to God. When you're up, in high gear, you lose it, you don't really see what's happening."
He recalls a sermon of his own. "That Sunday morning, I prepared a message, but the end result, I had no idea. When I came to myself, the church was in an uproar."
Although preachers are reluctant to say so, a sermon is also a performance that can be good or bad.
And Eddie James, Previn Carr says, is excellent: "In his preparation and going into the message, there wasn't a bad mark anywhere."
Ecstatic, highly dramatic preaching is an invitation to the Holy Spirit to descend upon the congregation. It is a cathartic ritual that takes people out of themselves.
But it is more than that. Listening to Eddie James, you know where Jesse Jackson came from. Listening to Eddie James, you know where Martin Luther King Jr. came from. Listening to a black service, you know where rap comes from. Listening to a black service, you know where the blues come from.
At the heart of black culture in America is the church, and behind the church stands Africa.
The black "folk pulpit" gave birth to a distinctive manner of vocal delivery that can be witnessed in churches across the country every Sunday and was heard at the Democratic National Convention in 1988.
"Traditionally the preacher starts off quietly, gently," Keith Miller says. He is an assistant professor in the English department at Arizona State University and the author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr. and Its Sources. "Then imperceptibly he picks up rhythm, he gets louder." The audience is held in suspense, Miller says, and impelled to keep listening, until the preacher swings toward his "thunderous conclusion."
Certain conventions are invariably observed, such as alternating loud and soft. Rhymes or plays on words are important, like Jesse Jackson's "Hands that once picked cotton will pick a President."
"I don't understand why white preachers don't use these methods," Miller says. "With a white preacher, there's nothing in the delivery that tells you to keep listening."
Just as important as the preaching style is music. When the Pentecostal movement spread among the poorer members of the black community at the end of the 19th century, gospel music grew hand in hand with it. Both music and movement fused Europe with Africa. Gospel music set English hymns to African rhythms and moved its listeners to perform an ecstatic ring-dance tribal in origin. Preachers told of Christian doctrine to congregations that answered them in a call-and-response pattern born in west Africa and kept alive in the cotton fields of the Deep South.
"Music paves the way," says Elwood McDowell, a black minister and adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. "It breaks up the ground before the seed is sown with the Word."
A black religious service is "an ecstatic consciousness together," McDowell says. "I studied psychotherapy, and it's emptying out one's garbage pail in a safe environment. There's a built-in psychotherapy in our culture. You let the unconscious self take over, and it's so fulfilling."
Many middle-class blacks have left some of the more emotional hallmarks of the Pentecostal church behind--the dancing, called "shouting," and the falling down that represents having been "slain in the spirit." In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in such services, and membership in Pentecostal churches is growing.
McDowell himself was educated in Catholic schools ("I was a real brainy kid, a bookworm") but in college discovered what he calls his emotional self, and joined a Baptist church. "For me to go back to my own tradition has been a wonderful thing. I think Jung was right," McDowell says. "There is a racial soul that connects us."
NAOMIE JAMES AND her husband ran a strict household. What she calls "worldly music" wasn't allowed, although one or another of the boys would sometimes borrow rap records and bring them home. "It got destroyed," she says, then mimics a little boy whining, "But Mom, it wasn't mine."
"A child left to himself will bring you to shame," she says, and she recalls what she said to herself when she realized how rebellious Eddie's younger brother Justin was turning out to be. "This one," she said of the 5-year-old, "I'm going to have to break."
Naomie saw the world as a place fraught with danger to her children, and says, "We did not want them to see anything or hear anything." She was choosy about their playmates and unyielding when it came to parties at which there would be smoking, drinking and bad language: They couldn't go.
"Eddie never even went outside," she says. "He went to school and came straight home." When he had summer jobs, he brought the whole check home to her.
The family of five boys and one girl seems to fall into two camps, according to Naomie's descriptions. Eddie, his sister Janet, 18, and his brother David, 7, are the religious ones. Terrance, 15, Samuel, 9, and Justin, 5, are the worldly ones.
Even Naomie laughs when she describes the room Eddie and Terrance shared. "Eddie's wall was full of Scriptures--1 Corinthians, 5 and 9. No girls, just Scriptures. The other side was all basketball posters and women. You'd walk in and you knew which side was Eddie's." Turning in her seat she points to an imaginary wall: "`God' and `God' and `Jesus' and `Lord.'"
When it came time for Eddie to go to college, Naomie says, she chose Oral Roberts, the evangelist's college in Tulsa, because she didn't want him "damaged" by "one of those secular universities."
Eddie was especially important to her after her marriage began to suffer. That happened before her youngest children were even born. Her husband, she says, was a workaholic who spent long hours away from the house running his small construction company.
"Eddie has no relationship with his father," Naomie says. While it pained him, it also forced him to grow up fast, and to be the father to the four younger boys. He went to the store, he changed their diapers, he helped Naomie when she had flat tires on her car, he even went to talk to the teachers when the boys were having trouble in school.
"When I had him around, I didn't feel I needed his father," Naomie says.
A week or so before Thanksgiving, just about the time Eddie was starting his job at the 7-Eleven, his father moved to Seattle. He married a woman who had borne him two girls, and they took Eddie's four brothers with them.
Without the boys, Naomie no longer needed the house near 19th Avenue and Roeser, so she moved to her studio apartment in Glendale. She is in school, studying to be a paralegal, and will have to get a job outside her home for the first time in her 39 years. She has never lived alone before, and it frightens her. "Every face I saw was an attacker," she says. She is afraid to walk into her apartment complex alone after the sun has gone down, and doesn't even like to drive very far in her car. The breakup of the family has been hard on Eddie, too. "Eddie weeps," she says.
Naomie turns for comfort to her religious faith, and relates an incident that took place a couple of weeks earlier. Without warning her, Eddie showed up at the church she attends. As the service got emotional, Naomie says, "Eddie grabs me by the shoulders. My first thought was, `What are you doing?' Then the spirit told me, `Don't talk like a mother!'" Naomie jumps up to demonstrate what they did next. Dancing in a circle she says, "We were shouting together! Then the pastor laid hands on us and we fell out." She tumbles to the floor, showing what she means.
As she lay there, she says, she heard the words, "It is well." It gave her strength, she says. "God doesn't need to keep you no 30 minutes," Naomie explains. "`It is well.' Hey, you could live on that."
WHEN HE WAS 11, Eddie was invited to San Francisco to sing at a national convention of the Church of God in Christ. Mattie Moss Clark introduced him to the audience of 20,000. He sang "Because He Lives," got a standing ovation and cried on the bosom of the gospel music matriarch.
He loved the attention, but when Eddie talks about the trip to San Francisco he gets most excited telling another part of it--how he got to see the red brick house featured in the opening credits of Too Close for Comfort, a TV show he loved. He drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, just like in the opening credits, and for months afterward, watched those credits to see if the car he was in would appear.
At 20, Eddie James is both man and child. As a preacher, Eddie James is both man of God and man in the world. He has spent his life with his face turned in two directions at once.
As a sophomore at South Mountain High School, Eddie won $50 at a talent show for singing "For God So Loved the World." "People are crying," he remembers with pleasure.
A group of guys who'd taken third place for breakdancing approached him afterward, wanting the money. "You sang some little church song," they said sneeringly.
Then a second group of students came along. Eddie had been friends with some of them before they got into gangs and drugs, and old loyalties prevailed. "`If you mess with the preacher, I'm going to kick your . . . fill in the blank,'" Eddie remembers his friends telling the menacing breakdancers.
Because he is a bright and thoughtful young man, Eddie sees messages in unlikely places--like the action movies he dotes on, the shoot-'em-ups with his favorites Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme. In them, though, he sees more than bullets. Eddie talks about the final scene in Terminator 2, when Arnold Schwarzenegger points to his own head, saying it contains the final piece of machinery that must be destroyed. Eddie saw the scene as a metaphor for man's need to overcome his ego.
Because he has a simple heart, Eddie means the words to the "Star-Spangled Banner." "I really appreciate this country," he says. "Oppression for me has had a way of making me appreciate the good rather than dwelling on the bad."
Because he has a loving soul, Eddie wants someday to lead an interracial church. "When we get to heaven," he points out, "there's only one heaven. There's not a black heaven, a white heaven, a Chinese heaven, a Mexican heaven . . . "
Sometimes Eddie's religion appears to be a form of magic to keep away a threatening world, its Scriptures the incantations. Sometimes his religion appears to be a fragile package of hope he is carrying through unsafe streets. It is at once a way to make sense of the world, and a way out of it. Because he was raised in a religion that promised deliverance, because he grew up in churches where people struggled to pay the rent, Eddie has a belief in the hand of the Lord that can come close to superstition. When a gospel music performance is switched from one location to another, he sees at work a divine will that makes every event explicable.
At its best, Eddie's religious belief can make the world rational. At its worst, Eddie's religious belief can rationalize.
He tries to be forgiving toward his father, although he knew of the two little girls who were his sisters, and calls the situation "a big mess." His father, a minister, is no worse than many Biblical figures, Eddie says, and has repented of his actions. "He recognizes and he realizes that he did wrong and he confessed that and he repented that," Eddie says. But the pain accumulated over years of childhood neglect shows through. "No one else's opinions or thoughts mattered," he says of his father. "He just came and went when he felt like it. Now all of a sudden, he recognizes, `Hey, I haven't been the father I should have been.'" Eddie is referring to his father's taking his four brothers to Seattle. "I got to stay here and pay rent," he says with a rueful laugh. "I want to trade places with them. It makes me so jealous. I want be young again. You don't realize what you don't have to worry about--you just expect to have food to eat. Now I have to deal with all this," he says, looking around the apartment and meaning rent, work, adult life in general. At the border of manhood, Eddie seems to be casting a last look over his shoulder at childhood slipping away.
Eddie's discussions of his future show this same yearning. He'd like to attend college, but when he talks about going back to Oral Roberts, sometimes he talks about a degree in theology and music--and sometimes he talks about how the school will take care of him and how his best friend Lavette is there. After years of preaching about deliverance from the more exotic forms of earthly travail--drugs, alcohol--Eddie is only now realizing the drudgery that makes up most of daily life.
He quit his job at the 7-Eleven after only a few weeks, because the money coming up missing was being deducted from his check, and because the graveyard hours were interfering with his work with the choir.
"All of this," and his mother's difficulties living alone, have prompted Eddie to look for a house he can share with her, and with his sister Janet, who will transfer from the University of Arizona to Arizona State. Eddie has no qualms about moving back in with his family, even though when he talks about his shortcomings--flying off the handle, being too sensitive--one thing he mentions is his lack of exposure to the world.
"I want to get out and experience being secular," he says. "I've never really done it. Friends of mine would come to church and testify, `I used to do coke. I used to do drugs. I was a Crip. I was just dissing and the other.' Here I was just a little church boy.
"Their testimony brought the house down, and mine was so boring."
Eddie laughs, realizing the silly aspect of wanting to have an exciting testimony.
Then he says, almost as an afterthought, his mind still running on the secular world he never knew, the cigarettes he has never smoked, the drinks he has never tasted, the clubs he has never visited, "I think if I got deep into it, I wouldn't come back."
AFTER EDDIE FINISHED preaching at St. John's Sunday afternoon, one of the ministers at the church came to the pulpit and calmed the congregation by singing gently, "How Great Thou Art." He also spoke to Eddie, saying, "Thank you, Minister James, for letting the Lord use you."
People began to slip away as the service wound down, and to gather in small groups outside the church door. Darkness had fallen, and a block away, at the corner of 13th Avenue and Pima Street, where the drug dealers had been standing earlier, the red and white lights of two police cars were flashing.
Proofer: indent in PQ per editor.
"You can call me in the midnight hour!"
("Yeah!")
Eddie asked the man, "Why do you disrespect yourself by doing that?" and suggested he turn his life over to Jesus.
The sounds of gospel music were in his ears before he could walk.
"I just hear it in my head and sing it forth."
Eddie James was not knocked down, but he was called nonetheless.
"There's a built-in psychotherapy in our culture. You let the unconscious self take over, and it's so fulfilling."
"`It is well.' Hey, you could live on that."
Sometimes his religion appears to be a fragile package of hope he is carrying through unsafe streets.
"Their testimony brought the house down, and mine was so boring.
