A Prayer for the City (43 page)

People on the block, in a kind and admiring way, called her the crazy lady.

It was after the funeral that Fifi began to go to Cookman United every Sunday, and it wasn’t long before Robin became her spiritual soul mate. She confided in him, told him things that she could tell no one else. However strong the spirit, being in your sixties and taking care of four great-grandchildren under the age of seven was hellish. Their parents loved Fifi desperately and gave her financial support. But sometimes they treated her like the live-in sitter. They knew that she would take care of the kids, and when they got frustrated with their own lives and told the kids to shut up because they were crying or got in trouble and went off to jail, they knew that Fifi would take over. “You can see why I have a nervous condition,” said Fifi, and the demands placed on her, even though she had a job as a cook and companion to an elderly man who lived over in East Falls, were endless—the laundry in the basement that always needed to be washed, so much of it that Fifi used a shopping cart to get it from the washer to the dryer; the toys that filled the living room floor like weeds and always needed to be put away; the school programs and after-school programs that had to be arranged; the bouts of bed-wetting and hyperactivity; the different requests for breakfast. Budda, at six the oldest of the great-grandchildren, wanted Pop-Tarts and oatmeal. Three-year-old Kalih wanted a cheese sandwich. Three-year-old Susette wanted peanut butter and jelly. Two-year-old Tonya wanted cereal. Every day it was like that.

Every single day.

She loved the kids more than anything else. They sustained her and filled her with laughter when she was feeling pinned and desperate. But they also drove her crazy sometimes, the nonstop energy of them. She became strict, but they were always one step ahead of her. “I lay down rules,” said Fifi. “It’s like laying down spaghetti.”

She talked about the pain she felt for her son Tony, a smart and decent man trapped in prison for life for a stupid and impulsive grudge killing. She talked about the pain she felt for Tony’s three boys, so clearly affected by a father whose attempts at parenting from behind the gray walls of prison, his pleadings that they not follow his path, were of no use at all. Keith was dead before he was old enough to vote, and the other two boys, Cochise and Gino, had also gotten on the treadmill of crime and jail. Gino, the oldest, was in a detention center on a federal firearms charge, and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were passing pictures of Cochise around the neighborhood as they searched for him.

She also talked of the pride she felt for Posquale, the one grandson who seemed determined not to lose himself to the streets. He was going to the Community College of Philadelphia to get a degree and hoped to go into business for himself as a caterer. He felt he owed it to Fifi not to follow the same path taken by some of her other grandchildren, and he was striving to make good on that debt. She had raised him from birth until age eleven, and she had given him the “strong hand” of love and stability and discipline that all children need. He had had his bouts with selling drugs and playing dice, and he had risen above them. He was working to get ahead, and he was making steady and impressive progress, but his aversion to birth control had made him the father of eleven children out of wedlock, according to his own account, all but one of them by different mothers. Three of the children died of medical complications as tiny infants, but that still left eight children to raise. Fifi wasn’t sure that all the children really were his, and Posquale himself had questions about three of them. But he knew that word was out in the neighborhood that he was a good man to peg as a father because of his reputation for not running out. So he provided for all of them, by his own means and also with the help of public assistance. He was proud of the fact that he had been taken to court only once for failure to provide child support, and on weekends he frequently had all the children together. He loved them, but he also acknowledged that he would have done it differently had he been given the opportunity. “If I had a
chance to go back and fix all my problems, I wouldn’t have any kids,” said Posquale. “I would have learned about the condom.”

The more Fifi got to know Robin, the more she depended on him. When he said he was getting married, she didn’t understand it. How could he? How could he do this? What was wrong with him? “I kept asking, ‘Robin, why do you need a wife? We cook for you, we clean for you.’ ”

Robin tried to explain to her that it was about more than just cleaning and cooking.

Fifi sort of understood. She grew to accept the change in his marital status. She embraced Robin’s wife as she embraced Robin. And Robin was still there for her, to revel in her laughter and give sympathy during her bouts of pain and dispense practical advice when she began to sob from exhaustion and frayed nerves—custody hearings, doctors’ appointments, shopping, sandwich making, after-school pickups, so many piles of laundry that it had begun to smell, calls from prison, calls from jail, calls for money, calls for help. “Sometimes you feel like an octopus putting tentacles out,” said Fifi. But then the sobbing would pass, and the spirit would take over, prompted by a Mario Lanza song on the radio where she worked or a particularly good sermon or the Can-Can sale at Shop Rite or a flea-market spectacular or something the great-grandkids said.

“
I’m gonna tell Grandma you were kissin’ all the girls today
.”

“
I wasn’t kissin’ all the girls. They were kissin’ me.”

In addition to her salary, she also received financial assistance from various family members. Money was tight, but there was enough to go around, and she lived frugally, using supermarket coupons with almost surgical precision and ferreting out bargains no matter how remotely tucked away they were in the mile-long aisles—cans of soup, frozen bags of corn on the cob, precooked Chinese dinners, cartons of iced tea.

Robin knew she was a remarkable woman, unlike any other he had ever met. And she believed he was equally remarkable, a true miracle who had taken the disintegrating shell of Cookman United and saved it from extinction.

The original charter of the church dated back to 1881, and in celebration of its dedication a decade later on the last Sabbath of May, 1,333 people
swelled through its doors. The original building was destroyed by fire in 1925, but the structure was quickly rebuilt, and its interior of solid wood and straight lines served a congregation of whites who lived and worked in the neighborhood. Attendance numbered regularly in the hundreds until the end of the 1950s, when many of the members left the neighborhood for the suburbs. The church reflected the job loss and population loss that had seized North Philadelphia, and by the time Robin Hynicka arrived as a missioner in 1978, it was barely there at all. Robin was a graduate of Albright College in Reading who had grown up on a farm in Lancaster County, the son of a plant manager for RCA. With a master’s degree fresh from the divinity school at Duke University, he was twenty-four at the time and unprepared for what lay ahead. He drove down Lehigh Avenue with his mother and brother and pulled up to the house next to the church where he would be staying. It was unrenovated and dilapidated, with a bathtub in the front room. That first Sunday he preached to five people, two adults and three children, and the biggest issue facing him when he delivered his sermon was whether to stand at the pulpit or on the church floor.

He was a white in an area of the city that was black, and he knew he needed the divine intervention of God to build trust and ease natural suspicions. He liked basketball, and he joined a neighborhood team called the Smokers. The coach put him in, and he was the only white on the court. It was the championship game, he got fouled, and although he had been a fine athlete in college, he had never been more nervous than he was at this moment, and he prayed to God in a style that the Duke Divinity School had probably not taught him—“Please God, please let me make this shot”—and then the wind started to blow, and the hoop began to shake, and he threw up the shot.

It hit one side of the rim.

God was answering him.

It hit the other side of the rim.

God was still answering him.

He closed his eyes.

God was
still
answering him.

It went in.

Shortly afterward, he accidentally locked himself out of his house. He had to walk through some of the roughest parts of the city to get another set of keys, and he made it to within three or four blocks of where he needed to go when he saw a group of black kids standing on the corner. He couldn’t avoid them, and he felt instantly afraid and automatically assumed
that they wanted to rob him or shoot him or just mess with him a little bit when one of them said, “Hey Robin.” The kid had recognized him from the basketball game, and in that moment Robin understood that the problem was not what those black kids on the corner felt but what he felt. “My reason for being afraid was based on my own racism. They had done nothing. There were no weapons visible. There was no verbal abuse.”

It was a pivotal point of self-awareness, one that he remembered as he began the long and improbable task of rebuilding the congregation. Prophecies about human nature were risky and self-defeating, and he quickly found that those who he thought would support him the most supported him the least and those who he thought would support him the least supported him the most. There was no grand scheme or master plan, just the sweat of labor and dedication. The neighborhood, which was bad when he got there, only got worse, thinning out the desert even more. The Botany 500 plant, several blocks up the street from the church, at Broad and Lehigh, closed, and the ravages of crack set in in an epidemic every bit as corrosive as the earlier tuberculosis scares. Eventually a cure had been found for tuberculosis, but the cures for crack—decent jobs, decent schools, decent places to live—were further away than ever, and Robin knew that every family in the community in which he served had been affected. Families that were struggling to remain stable came unglued. Grandmothers became baby-sitters for husbandless daughters who roamed the streets like the living dead. Once-beautiful women turned to prostitution. A faithful churchgoer on her deathbed whispered to Robin, not asking for salvation but announcing that her fourteen-year-old granddaughter was pregnant. A mother he knew was beaten so badly by her son for five dollars that she was put on life support and eventually died.

But with help from what Robin called the mothers of the church, women like Fifi and Ester Potts and Ellen Arttaway, the congregation slowly grew. There was an irrepressible spirit, and the church served as its focal point. The congregation never came close to the numbers that had sustained it in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s, but by the time Robin decided to take the next step in his life, it numbered 108, more than twenty times the number that had shown up that very first time.

He had the soul of a man of the cloth, but he still had the competitive ferocity of the wide receiver he had been in high school and college. He was long and lean, and he didn’t like being screwed with. When he witnessed a purse snatching near the church, he ran and tackled the guy and ended up with a huge gash in his head that required thirteen stitches. When someone
stole his favorite jacket, the one with the leather sleeves, from the wall rack in his office, he embarked on a high-speed chase for two blocks, all the way to the Broad Street subway line. He never found the perpetrator, but at least he was able to retrieve his wallet, which had been left on top of a token dispenser. His parents thought he was crazy to be doing what he was doing, but he kept on despite his own bouts of self-doubt. He wondered whether the church was really relevant, whether anything could really be relevant in the mess of the desert out there. But he also realized that the role of the church wasn’t necessarily to save but was to offer peace and refuge. “That’s what I provided as a person; that’s what the church provided,” he said at one point. “I provided a step every week out of the chaos. I was available.”

In his life, Robin could remember books that were so touching and so real that he had avoided reading the final chapter for as long as possible so they would never end. He had done that with
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and he was doing it now, at the end of June 1993, in saying good-bye to Cookman. “We’re trying to avoid the last several pages of this book,” he said a week before his last sermon, and his normally cluttered office had now been filled with the smell of cardboard moving boxes. The once-crammed bookshelf was empty; all that was left were the Holy Bible and
The Life of Christ
between faded covers.

His new job, as executive director of the Frankford Group Ministry, would involve far more administration than his job at Cookman had, and he seemed to welcome that. But the bonds he had forged, the strength and the intimacy of them, were unlike anything he could have imagined. He had come to Cookman as a young pragmatist. Fifteen years later, he was leaving as a true believer in the miracles of the human spirit.

In the days before the last sermon, his mind traveled. Sitting late one night in the pharmacology lab at Penn, where his wife, Weslia, a PhD candidate, was doing an experiment, his mind raced back five years and then ten years and then fifteen—to the house next door to the church with the bathtub in the front room, to the providential foul shot that became a rite of acceptance, to his fear of those boys on the corner that exposed his own vein of racism and wrongful expectation. He knew that going to the Frankford Group Ministry was a good move. There was infinitely more responsibility in the job, and there was the challenge of supervising a staff. But there was always the question of what would happen to those he was leaving behind. His constant accessibility at Cookman, he admitted, had been
a weakness as well as a strength. He always had this sense that he was picking up the pieces, constantly picking up the pieces. But it was hard to imagine what life for someone like Fifi would have been like without him. Truly he had been her heart. When she hugged him, she just felt secure, and in the desert of North Philadelphia, in the context of her life, that was a sacred feeling.