The Cross and the Switchblade

  Linda’s job with the Debs was not an easy one. She got her introduction to the girls on her very first Saturday night at the center. Five girls walked through the door and demanded to be shown around. I could smell alcohol on the girls’ breath.

  “We have a service here at 7:30,” I said. “Come then; you’ll be welcome.” The girls came back at 7:30, bringing a group of boys with them.

  The girls giggled, mocked, blew loud bubbles with their gum, got up and walked in and out. Several of the girls got out knives and started cutting their shoelaces. In the middle of my sermon, they began to argue with me from the floor of the little chapel. I turned the meeting over to an all-girl trio (which included Linda), but they couldn’t sing above the noise.

  Finally we just gave up trying to hold an orderly meeting and turned our attention instead to individual boys and girls. Most of the girls got out of their seats and stormed out the door, slamming it loudly.

  The evening broke up early. This was Linda’s introduction to her future friends.

  “It’s hopeless,” said Linda the next morning. “I don’t see how I can work with kids as hard as these.”

  “Wait till you see what the Holy Spirit can do, Linda, before you make up your mind.”

  The very next Tuesday, Linda had her first experience of watching the change. Afterward, she showed me the letter she had written to her parents:

  . . . every minute is full of excitement and a new adventure. On Tuesday the entire gang of boys and girls returned. We wanted to have them come on different nights, but the girls begged to come in with the boys for a service. They promised not to laugh and to be good; so we let them all in. During the service, we sang “Jesus Breaks Every Fetter.” Dave asked if there was anything that anyone would like for God to break in their lives. A fourteen-year-old girl said she would like to be delivered from heavy drinking every night. One of the girls pulled up her sleeve and asked if God could forgive this—a line showing heroin inserts. The girls behaved as well as I’ve seen girls behave anywhere.

  From that moment on, girls from the gangs sought Linda out for help. Elaine, for instance, one of the girls from the local gang, came to Linda with a very common problem for a Deb; she was poisoning her life with hate. Elaine was a hard girl; you could feel the hatred that clung about her. She was a discipline problem at school and at home. If she was told to sit, she’d stand; if told to stand, she’d sit. If she was told she had to stay in, she’d slip out; or if she was told to get out of the house, nothing could make her leave.

  One afternoon Elaine came to see Linda. They sat in the kitchen and talked. Elaine’s first words were that she had been drinking heavily. Then she told Linda that she had recently started going to wild parties, and they were getting wilder.

  Suddenly, Elaine began to cry. “Linda,” she said, “I don’t want to hate myself anymore. Can you help me?”

  Soon Elaine was coming regularly to our gang church meetings that we held every Wednesday night. She stood up and told what happened to her hate. Her face was open and fresh and free as Linda’s. She started bringing her cousins and her friends. She stopped her drinking and her wild partying.

  Elaine was no isolated case. Day in and day out, we could count on reaching girls like Elaine with this special kind of love. I’ll never forget the day Elaine put her finger on the quality of the love that redeems.

  “I’ve finally got it figured out, Reverend Wilkerson,” she said. “Christ’s love is a love with no strings attached.”

  Elaine was right. Christ’s love is a love that asks nothing in return. It is a love that wants only the best for these boys and girls.

  In one of her letters home, Linda wrote that her life was in constant danger. This was not an exaggeration. We did what we could to protect our workers. For instance, we had a rule that street work must be done in teams of two or three. We had a rule that girls were not allowed to make contact with boys on the street, and boys were not allowed to make contact with girls. And we had a rule that workers must make contact with each other at regular intervals, especially at night.

  The fact remained, however, that our young students were walking into areas where even armed policemen traveled in pairs for protection. Many of the teenagers on the street carried concealed weapons. If a boy was high on heroin, he might lash out with his knife, just for kicks. But a much more serious problem was the jealousy that was aroused when our workers threatened to break up relationships.

  One night Linda and a partner, Kay, were out near midnight on a sweltering summer night. The girls should have gone to bed, but they headed out into the night, praying that the Holy Spirit would lead them to girls in need.

  They came to a store, and looking inside, they saw four teenage girls listening to music and sipping Cokes. Linda and Kay walked in and struck up a conversation with the girls. The four girls argued for only a few moments, then one of them began to cry.

  “Come on,” said another of the foursome. “Let’s go out on the street. I don’t want anyone to hear this.”

  So all the girls stepped outside. Hardly had they started talking again when all four of the girls started to cry.

  Two fellows walked up.

  “What’s going on?” they asked.

  The teenage girls told them they didn’t want to talk to the boys.

  This aroused the boys’ curiosity even more than the tears, and they pressed in. “What are you trying to do?” they asked Linda. “Take our girls away from us?”

  One of the boys began to pinch Linda. “Come over into the park, and I’ll show you something.” The other fellow joined in, and the two of them made suggestions to Linda and Kay that left them embarrassed.

  But looking the leader of the boys squarely in the eye, Linda said slowly, “God bless you.”

  The boy’s jaw dropped. Linda turned and picked up her conversations with the four girls. The boys sputtered a while, then one of them said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Linda and Kay went back to their talks with the teenage girls. After a while, they became aware that a whole crowd of boys was descending slowly on them from many different directions.

  “Watch out,” whispered one of the girls.

  Linda and Kay moved closer together, but they continued talking calmly. Suddenly there was a loud laugh and a cry. All of the girls were surrounded by yelping, shouting teenage boys who crowded in and separated Linda and Kay from the other girls.

  “You make me mad,” said the leader of the boys. “You talking religion to our girls? You’ll take them away from us.”

  Again Linda and Kay heard language they’d never heard before. The boys pushed and taunted them.

  Something glistened in the dark. One of the boys held a knife in his hand that shone in the night.

  Without warning he lunged at Linda. She slipped her body sideways. The knife slashed through her clothing. It ripped out a chunk of her dress, but it did not touch her body.

  Linda turned to the boy while he was still off balance. Once again she spoke the words that had helped her before. Her voice was low as she said, “God bless you.”

  She took Kay by the arm. “Come over to the center tomorrow: 416 Clinton Avenue,” she said. “We’ll be expecting you.” Then she and Kay sauntered off across the street.

  At first the boys followed them. Then the leader shouted for the boys to stop. “Forget it,” he said. “I don’t feel like fooling with them.”

  Linda and Kay came back to the center shaking. But the next day they picked up conversations with the four girls, and the next night Linda and Kay were out on the street again.

  18

  The center turned out to be what we hoped it would be: a home. Full of love, subject to spiritual discipline, heading toward the same common goal, but free. There was a release in that kind of atmosphere that could not be overestimated. It kept us from becoming tied up in knots. It allowed us to laugh.

  I was glad about that. It didn’t seem likely to me that any true ho
use of God would be a drab and somber place. Certainly the center was no place for the long-of-face. If it wasn’t a pillow fight in the girls’ dorm, or a short sheet in the boys’, then it was sugar in the saltshaker. But we kept our young people so busy that there wasn’t much energy left for roughhousing.

  It surprised me to discover how much of the free give-and-take we encountered at 416 Clinton Avenue centered on the kitchen.

  I think maybe God saw to it, during those first long months of our work at the center, that we never found a cook. We tried every system under the sun to keep ourselves fed, but the one that never worked out was to have a full-time cook. A kitchen is the heart of a home, and a cook has a way of chasing you out so that she can get her work done. Thus you are chased from the heart of the home.

  Not so with the center, because we could never come up with a cook.

  The result was a wonderful, chaotic, happy mess. To understand it you must first understand where the food itself came from. Like everything else at the center, we got our food by praying for it. Each day we prayed for food, and the way it came in was a vivid lesson to young people—including live-in gang members—learning about faith. People sent in a ham, potato chips, fruit, vegetables. Or they sent in money not earmarked for a special purpose.

  One day, however, the kids went down to breakfast, and there wasn’t anything on the table. By the time I arrived, the center was buzzing with the problem of no food.

  “Your prayers didn’t work I guess this time, did they, Dave?” said one of the gang boys.

  Lord, I said to myself, teach us a lesson in faith that will live with us forever. Aloud, I said, “Let’s make an experiment. Here we are without food for the day, right?”

  The boy nodded his head.

  “The Bible says, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ right? So why don’t we all go into the chapel right now and pray that we either get the food for this day or money to buy the food.”

  “Before lunch, Dave?” said the boy. “I’m getting hungry.”

  “Before lunch. How many do we have here?” I glanced around. The number in the center was constantly shifting. On that day we could count 25 people who would need to be fed. I figured it would cost between 30 and 35 dollars to feed that number of people lunch and supper. Others agreed. So we went into the chapel, closed the door, and began to pray.

  “While You’re at it, Lord,” said the gang boy, “would You please see that we don’t go hungry for the rest of the summer?”

  I thought this was stretching things a bit. But I had to admit that it would leave us freer to work at other kinds of prayer if we didn’t have to pay so much attention to such basic needs as food.

  One of the things about our prayer at the center was that it tended to be a bit loud. If we felt concerned, we said so not only with our lips but with the tone of our prayer.

  And this morning we were quite concerned. While we were saying so in tones that left no doubt about how we felt, a stranger walked in.

  We didn’t even hear when she knocked on the door of the chapel. When finally she opened the door and saw all 25 of us on our knees, thanking God for the food He had given us in the past and thanking Him, too, for the food He would be giving us, somehow, in this emergency, I’m sure she was sorry she had come.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  I immediately got up. The rest kept right on with their prayer.

  This lady started asking questions. I noticed that the more she found out about what we were doing, the more enthusiastic she became. Finally, she asked about the prayer session. I told her about realizing that we had no food in the house and about the purpose of the prayer.

  “When did you begin this prayer?” the lady asked.

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Well,” she said, “that is truly extraordinary. I knew very little about your work. But an hour ago I received a sudden impulse to do something completely out of character for me. I felt that I was supposed to empty my piggy bank and bring the contents to you. Now I know the reason.” She reached into her purse.

  She placed a white envelope on my desk and with an expression of hope that it would be of some help, she thanked me for showing her our center and left. That envelope contained just over 32 dollars, the amount we needed to feed ourselves for the rest of the day.

  And that teenager’s prayer was answered, too! For the rest of the summer, we never again wanted for food.

  Finding enough money to run the center was a matter of even greater difficulty. As the time grew closer for our young workers to go back to school, we made a reckoning of what it had cost us to run the center full swing for the summer. We were astonished at how much cash was involved.

  There were monthly electric bills and food bills, printing bills and transportation bills. There were clothing bills for our street boys, whose clothes we often had to throw away; there were repair bills and plumbing bills and taxes. There were salaries. Even those small wages paid to staff added up. Our expenses regularly ran more than a thousand dollars each week.

  We never had more than a few dollars in the bank. As fast as the money came in, we found a need for it. Often I yearned for a financial situation that would allow us to breathe a little more easily. But just as often, I came back to the conviction that the Lord wanted us to live this way—to depend totally on God for the needs of His work.

  Where did the weekly money come from? A lot of it was raised by teenagers themselves. All across the country young boys and girls helped support this work by babysitting, mowing lawns and washing cars. Individual churches took us as a missionary concern.

  We were usually able to handle weekly expenses. But we were faced with a crisis come summer’s end. In two weeks the second mortgage on the home was due: fifteen thousand dollars. I had not put anything aside toward its payment. We were barely scraping by as it was.

  August 28, 1961, was our deadline. We would have to face reality on that date.

  19

  Late one afternoon Maria telephoned me to say that she wanted to see me. I called Linda in and briefed her. “This is a girl you should know,” I said. “She has tremendous potential if her energies can ever be channeled in the right direction. She’s brave; but it’s gang bravery. When she became president of her gang, she had to stand with her back to the wall and let the kids hit her as hard as they could. She’s a brilliant organizer, but she’s thrown this away on the gang. She built her unit up until it had more than three hundred girls in it.

  “But I think she’s coming because she’s back on heroin.”

  I briefed Linda on Maria’s battle with the drug. I told her how she’d been a mainline addict when I first met her nearly four years earlier. I told how she’d tried to throw the habit after she came forward at St. Nick’s, how she’d married, how everything seemed to go smoothly for a while. Maria quit the gang, her husband got a job, children began to come along.

  But one day Maria and Johnny had a fight. The first thing Maria did was connect with a seller and start “drilling” again. She had gone off once more for a short while. But now, I felt sure, she was calling to say she was back on again.

  When Maria arrived, what a tragic change had come over her since I last saw her! Her eyes were glassy. Her nose ran. Her complexion was pasty. Her hair was matted and unkempt. But what struck me the most about Maria were her hands. She held them in tight fists. She kept clenching and unclenching those fists.

  “Reverend Wilkerson,” she said, “I need help.”

  “Come on in, Maria,” I said. We pulled up a chair for her. “I’ve told Linda about you, Maria. Everything, both good and bad. I want you to get to know Linda. She’s working with a lot of girls around the city. She’s got a real way of understanding. You’ll get along.”

  Maria and Linda did have their talk. Later Linda came into my office, worried that she had not gotten through at all to the girl.

  “It’s the drugs, Dave,” she said. “It’s death on the installment plan.�
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  A few days later, matters got worse. Maria phoned Linda, pleading for help. She was about to get into serious trouble, she said, and she didn’t know how to stop herself. She had just taken heroin and had drunk a full bottle of whiskey, and she and her old gang were heading off to fight a rival gang. “We’re going to kill a girl named Dixie,” Maria said. “You’ve got to stop us.”

  Linda and two of her partners raced uptown. They barged right into the headquarters of the girls’ gang. They stayed for more than an hour, and before they left, the fight was called off.

  “Dave,” said Linda when she got back, “this thing is desperate. We’ve simply got to do something for these girls.”

  What is this thing called drug addiction?

  Most narcotics addicts are lonesome, frustrated, angry, and usually come from a broken home. One sampling of drugs and the boy discovers what it would be like to be permanently happy. He forgets his drunken father and wandering mother, the stifling poverty, and the total lack of love in his life. He is free, and that is no small thing.

  Now comes the truly fiendish part of this story.

  Heroin costs money—every day. How does an addict pay for drugs?

  He might turn to crime. Muggings, purse snatchings, shoplifting, housebreaking, armed robbery and auto thefts became a major problem in New York. The police said the reason was drug addiction.

  Shorty was nineteen years of age and addicted to heroin. He had been on drugs since he was fifteen years old. Tammy was Shorty’s girlfriend, a very beautiful girl of seventeen.

  Shorty asked me to “get Tammy off the stuff,” and I agreed to see the girl. When Shorty and I tapped on the door of a dark, rat-infested basement room in Brooklyn, there was a quick shuffling inside. We waited, while an impatient Shorty mumbled under his breath. When the door opened, there stood Tammy, openmouthed in surprise at our visit.