In sports, it was bad enough. But I had a particular distaste for religious hypocrisy. Televangelists who solicited money, got arrested for lewd behavior, and soon were back soliciting under the guise of repentance—that stuff turned my stomach. I wanted to trust Henry Covington. But I didn’t want to be naïve.
And then, let’s be honest, his world of faith wasn’t one I was used to. So broken down. So makeshift. The church seemed to sag even on the inside. The up staircase, Henry said, led to a floor where five tenants lived in dormlike rooms.
So, wait, people live in your church?
“Yes. A few. They pay a small rent.”
How do you pay your bills?
“Mostly from that.”
What about membership dues?
“There aren’t any.”
Then how do you get paid a salary?
He laughed.
“I don’t.”
We stepped out into the sun. The one-legged man was still there. He smiled. I forced a smile back.
Well, Pastor, I’ll be in touch, I said.
I don’t know if I meant it.
“You’re welcome to come to service on Sunday,” he said.
I’m not Christian.
He shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that meant okay, then you’re not welcome, or okay, you still are.
Have you ever been in a synagogue? I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “when I was a teenager.”
What was the occasion?
He looked down sheepishly.
“We were robbing it.”
OCTOBER
Old
The synagogue parking lot was jammed with cars, and the spillover stretched half a mile down the main road. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the day when, it is said, the Lord decides who will be sealed in the Book of Life for another year.
Although solemn by any measure, this was always the Reb’s shining hour, the morning for which his greatest sermons seemed reserved. It was rare when congregants did not go home buzzing about the Reb’s message on life, death, love, forgiveness.
Not today. At eighty-nine, he had stopped giving sermons. He made no appearance on the pulpit. Instead, he sat quietly among the other worshippers, and I sat in the next section over, beside my father and mother, as I had done on this occasion all my life.
It was the one day I looked like I belonged.
At some point during the afternoon service, I walked over to find the Reb. I passed former classmates, vaguely familiar faces but with thinning hair now, or eyeglasses, or jowls that didn’t used to be there. They smiled and whispered hello, recalling me faster than I did them, and I wondered if deep down they thought I felt superior because I’d moved on. They might have been justified; I think I acted that way.
The Reb was sitting a few seats off the aisle, clapping along to an upbeat prayer. He wore a cream-colored robe, as usual, but his walker, which he hated to use in public, rested against the nearby wall. Sarah was next to him, and when she spotted me, she tapped her husband, who looked over from his clapping.
“Ahh,” he said. “All the way from Detroit.”
His family members helped him up.
“Come. Let’s talk.”
He eased out slowly, finding the walker. People in the aisle drew in, hands at the ready, in case he needed help. You could see in their faces the mix of reverence and concern.
He grabbed the handles and steered himself out.
Twenty minutes later, after stopping every few feet to greet somebody, we found seats in his small office, across from the large one he’d once inhabited. I had never before had a private audience with the Reb on the holiest day of the year. It felt strange being in his office when all those other people were outside.
“Your wife is here?” he asked.
With my folks, I said.
“Good.”
He had always been sweet to my wife. And he never chafed me over her faith. That was kind.
How are you feeling? I asked.
“Ach. They want me to eat today.”
Who?
“The doctors.”
It’s okay.
“It isn’t.” He clenched a fist. “Today we fast. That is my tradition. I want to do what I always did.”
He lowered the fist, which shook on its own.
“You see?” he whispered. “This is man’s dilemma. We rail against it.”
Getting old?
“Getting old, we can deal with. Being old is the problem.”
One of the Reb’s most memorable sermons, to me, anyhow, came after his oldest living relative, an aunt, had died. His mother and father were already gone, and his grandparents were long since buried. As he stood near his aunt’s grave, he realized a simple but frightening thought:
I’m next.
What do you do when death’s natural pecking order puts you in the front of the line, when you no longer can hide behind “It’s not my turn”?
Seeing the Reb now, slumped behind his desk, reminded me, sadly, of how long he had been on top of his family’s list.
Why don’t you do sermons anymore? I asked.
“I can’t bear the thought,” he said, sighing. “If I stumbled on a word. If, at a key moment, I should lose my place—”
You don’t need to be embarrassed.
“Not me,” he corrected. “The people. If they see me discombobulated…it reminds them that I’m dying. I don’t want to scare them like that.”
I should have known he was thinking of us.
As a child, I truly believed there was a Book of Life, some huge, dusty thing in a library in the sky, and once a year, on the Day of Atonement, God flipped through the pages with a feathered quill pen and—check, check, X, check—you lived or you died. I was always afraid that I wasn’t praying hard enough, that I needed to shut my eyes tighter to will God’s pen from one side to the other.
What do people fear most about death? I asked the Reb.
“Fear?” He thought for a moment. “Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?”
That’s big.
“Yes. But there’s something else.”
What else?
He leaned forward.
“Being forgotten,” he whispered.
There is a cemetery not far from my house, with graves that date back to the nineteenth century. I have never seen anyone come there to lay a flower. Most people just wander through, read the engravings, and say, “Wow. Look how old.”
That cemetery came to mind in the Reb’s office, after he quoted a poem both beautiful and heartbreaking. Written by Thomas Hardy, it told of a man among tombstones, conversing with the dead below. The recently buried souls lamented the older souls that had already slid from memory:
They count as quite forgot,
They are as men who have existed not,
Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath
It is the second death.
The second death. The unvisited in nursing homes. The homeless found frozen in alleys. Who mourned their passing? Who marked their time on earth?
“Once, on a trip to Russia,” the Reb recalled, “we found an old Orthodox synagogue. Inside, there was an elderly man, standing alone, saying the mourner’s Kaddish. Being polite, we asked for whom he was saying it. He looked up and answered, ‘I am saying it for myself.’”
The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public Web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming, Notice me! Remember me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.
How then, I asked the Reb, can you avoid the second death?
/> “In the short run,” he said, “the answer is simple. Family. It is through my family that I hope to live on for a few generations. When they remember me, I live on. When they pray for me, I live on. All the memories we have made, the laughs and the tears.
“But that, too, is limited.”
How so?
He sang the next sentence.
“Ifff…I’ve done a good jobbb, then I’ll be re-mem-bered one generation, maybe two…but e-ven-tu-allllly…they’re gonna say, ‘What was his naaame again?’”
At first I protested. Then I stopped. I realized I did not know my great-grandmother’s name. I’d never seen my great-grandfather’s face. How many generations does it take, even in close-knit families, for the fabric to unravel?
“This is why,” the Reb said, “faith is so important. It is a rope for us all to grab, up and down the mountain. I may not be remembered in so many years. But what I believe and have taught—about God, about our tradition—that can go on. It comes from my parents and their parents before them. And if it stretches to my grandchildren and to their grandchildren, then we are all, you know…”
Connected?
“That’s it.”
We should get back to services, I said.
“All right. Yes. Gimme a little shove here.”
I realized it was just me there, and he couldn’t get up from the chair without help. How far was this from the days when he commanded the pulpit with a booming voice and I sat in the crowd, wowed by his performance? I tried not to think about that. I awkwardly moved behind him, counted “one…two…three,” then lifted him by the elbows.
“Ahhhh,” he exhaled. “Old, old, old.”
I bet you could still do a helluva sermon.
He grabbed the walker’s handles. He paused.
“You think so?” he asked, softly.
Yeah, I said. No question.
In the basement of his house there are old film reels of the Reb, Sarah, and their family:
Here they are in the early 1950s, bouncing their first child, Shalom.
Here they are a few years later with their twin girls, Orah and Rinah.
Here they are in 1960, pushing Gilah, their youngest, in her baby carriage.
Although the footage is grainy, the expressions of delight on the Reb’s face—holding, hugging, and kissing his children—are unmistakable. He seems predestined to raise a family. He never hits his kids. He rarely raises his voice. He makes memories in small, loving bites: slow afternoon walks home from temple, nights doing homework with his daughters, long Sabbath dinners of family conversation, summer days throwing a baseball backward over his head to his son.
Once, he drives Shalom and a few of his young friends over the bridge from Philadelphia. As they approach the toll booth, he asks if the boys have their passports.
“Passports?” they say.
“You mean you don’t have your passports—and you expect to get into New Jersey?” he cries. “Quick! Hide under that blanket! Don’t breathe! Don’t make a sound!”
Later, he teases them about the whole thing. But under that blanket, in the back of a car, another family story is forged, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.
His kids are grown now. His son is an established rabbi. His oldest daughter is a library director; his youngest, a teacher. They each have children of their own.
“We have this photograph, all of us together,” the Reb says. “Whenever I feel the spirit of death hovering, I look at that picture, the whole family smiling at the camera. And I say, ‘Al, you done okay.
“This is your immortality.’”
Church
As I entered the church, a thin man with a high forehead nodded and gave me a small white envelope in case I wished to make a donation. He motioned for me to take a seat anywhere. The weather had turned to a blowing rain, and the hole in the ceiling loomed overhead, dark and dripping, the red buckets on plywood planks to catch the incoming water.
The pews were mostly empty. Up front, near the altar, a man sat behind a portable organ and occasionally hit a chord, which was punctuated with a rim shot—pwock!—by a drummer. Their small music echoed in the big room.
Standing to the side was Pastor Henry, in a long blue robe, swaying back and forth. After several of his entreaties, I had come to a service. I’m not sure why. Maybe curiosity. Maybe, to be blunt, to see if I trusted him for the charity contribution. We had spoken several times now. He had spared no detail of his criminal history—the drugs, the guns, the jail time—and while it was nice that he was honest, if you went strictly on his past, there might be no reason to invest in his future.
But there was also something sad and confessional in his face, something weary in his voice, as if he’d had enough of the world, or at least certain parts of it. And while I couldn’t help but think of that old expression “Never trust a fat preacher,” I had little concern that Henry Covington was siphoning profits from his congregation. There were none to be had.
He looked up from his meditation and saw me. Then he continued praying.
Henry Covington was sent to Detroit in 1992 by Bishop Roy Brown of the Pilgrim Assemblies International in New York. Brown had discovered Henry in his church, had heard his testimony, and had taken him to prisons and watched the way inmates reacted to his story. Eventually, after training him, teaching him, and ordaining him a deacon, he asked Henry to go to the Motor City.
Henry would have done anything for Brown. He moved his family into a Ramada Inn in downtown Detroit and was paid three hundred dollars a week to help build a new Pilgrim ministry. His transportation was an old black limousine that Bishop Brown granted him, in part to ferry the man around when he came to town for weekend services.
Over the years, Henry served under three different pastors, and each one noted his devotion to study and his easy connection to people in the neighborhood. They elevated him to elder and finally pastor. But eventually the Pilgrim interest faded, Bishop Brown stopped coming, and so did Henry’s money.
He had to sink or swim on his own.
His house went into foreclosure. The sheriffs put a sign on the door. His water and electricity were turned off. Meanwhile, the ignored church had a busted boiler and cracked pipes. There were local drug dealers who let it be known that if Henry let the place serve as a secret distribution center, his financial woes could go away.
But Henry was done with that life.
So he dug in. He formed the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry, he asked God for guidance, and he did whatever he could to keep his church and his family afloat.
Now, as the organ played, someone hobbled forward on crutches. It was the one-legged man from my first visit. His nickname was Cass, short for Anthony Castelow. It turned out he was a church elder.
“Thank you, thank you, Lord,” he began, his eyes nearly closed, “thank you, thank you, thank you…”
Someone clapped. Someone yelled, “Well…,” which came out more like “Way-elll.” You could hear the traffic noise through the doors when they opened.
“Thank you, Jesus…thank you for our pastor, thank you for the day…”
I counted twenty-six people, all African-American, mostly female. I sat behind an older woman who wore a dress the color of a Caribbean sea, with a wide hat to match. As crowds went, it was a far cry from those megachurches in California, or even a suburban synagogue.
“Thank you for this day, thank you, Jesus…”
When Elder Cass finished, he turned to go, but the cord got caught in his crutch and the microphone hit the floor with an amplified phwock.
A woman quickly put it right.
Then the sanctuary quieted.
And with his cheeks and forehead already shiny with perspiration, Pastor Henry came forward.
The moment a cleric rises for a sermon is, for me, a time for the body to ease in, as if the good listening is about to start. I had always done this with the Reb, an
d, out of habit, I slid down in the wooden pew as the organist held the last chords of “Amazing Grace.”
Henry leaned forward toward the people. He held there, for a moment, as if pondering one last thought. Then he spoke.
“Amazing grace…,” he said, shaking his head. “…Amaaaa-zing grace.”
Someone repeated, “Amazing grace!” Others clapped. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the quiet, reflective audience I was used to.
“Amaaaazing grace,” Henry bellowed. “I coulda been dead.”
“Mmm-hmm!”
“Shoulda been dead!”
“Mmm-hmm!”
“Woulda been dead!…But his grace!”
“Yes!”
“His grace…saved a wretch. And I was a wretch. You know what a wretch is? I was a crackhead, an alcoholic, I was a heroin addict, a liar, a thief. I was all those things. But then came Jesus—”
“Jesus!”
“I call him the greatest recycler I know!…Jesus…he lifts me up. He rearranges me. He repositions me. By myself, I’m no good—”
“Way-ell—”
“But he makes all the difference!”
“Amen to that!”
“Now, yesterday…yesterday, friends, a portion of the ceiling done fell down. It was leaking in the sanctuary. But you know—”
“Tell it, Rev—”
“You know-you-know-you-know…how that song go…Hallelujah—”
“Hallelujah!”
“Anyhow!”
He began to clap. The organist joined in. The drummer right behind him. And off they went, as if a floodlight had just ignited the altar.
“Haaaa-llelujah anyhow…” Henry sang, “…never gonna let life’s troubles get you down…
“No matter what comes your way,
“Lift your voice and say—
“Hallelujah…anyhow!”
His voice was beautiful, pure and crisp and almost too high-pitched, it seemed, to come from such a large man. The whole congregation was immediately engaged, inspired, clapping, dipping shoulders and singing along—all except me. I felt like the loser who got left out of the choir.