Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [73]
“Hey, Angela!” We looked up to see Marty waving at us from the stage. “You guys can talk to Barack all you want later. Right now I need all of you up here with me.”
The women exchanged knowing looks before Angela turned back to me.
“I guess we better get going,” she said. “But we really do have to talk. Soon.”
“Sure do,” said Mona before the three of them walked away, Angela and Shirley busy chatting away in the front, Mona leisurely bringing up the rear.
The auditorium was almost filled by this time, two thousand people in all, maybe a third of them blacks bused in from the city. At seven o’clock, a choir sang two gospel songs, Will took a roll call of all the churches represented, and a white Lutheran from the suburbs explained the history and mission of CCRC. A procession of speakers then mounted the stage: a black legislator and a white legislator, a Baptist minister and Cardinal Bernardin, and finally the governor, who offered his solemn pledge of support for the new job bank and recited evidence of his tireless efforts on behalf of the working men and women of Illinois.
To my mind the whole thing came off a bit flat, like a political convention or a TV wrestling match. Still, the crowd seemed to be enjoying itself. Some people hoisted bright banners bearing the name of their church. Others broke into boisterous cheers as a friend or relative was recognized from the stage. Seeing all these black and white faces together in one place, I, too, found myself feeling cheered, recognizing in myself the same vision driving Marty, his confidence in the populist impulse and working-class solidarity; his faith that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground.
When the rally was over, Marty mentioned that he had to give some people a ride home, so instead of riding with him I decided to take one of the buses heading back to the city. As it turned out, there was an empty seat next to Will on the bus, and in the glow of the freeway lights, he began to tell me a little about himself.
He had grown up in Chicago, he said, and served in Vietnam. After the war, he had found a job as an executive trainee at Continental Illinois Bank and had risen fast, enjoying the trappings of the work—the car, the suits, the downtown office. Then the bank had reorganized and Will was laid off, leaving him shaken and badly in debt. It was the turning point in his life, he said, God’s way of telling him to get his values straight. Rather than look for another job in banking, he turned to Christ. He joined St. Catherine’s parish in West Pullman and took a job as the janitor there. The decision had put some strain on his marriage—his wife was “still adjusting,” he said—but according to Will, the ascetic lifestyle suited his new mission: to spread the Good News and puncture some of the hypocrisy he saw in the church.
“A lot of black folks in the church get mixed up in middle-class attitudes,” Will said. “Think that as long as they follow the letter of Scripture, they don’t need to follow the spirit. Instead of reaching out to people who are hurting, they make them feel unwelcome. They look at people funny unless they’re wearing the right clothes to mass, talk proper and all that. They figure they’re comfortable, so why put themselves out. Well, Christ ain’t about comfort, is he? He preached a social gospel. Took his message to the weak. The downtrodden. And that’s exactly what I tell some of these middle-class Negroes whenever I stand up on Sunday. Tell ’em what they don’t wanna hear.”
“Do they listen?”
“No.” Will chuckled. “But that don’t stop me. It’s like this collar I wear. That really gets some of ’em mad. ‘Collars are for priests,’ they tell me. But see, just ’cause I’m married and can’t be ordained don’t mean I don’t have a calling. Ain’t nothing in the Bible talking about collars. So I go ahead and wear a collar to let people know where I’m coming