Strivers Row by Kevin Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

all the faithful who couldn’t get a seat inside. The boy would go dashing back and forth down the block, making sure everything was working—watching as the windows went up, and men and women leaned outside to hear the voice of his adopted father rolling up and down West 138th Street. Sometimes, in one of his more histrionic moods, Adam would charge down from the pulpit and right out onto Seventh Avenue. Plunging into the crowds there, Preston grinning and holding on to his hand, just as Jonah knew that Adam had held on to his own father’s hand, walking the streets of San Juan Hill years before.
    To have a child. A son, to pass something on to. What, exactly?
    He didn’t want Amanda looking at him just now—knowing what they would both be thinking about. He stood up abruptly, announcing that he would help Adam put Preston back to bed even though he half-expected to hear them whispering about him when he left the room, making his way slowly upstairs and along the second-floor hall of the house.
    The cottage was just as stylish and outrageous as everything else about Adam. Most of the other colored homes in Oak Bluffs were austere and understated. Tasteful old houses that looked as if they were trying their best to melt into the background, more Yankee than the Yankees. Adam’s house, by contrast, was a loud, green, gingerbread cottage, just like the white folks’ houses by the old Methodist Campground. The fishing tackle he used every day hung proudly along the wall, much as—and precisely because—it would have appalled the most proper members of the Abyssinian.
    That was Adam, too. Poking fun at the pretensions of white people and his own congregation, all at the same time.
    Above the fishing tackle were hung a series of family photographs. Adam with his parents, and his late sister. Adam and Isabel and Preston on the boat. Adam in the Abyssinian pulpit in full robe and regalia—
    Jonah stopped when he saw what might have been his own face, cast in a much darker shade. It was a photograph of his father, posing with Adam Senior, and the Rector Hutchens C. Bishop, of St. Philip’s. The three men holding up masonry trowels at what must have been the laying of the cornerstone at one of their churches, nearly twenty-five years ago, trying to look as grave and dignified as befitted the occasion. But peering closely at the picture, even in the darkening hall, Jonah could see how they couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear, their lips just barely managing to keep their teeth covered.
    And why not, after all they had accomplished? Men who had made themselves from nothing, brought their people up from nothing, the founders and the very embodiment of their churches—
    They had been “The Three Kings,” the ministers who had first made the great exodus uptown. Moving their churches up to Harlem lock, stock, and congregation when it was still a place where goats and pigs wandered through the streets. Powell, Bishop, and his own father—the Reverend Milton Dove, pastor and founder of the Church of the New Jerusalem.
    He was the least of The Three Kings, perhaps, the one with no real theological training. The New Jerusalem not as large or as influential as the Abyssinian, nor as Old New York and high hat as Episcopal St. Philip’s. But it was, more than either of them, the church of the working people of Harlem—the church of the new people, just up from the fields of Mississippi and Georgia, and South Carolina. Heartsick and lost in the big city, just like the first, ragged band his father had so famously led out of the Wilderness.
    To do such a thing—
    He stared for a long moment at that face. It really could have been his own, a few years older. Save for the darker coloring, of course, and the scars that still remained from when—eighty years ago, now—he had been beaten nearly to death by a white mob on a City street. He knew that his father had been