meant he was on his way to court. Eventually he was such a familiar face in the youth courts, they asked him if he would be interested in serving as Protestant Chaplain of Youth House. This is the prison for New York boys awaiting trial or sentencing. For the next several years, he got up early every Sunday morning and went to hold a service and talk individually with kids in Youth House.
Most of the boys he dealt with were black, because the gangs of Harlem and Brooklyn were made up of black Baptists and other Protestant boys who gave themselves names like The Deacons or The Chaplains or The Bishops. My father had already spent one summer living and working in Harlem during seminary. He formed friendships with some of the toughest leaders of these gangs. Though he was white, they often asked him to go into court with them. Later on in the fifties, when gangs suddenly became a kind of national craze for a few years thanks to movies like The Wild Ones and Blackboard Jungle, Life Magazine ran a series of memoirs by a warlord of one of the Harlem gangs named Churchy. My father happened to look over my shoulder as I was devouring this piece with great interest.
“I knew him,” he said.
“You did? Do you want to read this?”
“I don’t think so. I think I know too much about it already.”
The other day, I heard my father’s voice for the first time in six years. It was only a tape, but suddenly I felt my own strength shift inside me at the sound. He lived in his words and spent most of his life talking to people. That was chiefly how he ministered to them. After he left Judson and went to the office of the Congregationalist Church, he began to travel all over the country, preach in hundreds of churches, talk to thousands of ministers, laymen, people on airplanes, everyone. His congregation became a group of men and women stretched across America who only had him in common. After he died, hundreds of letters came to our house saying, “Bob Spike was my minister. He changed my life.” Writing this is almost embarrassing. It sounds like schmaltz. My father detested sentimental eulogizing. Knee deep in confusion in America, it seems almost impossible to write about a man like my father. He does not seem like a modern hero but someone out of a book written in the early part of the century. On the other hand, when the total story of his life is recalled, he is as typical of the sixties as any man was. Impossible as it sounds, my father could heal people just by talking to them. He was a man who believed in his own “soul,” who helped other people believe in theirs: government people in Washington, students in Harlem, people who worked in the White House and people who worked in the White Tower hamburger stand. There were hundreds of members in his congregation.
In his calm voice, he would lay out reasonable views of the world in such crystal-clear visions that you couldn’t help feeling hopeful. Even though some of his visions were highly critical, almost despairing, of the future of this country, and the church’s place, he never talked as a minister or church leader or even father. It was as Bob Spike, a man who combined all three roles but made them his own. He would lend you his faith in things as things were. He didn’t paint heavenly pictures in the air but pinned down reality in each moment, “in the middle of the street.”
He liked to laugh at himself and to sit over a drink and trade stories. Dirty jokes were okay and so was profanity. I never saw my father shocked by language, and by only one movie—The Ten Commandments. What did shock him was cruelty and injustice, hypocrisy and betrayal.
As I grew up, I often asked him questions about religion and the Bible, which I loved to read. But he never forced any religion on either me or my brother. We both were baptized and confirmed. But he trained me himself at home for the latter and I was confirmed at Judson Church in the Village, though we were living, by then, in Tenafly. We rarely went to church in the suburbs. There weren’t any that he really felt comfortable in near our house. Most Sundays, anyway, he was off preaching somewhere around the country. I began to wonder if I was an atheist when I was about eleven. I asked my father why he believed in God.
“When things get hectic or very troubled, I have this thing I feel. I suppose I call this God. It is just a feeling, very mysterious but I get it, which I can rest inside, feel safe inside. I rest in this feeling of ‘God.’”
In his book The Freedom Revolution and the Churches, he wrote:
The whole human race is encamped once again by the Red Sea. Will it be engulfed by the terrible forces that the clever shamans have let loose—destructive hydrogen bombs, or mechanically clever devices to enslave the whole race to idleness? The human spirit is aching with anxiety about the future. And, in addition, some parts of the human family are still kept in slavery because of their color. I believe that the God of our Fathers will deliver us.
So do I. At least, I believe the God of my father will.
My father delivers me to Keaton in late September. When he drives away in his little cream-colored Morris Minor, I stand on the curb and wave good-bye like a good scout. In fact, I am curious about what will happen next. In hours, I find that I have jumped right into a combination New England prep school (with all the pretensions but none of the qualities) and West Point military academy (with both the pretensions and the qualities). As a new boy, I have to spend two ridiculous weeks under New Boy Rules, which are a kind of martial law administered by the senior class. I must doff my blue and gold beanie at all the seniors, always wear one blue and one gold sock, a blue and gold bowtie, and recite cheers and fight songs for any upper classmen who request it. I have come to accomplish one thing: get the grades to get into Harvard. But I quickly see that Keaton is in business not just to educate but to mold character. I like mine the way it is, and so do my parents, but that is hardly relevant. The next year becomes a struggle to shut up and study.
Built around a grassy quad, the brick buildings of Keaton are square and plain, not ugly but not attractive. Most monstrous of them all is Smyth Hall, an enormous building in which about half the four hundred students are housed, along with the vast dining hall and the “butt lounge,” which is the only area where boys sixteen and over, with parents’ permission, are allowed to smoke. The rest of the campus is built on a thin crust of dry land floating over the marshes of eastern Pennsylvania. There is a mudhole called Tom’s Lake and a nine-hole golf course used by the golf team, faculty, and God only knows who else. It is off-limits to most of the students. The focal point of the campus, at the south end of the quad, is the Baptist chapel with its white steeple and new, redbrick walls.
True, I love to read the Bible. But not for the religion in it. I read it like a novel, especially the Gospels, and look at Christ as a rebel-hero to identify with, to weep over at his Crucifixion, but not to worship. Any kind of worship leaves me feeling self-conscious and uncomfortable. I know my father may be leading the prayer, all heads are bowed, yet I stare around the room looking at people for my own interests. Whose lips are moving? Who else doesn’t close his eyes? Now at Keaton we go into the chapel five times a week for worship. Four days during the school week we have chapel, in which local ministers, from fundamentalists to liberals, come and deliver short homilies to the boys. There is Convocation one Sunday a month. Other Sundays we go to local churches in Coaltown. Worship abounds. Yet nobody, not the teachers or the students, seems to take it seriously. In fact, Keaton is no more Christian than the most public of public schools.
Keaton is run by bells, not God. A bell wakes me up. A bell orders me to sleep. The first step is learning to cheat the bells.
When the wake-up sounds shortly before seven, I burrow my head under the pillow and continue sleeping. Not until the warning bell for breakfast do I jump up, dive into my clothes, and run across a hundred yards of quad, trying to tie my tie as I sprint. Up the stairs, getting the knot to my throat just in time to melt through the door with the last bit of crowd and into the dining hall. Nothing can adequately describe the sinking feeling, the depression, which hits you in the face as you enter this vast warehouse for eating first thing in the morning. Like a prison or an army camp, the tables are lined up across the wide interior for hundreds of boys to stand and wait through Grace so that they can explode into a thunder of scraping chairs. Then wait for the master—as every teacher must be called—to pass out the tubs of soggy cereal and greasy eggs.
I