Here briefly, soon enough gone, we who are fairly well-off and consider ourselves well-educated ask why and what. Why are we here? What is “life” all about? Here out of nowhere, soon enough aware that awareness lasts only so long and can mean only so much, some of us pray for answers to questions like those-and occasionally feel the glimmer of an answer or two. The answer often enough has to do with a sense of destination. And how much we want it, need it in our proud, self-conscious, cleverly humble, thoughtlessly arrogant and presumptuous minds: the conviction we are on a journey that matters, the sense that we have something ahead of us, a place of sorts awaiting. 

Like us, men and women who are poor and desperate and at best barely literate also hunger for a permanent home, a somewhere in which an arrival is never to be followed by a departure, “a guaranteed set-up” is the way I heard it put by one of West Virginia’s mountaineers now become a citizen of “Chicago, Chicago, a wonderful town.” He had heard that song in a juke box and he felt as entitled as any observer and writer to take note of the ironies about him in that “wonderful town.” To do so, however, he did not choose the language of social science (or for that matter politics). Instead he called upon another, more familiar and congenial “frame of reference,” and in so doing he could give his head and his heart and his voice and his arms and his hands all the reign and sway he wanted and needed: “Before I came here to the city, I prayed; let me tell you, I did. I prayed and I prayed until I was so tired I thought God would just enter my head, all prayed-out like it was, and say something like, ‘Listen, Mister Allen, the way to go is that way, and when you get there, it’ll be alright, so don’t you worry yourself one bit more.’ But I know my religion. I know God hasn’t gone and wasted His time by putting us here, just so He can always be whispering little hints into our ears, and telling us all the answers before the game is over. You have to close your eyes sometimes. You have to trust in what’s ahead. He did, on the Cross He did. His eyes were lowered, you know. I told my wife all the way up to Chicago that I’d rather not look too hard, I’d just rather not. I’d rather keep my eye on the road, so we’ll be spared death; to look, to see what it’s like as we got near to the city—well, that wasn’t for me. I might have turned around. I might have lost my nerve and got to thinking like the Devil wants you to—and according to the Devil there’s no Heaven, there’s no rest in store for us, there’s no guaranteed set-up, even if God tries to build one for you. I might have stopped the car and sat there and shake and shake, while she was crying the way she always does, Clara—soft it is, and she lets the tears go all the way down, and they fall off her face or some of them find a way of getting onto her neck, and she doesn’t seem to mind. 

“We had none of that on the road. I said to Clara and all my kids that they should say goodbye to those mountains—goodbye, period, the end. We hope to go back, of course. But you can’t come to the city unless you’ve decided to come. You see what I mean? I’ll tell you how it is: you don’t want to leave because of the strangeness ahead of you, but you know you leave or you near die, just about, and you know that your kids might find something in the cities, though God knows what, so you wrench yourself away, you tear yourself and force yourself and pull upon yourself, and finally you’re loose, and floating—driving the car it is—and soon you’re” there. And here we are and here we’ve been for a couple of years, but don’t ask me if I was right or wrong. Do we ever know, any of us, what’s right and what’s wrong? I say no—but I could be wrong, you know.” 

And he went on; and he went on; and he told me that it is true that his mind catches itself wandering back, but most of the time no, most of the time he is in spirit where he is in fact—which means in a white ghetto of sorts just north of Chicago, where he has decided to “seek salvation,” or less grandly, to “make a struggle,” or more personally, “to throw everything, every ounce of energy, toward staying alive.” Not that he actually can do so, summon all his abilities in the way he once hoped he might be able. Often he complains that he feels useless, hopeless, idle, ill-used, at a loss about things, worried in general as well as over the specific and obvious difficulties in his and his family’s way. Often he wonders whether another city might not be the answer—since, again, he believes he has thoroughly convinced himself that there is no real turning back to West Virginia. But does one do that, go from city to city? Or are not all cities alike, places of what he calls “strangeness,” places at best of the thinnest hope, places where one barely gets a hold on things and feels no more than safely arrived—rather than utterly and explicitly condemned, as was the case “back home, up the hollow.” 

Now how can that be? How can he feel so, a man who loves Down Bottom Creek, West Virginia, and hates Chicago, Illinois, a man who pines for those hills, yearns for his old cabin, mourns dozens of things left behind and could leave the city tomorrow and miss nothing, so he at least insists? No one can answer such questions. In his own way, with his own words and his own “perspective” (if such he has to have) that mountaineer has asked them of himself, those questions and all the others that anyone in the whole wide world might be inclined to: “I’ve asked myself everything there is to ask. There can’t be a single question I haven’t put to myself. Lately I’ve been sick, and when you get sick, it makes you stop and think, and you ask yourself even more questions. Sickness can break a man’s pride; that’s what our minister used to tell us back in the hills. Here we have a minister, too, and thank God for him, because if you have questions nagging at you, it’s a minister who can help you with the answers. 

“There’s one answer I do believe I’ve found for myself: it’s better for my children up here. In a city you can get some money; it may not be a lot of money, but back there we got no money. Here I work. I don’t make much, but I make something. I make enough to feed my family, and my kids get some food in school, and there’s no courthouse gang out to starve us to death like there was back there. I love the mountains, but look what goes with the mountains—the crooks in the courthouses, and the robbing they do of you and the cheating, if you so much as lift an eyebrow on anything they say or they do. In the city you’re able to wake up in the morning and you know you’ll make it through the day and so will your wife and kids. Here in Chicago I’m not saying to myself that I don’t know if we’ll ever eat again. Here I live in a building that has running water and electricity and heat. The snow and ice outside don’t mean sitting day and night in front of a fire, and knowing that it’s only a log or two that keeps us all from dying.” 

So, it was exceedingly grim in the past and now it is still grim, but not quite so grim; never forget it, small differences make a great deal of difference. Over and over again one hears that said: it’s no great pleasure in the big city, but it’s a little better there in certain respects, and accordingly life itself can take on a somewhat changed meaning. Not that memories fade and all the good things about the past are forgotten, nor do the noisy streets and crowded tenements of America’s “second city” grow and grow on newly-arrived white yeomen from the hills of Appalachia, so that a return to the hollows gradually becomes inconceivable for them. 

Maybe the man’s wife can say what they both have in mind. Maybe she can find the words, the Clara he mentions all the time as the one with the “good sense and courage” to make him leave—ask and urge and beg and plead and insist and demand that they all leave: “I never know what to say. I’m no good at saying anything. But I know one thing: it’s good to be here in the city, as bad as it is here. And I believe God was the one who told us, finally, that we had to go. He came to us, God did, and He told us that He’d done it before, asked people to move across rivers and deserts. It used to be I could hear God in church, don’t ask me how. Sometimes I’d hear Him in the woods; I’d hear His voice in the wind, or I’d hear his voice go washing down the side of the hill, bubbling and gurgling along, right inside the creek. I told the minister that, and he smiled, and he said that of course it will happen, because that’s what God did it for, provide us with all of Nature’s things, so we could have them, and sometimes we could listen to Him through them. Here in the city there’s not much of Nature, only us folks, a lot of people. I see people everywhere, and in church it’s so crowded. I’m not in West Virginia any more—but I still can hear Him, only it’ll be the knock of our radiator or the street traffic that sets me to thinking about Him. I’ve wondered since we came to the city if Jesus hasn’t actually come down here to stay with us. I mean, there are so many people in Chicago, I would think He’d be able to hide among us all, and that way get to know a lot about His poor flock down here. 

“In the city you see just about everybody in the world, and you’re reminded of the Bible. I never did understand a lot of those people in the Bible; they’re not like us from the hills. But when we came into the city I began to see that it was a bigger world than I’d ever known, and God has a lot more on His shoulders than us in Down Bottom Creek. That’s what the city has taught me. He’s not only everywhere, but He’s got to be busy; and that means He wants us to be more on our own when we’re in a place like Chicago. There are times when I say to myself that right here is the place you really meet God the way you will later, when He’s going to decide about you, about where you stand with Him. When I was a little girl I was always hearing my daddy and our minister Mr. McCleary talking about the next world, the next world. Well, you know I say to my husband sometimes that I do believe we may have started on our way to the next world. We’ve left home. We’re in this big city. Everywhere you turn it’s new and strange, and so we’re being tested, just like it says in the Bible the Lord wants to do with His people, so that He can make up His mind what He thinks about you. 

“Since we’ve been living here I haven’t relied upon the Lord the way I had to back there, when we could have just disappeared one of those winters, because of no food and no strength to fight the winter—with pieces of coal my husband and the boys would carry home and wood they’d go cut and bring back. No, here I worry about the Lord, and I’m not so sure of His intentions for us. I ask myself sometimes: What does He have in mind next for us to do? We can’t go anyplace further. This is the last stop before we meet Him and He judges us. Back home I’d say to my husband on a real bad day: let’s go, let’s leave, let’s take ourselves out of here and up to Chicago or Detroit or someplace where we won’t see our children so hungry and so sick all the time. Well, he’d say to me that maybe we should go, but let’s stay just a little longer, and if the good Lord says we should pick up and move, then we will. One day we did, of course. And now that we’re here, we yearn for the hills, especially in the summer. But the way I see it, God wanted us to be tested. In the city you’re tested. Up in the hollow we were tested, too, yes. But there we knew what we could do, and we did it, and it was our soil, and our people have been living on it for so long back you can’t count the years. 

“In Chicago it’s different. In Chicago God isn’t right by your side, giving you a lift here and extending His hand to you. In Chicago He’s saying to you that there’s no place to go now, and you’ve got to dig your heels in and try and prove yourself; and it’s hard, real hard, but if you’re to be saved you have to earn it. I tell my children now that when they pray to God here in the city they’d better remember that it’s not like in our church back there. He could know each of us back there. I still believe He knows each of us, wherever we are; but I believe in a city He’s put us more on our own. I can almost hear Him saying to me: now Clara, you’ve come a long way, and it’s been hard, but now is the time to show what you and your family can do. I asked our minister if he thought that sounded right, and he said it did, because it has to be in a place like this city that the Lord makes His choices. Up in the hollows He is there to help us; here He is there watching us and seeing how we do.” 

As I have listened to her and her husband and others like them I have found myself again and again taking note of the virtually apocalyptic quality to their descriptions of city-life. It is as if a final confrontation of sorts has come upon them, refugees of sorts, people of faith who at last have met up with what to them seems like a bit of luck, but also a terrible moment of trial, and maybe a prelude to disaster. Needless to say, we all have our hopeful and gloomy sides, and we all can feel thoroughly challenged one minute and at another time either bored or chained to an unyielding destiny handed down long ago. For a family like Clara’s, though, a change of scene, a move to the city, has served to sharpen just such alternative moods. And for such people changes in mood bring about changes in faith, changes in religious conviction or sentiment. Once God was immediately present, an ally. He offered a distant promise, even as every single day He could be called upon, talked with, beseeched and implored—and upon occasion gently or slyly or impatiently taken to task. Now God is more removed and harder to reach. Now He has become not only the occasionally stern judge He was always known to be, but a consistently demanding observer who is reluctant indeed to become active in the world’s business. Now He is no longer quite so uncompromising and harsh, only further away and more wrapped up in seeing and weighing things. 

If God is felt to have left such families more to themselves, they are not quite as alone as they believe to be the case. They know that they have kin nearby in Chicago. They know there are thousands like themselves in other cities. But they certainly do not know about all they share with many others whose religious beliefs are not so very different, whose lives are also rather comparable in a number of ways. I have in mind the blacks who have also come to our cities, the blacks who like Clara and her husband and children have brought God with them-and in so doing come to feel “changed toward Him,” even as they themselves have changed, have found a new place to live if not a New Life. In Boston’s black ghetto I hear from Mrs. Josephine Williams how and why she has, in her words, “changed toward Him.” Mrs. Williams is a Baptist, and in case anyone has forgotten (I believe many of us have) the Baptist Church commands the allegiance of more American blacks than any other organization. Millions and millions of Mrs. Williams’ people go to Baptist churches all over the countryside of the South; and in cities those churches appear wherever blacks move in and settle down and try to live and work and prosper and make sense of the world and their position in it. 

“We’re different now that we’re here and not in Georgia,” Mrs. Williams says, obviously sure of herself and ready to be put to the test: “I’ll tell you why. It’s because up here in the city everything goes faster. I feel as if my whole life is going by at 60 miles an hour. We came up here five years ago, and in the bus we hit 60, I guess it was one of the turnpikes, and I got real scared. I’ve never seen so many trees and houses go by so fast. Now that I’m up here I never go any place very far, and in the city a bus can’t speed very fast anyway. But everything seems fast. Like I say, my life seems to be rushing away from me and I can’t catch hold of it. That’s why I feel changed toward Him, our Lord. It used to be in Waycross, Georgia, I’d sit in church for hours and we could have a good long talk for ourselves, God and me, and God and my sister. (We’d always sit together and she’d pray and I’d listen and then I’d pray and she’d listen.) Now my sister is ailing, and it’s real bad. But even if she could carry herself to church, it wouldn’t be the same. We went together when we first came up here, before she got sick, and we both said the same thing: up North is not down South, and God has to treat His children according to where they live. Working in the fields, we could stop and talk with Him, you know, wherever we were. Now I can’t always feel Him near me, even when I’m right up front there in the church.” 

Why, exactly why, does she feel so differently about God? Is she “estranged?” Has city living got to her mind? Is it the ghetto’s fast pace that her self-described “slowness” can’t in any form accept? When she talks about God and His church is she in fact talking about man and his society—in which case is it that once she was happy, if desperate, and now she is better fed and clothed but unhappy, and still desperate, though psychologically or spiritually rather than, say, out of hunger? I have no doubt that those questions implicitly contain some answers. Mrs. Williams has indeed gone through a psychological shock of sorts, and as a result the nature of her religious faith has certainly changed. Yet, a good deal more has to be said about what goes on between Mrs. Williams and the God she very much wants near her, the God she misses, “looks out after,” and yes, of all things, worries about, for the first time in her life even feels sorry for, and not out of rudeness or blasphemy or clever intellectual contrivance, but because her heart compels the effort of sympathy. And what has to be said has, I believe, been said—by Mrs. Williams. Here she is, talking about the “sorriness” God has to see in Boston, and talking about her sorrow, and talking about God, and again, His sorrow: “I never stopped and thought about God and how He gets over all of this. I guess I used to take Him for granted. We’re His children, you know, and He must follow us right into this street, and busy as He is there must be a few seconds during the year when He shakes His head and asks Himself where they’re going and what’s happened to them—us, the black folks, here in a building like this one. 

“It’s good to be here; I’m not saying otherwise. Every time I look at my little girl, my Ruthie, I know that. She gets food she wouldn’t get, and the welfare lady sends a taxi over and we go to the hospital in it, because Ruthie can’t walk too good, and neither can I. The doctor tells me I have a bad heart, and if someone had given me medicine a long time ago, the valves in my heart (they are like doors, he said) wouldn’t be so worn out, the way they are. I told him God chooses the way we’ll all go, and I’d sooner die of a tired heart than have a heart of stone. The doctor said he couldn’t go along with me, because it’s his job to fight every illness he sees, all day long. I told him I was sure God wouldn’t hold that against him and he laughed, you know. 

“God sees a lot of trouble up in the city. There’s sorriness here, too much even for Him to keep His mind on all day long, and into the night. In Georgia you could always take your mind off yourself and everyone else. I would sit myself under a tree and all I’d listen to would be a few flies or mosquitoes talking away, or those birds that are always on the lookout for you and forever reminding themselves to be careful and don’t get too close to anyone, be it a man, a woman or even the littlest of babies. I remember once Ruthie was asleep and they forgot themselves, the birds did. They were hopping and skipping and jumping all around her, and suddenly she woke up, the little one did, and she let out a cry—some cloud must have crossed over her forehead—and then the birds just scattered, so fast it was like an umbrella opening up in a real hurry because of rain. I said to myself that Ruthie has got more strength than she knows, because just look what she could do. 

“Up here, though, you never can know what your child will be able to do, even when she’s bigger, and that’s because it’s not God’s world, it’s all built by man, the city is. That’s why I know it must be hard for Him to be patient with us. I do believe He must pray for us, just as we do for Him. In Georgia I never thought like that, because all you had to do was step out of your house and there He was, all over. Here you can’t see anything but a lot of people, and you hear the noise they make all day long, and they’re always ready to cross you up—if it’s not the landlord wanting his money, it’s the welfare lady telling you to straighten yourself up and do as she says or you’ll sure enough be in a jam fast, or it’s someone on the street who wants to steal from you or get you and your children into trouble. And Lord, there’s more kinds of trouble in just this street than I ever saw in all of Georgia, and I’ve been up and down the state because my aunt moved into Atlanta. I came up here because I had another aunt up here, and I figured if I was going to move to the city, I might as well move out of the South, too. But there’s no difference between Boston and Atlanta. They’re cities, that’s what they both are, big cities. 

“I know my bible, yes sir I do. To my way of thinking, God suffered so we wouldn’t be the only ones who suffered. Because He suffered, we can fall back on His example, and we can say to our kids that it’s bad, it sure is, but Jesus Christ Almighty our Lord, He walked all over, and they didn’t accept Him, a lot of people, and finally they sure did do Him in bad. And maybe we had to leave Waycross, Georgia, and move here. Maybe it’s up here that God gives us a chance, and says we’ve got to try and save ourselves, like He did, and if we but try, He’ll remember us when we finally come to meet Him. 

“A little while ago our minister talked to us about Judgment Day. Now, I’ve been hearing about Judgment Day since I was a child back South and old enough to sit there in church, ‘The Church of God the King’ my aunt always used to call it—by the whole name. But the new minister was saying that Judgment Day might be everyday, and I thought he was wrong there, as wrong as he could be. Then I got home and I got to thinking. I said to myself that maybe he was right, after all. Every time I open the door and walk down the hall and go out into the street I expect I may have all I can do to stay alive and not lose something to a robber: it could be my life or it could be the few dollars I have on me. That’s why you have to pray that you won’t lose faith in God. It’s harder to keep your faith when you’re not sure what to expect from day to day. 

“My oldest boy, he’s 15, and he sure knows how to say things that are true. He says you can do a lot more for yourself in the city than back home in Georgia, but only if you move fast and it’s all up to you. That’s what I think the minister meant. God has said goodbye to us, for most of the time, while we’re up here, and He may be watching over us, but He wants us to move along on our own steam, and that’s what we have to do, I know. He did the same Himself, didn’t He? He walked the Holy Land. He tried to do His best, but it wasn’t enough. Even God the Father couldn’t save Him, except after Jesus had gone and died. When I’m really down I know it’s no use whatever we do, we’ll lose, at least here on this earth. When I feel up, I say we have to work hard, and the world may be a lot better one of these days, a lot better. But we’ll never know, will we? I’m not sure God Himself knows what we’ll come to, hereabouts and that’s the biggest worry I have. But I’m afraid to tell my minister what I think. I did once and he got himself all excited and he was cross as could be with me. All I said was that God couldn’t be as sure of Himself when He looks down upon Boston as He is when it’s time for Him to worry about Waycross, Georgia. That’s all I said. And I think I was on to something, even if that minister says no.” 

She believes she was on to a lot. She believes that for her religion became much more complicated, difficult and impersonal after she moved from a rural life to an increasingly sophisticated urban one. She believes that her children are “learning so much new up here that they are forgetting the most important thing to remember, God’s wishes.” She believes that “the city is a place of temptation.” Before there was only extreme hardship and the daily surrender to God’s inscrutable will. Now there is “promises, a lot of them, and people whispering into my children’s ears.” 

Many things are whispered into her children’s ears, not all of them bad or wicked or sinful or insulting or demeaning. Yet, even opportunities bring their dangers—and for people brought up to expect nothing (or risk death for expecting much of anything) it is by no means easy to sit back and welcome God’s grace as at last within grasp. God was tricked, remember. God was arrested, arraigned, condemned and killed, remember—just as He was (because He was) beginning to make a dent on people, to make His way, to obtain a responsive following, the attentive ears of believing men. Put differently, life always was and always will be treacherous, unpredictable, uncertain. God must not be doubted, but men and their promises, cities and their blandishments, they are quite another story. Maybe someday it will be different. Maybe someday our cities will bring for Mrs. Williams and others like her glimmers of the New Jerusalem. But right now it is memories of the old Jerusalem that haunt such people, the Jerusalem of rural cabins and cottonfields and watchful, heavily armed sheriffs, the Jerusalem one entered with hope and just about nothing else, the Jerusalem one soon learned to know and often enough feel miserable about—hence the dreams of another chance, a New Life, this time in a City of God’s. 

By no means is Mrs. Williams without any hope; nor are the Allens, once of West Virginia and now of Illinois, totally in despair. They have put behind them their past and not a small part of their heritage precisely because they do indeed have hope, a kind of hope, it seems, America’s cities alone have right now for such people. All the while, though, they worry—and not only about the obvious, concrete, explicit problems that go with everyday life. They worry, too, about just those matters any “urban planner” thinks about, not to mention whatever metaphysicians our cities still manage to have around. Will the city, some form of it, bring the best life ever to more and more people? Is there ahead of us some “golden age” that bricks and mortar and wise social policies and plenty of money and well-designed programs will all manage to usher in? Will old, dying cities become bright and swinging, full of all that man has dreamed is possible, full of so much that so many have never dreamed to be possible? Will we somehow save ourselves from fear and hate and revolution by arranging things, enacting new laws, raising up buildings, tearing down others, and in schools and places of business and on streets and avenues achieving what words like “desegregation” or “integration” or “social justice” or “radical political change” are meant to convey? 

Far be it for Clara Allen or Josephine Williams to take up such broad and speculative issues quite that way. They are no social theorists, no “experts,” no students of America’s “urban dilemma.” But they are not completely immune to big and significant questions, and at times they can be as grandiose or messianic or prophetic or pervasively alarmed as any of us. We have our visions. They have theirs. We dream, or dare not dream, so awful do things seem, and they have their moments of confidence and times of unqualified doubt. And if we want more Reason, a Better World, a New Society, New Towns, Cities of the Future, they continually wonder just what it will be like in the New Jerusalem ahead of them. They wonder, as a matter of fact, how one is ever to distinguish between the New Jerusalem and the Jerusalems that have always been with us, waiting to receive all sorts of visitors, strangers, exiles, wanderers, refugees? That is to say, how does a believer know God’s will, and indeed how can we be sure, now or in some other life, of the real thing? For Mrs. Allen the answer goes something like this: “God is awaiting us, and when we get to Him we’ll know, and until we do, we’ll worry. We come to the city so we can have enough food every day. I never expected to find God and His kingdom here, though to hear some people on the radio and television talk about Chicago, you’d think God built this city for His favorite children. We left the happiness we had back home so we can stay alive here. Sometimes I really believe God sent us here so we’ll be away from Him for a while, and more grateful when He calls us back.” 

Nor is her radical sense of disenchantment, mixed as it is with real awareness of the improved standard of living now hers and her family’s, unfamiliar to Mrs. Williams: “Before we were in the wilderness and it was touch and go if we’d make it. When we decided to come up here, I had a dream that we’d find the Holy City; but it’s not a holy city, this one, that’s for sure, though we eat better here. I have nightmares, and in them it’s always the same: we’re falling way down, down, down, the whole family, and we’re bad off and there’s no welfare check. Then I wake up and I know what a fool I was to think we’d ever reach that Holy City until we’re dead and gone from this city here. But meanwhile my kids have their food in them. That’s something.” 

And so it goes in our cities. Perhaps Mrs. Williams is unwittingly blasphemous when she compares her travail with that of Jesus. His stay in the wilderness, His hunger, His time in the Holy City, the temptations He knew there at the hands of the Devil, are not exactly those Mrs. Williams or Mrs. Allen have known. Not divine, indeed only too human and terribly needy, those women would doubtless tell any stones that came their way to become bread. Yet, like Christ, they continue to believe that there is more to life, much more, than the comfort that material possessions provide. Some would say they have to believe so out of desperation. Others would want to raise them high, make of them superior spiritual people, who see further than the rest of us do, who have a wisdom we lack. But they themselves make no such claims for themselves, nor do they ask for the clever and condescending “explanations” of their beliefs, their religious faith, that various observers are tempted to offer. 

Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Williams speak for no one but themselves, and have nothing to recommend to others. From childhood on they have heard Christ’s story, listened to His experiences, memorized His words—even as they would be declared “illiterate” by us, the knowing and articulate ones. From childhood on they have understood how scarce bread can be, how famished Christ must have felt those forty days. In Mrs. Williams’ words, “We live on God; we wait on Him. After I’ve prayed to Him, I’ll just think of Him, and sometimes I’ll say to myself the words He said—that my mamma told to me back in Georgia.” When the New English Bible came out I told Mrs. Willams that I had been reading it, and she asked me how it differed from the Bible she has never read, but heard and heard quoted, and can recite by heart and with passionate conviction, for all her “ignorance” and “poor education.” In the course of things I found myself calling upon Matthew’s account of how Jesus was tested—because she herself knew the story so well. I told her that the New English Bible had Jesus speak this way: “Man cannot live on bread alone; he lives on every word that God utters.” 

She waited maybe four or five seconds, long enough for the words to be taken in and tested, long enough for me to get a little curious, then a little worried. But there was no reason for apprehension. She is an old veteran of biblical translations, even of exegesis. When she at last responded she spoke to the spirit, not the letter: “Yes, that’s right—every single word. And we need them real bad, God’s words; we need them more than anything else in the whole world.” 

And one more time I could only think to myself that so it goes in our cities, so it goes with the needy—for many of whom He very much lives: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who walked and wandered and knew the countryside and eventually knew the city and was badgered and importuned and made light of and mocked; Who was judged suspect, dangerous, an outrageous dissenter, a threat to an empire’s sense of law and order; Who was put to death; Who yet lives on in the mind and heart and soul of a Mrs. Williams or a Mrs. Allen; and Who thereby does indeed walk the streets of our American ghettos.