"evil" they mean "sick" or "nasty." When I say "evil," I mean power that makes use of human bodies like they were puppets. Evil is the spirits that inhabited the woman who spoke filth to Jesus, and whom Jesus cast out of her and into the bodies of the Gadarene swine. That's the power we need in this world, right now, to cast out the filth-speaking devils and free the children of God to hear his sweet word and redeem their souls from despair.

I won't let them be like my mother, forgetting everything, or my father, denying everything. I will wake them up.

The trouble with all this grim determination was that Word wasn't much of a speaker. He knew it, too. Growing up in Baldwin Hills as the son of a fine-spoken English professor and poet, Word spoke English too fluently and clearly to be credible on the street. He sounded like a foreigner here—but not foreign enough for anyone to take him for Jamaican or a highly educated British black.

As one little boy said it when Word asked him where the unlocked entrance to City Haven might be,

"You sound like a white man." To which Word could only smile and say, "You've never met a white man who talks this well."

He had tried for a while, back in grad school. He rented movies that were full of street slang, but the more he listened, the more it dawned on him that most of these scripts were written by white guys faking it. Spike Lee he could trust, but when he tried to talk like characters from Spike's movies, it sounded so phony that even Word himself was disgusted. It was too late for him to pick up any of the street-black dialects in America. The most he could do was lapse back into the phony Baldwin Hills version, and he knew that talking that way would open no doors for him in the gang neighborhoods.

And yet there were his dreams. He could see himself standing in a huge arena, with tens of thousands of people, black and white, screaming and chanting "Give us Word, give us Word!"

In the dream, Word walked out onto the stage and saw all the faces, and in his dream he was able to see each individual of them, all at once, to understand what they wanted, to feel their need and he knew that he could grant their wishes, feed their hunger, shelter them from all that they feared. If they truly believed in him, then anything was possible, because with their faith joined together with his own, God himself could not say no to them.

He opened his mouth to speak...

And every time, the dream stopped there. Just a sudden flash of being in a car riding along a road between canyon walls, and then he'd either wake up or go off into some random silly dream that he couldn't even remember in the morning.

But the dream of that arena, of that audience, Word remembered every bit of it. He knew it was real. He hungered for it.

So he set out to become Reverend Word Williams, and when he gave up on divinity school, the only route left to him was apprenticeship.

He knew right away that Rev Theo was the right choice. His preaching wasn't empty—he felt the fire. More important, he really loved the people and they knew it. He cared what they were going through. He tried to help them with their children. Even their money problems. Sometimes he'd turn down their contributions—small as they were. "You can't afford that, Sister Rebecca."

"Oh, but I want to, Rev Theo."

"It's the widow's mite, Sister Rebecca, and the Lord knows you gave it. Now I give it back to you as Jesus' own blessing on your family."

But then sometimes he'd keep the contribution—and from someone in worse shape than Sister Rebecca. When Word asked him about it, he said, "It's important for her to feel like she's part of the church. Sister Rebecca contributes often and gets the blessings that come from her sacrifice. But Sister Willa Mae, this is her first time, and to refuse her gift would be to deny her a place in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ."

The man was wise, Word decided. Wise and good, and I should be like him.

Only when it came to the sermons, Word was terrified, because he knew he'd fail. Rev Theo's sermons were musical, rhythmic, passionate. Above all, though, they were personal. He knew these people, named names from the pulpit. "Don't you be afraid like Sister Ollie is afraid! You know she hears a noise in the night and she thinks it's a burglar come to steal from her! Oh, Sister Areena, you laughing, but that's cause any noise you hear, you hoping it's one of your men coming back to you to make another baby! You know we love you, Sister Areena, but you got to let Jesus teach you how to say no when a man wants what he got no right to have. You know that. And at least you got hope!

Any kind of hope better than living all the time in fear. You can go to sleep on a dream of hope, but fear will steal the sleep right out of your bed.

And Sister Ollie was sitting there weeping because he knew her heart, and Sister Areena, too, and now the whole congregation knew them and loved them anyway. Sister Ollie called out to Rev Theo, "I won't be afraid no more, Rev Theo! I let Jesus into my heart!" And Sister Areena cried, "I ain't lost hope yet!" And everybody clapped and cheered and laughed and wept and...

And how the hell was Word going to touch their hearts the way Rev Theo did? Lucky if he didn't put them straight to sleep.

So Word helped Rev Theo in his ministry, visiting people, taking notes at meetings, going with him to ask for money from ministers of richer churches or from black businessmen. Word went here and there in Baldwin Hills, asking people he knew had money if they could help sustain a little storefront church in South Central. He smiled and nodded when they patronizingly said, "I didn't know you were with the Lord now, Word. I'm glad to see you found Jesus."

I didn't, thought Word. Not yet. But I sure found the devil, and I'm hoping Jesus won't be far behind.

He was energetic. He was dedicated. Rev Theo counted on him for more and more. And one on one, Word liked talking to the members of the church. They liked him—though of course they all told him to learn from Rev Theo, because he was a real man of God. "That's what I'm here for," said Word, "but the Lord doesn't work through me the way he works through Rev Theo."

"The Lord works through everyone," said Rev Theo. "They just don't always know it."

But what Word had most hoped to learn never happened. Despite his love and faith, Rev Theo didn't have the power. People who were ailing would ask him to lay on hands and he did, but they didn't get better except in the ordinary way. "That's how healing works," Rev Theo explained to Word. "All in the Lord's own time." But Word had seen another kind of healing, where a gravely injured old man gripped the hand of a magical boy and rose up from his bed and his cast fell away from his broken leg and he walked on it, and his clothing was restored to him—filthy as it was, but when the devil worked miracles, what could you expect but filthiness?

Now it was time to preach. To stand before the congregation. It was the nighttime meeting, for the people who worked during the day, so it was a smaller group. And it included a couple of men, neither one of them married, trying to come back from drug dealing and even darker sins. At first they scared Word a little, and they knew that he was scared, and that amused them but both of them at different times had said to him, Don't be afraid of me, the only person I harm these days is me. But what could Word say to them? He'd been raised in privilege, surrounded by literature and love and the comforts of life.

Rev Theo introduced him—including a reminder that it was his first sermon and they should be as kind to Word as Rev Theo's first congregation had been to him. Word appreciated what he said, but also resented it a little because he had hoped that Rev Theo might believe that he'd do a good job.