Religion: Messiah’s Troubles

His wife was spending the evening in Manhattan, so when Harry Greene, a contractor of Weehawken, N. J., was offered a chance last week to see the inside of “God’s Kingdom No. 1,” headquarters of Harlem’s benign black Major (“Father”) Divine, he accepted eagerly. His friend Paul Comora, a process server, was to hand a summons to Father Divine, against whom a onetime follower named Jessie Birdsall had brought suit for $2,000 which, she said, represented savings she had turned over to the Harlem “God.” Greene and Comora arrived at the Kingdom, a big brick building on 115th Street which as usual was full of Negro and white faithful, babbling, “Peace! It’s wonderful,” and gorging themselves on the cult’s free food.

In a packjammed assembly room Father Divine was preaching, in his prolix, cir cuitous style, on “The Great Enthusiasm.”

Greene and Comora joined the only other outsider present, a New York Jour nal reporter named Joseph Denove. After the garrulous black “God” had been at it for two hours, and showed no sign of concluding although it was 3 a. m., even Harry Greene grew bored watching. They approached the platform, where Comora in legal fashion smartly tapped Father Divine on the chest with the summons. According to the process server, Father Divine shouted “Ugh!” or “a sort of a yell,” and the assembly room became uproar.

Mobbed by howling blackamoors, Comora and Denove were hurled downstairs and into 115th Street where they separated, Denove returning with police. By that time, Spectator Greene had been taken to a drugstore. He came to next morning, wounded about the head, kicked in the abdomen, a tube in his swollen nose, two ribs broken, a stab wound in his side.

Father Divine disappeared before police could lay hands upon him. An alarm went out for his arrest, for felonious assault and “acting in concert” with three other Negroes whom police charged with stab bing Greene. For the podgy little Messiah who claims 30,000,000 followers (and has about 50,000), there then followed other misfortunes. First of these was the apostasy of his fat, capable right hand, “Faithful Mary” (Viola Wilson).

Faithful Mary claims, and police records of Newark, N. J. back her up to a considerable extent, that she once drank, ate garbage, stole milk, became a depraved wreck before the influence of Father Divine restored her to health and happiness.

A hard worker and able organizer of “extensions” of the Father’s “heavens,” she was long pointed to as the prime “sample and example” of his powers. Last week Faithful Mary seized upon Father Divine’s disappearance as an excuse to announce what she said she had lately come to realize: that Father Divine “ain’t God. He’s just a damned man. He ain’t no more God than you’re God.” Her renunciation, she said, had been expedited by his demands that she turn over to him all the property held in her name. Faithful Mary’s patience cracked when Father Divine requested the building where she was living last week—the Peace Hotel at High Falls, N. Y., one of 22 properties in the Hudson River Valley acquired by Father Divine as a “Promised Land” for his people. Said Faithful Mary: “Peace, I don’t want to do it.” Since “God” Divine avoids many legal troubles and income taxes by registering property in the names of his followers, there was nothing he could do to retrieve Peace Hotel or any of the local businesses owned by Faithful Mary.

For nearly three days after the assault in Harlem, police hunted for Father Divine.

They sent out an eight-State alarm. At last in Milford, Conn., police appeared at a small Divine “heaven” where a Negro called “Simon Peter” attempted to bar their way. As they later remarked, they “roughed up Simon Peter a bit.” One of them descended to the cellar, found Father Divine vainly seeking to “invisibilize” himself behind the furnace. “Peace!” he quavered. “I’ll go with you and I’ll waive extradition.” The Messiah was bundled off to police headquarters in Manhattan. It was after midnight, too late for his three attorneys to arrange bail, so Father Divine spent the rest of the night in jail. In noisy Harlem, miles uptown, word of “God’s” plight circulated, and soon the streets near the jail began filling with chanting Negroes (see pictures, p. 62).

So large grew the crowd that a policeman asked who was its leader. A scrawny Negro named “Happy Heart” stepped forward, said: “Father’s followers have no leader. We all work by intuition. You won’t have any trouble if you just let us alone.” Father Divine was taken to Felony Court, released for hearing this week upon payment of $500 bail by a follower named “St. Mary Bloom.” Uptown there were more crowds and the skies rained cards printed: Your Maker and Creator Is Here. In Kingdom No. 1, Father Divine ate with his shouting followers. The homecoming was climaxed beyond their hopes when someone came in with the agreeable news that. Faithful Mary had been in a motor accident in New Jersey. Said Father Divine: “If anyone sides with her, the same curse shall fall on their heads as has fallen on hers. They shall go down with her. Her sins have brought her fall. But this was just a slight sketch to let you know what can happen.” Next day Father Divine was “tired.” Over him hung not only the assault charge, which he and other Harlemites seemed to think would be difficult to make stick, but also charges against other members of his cult: that his coal truck drivers were dealing in bootleg coal; that a 13-year-old was being overworked in a Divine restaurant.

Father Divine learned that in Los Angeles his onetime “St. John the Revelator,” John Wuest Hunt, had been indicted with three other Divinites on Mann Act charges, based upon testimony by 17-year-old Delight Jewett (TIME, April 12). Seeking rest, the little black “God” headed north to his Promised Land. There, dying of heart and kidney ailments in a Catholic hospital, lay the only follower who had been told nothing of his troubles—his placid, greying wife, Mother Penninah Divine. She had been visited daily by Faithful Mary, was now alone. Father Divine visited her briefly. At week’s end in the Promised Land, a $30,000 frame “heaven” caught fire, spilled 15 half-clad black angels into the chilly night, burned to the ground.