2000s Archive

Feeding Body and Soul

Originally Published October 2003
How a railroad cook from Cape Verde created a church, a musical genre, and some divine cafeterias.

Sunday morning at the Mint Street sanctuary of the United House of Prayer for All People in Charlotte, North Carolina. A loose clutch of 12 trombone players honks and bleats alongside the mirror-framed altar. Two drummers lay down a backbeat. An organ rumbles to life and gives heft to the groove. As the music builds, a wizened grande dame at the back of the sanctuary leaps into the air like a schoolgirl on a playground. A handful of the 50 or so parishioners join her. The trombone players take a collective stutter step, lean forward in unison, then backward, then forward again, bobbing and weaving and shouting a thunderous reply.

Downstairs, in the cafeteria (one of seven Charlotte operations run by the church), cooks in pleated toques lug hotel pans of chicken and dressing from the depths of the kitchen to the gleaming buffet line. As the clock slides toward twelve, the dining room begins to fill. A teenage boy, his lithe body wrapped in the coil of a sousaphone, enters by a side door. He stops to ponder the buffet, to get a good whiff of the fried chicken and the macaroni and cheese. He eyes the wedges of coconut pie, the slices of preternaturally vibrant red velvet cake. And, as the horns explode, he carries his battered nickel instrument heavenward.

Ask a typical Charlotte native to name the religious personalities who have shaped the city, and they’ll tell you how, in 1934, evangelist Billy Graham found Jesus at a local tent revival. Or they might relate the sad tale of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who, in the 1980s, rose to fame and fell into disrepute at their Heritage U.S.A. complex, south of town. Tom Hanchett, historian at the local Levine Museum of the New South, acknowledges the impact of Graham and the Bakkers, but is quick to argue that the influence of the United House of Prayer for All People has often been discounted. “There’s a tendency to see a charismatic sect like the United House of Prayer as a cult built around a charlatan,” says Hanchett. “And, unfortunately, a number of people have reacted to Daddy Grace’s church in that way.”

Born Marcelino Manoel da Graça on the Cape Verde Island of Brava, off the coast of Senegal, Grace immigrated as a teenager to southeastern Massachusetts sometime around 1903. After turns as a cranberry picker and a drummer of patent medicines, he was called by the Lord to the Christian ministry. By 1919, Grace had cobbled together a sanctuary out of castoff timbers in the Portuguese fishing village of West Wareham.

Though Massachusetts is the acknowledged birthplace of the church, the particular brand of worship espoused by the United House of Prayer did not flourish until Grace won a job as a cook on the Southern Railway. Along a route that ran southward from Washington, D.C., to Savannah, Georgia, he fried chicken, baked biscuits, and preached a gospel of prosperity, empowerment, and sanctification that converted tens of thousands.

As his fame spread, Grace cultivated a flamboyant persona. By the time he turned 30, his parishioners had begun calling him Daddy. When he reached 40, he had acquired a leonine mane and a Daliesque mustache. Given to wearing purple cutaway coats with chartreuse vests beneath flowing black robes, he often paraded pasha-style among throngs of supplicants tossing rose petals and dollar bills. One of his more curious quirks was to trim the fingernails on his right hand close while growing the fingernails on his left hand to a length of three inches and painting them red, white, and blue. Asked why, he was likely to reply, “Never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.”

In Charlotte—site of a tent revival early in Grace’s career that lasted more than six weeks and culminated in the river baptism of 643 converts—his message rang truest, loudest. Here, the United House of Prayer built a reputation among ­working-class African-Americans as a church that addressed the gut-level needs of the community. (The church was not, however, above grandstanding, as evidenced by the staging of circuslike annual convocation parades and the draping of church buildings in baroque displays of Christmas lights.)

Like Pentecostal denominations, the church relies upon a literal interpretation of the Bible. Psalm 150 (“Praise ye the Lord. Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet. Praise Him with psaltery and harp. Praise him with timbrel and dance”) loomed large in a doxology that has embraced more traditional choirs and string ensembles as well as groups that owed their inspiration to a melding of the West African ring shout and American brass band traditions. These latter groups, known as trombone shout bands, came to define services at the United House of Prayer, and the tradition endures to this day. On a given Sunday in a given church, 10, 20, or more brass musicians gather to punctuate sermons, prayers, and protracted tithe calls with soaring trombone runs that parishioners answer with ecstatic dancing and contrapuntal shouts of praise.

Long before the more mainstream denominations embraced the concept of a corporate Christian campus that served the needs of body and soul, the United House of Prayer opened beauty salons, barbershops, and, of course, cafeterias. And before vertical integration was a buzzword in the business world, Grace stocked those cafeterias with coffee from his plantation in Brazil and eggs from his hatchery in Cuba.

The impetus was both political and practical: political because Grace, like his contemporary Marcus Garvey, preached a doctrine of African-American self-sufficiency; practical because the lengthy weeknight and all-day-Sunday worship schedule at a United House of Prayer meant the church had to feed its people or lose them to the enterprising cooks who set up sidewalk stands nearby and hawked fried fish and pies. “When I was a kid, everybody assumed church took all day,” recalls a onetime Charlotte parishioner. “And if Daddy Grace was there, you better pack a toothbrush, ’cause you were gonna be there all night, too.”

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