Eller smiles and shakes his head abashedly, as though
there is something faintly obscene about the idea of a
Caribbean cruise.
"This is it right here," Ferree says. "It's all we
do."
At 8 o'clock, services begin downstairs in the worship
hall.
It's an oblong, irregularly shaped room. The ceiling
is low, bristling with tiny crags of stucco, which Ferree is
in danger of scraping his head on when he stands before the
pulpit. Ferree looks at the crowd of 15 that is scattered
through the pews, mostly African American women in their
middle years. "If you was in Jerusalem," he says, "right
now, tonight, in the tomb where Jesus laid 2,000 years ago,
you couldn't get one bit closer than you can get in this
room tonight."
"Help him, Lord," one woman says.
"Tell it," says another.
"How many knows there's nowhere on Earth that God's
any greater than He is in this room?"
"Tell the truth."
"I'm trying," he says.
Ferree unspools his long, unscripted sermon, which
begins with a kind of lollygagging comic overture, riffing
on the woes of parenting and married life, and takes an
occasional swipe at the celebrity clergy -- "that bunch that
comes to bleed widows dry, to buy another jet, to put
another wing on their house."
Ferree's delivery swells in an intensity that spreads
ineluctably throughout the room. Trembling thickets of hands
go up. Aggrieved moans drift through the church. Ferree's
features begin to broaden and harden, and his phrases pour
out in an impassioned torrent: He winces, clutches the
microphone. "Oh God," he says, and then goes into a brief
bout of tongues.
"O-ta-shalamba-ambalabahai-atamba-lalabahai."
