On March 14 of this year, The New York Times ran the following
headline: Mother Divine Who Took Over Her
Husband’s Cult, Dies at 71. Mother Divine actually died on March 4 but it
took The Times a while to print an
obit.
I met Mother Divine some years ago when I visited her estate at Woodmont
in Gladwyne , Pennsylvania
The
mansion is a multi-room French Gothic masterpiece, designed by Quaker architect
William Price for Philadelphia
industrialist Alan J, Wood, Jr., in 1892. After the demise of the Gilded Age
and the selling off of many of Philadelphia ’s
old mansions, it was sold to Father Divine for a relatively humble $75,000.
Woodmont
then became the headquarters for the Peace Mission Movement.
The Peace Mission Movement began as a
force for peace and goodwill between the races. The movement, as Mother Divine
noted, was to make people “industrious, independent, tax-paying citizens
instead of consumers of tax dollars on the welfare rolls.”
Since the passing of Father Divine in 1965,
the Peace Mission Movement has been under the direction of Father Divine’s
second wife, Edna Rose Ritchings, a white Canadian woman he met in 1946.
Father
Divine’s greatest contributions are probably in the area of Civil Rights. As
early as 1951, he advocated for reparations for the descendents of slaves and
for integrated neighborhoods. Decades before the Civil Rights Act, before the
NAACP, Stokley Carmichael, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers, Father Divine
preached peaceful non-violent social change.
Unfortunately, Father Divine’s “preaching” work on behalf of Civil
Rights is a mostly understated fact.
Father Divine’s marriage to the second Mother
Divine (the first was an African American woman named Peninniah, who died
shortly after the Woodmont purchase) was a celibate affair, as members, both
married and unmarried, are prohibited from having sex, or using alcohol and
tobacco.
When I first saw Mother Divine she was
descending the grand staircase in the mansion. She was dressed in a full blown
white 19th Century ball gown while being escorted by a sentry
dressed in red who also wore a small red beret tilted to the side in the style
of Che Guevara. The sentry was a thin black woman and Mother was white--- she
had Arctic snow hair and skin much paler than the color of Dove soap. She
carried herself with a confident elegance, her head erect and her eyes focused
on some invisible point on the horizon. Her walk down the staircase was so slow
it called to mind the walking styles of European aristocracy, namely Queen
Elizabeth II of England .
Emblems of royalty were very
evident in the mansion, not only in the grandiose architecture and design of
the place but in the studied attentiveness and seriousness of Mother’s other sentries,
who also wore cocked berets. The sentries were stationed throughout the house like
Swiss Guards in the Vatican .
The atmosphere definitely evoked the formality of a royal court because it was
obvious that the sentries would not tolerate any foolish action, like
presupposing it was okay to sit on the furniture, which of course we did not
do.
In situations like this, the human
tendency is to be formal yourself even though I longed to see just one of the
sentries smile or show some warmth. ‘Feel good’ camaraderie is not in the
Woodmont style book, however. The sentries, when they did smile, did it in a
fixed way as if they were ready to retract it and turn it upside down at a
moment’s notice. I knew this to be the case when I asked one of them, a Miss
something-or-other, if I could take a photograph. My request was met with a
stern “No, you may not take photographs,” as if I should have known better. I
replied with a somewhat stunned “Oh… okay,” the ‘Oh’ in my reply signaling my
dismay at such a silly rule, since what could possibly be wrong with taking a snapshot?
Often the ‘secondary’ people
around any high ranking leader have an inflated sense of self importance and behave
in a manner that may “out-formalize” the personal style of the big boss, the
very person one would expect to flaunt attitude.
Mother Divine had an easy and light spirit and it was easy to see a mischievous
glint in her eyes. She was quick to smile and laugh but yet she was surrounded
by stiff wooden Cigar Store Indian types who were quick to scold. .
Dinner began
when Mother rang a large hand bell. A female cook in a white uniform produced
the platters from a small kitchen directly behind Mother. Numerous platters of
salad items, including a wide assortment of vegetables, condiments and sauces,
set the pace for more complicated platters offering meats and fish, rice,
potatoes, breads, more vegetables and meats until at last diners could devote
their attention to the business at hand, eating, rather than the elaborate
ritual of passing platters.
When
platters were passed from one diner to another, they never touched the table.
Diners were not allowed to hold two platters at the same time, so the synchronization
of the plates had the movements of a dance. While this was going on, diners
listened to old audio tapes of Father Divine sermons. The mostly elderly crowd,
men in suits and women in Peace Mission uniforms, combined eating with the
singing of hymns. A few elderly white women, European by birth, clapped their
hands in sing song fashion in between mouthfuls, reminding me of the antics of patients
in a mental institution.
After dinner, Mother invited
my artist friend and me into her private office where she showed us old
photographs of Father Divine. A sentry stood beside her as the four of us
chatted. I found myself occasionally looking out of Mother’s office window at
the tomb of Father, believed by followers to be God incarnate. The conversation
was not profound but filled with cursory pleasantries. There were even several
photo ops in which Mother snuggled up against my artist friend and I.
Photographs were no longer an issue because the sentry who greeted us in the
foyer was not the one standing by Mother’s side.
By the time my friend and I left Woodmont we had the feeling that the
sentries around Mother were much like a covert army. It was like the feeling
you get when you visit a couple who are in a bad marriage but who put on a
happy face when company comes. You can somehow feel the tension and repressed
emotion coming from the couple but there’s no way you can prove that it exists.
Mother, after all, was sitting on a vast
fortune and a huge empire. She was elderly and had to be helped around the
mansion on her daily walks around the estate.
While in a cab leaving the
estate, we passed Mother as she began her daily walk, escorted by several dour
looking sentries. During our chat with Mother she appeared strong but seeing
her outdoors was a profound change. She not only looked weak and vulnerable but
she seemed to be almost totally under the care and direction of the women
propping her up.
The word ‘care’ in this sense can also be a
code word for power and control. We have all heard stories of what happens to
some elderly mothers when their care is relinquished to their children, and how
one child can claim power of attorney and have the mother committed to a nursing
home while her assets are funneled into other family bank accounts.
My friend and I were certain that Mother liked us and so we were very
surprised when we were turned down by a secretarial sentry when we called later
to schedule a follow up interview. The sentry told us that we were not
permitted to visit. No reason was given but it was obvious that we were no
longer welcome at Woodmont.
Since that time we have both felt that Mother was really a prisoner
behind pearly gates and that she was not acting as a free agent.
This is why I think it is a good thing that The New York Times called the Peace Mission a cult.
