Nicky Cruz Lays Down the Switchblade

I was sixteen that spring, sitting in the third row of folding chairs at St. Nicholas Arena with the rest of the youth choir from my church, and I still remember how cold that building felt even with a thousand bodies packed into it. Our pastor had gone to a meeting weeks before where a young preacher from Pennsylvania stood up in front of all the Hispanic congregations in the borough and asked for help. He wanted the doors open to the gangs. Every one of us knew what that meant. In Bedford-Stuyvesant you did not say the words Mau Maus casually, not even in the daylight, not even inside a church basement with the windows shut.

I had heard about them the way you hear about weather. You didn't see them coming until you were already wet. They ran with chains and zip guns and knives ground down to a shine, and their leader was a boy not much older than my own brother, a Puerto Rican kid named Nicky Cruz who people said had come north at fifteen with nothing but a suitcase and a grudge. Some of the older women in my church swore his own mother had cursed him before he ever got on the plane. I didn't know if that was true. I only knew that by sixteen he was running the gang, and by seventeen half of Brooklyn crossed the street when they saw him coming.

The preacher's name was David Wilkerson, and when he first showed up in our neighborhood he looked like he'd wandered off a dairy farm and gotten lost on the subway. Skinny, pale, a suit that didn't fit him, a Bible under his arm like a schoolbook. Somebody told me he'd left a church back in the hill country of Pennsylvania because God had shown him a photograph in a magazine of boys on trial for murder, and he couldn't stop thinking about their faces. He came to the city not knowing a soul, walking straight into the middle of the gang wars like he didn't understand what a switchblade could do to a throat.

He found Cruz on a street corner, and it did not go the way you would hope. Cruz spat in his face. Then his fists went to work, and Wilkerson went down more than once. I heard about it from a boy at my church who'd seen it happen, who said the preacher just kept getting back up, wiping his mouth, saying he wanted to tell them something. Cruz told him if he didn't leave he would cut him into a hundred pieces. I have turned that moment over in my mind more times than I can count, because it is the kind of threat that ends most conversations forever.

Wilkerson didn't run. He said that even in a hundred pieces, every piece would still love him. Every piece would still say God loved him too.

Nobody in that neighborhood had ever heard anyone talk like that, least of all to Nicky Cruz. Gang boys did not get told they were loved. They got told what they were worth in a fight, what corner they controlled, what colors they wore. Love was a word from radio songs, not something a grown man said to your face after you'd just split his lip. I think that is why Cruz let him walk away that day instead of finishing what he'd started. Something in the sentence didn't fit any script he knew, and it must have stuck like a splinter he couldn't dig out.

The week of the rally, Wilkerson rented St. Nicholas Arena, the boxing hall on West 66th Street, the kind of place built for men to hurt each other in front of a paying crowd, and he filled it instead with folding chairs and a card table for a pulpit. Our pastor sent every young person in the congregation, and I went every single night that week, up on the low platform with the choir, closer to the front than I wanted to be once I understood who might be sitting in those rows.

The first nights were ordinary enough, singing and testimonies and Wilkerson pacing at the front in his ill-fitting suit, but everybody in that building knew what he was really waiting for. Word had gone out through the neighborhood the way word always goes out, mouth to mouth, corner to corner, that the meetings were for the gangs, and that the preacher wanted the Mau Maus to come hear him out. I don't know how many nights passed before they actually walked in, but I remember the exact feeling of the air changing when they did.

They came in loud, on purpose, the way boys come into a room when they want everyone to know they didn't have to ask permission. Cruz was among them, and even from the platform I could pick him out, not the tallest, not the loudest exactly, but the one the others arranged themselves around without seeming to try. He had told his boys they were going to raise trouble that night, disrupt the meeting, make the preacher look like a fool in front of the whole neighborhood. I found that out later. In the moment, all I knew was a current running through the crowd, chairs creaking, somebody's mother gripping her purse a little tighter.