I wrote this story: Jackie went to San Juan Motors, a used-car lot up
the street from her church, to trade the van and sign a contract for a
white Ford Escort station wagon. The guy who sold it to her went to her
church. He said to her, “I’m going to put a brand-new radio in it just for
you because you are so terrific.” On the way home, she picked up one of
her sons from church and another from school, and every time anyone
opened the car doors the tuner would reset to the left-most position on
the dial and the speakers would scream with static. The radio slid right
out of the dashboard and onto the floor whenever she accelerated from a
full stop. Then, a week later, the wagon broke down in front of the Hobby
Lobby and Cracker Barrel on a parkway in the suburban Northland of
Kansas City, three and a half miles from her house.
Jackie was the main character of a book about a mixed-race, inner-city
Pentecostal megachurch that I never wrote. Several times a week I would
follow her around, scribbling notes in a narrow notepad, asking her questions, trying to find a story and a shape to her life that would fit me and
the rest of the world. She didn’t have time to be without a car. Her two
youngest sons, P. J. and Jonathan, were starting public school after years
of home schooling. Cameron, her second oldest, was eighteen, jobless
and carless, and he still expected her to provide everything he needed
and most of what he wanted. She worked as a part-time hospice aide,
did some sporadic work as a model and ran an as-yet unprofitable business venture that she described to me as “kind of like a direct-marketing
business opportunity, except we sell phone service, and everybody needs
that.” Even when her car was working, she felt like she needed an extra
hour each day and an extra day each week—a “Smonday,” as her pastor
liked to say. Without a car she had to take the bus everywhere, had to
hoof it an hour and a half in both directions, on a hilly stretch, just to
catch the nearest ride. It had been hot that fall, too, with a couple of days
in the high 90s. At times it seemed like more than she could handle.
When she felt overwhelmed, she said, she imagined herself a Sherman
tank, slow but relentless, and strong—just like the motivational speaker
had said a year earlier in a speech at a business conference she had gone
to in Anaheim. It was the climax of his pep talk, the highlight of the
whole convention, when he marched back and forth across the stage,
imitating a tank, and the crowd went wild, knowing they had what it
would take to make their prayers come true. I’d been around Jackie long
enough to know that her prayers were for easy money and for the time
it would buy. Jackie wanted to give every waking minute to her sons, to
