Third of four parts.
Labor Day weekend had arrived, warm and steamy, and inside the old garage on Quincy Street, the heat and aroma of chicken frying in large vats of oil hung in the breezeless air.
Aaron Graham, the young and earnest pastor, paced back and forth at the front of the room, sporting a close-cropped haircut and beige shorts and waving a bottle of fruit juice as he launched into a sermon on persevering.
"That's the word of the day," he beamed.
The twenty-odd worshipers used a makeshift bulletin - a typed outline on a piece of paper - as a fan to stir the air. Some listened raptly. One woman slept on a couch. When he finished speaking, Aaron peered in the direction of the kitchen installed in one corner of the garage and shouted: "Hey, Dora! Any announcements?"
A sullen face under a straw hat, cheeks moistened from the hot stove, poked around the partition. It was Dora Vaughan, daughter of Ma Siss, the neighborhood matriarch who had begun this church in a chop shop two years earlier, in 2002. Dora spoke directly and emphatically: The women of Ma Siss's Place had started a class on the basics of Christianity, and more people should come. There was a free lunch after each worship service, so people should stay.
And change was coming. Jesus promised that. Dora had seen the evidence herself; after a lifetime of addictions, she had been drug-free for two years. And now she was throwing herself into the thrift shop and food pantry, determined to stay clean.
"God has done mighty things here," Dora said. "Hold onto your seats. Don't leave before the miracles."
Everyone at Ma Siss's Place looks to Dora, looks out for Dora, or mourns for Dora, depending on the day.
As her mother launched the prayer group and then the church, Dora was one of its most devoted members and committed evangelists. She oversaw the food pantry and the thrift shop. During worship, she would burst into song, or prayer, or tears, and take the congregation with her.
When Aaron and Amy got married, in November 2003, Dora led a vanload of worshipers on the long road trip to Huntington, W.V., to witness the event, and then while the couple was away for months on an extended honeymoon, Dora was a mainstay of the embryonic congregation, its de facto sexton and usher and deacon, cooking the food and hauling the furniture and welcoming visitors with a hard face and an easy laugh. Her spirit was infectious. When she laughed, others smiled; when she sang, others tapped their feet.
"We're trying to bring people closer to God, people that want to pray against violence, who want to take the neighborhood and grow it up stronger, and hopefully, like how Ma Siss's Place started, for another one to start in Mattapan, another one to start in the South End, for it to just keep . . . growing and going, you know," she said.
But if Dora's presence was vital, her absence could be devastating - and would be in the crisis year ahead, when this tiny, resolute, Christian outpost on Quincy Street almost vanished from Boston's map.
It was always the same thing that took her away.
She was 23 when she starting using cocaine, and already a mother, a wife, and a high school dropout.
She said she was introduced to the drug by her first husband and was swiftly hooked. A childhood of churchgoing and her own enduring faith weren't enough to protect her. Something inside was too strong to resist, too weak to fight back.
"I was on alcohol, crack cocaine, heroin," she said. "A couple of times I let someone inject me in my neck. I could have been paralyzed, or blind. But you don't think of your life at that point."
Even when she was sober, the darkness hovered nearby.
Some days she seemed to subsist largely on ice, which she ate out of paper cups, and cigarettes, which she smoked on the stoop of whatever building she was at. Most Saturdays, as the others prayed, she watched from the doorway, overseeing the thrift shop and the kitchen while monitoring the prayer, sometimes popping in to offer testimony, often a tribute to her mother, but rarely fully entering the room.
"I just stand back and listen and watch, you know, and then I'll know if this is a place I want to stay, or do I want to cut out," she said. "It's always a big precaution thing, from being hurt so much."
The thrift shop and food pantry became Dora's refuge and her domain. She and her mother would go to a warehouse to buy discounted food that they could resell below supermarket prices. She would pick up clothing and furniture from houses being sold, and donors -some of whom heard about Ma Siss's Place on the Internet - would drop off material by the door. On Saturdays Dora's husband, Raymond Vaughan, would drive to Haymarket to get fruits and vegetables that they would resell at cost. She would offer buyers a large garbage bag of clothing for $5, but if people had no money, they could just take it.
"For me it's a lifesaver, because this is what keeps me strong," Dora said. "Here I've learnt to look for other people, and help them first."
Day after day she and Raymond, whom she met in rehab, solicited donations, organized the shelves and the yard, and negotiated sales prices with the steady stream of people who stopped in to buy canned goods, used clothing, furniture, appliances.
"There's this lady, and she had five children in Africa that she wanted to bring here, and she wouldn't spend any money unless she had to," Dora said. "It was wintertime, and she had on this little bitty thin coat that was too small for her, but her pride and her will of saving the money to bring her children here was just so remarkable, I literally took the coat off of my back and gave it to her. I meet a lot of people, and I talk to them, and the stories that they tell me . . . how can I be selfish when they're willing to give up so much, you know?"
Dora said she couldn't be bothered to check if the people who come are really in need.
"Who's to say if a person is hungry or not?" she asked. "If they're lying, I'm not supposed to judge it. Let God handle it."
The thrift shop, she saw, drew outsiders in.
"Our first and main priority is to bring people closer to Jesus," Dora said, "and the way how we do that is by letting them know with our good-natured spirit of giving out food."
The congregation had come a long way in its first two years. The members had given the place an ambitious name, the Quincy Street Missional Church, and had signed "Articles of Organization," declaring nine lofty purposes, starting with, "to promote the application of the Word of God to the human situation."
Ralph Kee, a 68-year-old Baptist minister who had been planting new churches in Boston since 1970, had stepped in to shepherd the nascent congregation while Aaron and Amy were away on their honeymoon. He helped write bylaws, establish a formal membership process, and start an "Introduction to Christianity" course - all efforts that fell apart over time. And he helped form a sense of the church as one that is evangelical, aspiring to take its message to the neighborhood, and, ultimately, the world.
"I think God's will is for Quincy Street to succeed," Ralph said.
But there were many challenges, and chief among them was reaching the neighborhood's young people. Some of the teenagers and young children had participated back when the congregation first started meeting in the garage, but now they mostly came by just for the lunch after Saturday worship, if at all.
"It's life or death for some of these young men, because the best hope for a young black man in America is to get into church," Ralph said.
That fall, on Dec. 5, 2004, Derrick Edwards became the first of the congregation's young men to get shot. He was 18, a budding rap poet who would sit in the front row and recite rhythmic, rhyming prayers. The church's elders hoped that one day he would be a leader in a neighborhood and the church.
But just after midnight, he was standing outside a birthday party on Barry Street, just a few blocks from Ma Siss's Place, when a fight broke out. Shots were fired. Derrick was hit. By the time the ambulance got him to Boston Medical Center, he was dead.
"You could see that internal war that was going on in Derrick's life," Aaron said a few days later. "He would try to be involved with what's going on at our church, but the reality of it is that he was having to count the cost double hard, because there wasn't any other youth who were really excited about what's going on there."
At Derrick's funeral, Aaron spelled out a few options for the congregation.
"We can numb ourselves from the problem, by drinking or using alcohol or trying to escape," he said. "We can become angry, and try to get even by retaliating. . . . Or we could come together and unite and work on this."
Aaron and Amy were determined to work on it. They brought groups of evangelical college students to the garage to visit and volunteer. They set up a nonprofit, called Kaleo, and raised money from friends back in Virginia and West Virginia. Over Christmas they flew to Aaron's home church, Bon Air Baptist, in Richmond, and were ordained as ministers. When they got back, they helped found a new group, the Boston Faith and Justice Network, with dreams of a posse of young, social-justice-minded evangelicals advocating for the poor. They considered moving to Drayton Avenue but decided to live nearby, in South Boston, where they would have some time to themselves. They were still coming to Dorchester daily, but everyone knew that wouldn't last forever.
Ma Siss, meanwhile, was growing frustrated. Worshipers came but didn't offer much assistance or money. She stopped making meals each Saturday, concerned it was costing too much and appreciated too little. The church set up a group of elders, but only two, Ma Siss and Fannie Hurst - known to all as Ma Fann - were African-American and residents of the neighborhood. The four other elders - Aaron, Amy, Ralph, and Tom Groeneman, a recovering alcoholic and would-be preacher - were all deeply committed to the congregation, but also outsiders in multiple ways.
Suddenly, as it often does for Ma Siss, help arrived, seemingly out of nowhere. In May of 2005, Tony Thompson, a garrulous 49-year-old Florida native who described himself as "a backsliding preacher" moved into the neighborhood, earning a living doing odd jobs, and occasionally borrowing money from Ma. One day Dora saw him with a loaf of bread and hollered, "You went and paid $2 for bread; we have five for a dollar."
Tony was poor - "Things was so bad the roaches and the rats left," he said - and had a criminal record, which he talked about openly, but also said was undeserved. He had a passion for Christianity, and wanted to minister on the street. Tony seemed to have a gift for preaching. He was able to recite parts of the Bible from memory, and he committed himself enthusiastically to helping strengthen Ma Siss's Place.
He started coming to worship with his wife, Gloria, a deeply devout woman who would occasionally speak in tongues, her shoulder jerking, as she prayed. The congregation had been looking for leaders - especially black men - and came to call Tony an associate pastor. He led daily prayers in the garage, often wearing a baseball cap that said "Jesus," and he would offer the invocation at Saturday worship.
But Tony also arrived with ideas that put him on a collision course with Dora. He and Gloria began spending days at the thrift shop. They thought it would be more successful if it branched out from donated clothing, food, and furniture to sell more housewares and antiques at higher prices, and if it took a more tough-minded approach, marking prices on its goods and sticking to them.
"There's a new sheriff in town," he would say, "and his name is Anthony Thompson."
Between Tony and Dora it could sound like an argument over whether to sell five loaves of bread for a dollar, or for a dollar apiece, and it often was. But it was also a question of what God would have them do - keep the shop solvent or do right by each needy soul passing through.
"If they come in," Dora said of their customers, "and you say, 'Well, could you give me $2 donation for these shoes,' and if they say that they don't have it . . . you don't say, 'Well, you don't have [the money] you don't have the shoes.' What kind of stuff is that?"
Ominously, as they squabbled, money began to disappear from the shop. Financial controls were loose to begin with, and it was weeks before anyone realized that there was a problem. Some suspected Dora was feeding a resurgent drug habit.
In the spring of 2005, as Dora grew increasingly demoralized, something gave way. She started using again, first a prescription painkiller she purchased from a neighbor, then methadone.
"I had all of the warning signs," she said. "I just chose to pick up. I could've not have, but I got really frustrated, and I was like, just forget it."
As she fell, her faith in Ma Siss's Place fell with her. She felt there was no support for her. She had been one of Aaron's biggest fans, but as she tumbled, doubts about his sincerity festered.
"I felt as though he wasn't available," she said. "I felt as though he was judgmental. I felt as though he wasn't really as he was claiming to be. And then the devil just put all kinds of things in front of me: He's not really here for us; he's here because he can go to college and he can buy a car and his rent is paid, and . . . all he has to do is tell this organization he's here in the ghetto helping these little poor black addicts and alcoholics and stuff."
Rather than confront Aaron, she simply stopped talking to him. He, in turn, was frustrated by his inability to reach her.
Dora also became critical of many of her fellow church members, who, she believed, trafficked in gossip and reveled in her woes. She also thought some had encouraged her mother's anger toward her husband, Raymond, who had an argument with Ma Siss over management of the thrift shop.
And so Dora and Raymond stopped coming to Ma Siss's Place, stopped coming to church. They were gone.
Then came the flood.
It was October, 2005, and the congregation had spent months physically transforming the garage - installing a ceiling to conceal the ductwork, plastering the cinderblock walls, and laying vinyl tiles and plywood over the grease-stained cement floor. Adalberto Arroyo, the neighborhood handyman, had separated the kitchen and food pantry from the worship area with a wall and a glass-paned door, so that now there was a space that could actually be called a sanctuary. A group of volunteers from Pennsylvania, who had heard about Aaron, had fashioned a cross out of boards from
But then a city contractor, installing a new water main at Quincy Street and Columbia Road, broke the gate that controls the flow of water through the pipes, and a massive sheet of water came gushing down Quincy Street toward the church.
It was hours before the main was fixed and the foot-deep water drained.
Everything in the churchyard - furniture, washing machines, clothing - was destroyed, as were a computer, files, food, and the floor inside. A thin coating of mud covered the yard and the kitchen area.
"Let me tell you, it was a baby Katrina," Tony said. "When I came out the door, it was up to my knees."
The next morning Tony gathered with a small group he called his "prayer crew" to ask for God's help. By midday Ma Fann and Tony's sister-in-law, Ann Beaudoin, were sitting in the cold, dark, building, waiting. Ma Siss had called her insurance agent, but nothing was happening fast.
Tom, who was starting to take classes at Gordon-Conwell's Center for Urban Ministerial Education, saw a connection between the church's various woes, tying the flood to the disappearance of Dora and the violence in the streets.
"We're in a spiritual struggle in this world, between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light," he said. "There is a war going on for your soul, for my soul, for the souls of the people in Dorchester."
The first Saturday after the flood - the eighth straight day of rain that October - the displaced congregation gathered in the living room at 22 Drayton, a three-decker owned by Ma Siss that was home to Brian and Cathi Corcoran, several African refugees, and a rotating group of young and often penniless Christian activists. The Corcorans had tied balloons to a post to help people find the house. Rain was pouring down outside, and when Ma Siss arrived, at about 1:15 p.m., gasping for breath and saying, "Praise God," just 10 people were scattered around the room.
"Satan tried to attack us with a mini-tsunami," Tony said, his voice rising to a shout. "We are looking toward God to bring good out of this situation."
Aaron was dispirited by the flood, and feeling a little sick, but also moved by the return to worship in a house.
"Our faith is not dependent on a temple built by human hands," he said. "If we have to have church in the street, we'll have church in the street."
By the time Aaron had finished, a small crowd had gathered, including visiting missionaries from Thailand and California, acquaintances of Aaron and Ralph, who were curious to see what they were up to in Dorchester.
Ma Siss was stoic, even as the church she founded sat mildewing around the corner. She welcomed the visitors as she shrugged off the multiplying crises.
"No matter what happens, we always make our way," Ma Siss said. "Can't nothing stop us now."
Two days after Thanksgiving, Dora returned.
The congregation had moved back to the garage, after a massive cleanup effort and another round of renovations. That Saturday, a midsize crowd had gathered for worship, including Aaron's parents, up from Virginia for the holiday.
Dora, gone for months, sat in the back of the garage, as if nothing special had happened.
A few minutes into the service, she stood, and began her confession.
"I want to stand before the church and apologize to everyone and ask for everyone's forgiveness, because, as mostly everybody knows, I relapsed, and I was trying to hide it while still being down here," she said, starting to cry.
"How can I tell people about the church, and that I love the church, if I don't set a good example? I let my family down, especially my mother, but yet still she's forgiven me again and accepted me again. . . . So I'm asking everyone for their forgiveness, and I'm asking everyone, if they see that I'm trying to take on too much, please let me know. I won't be offended at all. I want everybody to know that I miss you all and I love you all so much."
Ann approached Dora, and placed a hand on her shoulder. Cathi, cradling her son Levi in her arms, went over to lay her hands on, too. And Aaron joined in, placing his hands on Dora's shoulders. Tears were streaming down his face.
"Father, God, we thank you for our sister, Dora," he began. "We thank you for bringing her back home today."
And then he launched, singsong, into an impromptu litany of praise.
"You're a God of second chances," he said. "You're a God of third and fourth and fifth chances, God. And Lord, we just pray, God, that you would be with her, Lord, so that you would just protect her, God, protect her from the evil one, Lord, help us, Lord, to encourage her, God, and to play our part, God."
Christmas was coming. The garage was repaired. Dora was back. Hope was in the air. But the troubles kept coming, too. The congregation had to drop its weekly bread distribution because of a lack of money and volunteers. Aaron and Amy had both been admitted to graduate school so they had less time in the neighborhood.
And then Tony disappeared. His cellphone had been cut off, and Aaron couldn't reach him. He had been talking about starting his own congregation, and wanted to rent space in the garage. He came to a worship service but spent the whole time in the kitchen. Ma Fann said he'd been drinking -- which Tony denies -- and declared, "You can't be with God one day and the devil the next." Ma Siss, concerned that too many people had keys to the garage, suggested they change the locks.
She also decided to close the thrift shop mornings. There just weren't enough volunteers to staff it, or enough business to justify it. At a Thursday afternoon church meeting in early December, she displayed the telephone and gas and electric bills for the garage and said she was having trouble paying them.
"If it keep like this here, I'm going to have to put one of my houses up for sale," she said. "We got to do something. We got to go begging or something."
A few days later, the congregation gathered to mark the first anniversary of Derrick's death. His mother and her co-workers joined the worshipers for a tearful tribute, but despite shouted exhortations from Ma Fann, most of the teenagers in attendance sat looking down at their hands or the folding tables, refusing to speak. On a piece of posterboard along the wall, Derrick's mother had posted the lyrics of his favorite song, hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur's "In the Event of My Demise."
The congregation decried the violence that ended Derrick's life, but the very next night one of Ma Siss's foster sons, Stephen Thompson, was shot. Stephen had been walking home from the corner drug store when a teenage boy with whom he had had a long-running feud opened fire. Happily, his ex-friend was a bad shot, and Stephen was hit only in the foot.
Then, a few days later, Dora got arrested. She and her daughter Christine, nicknamed Girlie, had driven down to Quincy to pick up a donation for the thrift shop. A police officer spotted the family's white pickup truck, noticed that its registration had expired, and pulled them over. It turned out the vehicle was not only unregistered, but also uninsured. Dora's license was suspended, and she had four outstanding arrest warrants, from four different courthouses, for failures to pay fines for previous false check offenses.
Ma Siss and Aaron were both frustrated, but also thought maybe Dora would finally resolve her lingering legal issues.
"I've warned Dora many times," Aaron said. "Hopefully, this will be good for her, and will force her to deal with what she has in her heart."
Ma Siss, who paid off $1,200 of her daughter's fines, had a similar attitude.
"After 10 years, Dora could have all this stuff wrapped up," she said. "I tell her all the time not to drive. I don't know why she was driving."
Only a handful of people showed up at worship the day of Christmas Eve 2005 - it was an unseasonable 50 degrees outside, and many folks were traveling or shopping in anticipation of the holiday. Ma Fann exhorted Tom, who was leading worship, to keep the service short.
But Dora was back, and when Tom asked for someone to lead the congregation in song, she walked to the front, asked for a microphone, and led a spontaneous rendition of "Silent Night." Ma Siss offered a shouted prayer, saying: "It's just a joy to see another year pass along. . . . Just pray and hope that we can find some more Christian families to come in."
Then Daequan Baker, Ma Sis's 9-year-old great-grandson, shyly asked, "Can I say another one?"
"I pray for all these gangsters in the street, and the alcoholics that been smoking and drinking, Lord," Daequan said. "And I pray for everybody that has done the best, and I praise everybody that can keep on doing it and share this nice Christmas together. No more drinking and no more fighting. Amen."
The meal after church was simple that day - hamburgers baked in gravy, hot dogs with beans, a casserole of corn and string beans.
The next day, Christmas, Ma Siss awoke in pain, aching from arthritis, her legs swollen.
She was feeling down. She'd stopped cooking big holiday meals because her children and grandchildren didn't seem to appreciate it.
"I'm about even ready to sell my fine china, cause it's no service to me," she said.
Her dining room table was piled high with laundry and an unwrapped gingerbread house; one of her foster sons, Adam, was wandering around with a Nerf gun and mock bulletproof vest he had been given for Christmas. A disheveled man knocked on the door, came in, and offered to sell Ma Siss bags of electrical supplies. When she declined, he asked for $10 for Christmas.
Dora skipped her next court hearing, at Boston Municipal Court; she said she didn't have enough money to pay the required fine. But at a New Year's Eve worship service the following Saturday, she led the congregation in singing her favorite hymn, "Victory is Mine," and offered her own prayer for the new year.
"What we've done - good, bad, indifferent -we can't change it," she said. "I'm praying for the new year coming up, for my faith in God to just overpower me, because, I don't know why, but I just do things at the spur of the moment, and I don't think it out carefully, and it gets me in a lot of trouble."
Michael Paulson can be reached by e-mail at mpaulson@globe.com. Pat Greenhouse can be reached at greenhouse@globe.com
