Politics, History Grace a Church On a hot Sunday morning in Crown Heights, Alan Hevesi took his campaign for mayor into the front row of the Church of St. Mark, facing an altar of high and gilded Anglican grace. Beside him in the pew was Abner Louima. They seemed at ease in each other's company. "I had an Irish friend in England," the Rev. Tyrone Reddie was saying from the altar. He is black, from Jamaica, and much of the congregation was from the English-speaking Caribbean. "His name was Joe, and in that time, the IRA was blowing up bombs. And people were dying. And each time something happened, Joe went home." His friend Joe Hardy was from County Tyrone. "Joe was going home because it was home." Hevesi listened carefully, as Reddie expanded on a sermon keyed to the 39th anniversary of Jamaica's independence from Britain. The audience, crisp in starched dresses and Sunday-morning suits, was made up of immigrants, many from Jamaica and Guyana, and they knew what Reddie meant about the inexorable pull of home. Jamaica has had terrible trouble over the past year, as faction killed faction, and ripples of that trouble have found their way to Brooklyn. "The British taught us to divide and conquer," Reddie said, "and though we have thrown them out, some of their things remain ..." And so he preached to Hevesi and Louima and those packed into the pews about the evils of division. Existing Strains In an indirect way, he was speaking about the riots in Crown Heights 10 years ago; but he was talking, too, about his Irish friend's home country, and about Israel, and about the strains that still exist in New York, often among blacks themselves. And he talked about when he was a young clergyman, and how at Communion he would look at people's hands: "Those hands tell us the story of the labor involved in what they have done." And added what should be the message delivered by every politician to people who work with their hands and their backs: "Every man and woman must have a chance to be." When Reddie was finished, a black politician named Clarence Norman introduced Louima, who waved shyly to warm applause. Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was a victim of demented cruelty in the toilet of a New York police stationhouse. But he did not flee; he did not generalize the horror and blame all police officers; he stayed among us, and this year, for the first time, he will vote in an election for mayor. He says he will vote in the Sept. 11 primary for Alan Hevesi. When Hevesi was introduced, he stood before his audience in a dark blue suit and light blue tie, his face pink from outdoor campaigning. He will never be confused with Robin Williams, and he lacks some musical sense that is in most of the great orators, from Franklin Roosevelt to Mario Cuomo. But he was relaxed. He told a few small jokes. He emphasized several times that "we're all in this together." He said he would have "zero tolerance for crime, and zero tolerance for police misconduct." That line got warm applause, as he glanced down at Louima, and he amplified it by vowing to have "zero tolerance for any form of bigotry." Hevesi finished quickly, his lifetime in politics having taught him the importance of knowing when to get off the stage. This was a campaign stop, granted to him by the grace of the congregation. He was not going to numb his hosts with the details of policy. A Glimpse of City's Future Then he and Louima sat together while the ceremonies resumed. It was not clear, in the church, or out on the steps afterward, whether anybody was yet thinking hard about the campaign. Two people I spoke to said the same thing: "I'm still thinking it over." The Democrats have fielded four professional politicians: Hevesi, Mark Green, Fernando Ferrer and Peter Vallone. Each, in his way, a good man. Not one is a raving demagogue. All know how the city works. Each swears that he has no intention of dismantling the good things that Rudy Giuliani has set in motion. Each would probably make a decent mayor. But on this first weekend in August, none had yet stirred any passion here on the corner of Brooklyn Ave. and Union St. The church itself held the future of New York in certain very special ways. Among the congregants were doctors and lawyers, domestics and people whose hands, as Reddie said, told the tale of work. They each cherish an image of home, what the Italians, Jews and Irish always called the Old Country. But they were here to stay. Nobody is going back to what they left, not even Louima. Hevesi, who has been active for at least a decade among Irish, Haitian and other immigrant groups, knows this. It remains to be seen whether knowing it, and addressing this new political reality, will make him mayor. But there he was, a proud Jew, son of immigrants from Poland and Hungary, singing Christian hymns. Some of those hymns were sung in Anglican ceremonies in that part of the 19th century when it was legal for Americans to own human beings. While Hevesi and Louima were singing, I glanced at the wall beside me and saw a bronze plaque honoring those from St. Mark's who had served in World War II. The names ranged from Anderson to Whitelocke. They had fought Hitler. They had fought Tojo. Some of them had died in frozen forests and on bloody beaches. Now they are old, or dead, or moved away. But I wished every one of them could have seen the inside of this church on this Brooklyn Sunday morning, where a white man was asking black men and women for their votes. That moment was possible, in part, because of those forgotten men and women. Here, built into the Sunday-morning ritual, was the refusal to hate, the refusal of stupidity and anger, the refusal of what was at the core of World War II: implacable evil. We came together to that part of one of the hymns, where each person must clasp the hand of the human being beside him. I am the most secular of men, but I reached for the hand of the man beside me. A black man. He grasped my hand, and I his. And when we came to the part of the hymn that said, "Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for-eveeeer," we raised our hands together into the air.