Editor's Note

First Missionary is a world away from other churches I've attended. Unlike First Presbyterian Church of Verona, New Jersey, into whose purple-and-white-robed propriety I was confirmed, and unlike First Baptist Church of Molena, Georgia, whose country pastor had a disconcerting knack of discerning from the pulpit the transgressions of my adolescent heart, First Missionary is a clapping church. Child of the black haute bourgeoisie of Jacksonville, Florida, great-granddaughter of A. L. Lewis-Florida's first black millionaire and cofounder of Florida's first insurance company and also of American Beach, a black Depression-era seaside resort that still exists in threadbare splendor-she threw all her pedigree and privilege overboard, deserted her celebrated career as an opera singer in Europe in the 1950s and '60s, gave away her inheritance to the last penny to environmental causes, grew her hair to her heels, and lobbied hard and successfully to preserve local black history and to protect the great sand dune at the core of American Beach, where she lived as a willful pauper, sometimes residing on a chaise longue on the beach in front of A. L. Lewis' old home.