The Man With The Golden Tongue

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By Will James
SBU J-School Reporter

James Macklin talks, and he makes friends. 

Making friends carried him from a tumultuous childhood in rural Virginia, orphaned, to a fruitful tenure as a business owner in New Jersey.  Making friends took him, homeless, from the streets of the Bowery into the administrative ranks of New York philanthropy.   Making friends kept him alive and fed when he lost everything to cocaine addiction.  Now, at 68, James Macklin makes friends for a living. 

From his office at Christian Herald headquarters on the Lower East Side, he courts the region’s ripe base of charity donors, contacting as many as 30 or 40 companies, churches and individuals a day. As he once sustained himself, he secures the donations that feed, shelter and rehabilitate the growing ranks of Manhattan’s homeless at a critical time. Last year, the number of families in New York shelters hit a record high and the number of homeless individuals in shelters increased by 11 percent since 2006, according to Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group.

 Pictures hang from wires over the wooden spiral staircase leading to Macklin’s regal, high-ceilinged office and stand on easels in front of the high windows across from his desk – semblances of men and women slumped against buildings, or simple portraits of their staring faces.  The images contrast sharply with the suit-jacketed man with the immaculate shoes.  And they recall the lowest points of his strange life.

His story is his pitch.

“Most of the people that I’ve called to get involved in the mission done it because of meeting me,” he said. “I let them see what’s going on, let them look at the story of my life. And you decide what you want to give. I’m not going up to twist nobody’s arm. I’m not a shakeup artist. We form a relationship. People don’t give to institutions. They give to people.”

Macklin, a black man, was born in Lawrenceville, Va., in 1938 to a 14-year-old mother.  He was raised on a farm by his grandmother’s friend, a wealthy white woman named Lee Hester Peterson Walker. 

“She was a morally exceptional woman," he said. "She believed in education."  He described her as a civic leader and a businesswoman. She taught him to sing, standing him on a milk crate in church while she played piano. She died of a brain tumor when Macklin was 9. 

“Broke my heart,” he said.  “I might have been running for president years ago if that lady didn’t die.”  He used the surname "Walker" for most of his life.

Macklin weathered the rest of his childhood in a series of foster homes, some with black families, some with white.  None of them, he said, sent him to school.

“I went to some horrible ones," he said.  "The kids went to school.  I had to work on the farm.  It was reason to be bitter.  And I guess I was.” 

This first dark period of his life ended when he fled to Baltimore at the age of 16.  He survived by singing, and he survived by making friends.  When asked how he spent those years, he said, flatly, "I met people." 

After drifting for years, he settled in Plainfield, N.J., at 25.  At the behest of a friend, he reluctantly began searching for his birth mother, Phyllis Macklin, traveling to Lawrenceville, then tracing her to Englewood, N.J., a 45-minute ride away.

Macklin narrates the tale of their reunion like it’s one of his favorites, simultaneously practiced and genuine.  When he knocked on the door of the one-story home in suburban Englewood, he said, a female voice asked who he was. 

"Me," he said.

When she asked again, he replied, "Me," as if all of the voluble charm that had sustained him since childhood had left him.  The woman who answered the door was his aunt.  His aunt introduced him to his mother, who lived in the same house.  Macklin met the woman from whom, he said, spring whatever aspects of his talents and character are inherited. 

"She was very uneducated," he said.  "But she made it."  They became close and remained so until she died in 2005, at 79.  Weeks before she died, she revealed to Macklin that he was the result of a rape she had suffered when she was 13.

He changed his name to "Macklin."  

As James Macklin of Plainfield, he said, he grew wealthy in the 1970’s, building a successful office-cleaning business.  But after ten years of prosperity, he lost everything when he became addicted to cocaine.

"I did very, very, very well," he said.  "I threw it away.” Down and out, he crossed the Hudson River to New York. He was in his forties and homeless.  His people skills went toward procuring food and shelter.  Restaurant owners would feed him after hours.  New friends would let him stay the night. 

"I never ate at a soup kitchen," he said.  

After a year, Macklin said, he enrolled in a rehabilitation program. His career with Christian Herald began at the receiving end of the charity organization. 

Christian Herald is the umbrella organization for the Bowery Mission, an ancient brick building that has served since 1879 as a respite in Manhattan's traditional skid row.  For ten years, Macklin lived there. During the year-long rehabilitation process, he cleaned bathrooms, answered phones and mopped floors.  He stayed on, working his way rapidly through promotions: security manager, then assistant director of the mission, then director. 

Christian Herald hired him a decade ago as director of outreach.

On a mid-January morning, Macklin headed downtown to the mission to fulfill his public relations duties.  A German television crew was meeting him to talk about a museum that went up next to the Bowery Mission.  They wanted him to comment on gentrification, the changing face of the Bowery and Manhattan at large, a process he's watched for 20 years now.

He walked to the 6 train with an ease and a briskness that, along with his posture, his full head of hair and his lucid, active eyes, defy his age.   He paused to point out one of the best places for a shoe shine.

Everything about the way he walks seems to defy his illness - a 1995 HIV diagnosis and prostate cancer.  The cancer was successfully treated with a seed implant.  The HIV remains dormant.  "I look pretty good, right?" he said.

At the station, he fumbled at a Metrocard vending machine. A subway worker left her booth, exasperated in her attempts at guiding the old man verbally through the process of refilling his senior citizen’s pass.  At first, she was curt with him.  By the time Macklin pushed through the turnstile, they were laughing together like familiar acquaintances.

 The subtle process with which James Macklin makes friends is baffling to watch. He operates with what sounds like a smooth rhythm of alternating dominance and affability.  Moments of command disarmed by well-placed belly laughs.  

At the mission, he was greeted like a patriarch.  The soup kitchen chef made him a plate and took it from him when he was finished.  An unceasing flow of residents in the midst of the rehabilitation program and alumni who work on the staff approached his table as the news crew set up.

"Have you ever heard this man sing?" a staff member said.  "It'll make you cry, man.  For real."  Macklin has sung on Brian Gumbel's and Paula Zahn's television shows.  He made the New York Times in 2007 for his coordination of Anointed Voices, a gospel group composed entirely of formerly homeless men, based at the Bowery Mission.  

He has a legacy there.  "I've known Macklin for nine or ten years," said Rocco Troiano, a chef who began as a paid staff member but now volunteers.  "Did you know he never had an argument with a member of the community or a member of this house?  That's amazing."

His ease with people comes with what he describes as a knack for character judgment.

More than a decade ago, Macklin was director of the Bowery Mission when Kiki Adebola, an undocumented immigrant from Nigeria, came into the soup kitchen.  Lacking a green card, he was barred from enrolling in the rehabilitation program.  But Macklin befriended him.

“He was at the front desk a lot when I used to come in from the streets to eat," Adebola said.  “He said, ‘Hey, you look like a good guy. Let me see what I can do for you.’  And he bent the rules for me.”

Macklin said that he ignored the Mission's then-requirement that all rehabilitation candidates be U.S. citizens.  Adebola graduated the program and, like Macklin, rose steadily through the ranks.

"Today, I’m the director of discipleship," Adebola said.  "I run the program.  I came here from the streets through Macklin.  His gamble paid off on me." 

During the interview, Macklin sat loosely in a plastic cafeteria chair. When it was finished, the crew members smiled wide.  If they had come expecting to amble through a boilerplate "community reaction," they were already reworking the story in their heads.  They had landed a glut of sound-bite gems.  But Macklin had not said what they might have expected. He refused to speak against the glossy museum's intrusion into the Bowery, although it sticks out like a sore thumb amid the stouter, quainter architecture.  

"I will never criticize change," Macklin said after the interview.  "I'm sorry.  You work with change."  

A few minutes later, he said his goodbyes and left the mission for the day.  Sometimes, at night, Macklin said, homeless people from the Bowery ride the train with him back to the Bronx home where he lives with his wife.  They make sure he gets home safe, he said.  

Apart from his career at Christian Herald, one or two public speaking engagements a week keep him busy.  He speaks to students in the city and elsewhere.  He speaks at churches and synagogues.  He speaks mostly about his life.  "The older I get, I think, the better I get," he said.  He cites Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Louis Farrakhan and the Rev. Calvin Butts as influences.

His pastor at the Baptist House of Prayer in the Bronx is trying to enlist him as a preacher.  Macklin said that his friends have been trying to get him to give sermons for years.  

"He's one of the greatest singers and speakers there," said Miriam Deas, a pastor's aide there.  "We can't have him come in and not say a few words.  Myself, as an adult, just wants to keep following him everywhere he goes.  Because he's the greatest person I've ever met."  

Macklin is considering the offer, preaching on top of his work with Christian Herald.  A turbulent life has left him with a lot to say, and his talent has imbued him with a thousand compelling ways to say it. The secret to relating to people and speaking, Macklin says, is simple. You seek out new experiences, and draw on them.

Characteristically, he sums up his life in a series of inspirational aphorisms. "I've never lost a battle.  Why should I be angry?" he said.  "And, on top of that, I know who I am."  

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