Across the Bay to 'Akká: Louis Gregory's Pilgrimage Arrival

In *A Heavenly Vista* Louis George Gregory — the African American lawyer from Washington who would in 1951 be named posthumously a Hand of the Cause of God — gives a brief chapter to the afternoon in April 1911 when, having spent several days with the Master in Alexandria, he travelled by boat to Haifa and was conveyed across the bay to ‘Akká for the formal portion of his pilgrimage.

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He had crossed, the booklet records, by the small steam-launch that ran between Haifa and ‘Akká in those years. The bay was calm. The line of the city wall — the same Crusader-era fortifications inside which Bahá’u’lláh had been imprisoned for years — rose, in its old sandstone, as the boat approached.

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> As the small boat approached the wall the city walls of > ‘Akká rose, in their old sandstone, to meet me.

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He was set down at the small wooden landing-stair under the sea wall. A Persian believer was waiting on the stones of the quay to receive him. They walked together through the narrow streets of the old city, the believer leading the way, Gregory following with the small case he had brought.

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The walk, the booklet records, was short — perhaps a quarter of a mile through the lanes that had received Bahá’u’lláh Himself in 1868. Gregory was conscious, in every step, of the soil he was walking on. The city had been the prison-city; it was now, by the strange transformation that holiness works on geography, a holy city. The lanes through which men had once spat at the Holy Family were the lanes through which a Western pilgrim now walked in reverent silence.

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He arrived at the door of the house that had been prepared for him. He was received by the family and by the small group of believers staying for that pilgrimage period. He was given his room. He set down his case.

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Gregory does not, in his small booklet, dwell on the historical moment he himself constituted. He had been, he was aware, the first African American believer to come on pilgrimage to ‘Akká. The Master had known this; the Master, in fact, had specifically sent for him. Gregory’s entry into the holy city was, in its quiet way, a recognition that the Cause was for every people on earth — and that the colour line that ran through American society did not, and would not, run through the household at ‘Akká.

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He prepared himself, the booklet ends, for the next morning, when he would be conducted to the Master’s presence and would sit in the same small room in which the Master Himself had received the long succession of Eastern pilgrims across the years of the imprisonment.

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