The preacher known as Rev. Ike died on Tuesday. He was part of the backdrop of my childhood, one of the more prominent black preachers whose voice rang out from our radio during weekly or nightly broadcasts.I don’t remember ever seeing him on TV. My mother listened to Rev. Ike, but not because she subscribed to his philosophy of the ‘God in you’ or the gospel of prosperity. Being an old-school Christian and conservative to the core, she listened only to gather fodder to scoff at and criticize him. It didn’t matter to me back then, and aside from the fact that his surviving children and wife deserve comfort and pity at this time, his passing doesn’t really move me today. I’m not conservative enough to be offended by what he preached and I’m not part f the ‘name it, claim it’ crowd either.
What piqued my interest, though, was his full name: Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, which is a Dutch surname if I’ve ever heard one. Here is a photo of him that ran in The New York Times. So I did some Googling about this fallen American icon. There is also an NPR obit on the late preacher. 
Sure enough, it turns out that his father was Dutch Indonesian and his mother was an African-American. His parentage, or late parentage is the main reason I’m talking about this guy. His parents divorced when he was 5 years old. Normally, I’d say it is a pity that he came from a broken home, but clearly he found a way to bounce back nicely, wouldn’t you say?
When I was a college freshman or sophomore, I almost pledged Delta Sigma Theta, thinking it would be a great way to get more out of college life. I went to a couple of pre-rush meetings, met the young women who were supposed to be my ‘line sisters’, learned the Greek alphabet, memorized the list of founding sorors and even got a pledge name. But the $600-plus membership fee in the first year, stopped my progress cold. There was no way I could have coughed up that much money by the end of my pledge process,or justified doing so to my very pragmatic mother, a first-generation immigrant. Further, a family friend and mentor discouraged me from pledging. She worked in my college’s financial aid office (I was always grateful that I never needed to spend a lot of time in that place, with its bad yellowish lighting and utilitarian furniture), where I would visit her and talk about whatever was going on with me in my classes and among my peers. So I never pledged any black sororities. I cannot say that I bitterly regret skipping the pledging process, but there are times when I wonder whether I made a mistake. Like whenever I run into my old high school vice principal for instance. I’ve come across Ms. Lennox in a range situations, from Alvin Ailey performances to supermarket aisles, and for a while, she always seemed to be more advanced in her career than the last time I saw her. When we part, I begin to wonder whether I should have gone through with Delta sisterhood, because it might have brought me into closer contact with more high-profile professionals.