The bakery, which sells its secret pies only Thursdays through Sundays, has two hand-lettered signs on its ancient pink plaster walls.
The one above the display case describes Spicer's secret sweet potato cheesecake as "18K Gold That You Can Eat." The one taped in the secret sweet potato kitchen reads:
"You will reap in due season if you faint not. If you faint in the time of adversity, your strength is small."
Cleveland Spicer's strength is not small. He has gone a few rounds with adversity. He has fainted not.
"It'll be 300 degrees in that kitchen," he says happily, sitting in his living room directly above it, breathing the sweet potato air that filters up through the floorboards and smells like a midsummer night's dream all year long.
"The heat don't bother me. I look at that prayer downstairs every day. I can't faint. I am the king of the sweet potato pie. I am on the road to Successville. Ain't no turning around for me."
Spicer is a 50-year-old man with a 25-year-old smile - which is to say that while his beard, moustache and chest hairs are turning gray, there is no dust on his smile. No cynicism. No loss of faith.
He spent 18 years of his life laying bricks, then had to give up his trade
because something in the cement was poisoning his skin. He drove a cab for five years in New York, then came home to spend the past nine years in Philadelphia trying to turn his father's lifelong sweet potato dreams into reality.
A photo of his mother, Eller Belle, and his father, J.C., in crisp summer suits occupies a prominent place in the living room alongside a brown suede cowboy hat that Spicer got in exchange for a sweet potato cheesecake in New Hope last year and his father's old Univox laydown electric bass.
