The sounds of a shouting, old-time preacher on the radio came blaring from an upper-bedroom window of a small, dilapidated house one Sunday afternoon, carrying a hoarse, crackling sermon to the streets nearby.

The woman who lives here, in the north end of the State Fair neighborhood, does this every Sunday. It’s her way of sending a message with an AM radio to the surrounding neighborhood and its criminal and misbehaving residents. “That’s what you got to do,” she said.

She gave her name as Linda Ford, but was as vague about that as everything else about her. A number of grandchildren live with her, though she declined to specify how many. She’s in her 50s, but didn’t say exactly how old she is. She didn’t say what she does for a living, if anything. A daughter lives in a house a few blocks away. She did say she grew up in North Carolina, and she still retains a distinct accent. And she’s a devoutly religious woman in a city brimming with devout churchgoers. Detroit is, if nothing else, a solidly religious city.

The city’s neighborhoods are filled with people like her, pious people who can be seen every week dressed in colorful Sunday finery and streaming into hundreds of city churches nestled in terrible neighborhoods. Many of them experience life through a filter of immediate, tangible religiousness, in which no act is without eventual reward or punishment, no circumstances are random, and angels and demons are as present and real as the prostitutes and drug dealers living nearby. In a neighborhood like State Fair, where things have fallen totally out of control, some people throw all their energy into an intense, sustaining, sincere belief that keeps them from going completely crazy in an insane situation. For people like Ford, it provides a way to tolerate the intolerable; giving them a simple, consistent explanation of why they are fated to be here, now.

“There are demons out here, that’s all,” she explained. “It is the Devil out here. He knows his days is ending up. He trying to capture everybody he can. But Jesus working overtime, too. There’s a lot of things we don’t understand about God.”

Her house is old and tilting in places. She’s planted small annuals along her front wall, watering them by drawing rainwater from a garbage can with a small pail. Small pots housing plastic plants dot the porch. Her front window is blocked by a piece of cardboard, on which are scrawled religious admonitions. Her wood front door also has crude religious writing on it, written in black marker in large, uneven letters. The whole house serves as a message.

The loud, static-borne Sunday radio sermons certainly attract attention. “I’ve had people stop by, I’ve had prayer with people,” she said. “I seen the prostitutes stop by and look at it.”

Like others here, she goes out of her way to help some of the strung-out hookers roaming the streets of her neighborhood. One who lives nearby stops over sometimes.

“There’s a little Chaldean girl, she hug me, she said ‘I needed that, you know’ she said ‘cause my boyfriend mistreating me.’ She said ‘I know I’m doing wrong,’ but she can’t come for help. Ain’t got nowhere to go, once the parents put them out ‘cause they get a little habit. Some of them been abused at home. Instead of condemning them, you sit and talk to them. I talk to a lot of them. Some of them, their heart is sweet. They’re really compassionate people; they’re just looking for love and kindness, and if you show it to them they’ll give you utmost respect. These people out here picking them up abuse them and use them. That’s all they know.”

The writings, the blaring sermons, are part of her air of defiance. She says she has no fear whatsoever of anyone or anything in the neighborhood. “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” she said. “When the Lord getting ready for me to go I’m gone. You can’t be afraid because then you’ll have no life.”

Just down the sidewalk, a drug dealer on a bicycle kept passing by us, curious about the unusual activity so close to his home. She stared at him. A car pulled up, someone bought something from him, and then pulled up to us, making dumb small talk, mostly trying to poke around and find out why we were watching the transaction. Ford simply told him “God bless you,” and “Have a blessed day.” He left. The drug dealer kept eyeing us warily.

Ford wasn’t fazed. “You just keep praying for them,” she said. “That’s all we can do.”