prayeh, an' hit may be

THE church of Little St. John's, Anderson County, stands in the hollow fork of the Foxford Ridge road, just this side Fink's Camp-Meeting Grove. The building, formerly a ginhouse, was bought by the black men of the settlement, and converted into a sanctuary, used also as a schoolhouse for the black children. The negroes bought also the plantation bell which once rang summons to the cottonfield gang, and erected it upon the roof of the church in a crude little belfry of boards. By day the church, beaten purple-gray and lichen-green by the weather, is spotted over with orange patches of sunlight, sifted through the thin-leaved branches of the oaks surrounding it. By night the whole crossroads huddle close together in the darkening brilliance of the moonlight, which is half mystery.

It was a quiet night in August. As we approached the church the passion-flowers lay in the vines by the roadside like fallen stars. The long-leaved pines sent out a hyacinthine sweetness, and the resinous perfume of rosemary pine drifted down the hill to us. In the hollow below the little church lay a little uncultivated cotton patch, idling its life away. Below the fallow cotton patch the tassels of a field of corn sent out a haunting fragrance through the night.

To the senses of primitive men these odors of the night are maddening things:

de

las' time; I don' know.

The smells of the day and the perfumes of artifice belong to the cultivated races. The mist which crept along the hollow smelled of a thousand subtle things: fennel, marigold, fumitory, dogsbane, snakeroot, pipsissewa, stramonium, the Voudou conjurer's atropin. Strong on the wind came a whiff of another rankness, solanum, with its distortion and hopeless delirium, its promised satisfaction of revenge, reconciliation of lovers, and gratification of passion. The mist, heavy with odors, crept along the cotton patch, and entered the shadowy edge of the grove. The dim light of the church, faint and yellow, crept from the wide-open doors, shimmering among the pillared tree trunks, and faced the outer darkness, as the primitive church in the worn East faced the utter darkness and the void, and found there Oph and Jaldabaoth.

The little, struggling church on the hillside, the shadowy darkness in the hollow, made, to my mind, a strange picture of the conflict between the powers of good and ill, of the half-pagan, half-Christian, entirely Oriental religion which struggled with the early faith in Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria, and which has, to a greater or less extent, descended upon the American negro, like a Manichæism which rivals Christianity, a contest of the forces of good and evil; on one side light, life, law, order, and truth; on the

other darkness, impurity, all that is evil, and death.

The full and rising moon shone brilliantly over the Carolina wood. One bright planet, silvery-green, hung high overhead. It was past nine o'clock. A network of wandering paths, foot-worn, water-worn, dew-wet, and shimmering, came gathering in at the crossroads. A dark figure, small groups of figures, came down the slope, following the pathways across the cottonfields, or up through the dale. The road, by noon as red as a bright, brick-colored geranium bloom, lay half-lost, with all its color, in the moonshine.

Along the road members of the congregation were coming, singing, not loudly, as wild airs as ever African twilight listened to. Through the faint light and the mist we could see them in the darkness and the shadow of the woods, seeming a part of it, their bodies swaying from side to side, hands upraised, with harsh, clapping sounds, their feet scarcely clearing the sandy ruts, shuffling, scuffling along, in time to the beat of their music.

Where the preacher came, by another path, with a one-armed deacon, hymnbook and Bible in their hands, there was decorous it were not true to call it pompous silence.

The women had not yet come. There had been a prayer meeting, led by lay brothers, exhorters, before the evangelist, preacher, and deacons came. As we paused at the edge of the little grove a man with a wonderfully soft, deep voice was praying. He seemed almost to be singing, his voice was so melodious and so evenly modulated in its tones; a bass, not of the rasping, guttural variety common among mountain whites, but deep and suave as an organ-pipe. His prayer, in its strange, sweet, half-chanted intonations, seemed a Laus Perennis, its melodious flow going steadily and musically on without a pause, like an old Ambrosian chant; old Antioch seemed to listen with us.

Suddenly, without a pause, and where VOL. 98 - NO. 2

I could not lay my finger, the chanted prayer turned into a song. The same deep bass voice led it. The others, with scarcely a moment's hesitation, joined in its quaint refrain. The grouped voices rolled heavily and compactly together, like distant, condensed thunder in a barrel; or, rather, like a dozen sleepy trombones making music under a window at night. The voices all were bass, or baritones, of a rather sombre cast, and all possessed the same searching, melancholy tone. The blending was close, the effect rich and full, the passionate, dramatic melody (with gradations of tone which sharps and flats are inadequate to express, persistently minor) now and then rising in a rush of sound into the harmony of some strange, chromatic, accidental chord. Individual voices could be distinguished, modulating themselves to the greater body, some a little sharp, some a little flat; all feeling, as if without knowledge or intent, for that vibrating sense which attests perfect harmony, or for the unjarring flow of perfect unison; never quite attaining either, yet, nevertheless, going on in unbroken sweep. Some were singing antiphonally, at deeper octave, some magadizing, using indifferently and irrelevantly harmonies of the third, fifth, or sixth, producing odd accidental concords of sound, strange chromatic groups of semitones, and irregular intervals such as are found in Magyar music. Yet, as they sang, dissonance and harsh intervals seemed to weed themselves away; the melody sweetened, the discordant voices fell, or wrought themselves, into a complex, unusual harmony, and ended suddenly upon a diminished chord, startling both my companion and

me.

There were figures now passing through the shadows among the oak trees; they swished through the little fern brake under the pines; a black bench under the trees was filled.

The preacher, the deacons, and the evangelist had gone up the church steps; the women of the congregation had come;

the wooden flights creaked and rattled under their heavy tread. We stopped at the door to look in, not wishing to stare about the Lord's house, even if it were a shanty.

Three kitchen lamps with wrinkled tin reflectors were nailed against the wall. They shed a dim, uncertain light through the church, fading away into the darkness behind us. The doors were of unplaned, whip-sawed plank, warped and cracked. They had no locks; on one hung three rusted links of an old padlock chain. The windows were boarded up with rough plank, the congregation being too poor to purchase glass. Wide cracks in the walls everywhere let in pale streaks of the moonlight. Along the ridgepole the wind had stripped away two rows of shingles, and through the gap a line of stars peeped faintly down through the yellow lamplight. The ridgepole looked like a bare-boned spine. The lamplight, smoky at best, lost itself among the beams and shadows overhead, the room being unceiled. The wind whiffed up softly through wide cracks in the floor.

The benches were of plank and slabs, bored each with four holes into which peg-legs were driven; the seats of the benches shone, worn smooth by attrition. A small pulpit of boards with a little ledge held the dog-eared Bible; behind the pulpit, upon a rude bench, on a ruder platform, sat the preacher, the evangelist, and the one-armed deacon. In front of the pulpit and its little square platform was a small table on four uneven legs. The old cotton-bale door in the end of the building, behind the pulpit platform, was planked over: the people were poor indeed, and this was their highest chancel. The house was a mere shell of scantling and weather-boards, cheaply erected, illconstructed, unpainted, unwhitewashed, cobwebbed, and gray. At the end opposite the pulpit the bell-rope dropped like a pendant vine through a hole in the roof, fully a yard across, and but scantly covered by the tottering belfry. A larger

lamp, with a white porcelain shade, hung directly before the pulpit, above the little table, swaying slightly to and fro.

The church was well filled. The women were seated at one side, the men at the other. The congregation, both men and women, came in, sat down, arose, changed their seats, or went out again with perfect freedom, and with, apparently, no restraint whatever upon their

movements.

The preacher leaned on the pulpit, one hand at either side. The worn Bible lay between them. He held in one hand a roll of "notes," to which he never referred. He was tall, and his face powerful, though grotesque, oddly akin to the grotesquery of the shopworn, shambling lions in the negro artist, Tanner's, picture of Daniel in the Lion's Den. His voice when he spoke was deep, and not unsuggestive also of power.

"Brederin," he said, in a tone so quiet that I had to fix my attention, "you will find my tex' in de sixt' chapteh er Rebelations."

The vision and the mystery of Revelation, and the dramatic darkness of the Minor Prophets, are a golden storehouse to the African.

"I hab foun' de chapteh, but I loss de vuss, an' I can't fin' hit; so I'll read yo' out'n de nex' chapteh. I t'ank de Lo'd I don' keep museff tuh one chapteh er de Scripcheh: I belieb ter read de whole er de Scripcheh an' try tuh ondehstan' hit. My tex' is in de sixteent' vuss an' de las' paht er de sebenteenth: 'An' dey shill hongry no mo', neider thusty any mo'.' Den agin hit say, 'Go'd gwine wipe away all de teahs fum dey yeyes.""

He stood for a moment silently looking at the faces of his auditors and leaning on his hands.

"Brederin: I wan' ter talk tuh you t'night 'bout de inneh man an' de inneh woman, an' I hope hit will suit yo'! Dis revibal bin er-goin' on 'bout twelve nights; some souls is bin save; but some er you hain't took de wohd er Go'd to yo' heaht; no, not by no manner o' means!

But I'm goin' ter be gentle wid yuh, my brederin. Dere's a heap er t'ings I wants ter tell yuh, but you can't stan' 'em. . . no, suh; you can't stan' 'em. "Now I ain' gwine have no laffin'! I'm in dat fix, ter-night, I won't stan❜ no foolin'. Yo'-all keep on an' yo'-all 'll git blowed up! Sometimes you kin play wid me; but you can't play wid me to-night! Some er you, I reckon, is mighty tiuhd, 'cause you bin losin' yo' night's res'; but w'ich does you t'ink orter be de mores' tiuhd, you or me? I know you has bin in de fiel' all tru de heat an' de burding er de day; but 'peahs tuh me like I orter be de mores' tiuhd; 'cause you-all kin skip erbout in de service, an' you-all kin nod; an' you don't hab ter help all thu de meetin'; but I can't git no res' .. I'm erbleeged tuh be up hyeah, talkin' an' preachin' an' stan'in' up. An' 'peahs ter me ef I kin keep on er-preachin', you-all orter could keep on er-listenin'."

He spoke a little more sharply, with something like a snap in his voice:

"An' I don' wan' no sleepin'; but I want yuh all tuh wek up one ernutheh. An' ef yo' see yo' nabuh sleepin', I want yuh ter gib um er nudge; an' ef de man buh-hine yo' gone ter sleep, I don' want yuh ter say nuttin' . . . t'un an' wek um up, an' tell um say 'I's doin' a 'commodation ter de Lo'd!' . . . An' I don' wan' no noise; I want ebbryt'ing quite.

"Now, I wan' tuh tell yo' w'at hit is ter be a Christian. An' I want yo' all tuh help me... tuh knit up wid me in de meetin', tuh hol' me up, tuh tek hol' er de gospel plough, an' set hit down deep; not tuh set back an' nod, an' sleep, an'

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pus

"An' dat ain't all; not by no manneh er means! Dere's vircheh in bein' er Christian: Christianity is vircheh. Dat's a fac'... Christianity is vircheh, an' vircheh mek er good pussonal life; vircheh mek er good citizen; vircheh mek er country truly free; vircheh mek er gret nation; vircheh builds up a race. Dere's two kin's er vircheh, muh brederin, sonal an' spiritual. . . . I hopes yo'll git 'em both! Christ, Christian, Christianity dat's hit: Christianity come fum Christ; Christianity is tuh bin lak Christ. Fo' ouah Fawtheh w'ich is in hebben so berry lub de worl' dat 'e gabe 'is only begotten Son, dat whosoebber belieb in Him might hab ebberlastin' life."

...

"Deah Lo'd!" "Amen!" "Yes, Lo'd!" came from the body of the church. "Ooh! O-oh!" agitated voices began to cry. Some one began to sing under his breath, with just enough tone to be audible, not enough to rise above a deep hum: “He dat belieb on de Fawdeh an' de Son, hat ebberlastin' life!"

life!

"Muh brederin, how yo'-all reckon John knowed all dese t'ing wut 'e wrote ? How yo'-all reckon dis hyeah man foun' out all 'bout hebben an' de las' day, an' all? I don't ondehstan' hit; but hit's er fac', . . . de Lo'd showed all dese signs an' wondehs ter John.

"How yo' reckon de Lo'd let th'ee er fo' er fibe wicked mens tek John an' do 'im lak dey done um, . . . dem lowdown, despitable an' desputable mens, wut bine John han' an' foot wid ropes an' fettahs an' chains an' bon's, an' tuk 'im aboa'd dat onfit ship, an' fotch 'im way down ter dat Lonesome Valley, down een de Isle er Patmos?"

His voice began to rise, and to quiver with a tense resonance exceedingly queer to hear; and his tongue had begun to drop into a faintly-marked rhythm.

'e

oddeh sho', an' lan' um day on dat Islánt an' come back safe dis sider home! I dunno w'y de Lo'd leff um; but 'e leff um. Go'd done a good many t'ing I do'no w'y 'e done um; but 'e done um, hab er p'int ter make. So 'e leff 'em took John way obeh in dat Lonesome Valley, way dey wuz n't er man, ner a house, ner a village, ner a ma'shal tuh puhvent de imposination o' wicked peoples, an' dey chain um ter a tree.

"But dough John's uthly pusson wuz chain ter a tree, er a stake, down in dat Valley, alone by 'isseff, de Lo'd leff 'is spirichil pusson mount ter hebben on er cloud. Dis wuz de Lo'd's day, min' yo', an' not jes' any week-day, dat 'e show dese t'ing tuh John; but on de Lo'd's day, muh dyin' brederin!

"Now w'ile John chain dey, dere come er voice er-callin',

"John, O John! Come up hytheh; Come up hytheh, John!'

"Wha' d' yo' want, Lo'd? Wha'd' yo' want, now?'

9

9

Wha' d' yo' want now? Come

The preacher's dark eyes swept the congregation. He peered under the swinging lamp, leaning down across the pulpit, and quick as a flash his voice changed from the ecstatic to the ironic:

...