1GRANNY was an ardent member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and I was compelled to make a pretense of worshiping her God, which was her exaction for my keep. The elders of her church expounded a gospel clogged with images of vast lakes of eternal fire, of seas vanishing, of valleys of dry bones, of the sun burning to ashes, of the moon turning to blood, of stars falling to the earth, of a wooden staff being transformed into a serpent, of voices speaking out of clouds, of men walking upon water, of God riding whirlwinds, of water changing into wine, of the dead rising and living, of the blind seeing, of the lame walking; a salvation that teemed with fantastic beasts having multiple heads and horns and eyes and feet; sermons of statues possessing heads of gold, shoulders of silver, legs of brass, and feet of clay; a cosmic tale that began before time and ended with the clouds of the sky rolling away at the Second Coming of Christ; chronicles that concluded with the Armageddon; dramas thronged with all the billions of human beings who had ever lived or died as God judged the quick and the dead....

2While listening to the vivid language of the sermons I was pulled toward emotional belief, but as soon as I went out of the church and saw the bright sunshine and felt the throbbing life of the people in the streets I knew that none of it was true and that nothing would happen.

3Once again I knew hunger, biting hunger, hunger that made my body aimlessly restless, hunger that kept me on edge, that made my temper flare, hunger that made hate leap out of my heart like the dart of a serpent’s tongue, hunger that created in me odd cravings. No food that I could dream of seemed half so utterly delicious as vanilla wafers. Every time I had a nickel I would run to the corner grocery store and buy a box of vanilla wafers and walk back home, slowly, so that I could eat them all up without having to share them with anyone. Then I would sit on the front steps and dream of eating another box; the craving would finally become so acute that I would force myself to be active in order to forget. I learned a method of drinking water that made me feel full temporarily whether I had a desire for water or not; I would put my mouth under a faucet and turn the water on full force and let the stream cascade into my stomach until it was tight. Sometimes my stomach ached, but I felt full for a moment.

4No pork or veal was ever eaten at Granny’s, and rarely was there meat of any kind. We seldom ate fish and then only those that had scales and spines. Baking powder was never used; it was alleged to contain a chemical harmful to the body. For breakfast I ate mush and gravy made from flour and lard and for hours afterwards I would belch it up into my mouth. We were constantly taking bicarbonate of soda for indigestion. At four o’clock in the afternoon I ate a plate of greens cooked with lard. Sometimes on Sundays we bought a dime’s worth of beef which usually turned out to be uneatable. Granny’s favorite dish was a peanut roast which she made to resemble meat, but which tasted like something else.

5My position in the household was a delicate one; I was a minor, an uninvited dependent, a blood relative who professed no salvation and whose soul stood in mortal peril. Granny intimated boldly, basing her logic on God’s justice, that one sinful person in a household could bring down the wrath of God upon the entire establishment, damning both the innocent and the guilty, and on more than one occasion she interpreted my mother’s long illness as the result of my faithlessness. I became skilled in ignoring these cosmic threats and developed a callousness toward all metaphysical preachments.

6But Granny won an ally in her efforts to persuade me to confess her God; Aunt Addie, her youngest child, had just finished the Seventh-Day Adventist religious school in Huntsville, Alabama, and came home to argue that if the family was compassionate enough to feed me, then the least I could do in return was to follow its guidance. She proposed that, when the fall school term started, I should be enrolled in the religious school rather than a secular one. If I refused, I was placing myself not only in the position of a horrible infidel but of a hardhearted ingrate. I raised arguments and objections, but my mother sided with Granny and Aunt Addie and I had to accept.

7The religious school opened and I put in a sullen attendance. Twenty pupils, ranging in age from five to nineteen and in grades from primary to high school, were crowded into one room. Aunt Addie was the only teacher and from the first day an acute, bitter antagonism sprang up between us. This was the first time she had ever taught school and she was nervous, self-conscious because a blood relative of hers—a relative who would not confess her faith and who was not a member of her church—was in her classroom. She was determined that every student should know that I was a sinner of whom she did not approve, and that I was not to be granted consideration of any kind.

8The pupils were a docile lot, lacking in that keen sense of rivalry which made the boys and girls who went to public school a crowd in which a boy was tested and weighed, in which he caught a glimpse of what the world was. These boys and girls were will-less, their speech flat, their gestures vague, their personalities devoid of anger, hope, laughter, enthusiasm, passion, or despair. I was able to see them with an objectivity that was inconceivable to them. They were claimed wholly by their environment and could imagine no other, whereas I had come from another plane of living, from the swinging doors of saloons, the railroad yard, the roundhouses, the street gangs, the river levees, an orphan home; had shifted from town to town and home to home; had mingled with grownups more than perhaps was good for me. I had to curb my habit of cursing, but not before I had shocked more than half of them and had embarrassed Aunt Addie to helplessness.

9As the first week of school drew to a close, the conflict that smoldered between Aunt Addie and me flared openly. One afternoon she rose from her desk and walked down the aisle and stopped beside me.

10“You know better than that,” she said, tapping a ruler across my knuckles.

11“Better than what?” I asked, amazed, nursing my hand.

12“Just look at that floor,” she said.

13I looked and saw that there were many tiny bits of walnut meat scattered about; some of them had been smeared into grease spots on the clean, white pine boards. At once I knew that the boy in front of me had been eating them; my walnuts were in my pocket uncracked.

14“I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

15“You know better than to eat in the classroom,” she said.

16“I haven’t been eating,” I said.

17“Don’t lie! This is not only a school, but God’s holy ground,” she said with angry indignation.

18“Aunt Addie, my walnuts are here in my pocket....”

19“I’m Miss Wilson!” she shouted.

20I stared at her, speechless, at last comprehending what was really bothering her. She had warned me to call her Miss Wilson in the classroom, and for the most part I had done so. She was afraid that if I called her Aunt Addie I would undermine the morale of the students. Each pupil knew that she was my aunt and many of them had known her longer than I had.

21“I’m sorry,” I said, and turned from her and opened a book.

22“Richard, get up!”

23I did not move. The room was tense. My fingers gripped the book and I knew that every pupil in the room was watching. I had not eaten the nuts; I was sorry that I had called her Aunt Addie; but I did not want to be singled out for gratuitous punishment. And, too, I was expecting the boy who sat in front of me to devise some lie to save me, since it was really he who was guilty.

24“I asked you to get up!” she shouted.

25I still sat, not taking my eyes off my book. Suddenly she caught me by the back of my collar and yanked me from the seat. I stumbled across the room.

26“I spoke to you!” she shouted hysterically.

27I straightened and looked at her; there was hate in my eyes.

28“Don’t you look at me that way, boy!”

29“I didn’t put those walnuts on the floor!”

30“Then who did?”

31My street gang code was making it hard for me. I had never informed upon a boy in the public school, and I was waiting for the boy in front of me to come to my aid, lying, making up excuses, anything. In the past I had taken punishment that was not mine to protect the solidarity of the gang, and I had seen other boys do the same. But the religious boy, God helping him, did not speak.

32“I don’t know who did it,” I said finally.

33“Go to the front of the room,” Aunt Addie said.

34I walked slowly to her desk, expecting to be lectured; but my heart quickened when I saw her go to the corner and select a long, green, limber switch and come toward me. I lost control of my temper.

35“I haven’t done anything!” I yelled.

36She struck me and I dodged.

37“Stand still, boy!” she blazed, her face livid with fury, her body trembling.

38I stood still, feeling more defeated by the righteous boy behind me than by Aunt Addie.

39“Hold out your hand!”

40I held out my hand, vowing that never again would this happen to me, no matter what the price. She stung my palm until it was red, then lashed me across my bare legs until welts rose. I clamped my teeth to keep from uttering a single whimper. When she finished I continued to hold out my hand, indicating to her that her blows could never really reach me, my eyes fixed and unblinking upon her face.

41“Put down your hand and go to your seat,” she said.

42I dropped my hand and turned on my heels, my palm and legs on fire, my body taut. I walked in a fog of anger toward my desk.

43“And I’m not through with you!” she called after me.

44She had said one word too much; before I knew it, I had whirled and was staring at her with an open mouth and blazing eyes.

45“Through with me?” I repeated. “But what have I done to you?”

46“Sit down and shut up!” Aunt Addie bellowed.

47I sat. I was sure of one thing: I would not be beaten by her again. I had often been painfully beaten, but almost always I had felt that the beatings were somehow right and sensible, that I was in the wrong. Now, for the first time, I felt the equal of an adult; I knew that I had been beaten for a reason that was not right. I sensed some emotional problem in Aunt Addie other than her concern about my eating in school. Did my presence make her feel so insecure that she felt she had to punish me in front of the pupils to impress them? All afternoon I brooded, wondering how I could quit the school.

48The moment Aunt Addie came into the house—I reached home before she did—she called me into the kitchen. When I entered, I saw that she was holding another switch. My muscles tightened.

49“You’re not going to beat me again!” I told her.

50“I’m going to teach you some manners!” she said.

51I stood fighting, fighting as I had never fought in my life, fighting with myself. Perhaps my uneasy childhood, perhaps my shifting from town to town, perhaps the violence I had already seen and felt took hold of me, and I was trying to stifle the impulse to go to the drawer of the kitchen table and get a knife and defend myself. But this woman who stood before me was my aunt, my mother’s sister, Granny’s daughter; in her veins my own blood flowed; in many of her actions I could see some elusive part of my own self; and in her speech I could catch echoes of my own speech. I did not want to be violent with her, and yet I did not want to be beaten for a wrong I had not committed.

52“You’re just mad at me for something!” I said.

53“Don’t tell me I’m mad!”

54“You’re too mad to believe anything I say.”

55“Don’t speak to me like that!”

56“Then how can I talk to you? You beat me for throwing walnuts on the floor! But I didn’t do it!”

57“Then who did?”

58Since I was alone now with her, and desperate, I cast my loyalties aside and told her the name of the guilty boy, feeling that he merited no consideration.

59“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.

60“I don’t want to tell tales on other people.”

61“So you lied, hunh?”

62I could not talk; I could not explain how much I valued my code of solidarity.

63“Hold out your hand!”

64“You’re not going to beat me! I didn’t do it!”

65“I’m going to beat you for lying!”

66“Don’t, don’t hit me! If you hit me I’ll fight you!”

67For a moment she hesitated, then she struck at me with the switch and I dodged and stumbled into a corner. She was upon me, lashing me across the face. I leaped, screaming, and ran past her and jerked open the kitchen drawer; it spilled to the floor with a thunderous sound. I grabbed up a knife and held it ready for her.

68“Now, I told you to stop!” I screamed.

69“You put down that knife!”

70“Leave me alone or I’ll cut you!”

71She stood debating. Then she made up her mind and came at me. I lunged at her with the knife and she grasped my hand and tried to twist the knife loose. I threw my right leg about her legs and gave her a shove, tripping her; we crashed to the floor. She was stronger than I and I felt my strength ebbing; she was still fighting for my knife and I saw a look on her face that made me feel she was going to use it on me if she got possession of it. I bit her hand and we rolled, kicking, scratching, hitting, fighting as though we were strangers, deadly enemies, fighting for our lives.

72“Leave me alone!” I screamed at the top of my voice.

73“Give me that knife, you boy!”

74“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you if you don’t leave me alone!”

75Granny came running; she stood thunderstruck.

76“Addie, what are you doing?”

77“He’s got a knife!” she gasped. “Make ’im put it down!”

78“Richard, put down that knife!” Granny shouted.

79My mother came limping to the door.

80“Richard, stop it!” she shouted.

81“I won’t! I’m not going to let her beat me!”

82“Addie, leave the boy alone,” my mother said.

83Aunt Addie rose slowly, her eyes on the knife, then she turned and walked out of the kitchen, kicking the door wide open before her as she went.

84“Richard, give me that knife,” my mother said.

85“But, mama, she’ll beat me, beat me for nothing,” I said. “I’m not going to let her beat me; I don’t care what happens!”

86“Richard, you are bad, bad,” Granny said, weeping.

87I tried to explain what had happened, but neither of them would listen. Granny came toward me to take the knife, but I dodged her and ran into the back yard. I sat alone on the back steps, trembling, emotionally spent, crying to myself. Grandpa came down; Aunt Addie had told him what had happened.

88“Gimme that knife, mister,” he said.

89“I’ve already put it back,” I lied, hugging my arm to my side to conceal the knife.

90“What’s come over you?” he asked.

91“I don’t want her to beat me,” I said.

92“You’re a child, a boy!” he thundered.

93“But I don’t want to be beaten!”

94“What did you do?”

95“Nothing.”

96“You can lie as fast as a dog can trot,” Grandpa said. “And if it wasn’t for my rheumatism, I’d take down your pants and tan your backside good and proper. The very idea of a little snot like you threatening somebody with a knife!”

97“I’m not going to let her beat me,” I said again.

98“You’re bad,” he said. “You better watch your step, young man, or you’ll end up on the gallows.”

99I had long ceased to fear Grandpa; he was a sick old man and he knew nothing of what was happening in the house. Now and then the womenfolk called on him to throw fear into someone, but I knew that he was feeble and was not frightened of him. Wrapped in the misty memories of his young manhood, he sat his days out in his room where his Civil War rifle stood loaded in a corner, where his blue uniform of the Union Army lay neatly folded.

100Aunt Addie took her defeat hard, holding me in a cold and silent disdain. I was conscious that she had descended to my own emotional level in her effort to rule me, and my respect for her sank. Until she married, years later, we rarely spoke to each other, though we ate at the same table and slept under the same roof, though I was but a skinny, half-frightened boy and she was the secretary of the church and the church’s day-school teacher. God blessed our home with the love that binds....

101I continued at the church school, despite Aunt Addie’s never calling upon me to recite or go to the blackboard. Consequently I stopped studying. I spent my time playing with the boys and found that the only games they knew were brutal ones. Baseball, marbles, boxing, running were tabooed recreations, the Devil’s work; instead they played a wildcat game called popping-the-whip, a seemingly innocent diversion whose excitement came only in spurts, but spurts that could hurl one to the edge of death itself. Whenever we were discovered standing idle on the school grounds, Aunt Addie would suggest that we pop-the-whip. It would have been safer for our bodies and saner for our souls had she urged us to shoot craps.

102One day at noon Aunt Addie ordered us to pop-the-whip. I had never played the game before and I fell in with good faith. We formed a long line, each boy taking hold of another boy’s hand until we were stretched out like a long string of human beads. Although I did not know it, I was on the tip end of the human whip. The leading boy, the handle of the whip, started off at a trot, weaving to the left and to the right, increasing speed until the whip of flesh was curving at breakneck gallop. I clutched the hand of the boy next to me with all the strength I had, sensing that if I did not hold on I would be tossed off. The whip grew taut as human flesh and bone could bear and I felt that my arm was being torn from its socket. Suddenly my breath left me. I was swung in a small, sharp arc. The whip was now being popped and I could hold on no more; the momentum of the whip flung me off my feet into the air, like a bit of leather being flicked off a horsewhip, and I hurtled headlong through space and landed in a ditch. I rolled over, stunned, head bruised and bleeding. Aunt Addie was laughing, the first and only time I ever saw her laugh on God’s holy ground.

103In the home Granny maintained a hard religious regime. There were prayers at sunup and sundown, at the breakfast table and dinner table, followed by a Bible verse from each member of the family. And it was presumed that I prayed before I got into bed at night. I shirked as many of the weekday church services as possible, giving as my excuse that I had to study; of course, nobody believed me, but my lies were accepted because nobody wanted to risk a row. The daily prayers were a torment and my knees became sore from kneeling so long and often. Finally I devised a method of kneeling that was not really kneeling; I learned, through arduous repetition, how to balance myself on the toes of my shoes and rest my head against a wall in some convenient corner. Nobody, except God, was any the wiser, and I did not think that He cared.

104Granny made it imperative, however, that I attend certain all-night ritualistic prayer meetings. She was the oldest member of her church and it would have been unseemly if the only grandchild in her home could not be brought to these important services; she felt that if I were completely remiss in religious conformity it would cast doubt upon the stanchness of her faith, her capacity to convince and persuade, or merely upon her ability to apply the rod to my backside.

105Granny would prepare a lunch for the all-night praying session, and the three of us—Granny, Aunt Addie, and I—would be off, leaving my mother and Grandpa at home. During the passionate prayers and the chanted hymns I would sit squirming on a bench, longing to grow up so I could run away, listening indifferently to the theme of cosmic annihilation, loving the hymns for their sensual caress, but at last casting furtive glances at Granny and wondering when it would be safe for me to stretch out on the bench and go to sleep. At ten or eleven I would munch a sandwich and Granny would nod her permission for me to take a nap. I would awaken at intervals to hear snatches of hymns or prayers that would lull me to sleep again. Finally Granny would shake me and I would open my eyes and see the sun streaming through stained-glass windows.

106Many of the religious symbols appealed to my sensibilities and I responded to the dramatic vision of life held by the church, feeling that to live day by day with death as one’s sole thought was to be so compassionately sensitive toward all life as to view all men as slowly dying, and the trembling sense of fate that welled up, sweet and melancholy, from the hymns blended with the sense of fate that I had already caught from life. But full emotional and intellectual belief never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.

107My body grew, even on mush and lard gravy, a miracle which the church certainly should have claimed credit for. I survived my twelfth year on a diet that would have stunted an average-sized dog, and my glands began to diffuse through my blood, like sap rising upward in trees in spring, those strange chemicals that made me look curiously at girls and women. The elder’s wife sang in the choir and I fell in love with her as only a twelve-year-old can worship a distant and unattainable woman. During the services I would stare at her, wondering what it was like to be married to her, pondering over how passionate she was. I felt no qualms about my first lust for the flesh being born on holy ground; the contrast between budding carnal desires and the aching loneliness of the hymns never evoked any sense of guilt in me.

108It was possible that the sweetly sonorous hymns stimulated me sexually, and it might have been that my fleshy fantasies, in turn, having as their foundation my already inflated sensibility, made me love the masochistic prayers. It was highly likely that the serpent of sin that nosed about the chambers of my heart was lashed to hunger by hymns as well as dreams, each reciprocally feeding the other. The church’s spiritual life must have been polluted by my base yearnings, by the leaping hunger of my blood for the flesh, because I would gaze at the elder’s wife for hours, attempting to draw her eyes to mine, trying to hypnotize her, seeking to communicate with her with my thoughts. If my desires had been converted into a concrete religious symbol, the symbol would have looked something like this: a black imp with two horns; a long, curving, forked tail; cloven hoofs, a scaly, naked body; wet, sticky fingers; moist, sensual lips; and lascivious eyes feasting upon the face of the elder’s wife....

109A religious revival was announced and Granny felt that it was her last chance to bring me to God before I entered the precincts of sin at the public school, for I had already given loud and final notice that I would no longer attend the church school. There was a discernible lessening in Aunt Addie’s hostility; perhaps she had come to the conclusion that my lost soul was more valuable than petty pride. Even my mother’s attitude was: “Richard, you ought to know God through some church.”

110The entire family became kind and forgiving, but I knew the motives that prompted their change and it drove me an even greater emotional distance from them. Some of my classmates—who had, on the advice of their parents, avoided me—now came to visit and I could tell in a split second that they had been instructed in what to say. One boy, who lived across the street, called on me one afternoon and his self-consciousness betrayed him; he spoke so naïvely and clumsily that I could see the bare bones of his holy plot and hear the creaking of the machinery of Granny’s maneuvering.

111“Richard, do you know we are all worried about you?” he asked.

112“Worried about me? Who’s worried about me?” I asked in feigned surprise.

113“All of us,” he said, his eyes avoiding mine.

114“Why?” I asked.

115“You’re not saved,” he said sadly.

116“I’m all right,” I said, laughing.

117“Don’t laugh, Richard. It’s serious,” he said.

118“But I tell you that I’m all right.”

119“Say, Richard, I’d like to be a good friend of yours.”

120“I thought we were friends already,” I said.

121“I mean true brothers in Christ,” he said.

122“We know each other,” I said in a soft voice tinged with irony.

123“But not in Christ,” he said.

124“Friendship is friendship with me.”

125“But don’t you want to save your soul?”

126“I simply can’t feel religion,” I told him in lieu of telling him that I did not think I had the kind of soul he thought I had.

127“Have you really tried to feel God?” he asked.

128“No. But I know I can’t feel anything like that.”

129“You simply can’t let the question rest there, Richard.”

130“Why should I let it rest?”

131“Don’t mock God,” he said.

132“I’ll never feel God, I tell you. It’s no use.”

133“Would you let the fate of your soul hang upon pride and vanity?”

134“I don’t think I have any pride in matters like this.”

135“Richard, think of Christ’s dying for you, shedding His blood, His precious blood on the cross.”

136“Other people have shed blood,” I ventured.

137“But it’s not the same. You don’t understand.”

138“I don’t think I ever will.”

139“Oh, Richard, brother, you are lost in the darkness of the world. You must let the church help you.”

140“I tell you, I’m all right.”

141“Come into the house and let me pray for you.”

142“I don’t want to hurt your feelings....”

143“You can’t. I’m talking for God.”

144“I don’t want to hurt God’s feelings either,” I said, the words slipping irreverently from my lips before I was aware of their full meaning.

145He was shocked. He wiped tears from his eyes. I was sorry.

146“Don’t say that. God may never forgive you,” he whispered.

147It would have been impossible for me to have told him how I felt about religion. I had not settled in my mind whether I believed in God or not; His existence or nonexistence never worried me. I reasoned that if there did exist an all-wise, all-powerful God who knew the beginning and the end, who meted out justice to all, who controlled the destiny of man, this God would surely know that I doubted His existence and He would laugh at my foolish denial of Him. And if there was no God at all, then why all the commotion? I could not imagine God pausing in His guidance of unimaginably vast worlds to bother with me.

148Embedded in me was a notion of the suffering in life, but none of it seemed like the consequences of original sin to me; I simply could not feel weak and lost in a cosmic manner. Before I had been made to go to church, I had given God’s existence a sort of tacit assent, but after having seen His creatures serve Him at first hand, I had had my doubts. My faith, such as it was, was welded to the common realities of life, anchored in the sensations of my body and in what my mind could grasp, and nothing could ever shake this faith, and surely not my fear of an invisible power.

149“I’m not afraid of things like that,” I told the boy.

150“Aren’t you afraid of God?” he asked.

151“No. Why should I be? I’ve done nothing to Him.”

152“He’s a jealous God,” he warned me.

153“I hope that He’s a kind God,” I told him.

154“If you are kind to Him, He is a kind God,” the boy said. “But God will not look at you if you don’t look at Him.”

155During our talk I made a hypothetical statement that summed up my attitude toward God and the suffering in the world, a statement that stemmed from my knowledge of life as I had lived, seen, felt, and suffered it in terms of dread, fear, hunger, terror, and loneliness.

156“If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world, I’d do it. But I don’t believe anything can stop it,” I told him.

157He heard me but he did not speak. I wanted to say more to him, but I knew that it would have been useless. Though older than I, he had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel.

158“Don’t be angry,” I told him.

159Frightened and baffled, he left me. I felt sorry for him.

160Immediately following the boy’s visit, Granny began her phase of the campaign. The boy had no doubt conveyed to her my words of blasphemy, for she talked with me for hours, warning me that I would burn forever in the lake of fire. As the day of the revival grew near, the pressure upon me intensified. I would go into the dining room upon some petty errand and find Granny kneeling, her head resting on a chair, uttering my name in a tensely whispered prayer. God was suddenly everywhere in the home, even in Aunt Addie’s scowling and brooding face. It began to weigh upon me. I longed for the time when I could leave. They begged me so continuously to come to God that it was impossible for me to ignore them without wounding them. Desperately I tried to think of some way to say no without making them hate me. I was determined to leave home before I would surrender.

161Then I blundered and wounded Granny’s soul. It was not my intention to hurt or humiliate her; the irony of it was that the plan I conceived had as its purpose the salving of Granny’s frustrated feelings toward me. Instead, it brought her the greatest shame and humiliation of her entire religious life.

162One evening during a sermon I heard the elder—I took my eyes off his wife long enough to listen, even though she slumbered in my senses all the while—describe how Jacob had seen an angel. Immediately I felt that I had found a way to tell Granny that I needed proof before I could believe, that I could not commit myself to something I could not feel or see. I would tell her that if I were to see an angel I would accept that as infallible evidence that there was a God and would serve Him unhesitatingly; she would surely understand an attitude of that sort. What gave me courage to voice this argument was the conviction that I would never see an angel; if I had ever seen one, I had enough common sense to have gone to a doctor at once. With my bright idea bubbling in my mind, wishing to allay Granny’s fears for my soul, wanting to make her know that my heart was not all black and wrong, that I was actually giving serious thought to her passionate pleadings, I leaned to her and whispered:

163“You see, granny, if I ever saw an angel like Jacob did, then I’d believe.”

164Granny stiffened and stared at me in amazement; then a glad smile lit up her old wrinkled white face and she nodded and gently patted my hand. That ought to hold her for a while, I thought. During the sermon Granny looked at me several times and smiled. Yes, she knows now that I’m not dismissing her pleas from my mind.... Feeling that my plan was working, I resumed my worship of the elder’s wife with a cleansed conscience, wondering what it would be like to kiss her, longing to feel some of the sensuous emotions of which my reading had made me conscious. The service ended and Granny rushed to the front of the church and began talking excitedly to the elder; I saw the elder looking at me in surprise. Oh, goddamn, she’s telling him! I thought with anger. But I had not guessed one-thousandth of it.

165The elder hurried toward me. Automatically I rose. He extended his hand and I shook it.

166“Your grandmother told me,” he said in awed tones.

167I was speechless with anger.

168“I didn’t want her to tell you that,” I said.

169“She says that you have seen an angel.” The words literally poured out of his mouth.

170I was so overwhelmed that I gritted my teeth. Finally I could speak and I grabbed his arm.

171“No.... N-nooo, sir! No, sir!” I stammered. “I didn’t say that. She misunderstood me.”

172The last thing on earth I wanted was a mess like this. The elder blinked his eyes in bewilderment.

173“What did you tell her?” he asked.

174“I told her that if I ever saw an angel, then I would believe,” I said, feeling foolish, ashamed, hating and pitying my believing granny. The elder’s face became bleak and stricken. He was stunned with disappointment.

175“You... you didn’t see an angel?” he asked.

176“No, sir!” I said emphatically, shaking my head vigorously so that there could be no possible further misunderstanding.

177“I see,” he breathed in a sigh.

178His eyes looked longingly into a corner of the church.

179“With God, you know, anything is possible,” he hinted hopefully.

180“But I didn’t see anything,” I said. “I’m sorry about this.”

181“If you pray, then God will come to you,” he said.

182The church grew suddenly hot. I wanted to bolt out of it and never see it again. But the elder took hold of my arm and would not let me move.

183“Elder, this is all a mistake. I didn’t want anything like this to happen,” I said.

184“Listen, I’m older than you are, Richard,” he said. “I think that you have in your heart the gift of God.” I must have looked dubious, for he said: “Really, I do.”

185“Elder, please don’t say anything to anybody about this,” I begged.

186Again his face lit with vague hope.

187“Perhaps you don’t want to tell me because you are bashful?” he suggested. “Look, this is serious. If you saw an angel, then tell me.”

188I could not deny it verbally any more; I could only shake my head at him. In the face of his hope, words seemed useless.

189“Promise me you’ll pray. If you pray, then God will answer,” he said.

190I turned my head away, ashamed for him, feeling that I had unwittingly committed an obscene act in rousing his hopes so wildly high, feeling sorry for his having such hopes. I wanted to get out of his presence. He finally let me go, whispering:

191“I want to talk to you sometime.”

192The church members were staring at me. My fists doubled. Granny’s wide and innocent smile was shining on me and I was filled with dismay. That she could make such a mistake meant that she lived in a daily atmosphere that urged her to expect something like this to happen. She had told the other members and everybody knew it, including the elder’s wife! There they stood, the church members, with joyous astonishment written on their faces, whispering among themselves. Perhaps at that moment I could have mounted the pulpit and led them all; perhaps that was to be my greatest moment of triumph!

193Granny rushed to me and hugged me violently, weeping tears of joy. Then I babbled, speaking with emotional reproof, censuring her for having misunderstood me; I must have spoken more loudly and harshly than was called for—the others had now gathered about me and Granny—for Granny drew away from me abruptly and went to a far corner of the church and stared at me with a cold, set face. I was crushed. I went to her and tried to tell her how it had happened.

194“You shouldn’t’ve spoken to me,” she said in a breaking voice that revealed the depths of her disillusionment.

195On our way home she would not utter a single word. I walked anxiously beside her, looking at her tired old white face, the wrinkles that lined her neck, the deep, waiting black eyes, and the frail body, and I knew more than she thought I knew about the meaning of religion, the hunger of the human heart for that which is not and can never be, the thirst of the human spirit to conquer and transcend the implacable limitations of human life.

196Later, I convinced her that I had not wanted to hurt her and she immediately seized upon my concern for her feelings as an opportunity to have one more try at bringing me to God. She wept and pleaded with me to pray, really to pray, to pray hard, to pray until tears came....

197“Granny, don’t make me promise,” I begged.

198“But you must, for the sake of your soul,” she said.

199I promised; after all, I felt that I owed her something for inadvertently making her ridiculous before the members of her church.

200Daily I went into my room upstairs, locked the door, knelt, and tried to pray, but everything I could think of saying seemed silly. Once it all seemed so absurd that I laughed out loud while on my knees. It was no use. I could not pray. I could never pray. But I kept my failure a secret. I was convinced that if I ever succeeded in praying, my words would bound noiselessly against the ceiling and rain back down upon me like feathers.

201My attempts at praying became a nuisance, spoiling my days; and I regretted the promise I had given Granny. But I stumbled on a way to pass the time in my room, a way that made the hours fly with the speed of the wind. I took the Bible, pencil, paper, and a rhyming dictionary and tried to write verses for hymns. I justified this by telling myself that, if I wrote a really good hymn, Granny might forgive me. But I failed even in that; the Holy Ghost was simply nowhere near me....