Then Reverend Morgan stepped to the pulpit, and you could see the old man trembling—with scorn, with a rage for Jesus, a fury that had never failed him once in half a century’s years of preaching.
He had a full, rich voice for a thin man, and you knew from the minute he started speaking that he meant business.
“The Gospel for today’s sermon is from John, chapter eight, verse thirty-four. Mark on this, and remember. John said, ‘Whosoever commiteth sin is the servant of sin.’ He was talking almost two thousand years ago, but he was talking to you, my brother, and to you, my sister. To the old folks and the babies. To every one of you.” He stared at them hard, looked into every eye.
Charlie knew he was a sinner. He knew, even as he couldn’t turn his eyes away, that even by looking at the back of Sylvan’s head, remembering in the back of his throat the taste of her tongue in his mouth, he was committing at least two of the Seven Deadly Sins. But he didn’t care. He was fine with that, and with whatever price he would have to pay.
“. . . and the sad thing is, dear friends, is that sin is real. As real as the rich man’s Cadillac, as real as the poor man’s crust of bread. It is as real as your neighbor’s wife, your neighbor’s land. And it is there forever. Forever and ever.”
The congregation wasn’t stirring now. They were transfixed. Even the children quieted down at the sound of that rich and terrible voice.
“When you sin . . . and who among us does not, does not sin every day in every way, from the moment we open our eyes until long after we have lost ourselves in lustful dreams? When you sin, God does not abandon you. No. No. It is not in the nature of God to abandon you, no matter how hellish your heart, no matter how sinful your dreams or your covetous desires. No. No. God does not abandon you. When you sin, you abandon God, the God who made you for no reason and who loves you beyond all reason, you abandon God and turn away into the open, inviting jaws of hell.
“Do you know what hell is? Hell is simply this, dear friends. Hell is the place where God isn’t. You may find riches untold there—that Cadillac you dream about, or that woman or that man, that land of riches and jewels and money, always money, that land you dream of at night with lust in your heart—but you will not find God. God waits for you. In heaven. God calls you home. In the midst of your lust and your envy and your sloth and your gluttony and your pride, stop and listen for a sound. And you will hear it, I promise you, God promises you. You will hear it as I have heard it.”
His voice grew louder, more commanding, and they sat, obedient to the fear he planted in their hearts and to the power in the old man’s voice. Morgan was almost yelling now, his voice was hoarse, rasping, the way you imagine the voice of the devil.
“It is God. He is calling you home. Home to Him. Home to heaven. Sin is real. Hell is real. And God is calling you home. Which will you choose, on that great day? Which will you choose tonight? Tomorrow? Forever?”
He stopped, and stared out over the congregation for a full minute. None of them, not one save for Sylvan, could hold his gaze. They looked at the baby Jesus in the stained-glass windows, they looked at their hands, fumbled in their pockets for a clean handkerchief.
To Charlie, these people around him didn’t look like sinners. Sinners wore makeup and drank liquor and bet on horses. Sinners shot people. Sinners lied. They didn’t go about their business with the calm and dignity of the people he’d met in the town or around the county. But, apparently, they felt like sinners. They needed to think of themselves that way, at least for the twenty minutes a week Morgan harangued them from the pulpit.
He wondered why these people, who worked so hard at doing their best, at going about their daily lives without causing anybody too much trouble, would need that kind of thing—being yelled at week after week, told every week they were going to end up in hell—and in what way it gave them comfort, strength to go on. They didn’t covet, or envy, they worked hard and, for the most part, told the truth, because it was a small town, after all. They had to live with themselves, and with each other.
They looked ashamed—of what? he wondered. After the sermon, they said the few remaining prayers as if in a daze, and then they all sang “Alleluia, Sing to Jesus” for the recessional. Their voices rose when they came to the lines, “Alleluia, not as orphans, are we left in sorrow now,” and nodded solemnly as Reverend Morgan passed up the aisle, fixing each of them with his steely gaze. Then they filed out of the church into the chill, bright morning air. In and out in an hour. At least there was that.
Charlie couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
In the churchyard, the parishioners stood around talking, as though they hadn’t seen each other every day for all of their lives. As they talked to Will and Alma and Charlie, almost every man and woman reached down absently and touched Sam’s head, tousled his hair. He was the youngest child there, except for an infant or two, the last fruit of his parents’ generation, and the people felt a special fondness for him. Sam liked having his head touched, leaned his forehead into their hands, and smiled up at them, always asking how they were and what they were doing with a genuine interest and concern.
Boaty and Sylvan Glass didn’t move around; they just stood in the one shady spot, and every man and woman went up to greet them, but only for a minute. Sylvan smiled, her lips red, her eyes hidden by the shadow of her hat and her dark, dark tortoise-shell sunglasses.
Charlie, when it came their turn to speak to them, couldn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t even pretend to look at Boaty, never heard a word he said. He wanted to see her eyes, her green eyes, he wanted her to look at him and say anything, anything at all, but she never did. She spoke only to Alma, and hardly even that, and nobody noticed how Charlie was staring at her, not even Boaty, who was probably used to it anyway. Nobody noticed except Sam, who also stared at her, but for other reasons, reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, as though he had never seen her before, or as though he didn’t connect this glamorous woman with the woman he had seen waiting on the porch of a big white farmhouse, just three days before.
Of all the grownups, only Boaty and Sylvan didn’t reach out to touch Sam’s head, didn’t smile at him and ask how he was as though he were grown already, and he stood there wanting to feel her small white hand on his head, feel her fingers with their red nails run through his hair. He felt the wish in his body, his child’s body, and it was something he had never felt before. He wanted to be Charlie, to be his height, to stare so intently at her eyes, even if she never looked back. He wanted to know what Charlie saw when he looked at her, what they had talked about that day when the door closed behind them, because they must have talked; that was what grown people did.
Maybe they listened to the radio. Maybe they read the newspaper. He didn’t know what they did, but he wanted to know.
He watched her as she talked to his mother while Charlie stared, hunting for her eyes, and Sam knew, all of a sudden, that men were different from women, and that men wanted something from them that he didn’t know how to say, something they had that men wanted and wouldn’t give up on. It had never occurred to him before.
He knew his mother and father dressed differently, like all mothers and fathers, and that they talked about different things, to him, to each other. But it had always seemed there was no essential difference between them. Now he knew there was. He didn’t know what the difference could be, but he knew it was there, and it could be measured in the way Charlie Beale hunted for the glance of Sylvan Glass in the churchyard. He had seen it in the way a beagle would freeze at the scent of a bird, a dog trembling with eagerness in his blood for the animal he knew was there, unseen, frozen in a place of its own.
It lasted no more than a few seconds. His mother took his hand. They moved on—to other families, other men and women and children, all familiar to him. The light went out in Charlie’s eyes and a warmer, more pleasant light came on, like the light in Jackie Robinson’s eyes after the bird had flown and the scent was lost. B
ut Sam had seen it, and he knew that it was born in Charlie, part of his nature, the way it was born in Jackie Robinson. He also knew he would see it again.
On the walk home, Charlie turned to Alma. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m not going there again.”
“That Morgan is a tough old bird, that’s for sure,” Will answered. “But I’ve been listening to him spew that shit for forty years, and it ain’t scared me off yet.”
“Will,” said Alma. “Not that way. Don’t listen to your father, Sam. You’re right, Mr. Beale, he’s hard to take sometimes. A bit fanatical. But it’s good for you, in the end. And, as I said, everybody goes.”
“Mrs. Haislett,” Charlie answered, “I’m not being disrespectful. I try to be a good man. To do the right thing. But I’m not going to go there once a week and have some old man scream at me about what a bad and terrible person I am. Hellfire and all that. I don’t believe it. And I don’t need to hear it.”
“Then try another church. To me, it doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you go. I don’t believe in hell, I don’t think. I don’t know if I even believe in heaven. But I believe in goodness. I think it’s the only thing that matters. It’s the only thing we’ll be remembered for after we’re gone. It’s the only real money you have in the bank—don’t laugh at me, Will—and church is just the place where you go once a week and think, deep down to your bones, whether you’re being the kind of person you hoped you’d be, measure the distance between that person and the person you really are. I don’t listen much to Morgan any more. I just sit quietly and listen to my own heart, my own thoughts. You can go anywhere you like as long as you go somewhere. The town expects it, and I would consider it a kindness.”
So he did. For the next several weeks, he tried other churches, and he said all they talked about was hell. Even the Episcopalians, who were very proper and mostly richer and quieter, and who received him warmly in their small congregation and asked him home to lunch. Even they talked about hell.
“Do you know what hell is?” their minister, Mr. Farrar, asked, the second time he tried them. “Hell is your heart. It is the blood in your veins. It is who you are, if you don’t listen to the Word. Hell is you.” Farrar didn’t yell at them, like Morgan. That wasn’t the Episcopalian way.
He spoke in a sad, warm voice, as though he yearned to keep the terrible and inevitable truth from his sheltered congregation. But it was said nevertheless, and the roast beef afterward tasted rancid in Charlie’s mouth, even though he had cut it himself and sold it to the Gadsden sisters only two days before. He responded in kind to their girlish, flirtatious chatter, but he felt, the whole time, as he smiled and charmed them in that way he had, that his clothes were too tight, as if he were wearing some other man’s underpants.
He tried every church at least once. The Episcopalians got two chances. He told Will and Alma all about it, every Sunday evening, in the kitchen now—it was too cold to sit out on the porch, and the night came on so early.
“Keep going, Mr. Beale. You’ll hear it. And, if you don’t, just sit quietly and listen to your own heart beat.”
In the end, he went past all the white churches and walked through the doors of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sat, the only white person who had ever set foot in there, in the far corner, making himself small in the last row of folded chairs. And he knew right away he was home.
He walked in a few minutes late, having paced nervously outside, debating, and everywhere he looked there was color and light and music and joy. The people in the congregation, less than forty including babies, looked at him and froze for a second as he sat down, but then they looked away, they were so focused on prayer and song and rapture. The minister, Reverend Shadwell, spoke in a warm, rich voice. He spoke with the zeal of a missionary, and he talked about heaven and the riches that awaited them there, on that happy day.
Everybody, even the poorest of them, smelled so clean, and their clothes were so bright, reds and purples and pure, blinding whites, the ladies, even the littlest girls, in hats, the men in white shirts so clean and starched they sparkled in the light from the candles. The words they sang and said seemed brand new, not arbitrary or learned by rote, but fresh and strong and joyful in every single way, as if they sprang directly from the wellspring of their hearts.
Claudie Wiley had made most of the dresses the women wore. Claudie herself never, ever went to church, no matter how often Shadwell knocked on her door.
So he finally heard it, there at the CME, the thing Alma had told him to listen for. He heard the beat of his own heart and, as sure as the gauges in the dashboard of his truck, the beats measured for him the distance between where he was and where he had meant to be. Just as Alma had said.
He thought about the qualities of his own soul, about his many sins that would all be washed away. He thought about God. He thought about heaven, and for all the length of the long service that went on way past lunch, he didn’t think for one second about Sylvan Glass.
But as he sat there, he felt in his body exactly the way he felt on Wednesday afternoon, when he was with her. He felt redeemed.
He heard in every word these people uttered, so poor, so maligned and mistreated and overworked and heaped with secret scorn, not even secret, he heard and knew how they went on with their lives. He knew why they did the things they did, the passions that simmered in their souls, still chained by society and law, their hollow, toilsome freedom and their endless fountains of exultation.
They were bonded by blood, both bound and freed because they were the outsiders, as he was, set apart in the towns where they had lived their whole lives, for generations, and they were bound by an unbreakable will, a belief that told them their day was close at hand, even if they had to leave their bodies behind to see it.
“It is close at hand,” Shadwell sang to them in exultation in that voice that was later to sing to thousands, millions. “The day of Revelation. The rapture. Freedom. My people, my brothers and sisters, freedom!”
They believed that day would come, no matter what, and that day would be called freedom, would be called Salvation, and it would last until the universe darkened and froze and time stopped still and there was not a breath left in this or any world.
Charlie left the church as the last amens were being shouted. Nobody saw him leave, so lost were they in the wholeness of their revelation.
He walked home, completely at peace. He knew now he would go on doing the things he was doing—going to work, buying up land he didn’t understand, seeing Sylvan Glass for reasons he couldn’t help. But he also knew it would all be fine, whatever happened. He knew it was the right thing to do. He was in the place he was meant to be. He was home, finally, at the happy and complete end of his long and troubled road.
He was home.
PART TWO
The Prisoner of Sin
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MISSED YOU AT Sunday dinner” was all Will said the next morning. Charlie didn’t say anything, just went on sharpening his knives.
“Alma missed you, too. And Sam asked about you, didn’t you, son?”
“There’s a new comic strip in the funny papers,” Sam said. “Roy Rodgers. I wanted to show you.”
The man and the boy looked at him, but Charlie didn’t answer for a long time.
“Had things to do,” he finally said. “Chores. Nobody looks after me but me.”
“Well, son, we try, you know. Alma and me.” Will sounded a little irritated.
“I know that, Will. And I’m grateful. Sometimes I just need to be alone. Private.”
“It’s not right, you know. There’s something not right about it. Those people—”
“It suits me fine.”
“—you know they don’t want you.”
“Then they’ll let me know.” He hoped they wouldn’t. He went for three weeks straight hoping they wouldn’t tell him to stop coming, especially because the women from the CME came in Monday morning early, as th
ey always did, and a few even said it was nice to see him yesterday at services. But they did, they let him know.
On the third Sunday, right after Charlie had come home from the service and changed out of his church clothes, he was sitting on the porch, just fixing it all in his mind, when Lewis Shadwell walked up the sidewalk, into the part of town where Negroes never went, except to clean white people’s houses, and stepped to the bottom of Charlie’s porch. His face still glowed with the joy of preaching to his congregation.
He was twenty-eight years old, dark skinned, a little heavy but strong, you could tell. He wasn’t yet the firebrand he was later to become, with the sit-ins, and the marches, and getting his picture in the papers. That Sunday, he was just a nice, devout young man who was born shy and gentle and stayed that way until he found a reason to be otherwise. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and his clerical collar was white and stiff, and tight against his dark, thick neck, as though it had been issued him when he graduated from seminary, before he gained the weight.
“Afternoon, Reverend Shadwell,” said Charlie as he stood up. “Please. Come join me. It’s a little cold to sit outside, so come on in.”
They walked into the sitting room, and Shadwell sat on the sofa, not taking his coat off, as though he shouldn’t really be there, and wouldn’t be staying long. He seemed so uncomfortable, with his coat bunched up around his waist and the dog sniffing his feet, but Charlie didn’t know what to offer him, so he just sat and waited.
Shadwell cleared his throat. Cleared it again. “The thing is . . .” he said, and then he stopped as though he didn’t truly know what the thing was, although both he and Charlie knew well enough. “The thing is, we appreciate it.”
“I should have stayed later, longer,” said Charlie. “I should have said hello to some folks. I apologize.”
“No need. You take what you need and leave the rest, and that’s fine. But the thing is, well, we’ve talked, the elders and I, and we don’t think it’s a good idea. It just can’t be. I’m sorry.”