Liberation Day 2008

I have been busy working on my thesis. Part of my reading lead me to the following passage from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. In that book he describes his own conversion and participation in a Pentecostal church located in Harlem during the 1930s.

The church was very exciting. It took me a long time to disengage from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock." Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying,as they said, "the Word"--when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs--they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them--and their cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Yes, Lord!" and "Praise His name!" and "Preach it, brother!" sustained and shipped my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar. (p 33-34)

From The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, published by Vintage in 1993