ABSTRACT
And the darkness of John's sin was like the darkness of the church on Saturday evenings; like the silence of the church while he was there alone, sweeping, and running water into the great bucket, and overturning chairs, long before the saints arrived. It was like his thoughts as he moved about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle that he hated, yet loved and feared. It was like Roy's [his brother's] curses, Roy ... cursing in the house of God, and making obscene gestures before the eyes of]esus. It was like all this, the walls which testified that the wages of sin was death. (19)
In the following pages, then, I question African American criticism's reliance on historical readings of the black church. In contrast, I articulate that Baldwin's relationship to religious words is primarily lexical, and not historical. I then showcase the pitfalls of the traumatic model of historical and painful racial affiliation inhering within the evangelical conversion experience that John, despite his active resistance, has no choice but to repeat. Finally, in the last section, I focus on the blasphemous results of]ohn's own eventual acceptance of the Lord's Word: John learns to repeat his community's religious text, his community's description of the black flesh, but his inflection, with its resisting insight, makes all the difference for John's continued and thriving existence within a community sinfully organized around the power of religious language.
