voluntary presence, they are saved. Except Hughes and another boy, Westley. Neither budges; Langston is not feeling it. But it’s hot, and the hymns keep insinuating, and the preacher keeps intoning, and the flock keeps expecting, until Westley finally capitulates: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved,” he says to Langston, and so Westley goes to the front of the church. And he is saved. Now, from every corner, the hanky-waving faithful and Langston’s family besiege him, the last straggler, to get up. They pray for him “in a mighty wail of moans and voices.” And, though he feels he wants to receive the Lord, nothing happens. He waits again. But still he can’t see Jesus. Seeing Westley, happily swinging his legs up front, Langston muses, “God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple” (20).
So. At last Langston gets up and saunters to the front of the church. And he is saved. Voilà! Lord and congregation propitiated. The dominoes have fallen.
That night, however, after the hurrahs of the family have settled and Langston is alone in bed, he cries. His aunt hears him and comes into his room. His tears, she says, are the Holy Ghost reminding him that he has seen Jesus. The everlasting has arrived in his life for good. But no, Langston thinks, his tears are his shame for lying: “I couldn’t bear to tell her,” he writes, “that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me” (21).
How simply wrought yet religiously portentous this confession is. Several things are true. The initiation passed, the emotional purge exacted, Langston is saved in the eyes of the church members; he is saved by his conscience, the opposite of what his family treasures him for receiving; and he is saved by the querulous surprise of his self-disclosure. He knows that what they believe and what he believes—which each would swear to—are the same as they are different. Salvation and faked salvation—river and bank, sun and moon. Doesn’t this happen often whenever we are tapped by the rank-and-file to bow our heads in prayer for the dearly departed or to stand for the seventh-inning rendition of “God Bless America”? How many of us, caps in hand, embarrassed faces, dodgy hearts, relish little of what we’re supposed to and, instead, feel that the land-that-I-love or the deity-on-high fervor is a public face we’re preternaturally unable to feign. The degree to which we hide an absent belief is also the degree to which we hope such an absence might be acknowledged.
The story begins with church members meandering through the sleepy hymn “The Ninety and Nine.” Despite the tune’s avowal that the lone stray sheep (young Langston), brought back to the fold, is the most blessed of the flock, another counter-certainty raises its head: there is, for young Langston, no God except the God who isn’t there, a strangely satisfying hollow that awakens the writer’s conscience. Reverse salvation—that which is presumed to ground his life, the weight of the Old Rugged Cross, he discovers he has no desire to lug. But that’s not the point. The point is, how does he, how do we live with ourselves if we protect others from knowing what we genuinely feel?
It is not odd that the writer admits his strength as a failure: that’s part of the confessional tradition. But it is odd to have learned a kind of doublespeak that shielded those good gospel women who raised and loved him from his disbelief, women to whom he could only disclose, while young, his apostate identity except in the guise of telling the truth—showing he was saved when he wasn’t and wouldn’t be.
* * *
HUGHES’S SPIRITUAL pivot comes from an artist whose sensibility our culture has deftly fitted him with. To live loyally, to be indoctrinated into a religious community, is the lot of the child whose “participation” is typically no more than an accident of birth. In charismatic or Baptist-style congregations (compare James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) reside the public means to—and a performance of—salvation. You are how you conform to your church; you are not how the church conforms to you. But despite this tilt, Hughes upholds his individuality, if stealthily and deceptively, within the community, which is the lot of the adult observer, the later-assessing writer.
For Hughes, such hiding in plain sight, enduring ambiguity, is best suited to the internal personal drama of the tale. There, the reader is prodded to interpret motives and decisions without the author’s interference, though sometimes such authorial guidance does appear. There, the writer avoids—should avoid—the overt preaching or teaching rhetoric of religious tracts and devotional formulae.
In a word, Hughes’s spirituality is his character. The conflicting motives are remarkable. Consider, first, that Jesus got Langston to go to the front of the church; consider, second, that Langston went up there of his own free will because, Jesus having failed to nudge him and the church demanding he conform, he strolled up on his own. The first posits a truth that wisely directs our behavior from the outside, though it’s also thought of as an inner push or conscience; the second posits that the source is enigmatic at best because it can be contrived or, in certain people, managed because painful consequences come to those who mess with the sanctimony others, chiefly members of one’s family, hold dear. That Hughes conveys the subtlety of both with such a simple narrative is, as I say, uncanny.
What’s more, he conveys an even stronger ambiguity, which I call flawed reliability. No story is wholly good or bad, so the deconstructionists have taught us, and no author can be wholly credible. All confession is, in part, unreliable. In fiction and nonfiction,3 modern writers build characters with stark fallibility if they wish readers to trust their creations as sharing our culture’s doubt and delusion. A character—think Humbert Humbert, testifying at his trial, in Lolita—has to engage with his reliability as his story. With “Salvation,” the fallibility of young Langston’s conviction is everywhere present in the story. The piece discloses the constant skirmish he has with church rules. His family and Westley, in particular, do not see what we do: that going up front is a success and a failure.
And there’s something even bigger. Trust. The reader’s trust. I trust Hughes because he seems to say that an individual’s salvation cannot be known by other people and, in like manner, requires some of that unknowingness from the author. In other words, it’s easy to fake salvation for a crowd of born-agains, but it’s even easier to fake it for oneself. I trust those who show me how fallible the teller of the tale might be. How can anyone know—leaving aside gospel women and preachers and the public spectacle of testifying—whether one is saved? How does coming to the front of the church during the high drama of an evangelical threshing salvationally guarantee that when you die the pearly gates will open? You will be saved in the moment as, apparently, all the little lambs that day were “saved,” even the tricksters, Westley and Langston. But the question-inviting and begging of such theater is the legacy.
Anyone can conjure the “evidence” of things unseen—ghosts and spirits and highways to heaven. But when writers develop their narrator’s psychology, they present competing evidence as well. While things are unseen, they are also seen for their unseenness, if you will, for their unreliability. Indeed, Hughes defers to the complicated knowingness of the child. Just as the church community tricks children into public testament—heed the call and let the Lord in—the child, in his honesty, divulges where the rabbit is hidden. Saying that makes him a reliable witness to the deception.
(Deconstruction is not easy.)
The child, Langston, is saved by the truth that he wasn’t saved. He lies to himself and then refuses to tell the lie to his family until many years later, nearing forty, when he finally opens and owns up in The Big Sea. There, the family, if they’ve read the story, may have learned that faith is not merely a matter of raw belief. It is a matter of tenacious conscience. We like to think that publicly witnessed religious conviction is by nature preferable to privately witnessed disbelief. Don’t be misled, Hughes argues. If the faith is in anything, it is in the child’s instinctual ability to handle paradox
