The road wandered from our
rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat
and corn, until we could hear dimly across the fields a
rhythmic cadence of song,--soft, thrilling, powerful, that
swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a country
schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a
Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not
perhaps as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time;
yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I know not what
would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some
one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted
the long prayer with a loud Amen! And so most striking to
me, as I approached the village and the little plain church
perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed
that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in
the air and seemed to seize us,--a pythian madness, a
demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and
word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed
and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us
in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and
then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly
leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while
round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of
human passion such as I had never conceived before.
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