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one EVOLVING FAITH Rev. Charles A. Hill and the Making of a Black Religious Radical In the short story “Fire and Cloud,” published in the 1940 collection Uncle Tom’s Children, African American writer Richard Wright explores the con›icts among religion, politics, race, and class by focusing on the inner turmoil and external pressures besetting Reverend Taylor, the story’s protagonist. The tale commences with Reverend Taylor, a Black minister in a small southern town, returning from a discouraging meeting with the town’s white relief of‹cer. Taylor had gone, hat in hand, to plead the case of the town’s nearly destitute and increasingly desperate Black population. He was rebuffed, told only that “Everybody’s hungry, and after all, it’s no harder on your people than it is on ours.”1 The of‹cer’s only suggestion is that Taylor tell his congregation “they’ll just have to wait.” Mulling over how best to convey the bad news, Taylor begins to think, “Lawd, mabe them Reds is right,” which is to say maybe the community should band together, stage a massive interracial march downtown, and “scare ’em inter doin’ something!”2 At the same time, Taylor is worried that such a militant course of action would offend the mayor and the town’s white elite, endangering his ›ock and the entire Black community by stirring up the antagonism of local whites. It would also, he fears, place his own position as minister of his church in jeopardy , especially since Deacon Smith—“A black snake in the grass! A black Judas!”—is looking for any excuse to engineer Taylor’s ouster. By the time Taylor arrives at his home, all of these pressures and wor25 ries and competing constituencies have been gathered under one roof, literally. The Reds, Hadley and Green, are in the Bible room; the chief of police, who has been sent by the mayor, is in the parlor; Deacon Smith, who has been using the rumor of a demonstration in his campaign to discredit Taylor and curry favor with the local white political bosses, is in the basement with the other deacons; and a distressed and agitated delegation from his congregation is crowded into the front hallway. The physical structure of the house, then, operates as a symbolic representation of Reverend Taylor’s internal con›icts—con›icts that are resolved when Taylor is abducted and savagely beaten by a gang of white men, after which he agrees to support the interracial march. In preparation for that march Wright has Taylor preach an uncompromising sermon, urging his audience to take collective action on its own behalf. Sistahs n Brothers, Ah know now! Ah done seen the sign! Wes gotta git together. Ah know whut yo life is! Ah done felt it! Its ‹re! Its like the ‹re that burned me last night! Its sufferin! Its hell! Ah can’t bear this ‹re erlone! Ah know now wut t do! Wes gotta git close t one ernother! Gawds done spoke! Gawds done sent His sign. Now its time fer us t ack.3 Characteristically, Wright leaves the question of the march’s success unanswered. We are not told whether the Black and white marchers, united at least for the moment around shared class interests, are able to force the hand of the town’s elite. While he suggests that all of the participants , especially the African American ones, have been transformed by the experience of interracial collective struggle, Wright ends with Taylor ’s newfound conviction that “This is the way!” “Gawd ain no lie!” he tells himself, and the story concludes as he “mumbled out loud, exultingly : ‘Freedom belongs t the strong!’”4 This story of one religious man’s, one minister’s, conversion to the necessity of collective action is instructive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Wright’s ability to capture the complex relationship of faith to action. At the beginning of the tale the sympathetic Taylor is a man of God, whose authority as a minister anoints him a mediator between the Black community and the white power structure. Sustained by his faith, he accommodates himself to the racial and class status quo, viewing his passivity as the only viable option in a town (and a world) where “the white folks jus erbout owns” everything. At the story’s end, Taylor’s faith continues to shape his identity and his actions, but now 26 FAITH IN THE...

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