Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

with a piano, too, and the young man who played had a rhythm and a rollthat sent waves of jubilant sound rippling up and down the aisles between the folding chairs and bouncing off the walls and ceiling. Somebody said that Eve in the picture, at a certain point, even started to open her mouth and sing, and the snake gave a couple of wiggles. And at one place in the Sunday services, maybe because she was thinking about her daughter in the South, Essie was moved to stand and sing all alone “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and people started to cry, and Chicken Crow-For-Day jumped up and said, “I’m motherless and fatherless, too, but right now this minute I know I have found Jesus.”
    He shouted until Essie finished singing, then the old man took the rostrum and began to testify.
    “Right now this minute I have come to God!” He was six feet tall, acknowledged sixty years old, thin as a shadow, and he said, “Right now I have found God! After all my years of sin, tonight the light!”
    So many people in the church shouted simultaneously that you could hardly hear Crow-For-Day. But he went on, “Dyed-in-the-wool, dyed-in-the-wool, a dyed-in-the-wool sinner, dyed-in-the-wool with a dye so deep and a stain so dark that only the lamb of God could wash me clean. I seen these lambs in these windows and I said I’m going in. And I come—and look at me now, white, whiter than snow, washed white!” And nobody laughed that he was not white at all, because everybody was listening beyond his words and looking through him to the hope that they, too, might find some sort of joy akin to his, some kind of sin cleanser, though it be but for a moment, like this ancient reprobate had found—for you could look into his face and tell he had been until this moment a hound.
    “Sniffing after women, tailing after sin, gambling on green tables,Saratoga, Trenton, High Point, North Carolina, let ’em roll! Santa Anita, Hialeah, Belmont, Miami, never read nothing but the racing forms. Harlem, nothing but the numbers columns in the
Daily News
. And for relaxations, crime in the comic books. Oh, but tonight Sister Essie has done snatched me off the ship of iniquity on which I rid down the river of sin through the most awfullest of storms, through gales of evil and hurricanes of passions, purple as devil’s ink, green as gall. Yes, I tell you I shot dices. Now I’ve stopped. I lived off of women. Uh-uh! No more! I’ll make my own living now. I carried a pistol, called it Dog—because when it shot, it barked just like a dog. I won’t carry no pistol no more. Looky here! Everybody, looky here!”
    Four women fainted and twenty screamed as Crow-For-Day pulled a pistol from his pocket, walked down the aisle with it above his head, and threw it out the open window into the street. Pistol out the window, gone.
    “I carried a knife. Knives got me in trouble. Here goes old knife, too.” And out the window went the knife, gone. As heavy as Essie was, she leaped into the air three times on the rostrum and said, “Thank God!”
    “I hope, Essie, you’ll throw your old switchblade away, too,” said Laura on the platform but Essie did not hear her at all, or if she heard, she did not reply.
    By then Crow-For-Day had come back up the aisle to the front of the church and turned to reveal still more of his sinful past to the congregation. “I drank likker,” he shouted.
    “Me, too,” said Sister Birdie Lee.
    “It made me fool-headed,” cried Crow-For-Day. “Thank God I stopped last year so I don’t have to stop drinking now.”
    “We stopped, stopped, stopped,” said Birdie Lee.
    “Let the man talk, Birdie,” said Laura. “Let the new soul talk.”
    “I witnessed the chain gang,” cried Chicken, “the jail, the bread line, the charity house—but look at me tonight. Look at me now!”
    “Look, look, look,” cried Birdie Lee.
    “Bless God, I’ve lived to see the rooster crow for day, the sun of grace to rise, the