Back to Blog
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes5/27/2023 Waves of rejoicing swept the place.” And, as the church does, the author imbues with enormous significance the ten feet of space between the front row of pews and the altar, which the boy must cross to be saved. The control of space. Sometimes we see close-ups from twelve-year-old Langston’s point of view of “old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands” other times we see long shots, as if from up in the church’s rafters: “Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting.Time then slows down paragraph by paragraph until, as Langston’s decisive moment approaches, it creeps. The control of time. As the story opens, time breezes along in the weeks leading up to the revival meeting at twelve-year-old Langston’s church.“Salvation” is the third chapter of Langston Hughes’s memoir The Big Sea, but this two-page tour de force of prose is also a compact and complete story.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |