The church had been decorated, with sparse flowers from kitchen gardens and hedgerows, and with streamers of colored crepe paper.
Above the pulpit hung a battered Christmas bell, the accordion sort that collapses.
The pulpit was empty, though the choir was already in place, fanning themselves although it was not warm.
Most of the women were gathered on one side of the room. They were talking.
Then the bell struck one time and they dispersed to their seats and the congregation sat for an instant, expectant.
The bell struck again one time.
The choir rose and began to sing and the congregation turned its head as one as six small children--four girls with tight pigtails bound with small scraps of cloth like butterflies, and two boys with close napped heads--entered and marched up the aisle, strung together in a harness of white ribbons and flowers, and followed by two men in single file.
The second man was huge, of a light coffee color, imposing in a frock coat and white tie.
His head was magisterial and profound, his neck rolled above his collar in rich folds.
But he was familiar to them, and so the heads were still reverted when he had passed, and it was not until the choir ceased singing that they realised that the visiting clergyman had already entered, and when they saw the man who had preceded their minister enter the pulpit still ahead of him an indescribable sound went up, a sigh, a sound of astonishment and disappointment.
The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat.
He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey.
And all the while that the choir sang again and while the six children rose and sang in thin, frightened, tuneless whispers, they watched the insignificant looking man sitting dwarfed and countrified by the minister's imposing bulk, with something like consternation.
They were still looking at him with consternation and unbelief when the minister rose and introduced him in rich, rolling tones whose very unction served to increase the visitor's insignificance.
"En dey brung dat all de way fum Saint Looey," Frony whispered.
"I've knowed de Lawd to use cuiser tools den dat," Dilsey said. "Hush, now," she said to Ben. "Dey fixin to sing again in a minute."
When the visitor rose to speak he sounded like a white man.
His voice was level and cold. It sounded too big to have come from him and they listened at first through curiosity, as they would have to a monkey talking.
They began to watch him as they would a man on a tight rope.
They even forgot his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity with which he ran and poised and swooped upon the cold inflectionless wire of his voice, so that at last, when with a sort of swooping glide he came to rest again beside the reading desk with one arm resting upon it at shoulder height and his monkey body as reft of all motion as a mummy or an emptied vessel, the congregation sighed as if it waked from a collective dream and moved a little in its seats.
Behind the pulpit the choir fanned steadily.
Dilsey whispered,
"Hush, now.
Dey fixin to sing in a minute."
Then a voice said,
"Brethren."
The preacher had not moved.
His arm lay yet across the desk, and he still held that pose while the voice died in sonorous echoes between the walls.
It was as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes.
"Brethren and sisteren," it said again.
The preacher removed his arm and he began to walk back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him, a meagre figure, hunched over upon itself like that of one long immured in striving with the implacable earth, "I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!" He tramped steadily back and forth beneath the twisted paper and the Christmas bell, hunched, his hands clasped behind him.
He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice.
With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman's single soprano:
"Yes, Jesus!"
As the scudding day passed overhead the dingy windows glowed and faded in ghostly retrograde.
A car passed along the road outside, laboring in the sand, died away.
Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben's knee.
Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time.
"Brethren," the minister said in a harsh whisper, without moving.
"Yes, Jesus!" the woman's voice said, hushed yet.
"Breddren en sistuhn!" His voice rang again, with the horns.
He removed his arm and stood erect and raised his hands. "I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!" They did not mark just when his intonation, his pronunciation, became negroid, they just sat swaying a little in their seats as the voice took them into itself.
"When de long, cold--Oh, I tells you, breddren, when de long, cold…. I sees de light en I sees de word, po sinner!
Dey passed away in Egypt, de swingin chariots; de generations passed away.
Wus a rich man: whar he now, O breddren?
Wus a po man: whar he now, O sistuhn?
Oh I tells you, ef you aint got de milk en de dew of de old salvation when de long, cold years rolls away!"
"Yes, Jesus!"
"I tells you, breddren, en I tells you, sistuhn, dey'll come a time.
Po sinner sayin Let me lay down wid de Lawd, femme lay down my load.