Church

"Between the tent of Christ and the tents of sin there stretched scarcely a half-mile. Rivalry reigned: the revival and the carnival held sway in Stanton at the same time. Both were at the south edge of town, and both were loud and musical in their activities...The old Negroes went to the revival, and the young Negroes went to the carnival, and after sundown these August evenings the mourning songs of the Christians could be heard rising from the Hickory Woods while the profound syncopation of the minstrel band blared from Galoway's Lots, strangely intermingling their notes of praise and joy."

Two Lawrence churches had an effect on Hughes. In 1911, he attended the funeral of George "Nash" Walker at the Warren (now 9th) Street Baptist Church. Walker was a vaudeville star from Lawrence who returned to visit during the years when Hughes lived here. Hughes probably had this church in mind when he wrote about Aunt Hager's funeral in Not Without Laughter.

"The little Baptist Church was packed with people. The sisters of the lodge came in full regalia, with banners and insignia, and the brothers turned out with them. Hager's coffin was banked with flowers...wreaths and crosses with golden letters on them: ‘At Rest in Jesus,’ ‘Beyond the Jordan,’ or simply: ‘Gone Home.’...They were all pretty, but, to Sandy, the perfume was sickening in the close little church...The Baptist minister preached...The choir sang ‘Shall We Meet Beyond the River?’ People wept and fainted."

Hughes did attend church with Auntie Reed at St. Luke's AME at 9th and New York Street. Uncle Reed was not a church-goer. Hughes wrote that

"...both of them were very good and kind--the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well."

He also wrote in his autobiography of an experience in church that affected him profoundly.

"That night I was escorted to the front row and placed on the mourners' bench with all the other young sinners, who had not yet been brought to Jesus... Finally all the young people had gone to the altar and been saved, but one boy and me... Finally Westley said to me in a whisper: ‘I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved.’ So he got up and was saved... I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting--but he didn't come. I wanted to see him, but nothing happened to me. Nothing! I wanted something to happen to me; but nothing happened... So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved... That night... I cried... [My aunt] woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn't come to help me."