Ignorance as bliss in Hughes' "Salvation"

"My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices."

Langston Hughes' depiction of this scene toward the end of "Salvation" imparts the biblical idea of hell that many of us have heard since we were younger than the author is in his story.
"Mighty" wails of "moans and voices" are sounds we can hear when we think of "hell" and the atmosphere as it's been written; Hughes' patience and waiting conjures up the idea of purgatory, which is where he's kind of stuck throughout this story. The idea of purgatory, a place where sinners wait until they are prayed out of their limbo, threads through this whole piece, beginning with the happiness of those who have been saved (the adults) praying for others (the children) and ending with his salvation as the church "into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air."

How can one not see the illuminated images of Jesus rising from some glossy portrait into the flaxen beams of heaven?

In our class notes we see that "detail, sensory information and action" are the hallmarks of scene and movement. Hughes uses some dialogue throughout the piece, but what really moves the story, for me, is the imagined lull of prayers and voices that I hear in my head when I think of a congregation in prayer. That noise and reverence, although "holy," hums and buzzes in my skull, pushing me forward and adding to the urgency and tingling sensations the young Hughes must have felt. Added to the power of this feeling is the one recollection of times I've felt conflicted by self or society, much as Hughes is here.

Overall, although this piece moves through the shadows of peaks and valleys created by both Hughes' reactions and the desires of his church, what I find most compelling is that Hughes' salvation comes not so much in way of protecting his soul, but enlightening his mind.

For those who know of Hughes as a writer beyond this piece, it's not stretch to say that he wrote about the freedom and salvation that comes when the mind is loosed of ignorance. In depicting the actions of the little girls who cried and then ran to be saved--fearful for their souls-- and the rest of the "poor sinners," with their "work-gnarled hands"-- it's easy to see that Hughes' final savior is his mind itself, and his own understanding of truth. It's a painful truth for him to learn, that he can no longer believe in Jesus, or the adults who seem so wise, but in the end, his conflicts with the questions he had about Jesus prior to the revival (his aunt tells him all about the "feeling" but his scepticism persists) are answered and he comes to his own beliefs.

As we've looked at memoir from the perspective of the child thus far, we've seen that adults are often wise, confusing and so removed from the realities of childhood that their knowledge seems vastly superior and almost unattainable to the child(ren). But here we have an author who has bucked the conventions of his society and his aunt regardless of what he once thought or wanted to believe. Hughes doesn't tell us how all of this comes together for us; in introducing the characters he does, however briefly, and building the suspense of the moment with the quick snapshots of scenery and action, we come to feel the same flatness and acceptance that he feels.

What this acceptance becomes is not one of Jesus, but an acceptance of "oh, well, I wanted this because everyone told me I wanted it, but now I realize it's not really for me." This is a difficult kind of acceptance for anyone to bear because realizing we don't fit in, at any age, marks us as different, and therefore, potentially unsaved by common knowledge and ideals.