Often I had thought vaguely of depicting in fictional and symbolic terms the religious disposition of my grandmother and, by doing so, rendering a picture of the inner religious disposition of the American Negro. (Strangely, despite our proud boast that we are a religious people, we have but little literature dealing with religious emotion per se. I exclude such novels as Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry; they are satires upon institutional religion and criticisms of much of religious conduct rather than depictions of the living inner springs of religious emotion. After all, it is hard to believe that every man who preaches or who goes to church of a Sunday morning is trying to fool somebody! And the descriptions of religious states and reactions by William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, Waldo Frank, et al., are couched in abstract, philosophic rather than concrete, imagistic terms.) What baffled me in my longing to depict the inner structure of my grandmother’s religion was my inability to find a suitable form in which it could be couched. I do not mean literary form, but form of action, a contour of movement, a ritualistic scheme whose dynamics would lay bare the inner but not the outer processes of religion. The primitive forms of religious life among the masses of Negroes in America are all too well-known: the shouting, the singing, the moaning, the fainting, and the rolling. . . . I suppose my grandmother indulged in more than her share of these during her lifetime, but these external manifestations, in my opinion, did not indicate the true structure of her religious personality. To me it seemed that the tenets of her religion were illogical if not degrading; the images and symbols of her imagination were largely borrowed from the Old Testament; her actual knowledge of the Bible was limited; her codes of conduct did not add up to anything meaningful; yet, there was something elusive but abiding at the core of her personality that she clung to when all else failed and faded, something which she preserved even when the styles of religious worship changed. And I was interested in that something that made her tick. But I was afraid that if I depicted that something in terms of the forms of religious life common among Negroes—forms well-known also to whites—that the attempt would defeat itself, that the reader would be carried away by the local color—à la The Green Pastures—and by the peculiar mannerisms and would laugh instead of being enthralled.

My concern with depicting the religious impulses among Negroes—using my grandmother’s life as a model—did not in any degree occur to me all at once. The vague desire would well up and subside many times throughout a period of years; but always I’d push the thought aside, feeling that I had not yet found the form of action that would do justice to the principle involved, that would bring out in bold outline the functional pattern of response and reflex that lay at the back of her religious disposition. I did not know that, in my living, many other parallel experiences were happening to me and that at some time in the future—a time when I was not thinking of writing of religion—a spark would ignite a fire of meaning that would fuse them all into one organic concept, a concept that would shed meaning not only upon my grandmother’s religion and its relation to me, but would strip the daily mask from the many parallel experiences and show me that at bottom they were all one and the same.