So I sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church, waiting for Jesus to come to me. I had heard a great many old people say the same thing and it seemed to me they ought to know. My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. 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. Then just before the revival ended, they held a special meeting for children, “to bring the young lambs to the fold.” My aunt spoke of it for days ahead. Every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying, and shouting, and some very hardened sinners had been brought to Christ, and the membership of the church had grown by leaps and bounds.

There was a big revival at my Auntie Reed’s church. I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. Irony. The verbal irony of the title, “Salvation,” is a kind of shorthand for the dramatic irony of the plot, wherein the more lost young Langston feels, the more his fellow congregants are convinced they are saving him.Polyphony. Not only the two Langstons’, but his Auntie Reed’s, the preacher’s, and his friend Westley’s voices are heard, as is the voice of the church via the liturgy.The doubleness of the narrator. His diction and sensibility move fluidly back and forth between the man’s and the boy’s.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.

I get on my knees and pray boy