Uncle Elmer’s eyebrows raised a little, superciliously, shocked.
“A spiritual thing? To turn your back on God!”
“I haven’t said that—” How could he explain when “spiritual” meant to them only Uncle Elmer’s idea of “Biblical”? “I mean it is something that’s happened to my spirit—deep inside me.”
How could he explain what had happened to him as he lay in the rushes watching the procession of black girls? Or what had happened as he stood half-naked by the dying fire listening to the drums beating against the dome of the night? How could he explain when he did not know himself? Yet it was an experience of the spirit. It had happened to his soul.
He kept repeating to himself, “I won’t—I won’t. They can’t make me.” He saw his mother watching him with sad eyes, and he had to look away in order not to weaken and surrender.
Then Naomi’s flat voice, “I’ve prayed—I’ve pled with him. I never cease to pray.” She had begun to weep.
Philip’s jaw, lean from illness and dark from want of shaving, set with a sudden click. His mother saw it, with a sudden sickening feeling that the enlarged photograph above his head had come to life. She knew that jaw. She knew what it meant when it clicked in that sudden fashion.
“It’s no use talking about it—I won’t go back—not if I burn in Hell.”
Uncle Elmer interrupted him, all the smoothness gone suddenly from his voice. “Which you will as sure as there’s a God above!”
The thin, yellow, middle-aged man was transformed suddenly into the likeness of one of the more disagreeable Prophets of the Old Testament. He was cruel, savage, intolerant. Emma Downes knew the signs; she saw that Elmer was losing his temper and beginning to roll about in the righteousness that made him hard and cruel. If he went on against that set, swarthy jaw of Philip, only disaster could come of it. They would lose everything.