Kenneth looked at him in surprise, not at the idea of holding a meeting, but at the language the man was using.
“I hope you’ll pardon me for asking so personal a question, Reverend Wilson, but you don’t talk now as I’ve always heard you before. Why, your language now is that of an educated man, and before you—you—talked like a—like a⸺”
Mr. Wilson laughed easily.
“There’s a reason—in fact, there are two reasons why I talk like that. The first is because of my own folks. Outside of you and your folks, the Phil. lips family, and one or two more, all of my congregation is made up of folks with little or no education. They’ve all got good hard common sense, it’s true. They’d have to have that in order just to live in the South with things as they are. But they don’t want a preacher that’s too far above them they’ll feel that they can’t come to him and tell him their troubles if he’s too highfalutin. I try to get right down to my folks, feel as they feel, suffer when they suffer, laugh with them when they laugh, and talk with them in language they can understand.”
Mr. Wilson smiled, almost to himself, as memories of contacts with his lowly flock came to him.
“I remember when I first started preaching over at Valdosta. I was just out of school and was filled up with the ambition to raise my people out of their ignorance. I was determined I would free them from a religion that didn’t do anything for them but make them shout and holler on Sunday. I was going to give them some modern religion based on intelligence instead of just on feeling and emotion.”
He chuckled throatily in recollecting the spiritual and religious crusade on which he had based such exalted hopes.
“I preached to them and told them of Aristotle and Shakespeare and Socrates. One Sunday, after I’d preached what I thought was a mighty fine sermon, one old woman came up after the services and said to me: “Brer Wilson, dat’s a’ right tellin’ us ‘bout Shakespeare and Homer and all dem other boys. But what we want is for you t’ tell us somethin’ ‘bout Jesus!’”
Kenneth laughed with the preacher at the old woman’s insistence on his not straying from the religion to which they were used.
“I had to discard my high-flown theories and come down to my folks if I wanted to do any good at all.”