Salvation

Langston Hughes attracts readers beginning from the title of this story. Using “Salvation” as a title, he eventually makes the readers be prepared for an adventure. This word raises curiosity of the readers. Hughes could call his story, for example, “Incident in a church” which is not a good attractive title. “Salvation” implies for an interesting narrative. From the beginning of the story, even from the first sentence, the readers can see that it is a true autobiographical story from author’s childhood. It is nonfiction about the church, or it is related to the church, because using the word “sin” people usually think about God or prayer. Then he uses the entering sentence “It happened like this”, which momentarily prepares us to become a part of author’s past.

This is a narrative story with elements of description and process. There are many cases when the author uses lots of descriptive adjectives to make the picture in our mind more clear and understandable. For instance, “wonderful rhythmical ceremony”, “old women with jet-black faces and braided hair”, “old men with work-gnarled hands”. Also Hughes describes all actions more completely using many verbs in the sentences. Verbs convey the sequence of the events. For example, “aunt came, and knelt at my knees, and cried”. Using those verb forms author makes us feel this story as a process; it is not a quick five-minute action, it continues through the evening. We that it is evening, because of a few phrases: “Now it was really getting late” or “every night for weeks”. Then author in detail describes what happens. He uses a past tense because this situation happened in his childhood long time ago. Putting dialogs in the text, Hughes make us realize that it is a true story with true people. Also there are many questions in the story. Those questions usually are repeated (“Why don’t you come?” or “Won’t you come?”) in order to finally get answers.

In this story we can notice lots of short sentences. It is precise and clear statements, which make a big sense in the text. For instance, “I believed her” from that we can clearly see the author’s feelings, or “Nothing!” which implies the result of expectations.  The sentence “So I got up”, which is even made as a whole short paragraph, separates two parts of the story: the situation in the church and being with understanding what happened. The description of feeling miserable and shame (“I cried, in bed alone, and couldn’t stop”) in the last paragraph, finally, makes the narrative completely understandable and sad. The last sentence which carries the main idea of this incident has a huge sense in everybody’s life, when we think about Jesus. This sentence is a guide for the readers who didn’t understand the main purpose of this story from its beginning.