“Ragtime Revival,” Fiction, MariJean Wegert.
It was the hottest day of the entire summer. Dust spit with dry fervor along the edges of the roads and the laundry flapped furiously on the lines, glinting like bone in the sunlight.
Tom had run away from home. There was nothing on earth that would have kept him indoors on a Saturday in the summer, not excepting the stern orders from his mother to remain in his room after failing to finish his chores. But today he had an extra special reason to escape the confines of domesticity: there was a revival in town.
He had only heard whisperings about it so far; matronly townswomen murmuring behind their hands, the man at the hardware store clenching a pipe between his teeth; even the red-faced bully at school had said something loud and awestruck during lunch, claiming his ma had seen the neighbor come home staggering like a drunk from the tent meeting.
Tom didn’t know what a revival was, but from the whisperings he caught film ribbons: a yelling preacher, sweating from exertion and under the influence of the Spirit of God, calling frowning spinsters and ruddy businessmen up to the stage and putting his splayed palm on their foreheads, and, BAM! they had the Holy Spirit.
At least that's what the bully Sammy said. He said he had an uncle in Kentucky who knew about such things. Sometimes there were poison snakes, he had whispered. The minister would coil them out of a locked box and put them under a spell with the command not to sting believers. Then he would let them weave there in front of their scared, sanctified faces, all poison and no bite. All of this made a shiver of terrified excitement trace up and down Tom’s spine. He had to find out more.
The revival meeting was on the edge of town, in a clearing by a grove of pines. The dust under the needles kicked up in mushroom clouds in the wake of his bare feet, setting off tiny bombs of sharp fragrance under his heels.
The clearing held one big tent in the middle and a few smaller tents clustered nearby. Tom had been to the circus before (on another glorious day of escape), and the tent had looked much like this one, only striped brilliant red and yellow. Inside had come roars and snorts, whining and buzzing and mysterious jungle sounds. This white tent flapped like a giant empty hot ghost. He tiptoed closer. Not a soul was in sight outside the tent, but there was a sound coming from inside.
Tom was used to the sound of church music: a heavy organ boring notes into his skull, thudding out a melody, dirgelike. And sometimes it was a piano, thick strains of chords almost as tedious as the organ, and always along with it the pious murmur of fifty voices tonelessly voicing the verses, singing what might as well have been another language:
“Tis mystery all! The Immortal dies!
Who can explore His strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love Divine!”
The drone of this music was all too familiar to him. And that is what he expected to waft from the white tent, where the Holy Ghost was moving and indwelling and socking souls full-on with its strangled weight. But he heard something else.
He heard a glittering, misty rhythm drifting out of the white tent, turning solid on the air and hitting his ears like gold turned liquid back again. Tambourines. He peered inside.
The room was full of town folk, standing next to hard wooden chairs. At the front was a makeshift stage where he found the source of the tambourine: a boy sitting on one of the chairs, his eyes closed in the ecstasy of the rhythm he was creating. On the stage a man was dancing.
He was a black man, in a long, thin white robe, and everything about his person was angles— long angular face and nose, sharp bony shoulders and narrow hips and long lean legs, square hands which he was throwing around like he was possessed.
And he was dancing with fury.
The people were swaying, too, Tom realized, not the kind of swaying he saw in church most Sundays— the exhausted drugged sway of boredom— but wide-eyed and awake, in sync with the rhythm. Some of the townspeople were dancing, too. They were dancing with the beat, throwing up their hands and stomping and clapping and hooting. The tambourine kept beating out its golden rhythm, and Tom realized his foot was tapping.
What kind of revival was this?
The dancing preacher began to speak. His words were not a drone like Tom’s minister— they were exuberant, excited, perhaps even a hint of madness:
“People of the LORD!” he shouted, his words keeping time with the beat. Even his voice had a cadence to it, rippling and lyrical, with the end of every phrase drawn out slow with a warm, pulsing tenor:
“Celebrate with me the good things he has done here today! The Scriptures say in the Psalms: praise him with tambourines and dancing! Praise him with trumpet sound. Praise him with harp and lyre!”
He suddenly stopped his mad dancing and shuffled to the edge of the stage, leaned over confidentially. He spoke, his voice swelling with delight:
“We don’t have harp or lyre here today ya’ll, but we have something better!”
He motioned briefly, and three men leapt onto the stage. One man held a trumpet, another a trombone, and a third a clarinet. The rhythm hadn’t stopped and their instruments picked up a tune to the jangle of the zills. There were words too, and the revival preacher and tambourine player took up the jaunty tune along with the ensemble. Tom dimly heard them in the fever of the music, but understood clear:
“I’ll say bye and bye
when the morning comes
all you good folks will come
one by one!
we’ll tell the story
and how will people come
we will understan’ it better bye and bye
(I say!) bye and bye
when the mornin’ come
all good people
be counted one by one!
we will tell the story
‘bout how he overcome
we will understan’ it better bye and bye!
Something swelled up in Tom that he had never felt before. It started in his stomach and flew up to his throat -- a balloon, a bubble of gold, timbred happiness.
Tom started to dance there in the back of the tent. He forgot about being caught and he danced.
Everyone was dancing now, or at least swaying. Only a few were left, and even these were stomping their feet or clapping timidly. The heat of the day grew into a frenzy of furious excitement.
“For the LORD takes pleasure in His people; He will beautify the afflicted ones with salvation!” The preacher cried out, right in the middle of a stomp. “Dance before the Lord with all your might! For all our fountains are in YOU!” – and he threw his hands towards heaven.
“People of the Lord - that means he provides for us and loves us--” he was out of breath now, speaking in gasps. “Dance like Miriam, dance like David, let the joy of the LORD fill you with strength!”
The people were spilling out of the tent now to the clearing, dancing in the dust, kicking up clouds and dripping sweat. Tom danced, too, until he could not dance anymore, and he collapsed in the heat and dust of the ground around the tent, the smell of juniper and pine and golden tambourine in his nose. The only one standing was the preacher, at the front, and he was bent over gasping.
“You’ve got to feeeel it,” he panted, drawing out the word long and slow like taffy.
You’ve got to feel his joy! He did not create you to be downtrodden and guilt-ridden! He did not create you to be somber and sad at your sin! Do we forget about our Lord Jesus, about the bloodied cross and the empty tomb?”
“Yes, there is a time to mourn, yes there is a time to grieve our black hearts! But it does not glorify him to remain there. People of the Lord, you are redeemed by the king -- rejoice I tell you! And live! In! His! Joy!”
The last word the preacher drew long and writhing from his mouth, like a living thing.
“Go home now and tell your families! Go home and tell your friends: Rejoice with me! Dance with me! We are the Joyful Redeemed!”
The last words cracked like lightning and wove there, animated, in the vibrating air. Joyful Redeemed! Joyful Redeemed! We are the Joyful Redeemed!
Tom barely remembered stumbling back home, stopping at the spring alongside the road to gulp down water and wash his dust-streaked face. He snuck back home in the gathering pink of dusk and tumbled into bed, not bothering to help himself to a bit of supper from the pantry, too exhausted to pull off his trousers, not caring if his parents found him in a state of dirt and grime and escape. He slept long and deep.
When he woke the next morning, a sliver of gold streamed through the windows into his eyes. Gold. It all came back to him -- the smell of dust and pine and rattling music...
“It must have been a dream,” he muttered, rolling over. It was Sunday. He groaned, for the memory held against the reality of the moaning organ in the coming hours was too much to hold in.
“Well look who decided to stir!”
His mother pushed open the door to his room with a basket mounded with clean white laundry, humming a tune to herself and tapping her foot to an invisible beat.
Wait.
On the air, towards the edges of town, Tom thought he heard a jangly sound carried in on a sweet wind.
“Mother!” he exclaimed, forgetting his transgressive state.
“Is the revival still in town?”
“I don’t know, darling,” she said, drawing the curtains to let the sun spill onto the bed. “I heard they left town last night.”
Her eyes lit on Tom’s rumpled sheets and dust-streaked clothing, and he braced himself for a tongue-lashing. After an unexpected moment of silence, he unclenched one of his eyes to discover his mother smiling at him with… was it almost… amusement?
“Did you sneak off to see it yesterday? Child…I thought it was just a bit too quiet in your room last night.”
It wasn’t a dream. She shooed him out of bed then to replace his bedding, stopping the apology forming in Tom’s throat with a flick of her hand. “We’ll discuss it with your father later, and you can say your proper sorry then. Now get ready for church! You’re filthy.”
Approaching the steepled chapel, the jangly rhythm grew louder. Tom grew more incredulous the closer they drew, for from behind the wooden doors drifted unmistakable sounds: the golden liquid rhythm of a tambourine.
A trumpet. A trombone, and a clarinet.
As they slid into the pews, the minister leaned over the pulpit, his smile reaching Tom all the way at the back of the sanctuary. Had the minister ever smiled like that before?
“Welcome!” he called out to the congregation. “Let the redeemed of the Lord rejoice together today! Stand with me!”
Tom cleared his throat, for he felt something welling up into it: a bubble of golden, timbred happiness.
MariJean Wegert is an abolitionist, anarchist, animist, and mystic, whose work navigates the poetics of the postcolonial artistic imagination through lyric essay and story She is the author of Water the Bones: A Liturgy of the Midwest, and editor at Iansá Magazine, Clarion Poetry Journal, and North Meridian Review. Her poetry and essays have appeared in North Meridian Review, Clarion Quarterly Poetry Magazine, The Gladis, Tilted House, Geez Magazine, YoHo Journal, and others. Find her essays at