immersed himself in a white European institution. He assumes that the Bible is his story, the only story for him, rejecting Africa in favor of church doctrine. Unlike the slaves, whose "appropriation of the Exodus story was ... a way of articulating their sense of historical identity as a people" (Raboteau 311), Gabriel accepts the idea of God's wrath to keep himself and his people out of trouble. He does not adopt the freedom, autonomy, and exultation of Exodus but only the prohibitions of Leviticus, the threats and punishments of an angry and jealous Father. Gabriel, who is constantly struggling to repress what he considers to be his "baser" instincts, sees a world rife with sin and with little room for forgiveness. (7) Gabriel, of course, is unaware that Africans were baptized not only to save their souls but also to "regularize and pacify relations between slaves and masters" (Raboteau 164). He would reject the notion that as a reverend he iscolluding in promoting his own people's passivity, if not their subjugation. (8) He most likely does not know how during slavery blacks were encouraged to be good Christians and to submit to their masters' will. By the time Gabriel Grimes has found his salvation in the church, he is unaware not only of the atmosphere in which the Gospel was preached to Africans in America but also of the history of Africans in Africa. He obviously is not to be faulted for this. Cut off from the oral traditions of Africa, with no Moses at Mount Sinai to rekindle ancestral memories and recreate rituals, Gabriel has little choice but to use what is available to him to keep himself on the straight and narrow. He has learned the lesson of despair on his own flesh and sees theTemple of the Fire Baptized as "an oasis in the desert of perdition." The fundamentalism of the Pentecostal church, emphasizing sin and transgression with its "legacy of evangelical eighteenth-century New England Puritanism and nineteenth-centu...
