thdays now" one of the church elders, Sister McCandless, says (210). He notonly marks the passage of this new year but is also dramatically aware of his rebirth in Christ. Over the course of the Saturday night leading into the Sunday church service, John falls into an ecstatic trance on the "threshing floor," the open area before the altar (191). During the darkest hours of night he struggles with the voices of good and evil inside him--the good encouraging him to call out to Jesus for assistance, the evil chiding him for his naivete in thinking that a "white" God can provide the right answers. Though John perceives these two options as diametrically opposed, in fact they are not so rigidly distanced one from the other. "It is important to observe,"writes Raboteau, "that on a very general level African religions and Christianity ... shared some important beliefs" (127). These commonalities--belief in God the Father, the Supreme Creator, and belief in Jesus, the divine Son--make it possible for John to experience the promise ofspiritual salvation that the church had always held out to him. In the end John has his vision. Like the biblical Ruth who lay at Boaz's feet on the threshing floor during the barley harvest, he is blessed for appreciating and identifying with another people's belief system, for taking their God a his own. Assimilation, or acculturation, in both narratives is rewarded. Ruth's devotion to her foreign-born mother-in-law, Naomi, results in her husband's kinsman, Boaz, marrying her. She bears a son and eventually becomes great-grandmother to Israel's King David of the Messianic line. John is similarly rewarded with a promise of reconciliation and restoration. Love for and surrender to Jesus, the God he assumes as his own, ensures that he will survive his father, as well as the streets, and become a user of language (a preacher, a writer) to garner power and internal resilience. In this way his story will join "all o...
