At Church

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Trackton is a literate community in the sense that its members read and write when occasions within their community demand such skills. Outside the community, there are numerous occasions established by individuals and institutions in which Trackton residents must show their literacy skills. One of these situations is in the church life of the Trackton people. Most residents go to country churches for Sunday services, which are usually held twice a month. In these churches, the pastor serves not one, but several churches, and he also holds another job as well during the week. A pastor or reverend is always a man, usually a man who in his younger days was known as wild and had come to the Lord after recognizing the sins of his youth. Many pastors had been musicians entertaining in clubs before their conversion to religion. Few had formal theological training; instead they had gone to Black colleges in the South and majored in religion. Most had at least a four-year college education, and many had taken additional training at special summer programs, through correspondence courses, or in graduate programs at nearby integrated state schools. In their jobs outside the church, they were businessmen, school administrators, land-owning farmers, or city personnel.

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The country churches brought together not only residents of Trackton, a majority of whom worked in textile mills, but also school-teachers, domestic workers, hospital staff, clerks in local retail businesses, and farmers. Levels of formal education were mixed in these churches, and ranged from the elderly men and women who had had only a few years of grammar school in their youth, to the minister and some school administrators who had graduate-level education. Yet, in the church, all these types and levels of literacy skills came together in a pattern which reflected a strong reliance on the written word in both substance and style. Everyone wanted others to know he could read the Bible and church materials (even if he did not do so regularly). Church was an occasion to announce knowledge of how to handle the style of written language as well as its substance. Numerous evidences of formal writing marked every church service, and on special occasions, such as celebration of the accomplishments of a church member, formal writing was very much in evidence. For these celebration services, there were brochures which contained a picture of the individual, an account of his or her life, lists of members of the family, and details of the order of service. Funeral services included similar brochures. All churches had hymn books, and a placard on either side of the front of the church announced the numbers of the hymns. Choir leaders invited the congregation to turn to the hymn and read the words with him; he announced the number of the verses of the hymn to be sung. The minister expected adults to bring their Bibles to church along with their Sunday School materials and to read along with him or the Sunday School director. Mimeographed church bulletins dictated the order of the service from the opening hymn to the benediction. The front and back covers of the bulletin contained drawings and scripture verses which illustrated either the sermon topic or the season of the year. Announcements of upcoming events in the recreational life of the church or political activities of the Black community filled one page of the bulletin. Reports of building funds and missionary funds were brief and were supplemented by the pastor’s announcements in church service.

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Yet many parts of the service move away from the formality of these written sources. The congregation often begins singing the hymn written in the book, but they quickly move away from the written form to ‘raise’ the hymn. In this performance, the choir leader begins the hymn with the written words and the congregation follows briefly; however, another song leader will break in with new words for a portion of the hymn; the audience waits to hear these, then picks up the words and follows. The hymn continues in this way, with different members of the congregation serving as song leader at various points. Some of the words may be those which are written in the hymnbook, others may not be. A member of the congregation may begin a prayer at a particular juncture of the hymn, and the congregation will hum until the prayer is completed. The ending of the hymn is to an outsider entirely unpredictable, yet all members of the congregation end at the same time. Hymns may be raised on the occasion of the announcement of a hymn by the choir leader, spontaneously during a story or testimonial by a church member, or near the end of a sermon. In the raising of a hymn, written formulas are the basis of the hymn, but these are subject to change, and it is indeed that change which makes the congregation at once creator and performer. The formulas are changed and new formulas produced to expand the theme, to illustrate points, or to pull back from a particular theme to pick up another which has been introduced in a prayer or in the sermon. Every performance of a particular hymn is different, and such performances bear the mark of the choir leader and his interactional style with the congregation.

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A similar phenomenon is illustrated in oral prayers in church. These are often written out ahead of time by those who have been asked by the minister to offer a prayer at next Sunday’s service. The prayer as follows was given orally by a 45-year-old female school teacher.

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After the service, when I asked the schoolteacher about her prayer, she gave me the following text she had composed and written on a card she held in her hand during the prayer:

Kind heavenly Father, we thank thee for watching over us through the night.

We thank thee for thy guidance, kind heavenly Father, for your strong protection.

We pray that you will be with us, Lord, be with our families, young and old, near and far.

Lead us not into temptation, Lord. Make us strong and ever mindful of your gifts to us all. Amen.

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A comparison of the oral and the written prayer indicates numerous differences, but the major ones are of four types.

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Use of formulaic vocatives. Oh Lord, kind heavenly Father, and Jesus appear again and again in the prayer once the woman has left the printed text. In the written text, all but the final sentence contains such a vocative, but in the oral text, there are often two per sentence. In descriptions of folk sermons, such vocatives are said to be pauses in which the preacher collects his thoughts for the next passage (Rosenberg, 1970). Here, however, the thoughts have been collected, in that the entire text was written out before delivery, but the speaker continues to use these vocatives and to pause after these before moving on to another plea.

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Expression of personal involvement. Throughout the written version, the woman uses we, but in the expanded oral version, she shifts from we to I, and uses my and me where the plural might have been used had she continued the pattern from the written version. She shifts in line 10 to a singular plea, speaking as the weak sinner, the easily tempted, and praying for continued strength and readiness to being helped by her Lord. The written prayer simply asks for guidance (orally stated as ‘leadin’ ’ and ‘guidin’ ’) and strong protection (‘strong-arm protection’ and ‘protector’ in the oral version). The plea that the sinner not be faced with temptation is expressed in the written version in a familiar phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, and is followed by a formulaic expression often used in ministers’ prayers Make us ever mindful of. . . At line 22, she stops using thee, thy, and thou, archaic personal pronouns; thereafter she uses second person singular you.

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Expression in a wide variety of sentence structures. The written version uses simple sentences throughout, varying the style with insertion of vocatives, and repetitions of paired adjectives (‘young and old’, ‘near and far’). The spoken version includes compound-complex sentences with subordination, and repetition of simple sentences with variation (e.g., ‘I can call on ’im’. . .). There are several incomplete sentences in the spoken version (line 16–18), which if completed would have been complex in structure.

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Use of informal style and Black English vernacular forms. The opening of the spoken version and the written version uses standard English forms, and the first suggestion of informality comes with the dropping of the g in line 4. As the prayer progresses, however, several informal forms and features associated with the Black English vernacular are used: ’long( = along), childrens, ’im( = him), anytime o’day, he’p(= help), ’signed( = assigned), omission of there (in lines 36, 37) and use of it for standard English in line 38, double negative (lines 36, 37, 38, 40), cain’t( = can’t), and mo’( = more).

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There is no way to render the shifts of prosody, the melodic strains, and the changes in pace which accompany the spoken version. The intonation pattern is highly marked, lilting, and the speaker breaks into actual melody at the end of line 10, and the remainder of the prayer is chanted. (Note that at this point she also shifted to the singular first person pronoun.) Sharp pitch modulations mark the prayer, and on one occasion (end of line 35), a member of the congregation broke in with a supporting bar of the melody, lasting only 3.5 seconds). All vocatives after line 6 are marked by a lilting high rise–mid fall contour.

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It is possible to find in numerous studies of the religious life of Afro-Americans lengthy discussions of the historical role of the spoken word (see, for example, Levine, 1977:155ff for a discussion of literacy and its effects on Black religion). Current research with preachers (e.g., Mitchell, 1970; Rosenberg, 1970) and gospel songwriters (e.g., Jackson, 1966; Heilbut, 1971) in Black communities underscore and pick up numerous themes from historical studies. Repeatedly these sources emphasize the power of words as action and the substantiating effect a dynamic creative oral rendering of a message has on an audience. Preachers and musicians claim they cannot stick to a stable rendering of written words; thoughts which were once shaped into words on paper become recomposed in each time and space; written words limit a performance which must be created anew with each audience and setting. Though some of the meaning in written words remains stable, bound in the text, the meaning of words people will carry with them depends on the integration of those words into personal experience. Thus the performance of words demands the calling in of the personal experience of each listener and the extension by that listener of the meanings of those words to achieve the ultimate possibility of any message.

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In terms of the usual expectations of distinctions between the oral and literate mode, practices in the church life of Trackton residents provide evidence that neither mode is in control here. Members have access to both and use both. Oral spontaneous adjustments from the written material result in longer, more complex sentences, with some accompanying shifts in style from the formal to the more informal. Clearly in the oral mode, the highly personalized first person singular dominates over the more formal collective first person. Pacing, rate of speech, intonation, pitch, use of melodic phrases, and finally a chant, have much fluctuation and range from high to low when written materials are recomposed spontaneously. Spoken versions of hymns, prayers, and sermons show the speaker’s attempt to identify with the audience, but this identification makes use of only some features usually associated with the oral tradition (e.g., high degree of involvement of speaker, extensive use of first person). Other features associated with oral performance (e.g., simple sentences linked together by simple compounds, and highly redundant formulaic passages which hold chunks of information together) are not found here. The use of literate sources, and even literate bases, for oral performances does not lead to a demise of many features traditionally associated with a pure oral tradition. In other words, the language forms and uses on such occasions bear the mark of both oral and literate traditions, not one or the other.