Walk Through Darkness Read Online Free PDF

directed the boy to sit down at the base of a boysenberry tree. He bade him to eat his apple.
    William fumbled with the fruit. He went so far as to bring it up to his mouth and to test the skin against his teeth, but he didn’t bite into it. He could barely keep his hands from shaking, and he feared that any action, even chewing, would somehow betray him. He sat on the verge of flinching every time the man moved, however innocent his gesture: raising a hand to shoo away the flies, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket, a phlegmy clearing of his throat. He had never experienced his owner in such proximity. Mason’s odor was almost overpowering. A fragrant powder wafted up out of his clothing, an irritating substance like pollen. It was all William could do to hold the apple near his face and keep from coughing.
    Mason cracked open a book and read of the world’s creation, of the darkness that had been upon the lifeless void and how God filled it with light and life and water and all the creatures that roamed the earth. He read some of the story of the first human couple. Then he skipped forward and told of the evil that so soon came to rule the land and the flood that God sent to cleanse it away. He told of Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, andJapheth, from whom all the people of the world were descended. He paused and studied the boy for a moment. He dabbed his brow with his handkerchief and asked if he recognized the Truth contained within this book? Did he know that it had been written at the command of the one and only God of all creation? Did he understand that its doctrines were the Word of the Lord and that they could never be doubted, for in doubting was sin and in sin was eternal damnation?
    William mumbled, “Yessuh.”
    “Is that ‘yes, sir’ meant to encompass everything I have read thus far?
Everything?”
    William hesitated. He wasn’t sure how to answer. The man wanted to hear that he understood, didn’t he? Or did he want to hear that he didn’t understand? He wasn’t sure which way to respond, and it didn’t occur to him for a second to answer truthfully. “Suh?” he said, casting the word somewhere between a statement and a question.
    “Do you … Well, I mean to say, do you …” Mason exhaled in an exasperated way that set the boy’s heart beating even more rapidly. “It is a lot I ask of you, I know. Just the other day I had a conversation with a learned man from Virginia, who swore that it was useless to instruct Negroes in biblical truths as the race was biologically and morally incapable of true comprehension. I disagreed. I need not trouble your mind with the intricacies of it all, but no harm can be done by trying to convey to you some simplified version of the principle points. Not to mention, as I told the gentleman, that you and your race have a place in here.” He punctuated his statement by jabbing a finger into the open book. “Yes, you do. And that is just what we’ve come to discuss. Let me see …”
    William felt an ant bite into his big toe. He let his eye drop down to study it, just for a second, then tried to focus his gaze into the empty space just before his face.
    “And Noah began to be a husbandman,”
Mason began.
“And heplanted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. And he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’
” Mason held up a finger as if he expected William to interrupt him. “
And he said, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge