Now Abel Ah Yo, in his theology and word wizardry, was as much mixed a
personage as Billy Sunday. In his genealogy he was much more mixed, for
he was compounded of one-fourth Portuguese, one-fourth Scotch, one-fourth
Hawaiian, and one-fourth Chinese. The Pentecostal fire he flamed forth
was hotter and more variegated than could any one of the four races of
him alone have flamed forth. For in him were gathered together the
cannyness and the cunning, the wit and the wisdom, the subtlety and the
rawness, the passion and the philosophy, the agonizing spirit-groping and
the legs up to the knees in the dung of reality, of the four radically
different breeds that contributed to the sum of him. His, also, was the
clever self-deceivement of the entire clever compound.
When it came to word wizardry, he had Billy Sunday, master of slang and
argot of one language, skinned by miles. For in Abel Ah Yo were the five
verbs, and nouns, and adjectives, and metaphors of four living languages.
Intermixed and living promiscuously and vitally together, he possessed in
these languages a reservoir of expression in which a myriad Billy Sundays
could drown. Of no race, a mongrel _par excellence_, a heterogeneous
scrabble, the genius of the admixture was superlatively Abel Ah Yo’s.
Like a chameleon, he titubated and scintillated grandly between the
diverse parts of him, stunning by frontal attack and surprising and
confouding by flanking sweeps the mental homogeneity of the more simply
constituted souls who came in to his revival to sit under him and flame
to his flaming.
Abel Ah Yo believed in himself and his mixedness, as he believed in the
mixedness of his weird concept that God looked as much like him as like
any man, being no mere tribal god, but a world god that must look equally
like all races of all the world, even if it led to piebaldness. And the
concept worked. Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hawaiian, Porto Rican,
Russian, English, French—members of all races—knelt without friction,
side by side, to his revision of deity.
Himself in his tender youth an apostate to the Church of England, Abel Ah
Yo had for years suffered the lively sense of being a Judas sinner.
Essentially religious, he had foresworn the Lord. Like Judas therefore
he was. Judas was damned. Wherefore he, Abel Ah Yo, was damned; and he
did not want to be damned. So, quite after the manner of humans, he
squirmed and twisted to escape damnation. The day came when he solved
his escape. The doctrine that Judas was damned, he concluded, was a
misinterpretation of God, who, above all things, stood for justice.
Judas had been God’s servant, specially selected to perform a
particularly nasty job. Therefore Judas, ever faithful, a betrayer only
by divine command, was a saint. Ergo, he, Abel Ah Yo, was a saint by
very virtue of his apostasy to a particular sect, and he could have
access with clear grace any time to God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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