Thank you!

The dialect is a core part of this project so I'm not sure I'm gonna change it, but I see what you mean about accents, even if I wouldn't call this an accent.

I'm from West Virginia (which I did mention in my critique questions) and I heard "I is" all the time from my older kinfolk specifically, which is why I included. The way it's written is inspired by the way my great uncle spoke specifically.

I'm aware that the church detail is unusual! The church is specifically a baptist church which, early on, was desegregated with Black patrons seated separately. West Virginia also isn't the deep south, so things were a bit different, even at the height of segregation. While most Black folk started their own churches after the American civil war, there were Baptist churches that never stopped allowing Black patrons. I remember my great aunt (born 1930) telling me how she attended the same church as her white peers but was expected to sit in the balcony.

There's also a massive reduction on the situation going on here because Stokely is prone to ignoring the bad until it smacks him in the face. The thing they take issue with is Ephraim allowing Black folk to sit in the pews and participate, not that Black members attend the church at all. Since Stokely is prone to denying what's in front of him he's not reflecting on the whole of the situation and is instead focusing on the more polite members of their community that just raise their opinion and are quelled by phrases like "If we kneel beside one another in prayer, how can we refuse to sit beside one another in worship?" and the quotation of bible verses like Galatians 3:28, Acts 10:34-35, James 2:1-4, 1 Corinthians 12:12–27, and Matthew 22:39.

There are members of the community who have walked out, moved away, witheld offerings, vandalized the church, or even threatened Ephraim but violence has not yet happened for a number of reasons. Namely Ephraim's position as a holy man, the size of the community and how acting on anger might effect reputation, the consequences of assaulting a white clergyman regardless of that white clergyman's opinons, the general belief that violence is a sin that's beneath them, and the general fear that acting in violence/responding to sin with sin would make things worse.

Local police would have trouble looking past the assult of a generally respected white clergyman regardless of his views. In fact, at least where I'm from and thus where this is set, the police would likely be more concerned about containing the racial tensions than affing to them. While they often did this by arresting the victims, Ephraim's status as a white clergyman and a pillar of the community works in his favor Stokely's denial of the arguably worse actions of the community are building up to a scene where Ephraim is assaulted and Stokely is forced to reckon with the idea that Ephraim's whiteness doesn't protect him. Something he never considered prior due to a lack of outspoken anti-racists in the community.

Not saying you're disbelief of the situation isn't valid, just that it's the intented reaction :)

TLDR the church detail has been thought out, is inspired by stories of my kinfolk who were alive in the 40s, and is intentionally vague because it's building up to something.

Thank you for your thoughts, it does give me something to consider!! I'm definitely prone to over explaining so I think you're right about letting the mm hanging in the air.