Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [11]
John looked at him. Roy was not in a good mood.
‘I ain’t said nothing to you,’ he said.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said Roy, in the shrill, little-girl tone he knew John hated.
‘What’s the matter with you to-day?’ John asked, angry, and trying at the same time to lend his voice as husky a pitch as possible.
‘Don’t you let Roy bother you,’ said their mother. ‘He cross as two sticks this morning.’
‘Yeah,’ said John, ‘I reckon.’ He and Roy watched each other. Then his plate was put before him: hominy grits and a scrap of bacon. He wanted to cry, like a child: ‘But, Mama, it’s my birthday!’ He kept his eyes on his plate and began to eat.
‘You can talk about your Daddy all you want to,’ said his mother, picking up her battle with Roy, ‘but one thing you can’t say—you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.’
‘I been hungry plenty of times,’ Roy said, proud to be able to score this point against his mother.
‘Wasn’t his fault, then. Wasn’t because he wasn’t trying to feed you. Than man shoveled snow in zero weather when he ought’ve been in bed just to put food in your belly.’
‘Wasn’t just my belly,’ said Roy indignantly. ‘He got a belly, too, I know—it’s a shame the way that man eats. I sure ain’t asked him to shovel no snow for me.’ But he dropped his eyes, suspecting a flaw in his argument. ‘I just don’t want him beating on me all the time,’ he said at last. ‘I ain’t no dog.’
She sighed, and turned slightly away, looking out of the window. ‘Your Daddy beats you,’ she said, ‘because he loves you.’
Roy laughed. ‘That ain’t the kind of love I understand, old lady. What you reckon he’d do if he didn’t love me?’
‘He’d let you go right on,’ she flashed, ‘right on down to hell where it looks like you is just determined to go anyhow! Right on, Mister Man, till somebody puts a knife in you, or takes you off to jail!’
‘Mama,’ John asked suddenly, ‘is Daddy a good man?’
He had not known that he was going to ask the question, and he watched in astonishment as her mouth tightened and her eyes grew dark.
‘That ain’t no kind of question,’ she said mildly. ‘You don’t know no better men, do you?’
‘Looks to me like he’s a mighty good man,’ said Sarah. ‘He sure is praying all the time.’
‘You children is young,’ their mother said, ignoring Sarah and sitting down again at the table, ‘and you don’t know how lucky you is to have a father what worries about you and tries to see to it that you come up right.’
‘Yeah,’ said Roy, ‘we don’t know how lucky we is to have a father what don’t want you to go to movies, and don’t want you to play in the streets, and don’t want you to have no friends, and he don’t want this and he don’t want that, and he don’t want you to do nothing. We so lucky to have a father who just wants us to go to church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar and stay home all nice and quiet, like a little mouse. Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don’t know what I done to be so lucky.’
She laughed. ‘You going to find out one day,’ she said, ‘you mark my words.’
‘Yeah,’ said Roy.
‘But it’ll be too late, then,’ she said. ‘It’ll be too late when you come to be … sorry.’ Her voice had changed. For a moment her eyes met John’s eyes, and John was frightened.. He felt that her words, after the strange fashion God sometimes chose to speak to men, were dictated by Heaven and were meant for him. He was fourteen—was it too lat? And thus uneasiness was reinforced by the impression, which at that moment he realized had been his all along, that his mother was not saying everything she meant. What, he wondered, did she say to Aunt Florence when they talked together? Or to his father? What were her thoughts? Her face would never tell. And yet, looking down at him in a moment that was like a secret, passing sign, her face did tell him. Her thoughts were bitter.
‘I don’t care,’ Roy said, rising. ‘When I have children I ain’t going to treat them like this.’ John watched his mother; she watched Roy. ‘I’m sure this ain’t no way to be. Ain’t got no right to have a houseful of chil