Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [23]
‘Amen to that,’ said Aunt Florence, ‘tell that foolish nigger something.’
‘You can tell that foolish son of yours something,’ he said to his wife with venom, having decided, it seemed, to ignore his sister, ‘him standing there with them big buck-eyes. You can tell him to take this like a warning from the Lord. This is what white folks does to niggers. I been telling you, now you see.’
‘He better take it like a warning?’ shrieked Aunt Florence. ‘He better take it? Why, Gabriel, it ain’t him went half-way across this city to get in a fight with white boys. This boy in the sofa went deliberately, with a whole lot of other boys, all the way to the west side, just looking for a fight. I declare, I do wonder what goes on in your head.’
‘You know right well,’ his mother said, looking directly at his father, ‘that Johnny don’t travel with the same class of boys as Roy goes with. You done beat Roy too many times, here, in this very room for going out with them bad boys. Roy got hisself hurt this afternoon because he was out doing something he didn’t have no business doing, and that’s the end of it. You ought to be thanking your Redeemer he ain’t dead.’
‘And for all the care you take of him,’ he said, ‘he might as well be dead. Don’t look like you much care whether he lives, or dies.’
‘Lord, have mercy,’ said Aunt Florence.
‘He’s my son, too,’ his mother said, with heat. ‘I carried him in my belly for nine months and I know him just like I know his daddy, and they’s just exactly alike. Now. Uou ain’t got no right in the world to talk to me like that.’
‘I reckon you know,’ he said, choked, and breathing hard, ‘all about a mother’s love. I sure reckon on you telling me how a woman can sit in the house all day and let her own flesh and blood go out and get half butchered. Don’t you tell me you don’t know no way to stop him, because I remembered my mother, God rest her soul, and she’d have found a way.’
‘She was my mother, too,’ said Aunt Florence, ‘and I recollect, if you don’t, you being brought home many a time more dead than alive. She didn’t find no way to stop you. She wore herself out beating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here.’
‘My, my, my,’ he said, ‘you got a lot to say.’
‘I ain’t doing a thing,’ she said, ‘but trying to talk some sense into your big, black, hard head. You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrongdoings.’
‘Never mind, Florence,’ his mother said, ‘it’s all over and done with now.’
‘I’m out of this house,’ he shouted, ‘every day the Lord sends, working to put the food in these children’s mouths. Don’t you think I got a right to ask the mother of these children to look after them and see that they don’t break their necks before I get back home?’
‘You ain’t got but one child,’ she said, ‘that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy. No, I can’t stop him, I done told you that, and you can’t stop him neither. You don’t know what to do with this boy, and that’s why you all the time trying ton fix the blame on somebody. Ain’t nobody to blame, Gabriel. You just better pray God to stop him before somebody puts another knife in him and put him in his grave.’
They stared at each other a moment in an awful pause, she with a startled, pleading question in her eyes. Then, with all his might, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She crumpled at once, hiding her face with one thing hand, and Aunt Florence moved to hold her up. Sarah watched all this with greedy eyes. Then Roy sat up, and said in shaking voice:
‘Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.’
In the moment that these words filled the room, ad hung in the room like the infinitesimal mome