Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [24]
‘What did you say?’ his father asked.
‘I told you,’ said Roy, ‘not to touch my mother.’
‘You cursed me,’ said his father.
Roy said nothing; neither did he drop his eyes.
‘Gabriel,’ said his mother, ‘Gabriel. Let us pray….’
His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tear were in his eyes.
‘Gabriel,’ cried Aunt Florence, ‘ain’t you done playing the fool for to-night?’
Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream.
‘My Lord, my Lord,’ his father whispered, ‘my Lord, my Lord.’
He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning.
Hid Aunt Florence and his father faced each other.
‘Yes, Lord,’ Aunt Florence said, ‘you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.’
John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight-thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed.
John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step further. The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world. John moved forward, hearing his feet crack against the sagging wood, to where the golden cross on the red field of the altar cloth glowed like smothered fire, and switched on one weak light.
In the air of the church hung, perpetually, the odor of dust and sweat; for, like the carpet in his mother’s living-room, the dust of this church was invincible; and when the saints were praying or rejoicing, their bodies gave off an acrid, steamy smell, a marriage of the odors of dripping bodies and soaking, starched white linen. It was a store-front church and had stood, for John’s lifetime, on the corner of this sinful avenue, facing the hospital to which criminal wounded and dying were carried almost every night. The saints, arriving, had rented this abandoned store and taken out the fixtures; had painted the walls and built a pulpit, moved in a piano and camp chairs, and bought the biggest Bible they could find. They put white curtains in the show window, and painted across this window TEMPLE OF THE FIRE BAPTIZED. Then they were ready to do the Lord’s work.
And the Lord, as He had promised to the two or three first gathere