Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [27]
John said nothing. He touched a black key on the piano and it made a dull sound, like a distant drum.
‘You got to remember,’ Elisha said, turning now to look at him, ‘that you think about it with a carnal mind. You still got Adam’s mind, boy, and you keep thinking about your friend, you want to do what they do, and you want to go to the movies, and I bet you think about girls, don’t you, Johnny? Sure you do,’ he said, half smiling, finding his answer in John’s face, ‘and you don’t want to give up all that. But when the Lord saves you He burns out all that old Adam, He gives you a new mind and a new heart, and then you don’t find no pleasure in the world, you get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus every day.’
He stared in a dull paralysis of terror at the body of Elisha. He saw him standing—had Elisha forgotten?—beside Ella Mae before the altar while Father James rebuked him for the evil that lived in the flesh. He looked into Elisha’s face, full of questions he would never ask. And Elisha’s face told him nothing.
‘People say it’s hard,’ said Elisha, bending again to his mop, ‘but, let me tell you, it ain’t as hard as living in this wicked world and all the sadness of the world where there ain’t no pleasure nohow, and then dying and going to Hell. Ain’t nothing as hard as that.’ And he looked back at John. ‘You see how the Devil tricks people into losing their soul?’
‘Yes,’ said John at last, sounding almost angry, unable to bear his thoughts, unable to bear the silence in which Elisha looked at him.
Elisha grinned. ‘They got girls in the school I go to’—he was finished with one side of the church and he motioned to John to replace the chairs—‘and they nice girls, but their minds ain’t on the Lord, and I try to tell them the time to repent ain’t to-morrow, it’s to-day. They think ain’t no sense to worrying now, they can sneak into Heaven on their deathbed. But I tell them, honey, ain’t everybody lies down to die—people going all the time, just like that, to-day you see them and to-morrow you don’t. Boy, they don’t know what to make of old Elisha because he don’t go to movies, and he don’t dance, and he don’t play cards, and he don’t go with them behind the stairs.’ He paused and stared at John, who watched him helplessly, not knowing what to say. ‘And boy, some of them is real nice girls, I mean beautiful girls, and when you got so much power that they don’t tempt you then you know you saved sure enough. I just look at them and I tell them Jesus saved me one day, and I’m going to go all the way with Him. Ain’t no woman, no, nor no man neither going to make me change my mind.’ He paused again, and smiled and dropped his eyes. ‘That Sunday,’ he said, ‘that Sunday, you remember?—when Father got up in the pulpit and called me an Ella Mae down because he thought we was about to commit sin—well, boy, I don’t want to tell no lie, I was mighty hot against the old man that Sunday. But I thought about it, and the Lord made me to see that he was right. Me and Ella Mae, we didn’t have nothing on our minds at all, but look like the devil is just everywhere—sometime the Devil he put his hand on you and look like you just can’t breathe. Look like you just a-burning up, and you got to do something, and you can’t do nothing; I been on my knees many a time, weeping and wrestling before the Lord—crying, Johnny—and calling on Jesus’ name. That’s the only name that’s got power over Satan. That’s the way it’s been with me sometime, and I’m saved. What you think it’s going to be like for you, boy?’ He looked at John, who, head down, was putting the chairs in order. ‘Do you want to be saved, Johnny?’
‘I don’t know,’ John said.
‘Will you try him? Just fall on your knees one day and ask him to help you to pray?’
John turned away, and looked out over the church, which now seemed like a vast, high field, ready for the harvest. He thought of a First Sunday, a Communion Sunday not long ago when the saints, dressed all in white, ate flat, unsalted Jewish bread, which was the body of the Lord, and drank red grape juice, which was His blood. And when they rose from the table, prepared especially for this day, they separated, the men on the one side, and the women on the other, and two basins were filled with water so that they could wash each other’s feet, as Christ had commanded His disciples to do. They knelt before each other, woman before woman, and man before man, and washed and dried each other’