Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [28]
Elisha looked at him and smiled. ‘You think about what I say, boy.’
When they were finished Elisha sat down at the piano and played to himself. John sat on a chair in the front row and watched him.
‘Don’t look like nobody’s coming to-night,’ he said after a long while. Elisha did not arrest his playing of a mournful song: ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on me.’
‘They’ll be here,’ said Elisha.
And as he spoke there was a knocking on the door. Elisha stopped playing. John went to the door, where two sisters stood, Sister McCandless and Sister Price.
‘Praise the Lord, son,’ they said.
‘Praise the Lord,’ said John.
They entered, heads bowed and hands folded before them around their Bibles. They bore the black cloth coats that they wore all week and they had old felt hats on their heads. John felt a chill as they passed him, and he closed the door.
Elisha stood up, and they cried again: ‘Praise the Lord!’ Then the two women knelt for a moment before their seats to pray. This was also passionate ritual. Each entering saint, before he could take part in the service, must commune for a moment alone with the Lord. John watched the praying women. Elisha sat again at the piano and picked up his mournful song. The women rose, Sister Price first, and then Sister McCandless, and looked around the church.
‘Is we the first?’ asked Sister Price. Her voice was mild, her skin was copper. She was younger than Sister McCandless by several years, a single woman who had never, as she testified, known a man.
‘No, Sister Price,’ smiled Brother Elisha, ‘Brother Johnny here was the first. Him and me cleaned up this evening.’
‘Brother Johnny is mighty faithful,’ said Sister McCandless. ‘The Lord’s going to work with him in a mighty way, you mark my words.’
There were times—whenever, in fact, the Lord had shown His favor by working through her—when whatever Sister McCandless said sounded like a threat. To-night she was still very much under the influence of the sermon she had preached the night before. She was an enormous woman, one of the biggest and blackest God had ever made, and He had blessed her with a mighty voice with which to sing and preach, and she was going out soon into the field. For many years the Lord had pressed Sister McCandless to get up, as she said, and move; but she had been of timid disposition and feared to set herself above the others. Not until He laid her low, before this very altar, had she dared to rise and preach the gospel. But now she had buckled on her traveling shoes. She would cry aloud and spare not, and lift up her voice like a trumpet in Zion.
‘Yes,’ said Sister Price, with her gentle smile, ‘He says that he that is faithful in little things shall be made chief over many.’
John smiled back at her, a smile that, despite the shy gratitude it was meant to convey, did not escape being ironic, or even malicious. But Sister Price did not see this, which deepened John’s hidden scorn.
Ain’t but you two who cleaned the church? asked Sister McCandless with an unnerving smile—the smile of the prophet who sees the secrets hidden in the hearts of men.
‘Lord, Sister McCandless,’ said Elisha, ‘look like it ain’t never but us two. I don’t know what the other young folks does on Saturday nights, but they don’t come nowhere near here.’
Neither did Elisha usually come anywhere near the Church on Saturday evenings; but as the pastor’s nephew he was entitled to certain freedoms; in him it was a virtue that he came at all.
‘It sure is time we had a revival among our young folks,’ said Sister McCandless. ‘They cooling off something terrible. The Lord ain’t going to bless no church what lets its young people get so lax, no sir. He said, because you ain’t neither hot or cold I’m going to spit you outen my mouth. That’s the Word.’ And she looked around sternly, and Sister Price nodded.
‘And Brother Johnny here ain’t even saved yet,’ said Elisha. ‘Look like the saved young people would be as