Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [35]
At last, Gabriel, dressed in an old white shirt and short linen pants, stood on the edge of the water. Then he was slowly led into the river, where he had so often splashed naked, until he reached the preacher. And the moment that the preacher threw him down, crying out the words of John the Baptist, Gabriel began to kick and sputter, nearly throwing the preacher off balance; and though at first they thought that it was the power of the Lord that worked in him, they realized as he rose, still kicking and with his eyes tightly shut, that it was only fury, and too much water in his nose. Some folks smiled, but Florence and Deborah did not smile. Though Florence had also been indignant, years before when the slimy water entered her incautiously open mouth, she had done her best not to sputter, and she had not cried out. But now, here came Gabriel, floundering and furious up the bank, and what she looked at, with an anger more violent than any she had felt before, was his nakedness. He was drenched, and his thin, white clothes clung like another skin to his black body. Florence and Deborah looked at one another, while the singing rose to cover Gabriel’s howling, and Deborah looked away.
Years later, Deborah and Florence had stood on Deborah’s porch at night and watched a vomit-covered Gabriel stagger up the moonlight road, and Florence had cried out: ‘I hate him! I hate him! Big, black, prancing tomcat of a nigger!’ And Deborah had said, in that heavy voice of hers: ‘You know, honey, the Word tell us to hate the sin but not the sinner.’
In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty-six, Florence walked out through the cabin door. She had thought to wait until her mother, who was so ill now that she no longer stirred out of bed, should be buried—but suddenly she knew that she would wait no longer, the time had come. She had been working as cook and serving-girl for a large white family in town, and it was on the day her master proposed that she become his concubine that she knew her life among these wretched people had come to its destined end. She left her employment that same day (leaving behind her a most vehement conjugal bitterness), and with part of the money that with cunning, cruelty, and sacrifice she had saved over a period of years, bought a railroad ticket to New York. When she bout it, in a kind of scarlet rage, she held like a talisman at the back of her mind the thought: ‘I can give it back, I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go.’ But she knew that nothing could stop her.
And it was this leave-taking that came to stand, in Florence’s latter days, and with other many witness, at her bedside. Gray clouds obscured the sun that day, and outside the cabin window she saw that mist still covered the ground. Her mother lay in bed, awake; she was pleading with Gabriel, who had been out drinking the night before, and who was not really sober now, to mend his ways and come to the Lord. And Gabriel, full of the confusion, and pain, and guilt that were his whenever he thought of how he made his mother suffer, but that became nearly insupportable when she taxed him with it, stood before the mirror, head bowed, buttoning his shirt. Florence knew that he could not unlock his lips to speak; he could not say yes to his mother, and to the Lord; and he could not say no.
‘Honey,’ their mother was saying, ‘don’t you let your old mother die without you look her in the eye and tell her she going to see you in glory. You hear me, boy?’
In a moment, Florence thought with scorn, tears would fill his eyes, and he would promise to ‘do better.’ He had been promising t