Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [36]
She put down her bag in the center of the hateful room.
‘Ma,’ she said, ‘I’m going. I’m a-going this morning.’
Now that she had said it, she was angry with herself for not having said it the night before, so that they would have had time to be finished with their weeping and their arguments. She had not trusted herself to withstand the night before; but now there was almost no time t. The center of her mind was filled with the image of the great, white clock at the railway station, on which the hands did not cease to move.
‘You going where?’ her mother asked sharply. But she knew that her mother had understood, had indeed long before this moment known that this time would come. The astonishment with which she stared at Florence’s bag was not altogether astonishment, but a startled, wary attention. A danger imagined had become present and real, and her mother was already searching for a way to break Florence’s will. All this Florence knew in a moment, and it made her stronger. She watched her mother, waiting.
But at the tone of his mother’s voice Gabriel, who had scarcely heard Florence’s announcement, so grateful had he been that something had occurred to distract from him his mother’s attention, dropped his eyes and saw Florence’s traveling-bag. And he repeated his mother’s question in a stunned, angry voice, understanding it only as the words hit the air:
‘Yes, girl. Where you think you going?’
‘I’m going, she said, ‘to New York. I got my ticket.’
And her mother watched her. For a moment no one said a word. Then, Gabriel, in a changed and frightened voice, asked:
‘And when you done decide that?’
She did not look at him, nor answer his question. She continued to watch her mother. ‘I got my ticket,’ she repeated. ‘I’m going on the morning train.’
‘Girl,’ asked her mother, quietly, ‘is you sure you know what you’s doing?’
She stiffened. seeing in her mother’s eyes a mocking pity. ‘I’m a woman grown,’ she said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘And you going,’ cried Gabriel, ‘this morning—just like that? And you going to walk off and leave your mother—just like that?’
‘You hush,’ she said, turning to him for the first time, ‘she got you, ain’t she?’
This was indeed, she realized as he dropped his eyes, the bitter, troubling point. He could not endure the thought of being left alone with his mother, with nothing whatever to put between himself and his guilty love. With Florence gone, time would have swallowed up all his mother’s children, except himself; and he, then, must make amends for all the pain that she had borne, and sweeten her last moments with all his proofs of love. And his mother required of him one proof only, that he tarry no longer in sin. With Florence gone, his stammering time, his playing time, contracted with a bound to the sparest interrogative second, when he must stiffen himself, and answer to his mother, and all the host of Heaven, yes or no.
Florence smiled inwardly a small, malicious smile, watching his slow bafflement, and panic, and rage: and she looked at her mother again. ‘She got you,’ she repeated. ‘She don’t need me.’
‘You going north,’ her mother said, then. ‘And when you reckon on coming back?’
‘I don’t reckon on coming back,’ she said.
‘You come crying back soon enough,’ said Gabriel, with malevolence, ‘soon as they whip your butt up there four or five times.’
She looked at him again. ‘Just don’t you try to hold your breath till then, you hear?’
‘Girl,’ said her mother, ‘you mean to tell me the Devil’s done made your heart so hard you can just leave your mother on her dying bed, and you don’t care if you don’t never see her in this world no more? Honey, you can’t tell me you done got so evil as all that?’
She felt Gabriel watching her to see how she would take this question—the question that, for all her determination, she had dreaded most to hear. She looked away from her mother, and straightened, catching her breath, looking outwards through the small, cracked window. There outside, beyond the slowly rising mist, and farther off that her eyes could see, her life awaited her. The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead.
‘I’m going, Ma,’ she said. ‘I got to go.’
Her mother leaned back, face upward to the light and began to cry. Gabriel moved to Florence’s side and gra