Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [37]
‘You can’t go,’ he said. ‘You can’t go. You can’t go and leave your mother thisaway. She need a woman, Florence, to help look after her. What she going to do here, all alone with me?’
She pushed him from her and moved to stand over her mother’s bed.
‘Ma,’ she said, ‘don’t be like that. Ain’t a thing can happen to me up North can’t happen to me here. God’s everywhere, Ma. Ain’t no need to worry.’
She knew that she was mouthing words; and she realized suddenly that her mother scorned to dignify these words with her attention. She had granted Florence the victory—with a promptness that had the effect of making Florence, however dimly and unwillingly, wonder if her victory was real. She was not weeping for her daughter’s future, she was weeping for the past, and weeping in an anguish in which Florence had no part. And all of this filled Florence with terrible fear, which, which was immediately transformed into anger. ‘Gabriel can take care of you,’ she said, her voice shaking with malice. ‘Gabriel ain’t never going to leave you. Is you, boy?’ and she looked at him. He stood, stupid with bewilderment and grief, a few inches from the bed. ‘But me,’ she said, ‘I got to go.’ She walked to the center of the room again, and picked up her bag.
‘Girl,’ Gabriel whispered, ‘ain’t you got feelings at all?’
‘Lord!’ her mother cried; and at the sound her heart turned over; she and Gabriel, arrested, stared at the bed. ‘Lord, Lord, Lord! Lord, have mercy on my sinful daughter! Stretch out your hand and hold her back from the lake that burns forever! Oh, my Lord, my Lord!’ and her voice dropped, and broke, and tears ran down her face. ‘Lord, I done my best with all the children what you give me. Lord, have mercy on my children, and my children’s children.’
‘Florence,’ said Gabriel, ‘please don’t go. You ain’t really fixing to go and leave her like this?’
Tears stood suddenly in her own eyes, though she could not have said what she was crying for. ‘Leave me be,’ she said to Gabriel, and picked up her bag again. She opened the door; the cold, morning air came in. ‘Good-bye.’ she said. And then to Gabriel: ‘Tell her I said good-bye.’ She walked through the cabin door and down the short steps into the frosty yard. Gabriel watched her, standing frozen between the door and the weeping bed. Then, as her hand was on the gate, he ran before her, and slammed the gate shut.
‘Girl, where you going? What you doing? You reckon on finding some men up North to dress you in pearls and diamonds?’
Violently, she opened the gate and moved out into the road. He watched her with his jaw hanging, and his lips loose and wet. ‘If you ever see me again,’ she said, ‘I won’t be wearing rags like yours.’
All over the church there was only the sound, more awful than the deepest silence, of the prayers of the saints of God. Only the yellow, moaning light shone above them, making their faces gleam like muddy gold. Their faces, and their attitudes, and their many voices rising as one voice made John think of the deepest valley, the longest night, of Peter and Paul in the dungeon cell, one praying while the other sang; or of endless, depthless, swelling water, and no dry land in sight, the true believer clinging to a spar. And, thinking of to-morrow, when the church would rise up, singing, under the booming Sunday light, he thought of the light for which they tarried, which, in an instant, filled the soul, causing (throughout those iron-dark, unimaginable ages before John had come into the world) the new-born in Christ to testify: Once I was blind and now I see.
And then they sang: ‘Walk in the light, the beautiful light. Shine all around me by day and by night, Jesus, the light of the world.’ And they sang: ‘Oh, Lord, Lord, I want to be ready, I want to be ready. I want to be ready to walk in Jerusalem just like John.’
To walk in Jerusalem just like John. To-night, his mind was awash with visions: nothing remained. He was ill with doubt and searching. He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God. Or else he wished to stand up now, and leave this tabernacle and never see these people any more. Fury and anguish filled him, unbearable, unanswerable; his mind was stretched to breaking. For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees to-night, and he, a witness.
My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful s