Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [46]
And this was the beginning of his life as a man. He was just past twenty-one; the century was not yet one year old. He moved into town, into the room that awaited him at the top of the house in which he worked, and he began to preach. He married Deborah in that same year. After the death of his mother, he began to see her all the time. They went to the house of God together, and because there was no one, any more, to look after him, she invited him often to her home for meals, and kept his clothes neat, and after he had preached they discussed his sermons; that is, he listened while she praised.
He had certainly never intended to marry her; such an idea was no more in his mind, he would have said, that the possibility of flying to the moon. He had known her all his life; she had been his older sister’s older friend, and then his mother’s faithful visitor; she had never, for Gabriel, been young. So far as he was concerned, she might have been born in her severe, her sexless, long and shapeless habit, always black or gray. She seemed to have been put on earth to visit the sick, and to comfort those who wept, and to arrange the last garments of the dying.
Again, there was her legend, her history, which would have been enough, even had she not been so wholly unattractive, to put her for ever beyond the gates of any honorable man’s desires. This, indeed, in her silent, stolid fashion, she seemed to know: where, it might be, other women held as their charm and secret the joy that they could give and share, she contained only the shame that she had borne—shame, unless a miracle of human love delivered her, was all she had to give. And she moved, therefore, through their small community like a woman mysteriously visited by God, like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool. No ornaments ever graced her body; there was about her no tinkling, no shining, and no softness. No ribbon falsified her blameless and implacable headgear; on her woolen head there was only the barest minimum oil. She did not gossip with the other women—she had nothing, indeed, to gossip about—but kept her communication to yea and nay, and read her Bible, and prayed. There were people in the church, and even men carrying the gospel, who mocked Deborah behind her back; but their mockery was uneasy; they could never be certain but that they might be holding up to scorn the greatest saint among them, the Lord’s peculiar treasure and most holy vessel.
‘You sure is a godsend to me, Sister Deborah,’ Gabriel would sometimes say. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
For she sustained him most beautifully in his new condition; with her unquestioning faith in God, and her faith in him, she, even more than the sinners who came crying to the altar after he had preached, bore earthly witness to his calling; and speaking, as it were, in the speech of men she lent reality to the mighty work that the Lord had appointed to Gabriel’s hands.
And she would look up at him with her timid smile. ‘You hush, Reverend. It’s me that don’t never kneel down without I thank the Lord for you.’
Again: she never called him Gabriel or ‘Gabe,’ but from the time that he began to preach she called him Reverend, knowing that the Gabriel whom she had known as a child was no more, was a new man in Christ Jesus.
‘You ever hear from Florence?’ she sometimes asked.
‘Lord, Sister Deborah, it’s me that ought to be asking you. That girl don’t hardly never write to me.’
‘I ain’t heard from her rea