Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [47]
‘And serve her right, too—she ain’t had no business going away from here like she did, just like a crazy woman.’ And then he asked, maliciously: ‘She tell you if she married yet/’
She looked at him quickly, and looked away. ‘Florence ain’t thinking about no husband,’ she said
He laughed. ‘God bless you for your pure heart, Sister Deborah. But if that girl ain’t gone away from here a-looking for a husband, my name ain’t Gabriel Grimes.’
‘If she’d a-wanted a husband look to me like she could a-just picked one right here. You don’t mean to tell me she done traveled all the way North just for that?’ And she smiled strangely, a smile less gravely impersonal. He, seeing this, thought that it certainly did a strange thing to her face; it made her look like a frightened girl.
‘You know,’ he said, watching her with more attention, ‘Florence ain’t never thought none of these niggers around here was good enough for her.’
‘I wonder,’ she ventured, ‘if she ever going to find a man good enough for her. She so proud—look like she just won’t let anybody come near her.’
‘Yes,’ he said, frowning, ‘she so proud the Lord going to bring her low one day. You mark my words.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘the Word sure do tell us that pride goes before destruction.’
‘And a haughty spirit before a fall. That’s the Word.’
‘Yes,’ and she smiled again, ‘ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend? You is just go to be in it, that’s all—’cause every word is true, and the gates of Hell ain’t going to be able to stand against it.’
He smiled, watching her, and felt a great tenderness fill his heart. ‘You just stay in the Word, little sister. The windows of Heaven going to open up and pour down blessings on you till you won’t know where to put them.’
When she smiled now it was with a heightened joy. ‘He done blessed me already, Reverend. He blessed me when He saved your soul and sent you out to preach His gospel.’
‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, slowly, ‘all that sinful time—was you a-praying for me?’
Her tone dropped ever so slightly. ‘We sure was, Reverend. Me and your mother, we was a-praying all the time.’
And he looked at her, full of gratitude and a sudden, wild conjecture: he had been real for her, she had watched him, and prayed for him during all those years when she, for him, had been nothing but a shadow. And she was praying for him still; he would have her prayers to aid him all his life long—he saw this, now, in her face. She said nothing, and she did not smile, only looked at him with her grave kindness, now a little questioning, a little shy.
‘God bless you, sister,’ he said at last.
It was during this dialogue, or hard on the heels of it, that the town was subjected to a monster revival meeting. Evangelists from all the surrounding counties, from as far south as Florida and as far north as Chicago, came together in one place to break the bread of life. It was called the Twenty-Four Elders Revival Meeting, and it was the great occasion of that summer. For there were twenty-four of them, each one given his night to preach—to shine, as it were, before men, and to glorify his Heavenly Father. Of these twenty-four, all of them men of great experience and power, and some of them men of great fame, Gabriel, to his astonished pride, was asked to be one. This was a great, a heavy honor for one so young in the faith and in years—who had but only yesterday been lying, vomit-covered, in the gutters of sin—and Gabriel felt his heart shake with fear as this invitation came to him. Yet he felt that it was the hand of God that called him out so early to prove himself before such mighty men.
He was to preach on the twelve night. It was decided, in view of his possible failure to attract, to support him on either side with a nearly equal number of war horses. He would have, thus, the benefits of the storm they would certainly have stirred up before him; and should he fail to add substantially to the effect they had created, there would be others coming after him to obliterate his performance.
But Gabriel did not want his performance—the most important of his career so far, and on which so much depended—to be obliterated; he