Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [48]
Deborah, unasked, fasted with him, and prayed, and took his best black suit away, so that it would be clean and mended and freshly pressed for the great day. And she took it away again, immediately afterwards, so that it would be no less splendid on the Sunday of the great dinner that was officially to punctuate the revival. This Sunday was to be the feast day for everyone, but more especially for the twenty-four elders, who were, that day, to be gloriously banqueted at the saints’ expense and labor. On the evening when he was to preach, he and Deborah walked together to the great, lighted, lodge hall that had but lately held a dance band, and that the saints had rented for the duration of the revival. The service had already begun; light spilled outward into the streets, music filled the air, and passers-by paused to listen and to peek in through the half-open doors. He wanted all of them to enter; he wanted to run through the streets and drag all sinners in to hear the Word of God. Yet, as they approached the doors, the fear held in check so many days and nights rose in him again, and he thought how he would stand to-night, so high, and all alone, to vindicate the testimony that had fallen from her lips, that God had called him to preach.
‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, suddenly, as they stood before the doors, ‘you sit where I can see you?’
‘I sure will do that, Reverend,’ she said. ‘You go on up there. Trust God.’
Without another word he turned, leaving her in the door, and walked up the long aisle to the pulpit. They were all there already, big, comfortable, ordained men; they smiled and nodded as he mounted the pulpit steps; and one of them said, nodding towards the congregation, which was as spirited as any evangelist could wish: ‘Just getting these folks warmed up for you, boy. Want to see you make them holler to-night.’
He smiled in the instant before he knelt down at his throne-like chair to pray; and thought again, as he had been thinking for eleven nights, that there was about his elders an ease in the holy place, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy. While he sat, waiting, he saw that Deborah had found a seat in the very front of the congregation, just below the pulpit, and sat with her Bible folded on her lap.
When, at last, the Scripture lesson read, the testimonies in, the songs sung, the collection taken up, he was introduced—by the elder who had preached the night before—and found himself on his feet, moving toward the pulpit where the great Bible awaited him, and over that sheer drop the murmuring congregation; he felt a giddy terror that he stood so high, and with this, immediately, a pride and joy unspeakable that God had placed him there.
He did not begin with a ‘shout’ song, or with a fiery testimony; but in a dry, matter-of-fact voice, which trembled only a little, asked them to look with him at the sixth chapter of Isaiah, and the fifth verse; and he asked Deborah to read it aloud for him.
And as she read, in a voice unaccustomedly strong: ‘ “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts,” ’
Silence filled the lodge hall after she had read this sentence. For a moment Gabriel was terrified by the eyes on him, and by the elders at his back, and could not think how to go on. Then he looked at Deborah, and began.
These words had been uttered by the prophet Isaiah, who had been called the Eagle-eyed because he had looked down the dark centuries and foreseen the birth of Christ. It was Isaiah also who had prophesied that a man should be as a hiding-place from the wind and tempest, Isaiah who had described the way of holiness, saying that the parched ground should become a pool and the thirsty land springs of water: the very desert would rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It was Isaiah who had prophesied, saying: ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is