Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [51]
But, near the end of the dinner, when the women had brought up the pies, and coffee, and cream, and when the talk around the table had become more jolly and more good-naturedly loose than ever, the door had but barely closed behind the women when one of the elders, a heavy, cheery, sandy-haired man, whose face, testifying no doubt to the violence of his beginnings, was splashed with freckles like dried blood, laughed and said, referring to Deborah, that there was a holy woman, all right! She had been choked so early on white men’s milk, and it remained so sour in her belly yet, that she would never be able, now, to find a nigger who would let her taste his richer, sweeter substance. Everyone at the table roared, but Gabriel felt his blood turn cold that God’s ministers should be guilty of such abominable levity, and that that woman sent by God to comfort him, and without whose support he might already have fallen by the wayside, should be held in such dishonor. They felt, he knew, that among themselves a little rude laughter could do no harm; they were too deeply rooted in the faith to be made to fall by such an insignificant tap from Satan’s hammer. But he stared at their boisterous, laughing faces, and felt that they would have much to answer for on the day of judgment, for they were stumbling-stones in the path of the true believer.
Now the sandy-haired man, struck by Gabriel’s bitter astounded face, bit his laughter off, and said: ‘What’s the matter, son? I hope I ain’t said nothing to offend you?’
‘She read the Bible for you the night you preached, didn’t she?’ asked another of the elders, in a conciliatory tone.
‘That woman,’ said Gabriel, feeling a roaring in his head, ‘is my sister in the Lord.’
‘Well, Elder Peters here, he just didn’t know that,’ said someone else. ‘He sure didn’t mean no harm.’
‘Now, you ain’t going to get mad?’ asked Elder Peters, kindly—yet there remained, to Gabriel’s fixed attention, something mocking in his face and voice. ‘You ain’t going to spoil our little dinner?’
‘I don’t think it’s right,’ said Gabriel, ‘to talk evil about nobody. The Word tell me it ain’t right to hold nobody up to scorn.’
‘Now you just remember,’ Elder Peter said, as kindly as before, ‘you’s talking to your elders.’
‘Then it seem to me,’ he said, astonished at his boldness, ‘that if I got to look to you for a example, you ought to be an example.’
‘Now, you know,’ said someone else, jovially, ‘you ain’t fixing to make that woman your wife or nothing like that—so ain’t no need to get all worked up and spoil our little gathering. Elder Peters didn’t mean no harm. If you don’t never say nothing worse that that, you can count yourself already up there in the Kingdom with the chosen.’
And at this a small flurry of laughter swept over the table; they went back to their eating and drinking, as though the matter were finished.
Yet Gabriel felt that he has surprised them; he had found them out and they were a little ashamed and confounded before his purity. And he understood suddenly the words of Christ, where it was written: ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’ Yes, and he looked around the table, already jovial again, but rather watchful now, too, of him—and he wondered who, of all these, would sit in glory at the right hand of the Father?
And then, as he sat there, remembering again Elder Peter’s boisterous, idle remark, this remark shook together in him all those shadowy doubts and fears, those hesitations and tend