Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [52]
Yet, he thought, he would hold his peace awhile; he would seek to know more clearly the Lord’s mind in this matter. For he remembered how much older she was than he—eight years; and he tried to imagine, for the first time in his life, that dishonor to which Deborah had been forced so many years ago by white men: her skirts above her head, her secrecy discovered—by white men. How many? Had she borne it? Had she screamed? Then he thought (but it did not really trouble him, for if Christ to save him could be crucified, he, for Christ’s greater glory, could well be mocked) of what smiles would be occasioned, what filthy conjecture, barely sleeping now, would mushroom upward overnight like Jonah’s gourd, when people heard that he and Deborah were going to be married. She, who had been the living proof and witness of their daily shame, and who had become their holy fool—and he, who had been the untamable despoiler of their daughters, and thief of their women, their walking prince of darkness! And he smiled, watching their elders’ well-fed faces and their grinding jaws—unholy pastors all, unfaithful stewards; he prayed that he would never be so fat, or so lascivious, but that God should work through him a mighty work: to ring, it might be, through ages yet unborn, as sweet, solemn, mighty proof of His everlasting love and mercy. He trembled with the presence that surrounded him now; he could scarcely keep his seat. He felt that light shone down on him from Heaven, on him, the chosen; he felt as Christ must have felt in the temple, facing His so utterly confounded elders; and he lifted up his eyes not caring for their glances, or their clearing of throats, and the silence that abruptly settled over the table, thinking: ‘Yes. God works in many mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’
‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, much later that night as he was walking her to her door, ‘the Lord done laid something on my heart and I want you to help me to pray over it and ask Him to lead me right.’
He wondered if she could divine what was in his mind. In her face there was nothing but patience, as she turned to him, and said: ‘I’m praying all the time. But I sure will pray extra hard this week if you want me to.’
And it was during this praying time that Gabriel had a dream.
He could never afterwards remember how the dream began, what had happened, or who he was with in the dream; or any details at all. For there were really two dreams, the first like a dim, blurred, infernal foreshadowing of the second. Of this first dream, the overture, he remembered only the climate, which had been like the climate of his day—heavy, with danger everywhere, Satan at his shoulder trying to bring him down. That night as he tried to sleep, Satan sent demons to his bedside—old friends he had had, but whom he saw no more, and drinking and gambling scenes that he had thought would never rise to haunt him again, and women he had known. And the women were so real that he could nearly touch them; and he heard again their laughter and their sighs, and felt beneath his hands their thighs and breasts. Though he closed his eyes and called on Jesus—calling over and over again the name of Jes