Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [54]
Then she tried to smile, and began, instead, to weep. With a movement at once violent and hesitant, she let her head fall forward on his breast.
‘No,’ she brought out, muffled in his arms, ‘I ain’t scared.’ But she did not stop weeping.
He stroked her coarse, bowed head. ‘God bless you, little girl,’ he said, helplessly. ‘God bless you.’
The silence in the church ended when Brother Elisha, kneeling near the piano, cried out and fell backward under the power of the Lord. Immediately, two or three others cried out also, and a wind, a foretaste of that great downpouring they awaited, swept the church. With this cry, and the echoing cries, the tarry service moved from its first stage of steady murmuring, broken by moans and now and again an isolated cry, into that stage of tears and groaning, of calling aloud and singing, which was like the labor of a woman about to be delivered of her child. On this threshing-floor the child was the soul that struggled to the light, and it was the church that was in labor, that did not cease to push and pull, calling on the name of Jesus. When Brother Elisha cried out and fell back, Sister McCandless rose and stood over him to help him pray. For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.
Sister Price began to sing:
‘I want to go through, Lord,
I want to go through.
Take me through, Lord
Take me through.’
A lone voice, joined by others, among them, waveringly, the voice of John. Gabriel recognized the voice. When Elisha cried, Gabriel was brought back in an instant to this present time and place, fearing that it was John he heard, that it was John who lay astonished beneath the power of the Lord. He nearly looked up and turned around; but then he knew it was Elisha, and his fear departed.
‘Have your way, Lord,
Have your way.’
Neither of his sons was here to-night, had ever cried on the threshing-floor. One had been dead for nearly fourteen years—dead in a Chicago tavern, a knife kicking in his throat. And the living son, the child, Roy, was headlong already, and hardhearted: he lay at home, silent now, and bitter against his father, a bandage on his forehead. They were not here. Only the son of the bond-woman stood where the rightful heir should stand.
‘I’ll obey, Lord,
I’ll obey.’
He felt that he should rise and pray over Elisha—when a man cried out, it was right that another man should be his intercessor. And he thought how gladly he would rise, and with what power he would pray if it were only his son who lay crying on the floor to-night. But he remained, bowed low, on his knees. Each cry that came from the fallen Elisha tore through him. He heard the cry of his dead son and his living son; one that cried in the pit forever, beyond the hope of mercy; and one who would cry one day when mercy would be finished.
Now Gabriel tried, with the testimony he had held, with all the signs of His favor that God had shown him, to put himself between the living son and the darkness that waited to devour him. The living son had cursed him—bastard— and his heart was far from God; it could not be that the curse he had heard to-night falling from Roy’s lips was but the course repeated, so far, so long resounding, that the mother of his first son had uttered as she thrust the infant from her—herself immediately departing, this curse yet on her lips, into eternity. Her course had devoured the first Royal; he had been begotten in sin, and he had perished in sin; it was God’s punishment, and it was just. But Roy had been begotten in the marriage bed, the bed that Paul described as holy, and it was to him the Kingdom had been promised. It could not be that the living son was cursed for the sins of his father; for God, after much groaning, after many years, had given him a sign to make him know he was forgiven. And yet, it came to him that this living son, this headlong, living Royal, might be cursed for the sin of his mother, whose sin had never been truly repented; for that the living proof of her sin, he who knelt to-night, a very interloper among the saints, stood between her soul and God.
Yes, she hardhearted, stiff-neck, and hard to bend