Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [55]
Once he had asked Elizabeth—they had been married a long while, Roy was a baby, and she was big with Sarah—if she had truly repented of her sin.
And she looked at him, and said: ‘You done asked me that before. And I done told you, yes.’
But he did not believe her; and he asked: ‘You mean you wouldn’t do it again? If you was back there, where you was, like you was then—would you do it again?’
She looked down; then, with impatience, she looked into his eyes again: ‘Well, if I was back there, Gabriel, and I was the same girl! …’
There was a long silence, while she waited. Then, almost unwillingly, he asked: ‘And … would you let him be born again?’
She answered, steadily: ‘I know you ain’t asking me to say I’m sorry I brought Johnny in the world. Is you?’ And when he did not answer: ‘And listen, Gabriel. I ain’t going to let you make me sorry. Not you, nor nothing, nor nobody in this world. We is got two children, Gabriel, and soon we’s going to have three; and I ain’t going to make no difference amongst them and you ain’t going to make none neither.’
But how could not be difference between the son of a weak, proud woman and some careless boy, and the son that God had promised him, who would carry down the joyful line his father’s name, and who would work until the day of the second coming to bring about His father’s Kingdom? For God had promised him this so many years ago, and he had lived only for this—forsaking the world and its pleasures, and the joys of his own life, he had tarried all these bitter years to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. He had let Esther die, and Royal had died, and Deborah had died barren—but he had held on to the promise; he had walked before God in true repentance and waited on the promise. And the time of fulfillment was surely at hand. He had only to possess his soul in patience and wait before the Lord.
And his mind, dwelling bitterly on Elizabeth, yet moved backwards to consider once again Esther, who had been the mother of the first Royal. And he saw her, with the dumb, pale, startled ghosts of joy and desire hovering in him yet, a thin, vivid, dark-eyed girl, with something Indian in her cheekbones and her carriage and her hair; looking at him with that look in which were blended mockery, affection, desire, impatience, and scorn; dressed in the flame-like colors that, in fact, she had seldom worn, but that he always thought of her as wearing. She was associated in his mind with flame; with fiery leaves in autumn, and the fiery sun going down in the evening over the farthest hill, and with the eternal fires of Hell.
She had come to town very shortly after he and Deborah were married, and she took a job as serving-girl with the same white family for which he worked. He saw her, therefore, all the time. Young men were always waiting for her at the back door when her work was done: Gabriel used to watch her walk off in the dusk on a young man’s arm, and their voices and their laughter floated back to him like a mockery of his condition. He knew that she lived with her mother and stepfather, sinful people, giving to drinking and gambling and ragtime music and the blues, who never, except at Christmas-time or Easter, appeared in church.
He began to pity her, and one day when he was to preach in the evening he invited her to come to church. This invitation marked the first time she ever really looked at him—he realized it then, and was to remember that look for many days and nights.
‘You really going to preach to-night? A pretty man like you?’
‘With the Lord’s help,’ he said, with a gravity so extreme that it was almost hostility. At the same time, at her look and voice something leaped in him that he thought had been put down for ever.
‘Well, I be mighty delighted,’ she said after a moment, seeming to hav