Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [58]
But she did not rise, only looked at him and looked about her with a bright, pleased interest, as though she were at a theater and were waiting to see what improbable delights would next be offered to her. He somehow knew that she would never rise and walk that long aisle to the mercy seat. And this filled him for a moment with a holy rage–that she stood, so brazen, in the congregation of the righteous and refused to bow her head.
He said amen, and blessed them, and turned away, and immediately the congregation began to sing. Now, again, he felt drained and sick; he was soaking wet and he smelled the odor of his own body. Deborah, singing and beating her tambourine in the front of the congregation, watched him. He felt suddenly like a helpless child. He wanted to hide himself for ever and never cease from crying.
Esther and her mother left during the singing—they had come, then, only to hear him preach. He could not imagine what they were saying or thinking now. And he thought of to-morrow, when he would have to see her again.
‘Ain’t that the little girl what works at the same place with you?’ Deborah asked him on the way home.
‘Yes,’ he said. Now he did not feel like talking. He wanted to get home and take his wet clothes off and sleep.
‘She mighty pretty,’ said Deborah. ‘I ain’t never seen her in church before.’
He said nothing
‘Was it you invited her to come out to-night?’ she asked, after a bit.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think the Word of God could do her no harm.’
Deborah laughed. ‘Don’t look like it, does it. She walked out just as cool and sinful as she come in—she and that mother of her’n. And you preached a mighty fine sermon. Look like she just ain’t thinking about the Lord.’
‘Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord,’ he said, ‘one day He ain’t going to have no time for them.’
When they got home she offered to make him a hot cup of tea, but he refused. He undressed in silence—which she again respected—and got into bed. At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.
The next morning Esther said to him, coming into the yard while he was chopping wood for the woodpiles: ‘Good morning, Reverend. I sure didn’t look to see you to-day. I reckoned you’d be all wore out after that sermon—do you always preach as hard as that?’
He paused briefly with the axe in the air; then he turned again, bringing the axe down. ‘I preach the way the Lord leads me, sister,’ he said.
She retreated a little in the face of his hostility. ‘Well,’ she said in a different tone, ‘it was a mighty fine sermon. Me and Mama was mighty glad we come out.’
He left the axe buried in the wood, for splinters flew and he was afraid one might strike her. ‘You and your ma—you don’t get out to service much?’
‘Lord Reverend,’ she wailed, ‘look like we just ain’t got the time. Mama works so hard all week she just want to lie up in bed on Sunday. And she like me,’ she added quickly, after a pause, ‘to keep her company.’
Then he looked directly at her. ‘Does you really mean to say, sister, that you ain’t got no time for the Lord? No time at all?’
‘Reverend,’ she said, looking at him with the daring defiance of a threatened child, ‘I does my best. I really does. Ain’t everybody got to have the same spirit.’
And he laughed shortly. ‘Ain’t but one spirit you got to have—and that’s the spirit of the Lord.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that spirit ain’t got to work in everybody the same, seems to me.’