Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [65]
He stole the money while Deborah slept. And he gave it to Esther in the morning. She gave notice that same day, and a week later she was gone—to Chicago, said her parents, to find a better job and to have a better life.
Deborah became more silent than ever in the weeks that followed. Sometimes he was certain she had discovered that the money was missing and knew that he had taken it—sometimes he was certain that she knew nothing. Sometimes he was certain that she knew everything: the theft, and the reason for the theft. But she did not speak. In the middle of the spring he went out into the field tom preach, and was gone three months. When he came back he brought the money with him and put it in the box again. No money had been added in the meanwhile, so he still could not be certain whether Deborah knew or not.
He decided to let it all be forgotten, and begin his life again.
But the summer brought him a letter, with no return name or address, but postmarked from Chicago. Deborah gave it to him at breakfast, not seeming to have remarked the hand or the postmark, along with the bundle of tracts from a Bible house which they both distributed each week through the town. She had a letter too, from Florence, and it was perhaps this novelty that distracted her attention.
Esther’s letter ended:
What I think is, I made a mistake, that’s true, and I’m paying for it now. But don’t you think you ain’t going to pay for it—I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I know you going to be brought low one of these days. I ain’t holy like you are, but I know right from wrong.
I’m going to have my baby and I’m going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain’t going to read to him out of no Bible and I ain’t going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don’t drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.
‘What Florence got to say?’ he asked dully, crumpling his letter in his fist.
Deborah looked up with a faint smile. ‘Nothing much, honey. But she sound like she going to get married.’
Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field. He could not stand his home, his job, the town itself—he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he had known all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he saw his guilt in everybody’s eyes. When he stood in the pulpit to preach they looked at him, he felt, as though he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him as he had once condemned the twenty-three elders. When souls came weeping to the altar he scarce dared to rejoice, remembering that soul who had not bowed, whose blood, it might be, would be required of him at judgment.
So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had so transformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble. When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit of the Lord’s day, to behold things past, present, and to come, saying: ‘he which is filth, let him be filthy still,’ it was he who, crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherd boy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, wh