Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [75]
No, she did not accuse him; but she accused her aunt, and this from the moment she understood that her aunt had loved her mother, but did not love him. This could only mean that her aunt could not love her, either, and nothing in her life with her aunt ever proved Elizabeth wrong. It was true that her aunt was always talking of how much she loved her sister’s daughter, and what great sacrifices she had made on her account, and what great care she took to see to it that Elizabeth should grow up a good, Christian girl. But Elizabeth was not for a moment fooled, and did not, for as long as she lived with her, fail to despise her aunt. She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt’s mind.
And yet, to-night, in her great confusion, she wondered if she had not been wrong; if there had not been something that she had overlooked, for which the Lord had made her suffer. ‘You little miss great-I-am,’ her aunt had said to her in those days, ‘you better watch your step, you hear me? You go walking around with your nose in the air, the Lord’s going to let you fall right on down to the bottom of the ground. You mark my words. You’ll see.’
To this perpetual accusation Elizabeth had never replied; she merely regarded her aunt with a wide-eyed insolent stare, meant at once to register her disdain and to thwart any pretext for punishment. And this trick, which she had, unconsciously, picked up from her father, rarely failed to work. As the years went on, her aunt seemed to gauge in a look the icy distances that Elizabeth had put between them, and that would certainly never be conquered now. And she would add, looking down, and under her breath: ‘ ’Cause God don’t like it.’
‘I sure don’t care what God don’t like, or you, either,’ Elizabeth heart replied. ‘I’m going away from here. He’s going to come and get me, and ‘I’m going away from here.’
‘He’ was her father, who never came. As the years passed, she replied only: ‘I’m going away from here.’ And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.
But, yes—there was something she had overlooked. Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. She had not known this: she had not imagined that she could fall. She wondered, to-night, how she could give this knowledge to her son; if she could help him to endure what could now no longer be changed; if for ever, she came into the store alone, wearing her best white summer dress and with her hair, newly straightened and curled at the ends, tied with a scarlet ribbon. She was going to a great church picnic with her aunt, and had come in to buy some lemons. She passed the owner of the store, who was a very fat man, sitting out on the pavement, fanning himself; he asked her, as she passed, if it was hot enough for her, and she said something and walked into the dark, heavy-smelling store, where flies buzzed, and where Richard sat on the counter reading a book.
She felt immediately guilty about having disturbed him, and muttered apologetically that she only wanted to buy some lemons. She expected him to get them for her in his sullen fashion and go back to his book, but he smiled, and said:
‘Is that all you want? You better think now. You sure yo