Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [78]
She, for very terror on hearing this, had wept; yet she could not deny that for such an abundance of bitterness there was a positive fountain of grief. There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other. Now she understood in this nervous, hollow, ringing city, that nervousness of Richard’s which had so attracted her—a tension so total, and so without the hope, or the possibility of release, or resolution, that she felt it in his muscles, and heard it in his breathing, even as on her breast he fell asleep.
And this was perhaps why she had never thought to leave him, frightened though she was during all that time, and in a world in which, had it not been for Richard, she could have found no place to put her feet. She did not leave him, because she was afraid of what it might happen to him without her. She did not resist him, because he needed her. And she did not press about marriage because, upset as he was about everything, she was afraid of having him upset about her, too. She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even to-night, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry?
They had been very happy together, in the beginning; and until the very end he had been very good to her, had not ceased to love her, and tried always to make her know it. No more than she had been able to accuse her father had she ever been able to accuse him. His weakness she understood, and his terror, and even his bloody end. What life had made him bear, her lover, this wild, unhappy boy, many another stronger and more virtuous man might not have borne so well.
Saturday was their best day, for they only worked until o’clock. They had all the afternoon to be together, and nearly all of the night, since Madame William had her séances on Saturday night and preferred that Elizabeth, before whose silent skepticism departed spirits might find themselves reluctant to speak, should not be in the house. They met at the service entrance. Richard was always there before her, looking, oddly, much younger and less anonymous without the ugly, tight-fitting, black uniform that he had to wear when working. He would be talking, or laughing with some of the other boys, or shooting dice, and when he heard her step down the long, stone hall he would look up, laughing; and wickedly nudging one of the other boys, he would half shout, half sing: ‘He-y! Look-a-there, ain’t she pretty?’
She never failed, at this—which was why he never failed to do it—to blush, half-smiling, half-frowning, and nervously to touch the collar of her dress.
‘Sweet Georgia Brown!’ somebody might say.
‘Miss Brown to you,’ said Richard, then, and took her arm.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ somebody else would say, ‘you better hold on to little Miss Bright-eyes, don’t somebody sure going to take her away from you.’
‘Yeah,’ said another voice, ‘and it might be me.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Richard, moving with her toward the street, ‘ain’t nobody going to take my little Little-bit away from me.’
Little-bit: it had been his name for her. And sometimes he called her Sandwich Mouth, or Funnyface, or Frog-eyes. She would not, of course, have endured these names from anyone else, nor, had she not found herself, with joy and helplessness (and a sleeping panic), living it out, would she ever have suffered herself so publicly to become a man’s property—‘concubine,’ her aunt would have said, and at night