Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [79]
She was descending with Richard to the sea. She would have to climb back up alone, but she did not know this then. Leaving the boys in the hall, they gained the midtown New York streets.
‘And what we going to do to-day, Little-bit?’ With that smile of his, and those depthless eyes, beneath the towers of the white city, with people, white, hurrying all around them.
‘I don’t know, honey. What you want to do?’
‘Well, maybe, we go to a museum.’
The first time he suggested this, she demanded, in panic, if they would be allowed to enter.
‘Sure, they let niggers in,’ Richard said. ‘Ain’t we got to be educated, too—to live with the motherf——s?
He never ‘watched’ his language with her, which at first she took as evidence of his contempt because she had fallen so easily, and which later she took as evidence of his love.
And then he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand.
For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they give him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this. She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him.
But on other Saturdays they went to see a movie; they went to see a play; they visited his friends; they walked through Central Park. She liked the park because, however spuriously, it re-created something of the landscape she had known. How many afternoons had they walked there! She had always, since, avoided it. They bought peanuts and for hours fed the animals at the zoo; they bought soda pop and drank it on the grass; they walked along the reservoir and Richard explained how a city like a New York found water to drink. Mixed with her fear for him was a total admiration: that he had learned so young, so much. People stared at them but she did not mind; he noticed, but he did not seem to notice. But sometimes he would ask, in the middle of a sentence—concerned, possibly, with ancient Rome:
‘Little-bit—d’you love me?’
And she wondered how he could doubt it. She thought how infirm she must be not to have been able to make him know it; and she raised her eyes to his, and she said the only thing she could say:
‘I wish to God I may die if I don’t love you. There ain’t no sky above us if I don’t love you.’
Then he would look ironically up at the sky, and take her arm with a firmer pressure, and they would walk on.
Once, she asked him:
‘Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?’
And he looked at her a long moment. Then:
‘Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.’
‘Then how come you got to be so smart? how come you got to know so much?’
And he smiled, pleased, but he said: ‘Little-bit, I don’t know so much.’ Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she