Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [84]
But what a turning! How could she fail to pray that He would have mercy on her son, and spare him the sin-born anguish of his father and his mother. And that his heart might know a little joy before the long bitterness descended.
Yet she knew that her weeping and her prayers were in vain. What was coming would surely come; nothing could stop it. She had tried, once, to protect someone and had only hurled him into prison. And she thought to-night, as she had thought so often, that it might have been better, after all, to have done what she had first determined in her heart to do—to have given her son away to strangers, who might have loved him more than Gabriel had ever loved him. She had believed him when he said that God had sent him to her for a sign. He had said that he would cherish her until the grave, and that he would love her nameless son as though he were his own flesh. And he had kept the letter of his promise: he had fed him and clothed him and taught him the Bible—but the spirit was not there. And he cherished—if he cherished her—only because she was the mother of his son, Roy. All of this she had through the painful years divined. He certainly did not know she knew it, and she wondered if he knew it himself.
She had met him through Florence. Florence and she had met at work in the middle of the summer, a year after Richard’s death. John was then over six months old.
She was very lonely that summer, and beaten down. She was living alone with John in a furnished room even grimmer than the room that had been hers in Madame Williams’s apartment. She had, of course, left Madame Williams’s immediately upon the death of Richard, saying that she had found a sleep-in job in the country. She had been terribly grateful that summer for Madame Williams’s indifference; the woman had simply not seemed to see that Elizabeth, overnight, had become an old woman and was half mad with fear and grief. She wrote her aunt the driest, and briefest, and coldest of notes, not wishing in any way to awaken whatever concern might yet slumber in her breast, telling her the same thing she had told Madame Williams, and telling hr not to worry, she was in the hands of God. And she certainly was; through a bitterness that only the hand of God could have laid on her, this same hand brought her through.
Florence and Elizabeth worked as cleaning-women in a high, vast, stony office-building on Wall Street. They arrived in the evening and spent the night going through the great deserted halls and the silent offices with mops and pails and brooms. It was terrible work, and Elizabeth hated it; but it was at night, and she had taken it joyfully, since it meant that she could take care of John herself all day and not have to spend extra money to keep in a nursery. She worried about him all night long, of course, but at least at night he was sleeping. She could only pray that the house would not burn down, that he would not fall out of bed or, in some mysterious way, turn on the gas-burner, and she had asked the woman next door, who unhappily drank too much, to keep an eye out for him. This woman, with whom she sometimes spent an hour or so in the afternoons, and her landlady, were the only people she saw. She had stopped seeing Richard’s friends because, for some reason, she did not want them to know about Richard’s child; and because, too, the moment he was dead it became immediately apparent on both sides how little they had in common. And she did not seek new people; rather, she fled from them. She could not bear, in her changed and fallen state, to submit herself to the eyes of others. The Elizabeth that she had been was buried far away—with her lost and silent father, with her aunt, in Richard’s grave—and the Elizabeth she had become she did not recognize, she did not want to know.
But one night, when work w