Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [86]
He, at that moment, to her exasperated relief, became the most cheerful of infants. Florence was wearing a heavy, old-fashioned garnet brooch, which, as she opened the door, immediately attracted John’s eye. He began reaching for the brooch and babbling and spitting at Florence as though he had known her all of his short life.
‘Well!’ said Florence, ‘when he get big enough to really go after the ladies you going to have your hands full, girl.’
‘That,’ said Elizabeth, grimly, ‘is the Lord’s truth. He keeps me so busy now I don’t know half the time if I’m coming or going.’
Florence, meanwhile, attempted to distract John’s attention from the brooch by offering him an orange; but he had seen oranges before; he merely looked at it a moment before letting it fall to the floor. He began again, in his disturbingly fluid fashion, to quarrel about the brooch.
‘He like you,’ said Elizabeth, finally, calmed a little by watching him.
‘You must be tired,’ said Florence, then: ‘Put him down there.’ And she dragged one large easy chair to the table so that John could watch them while they ate.
‘I got a letter from my brother the other day,’ she said, bringing the food to the table. ‘His wife, poor ailing soul. done passed on, and he thinking about coming North.’
‘You ain’t never told me,’ said Elizabeth, with a quick and rather false interest, ‘you had a brother! And he coming up here?’
‘So he say. Ain’t nothing, I reckon, to keep him down home no more—now Deborah’s gone.’ She sat down opposite Elizabeth. ‘I ain’t seen him,’ she said, musingly, ‘for more than twenty years.’
‘Then it’ll be a great day,’ Elizabeth smiled, ‘when you two meet again.’
Florence shook her head, and motioned for Elizabeth to start eating. ‘No,’ she said, ‘we ain’t never got along, and I don’t reckon he’s changed.’
‘Twenty years is a mighty long time,’ Elizabeth said, ‘he’s bound to have changed some.’
‘That man,’ said Florence, ‘would have to do a whole lot of changing before him and me hit it off. No,’—she paused, grimly, sadly—‘I’m mighty sorry he’s coming. I didn’t look to see him no more in this world—or in the next one, neither.’
This was not, Elizabeth felt, the way a sister ought to talk about her brother, especially to someone who knew him not at all, and who would, probably, eventually meet him. She asked, helplessly:
‘What do he do—your brother?’
‘He some kind of preacher,’ said Florence. ‘I ain’t never heard him. When I was home he weren’t doing nothing but chasing after women and lying in the ditches, drunk.’
‘I hope,’ laughed Elizabeth, ‘he done changed his ways at least.’
‘Folks,’ said Florence, ‘can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, thoughtfully. ‘But don’t you think,’ she hesitantly asked, ‘that the Lord can change a person’s heart?’
‘I done heard it said often enough,’ said Florence, ‘but I got yet to see it. These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with. I reckon the Lord done give them those hearts—and, honey, the Lord don’t give out no second helpings, I’m here to tell you.’
‘No,’ said Elizabeth heavily, after a long pause. She turned to look at John, who was grimly destroying the square, tasseled doilies that decorated Florence’s easy chair. ‘I reckon that’s the truth. Look like it go around once, and that’s that. You miss it, and you’s fixed for fair.’
‘Now you sound,’ said Florence, ‘mighty sad all of a sudden. What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. She turned back to the table. Then, helplessly, and thinking that she must not say too much: ‘I was just thinking