Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [87]
‘But you ain’t fixing, is you,’ asked Florence, ‘to stay single all your days? You’s a right young girl, and a right pretty girl. I wouldn’t be in no hurry if I was you to find no new husband. I don’t believe the nigger’s been born what knows how to treat a woman right. You got time, honey, so take your time.’
‘I ain’t,’ said Elizabeth, quietly, ‘got so much time.’ She could not stop herself; though something warned her to hold her peace, the words poured out. ‘You see this wedding ring? Well, I bought this ring myself. This boy ain’t got no daddy.’
Now she had said it: the words could not be called back. And she felt, as sheb sat, trembling, at Florence’s table, a reckless, pained relief.
Florence stared at her with a pity so intense that it resembled anger. She looked at John, and then back at Elizabeth.
‘You poor thing,’ said Florence, leaning back in her chair, her face still filled with this strange, brooding fury, ‘you is had a time, ain’t you?’
‘I was scared,’ Elizabeth brought out, shivering, still compelled to speak.
‘I ain’t never,’ said Florence, seen it to fail. Look like ain’t no woman born what don’t get walked over by some no-count man. Look like ain’t no woman nowhere but ain’t been dragged down in the dirt by some man, and left there, too, while he go on about his business.’
Elizabeth sat at the table, numb, with nothing more to say.
‘What he do,’ asked Florence, finally, ‘run off and leave you?’
‘Oh, no,’ cried Elizabeth, quickly, and the tears sprang to her eyes, ‘he weren’t like that! He died, just like I say—he got in trouble, and he died—a long time before this boy was born.’ She began to weep with the same helplessness with which she had been speaking. Florence rose and came over to Elizabeth, holding Elizabeth’s head against her breast. ‘He wouldn’t never of left me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but he died.’
And now she wept, after her long austerity, as though she would never be able to stop.
‘Hush now,’ said Florence, gently, ‘hush now. You going to frighten the little fellow. He don’t want to see his mamma cry. All right,’ she whispered to John, who had ceased his attempts at destruction, and stared now at the two women, ‘all right. Everything’s all right.’
Elizabeth sat up and reached in her handbag for a handkerchief, and began to dry her eyes.
‘Yes,’ said Florence, moving to the window, ‘the menfolk, they die, all right. And it’s us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it’s over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us. Yes, Lord——’ and she paused; she turned and came back to Elizabeth. ‘Yes, Lord,’ she repeated, ‘don’t I know.’
‘I’m mighty sorry,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to upset your nice dinner this way.’
‘Girl,’ said Florence, ‘don’t you say a word about being sorry, or I’ll show you to this door. You pick up that boy and sit down there in that easy chair and pull yourself together. I’m going out in the kitchen and make us something cold to drink. You try not to fret, honey. The Lord, He ain’t going to let you fall but so low.’
Then she met Gabriel, two or three weeks later, at Florence’s house on a Sunday.
Nothing Florence had said had prepared her for him. She had expected him to be older than Florence, and bald, or gray. But he seemed considerably younger than his sister, with all his teeth and hair. There he sat, that Sunday, in Florence’s tiny, fragile parlor, a very rock, it seemed to the eye of her confusion, in her so weary land.
She remembered that as she mounted the stairs with John’s heavy weight in her arms, and as she entered the door, she heard music, which became perceptible fainter as Florence closed the door behind her. John had heard it, too, and had responded by wriggling, and moving his hands in the air, and making noises, meant, she supposed, to be taken for a song. ‘You’s a nigger, all right,’ she thought with amusement and impatience—for it was someone’s gramophone, on a lower floor, filling the air with the slow, high, measured wailing of t