Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [88]
Gabriel rose, it seemed to her, with a speed and eagerness that were not merely polite. She wondered immediately if Florence had told him about her. And this caused her to stiffen with a tentative anger against Florence, and with pride and fear. Yet when she looked into his eyes she found there a strange humility, an altogether unexpected kindness. She felt the anger go out of her, and her defensive pride; but somewhere, crouching, the fear remained.
Then Florence introduced them, saying: ‘Elizabeth, this here’s my brother I been telling you so much about. He’s a preacher, honey—so we got to be mighty careful what we talk about when he’s around.’
Then she said, with a smile less barbed and ambiguous than his sister’s remark: ‘Ain’t no need to be afraid of me, sister. I ain’t nothing but a poor, weak vessel in the hands of the Lord.’
‘You see!’ said Florence, grimly. She took John from his mother’s arms. ‘And this here’s little Johnny,’ she said, ‘shake hands with the preacher, Johnny.’
But John was staring at the door that held back the music; towards which, with an insistence at once furious and feeble, his hands were still outstretched. He looked questioningly, reproachfully, at his mother, who laughed, watching him, and said, ‘Johnny want to hear some more of that music. He like to started dancing when we was coming up the stairs.’
Gabriel laughed, and said, circling around Florence to look into John’s face: ‘Got a man in the Bible, son, who like music, too. He used to play on his harp before the king, and he got to dancing once day before the Lord. You reckon you going to dance for the Lord one of these days?’
John looked with a child’s impenetrable gravity into the preacher’s face, as though he were turning this question over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it out. Gabriel smiled at him, a strange smile—strangely, she thought, loving—and touched him on the crown of the head.
‘He a mighty fine boy,’ said Gabriel. ‘With them big eyes he ought to see everything in the Bible.’
And they all laughed. Florence moved to deposit John in the easy chair that was his Sunday throne. And Elizabeth found that she was watching Gabriel, unable to find in the man before her the brother whom Florence so despised.
They sat down at the table, John placed between herself and Florence and opposite Gabriel.
‘So,’ Elizabeth said, with a nervous pleasantness, it being necessary, she felt, to say something, ‘you just getting to this big city? It must seem mighty strange to you.’
His eyes were still on John, whose eyes had not left him. Then he looked again at Elizabeth. She felt that the air between them was beginning to be charged, and she could find no name, or reason, for the secret excitement that moved in her.
‘It’s mighty big,’ he said, ‘and looks to me—and sounds to me—like the Devil’s working every day.’
This was in reference to the music, which had not ceased, but she felt, immediately, that it included her; this, and something else in Gabriel’s eyes, made her look down quickly to her plate.
‘He ain’t,’ said Florence, briskly, ‘working no harder up here than he worked down home. Them niggers down home,’ she said to Elizabeth, ‘they think New York ain’t nothing but one long, Sunday drunk. They don’t know. Somebody better tell them—they can get better moonshine right there where they is than they likely to here—and cheaper, too.’
‘But I do hope,’ he said, with a smile, ‘that you ain’t taken to drinking moonshine, sister.’
‘It wasn’t never me,’ she said, promptly, ‘had that habit.’
‘Don’t know,’ he persisted, still smiling, and still looking at Elizabeth, ‘tell me folks do things up North they wouldn’t think about doing down home.’
‘Folks got their dirt to do,’ said Florence. ‘They going to do it, no matter where they is. Folks do lot of things down home they don’t want nobody to know about.’
‘Like my aunt used to say,’ Elizabeth said, smiling timidly, ‘she used to say, folks sure better not do in the dark what they’s scared to look at in the light.’
She had meant it as a kind of joke; but the words were not