Go Tell It on the Mountain (11 page)

And he looked around the church, at the people praying there. Praying Mother Washington had not come in until all of the saints were on their knees, and now she stood, the terrible, old, black woman, above his Aunt Florence, helping her to pray. Her granddaughter,
Ella Mae, had come in with her, wearing a mangy fur jacket over her everyday clothes. She knelt heavily in a corner near the piano, under the sign that spoke of the wages of sin, and now and again she moaned. Elisha had not looked up when she came in, and he prayed in silence: sweat stood on his brow. Sister McCandless and Sister Price cried out every now and again: “Yes, Lord!” or: “Bless your name, Jesus!” And his father prayed, his head lifted up and his voice going on like a distant mountain stream.

But his Aunt Florence was silent; he wondered if she slept. He had never seen her praying in a church before. He knew that different people prayed in different ways: had his aunt always prayed in such a silence? His mother, too, was silent, but he had seen her pray before, and her silence made him feel that she was weeping. And why did she weep? And why did they come here, night after night after night, calling out to a God who cared nothing for them—if, above this flaking ceiling, there was any God at all? Then he remembered that the fool has said in his heart, There is no God—and he dropped his eyes, seeing that over his Aunt Florence’s head Praying Mother Washington was looking at him.

Frank sang the blues, and he drank too much. His skin was the color of caramel candy. Perhaps for this reason she always thought of him as having candy in his mouth, candy staining the edges of his straight, cruel teeth. For a while he wore a tiny mustache, but she made him shave it off, for it made him look, she thought, like a halfbreed gigolo. In details such as this he was always very easy—he would always put on a clean shirt, or get his hair cut, or come with her to Uplift meetings where they heard speeches by prominent Negroes about the future and duties of the Negro race. And this had given her, in the beginning of their marriage, the impression that she controlled him. This impression had been entirely and disastrously false.

When he had left her, more than twenty years before, and after more than ten years of marriage, she had felt for that moment only
an exhausted exasperation and a vast relief. He had not been home for two days and three nights, and when he did return they quarreled with more than their usual bitterness. All of the rage she had accumulated during their marriage was told him in that evening as they stood in their small kitchen. He was still wearing overalls, and he had not shaved, and his face was muddy with sweat and dirt. He had said nothing for a long while, and then he had said: “All right, baby. I guess you don’t never want to see me no more, not a miserable, black sinner like me.” The door closed behind him, and she heard his feet echoing down the long hall, away. She stood alone in the kitchen, holding the empty coffeepot that she had been about to wash. She thought: “He’ll come back, and he’ll come back drunk.” And then she had thought, looking about the kitchen: “Lord, wouldn’t it be a blessing if he didn’t never come back no more.” The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer. Frank never did come back. He lived for a long while with another woman, and when the war came he died in France.

Now, somewhere at the other end of the earth, her husband lay buried. He slept in a land his fathers had never seen. She wondered often if his grave were marked—if there stood over it, as in pictures she had seen, a small white cross. If the Lord had ever allowed her to cross that swelling ocean she would have gone, among all the millions buried there, to seek out his grave. Wearing deep mourning, she would have laid on it, perhaps, a wreath of flowers, as other women did; and stood for a moment, head bowed, considering the unspeaking ground. How terrible it would be for Frank to rise on the day of judgment so far from home! And he surely would not scruple, even on that day, to be angry at the Lord. “Me and the Lord,” he had often said, “don’t always get along so well. He running the world like He thinks I ain’t got good sense.” How had he died? Slow or sudden? Had he cried out? Had death come creeping on him from behind, or faced him like a man? She knew nothing about it, for she had not known that he was dead until long afterward, when boys
were coming home and she had begun searching for Frank’s face in the streets. It was the woman with whom he had lived who had told her, for Frank had given this woman’s name as his next of kin. The woman, having told her, had not known what else to say, and she stared at Florence in simpleminded pity. This made Florence furious, and she barely murmured: “Thank you,” before she turned away. She hated Frank for making this woman official witness to her humiliation. And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men.

But it had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men. Frank claimed that she got it all wrong side up: it was men who suffered because they had to put up with the ways of women—and this from the time that they were born until the day they died. But it was she who was right, she knew; with Frank she had always been right; and it had not been her fault that Frank was the way he was, determined to live and die a common nigger.

But he was always swearing that he would do better; it was, perhaps, the brutality of his penitence that had kept them together for so long. There was something in her which loved to see him bow—when he came home, stinking with whisky, and crept with tears into her arms. Then he, so ultimately master, was mastered. And holding him in her arms while, finally, he slept, she thought with the sensations of luxury and power: “But there’s lots of good in Frank. I just got to be patient and he’ll come along all right.” To “come along” meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten
years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married. He had not changed at all.

He had never made enough money to buy the home she wanted, or anything else she really wanted, and this had been part of the trouble between them. It was not that he could not make money, but that he would not save it. He would take half a week’s wages and go out and buy something he wanted, or something he thought she wanted. He would come home on Saturday afternoons, already half drunk, with some useless object, such as a vase, which, it had occurred to him, she would like to fill with flowers—she who never noticed flowers and who would certainly never have bought any. Or a hat, always too expensive or too vulgar, or a ring that looked as though it had been designed for a whore. Sometimes it occurred to him to do the Saturday shopping on his way home, so that she would not have to do it; in which case he would buy a turkey, the biggest and most expensive he could find, and several pounds of coffee, it being his belief that there was never enough in the house, and enough breakfast cereal to feed an army for a month. Such foresight always filled him with such a sense of his own virtue that, as a kind of reward, he would also buy himself a bottle of whisky; and—lest she should think that he was drinking too much—invite some ruffian home to share it with him. Then they would sit all afternoon in her parlor, playing cards and telling indecent jokes, and making the air foul with whisky and smoke. She would sit in the kitchen, cold with rage and staring at the turkey, which, since Frank always bought them unplucked and with the head on, would cost her hours of exasperating, bloody labor. Then she would wonder what on earth had possessed her to undergo such hard trials and travel so far from home, if all she had found was a two-room apartment in a city she did not like, and a man yet more childish than any she had known when she was young.

Sometimes from the parlor where he and his visitor sat he would call her:

“Hey, Flo!”

And she would not answer. She hated to be called “Flo,” but he never remembered. He might call her again, and when she did not answer he would come into the kitchen.

“What’s the matter with you, girl? Don’t you hear me a-calling you?”

And once when she still made no answer, but sat perfectly still, watching him with bitter eyes, he was forced to make verbal recognition that there was something wrong.

“What’s the matter, old lady? You mad at me?”

And when in genuine bewilderment he stared at her, head to one side, the faintest of smiles on his face, something began to yield in her, something she fought, standing up and snarling at him in a lowered voice so that the visitor might not hear:

“I wish you’d tell me just how you think we’s going to live all week on a turkey and five pounds of coffee?”

“Honey, I ain’t bought nothing we didn’t
need
!”

She sighed in helpless fury, and felt tears springing to her eyes.

“I done told you time and again to give
me
the money when you get paid, and let
me
do the shopping—’cause you ain’t got the sense that you was born with.”

“Baby, I wasn’t doing a thing in the world but trying to help you out. I thought maybe you wanted to go somewhere tonight and you didn’t want to be bothered with no shopping.”

“Next time you want to do me a favor, you tell me first, you hear? And how you expect me to go to a show when you done brought this bird home for me to clean?”

“Honey, I’ll clean it. It don’t take no time at all.”

He moved to the table where the turkey lay and looked at it critically, as though he were seeing it for the first time. Then he looked at her and grinned. “That ain’t nothing to get mad about.”

She began to cry. “I declare I don’t know what gets into you. Every week the Lord sends you go out and do some more foolishness. How do you expect us to get enough money to get away from here if you all the time going to be spending your money on foolishness?”

When she cried, he tried to comfort her, putting his great hand on her shoulder and kissing her where the tears fell.

“Baby, I’m sorry. I thought it’d be a nice surprise.”

“The only surprise I want from you is to learn some sense!
That’d
be a surprise! You think I want to stay around here the rest of my life with these dirty niggers you all the time bring home?”

“Where you expect us to live, honey, where we ain’t going to be with niggers?”

Then she turned away, looking out of the kitchen window. It faced an elevated train that passed so close she always felt that she might spit in the faces of the flying, staring people.

“I just don’t like all that ragtag … looks like you think so much of.”

Then there was silence. Although she had turned her back to him, she felt that he was no longer smiling and that his eyes, watching her, had darkened.

“And what kind of man you think you married?”

“I thought I married a man with some get up and go to him, who didn’t just want to stay on the bottom all his life!”

“And what you want me to do, Florence? You want me to turn white?”

This question always filled her with an ecstasy of hatred. She turned and faced him, and, forgetting that there was someone sitting in the parlor, shouted:

“You ain’t got to be white to have some self-respect! You reckon I slave in this house like I do so you and them common niggers can sit here every afternoon throwing ashes all over the floor?”

“And who’s common now, Florence?” he asked, quietly, in the immediate and awful silence in which she recognized her error. “Who’s acting like a common nigger now? What you reckon my friend is sitting there a-thinking? I declare, I wouldn’t be surprised none if he wasn’t a-thinking: ‘Poor Frank, he sure found him a common wife.’ Anyway, he ain’t putting his ashes on the floor—he putting them in the ashtray, just like he knew what a ashtray was.” She
knew that she had hurt him, and that he was angry, by the habit he had at such a moment of running his tongue quickly and incessantly over his lower lip. “But we’s a-going now, so you can sweep up the parlor and sit there, if you want to, till the judgment day.”

And he left the kitchen. She heard murmurs in the parlor, and then the slamming of the door. She remembered, too late, that he had all his money with him. When he came back, long after nightfall, and she put him to bed and went through his pockets, she found nothing, or almost nothing, and she sank helplessly to the parlor floor and cried.

When he came back at times like this he would be petulant and penitent. She would not creep into bed until she thought that he was sleeping. But he would not be sleeping. He would turn as she stretched her legs beneath the blankets, and his arm would reach out, and his breath would be hot and soursweet in her face.

“Sugar-plum, what you want to be so evil with your baby for? Don’t you know you done made me go out and get drunk, and I wasn’t a-fixing to do that? I wanted to take you out somewhere tonight.” And, while he spoke, his hand was on her breast, and his moving lips brushed her neck. And this caused such a war in her as could scarcely be endured. She felt that everything in existence between them was part of a mighty plan for her humiliation. She did not want his touch, and yet she did: she burned with longing and froze with rage. And she felt that he knew this and inwardly smiled to see how easily, on this part of the battlefield, his victory could be assured. But at the same time she felt that his tenderness, his passion, and his love were real.

“Let me alone, Frank. I want to go to sleep.”

“No you don’t. You don’t want to go to sleep so soon. You want me to talk to you a little. You know how your baby loves to talk. Listen.” And he brushed her neck lightly with his tongue. “You hear that?”