Go Tell It on the Mountain (12 page)

He waited. She was silent.

“Ain’t you got nothing more to say than that? I better tell you
something else.” And then he covered her face with kisses; her face, neck, arms, and breasts.

“You stink of whisky. Let me alone.”

“Ah. I ain’t the only one got a tongue. What you got to say to this?” And his hand stroked the inside of her thigh.

“Stop.”

“I ain’t going to stop. This is sweet talk, baby.”

Ten years. Their battle never ended; they never bought a home. He died in France. Tonight she remembered details of those years which she thought she had forgotten, and at last she felt the stony ground of her heart break up; and tears, as difficult and slow as blood, began to trickle through her fingers. This the old woman above her somehow divined, and she cried: “Yes, honey. You just let go, honey. Let Him bring you low so He can raise you up.” And was this the way she should have gone? Had she been wrong to fight so hard? Now she was an old woman, and all alone, and she was going to die. And she had nothing for all her battles. It had all come to this: she was on her face before the altar, crying to God for mercy. Behind her she heard Gabriel cry: “Bless your name, Jesus!” and, thinking of him and the high road of holiness he had traveled, her mind swung like a needle, and she thought of Deborah.

Deborah had written her, not many times, but in a rhythm that seemed to remark each crisis in her life with Gabriel, and once, during the time she and Frank were still together, she had received from Deborah a letter that she had still: it was locked tonight in her handbag, which lay on the altar. She had always meant to show this letter to Gabriel one day, but she never had. She had talked with Frank about it late one night while he lay in bed whistling some ragtag tune and she sat before the mirror and rubbed bleaching cream into her skin. The letter lay open before her and she sighed loudly, to attract Frank’s attention.

He stopped whistling in the middle of a phrase; mentally, she finished it. “What you got there, sugar?” he asked, lazily.

“It’s a letter from my brother’s wife.” She stared at her face in the mirror, thinking angrily that all these skin creams were a waste of money, they never did any good.

“What’s them niggers doing down home? It ain’t no bad news, is it?” Still he hummed, irrepressibly, deep in his throat.

“No … well, it ain’t no good news neither, but it ain’t nothing to surprise
me
none. She say she think my brother’s got a bastard living right there in the same town what he’s scared to call his own.”

“No? And I thought you said your brother was a preacher.”

“Being a preacher ain’t never stopped a nigger from doing his dirt.”

Then he laughed. “You sure don’t love your brother like you should. How come his wife found out about this kid?”

She picked up the letter and turned to face him. “Sound to
me
like she
been
knowing about it but she ain’t never had the nerve to say nothing.” She paused, then added, reluctantly: “Of course, she ain’t really what you might call
sure
. But she ain’t a woman to go around thinking things. She mighty worried.”

“Hell, what she worried about it now for? Can’t nothing be done about it now.”

“She wonder if she ought to ask him about it.”

“And do she reckon if she ask him, he going to be fool enough to say yes?”

She sighed again, more genuinely this time, and turned back to the mirror. “Well … he’s a preacher. And if Deborah’s right, he ain’t got no right to be a preacher. He ain’t no better’n nobody else. In
fact
, he ain’t no better than a murderer.”

He had begun to whistle again; he stopped. “Murderer? How so?”

“Because he done let this child’s mother go off and die when the child was born. That’s how so.” She paused. “And it sound just like Gabriel. He ain’t never thought a minute about nobody in this world but himself.”

He said nothing, watching her implacable back. Then: “You going to answer this letter?”

“I reckon.”

“And what you going to say?”

“I’m going to tell her she ought to let him know she know about his wickedness. Get up in front of the congregation and tell them too, if she has to.”

He stirred restlessly, and frowned. “Well, you know more about it than me. But I don’t see where that’s going to do no good.”

“It’ll do
her
some good. It’ll make him treat her better. You don’t know my brother like I do. There ain’t but one way to get along with him, you got to scare him half to death. That’s all. He ain’t
got
no right to go around running his mouth about how holy he is if he done turned a trick like that.”

There was silence; he whistled again a few bars of his song; and then he yawned, and said: “Is you coming to bed, old lady? Don’t know why you keep wasting all your time and
my
money on all them old skin whiteners. You as black now as you was the day you was born.”

“You wasn’t there the day I was born. And I know you don’t want a coal-black woman.” But she rose from the mirror, and moved toward the bed.

“I ain’t never said nothing like that. You just kindly turn out that light and I’ll make you to know that black’s a mighty pretty color.”

She wondered if Deborah had ever spoken; and she wondered if she would give to Gabriel the letter that she carried in her handbag tonight. She had held it all these years, awaiting some savage opportunity. What this opportunity would have been she did not know; at this moment she did not want to know. For she had always thought of this letter as an instrument in her hands which could be used to complete her brother’s destruction. When he was completely cast down she would prevent him from ever rising again by holding before him the evidence of his blood-guilt. But now she thought she
would not live to see this patiently awaited day. She was going to be cut down.

And the thought filled her with terror and rage; the tears dried on her face and the heart within her shook, divided between a terrible longing to surrender and a desire to call God into account. Why had He preferred her mother and her brother, the old, black woman, and the low, black man, while she, who had sought only to walk upright, was come to die, alone and in poverty, in a dirty, furnished room? She beat her fists heavily against the altar. He,
he
would live, and, smiling, watch her go down into the grave! And her mother would be there, leaning over the gates of Heaven, to see her daughter burning in the pit.

As she beat her fists on the altar, the old woman above her laid hands on her shoulders, crying: “Call on Him, daughter! Call on the Lord!” And it was as though she had been hurled outward into time, where no boundaries were, for the voice was the voice of her mother, but the hands were the hands of death. And she cried aloud, as she had never in all her life cried before, falling on her face on the altar, at the feet of the old, black woman. Her tears came down like burning rain. And the hands of death caressed her shoulders, the voice whispered and whispered in her ear: “God’s got your number, knows where you live, death’s got a warrant out for you.”

Gabriel’s Prayer

W
HEN FLORENCE CRIED
, Gabriel was moving outward in fiery darkness, talking to the Lord. Her cry came to him from afar, as from unimaginable depths; and it was not his sister’s cry he heard, but the cry of the sinner when he is taken in his sin. This was the cry he had heard so many days and nights, before so many altars, and he cried tonight, as he had cried before: “Have your way, Lord! Have your way!”

Then there was only silence in the church. Even Praying Mother Washington had ceased to moan. Soon someone would cry again, and the voices would begin again; there would be music by and by, and shouting, and the sound of the tambourines. But now in this waiting, burdened silence it seemed that all flesh waited—paused,
transfixed by something in the middle of the air—for the quickening power.

This silence, continuing like a corridor, carried Gabriel back to the silence that had preceded his birth in Christ. Like a birth indeed, all that had come before this moment was wrapped in darkness, lay at the bottom of the sea of forgetfulness, and was not now counted against him, but was related only to that blind, and doomed, and stinking corruption he had been before he was redeemed.

The silence was the silence of the early morning, and he was returning from the harlot’s house. Yet all around him were the sounds of the morning: of birds, invisible, praising God; of crickets in the vines, frogs in the swamp, or dogs miles away and close at hand, roosters on the porch. The sun was not yet half awake; only the utmost tops of trees had begun to tremble at his turning; and the mist moved sullenly, before Gabriel and all around him, falling back before the light that rules by day. Later, he said of that morning that his sin was on him; then he knew only that he carried a burden and that he longed to lay it down. This burden was heavier than the heaviest mountain and he carried it in his heart. With each step that he took his burden grew heavier, and his breath became slow and harsh, and, of a sudden, cold sweat stood out on his brow and drenched his back.

All alone in the cabin his mother lay waiting; not only for his return this morning, but for his surrender to the Lord. She lingered only for this, and he knew it, even though she no longer exhorted him as she had in days but shortly gone by. She had placed him in the hands of the Lord, and she waited with patience to see how He would work the matter.

For she would live to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. She would not go to her rest until her son, the last of her children, he who would place her in the winding-sheet, should have entered the communion of the saints. Now she, who had been impatient once, and violent, who had cursed and shouted and contended like a man, moved into silence, contending only, and with the last measure of
her strength, with God. And this, too, she did like a man: knowing that she had kept the faith, she waited for Him to keep His promise. Gabriel knew that when he entered she would not ask him where he had been; she would not reproach him; and her eyes, even when she closed her lids to sleep, would follow him everywhere.

Later, since it was Sunday, some of the brothers and sisters would come to her, to sing and pray around her bed. And she would pray for him, sitting up in bed unaided, her head lifted, her voice steady; while he, kneeling in a corner of the room, trembled and almost wished that she would die; and trembled again at this testimony to the desperate wickedness of his heart; and prayed without words to be forgiven. For he had no words when he knelt before the throne. And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength.

For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the Son of God. He wanted to be master, to speak with that authority which could only come from God. It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind. He was later to say that this was a gift bequeathed him by his mother, that it was God’s hand on him from his earliest beginnings; but then he knew only that when each night came, chaos and fever raged in him; the silence in the cabin between his mother and himself became something that could not be borne; not looking at her, facing the mirror as he put on his jacket, and trying to avoid his face there, he told her that he was going to take a little walk—he would be back soon.

Sometimes Deborah sat with his mother, watching him with eyes
that were no less patient and reproachful. He would escape into the starry night and walk until he came to a tavern, or to a house that he had marked already in the long daytime of his lust. And then he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed his friends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud, in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all of him arising the stink of his corruption. Then he could not even weep. He could not even pray. He longed, nearly, for death, which was all that could release him from the cruelty of his chains.

And through all this his mother’s eyes were on him; her hand, like fiery tongs, gripped the lukewarm ember of his heart; and caused him to feel, at the thought of death, another, colder terror. To go down into the grave, unwashed, unforgiven, was to go down into the pit forever, where terrors awaited him greater than any the earth, for all her age and groaning, had ever borne. He would be cut off from the living, forever; he would have no name forever. Where he had been would be silence only, rock, stubble, and no seed; for him, forever, and for his, no hope of glory. Thus, when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow—feeling himself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could only die. He cursed the betraying lust that lived in him, and he cursed it again in others. But: “I remember,” he was later to say, “the day my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”