Go Tell It on the Mountain (20 page)

And he did not look at her, though he felt her eyes on him: he reached for his Bible and opened it. “Young men,” he said, “is all the same, don’t Jesus change their hearts.”

Royal did not go to war, but he went away that summer to work on the docks in another town. Gabriel did not see him any more until the war was over.

On that day, a day he was never to forget, he went when work was done to buy some medicine for Deborah, who was in bed with a misery in her back. Night had not yet fallen and the streets were gray and empty—save that here and there, polished in the light that
spilled outward from a pool-room or a tavern, white men stood in groups of half a dozen. As he passed each group, silence fell, and they watched him insolently, itching to kill; but he said nothing, bowing his head, and they knew, anyway, that he was a preacher. There were no black men on the streets at all, save him. There had been found that morning, just outside of town, the dead body of a soldier, his uniform shredded where he had been flogged, and, turned upward through the black skin, raw, red meat. He lay face downward at the base of a tree, his fingernails digging into the scuffed earth. When he was turned over, his eyeballs stared upward in amazement and horror, his mouth was locked open wide; his trousers, soaked with blood, were torn open, and exposed to the cold, white air of morning the thick hairs of his groin, matted together, black and rust-red, and the wound that seemed to be throbbing still. He had been carried home in silence and lay now behind locked doors, with his living kinsmen, who sat, weeping, and praying, and dreaming of vengeance, and waiting for the next visitation. Now, someone spat on the sidewalk at Gabriel’s feet, and he walked on, his face not changing, and he heard it reprovingly whispered behind him that he was a good nigger, surely up to no trouble. He hoped that he would not be spoken to, that he would not have to smile into any of these so well-known white faces. While he walked, held by his caution more rigid than an arrow, he prayed, as his mother had taught him to pray, for loving kindness; yet he dreamed of the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the head wobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered nothing but the rushing blood. And he was thinking that it was only the hand of the Lord that had taken Royal away, because if he had stayed they would surely have killed him, when, turning a corner, he looked into Royal’s face.

Royal was now as tall as Gabriel, broad-shouldered, and lean. He wore a new suit, blue, with broad, blue stripes, and carried, crooked under his arm, a brown-paper bundle tied with string. He and Gabriel stared at one another for a second with no recognition. Royal stared in blank hostility, before, seeming to remember Gabriel’s face,
he took a burning cigarette from between his lips, and said, with pained politeness: “How-de-do, sir.” His voice was rough, and there was, faintly, the odor of whisky on his breath.

But Gabriel could not speak at once; he struggled to get his breath. Then: “How-de-do,” he said. And they stood, each as though waiting for the other to say something of the greatest importance, on the deserted corner. Then, just as Royal was about to move, Gabriel remembered the white men all over town.

“Boy,” he cried, “ain’t you got good sense? Don’t you know you ain’t got no business to be out here, walking around like this?”

Royal stared at him, uncertain whether to laugh or to take offense, and Gabriel said, more gently: “I just mean you better be careful, son. Ain’t nothing but white folks in town today. They done killed … last night …”

Then he could not go on. He saw, as though it were a vision, Royal’s body, sprawled heavy and unmoving forever against the earth, and tears blinded his eyes.

Royal watched him, a distant and angry compassion in his face.

“I know,” he said abruptly, “but they ain’t going to bother me. They done got their nigger for this week. I ain’t going far noway.”

Then the corner on which they stood seemed suddenly to rock with the weight of mortal danger. It seemed for a moment, as they stood there, that death and destruction rushed toward them: two black men alone in the dark and silent town where white men prowled like lions—what mercy could they hope for, should they be found here, talking together? It would surely be believed that they were plotting vengeance. And Gabriel started to move away, thinking to save his son.

“God bless you, boy,” said Gabriel. “You hurry along now.”

“Yeah,” said Royal, “thanks.” He moved away, about to turn the corner. He looked back at Gabriel. “But you be careful, too,” he said, and smiled.

He turned the corner and Gabriel listened as his footfalls moved away. They were swallowed up in silence; he heard no voices raised
to cut down Royal as he went his way; soon there was silence everywhere.

Not quite two years later Deborah told him that his son was dead.

And now John tried to pray. There was a great noise of praying all around him, a great noise of weeping and of song. It was Sister McCandless who led the song, who sang it nearly alone, for the others did not cease to moan and cry. It was a song he had heard all his life:

Without raising his eyes, he could see her standing in the holy place, pleading the blood over those who sought there, her head thrown back, eyes shut, foot pounding the floor. She did not look, then, like the Sister McCandless who sometimes came to visit them, like the woman who went out every day to work for the white people downtown, who came home at evening, climbing, with such weariness, the long, dark stairs. No: her face was transfigured now, her whole being was made new by the power of her salvation.

“Salvation is real,” a voice said to him, “God is real. Death may come soon or late, why do you hesitate? Now is the time to seek and serve the Lord.” Salvation was real for all these others, and it might be real for him. He had only to reach out and God would touch him; he had only to cry and God would hear. All these others, now, who cried so far beyond him with such joy, had once been in their sins, as he was now—and they had cried and God had heard them, and delivered them out of all their troubles. And what God had done for others, He could also do for him.

But—out of
all
their troubles? Why did his mother weep? Why did his father frown? If God’s power was so great, why were their lives so troubled?

He had never tried to think of their trouble before; rather, he had
never before confronted it in such a narrow place. It had always been there, at his back perhaps, all these years, but he had never turned to face it. Now it stood before him, staring, nevermore to be escaped, and its mouth was enlarged without any limit. It was ready to swallow him up. Only the hand of God could deliver him. Yet, in a moment, he somehow knew from the sound of that storm which rose so painfully in him now, which laid waste—forever?—the strange, yet comforting landscape of his mind, that the hand of God would surely lead him into this staring, waiting mouth, these distended jaws, this hot breath as of fire. He would be led into darkness, and in darkness would remain; until in some incalculable time to come the hand of God would reach down and raise him up; he, John, who having lain in darkness would no longer be himself but some other man. He would have been changed, as they said, forever; sown in dishonor, he would be raised in honor: he would have been born again.

Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then he need no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it were, their quarrel over his father’s head to Heaven—to the Father who loved him, who had come down in the flesh to die for him. Then he and his father would be equals, in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God. Then his father could not beat him any more, or despise him any more, or mock him any more—he, John, the Lord’s anointed. He could speak to his father then as men spoke to one another—as sons spoke to their fathers, not in trembling but in sweet confidence, not in hatred but in love. His father could not cast him out, whom God had gathered in.

Yet, trembling, he knew that this was not what he wanted. He did not
want
to love his father; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred, and give his hatred words one day. He did not want his father’s kiss—not any more, he who had received so many blows. He could not imagine, on any day to come and no matter how greatly he might be changed, wanting to take his father’s hand. The storm that raged in him tonight could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree
in all John’s country, all that remained tonight, in this, John’s flood-time.

And he bowed his head yet lower before the altar in weariness and confusion. Oh, that his father would
die
!—and the road before John be open, as it must be open for others. Yet in the very grave he would hate him; his father would but have changed conditions, he would be John’s father still. The grave was not enough for punishment, for justice, for revenge. Hell, everlasting, unceasing, perpetual, unquenched forever, should be his father’s portion; with John there to watch, to linger, to smile, to laugh aloud, hearing, at last, his father’s cries of torment.

And, even then, it would not be finished.
The everlasting father
.

Oh, but his thoughts were evil—but tonight he did not care. Somewhere, in all this whirlwind, in the darkness of his heart, in the storm—was something—something he must find. He could not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.

The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower. The world turned dark, forever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their glass panes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this force, uncontrollable, so
abruptly visited on the earth. Gabriel walked homeward through this wilderness of water (which had failed, however, to clear the air) to where Deborah waited for him in the bed she seldom, these days, attempted to leave.

And he had not been in the house five minutes before he was aware that a change had occurred in the quality of her silence: in the silence something waited, ready to spring.

He looked up at her from the table where he sat eating the meal that she had painfully prepared. He asked: “How you feel today, old lady?”

“I feel like about the way I always do,” and she smiled. “I don’t feel no better and I don’t feel no worse.”

“We going to get the church to pray for you,” he said, “and get you on your feet again.”

She said nothing and he turned his attention once more to his plate. But she was watching him; he looked up.

“I hear some mighty bad news today,” she said slowly.

“What you hear?”

“Sister McDonald was over this afternoon, and Lord knows she was in a pitiful state.” He sat stock-still, staring at her. “She done got a letter today what says her grandson—you know, that Royal—done got hisself killed in Chicago. It sure look like the Lord is put a curse on that family. First the mother, and now the son.”

For a moment he could only stare at her stupidly, while the food in his mouth slowly grew heavy and dry. Outside rushed the armies of the rain, and lightning flashed against the window. Then he tried to swallow, and his gorge rose. He began to tremble. “Yes,” she said, not looking at him now, “he been living in Chicago about a year, just a-drinking and a-carrying on—and his grandmama, she tell me that look like he got to gambling one night with some of them northern niggers, and one of them got mad because he thought the boy was trying to cheat him, and took out his knife and stabbed him. Stabbed him in the throat, and she tell me he died right there on the floor in that barroom, didn’t even have time to get him to no hospital.”
She turned in bed and looked at him. “The Lord sure give that poor woman a heavy cross to bear.”

Then he tried to speak; he thought of the churchyard where Esther was buried, and Royal’s first, thin cry. “She going to bring him back home?”

She stared. “Home? Honey, they done buried him already up there in the potter’s field. Ain’t nobody never going to look on that poor boy no more.”

Then he began to cry, not making a sound, sitting at the table, and with his whole body shaking. She watched him for a long while and, finally, he put his head on the table, overturning the coffee cup, and wept aloud. Then it seemed that there was weeping everywhere, waters of anguish riding the world; Gabriel weeping, and rain beating on the roof, and at the windows, and the coffee dripping from the end of the table. And she asked at last:

“Gabriel … that Royal … he were your flesh and blood, weren’t he?”

“Yes,” he said, glad even in his anguish to hear the words fall from his lips, “that was my son.”

And there was silence again. Then: “And you sent that girl away, didn’t you? With the money outen that box?”

“Yes,” he said, “yes.”

“Gabriel,” she asked, “why did you do it? Why you let her go off and die, all by herself? Why ain’t you never said nothing?”

And now he could not answer. He could not raise his head.

“Why?” she insisted. “Honey, I ain’t never asked you. But I got a right to know—and when you wanted a son so bad?”

Then, shaking, he rose from the table and walked slowly to the window, looking out.