Go Tell It on the Mountain Page 9

  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?”

  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 whispere
d in her ear: “God’s got your number, knows where you live, death’s got a warrant out for you.”

  TWO

  Gabriel’s Prayer

  Now I been introduced

  To the Father and the Son,

  And I ain’t

  No stranger now.

  WHEN 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.