Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [106]
‘What you think,’ he asked, ‘you going to be able to do—against me?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘I ain’t long for this world, but I got this letter, and I’m sure going to give it to Elizabeth before I go, and if she don’t want it, I’m going to find some way—some way, I don’t know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord’s anointed id got on his hands.’
‘I done told you,’ he said, ‘that’s all done and finished; the Lord done give me a sign to make me know I been forgiven. What good you think it’s going to do to start talking about it now?’
‘It’ll make Elizabeth to know,’ she said, ‘that she ain’t the only sinner … in your holy house. And little Johnny, there—he’ll know he ain’t the only bastard.’
Then he turned again, and looked at her with hatred in his eyes.
‘You ain’t never changed,’ he said. ‘You still waiting to see my downfall. You just as wicked now as you was when you was young.’
She put the letter in her bag again.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither. You still promising the Lord you going to do better—and you think whatever you done already, whatever you doing right at that minute, don’t count. Of all the men I ever knew, you’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—’cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking.’
They had reached her corner. She stopped, and he stopped with her, and she stared into his haggard, burning face.
‘I got to take my underground,’ she said. ‘You got anything you want to say to me?’
‘I been living a long time,’ he said, ‘and I ain’t never seen nothing but evil overtake the enemies of the Lord. You think you going to use that letter to hurt me—but the Lord ain’t going to let it come to pass. You going to be cut down.’
The praying women approached them, Elizabeth in the middle.
‘Deborah,’ Florence said, ‘was cut down—but she left word. She weren’t no enemy of nobody—and she didn’t see nothing but evil. When I go, brother, you better tremble, ’cause I ain’t going to go in silence.’
And, while they stared at each other, saying nothing more, the praying women were upon them.
Now the long, the silent avenue stretched before them like some gray country of the dead. It scarcely seemed that he had walked this avenue only (as time was reckoned up by men) some few hours ago; that he had known this avenue since his eyes had opened on the dangerous world; that he had played here, wept here, fled, fallen down, and been bruised here—in that time, so far behind him, of his innocence and anger.
Yes, on the evening of the seventh day, when, raging, he had walked out of his father’s house, this avenue had been filled with shouting people. The light of the day had begun to fail—the wind was high, and the tall lights, one by one, and then all together, had lifted up their heads against the darkness—while he hurried to the temple. Had he been mocked, had anyone spoken, or laughed, or called? He could not remember. He had been walking in a storm.
Now the storm was over. And the avenue, like any landscape that has endured a storm, lay changed under Heaven, exhausted and clean, and new. Not again, for ever, could it return to the avenue it once had been. Fire, or lightening, or the latter rain, coming down from these skies which moved with such pale secrecy above him now, had laid yesterday’s avenue waste, had changed it in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as all would be changed on the last day, when the skies would open up once more to gather up the saints.
Yet the houses were there, as they had been; the windows, like a thousand, blinded eyes, stared outward at the morning—at the morning that was the same for them as the mornings of John’s innocence, and the mornings before his birth. The water run in the gutters with a small, discontented sound; on the water traveled paper, burnt matches, sodden cigarette-ends;