Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [23]
‘I done told you before,’ he said—he had not ceased working over the moaning Roy, and was preparing now to dab the wound with iodine—‘that I didn’t want you coming in here and using that gutter language in front of my children.’
‘Don’t you worry about my language, brother,’ she said with spirit, ‘you better start worrying about your life. What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see.’
‘What they see,’ his father muttered, ‘is a poor man trying to serve the Lord. That’s my life.’
‘Then I guarantee you,’ she said, ‘that they going to do their best to keep it from being their life. You mark my words.
He turned and looked at her, and intercepted the look that passed between the two women. John’s mother, for reasons that were not at all his father’s reasons, wanted Aunt Florence to keep still. He looked away, ironically. John watched his mother’s mouth tighten bitterly as she dropped her eyes. His father, in silence, began bandaging Roy’s forehead.
‘It’s just the mercy of God,’ he said at last, ‘that this boy didn’t lose his eye. Look here.’
His mother leaned over and looked into Roy’s face with a sad, sympathetic murmur. Yet, John felt, she had seen instantly the extent of the danger to Roy’s eye and to his life, and was beyond that worry now. Now she was merely marking time, as it were, and preparing herself against the moment when her husband’s anger would turn, full force, against her.
His father now turned to John, who was standing near the French doors with Ruth in his arms.
‘You come here, boy,’ he said, ‘and see what them white folks done to your brother.’
John walked over to the sofa, holding himself as proudly beneath his father’s furious eyes as a prince approaching the scaffold.
‘Look here,’ said his father, grasping him roughly by one arm, ‘look at your brother.’
John looked down at Roy, who gazed at him with almost no expression in his dark eyes. But John knew by the weary, impatient set of Roy’s young mouth that his brother was asking that none of this be held against him. It wasn’t his fault, or John’s, Roy’s eyes said, that they had such a crazy father.
His father, with the air of one forcing the sinner to look down into the pit that is to be his portion, moved away slightly so that John could see Roy’s wound.
Roy had been gashed by a knife, luckily not very sharp, from the center of his forehead where his hair began, downward to the bone just above his left eye: the wound described a kind of crazy half-moon and ended in a violent, fuzzy tail that was the ruin of Roy’s eyebrow. Time would darken the half-moon wound into Roy’s dark skin, but nothing would bring together again the so violently divided eyebrow.. This crazy lift, this question, would remain with him forever, and emphasize for ever something mocking and sinister in Roy’s face. John felt a sudden impulse to smile, but his father’s eyes were on him and he fought the impulse back. Certainly the wound was now very ugly, and very red, and must, John felt, with a quickened sympathy toward Roy, who had not cried out, have been very painful. He could imagine the sensation caused when Roy staggered into the house, blinded by his blood; but just the same, he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t changed, he would be in the streets again the moment he was better.
‘You see?’ came now from his father. ‘It was white folks, some of them white folks you like so much that tried to cut your brother’s throat.’
John thought, with immediate anger and with a curious contempt for his father’s inexactness, that only a blind man, however white, could possibly have been aiming at Roy’s throat; and his mother said with a calm insistence:
‘And he was trying to cut theirs. Him and them bad boys.’
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Florence, ‘I ain’t heard you ask that boy nary a question about how all this happened. Look like you just determine to raise Cain anyhow and make everybody in this house suffer because something done happened to the apple of your eye.’
‘I done asked you,’ cried his father in a fearful exasperation, ‘to stop running your