Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [25]
‘Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.’
In the moment that these words filled the room, ad hung in the room like the infinitesimal moment of hanging, jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other’s eyes. John thought for that moment that his father believed the words had come from him, his eyes were so wild and depthlessly malevolent, and his mouth was twisted into such snarl of pain. Then, in the absolute silence that followed Roy’s words, John saw that his father was not seeing him, was not seeing anything unless it were a vision. John wanted to turn and flee, as though he had encountered in the jungle some evil beast, crouching and ravenous, with eyes like Hell unclosed; and exactly as though, on a road’s turning, he found himself staring at certain destruction, he found that he could not move. Then his father turned and looked down at Roy.
‘What did you say?’ his father asked.
‘I told you,’ said Roy, ‘not to touch my mother.’
‘You cursed me,’ said his father.
Roy said nothing; neither did he drop his eyes.
‘Gabriel,’ said his mother, ‘Gabriel. Let us pray….’
His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tear were in his eyes.
‘Gabriel,’ cried Aunt Florence, ‘ain’t you done playing the fool for to-night?’
Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream.
‘My Lord, my Lord,’ his father whispered, ‘my Lord, my Lord.’
He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning.
Hid Aunt Florence and his father faced each other.
‘Yes, Lord,’ Aunt Florence said, ‘you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.’
John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight-thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed.
John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step further. The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world. John moved forward, hearing his feet crack against the sagging wood, to where the golden cross on the red field of the altar cloth glowed like smothered fire, and switched on one weak light.
In the air of the church hung, perpetually, the odor of dust and sweat; for, like the carpet in his mother’s living-room, the dust of this church was invincible; and when the saints were praying or rejoicing, their bodies gave off an acrid, steamy smell, a marriage of the odors of dripping bodies and soaking, starched white linen. It was a store-front church and had stood, for John’s lifetime, on the corner of this sinful avenue, facing the hospital to which criminal wounded and dying were carried almost every night. The saints,