Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [29]
‘I don’t know,’ John said.
‘Will you try him? Just fall on your knees one day and ask him to help you to pray?’
John turned away, and looked out over the church, which now seemed like a vast, high field, ready for the harvest. He thought of a First Sunday, a Communion Sunday not long ago when the saints, dressed all in white, ate flat, unsalted Jewish bread, which was the body of the Lord, and drank red grape juice, which was His blood. And when they rose from the table, prepared especially for this day, they separated, the men on the one side, and the women on the other, and two basins were filled with water so that they could wash each other’s feet, as Christ had commanded His disciples to do. They knelt before each other, woman before woman, and man before man, and washed and dried each other’s feet. Brother Elisha had knelt before John’s father. When the service was over they had kissed each other with a holy kiss. John turned again and looked at Elisha.
Elisha looked at him and smiled. ‘You think about what I say, boy.’
When they were finished Elisha sat down at the piano and played to himself. John sat on a chair in the front row and watched him.
‘Don’t look like nobody’s coming to-night,’ he said after a long while. Elisha did not arrest his playing of a mournful song: ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on me.’
‘They’ll be here,’ said Elisha.
And as he spoke there was a knocking on the door. Elisha stopped playing. John went to the door, where two sisters stood, Sister McCandless and Sister Price.
‘Praise the Lord, son,’ they said.
‘Praise the Lord,’ said John.
They entered, heads bowed and hands folded before them around their Bibles. They bore the black cloth coats that they wore all week and they had old felt hats on their heads. John felt a chill as they passed him, and he closed the door.
Elisha stood up, and they cried again: ‘Praise the Lord!’ Then the two women knelt for a moment before their seats to pray. This was also passionate ritual. Each entering saint, before he could take part in the service, must commune for a moment alone with the Lord. John watched the praying women. Elisha sat again at the piano and picked up his mournful song. The women rose, Sister Price first, and then Sister McCandless, and looked around the church.
‘Is we the first?’ asked Sister Price. Her voice was mild, her skin was copper. She was younger than Sister McCandless by several years, a single woman who had never, as she testified, known a man.
‘No, Sister Price,’ smiled Brother Elisha, ‘Brother Johnny here was the first. Him and me cleaned up this evening.’
‘Brother Johnny is mighty faithful,’ said Sister McCandless. ‘The Lord’s going to work with him in a mighty way, you mark my words.’
There were times—whenever, in fact, the Lord had shown His favor by working through her—when whatever Sister McCandless said sounded like a threat. To-night she was still very much under the influence of the sermon she had preached the night before. She was an enormous woman, one of the biggest and blackest God had ever made, and He had blessed her with a mighty voice with which to sing and preach, and she was going out soon into the field. For many years the Lord had pressed Sister McCandless to get up, as she said, and move; but she had been of timid disposition and feared to set herself above the others. Not until He laid her low, before this very altar, had she dared to rise and preach the gospel. But now she had buckled on her traveling shoes. She would cry aloud and spare not, and lift up her voice like a trumpet in Zion.
‘Yes,’ said Sister Price, with her gentle smile, ‘He says that he that is faithful in little things shall be made chief over many.’
John smiled back at her, a smile that, despite the shy gratitude it was meant to convey, did not escape being ironic, or even malicious. But Sister Price did not see this, which deepened John’s hidden scorn.
Ain’t but you two who cleaned the church? asked Sister McCandless with an unnerving smile—the smile of the