Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [37]
In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty-six, Florence walked out through the cabin door. She had thought to wait until her mother, who was so ill now that she no longer stirred out of bed, should be buried—but suddenly she knew that she would wait no longer, the time had come. She had been working as cook and serving-girl for a large white family in town, and it was on the day her master proposed that she become his concubine that she knew her life among these wretched people had come to its destined end. She left her employment that same day (leaving behind her a most vehement conjugal bitterness), and with part of the money that with cunning, cruelty, and sacrifice she had saved over a period of years, bought a railroad ticket to New York. When she bout it, in a kind of scarlet rage, she held like a talisman at the back of her mind the thought: ‘I can give it back, I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go.’ But she knew that nothing could stop her.
And it was this leave-taking that came to stand, in Florence’s latter days, and with other many witness, at her bedside. Gray clouds obscured the sun that day, and outside the cabin window she saw that mist still covered the ground. Her mother lay in bed, awake; she was pleading with Gabriel, who had been out drinking the night before, and who was not really sober now, to mend his ways and come to the Lord. And Gabriel, full of the confusion, and pain, and guilt that were his whenever he thought of how he made his mother suffer, but that became nearly insupportable when she taxed him with it, stood before the mirror, head bowed, buttoning his shirt. Florence knew that he could not unlock his lips to speak; he could not say yes to his mother, and to the Lord; and he could not say no.
‘Honey,’ their mother was saying, ‘don’t you let your old mother die without you look her in the eye and tell her she going to see you in glory. You hear me, boy?’
In a moment, Florence thought with scorn, tears would fill his eyes, and he would promise to ‘do better.’ He had been promising to ‘do better’ since the day he had been baptized.
She put down her bag in the center of the hateful room.
‘Ma,’ she said, ‘I’m going. I’m a-going this morning.’
Now that she had said it, she was angry with herself for not having said it the night before, so that they would have had time to be finished with their weeping and their arguments. She had not trusted herself to withstand the night before; but now there was almost no time t. The center of her mind was filled with the image of the great, white clock at the railway station, on which the hands did not cease to move.
‘You going where?’ her mother asked sharply. But she knew that her mother had understood, had indeed long before this moment known that this time would come. The astonishment with which she stared at Florence’s bag was not altogether astonishment, but a startled, wary attention. A danger imagined had become present and real, and her mother was already searching for a way to break Florence’s will. All this Florence knew in a moment, and it made her stronger. She watched her mother, waiting.
But at the tone of his mother’s voice Gabriel, who had scarcely heard Florence’s announcement, so grateful had he been that something had occurred to distract from him his mother’s attention, dropped his eyes and saw Florence’s traveling-bag. And he repeated his mother’s question in a stunned, angry voice, understanding it only as the words hit the air:
‘Yes, girl. Where you think you going?’
‘I’m going, she said, ‘to New York. I got my ticket.’
And her mother watched her. For a moment no one said a word. Then, Gabriel, in a changed and frightened voice, asked:
‘And when you done decide that?’
She did not look at him, nor answer his question. She continued to watch her mother. ‘I got my ticket,’ she repeated. ‘I’m going on the morning train.’
‘Girl,’ asked her mother, quietly, ‘is you sure you know what you’s doing?’
She stiffened. seeing in her mother’s eyes a mocking pity. ‘I’m a woman grown,’ she said.