Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [38]
‘And you going,’ cried Gabriel, ‘this morning—just like that? And you going to walk off and leave your mother—just like that?’
‘You hush,’ she said, turning to him for the first time, ‘she got you, ain’t she?’
This was indeed, she realized as he dropped his eyes, the bitter, troubling point. He could not endure the thought of being left alone with his mother, with nothing whatever to put between himself and his guilty love. With Florence gone, time would have swallowed up all his mother’s children, except himself; and he, then, must make amends for all the pain that she had borne, and sweeten her last moments with all his proofs of love. And his mother required of him one proof only, that he tarry no longer in sin. With Florence gone, his stammering time, his playing time, contracted with a bound to the sparest interrogative second, when he must stiffen himself, and answer to his mother, and all the host of Heaven, yes or no.
Florence smiled inwardly a small, malicious smile, watching his slow bafflement, and panic, and rage: and she looked at her mother again. ‘She got you,’ she repeated. ‘She don’t need me.’
‘You going north,’ her mother said, then. ‘And when you reckon on coming back?’
‘I don’t reckon on coming back,’ she said.
‘You come crying back soon enough,’ said Gabriel, with malevolence, ‘soon as they whip your butt up there four or five times.’
She looked at him again. ‘Just don’t you try to hold your breath till then, you hear?’
‘Girl,’ said her mother, ‘you mean to tell me the Devil’s done made your heart so hard you can just leave your mother on her dying bed, and you don’t care if you don’t never see her in this world no more? Honey, you can’t tell me you done got so evil as all that?’
She felt Gabriel watching her to see how she would take this question—the question that, for all her determination, she had dreaded most to hear. She looked away from her mother, and straightened, catching her breath, looking outwards through the small, cracked window. There outside, beyond the slowly rising mist, and farther off that her eyes could see, her life awaited her. The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead.
‘I’m going, Ma,’ she said. ‘I got to go.’
Her mother leaned back, face upward to the light and began to cry. Gabriel moved to Florence’s side and grabbed her arm. She looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were full of tears.
‘You can’t go,’ he said. ‘You can’t go. You can’t go and leave your mother thisaway. She need a woman, Florence, to help look after her. What she going to do here, all alone with me?’
She pushed him from her and moved to stand over her mother’s bed.
‘Ma,’ she said, ‘don’t be like that. Ain’t a thing can happen to me up North can’t happen to me here. God’s everywhere, Ma. Ain’t no need to worry.’
She knew that she was mouthing words; and she realized suddenly that her mother scorned to dignify these words with her attention. She had granted Florence the victory—with a promptness that had the effect of making Florence, however dimly and unwillingly, wonder if her victory was real. She was not weeping for her daughter’s future, she was weeping for the past, and weeping in an anguish in which Florence had no part. And all of this filled Florence with terrible fear, which, which was immediately transformed into anger. ‘Gabriel can take care of you,’ she said, her voice shaking with malice. ‘Gabriel ain’t never going to leave you. Is you, boy?’ and she looked at him. He stood, stupid with bewilderment and grief, a few inches from the bed. ‘But me,’ she said, ‘I got to go.’ She walked to the center of the room again, and picked up her bag.
‘Girl,’ Gabriel whispered, ‘ain’t you got feelings at all?’
‘Lord!’ her mother cried; and at the sound her heart turned over; she and Gabriel, arrested, stared at the bed. ‘Lord, Lord, Lord! Lord, have mercy on my sinful daughter! Stretch out your hand and hold her back