Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [43]
And he left the kitchen. She heard murmurs in the parlor, and then the slamming of the door. She remembered, too late, that he had all his money with him. When he came back, long after nightfall, and she put him to bed and went through his pockets, she found nothing, or almost nothing, and she sank helplessly to the parlor floor and cried.
When he came back at times like this he would be petulant and penitent. She would not creep into bed until she thought that he was sleeping. But he would not be sleeping. He would turn as she stretched her legs beneath the blankets, and his arm would reach out, and his breath would be hot and sour-sweet in her face.
‘Sugar-plum, what you want to be so evil with your baby for? Don’t you know you done made me go out and get drunk, and I wasn’t a-fixing to do that? I wanted to take you out somewhere to-night.’ And, while he spoke, his hand was on her breast, and his moving lips brushed her neck. And this caused such a war in her as could scarcely be endured. She felt that everything in existence between them was part of a mighty plan for her humiliation. She did not want his touch, and yet she did: she burned with longing and froze with rage. And she felt that he knew this and inwardly smile to see how easily, on this part of the battlefield, his victory could be assured. But at the same time she felt that his tenderness, his passion, and his love were real.
‘Let me alone, Frank. I want to go to sleep.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t want to go to sleep so soon. You want me to talk to you a little. You know how your baby loves to talk. Listen.’ And he brushed her neck lightly with his tongue. ‘You hear that?’
He waited. She was silent.
‘Ain’t you got nothing more to say than that? I better tell you something else.’ And then he covered her face with kisses; her face, neck, arms, and breasts.
‘You stink of whisky. Let me alone.’
‘Ah. I ain’t the only one got a tongue. What you got to say to this? And his hand stroked the inside of her thigh.
‘Stop.’
‘I ain’t going to stop. This is sweet talk, baby.’
Ten years. Their battle never ended; they never bought a home. He died in France. To-night she remembered details of those years which she thought she had forgotten, and at last she felt the stony ground of her heart break up; and tears, as difficult and slow as blood, began to trickle through her fingers. This the old woman above her somehow divined, and she cried: ‘Yes, honey. You just let go, honey. Let Him bring you low so He can raise you up.’ And was this the way she should have gone? Had she been wrong to fight so hard? Now she was an old woman, and all alone, and she was going to die. And she had nothing for all her battles. It had all come to this: she was on her face before the altar, crying to God for mercy. Behind her she heard Gabriel cry: ‘Bless your name, Jesus!’ and, thinking of him and the high road of holiness he had traveled, her mind swung like a needle, and she thought of Deborah.
Deborah had written her, not many times, but in a rhythm that seemed to remark each crisis in her life with Gabriel, and once, during the time she and Frank were still together, she had received from Deborah a letter that she had still: it was locked to-night in her handbag, which lay on the altar. She had always meant to show this letter to Gabriel one day, but she never had. She had talked with Frank about it late one night while he lay in bed whistling some ragtag tune and she sat before the mirror and rubbed bleaching cream into her skin. The letter lay open before her and she sighed loudly, to attract Frank’s attention.
He stopped whistling in the middle of a phrase; mentally, she finished it. ‘What you got there, sugar?’ he asked, lazily.
‘It’s a letter from my brother’s wife.’ She stared at her face in the mirror, thinking angrily that all these skin creams were a waste of money, they never did any good.
‘What’s them niggers doing down home? It ain’t no bad news, is it?