Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [46]
For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the son of God. He wanted to be the master, to speak with that authority which could only come from God. It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and heated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenceless city of his mind. He was later to say that this was a gift bequeathed him by his mother, that it was God’s hand on him from his earliest beginnings; but then he knew only that when each night came, chaos and fever raged in him; the silence in the cabin between his mother and himself became something that could not be borne; not looking at her, facing the mirror as he put on his jacket, and trying to avoid his face there, he told her that he was going to take a little walk—he would be back soon.
Sometimes Deborah sat with his mother, watching him with eyes that were no less patient and reproachful. He would escape into the starry night and walk until he came to a tavern, or to a house that he had marked already in the long daytime of his lust. And then he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed his friends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud, in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all of him arising the stinks of his corruption. Then he could not even weep. He could not even pray. He longed, nearly, for death, which was all that could release him from the cruelty of his chains.
And through all this his mother’s eyes were on him; her hand, like fiery tongs, gripped the lukewarm ember of his heart; and caused him to feel, at the thought of death, another, colder terror. To go down into the grave, unwashed, unforgiven, was to go down into the pit for ever, where terrors awaited him greater than any the earth, for all her age and groaning, had ever borne. He would be cut off from the living, for ever; he would have no name for ever. Where he had been would be silence only, rock, stubble, and no seed; for him, forever, and for his, no hope of glory. Thus, when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow—feeling himself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could only die. He cursed the betraying lust that lived in him, and he cursed it again in others. But: ‘I remember,’ he was later to say, ‘the day my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.’
And he walked homeward, thinking of the night behind him. He had seen the woman at the very beginning of the evening, but she had been with many others, men and women, and so he had ignored her. But later, when he was on fire with whisky, he looked again directly at her, and saw immediately that she had also been thinking of him. There were not so many people with her—it was as though she had been making room for him. He had already been told that she was a widow from the North, in town for only a few days to visit her people. When he looked at her she looked at him and, as though it were part of the joking conversation she was having with her friends, she laughed aloud. She had the lie-gap between her teeth, and a big mouth; when she laughed, she belatedly caught her lower