Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [48]
‘Then,’ he testified, ‘I heard my mother singing. She was a-singing for me. She was a-singing low and sweet, right there beside me, like she knew if she just called Him, the Lord would come.’ When he heard this singing, which filled all the silent air, which swelled until it filled all the waiting earth, the heart within him broke, and yet began to rise, lifted of its burden; and his throat unlocked; and his tears came down as though the listening skies had opened. ‘Then I praised God, Who had brought me out of Egypt and set my feet on the solid rock.’ When at last he lifted up his eyes he saw a new Heaven and a new Earth; and he heard a new sound of singing, for a sinner had come home. ‘I looked at my hands and my hands were new. I looked at my feet and my feet were new. And I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change my mind.’ And, yes, there was singing everywhere; the birds and the crickets and the frogs rejoiced, the distant dogs leaping and sobbing, circled in their narrow yards, and roosters cried from every high fence that here was a new beginning, a blood-washed day!
And this was the beginning of his life as a man. He was just past twenty-one; the century was not yet one year old. He moved into town, into the room that awaited him at the top of the house in which he worked, and he began to preach. He married Deborah in that same year. After the death of his mother, he began to see her all the time. They went to the house of God together, and because there was no one, any more, to look after him, she invited him often to her home for meals, and kept his clothes neat, and after he had preached they discussed his sermons; that is, he listened while she praised.
He had certainly never intended to marry her; such an idea was no more in his mind, he would have said, that the possibility of flying to the moon. He had known her all his life; she had been his older sister’s older friend, and then his mother’s faithful visitor; she had never, for Gabriel, been young. So far as he was concerned, she might have been born in her severe, her sexless, long and shapeless habit, always black or gray. She seemed to have been put on earth to visit the sick, and to comfort those who wept, and to arrange the last garments of the dying.
Again, there was her legend, her history, which would have been enough, even had she not been so wholly unattractive, to put her for ever beyond the gates of any honorable man’s desires. This, indeed, in her silent, stolid fashion, she seemed to know: where, it might be, other women held as their charm and secret the joy that they could give and share, she contained only the shame that she had borne—shame, unless a miracle of human love delivered her, was all she had to give. And she moved, therefore, through their small community like a woman mysteriously visited by God, like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool. No ornaments ever graced her body; there was about her no tinkling, no shining, and no softness. No ribbon falsified her blameless and implacable headgear; on her woolen head there was only the barest minimum oil. She did not gossip with the other women—she had nothing, indeed, to gossip about—but kept her communication to yea and nay, and read her Bible, and prayed. There were people in the church, and even men carrying the gospel, who mocked Deborah behind her back; but their mockery was uneasy; they could never be certain but that they might be holding up to scorn the greatest saint among them, the Lord’s peculiar treasure and most holy vessel.
‘You sure is a godsend to me, Sister Deborah,’ Gabriel would sometimes say. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
For she sustained him most beautifully in his new condition; with her unquestioning faith in God, and her faith in him, she, even more