Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [54]
‘I don’t think it’s right,’ said Gabriel, ‘to talk evil about nobody. The Word tell me it ain’t right to hold nobody up to scorn.’
‘Now you just remember,’ Elder Peter said, as kindly as before, ‘you’s talking to your elders.’
‘Then it seem to me,’ he said, astonished at his boldness, ‘that if I got to look to you for a example, you ought to be an example.’
‘Now, you know,’ said someone else, jovially, ‘you ain’t fixing to make that woman your wife or nothing like that—so ain’t no need to get all worked up and spoil our little gathering. Elder Peters didn’t mean no harm. If you don’t never say nothing worse that that, you can count yourself already up there in the Kingdom with the chosen.’
And at this a small flurry of laughter swept over the table; they went back to their eating and drinking, as though the matter were finished.
Yet Gabriel felt that he has surprised them; he had found them out and they were a little ashamed and confounded before his purity. And he understood suddenly the words of Christ, where it was written: ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’ Yes, and he looked around the table, already jovial again, but rather watchful now, too, of him—and he wondered who, of all these, would sit in glory at the right hand of the Father?
And then, as he sat there, remembering again Elder Peter’s boisterous, idle remark, this remark shook together in him all those shadowy doubts and fears, those hesitations and tenderness, which were his in relation to Deborah, and the sum of which he now realized was his certainty that there was in that relationship something fore-ordained. It came to him that, as the Lord had given him Deborah, to help him to stand, so the Lord had sent him to her, to raise her up, to release her from that dishonor which was hers in the eyes of men. And this idea filled him, in a moment, wholly, with the intensity of a vision: What better woman could be found? She was not like the mincing daughters of Zion! She was not to be seen prancing lewdly through the streets, eyes sleepy and mouth half-open with lust, or to be found mewing under night fences, uncovered, uncovering some black boy’s hanging curse! No, their married bed would be holy, and their children would continue the line of the faithful, a royal line. And, fired with this, a baser fire stirred in him also, rousing a slumbering fear, and he remembered (as the table, the ministers, the dinner, and the talk all burst in on him again) that Paul had written: ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’
Yet, he thought, he would hold his peace awhile; he would seek to know more clearly the Lord’s mind in this matter. For he remembered how much older she was than he—eight years; and he tried to imagine, for the first time in his life, that dishonor to which Deborah had been forced so many years ago by white men: her skirts above her head, her secrecy discovered—by white men. How many? Had she borne it? Had she screamed? Then he thought (but it did not really trouble him, for if Christ to save him could be crucified, he, for Christ’s greater glory, could well be mocked) of what smiles would be occasioned, what filthy conjecture, barely sleeping now, would mushroom upward overnight like Jonah’s gourd, when people heard that he and Deborah were going to be married. She, who had been the living proof and witness of their daily shame, and who had become their holy fool—and he, who had been the untamable despoiler of their daughters, and thief of their women, their walking prince of darkness! And he smiled, watching their elders’ well-fed faces and their grinding jaws—unholy pastors all, unfaithful stewards; he prayed that he would never be so fat, or so lascivious, but that God should work through him a mighty work: to ring, it might be, through ages yet unborn, as sweet, solemn, mighty proof of His everlasting love and mercy. He trembled with the presence that surrounded him now; he could scarcely keep his seat. He felt that light shone down on him from Heaven, on him, the chosen; he felt as Christ must have felt in the temple, facing His