Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [56]
He began to walk. Now he was wearing long, white robes. He heard singing: ‘Walked in the valley, it looked so fine, I asked my Lord was all this mine.’ But he knew that it was his. A voice said: ‘Follow me.’ And he walked, and he was again on the edge of a high place, but bathed and blessed and glorified in the blazing sun, so that he stood like God, all golden, and looked down, down, at the long race he had run, at the step side of the mountain he had climbed. And now up this mountain, in white robes, singing, the elect came. ‘Touch them not,’ the voice said, ‘my seal is on them.’ And Gabriel turned and fell on his face, and the voice said again: ‘So shall thy seed be.’ Then he awoke. Morning was at the window, and he blessed God, lying on his bed, tears running down his face, for the vision he had seen.
When he went to Deborah and told her that the Lord had led him to ask her to be his wife, his holy helpmeet, she looked at him for a moment in what seemed to be speechless terror. He had never seen such an expression on her face before. For the first time since he had known her he touched her, putting his hands on her shoulders, thinking what untender touch these shoulders had once known, and how she would be raised now in honor. And he asked: ‘You ain’t scared, is you, Sister Deborah? You ain’t got nothing to be scared of?’
Then she tried to smile, and began, instead, to weep. With a movement at once violent and hesitant, she let her head fall forward on his breast.
‘No,’ she brought out, muffled in his arms, ‘I ain’t scared.’ But she did not stop weeping.
He stroked her coarse, bowed head. ‘God bless you, little girl,’ he said, helplessly. ‘God bless you.’
The silence in the church ended when Brother Elisha, kneeling near the piano, cried out and fell backward under the power of the Lord. Immediately, two or three others cried out also, and a wind, a foretaste of that great downpouring they awaited, swept the church. With this cry, and the echoing cries, the tarry service moved from its first stage of steady murmuring, broken by moans and now and again an isolated cry, into that stage of tears and groaning, of calling aloud and singing, which was like the labor of a woman about to be delivered of her child. On this threshing-floor the child was the soul that struggled to the light, and it was the church that was in labor, that did not cease to push and pull, calling on the name of Jesus. When Brother Elisha cried out and fell back, Sister McCandless rose and stood over him to help him pray. For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.
Sister Price began to sing:
‘I want to go through, Lord,
I want to go through.
Take me through, Lord
Take me through.’
A lone voice, joined by others, among them, waveringly, the voice of John. Gabriel recognized the voice. When Elisha cried, Gabriel was brought back in an instant to this present time and place, fearing that it was John he heard, that it was John who lay astonished beneath the power of the Lord. He nearly looked up and turned around; but then he knew it was Elisha, and his fear departed.
‘Have your way, Lord,
Have your way.’
Neither of his sons was here to-night, had ever cried on the threshing-floor. One had been dead for nearly fourteen years—dead in a Chicago tavern, a knife kicking in his throat. And the living son, the child, Roy, was headlong already, and hardhearted: he lay at home, silent now,