Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [57]
‘I’ll obey, Lord,
I’ll obey.’
He felt that he should rise and pray over Elisha—when a man cried out, it was right that another man should be his intercessor. And he thought how gladly he would rise, and with what power he would pray if it were only his son who lay crying on the floor to-night. But he remained, bowed low, on his knees. Each cry that came from the fallen Elisha tore through him. He heard the cry of his dead son and his living son; one that cried in the pit forever, beyond the hope of mercy; and one who would cry one day when mercy would be finished.
Now Gabriel tried, with the testimony he had held, with all the signs of His favor that God had shown him, to put himself between the living son and the darkness that waited to devour him. The living son had cursed him—bastard— and his heart was far from God; it could not be that the curse he had heard to-night falling from Roy’s lips was but the course repeated, so far, so long resounding, that the mother of his first son had uttered as she thrust the infant from her—herself immediately departing, this curse yet on her lips, into eternity. Her course had devoured the first Royal; he had been begotten in sin, and he had perished in sin; it was God’s punishment, and it was just. But Roy had been begotten in the marriage bed, the bed that Paul described as holy, and it was to him the Kingdom had been promised. It could not be that the living son was cursed for the sins of his father; for God, after much groaning, after many years, had given him a sign to make him know he was forgiven. And yet, it came to him that this living son, this headlong, living Royal, might be cursed for the sin of his mother, whose sin had never been truly repented; for that the living proof of her sin, he who knelt to-night, a very interloper among the saints, stood between her soul and God.
Yes, she hardhearted, stiff-neck, and hard to bend, this Elizabeth whom he had married; she had not seemed so, years ago, when the Lord had moved in his heart to lift her up, she and her nameless child, who bore his name to-day. And he was exactly like her, silent, watching, full of evil pride—they would be cast out, one day, into the outer darkness.
Once he had asked Elizabeth—they had been married a long while, Roy was a baby, and she was big with Sarah—if she had truly repented of her sin.
And she looked at him, and said: ‘You done asked me that before. And I done told you, yes.’
But he did not believe her; and he asked: ‘You mean you wouldn’t do it again? If you was back there, where you was, like you was then—would you do it again?’
She looked down; then, with impatience, she looked into his eyes again: ‘Well, if I was back there, Gabriel, and I was the same girl! …’
There was a long silence, while she waited. Then, almost unwillingly, he asked: ‘And … would you let him be born again?’
She answered, steadily: ‘I know you ain’t asking me to say I’m sorry I brought Johnny in the world. Is you?’ And when he did not answer: ‘And listen, Gabriel. I ain’t going to let you make me sorry. Not you, nor nothing, nor nobody in this world. We is got two children, Gabriel, and soon we’s going to have three; and I ain’t going to make no difference amongst them and you ain’t going to make none neither.’
But how could not be difference between the son of a weak, proud woman and some careless boy, and the son that God had promised him, who would carry down the joyful line his father’s name, and who would work until the day of the second coming to bring about His father’s Kingdom? For God had promised him this so many years ago, and he had lived only for this—forsaking the world and its pleasures, and the joys of his own life, he had tarried all these bitter years to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. He had let Esther die, and Royal had died, and Deborah had died barren—but he had held on to the promise; he had walked before God in true