Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [58]
And his mind, dwelling bitterly on Elizabeth, yet moved backwards to consider once again Esther, who had been the mother of the first Royal. And he saw her, with the dumb, pale, startled ghosts of joy and desire hovering in him yet, a thin, vivid, dark-eyed girl, with something Indian in her cheekbones and her carriage and her hair; looking at him with that look in which were blended mockery, affection, desire, impatience, and scorn; dressed in the flame-like colors that, in fact, she had seldom worn, but that he always thought of her as wearing. She was associated in his mind with flame; with fiery leaves in autumn, and the fiery sun going down in the evening over the farthest hill, and with the eternal fires of Hell.
She had come to town very shortly after he and Deborah were married, and she took a job as serving-girl with the same white family for which he worked. He saw her, therefore, all the time. Young men were always waiting for her at the back door when her work was done: Gabriel used to watch her walk off in the dusk on a young man’s arm, and their voices and their laughter floated back to him like a mockery of his condition. He knew that she lived with her mother and stepfather, sinful people, giving to drinking and gambling and ragtime music and the blues, who never, except at Christmas-time or Easter, appeared in church.
He began to pity her, and one day when he was to preach in the evening he invited her to come to church. This invitation marked the first time she ever really looked at him—he realized it then, and was to remember that look for many days and nights.
‘You really going to preach to-night? A pretty man like you?’
‘With the Lord’s help,’ he said, with a gravity so extreme that it was almost hostility. At the same time, at her look and voice something leaped in him that he thought had been put down for ever.
‘Well, I be mighty delighted,’ she said after a moment, seeming to have briefly regretted the impetuosity that had led her to call him a ‘pretty’ man.
‘Can you make yourself free to come to-night?’ he could not prevent himself from asking.
And she grinned, delighted at what she took to be an oblique compliment. ‘Well, I don’t know, Reverend. But I’ll try.’
When the day was ended, she disappeared on the arm of yet another boy. He did not believe that she would come. And this so strangely depressed him that he could scarcely speak to Deborah at dinner, and they walked all the way to church in silence. Deborah watched him out of the corner of her eye, as was her silent and exasperating habit. It was her way of conveying respect for his calling; and she would have said, had it ever occurred to him to tax her with it, that she did not wish to distract him when the Lord had laid something on his heart. To-night, since he was to preach, it could not be doubted that the Lord was speaking more than usual; and it behooved her, therefore, as the helpmeet of the Lord’s anointed, as the caretaker, so to speak, of the sanctified temple, to keep silence. Yet, in fact, he would have liked to talk. He would have liked to ask her—so many things; to have listened to her voice, and watched her face while she told him of her day, her hopes, her doubts, her life, and her love. But he and Deborah never talked. The voice to which he listened in his mind, and the face he watched with such much love and care, belonged not to Deborah, but to Esther. Again he felt this strange chill in him, implying disaster and delight; and then he hoped that she would not come, that something would happen that would make it impossible for him ever to see her again.
She came, however; late, just before the pastor was about to present the speaker of the hour to the congregation. She did not come alone, but had brought her mother with her—promising what spectacle Gabriel could not imagine, nor could he imagine how she had escaped her young man of the evening. But she had; she