Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [66]
‘You know what I mean, she said. ‘You ain’t never going to have no kind of life with that skinny, black woman—and you ain’t never going to be able to make her happy—and she ain’t never going to have no children. I be blessed, anyway, if I think you was in your right mind when you married her. And it’s me that’s going to have your baby!’
‘You want me,’ he asked at last, ‘to leave my wife—and come with you?’
‘I thought,’ she answered, ‘that you had done thought of that yourself, already, many and many a time.’
‘You know,’ he said, with a halting anger, ‘I ain’t never said nothing like that. I ain’t never told you I wanted to leave my wife.’
‘I ain’t talking,’ she shouted, at the end of patience, ‘about nothing you done said!’
Immediately, they both looked toward the closed kitchen doors—for they were not alone in the house this time. She sighed, and smoothed her hair with her hand; and he saw then that her hand was trembling and that her calm deliberation was all a frenzied pose.
‘Girl,’ he said, ‘does you reckon I’m going to run off and lead a life of sin with you somewhere, just because you tell me you got my baby kicking in your belly? How many kinds of a fool you think I am? I got God’s work to do—my life don’t belong to you. Nor to that baby, neither—if it is my baby.
‘It’s your baby,’ she said, coldly, ‘and ain’t no way in the world to get around that. And it ain’t been so very long ago, right here in this very room, when looked to me like a life of sin was all you was ready for.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, rising, and turning away, ‘Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.’
‘You be careful,’ said Esther, ‘how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by a holy man, neither.’
‘Ruined?’ he cried. ‘You? How you going to be ruined? When you been walking through this town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture? How you going to stand there and tell me you been ruined? If it hadn’t been me, it sure would have been somebody else.’
‘But it was you,’ she retorted, ‘and what I want to know is what we’s going to do about it.’
He looked at her. He face was cold and hard—ugly; she had never been so ugly before.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, deliberately, ‘what we is going to do. But I tell you what I think you better do: you better go along and get one of these boys you been running around with to marry you. Because I can’t go off with you nowhere.’
She sat down at the table and stared at him with scorn and amazement; sat down heavily, as though she had been struck. He knew that she was gathering her forces; and now she said what he had dreaded to hear:
‘And suppose I went through town and told your wife, and the churchfolks, and everybody—suppose I did that, Reverend?’
‘And who you think,’ he asked—he felt himself enveloped by an awful, falling silence—‘is going to believe you?’
She laughed. ‘Enough folks’d believe me to make it mighty hard on you.’ And she watched him. He walked up and down the kitchen, trying to avoid her eyes. ‘You just think back,’ she said, ‘to that first night, right here on this damn white folks’ floor, and you’ll see it’s too late for you to talk to Esther about how holy you is. I don’t care if you want to live a lie, but I don’t see no reason for you to make me suffer on account of it.’
‘You can go around and tell folks if you want to,’ he said, boldly, ‘but it ain’t going to look so good for you neither.’
She laughed again. ‘But I ain’t the holy one. You’s a married man, and you’s a preacher—and who you think folks is going to blame most?’
He watched her with a hatred that was mixed with his old desire, knowing that once more she had the victory.
‘I can’t marry you, you know that,’ he said. ‘Now, what you want me to do?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘and I reckon you wouldn’t marry me even if you was free. I reckon you don’t want no whore like Esther for your wife. Esther’s just for the night, for the dark, where won’t nobody see you getting your holy self all dirtied up with Esther. Esther