Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [67]
He did not answer. He could find no words. There was only silence in him, like the grave.
She rose, and moved to the open kitchen door, where she stood, her back to him, looking out into the yard and on the silent streets where the last, dead rays of the sun still lingered.
‘But I reckon,’ she said slowly, ‘that I don’t want to be with you no more’n you want to be with me. I don’t want no man what’s ashamed and scared. Can’t do me no good, that kind of man.’ She turned in the door and faced him; this was the last time she really looked at him, and he would carry that look to his grave. ‘There’s just one thing I want you to do,’ she said. ‘You do that, and we be all right.’
‘What you want me to do?’ he asked, and felt ashamed.
‘I would go through this town,’ she said, ‘and tell everybody about the Lord’s anointed. Only reason I don’t is because I don’t want my mama and daddy to know what a fool I been. I ain’t ashamed of it—I’m ashamed of you—you done made me feel a shame I ain’t never felt before. I shamed before my God—to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.’
He said nothing. She turned her back to him again.
‘I … just want to go somewhere,’ she said, ‘go somewhere, and have my baby, and think all this out of my mind. I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That’s what I want you to do—and that’s pretty cheap. I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.’
‘Girl,’ he said, ‘I ain’t got no money.’
‘Well,’ she said, coldly, ‘you damn well better find some.’
Then she began to cry. He moved toward her, but she moved away.
‘If I go out into the field,’ he said, helplessly, ‘I ought to be able to make enough money to send you away.’
‘How long that going to take?’
‘A month maybe.’
And she shook her head. ‘I ain’t going to stay around here that long.’
They stood in silence in the open kitchen door, she struggling against her tears, he struggling against his shame. He could only think: ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’
‘Ain’t you got nothing saved up? she asked at last. ‘Look to me like you been married long enough to’ve saved something!’
Then he remembered that Deborah had been saving money since their wedding day. She kept it in a tin box at the top of the cupboard. He thought how sin led to sin.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a little. I don’t know how much.’
‘You bring it to-morrow,’ she told him.
‘Yes,’ he said.
He watched her as she moved from the door and went to the closet for her hat and coat. Then she came back, dressed for the street and, without a word, passed him, walking down the short steps into the yard. She opened the low gate and turned down the long, silent, flaming street. She walked slowly, head bowed, as though she were cold. He stood watching her, thinking of the many times he had watched her before, when her walk had been so different and her laughter had come ringing back to mock him.
He stole the money while Deborah slept. And he gave it to Esther in the morning. She gave notice that same day, and a week later she was gone—to Chicago, said her parents, to find a better job and to have a better life.
Deborah became more silent than ever in the weeks that followed. Sometimes he was certain she had discovered that the money was missing and knew that he had taken it—sometimes he was certain that she knew nothing. Sometimes he was certain that she knew everything: the theft, and the reason for the theft. But she did not speak. In the middle of the spring he went out into the field tom preach, and was gone three months. When he came back he brought the money with him and put it in the box again. No money had been added in the meanwhile, so he still could not be certain whether Deborah knew or not.
He decided to let it all be forgotten, and begin his life again.
But the summer brought him a letter, with no return name or address, but postmarked from Chicago. Deborah gave it to him at breakfast, not seeming to have remarked the hand or the postmark, along