Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [68]
Esther’s letter ended:
What I think is, I made a mistake, that’s true, and I’m paying for it now. But don’t you think you ain’t going to pay for it—I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I know you going to be brought low one of these days. I ain’t holy like you are, but I know right from wrong.
I’m going to have my baby and I’m going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain’t going to read to him out of no Bible and I ain’t going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don’t drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.
‘What Florence got to say?’ he asked dully, crumpling his letter in his fist.
Deborah looked up with a faint smile. ‘Nothing much, honey. But she sound like she going to get married.’
Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field. He could not stand his home, his job, the town itself—he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he had known all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he saw his guilt in everybody’s eyes. When he stood in the pulpit to preach they looked at him, he felt, as though he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him as he had once condemned the twenty-three elders. When souls came weeping to the altar he scarce dared to rejoice, remembering that soul who had not bowed, whose blood, it might be, would be required of him at judgment.
So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had so transformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble. When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit of the Lord’s day, to behold things past, present, and to come, saying: ‘he which is filth, let him be filthy still,’ it was he who, crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherd boy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, while they shouted: ‘Amen!’ and: ‘Hallelujah!’ struggled once more in his chains; when he spoke of the day of Pentecost when the Holy Ghost had come down on the apostles who tarried in the upper room, causing them to speak in tongues of fire, he thought of his own baptism and how he had offended the Holy Ghost. No: though his name was writ large on placards, though they praised him for the great work God worked through him, and though they came, day and night, before him to the altar, there was no word in the Book for him.
And he saw, in this wandering, how far his people had wandered from God. They had all turned aside, and gone out into the wilderness, to fall down before idols of gold and silver, and wood and stone, false gods that could not heal them. The music that filled any town or city he entered was not the music of the saints but another music, infernal, which glorified lust and held righteousness up to scorn. Women, some of whom should have been at home, teaching their grandchildren how to pray, stood, night after night, twisting their bodies into lewd hallelujahs in smoke-filled, gin-heavy dance halls, singing for their ‘loving man.’ And their loving man was any man, any morning, noon, or night—when one left town they got another—men could drown, it seemed, in their warm flesh and they would never know the difference. ‘It’s here for you and if you don’t get it it ain’t