Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [71]
‘Look like,’ he said sullenly, ‘that won’t none of these young men be satisfied till they can go off and get themselves crippled or killed.’
‘Well, you know that’s the way the young folks is,’ said Deborah, cheerfully. ‘You can’t never tell them nothing—and when they find out it’s too late then.’
He discovered that whenever Deborah spoke of Royal, a fear deep within him listened and waited. Many times he had thought to unburden his heart to her. But she gave him no opportunity, never said anything that might allow him the healing humility of confession—or that might, for that matter, have permitted him at last to say how much he hated her for her barrenness. She demanded of him what she gave—nothing—nothing, at any rate, with which she could be reproached. She kept his house and shared his bed; she visited the sick, as she had always done, and she comforted the dying, as she had always done. The marriage for which he had once dreamed the world would mock him had so justified itself—in the eyes of the world—that no one now could imagine, for either of the, any other condition or alliance. Even Deborah’s weakness, which grew more marked with the years, keeping her more frequently in her bed, and her barrenness, like her previous dishonor, had come to seem mysterious proof of how completely she had surrendered herself to God.
He said: ‘Amen,’ cautiously, after her last remark, and cleared his throat.
‘I declare,’ she said, with the same cheerfulness, ‘sometimes he remind me of you when you was a young man.’
And he did not look at her, though he felt her eyes on him; he reached for his Bible and opened it. ‘Young men,’ he said, ‘is all the same, don’t Jesus change their hearts.’
Royal did not go to war, but he went away that summer to work on the docks in another town. Gabriel did not see him any more until the war was over.
On that day, a day he was never to forget, he went when work was done to buy some medicine for Deborah, who was in bed with a misery in her back. Night had not yet fallen and the streets were grey and empty—save that here and there, polished in the light that spilled outward from a pool-room or a tavern, white men stood in groups of half-a-dozen. As he passed each group, silence fell, and they watched him insolently, itching to kill; but he said nothing, bowing his head, and they knew, anyway, that he was a preacher. There were no black men on the street at all, save him. There had been found that morning, just outside the town, the dead body of a soldier, his uniform shredded where he had been flogged, and, turned upward through the black skin, raw, red meat. He lay face downward at the base of a tree, his fingernails digging into the scuffed earth. When he was turned over, his eyeballs stared upward in amazement and horror, his mouth was locked open wide; his trousers, soaked with blood, were torn open, and exposed to the cold, white air of morning the thick hairs of his groin, matted together, black and rust-red, and the wound that seemed to be throbbing still. He had been carried home in silence and lay now behind locked doors, with his living kinsmen, who sat, weeping, and praying, and dreaming of vengeance, and waiting for the next visitation. Now, someone spat on the pavement at Gabriel’s feet, and he walked on, his face not changing, and he heard it reprovingly whispered behind him that he was a good nigger, surely up to no trouble. He hoped that he would not be spoken to, that he would not have to smile into any of these so well-known white-faces. While he walked, held by his caution more rigid than an arrow, he prayed, as his mother had taught him to pray, for loving kindness; yet he dreamed of the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the head wobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered nothing but the rushing