Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [75]
‘She mighty near has,’ said Deborah.
‘The Lord He held me back,’ he said, hearing the thunder, watching the lightning. ‘He put out His hand and held me back.’ Then, after a moment, turning back into the room: I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ He looked at her, old and black and patient, smelling of sickness and age and death. ‘Ah,’ he said, his tears still falling, ‘I bet you was mighty happy to-day, old lady, weren’t you? When she told you he, Royal, my son, was dead. You ain’t never had no son.’ And he turned again to the window. Then: ‘How long you been knowing about this?’
‘I been knowing,’ she said, ‘ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come to church.’
‘You got a evil mind,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t never touched her then.’
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but you had already done touched me.’
He moved a little from the window and stood looking down at her from the foot of the bed.
‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, and make me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time.’ She was very calm; her face was very bitter and patient. ‘Look like it weren’t His will. Look like I couldn’t nohow forget … how they done me way back there when I weren’t nothing but a girl.’ She paused and looked away. ‘But, Gabriel, if you’d said something even when that poor girl was buried, if you’d wanted to own that poor boy, I wouldn’t nohow of cared what folks said, or where we might have had to go, or nothing. I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and he might be living now.’
‘Deborah,’ he asked, ‘what you been thinking all this time?’
She smiled. ‘I been thinking,’ she said, ‘how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.’ She paused. ‘I’d been wanting you since I wanted anything. And then I got you.’
He walked back to the window, tears rolling down his face.
‘Honey,’ she said, in another, stronger voice, ‘you better pray God to forgive you. You better not let go until He make you know you been forgiven.’
‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘I’m waiting on the Lord.’
Then there was only silence, except for the rain. The rain came down in buckets; it was raining, as they said, pitchforks and nigger babies. Lightning flashed again across the sky and thunder rolled.
‘Listen,’ said Gabriel. ‘God is talking.’
Slowly now, he rose from his knees, for half the church was standing: Sister Price, Sister McCandless, and Praying Mother Washington; and the young Ella Mae sat in her chair watching Elisha where he lay. Florence and Elizabeth were still on their knees; and John was on his knees.
And, rising, Gabriel thought of how the Lord had led him to this church so long ago, and how Elizabeth, one night after he had preached, had walked this long aisle to the altar, to repent before God her sin. And then they had married, for he believed her when she said that she was changed—and she was the sign, she and her nameless child, for which he had tarried so many dark years before the Lord. It was as though, when he saw them, the Lord had returned to him again that which was lost.
Then, as he stood with the others over the fallen Elisha, John rose from his kneed. He bent a dazed, sleepy, frowning look on Elisha and the others, shivering a little as though he were cold; and then he felt his father’s eyes and looked up at his father.
At the same moment, Elisha, from the floor, began to speak in a tongue of fire, under the power of the Holy Ghost. John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and with something come to life between them—while the Holy Ghost spoke, Gabriel had never seen such a look on John’s face before; Satan, at that moment, stared out of John’s eyes while the spirit spoke; and yet John’s staring eyes to-night reminded