Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [80]
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I heard her call you one time.’
‘Well,’ she said helplessly, after a long pause, ‘good-bye.’
‘Good-bye? You ain’t going away, is you?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, in confusion.
‘Well,’ he said, and smiled and bowed, ‘good day.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘good day.’
And she turned and walked out into the streets; no the same streets from which she had entered a moment ago. These streets, the sky above, the sun, the drifting people, all had, in a moment, changed, and would never be the same again.
‘You remember that day,’ he asked much later, ‘when you come into the store?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, you was mighty pretty.’
‘I didn’t think you never looked at me.’
‘Well, I didn’t think you never looked at me.’
‘You was reading a book.’
‘Yes.’
‘What book was it, Richard?’
‘Oh, I don’t remember. Just a book.’
‘You smiled.’
‘You did, too.’
‘No, I didn’t. I remember.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘No, I didn’t. Not till you did.’
‘Well, anyway—you was mighty pretty.’
She did not like to think of what hardness of heart, what calculated weeping, what deceit, what cruelty she now went into battle with her aunt fro her freedom. And she wont it, even though on certain not-to-be-dismissed conditions. The principal condition was that she should put herself under the protection of a distant, unspeakably respectable female relative of her aunt’s, who lived in New York City—for when the summer ended, Richard said that he was going there and he wanted her to come with him. They would get married there. Richard said that he hated the South, and this was perhaps the reason it did not occurred to either of them to begin their married life there. And Elizabeth was checked by the fear that if her aunt should discover how things stood between her and Richard she would find, as she had found so many years before in the case of her father, some means of bringing about their separation. This, as Elizabeth later considered it, was the first in the sordid series of mistakes which was to cause her to fall so low.
But to look back from the stony plane along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place. In those days, had the Lord Himself descended from Heaven with trumpets telling her to turn back, she could scarcely have heard Him, and could certainly not have heeded. She lived, in those days, in a fiery storm, of which Richard was the center and the heart. And she fought only to reach him—only that; she was afraid of what might happen if they were kept from one another; for what might come after she had no thoughts or fears to spare.
Her pretext for coming to New York was to take advantage of the greater opportunities the North offered colored people; to study in a Northern school, and to find a better job than any she was likely to be offered in the South. Her aunt, who listened to this with no diminution of her habitual scorn, was yet unable to deny that from generation to generation, things, as she grudgingly put it, were bound to change—and neither could she quite take the position of seeming to stand in Elizabeth’s way. In the winter of 1920, as the year began, Elizabeth found herself in an ugly back room in Harlem in the home of her aunt’s relative, a woman whose respectability was immediately evident from the incense she burned in her rooms and the spiritualist séances she held every Saturday night.
The house was still standing, not very far away; often she was forced to pass it. Without looking up, she was able to see the windows of the apartment in which she had lived, and the woman’s sign was in the window still: MADAME WILLIAMS, SPIRITUALIST.
She found a job as a chambermaid in the same hotel in which Richard worked as lift-boy. Richard said that they would marry as soon as he had saved some money. But since he was