Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [82]
Saturday was their best day, for they only worked until o’clock. They had all the afternoon to be together, and nearly all of the night, since Madame William had her séances on Saturday night and preferred that Elizabeth, before whose silent skepticism departed spirits might find themselves reluctant to speak, should not be in the house. They met at the service entrance. Richard was always there before her, looking, oddly, much younger and less anonymous without the ugly, tight-fitting, black uniform that he had to wear when working. He would be talking, or laughing with some of the other boys, or shooting dice, and when he heard her step down the long, stone hall he would look up, laughing; and wickedly nudging one of the other boys, he would half shout, half sing: ‘He-y! Look-a-there, ain’t she pretty?’
She never failed, at this—which was why he never failed to do it—to blush, half-smiling, half-frowning, and nervously to touch the collar of her dress.
‘Sweet Georgia Brown!’ somebody might say.
‘Miss Brown to you,’ said Richard, then, and took her arm.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ somebody else would say, ‘you better hold on to little Miss Bright-eyes, don’t somebody sure going to take her away from you.’
‘Yeah,’ said another voice, ‘and it might be me.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Richard, moving with her toward the street, ‘ain’t nobody going to take my little Little-bit away from me.’
Little-bit: it had been his name for her. And sometimes he called her Sandwich Mouth, or Funnyface, or Frog-eyes. She would not, of course, have endured these names from anyone else, nor, had she not found herself, with joy and helplessness (and a sleeping panic), living it out, would she ever have suffered herself so publicly to become a man’s property—‘concubine,’ her aunt would have said, and at night, alone, she rolled the word, tart like lemon rind, on her tongue.
She was descending with Richard to the sea. She would have to climb back up alone, but she did not know this then. Leaving the boys in the hall, they gained the midtown New York streets.
‘And what we going to do to-day, Little-bit?’ With that smile of his, and those depthless eyes, beneath the towers of the white city, with people, white, hurrying all around them.
‘I don’t know, honey. What you want to do?’
‘Well, maybe, we go to a museum.’
The first time he suggested this, she demanded, in panic, if they would be allowed to enter.
‘Sure, they let niggers in,’ Richard said. ‘Ain’t we got to be educated, too—to live with the motherf——s?
He never ‘watched’ his language with her, which at first she took as evidence of his contempt because she had fallen so easily, and which later she took as evidence of his love.
And then he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand.
For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they give him,