Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [83]
But on other Saturdays they went to see a movie; they went to see a play; they visited his friends; they walked through Central Park. She liked the park because, however spuriously, it re-created something of the landscape she had known. How many afternoons had they walked there! She had always, since, avoided it. They bought peanuts and for hours fed the animals at the zoo; they bought soda pop and drank it on the grass; they walked along the reservoir and Richard explained how a city like a New York found water to drink. Mixed with her fear for him was a total admiration: that he had learned so young, so much. People stared at them but she did not mind; he noticed, but he did not seem to notice. But sometimes he would ask, in the middle of a sentence—concerned, possibly, with ancient Rome:
‘Little-bit—d’you love me?’
And she wondered how he could doubt it. She thought how infirm she must be not to have been able to make him know it; and she raised her eyes to his, and she said the only thing she could say:
‘I wish to God I may die if I don’t love you. There ain’t no sky above us if I don’t love you.’
Then he would look ironically up at the sky, and take her arm with a firmer pressure, and they would walk on.
Once, she asked him:
‘Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?’
And he looked at her a long moment. Then:
‘Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.’
‘Then how come you got to be so smart? how come you got to know so much?’
And he smiled, pleased, but he said: ‘Little-bit, I don’t know so much.’ Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she had grown to know: ‘I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. He weren’t going to beat my arse, then. And if he tried to kill me, I’d take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.’ Then he looked at her again, and smiled and kissed her, and he said: ‘That’s how I got to know so much, baby.’
She asked: ‘And what you going to do, Richard? What you want to be?’
And his face clouded. ‘I don’t know. I got to find out. Looks like I can’t get my mind straight nohow.’
She did not know why he couldn’t—or she could only dimly face it—but she knew he spoke the truth.
She had made her great mistake with Richard in not telling him that she was going to have a child. Perhaps, she thought now, if she had told him everything might have been very different, and he would be living yet. But the circumstances under which she had discovered herself to be pregnant had been such to make her decide, for his sake to hold her peace awhile. Frightened as she was, she dared not add to the panic that overtook him on the last summer of his life.
And yet perhaps it was, after all, this—this failure to demand of his strength what it might then, most miraculously, have been found able to bear; by which—indeed, how could she know?—his strength might have been strengthened, for which she prayed to-night to be forgiven. Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.
She lived quite a long way from Richard—four underground stops; and when it was time for her to go home, he always took the underground uptown with her and