Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [86]
‘What we going to do? she asked at last.
He smiled a vicious smile—she had never seen such a smile on his face before. ‘Maybe you ought to pray to that Jesus of yours and get Him to come down and tell these white men something.’ He looked at her a long, dying moment. ‘Because I don’t know nothing else to do,’ he said.
She suggested: ‘Richard, what about another lawyer?’
And he smiled again. ‘I declare,’ he said, ‘Little-bit’s been holding out on me. She got a fortune tied up in a sock, and she ain’t never told me nothing about it.’
She had been trying to save money for a whole year, but she had only thirty dollars. She sat before him, going over in her mind all the things she might do to raise money, even to going on the streets. Then, for very helplessness, she began to shake with sobbing. At this, his face became Richard’s face again. He said in a shaking voice: ‘Now, look here, Little-bit, don’t you be like that. We going to work this out all right.’ But she could not stop sobbing. ‘Elizabeth,’ he whispered, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth.’ Then the man came and said that it was time for her to go. And she rose. She had brought two packets of cigarettes for him, and they were still in her bag. Wholly ignorant of prison, she did not dare to give them to him under the man’s eyes. And, somehow, her failure to remember to give him the cigarettes, when she knew how much he smoked, made her wept the harder. She tried—and failed—to smile at him, and she was slowly led to the door. The sun nearly blinded her, and she heard him whisper behind her: ‘So long, baby. Be good.’
In the streets she did not know what to do. She stood awhile before the dreadful gates, and then she walked and walked until she came to a coffee shop where taxi drivers and the people who worked in nearby offices hurried in and out all day. Usually she was afraid to go into downtown establishments, where only white people were, but to-day she did not care. She felt that if anyone said anything to her she would turn and curse him like the lowest bitch on the street. If anyone touched her, she would do her best to send his soul to Hell.
But no one touched her; no one spoke. She drank her coffee, sitting in the strong sun that fell through the window. Now it came to her how alone, how frightened she was; she had never been so frightened in her life before. She knew that she was pregnant—knew it, as the old folks said, in her bones; and if Richard should be sent away, what, under heaven, could she do? Two years, three years—she had no idea how long he might be sent away for—what would she do? And how could she keep her aunt from knowing? And if her aunt should find out, then her father would know, too. The tears welled up, and she drank her cold, tasteless coffee. And what would they do with Richard? And if they sent him away, what would he be like, then, when he returned? She looked out into the quiet, sunny streets, and for the first time in her life, she hated it all—the white city, the white world. She could not, that day, think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there, and she hoped that one day God, with tortures inconceivable, would grind them utterly into humility, and make them know that black boys and black girls, whom they treated with such condescension, such disdain, and such good humor, had hearts like human beings, too, more human hearts than theirs.
But Richard was not sent away. Against the testimony of the three robbers, and her own testimony, and, under oath, the storekeeper’s indecision, there was no evidence on which to convict him. The courtroom seemed to feel, with some complacency and some disappointment,