Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [91]
‘I was scared,’ Elizabeth brought out, shivering, still compelled to speak.
‘I ain’t never,’ said Florence, seen it to fail. Look like ain’t no woman born what don’t get walked over by some no-count man. Look like ain’t no woman nowhere but ain’t been dragged down in the dirt by some man, and left there, too, while he go on about his business.’
Elizabeth sat at the table, numb, with nothing more to say.
‘What he do,’ asked Florence, finally, ‘run off and leave you?’
‘Oh, no,’ cried Elizabeth, quickly, and the tears sprang to her eyes, ‘he weren’t like that! He died, just like I say—he got in trouble, and he died—a long time before this boy was born.’ She began to weep with the same helplessness with which she had been speaking. Florence rose and came over to Elizabeth, holding Elizabeth’s head against her breast. ‘He wouldn’t never of left me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but he died.’
And now she wept, after her long austerity, as though she would never be able to stop.
‘Hush now,’ said Florence, gently, ‘hush now. You going to frighten the little fellow. He don’t want to see his mamma cry. All right,’ she whispered to John, who had ceased his attempts at destruction, and stared now at the two women, ‘all right. Everything’s all right.’
Elizabeth sat up and reached in her handbag for a handkerchief, and began to dry her eyes.
‘Yes,’ said Florence, moving to the window, ‘the menfolk, they die, all right. And it’s us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it’s over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us. Yes, Lord——’ and she paused; she turned and came back to Elizabeth. ‘Yes, Lord,’ she repeated, ‘don’t I know.’
‘I’m mighty sorry,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to upset your nice dinner this way.’
‘Girl,’ said Florence, ‘don’t you say a word about being sorry, or I’ll show you to this door. You pick up that boy and sit down there in that easy chair and pull yourself together. I’m going out in the kitchen and make us something cold to drink. You try not to fret, honey. The Lord, He ain’t going to let you fall but so low.’
Then she met Gabriel, two or three weeks later, at Florence’s house on a Sunday.
Nothing Florence had said had prepared her for him. She had expected him to be older than Florence, and bald, or gray. But he seemed considerably younger than his sister, with all his teeth and hair. There he sat, that Sunday, in Florence’s tiny, fragile parlor, a very rock, it seemed to the eye of her confusion, in her so weary land.
She remembered that as she mounted the stairs with John’s heavy weight in her arms, and as she entered the door, she heard music, which became perceptible fainter as Florence closed the door behind her. John had heard it, too, and had responded by wriggling, and moving his hands in the air, and making noises, meant, she supposed, to be taken for a song. ‘You’s a nigger, all right,’ she thought with amusement and impatience—for it was someone’s gramophone, on a lower floor, filling the air with the slow, high, measured wailing of the blues.
Gabriel rose, it seemed to her, with a speed and eagerness that were not merely polite. She wondered immediately if Florence had told him about her. And this caused her to stiffen with a tentative anger against Florence, and with pride and fear. Yet when she looked into his eyes she found there a strange humility, an altogether unexpected kindness. She felt the anger go out of her, and her defensive pride; but somewhere, crouching, the fear remained.
Then Florence introduced them, saying: ‘Elizabeth, this here’s my brother I been telling you so much about. He’s a preacher, honey—so we got to be mighty careful what we talk about when he’s around.’
Then she said, with a smile less barbed and ambiguous than his sister’s remark: ‘Ain’t no need to be afraid of me, sister. I ain’t nothing but a poor, weak vessel in the hands of the Lord.’
‘You see!’ said Florence, grimly. She took John from his mother’s arms. ‘And this here’s little Johnny,’ she said,