Go Tell It on the Mountain (21 page)

“I asked my God to forgive me,” he said. “But I didn’t want no harlot’s son.”

“Esther weren’t no harlot,” she said quietly.

“She weren’t my wife. I couldn’t make her my wife. I already had
you
”—and he said the last words with venom—“Esther’s mind
weren’t on the Lord—she’d of dragged me right on down to Hell with her.”

“She mighty near has,” said Deborah.

“The Lord He held me back,” he said, hearing the thunder, watching the lightning. “He put out His hand and held me back.” Then, after a moment, turning back into the room: “I
couldn’t
of done nothing else,” he cried, “what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?” He looked at her, old and black and patient, smelling of sickness and age and death. “Ah,” he said, his tears still falling, “I bet you was mighty happy today, old lady, weren’t you? When she told you he, Royal, my son, was dead.
You
ain’t never had no son.” And he turned again to the window. Then: “How long you been knowing about this?”

“I been knowing,” she said, “ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come to church.”

“You got a evil mind,” he said. “I hadn’t never touched her then.”

“No,” she said slowly, “but you had already done touched
me
.”

He moved a little from the window and stood looking down at her from the foot of the bed.

“Gabriel,” she said, “I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, and make me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time.” She was very calm; her face was very bitter and patient. “Look like it weren’t His will. Look like I couldn’t nohow forget … how they done me way back there when I weren’t nothing but a girl.” She paused and looked away. “But, Gabriel, if you’d said something even when that poor girl was buried, if you’d wanted to own that poor boy, I wouldn’t nohow of cared what folks said, or where we might of had to go, or nothing. I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and he might be living now.”

“Deborah,” he asked, “what you been thinking all this time?”

She smiled. “I been thinking,” she said, “how you better commence
to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.” She paused. “I’d been wanting you since I wanted anything. And then I got you.”

He walked back to the window, tears rolling down his face.

“Honey,” she said, in another, stronger voice, “you better pray God to forgive you. You better not let go until He make you
know
you been forgiven.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “I’m waiting on the Lord.”

Then there was only silence, except for the rain. The rain came down in buckets; it was raining, as they said, pitchforks and nigger babies. Lightning flashed again across the sky and thunder rolled.

“Listen,” said Gabriel. “God is talking.”

Slowly now, he rose from his knees, for half the church was standing: Sister Price, Sister McCandless, and Praying Mother Washington; and the young Ella Mae sat in her chair watching Elisha where he lay. Florence and Elizabeth were still on their knees; and John was on his knees.

And, rising, Gabriel thought of how the Lord had led him to this church so long ago, and how Elizabeth, one night after he had preached, had walked this long aisle to the altar, to repent before God her sin. And then they had married, for he believed her when she said that she was changed—and she was the sign, she and her nameless child, for which he had tarried so many dark years before the Lord. It was as though, when he saw them, the Lord had returned to him again that which was lost.

Then, as he stood with the others over the fallen Elisha, John rose from his knees. He bent a dazed, sleepy, frowning look on Elisha and the others, shivering a little as though he were cold; and then he felt his father’s eyes and looked up at his father.

At the same moment, Elisha, from the floor, began to speak in a tongue of fire, under the power of the Holy Ghost. John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and with something come to life between them—while the Holy Ghost spoke. Gabriel
had never seen such a look on John’s face before; Satan, at that moment, stared out of John’s eyes while the Spirit spoke; and yet John’s staring eyes tonight reminded Gabriel of other eyes: of his mother’s eyes when she beat him, of Florence’s eyes when she mocked him, of Deborah’s eyes when she prayed for him, of Esther’s eyes and Royal’s eyes, and Elizabeth’s eyes tonight before Roy cursed him, and of Roy’s eyes when Roy said: “You black bastard.” And John did not drop his eyes, but seemed to want to stare forever into the bottom of Gabriel’s soul. And Gabriel, scarcely believing that John could have become so brazen, stared in wrath and horror at Elizabeth’s presumptuous bastard boy, grown suddenly so old in evil. He nearly raised his hand to strike him, but did not move, for Elisha lay between them. Then he said, soundlessly, with his lips: “Kneel down.” John turned suddenly, the movement like a curse, and knelt again before the altar.

Elizabeth’s Prayer

W
HILE ELISHA WAS SPEAKING
, Elizabeth felt that the Lord was speaking a message to her heart, that this fiery visitation was meant for her; and that if she humbled herself to listen, God would give her the interpretation. This certainty did not fill her with exultation, but with fear. She was afraid of what God might say—of what displeasure, what condemnation, what prophesies of trials yet to be endured might issue from His mouth.

Now Elisha ceased to speak, and rose; now he sat at the piano. There was muted singing all around her; yet she waited. Before her mind’s eyes wavered, in a light like the light from a fire, the face of John, whom she had brought so unwillingly into the world. It was
for this deliverance that she wept tonight: that he might be carried, past wrath unspeakable, into a state of grace.

They were singing:

Elisha picked out the song on the piano, his fingers seeming to hesitate, almost to be unwilling. She, too, strained against her great unwillingness, but forced her heart to say Amen, as the voice of Praying Mother Washington picked up the response:

She heard weeping near her—was it Ella Mae? or Florence? or the echo, magnified, of her own tears? The weeping was buried beneath the song. She had been hearing this song all her life, she had grown up with it, but she had never understood it as well as she understood it now. It filled the church, as though the church had merely become a hollow or a void, echoing with the voices that had driven her to this dark place. Her aunt had sung it always, harshly, under her breath, in a bitter pride:

She was probably an old, old woman now, still in the same harshness of spirit, singing this song in the tiny house down home which she and Elizabeth had shared so long. And she did not know of Elizabeth’s shame—Elizabeth had not written about John until long after she was married to Gabriel; and the Lord had never allowed her aunt
to come to New York City. Her aunt had always prophesied that Elizabeth would come to no good end, proud, and vain, and foolish as as she was, and having been allowed to run wild all her childhood days.

Her aunt had come second in the series of disasters that had ended Elizabeth’s childhood. First, when she was eight, going on nine, her mother had died, an event not immediately recognized by Elizabeth as a disaster, since she had scarcely known her mother and had certainly never loved her. Her mother had been very fair, and beautiful, and delicate of health, so that she stayed in bed most of the time, reading spiritualist pamphlets concerning the benefits of disease and complaining to Elizabeth’s father of how she suffered. Elizabeth remembered of her only that she wept very easily and that she smelled like stale milk—it was, perhaps, her mother’s disquieting color that, whenever she was held in her mother’s arms, made Elizabeth think of milk. Her mother did not, however, hold Elizabeth in her arms very often. Elizabeth very quickly suspected that this was because she was so very much darker than her mother and not nearly, of course, so beautiful. When she faced her mother she was shy, downcast, sullen. She did not know how to answer her mother’s shrill, meaningless questions, put with the furious affectation of maternal concern; she could not pretend, when she kissed her mother, or submitted to her mother’s kiss, that she was moved by anything more than an unpleasant sense of duty. This, of course, bred in her mother a kind of baffled fury, and she never tired of telling Elizabeth that she was an “unnatural” child.

But it was very different with her father; he was—and so Elizabeth never failed to think of him—young, and handsome, and kind, and generous; and he loved his daughter. He told her that she was the apple of his eye, that she was wound around his heartstrings, that she was surely the finest little lady in the land. When she was with her father she pranced and postured like a very queen: and she was not afraid of anything, save the moment when he would say that it was her bedtime, or that he had to be “getting along.” He was always
buying her things, things to wear and things to play with, and taking her on Sundays for long walks through the country, or to the circus, when the circus was in town, or to Punch and Judy shows. And he was dark, like Elizabeth, and gentle, and proud; he had never been angry with her, but she had seen him angry a few times with other people—her mother, for example, and later, of course, her aunt. Her mother was always angry and Elizabeth paid no attention; and, later, her aunt was perpetually angry and Elizabeth learned to bear it: but if her father had ever been angry with her—in those days—she would have wanted to die.

Neither had he ever learned of her disgrace; when it happened, she could not think how to tell him, how to bring such pain to him who had had such pain already. Later, when she would have told him, he was long past caring, in the silent ground.

She thought of him now, while the singing and weeping went on around her—and she thought how he would have loved his grandson, who was like him in so many ways. Perhaps she dreamed it, but she did not believe she dreamed when at moments she thought she heard in John echoes, curiously distant and distorted, of her father’s gentleness, and the trick of his laugh—how he threw his head back and the years that marked his face fled away, and the soft eyes softened and the mouth turned upward at the corners like a little boy’s mouth—and that deadly pride of her father’s behind which he retired when confronted by the nastiness of other people. It was he who had told her to weep, when she wept, alone; never to let the world see, never to ask for mercy; if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never to let oneself be beaten. He had said this to her on one of the last times she had seen him, when she was being carried miles away, to Maryland, to live with her aunt. She had reason, in the years that followed, to remember his saying this; and time, at last, to discover in herself the depths of bitterness in her father from which these words had come.

For when her mother died, the world fell down; her aunt, her mother’s older sister, arrived, and stood appalled at Elizabeth’s vanity
and uselessness; and decided, immediately, that her father was no fit person to raise a child, especially, as she darkly said, an innocent little girl. And it was this decision on the part of her aunt, for which Elizabeth did not forgive her for many years, that precipitated the third disaster, the separation of herself from her father—from all that she loved on earth.

For her father ran what her aunt called a “house”—not the house where they lived, but another house, to which, as Elizabeth gathered, wicked people often came. And he had also, to Elizabeth’s rather horrified confusion, a “stable.” Low, common niggers, the lowest of the low, came from all over (and sometimes brought their women and sometimes found them there) to eat, and drink cheap moonshine, and play music all night long—and to do worse things, her aunt’s dreadful silence then suggested, which were far better left unsaid. And she would, she swore, move Heaven and earth before she would let her sister’s daughter grow up with such a man. Without, however, so much as looking at Heaven, and without troubling any more of the earth than that part of it which held the courthouse, she won the day: like a clap of thunder, or like a magic spell, like light one moment and darkness the next, Elizabeth’s life had changed. Her mother was dead, her father banished, and she lived in the shadow of her aunt.

Or, more exactly, as she thought now, the shadow in which she had lived was fear—fear made more dense by hatred. Not for a moment had she judged her father; it would have made no difference to her love for him had she been told, and even seen it proved, that he was first cousin to the Devil. The proof would not have existed for her, and if it had she would not have regretted being his daughter, or have asked for anything better than to suffer at his side in Hell. And when she had been taken from him her imagination had been wholly unable to lend reality to the wickedness of which he stood accused—
she
, certainly, did not accuse him. She screamed in anguish when he put her from him and turned to go, and she had to be carried to the train. And later, when she understood perfectly all that had happened
then, still in her heart she could not accuse him. Perhaps his life had been wicked, but he had been very good to her. His life had certainly cost him enough in pain to make the world’s judgment a thing of no account.
They
had not known him as she had known him;
they
did not care as she had cared! It only made her sad that he never, as he had promised, came to take her away, and that while she was growing up she saw him so seldom. When she became a young woman she did not see him at all; but that was her own fault.