At last, Gabriel, dressed in an old white shirt and short linen pants, stood on the edge of the water. Then he was slowly led into the river, where he had so often splashed naked, until he reached the preacher. And the moment that the preacher threw him down, crying out the words of John the Baptist, Gabriel began to kick and sputter, nearly throwing the preacher off balance; and though at first they thought that it was the power of the Lord that worked in him, they realized as he rose, still kicking and with his eyes tightly shut, that it was only fury, and too much water in his nose. Some folks smiled, but Florence and Deborah did not smile. Though Florence had also been indignant, years before when the slimy water entered her incautiously open mouth, she had done her best not to sputter, and she had not cried out. But now, here came Gabriel, floundering and furious up the bank, and what she looked at, with an anger more violent than any she had felt before, was his nakedness. He was drenched, and his thin, white clothes clung like another skin to his black body. Florence and Deborah looked at one another, while the singing rose to cover Gabriel’s howling, and Deborah looked away.
Years later, Deborah and Florence had stood on Deborah’s porch at night and watched a vomit-covered Gabriel stagger up the moonlit road, and Florence had cried out: “I hate him! I hate him! Big, black, prancing tomcat of a nigger!” And Deborah had said, in that heavy voice of hers: “You know, honey, the Word tell us to hate the sin but not the sinner.”
In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty-six, Florence walked out through the cabin door. She had thought to wait until her mother, who was so ill now that she no longer stirred out of bed, should be buried—but suddenly she knew that she would wait no longer, the time had come. She had been working as cook and serving-girl for a large white family in town, and it was on the day her master proposed that she become his concubine that she knew her life among these wretched had come to its destined end. She left her employment that same day (leaving behind her a most vehement conjugal bitterness), and with part of the money that with cunning, cruelty, and sacrifice she had saved over a period of years, bought a railroad ticket to New York. When she bought it, in a kind of scarlet rage, she held like a talisman at the back of her mind the thought: “I can give it back, I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go.” But she knew that nothing could stop her.
And it was this leave-taking that came to stand, in Florence’s latter days, and with many another witness, at her bedside. Gray clouds obscured the sun that day, and outside the cabin window she saw that mist still covered the ground. Her mother lay in bed, awake; she was pleading with Gabriel, who had been out drinking the night before, and who was not really sober now, to mend his ways and come to the Lord. And Gabriel, full of the confusion, and pain, and guilt that were his whenever he thought of how he made his mother suffer, but that became nearly insupportable when she taxed him with it, stood before the mirror, head bowed, buttoning his shirt. Florence knew that he could not unlock his lips to speak; he could not say yes to his mother, and to the Lord; and he could not say no.
“Honey,” their mother was saying, “don’t you let your old mother die without you look her in the eye and tell her she going to see you in glory. You hear me, boy?”
In a moment, Florence thought with scorn, tears would fill his eyes, and he would promise to “do better.” He had been promising to “do better” since the day he had been baptized.
She put down her bag in the center of the hateful room.
“Ma,” she said, “I’m going. I’m a-going this morning.”
Now that she had said it, she was angry with herself for not having said it the night before, so that they would have had time to be finished with their weeping and their arguments. She had not trusted herself to withstand the night before; but now there was almost no time left. The center of her mind was filled with the image of the great, white clock at the railway station, on which the hands did not cease to move.
“You going where?” her mother asked sharply. But she knew that her mother had understood, had indeed long before this moment known that this time would come. The astonishment with which she stared at Florence’s bag was not altogether astonishment, but a startled, wary attention. A danger imagined had become present and real, and her mother was already searching for a way to break Florence’s will. All this Florence knew in a moment, and it made her stronger. She watched her mother, waiting.
But at the tone of his mother’s voice Gabriel, who had scarcely heard Florence’s announcement, so grateful had he been that something had occurred to distract from him his mother’s attention, dropped his eyes and saw Florence’s traveling-bag. And he repeated his mother’s question in a stunned, angry voice, understanding it only as the words hit the air:
“Yes, girl. Where you think you going?”
“I’m going,” she said, “to New York. I got my ticket.”
And her mother watched her. For a moment no one said a word. Then, Gabriel, in a changed and frightened voice, asked:
“And when you done decide that?”
She did not look at him, nor answer his question. She continued to watch her mother. “I got my ticket,” she repeated. “I’m going on the morning train.”
“Girl,” asked her mother, quietly, “is you sure you know what you’s doing?”
She stiffened, seeing in her mother’s eyes a mocking pity. “I’m a woman grown,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“And you going,” cried Gabriel, “this morning—just like that? And you going to walk off and leave your mother —just like that?”
“You hush,” she said, turning to him for the first time, “she got you, ain’t she?”
This was indeed, she realized as he dropped his eyes, the bitter, troubling point. He could not endure the thought of being left alone with his mother, with nothing whatever to put between himself and his guilty love. With Florence gone, time would have swallowed up all his mother’s children, except himself; and he, then, must make amends for all the pain that she had borne, and sweeten her last moments with all his proofs of love. And his mother required of him one proof only, that he tarry no longer in sin. With Florence gone, his stammering time, his playing time, contracted with a bound to the sparest interrogative second, when he must stiffen himself, and answer to his mother, and all the host of Heaven, yes or no.
Florence smiled inwardly a small, malicious smile, watching his slow bafflement, and panic, and rage; and she looked at her mother again. “She got you,” she repeated. “She don’t need me.”
“You going North,” her mother said, then. “And when you reckon on coming back?”
“I don’t reckon on coming back,” she said.
“You come crying back soon enough,” said Gabriel, with malevolence, “soon as they whip your butt up there four or five times.”
She looked at him again. “Just don’t you try to hold your breath till then, you hear?”
“Girl,” said her mother, “you mean to tell me the Devil’s done made your heart so hard you can just leave your mother on her dying bed, and you don’t care if you don’t never see her in this world no more? Honey, you can’t tell me you done got so evil as all that?”
She felt Gabriel watching her to see how she would take this question—the question that, for all her determination, she had dreaded most to hear. She looked away from her mother, and straightened, catching her breath, looking outward through the small, cracked window. There, outside, beyond the slowly rising mist, and farther off than her eyes could see, her life awaited her. The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead.
“I’m going, Ma,” she said. “I got to go.”
Her mother leaned back, face upward to the light, and began to cry. Gabriel moved to Florence’s side and grabbed her arm. She looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were full of tears.
“You can’t go,” he said. �
�You can’t go. You can’t go and leave your mother thisaway. She need a woman, Florence, to help look after her. What she going to do here, all alone with me?”
She pushed him from her and moved to stand over her mother’s bed.
“Ma,” she said, “don’t be like that. Ain’t a blessed thing for you to cry about so. Ain’t a thing can happen to me up North can’t happen to me here. God’s everywhere, Ma. Ain’t no need to worry.”
She knew that she was mouthing words; and she realized suddenly that her mother scorned to dignify these words with her attention. She had granted Florence the victory—with a promptness that had the effect of making Florence, however dimly and unwillingly, wonder if her victory was real. She was not weeping for her daughter’s future, she was weeping for the past, and weeping in an anguish in which Florence had no part. And all of this filled Florence with a terrible fear, which was immediately transformed into anger. “Gabriel can take care of you,” she said, her voice shaking with malice. “Gabriel ain’t never going to leave you. Is you, boy?” and she looked at him. He stood, stupid with bewilderment and grief, a few inches from the bed. “But me,” she said, “I got to go.” She walked to the center of the room again, and picked up her bag.
“Girl,” Gabriel whispered, “ain’t you got no feelings at all?”
“Lord!” her mother cried; and at the sound her heart turned over; she and Gabriel, arrested, stared at the bed. “Lord, Lord, Lord! Lord, have mercy on my sinful daughter! Stretch out your hand and hold her back from the lake that burns forever! Oh, my Lord, my Lord!” and her voice dropped, and broke, and tears ran down her face. “Lord, I done my best with all the children what you give me. Lord, have mercy on my children, and my children’s children.”
“Florence,” said Gabriel, “please don’t go. Please don’t go. You ain’t really fixing to go and leave her like this?”
Tears stood suddenly in her own eyes, though she could not have said what she was crying for. “Leave me be,” she said to Gabriel, and picked up her bag again. She opened the door; the cold, morning air came in. “Good-bye,” she said. And then to Gabriel: “Tell her I said good-bye.” She walked through the cabin door and down the short steps into the frosty yard. Gabriel watched her, standing frozen between the door and the weeping bed. Then, as her hand was on the gate, he ran before her, and slammed the gate shut.
“Girl, where you going? What you doing? You reckon on finding some men up North to dress you in pearls and diamonds?”
Violently, she opened the gate and moved out into the road. He watched her with his jaw hanging, and his lips loose and wet. “If you ever see me again,” she said, “I won’t be wearing rags like yours.”
All over the church there was only the sound, more awful than the deepest silence, of the prayers of the saints of God. Only the yellow, moaning light shone above them, making their faces gleam like muddy gold. Their faces, and their attitudes, and their many voices rising as one voice made John think of the deepest valley, the longest night, of Peter and Paul in the dungeon cell, one praying while the other sang; or of endless, depthless, swelling water, and no dry land in sight, the true believer clinging to a spar. And, thinking of tomorrow, when the church would rise up, singing, under the booming Sunday light, he thought of the light for which they tarried, which, in an instant, filled the soul, causing (throughout those iron-dark, unimaginable ages before John had come into the world) the newborn in Christ to testify: Once I was blind and now I see.
And then they sang: “Walk in the light, the beautiful light. Shine all around me by day and by night, Jesus, the light of the world.” And they sang: “Oh, Lord, Lord, I want to be ready, I want to be ready. I want to be ready to walk in Jerusalem just like John.”
To walk in Jerusalem just like John. Tonight, his mind was awash with visions: nothing remained. He was ill with doubt and searching. He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying to the love of God. Or else he wished to stand up now, and leave this tabernacle and never see these people any more. Fury and anguish filled him, unbearable, unanswerable; his mind was stretched to breaking. For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.
My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint, far wind, which bid it: “Arise.” And this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation, and he began to feel a terror he had never felt before.
And he looked around the church, at the people praying there. Praying Mother Washington had not come in until all of the saints were on their knees, and now she stood, the terrible, old, black woman, above his Aunt Florence, helping her to pray. Her granddaughter, Ella Mae, had come in with her, wearing a mangy fur jacket over her everyday clothes. She knelt heavily in a corner near the piano, under the sign that spoke of the wages of sin, and now and again she moaned. Elisha had not looked up when she came in, and he prayed in silence: sweat stood on his brow. Sister McCandless and Sister Price cried out every now and again: “Yes, Lord!” or: “Bless your name, Jesus!” And his father prayed, his head lifted up and his voice going on like a distant mountain stream.
But his Aunt Florence was silent; he wondered if she slept. He had never seen her praying in a church before. He knew that different people prayed in different ways: had his aunt always prayed in such a silence? His mother, too, was silent, but he had seen her pray before, and her silence made him feel that she was weeping. And why did she weep? And why did they come here, night after night after night, calling out to a God who cared nothing for them—if, above this flaking ceiling, there was any God at all? Then he remembered that the fool has said in his heart, There is no God—and he dropped his eyes, seeing that over his Aunt Florence’s head Praying Mother Washington was looking at him.
Frank sang the blues, and he drank too much. His skin was the color of caramel candy. Perhaps for this reason she always thought of him as having candy in his mouth, candy staining the edges of his straight, cruel teeth. For a while he wore a tiny mustache, but she made him shave it off, for it made him look, she thought, like a halfbreed gigolo. In details such as this he was always very easy—he would always put on a clean shirt, or get his hair cut, or come with her to Uplift meetings where they heard speeches by prominent Negroes about the future and duties of the Negro race. And this had given her, in the beginning of their marriage, the impression that she controlled him. This impression had been entirely and disastrously false.
When he had left her, more than twenty years before, and after more than ten years of marriage, she had felt for that moment only an exhausted exasperation and a vast relief. He had not been home for two days and three nights, and when he did return they quarreled with more than their usual bitterness. All of the rage she had accumulated during their marriage was told him in that evening as they stood in their small kitchen. He was still wearing overalls, and he had not shaved, and his face was muddy with sweat and dirt. He had said nothing for a long while, and then he had said: “All right, baby. I guess you don’t never want to see me no more, not a miserable, black sinner like me.” The door closed behind him, and she heard his feet echoing down the long hall, away. She stood alone in the kitchen, holding the empty coffeepot that she had been about to wash. She thought: “He’ll come back, and he’ll come back drunk.” And then she had thought, looking about the kitchen: “Lord, wouldn’t it be a blessing if he didn’t never come back no more.” The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, a
s was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer. Frank never did come back. He lived for a long while with another woman, and when the war came he died in France.
Now, somewhere at the other end of the earth, her husband lay buried. He slept in a land his fathers had never seen. She wondered often if his grave were marked—if there stood over it, as in pictures she had seen, a small white cross. If the Lord had ever allowed her to cross that swelling ocean she would have gone, among all the millions buried there, to seek out his grave. Wearing deep mourning, she would have laid on it, perhaps, a wreath of flowers, as other women did; and stood for a moment, head bowed, considering the unspeaking ground. How terrible it would be for Frank to rise on the day of judgment so far from home! And he surely would not scruple, even on that day, to be angry at the Lord. “Me and the Lord,” he had often said, “don’t always get along so well. He running the world like He thinks I ain’t got good sense.” How had he died? Slow or sudden? Had he cried out? Had death come creeping on him from behind, or faced him like a man? She knew nothing about it, for she had not known that he was dead until long afterward, when boys were coming home and she had begun searching for Frank’s face in the streets. It was the woman with whom he had lived who had told her, for Frank had given this woman’s name as his next of kin. The woman, having told her, had not known what else to say, and she stared at Florence in simpleminded pity. This made Florence furious, and she barely murmured: “Thank you,” before she turned away. She hated Frank for making this woman official witness to her humiliation. And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men.
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