Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  The silence was the silence of the early morning, and he was returning from the harlot’s house. Yet all around him were the sounds of the morning: of birds, invisible, praising God; of crickets in the vines, frogs in the swamp, or dogs miles away and close at hand, roosters on the porch. The sun was not yet half awake; only the utmost tops of trees had begun to tremble at his turning; and the mist moved sullenly, before Gabriel and all around him, falling back before the light that rules by day. Later, he said of that morning that his sin was on him; then he knew only that he carried a burden and that he longed to lay it down. This burden was heavier than the heaviest mountain and he carried it in his heart. With each step that he took his burden grew heavier, and his breath became slow and harsh, and, of a sudden, cold sweat stood out on his brow and drenched his back.

  All alone in the cabin his mother lay waiting; not only for his return this morning, but for his surrender to the Lord. She lingered only for this, and he knew it, even though she no longer exhorted him as she had in days but shortly gone by. She had placed him in the hands of the Lord, and she waited with patience to see how He would work the matter.

  For she would live to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. She would not go to her rest until her son, the last of her children, he who would place her in the winding-sheet, should have entered the communion of the saints. Now she, who had been impatient once, and violent, who had cursed and shouted and contended like a man, moved into silence, contending only, and with the last measure of her strength, with God. And this, too, she did like a man: knowing that she had kept the faith, she waited for Him to keep His promise. Gabriel knew that when he entered she would not ask him where he had been; she would not reproach him; and her eyes, even when she closed her lids to sleep, would follow him everywhere.

  Later, since it was Sunday, some of the brothers and sisters would come to her, to sing and pray around her bed. And she would pray for him, sitting up in bed unaided, her head lifted, her voice steady; while he, kneeling in a corner of the room, trembled and almost wished that she would die; and trembled again at this testimony to the desperate wickedness of his heart; and prayed without words to be forgiven. For he had no words when he knelt before the throne. And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength.

  For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the Son of God. He wanted to be master, to speak with that authority which could only come from God. It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind. He was later to say that this was a gift bequeathed him by his mother, that it was God’s hand on him from his earliest beginnings; but then he knew only that when each night came, chaos and fever raged in him; the silence in the cabin between his mother and himself became something that could not be borne; not looking at her, facing the mirror as he put on his jacket, and trying to avoid his face there, he told her that he was going to take a little walk—he would be back soon.

  Sometimes Deborah sat with his mother, watching him with eyes that were no less patient and reproachful. He would escape into the starry night and walk until he came to a tavern, or to a house that he had marked already in the long daytime of his lust. And then he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed his friends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud, in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all of him arising the stink of his corruption. Then he could not even weep. He could not even pray. He longed, nearly, for death, which was all that could release him from the cruelty of his chains.

  And through all this his mother’s eyes were on him; her hand, like fiery tongs, gripped the lukewarm ember of his heart; and caused him to feel, at the thought of death, another, colder terror. To go down into the grave, unwashed, unforgiven, was to go down into the pit forever, where terrors awaited him greater than any the earth, for all her age and groaning, had ever borne. He would be cut off from the living, forever; he would have no name forever. Where he had been would be silence only, rock, stubble, and no seed; for him, forever, and for his, no hope of glory. Thus, when he came to the harlot, he came to her in rage, and he left her in vain sorrow—feeling himself to have been, once more, most foully robbed, having spent his holy seed in a forbidden darkness where it could only die. He cursed the betraying lust that lived in him, and he cursed it again in others. But: “I remember,” he was later to say, “the day my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

  And he walked homeward, thinking of the night behind him. He had seen the woman at the very beginning of the evening, but she had been with many others, men and women, and so he had ignored her. But later, when he was on fire with whisky, he looked again directly at her, and saw immediately that she had also been thinking of him. There were not so many people with her—it was as though she had been making room for him. He had already been told that she was a widow from the North, in town for only a few days to visit her people. When he looked at her she looked at him and, as though it were part of the joking conversation she was having with her friends, she laughed aloud. She had the lie-gap between her teeth, and a big mouth; when she laughed, she belatedly caught her lower lip in her teeth, as though she were ashamed of so large a mouth, and her breasts shook. It was not like the riot that occurred when big, fat women laughed—her breasts rose and fell against the tight cloth of her dress. She was much older than he—around Deborah’s age, perhaps thirty-odd—and she was not really pretty. Yet the distance between them was abruptly charged with her, and her smell was in his nostrils. Almost, he felt those moving breasts beneath his hand. And he drank again, allowing, unconsciously, or nearly, his face to fall into the lines of innocence and power which his experience with women had told him made their love come down.

  Well (walking homeward, cold and tingling) yes, they did the thing. Lord, how they rocked in their bed of sin, and how she cried and shivered; Lord, how her love came down! Yes (walking homeward through the fleeing mist, with the cold sweat standing on his brow), yet, in vanity and the pride of conquest, he thought of her, of her smell, the heat of her body beneath his hands, of her voice, and her tongue, like the tongue of a cat, and her teeth, and her swelling breasts, and how she moved for him, and held him, and labored with him, and how they fell, trembling and groaning, and locked together, into the world again. And, thinking of this, his body freezing with his sweat, and yet altogether violent with the memory of lust, he came to a tree on a gentle rise, beyond which, and out of sight, lay home, where his mother lay. And there leaped into his mind, with the violence of water that has burst the dams and covered the banks, rushing uncontrolled toward the doomed, immobile houses—on which, on roof-tops and windows, the sun yet palely shivers—the memory of all the mornings he had mounted here and passed this tree, caught for a moment between sins committed and sins to be committed. The mist on this rise had fled away, and he felt that he stood, as he faced the lone tree, beneath the naked eye of Heaven. Then, in a moment, there was silence, only silence, everywhere—the very birds had ceased to sing, and no dogs barked, and no rooster crowed for day. And he felt that this silence was God’s judgment; that all creation had been stilled before the just and awful wrath of God, and waited now to see the sinner—he was the sinner—cut down and banished from the presence of the Lord. And he touched the tree, hardly knowing that he touched it, out of an impulse to be hidden; and then he cried: “Oh, Lord, have mercy! Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!”

  And he fell against th
e tree, sinking to the ground and clutching the roots of the tree. He had shouted into silence and only silence answered—and yet, when he cried, his cry had caused a ringing to the outermost limits of the earth. This ringing, his lone cry rolling through creation, frightening the sleeping fish and fowl, awakening echoes everywhere, river, and valley, and mountain wall, caused in him a fear so great that he lay for a moment silent and trembling at the base of the tree, as though he wished to be buried there. But that burdened heart of his would not be still, would not let him keep silence—would not let him breathe until he cried again. And so he cried again; and his cry returned again; and still the silence waited for God to speak.

  And his tears began—such tears as he had not known were in him. “I wept,” he said later, “like a little child.” But no child had ever wept such tears as he wept that morning on his face before Heaven, under the mighty tree. They came from deeps no child discovers, and shook him with an ague no child endures. And presently, in his agony, he was screaming, each cry seeming to tear his throat apart, and stop his breath, and force the hot tears down his face, so that they splashed his hands and wet the root of the tree: “Save me! Save me!” And all creation rang, but did not answer. “I couldn’t hear nobody pray.”

  Yes, he was in that valley where his mother had told him he would find himself, where there was no human help, no hand outstretched to protect or save. Here nothing prevailed save the mercy of God—here the battle was fought between God and the Devil, between death and everlasting life. And he had tarried too long, he had turned aside in sin too long, and God would not hear him. The appointed time had passed and God had turned His face away.

  “Then,” he testified, “I heard my mother singing. She was a-singing for me. She was a-singing low and sweet, right there beside me, like she knew if she just called Him, the Lord would come.” When he heard this singing, which filled all the silent air, which swelled until it filled all the waiting earth, the heart within him broke, and yet began to rise, lifted of its burden; and his throat unlocked; and his tears came down as though the listening skies had opened. “Then I praised God, Who had brought me out of Egypt and set my feet on the solid rock.” When at last he lifted up his eyes he saw a new Heaven and a new earth; and he heard a new sound of singing, for a sinner had come home. “I looked at my hands and my hands were new. I looked at my feet and my feet were new. And I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change my mind.” And, yes, there was singing everywhere; the birds and the crickets and the frogs rejoiced, the distant dogs leaping and sobbing, circled in their narrow yards, and roosters cried from every high fence that here was a new beginning, a blood-washed day!

  And this was the beginning of his life as a man. He was just past twenty-one; the century was not yet one year old. He moved into town, into the room that awaited him at the top of the house in which he worked, and he began to preach. He married Deborah in that same year. After the death of his mother, he began to see her all the time. They went to the house of God together, and because there was no one, any more, to look after him, she invited him often to her home for meals, and kept his clothes neat, and after he had preached they discussed his sermons; that is, he listened while she praised.

  He had certainly never intended to marry her; such an idea was no more in his mind, he would have said, than the possibility of flying to the moon. He had known her all his life; she had been his older sister’s older friend, and then his mother’s faithful visitor; she had never, for Gabriel, been young. So far as he was concerned, she might have been born in her severe, her sexless, long and shapeless habit, always black or gray. She seemed to have been put on earth to visit the sick, and to comfort those who wept, and to arrange the last garments of the dying.

  Again, there was her legend, her history, which would have been enough, even had she not been so wholly unattractive, to put her forever beyond the gates of any honorable man’s desire. This, indeed, in her silent, stolid fashion, she seemed to know: where, it might be, other women held as their very charm and secret the joy that they could give and share, she contained only the shame that she had borne—shame, unless a miracle of human love delivered her, was all she had to give. And she moved, therefore, through their small community like a woman mysteriously visited by God, like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool. No ornaments ever graced her body; there was about her no tinkling, no shining, and no softness. No ribbon falsified her blameless and implacable headgear; on her woolen head there was only the barest minimum of oil. She did not gossip with the other women—she had nothing, indeed, to gossip about—but kept her communication to yea and nay, and read her Bible, and prayed. There were people in the church, and even men carrying the gospel, who mocked Deborah behind her back; but their mockery was uneasy; they could never be certain but that they might be holding up to scorn the greatest saint among them, the Lord’s peculiar treasure and most holy vessel.

  “You sure is a godsend to me, Sister Deborah,” Gabriel would sometimes say. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  For she sustained him most beautifully in his new condition; with her unquestioning faith in God, and her faith in him, she, even more than the sinners who came crying to the altar after he had preached, bore earthly witness to his calling; and speaking, as it were, in the speech of men she lent reality to the mighty work that the Lord had appointed to Gabriel’s hands.

  And she would look up at him with her timid smile. “You hush, Reverend. It’s me that don’t never kneel down without I thank the Lord for you.”

  Again: she never called him Gabriel or “Gabe,” but from the time that he began to preach she called him Reverend, knowing that the Gabriel whom she had known as a child was no more, was a new man in Christ Jesus.

  “You ever hear from Florence?” she sometimes asked.

  “Lord, Sister Deborah, it’s me that ought to be asking you. That girl don’t hardly never write to me.”

  “I ain’t heard from her real lately.” She paused. Then: “I don’t believe she so happy up there.”

  “And serve her right, too—she ain’t had no business going away from here like she did, just like a crazy woman.” And then he asked, maliciously: “She tell you if she married yet?”

  She looked at him quickly, and looked away. “Florence ain’t thinking about no husband,” she said.

  He laughed. “God bless you for your pure heart, Sister Deborah. But if that girl ain’t gone away from here a-looking for a husband, my name ain’t Gabriel Grimes.”

  “If she’d a-wanted a husband look to me like she could a just picked one out right here. You don’t mean to tell me she done traveled all the way North just for that?” And she smiled strangely, a smile less gravely impersonal. He, seeing this, thought that it certainly did a strange thing to her face: it made her look like a frightened girl.

  “You know,” he said, watching her with more attention, “Florence ain’t never thought none of these niggers around here was good enough for her.”

  “I wonder,” she ventured, “if she ever going to find a man good enough for her. She so proud—look like she just won’t let nobody come near her.”

  “Yes,” he said, frowning, “she so proud the Lord going to bring her low one day. You mark my words.”

  “Yes,” she sighed, “the Word sure do tell us that pride goes before destruction.”

  “And a haughty spirit before a fall. That’s the Word.”

  “Yes,” and she smiled again, “ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend? You is just got to be in it, that’s all—’cause every word is true, and the gates of Hell ain’t going to be able to stand against it.”

  He smiled, watching her, and felt a great tenderness fill his heart. “You just stay in the Word, little sister. The windows of Heaven going to open up and pour down blessings on you till you won’t know where to put them.”

  When she smiled now it was a heightened joy. “He done blessed me al
ready, Reverend. He blessed me when He saved your soul and sent you out to preach His gospel.”

  “Sister Deborah,” he said, slowly, “all that sinful time—was you a-praying for me?”

  Her tone dropped ever so slightly. “We sure was, Reverend. Me and your mother, we was a-praying all the time.”

  And he looked at her, full of gratitude and a sudden, wild conjecture: he had been real for her, she had watched him, and prayed for him during all those years when she, for him, had been nothing but a shadow. And she was praying for him still; he would have her prayers to aid him all his life long—he saw this, now, in her face. She said nothing, and she did not smile, only looked at him with her grave kindness, now a little questioning, a little shy.

  “God bless you, sister,” he said at last.

  It was during this dialogue, or hard on the heels of it, that the town was subjected to a monster revival meeting. Evangelists from all the surrounding counties, from as far south as Florida and as far north as Chicago, came together in one place to break the bread of life. It was called the Twenty-Four Elders Revival Meeting, and it was the great occasion of that summer. For there were twenty-four of them, each one given his night to preach—to shine, as it were, before men, and to glorify his Heavenly Father. Of these twenty-four, all of them men of great experience and power, and some of them men of great fame, Gabriel, to his astonished pride, was asked to be one. This was a great, a heavy honor for one so young in the faith, and in years—who had but only yesterday been lying, vomit-covered, in the gutters of sin—and Gabriel felt his heart shake with fear as his invitation came to him. Yet he felt that it was the hand of God that had called him out so early to prove himself before such mighty men.

  He was to preach on the twelfth night. It was decided, in view of his possible failure to attract, to support him on either side with a nearly equal number of war horses. He would have, thus, the benefit of the storm they would certainly have stirred up before him; and should he fail to add substantially to the effect they had created, there would be others coming after him to obliterate his performance.