Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  “Dearly beloved in the Lord,” he began—but her eyes were on him, that strange, that mocking light—“let us bow our heads in prayer.” And he closed his eyes and bowed his head.

  His later memory of this sermon was like the memory of a storm. From the moment that he raised his head and looked out over their faces again, his tongue was loosed and he was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. Yes, the power of the Lord was on him that night, and he preached a sermon that was remembered in camp-meetings and in cabins, and that set a standard for visiting evangelists for a generation to come. Years later, when Esther and Royal and Deborah were dead, and Gabriel was leaving the South, people remembered this sermon and the gaunt, possessed young man who had preached it.

  He took his text from the eighteenth chapter of the second book of Samuel, the story of the young Ahimaaz who ran too soon to bring the tidings of battle to King David. For, before he ran, he was asked by Joab: “Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready?” And when Ahimaaz reached King David, who yearned to know the fate of his headlong son, Absalom, he could only say: “I saw a great tumult but I knew not what it was.”

  And this was the story of all those who failed to wait on the counsel of the Lord; who made themselves wise in their own conceit and ran before they had the tidings ready. This was the story of innumerable shepherds who failed, in their arrogance, to feed the hungry sheep; of many a father and mother who gave to their children not bread but a stone, who offered not the truth of God but the tinsel of this world. This was not belief but unbelief, not humility but pride: there worked in the heart of such a one the same desire that had hurled the son of the morning from Heaven to the depths of Hell, the desire to overturn the appointed times of God, and to wrest from Him who held all power in His hands powers not meet for men. Oh, yes, they had seen it, each brother and sister beneath the sound of his voice tonight, and they had seen the destruction caused by a so lamentable unripeness! Babies, bawling, fatherless, for bread, and girls in the gutters, sick with sin, and young men bleeding in the frosty fields. Yes, and there were those who cried—they had heard it, in their homes, and on the street corner, and from the very pulpit—that they should wait no longer, despised and rejected and spat on as they were, but should rise today and bring down the mighty, establishing the vengeance that God had claimed. But blood cried out for blood, as the blood of Abel cried out from the ground. Not for nothing was it written: “He that believeth will not make haste.” Oh, but sometimes the road was rocky. Did they think sometimes that God forgot? Oh, fall on your knees and pray for patience; fall on your knees and pray for faith; fall on your knees and pray for overcoming power to be ready on the day of His soon appearing to receive the crown of life. For God did not forget, no word proceeding from his mouth could fail. Better to wait, like Job, through all the days of our appointed time until our change comes than to rise up, unready, before God speaks. For if we but wait humbly before Him, He will speak glad tidings to our souls; if we but wait our change will come, and that in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye—we will be changed one day from this corruption into incorruptibility forever, caught up with Him beyond the clouds. And these are the tidings we now must bear to all the nations: another son of David was hung from a tree, and he who knows not the meaning of that tumult shall be damned forever in Hell! Brother, sister, you may run, but the day is coming when the King will ask: “What are the tidings that you bear?” And what will you say on that great day if you know not of the death of His Son?

  “Is there a soul here tonight”—tears were on his face and he stood above them with arms outstretched—“who knows not the meaning of that tumult? Is there a soul here tonight who wants to talk to Jesus? Who wants to wait before the Lord, amen, until He speaks? Until He makes to ring in your soul, amen, the glad tidings of salvation? Oh, brothers and sisters”—and still she did not rise; but only watched him from far away—“the time is running out. One day He’s coming back to judge the nations, to take His children, hallelujah, to their rest. They tell me, bless God, that two shall be working in the fields, and one shall be taken and the other left. Two shall be lying, amen, in bed, and one shall be taken and the other left. He’s coming, beloved, like a thief in the night, and no man knows the hour of His coming. It’s going to be too late then to cry: ‘Lord, have mercy.’ Now is the time to make yourself ready, now, amen, tonight, before His altar. Won’t somebody come tonight? Won’t somebody say No to Satan and give their life to the Lord?”

  But she did not rise, only looked at him and looked about her with a bright, pleased interest, as though she were at a theater and were waiting to see what improbable delights would next be offered her. He somehow knew that she would never rise and walk that long aisle to the mercy seat. And this filled him for a moment with a holy rage—that she stood, so brazen, in the congregation of the righteous and refused to bow her head.

  He said amen, and blessed them, and turned away, and immediately the congregation began to sing. Now, again, he felt drained and sick; he was soaking wet and he smelled the odor of his own body. Deborah, singing and beating her tambourine in the front of the congregation, watched him. He felt suddenly like a helpless child. He wanted to hide himself forever and never cease from crying.

  Esther and her mother left during the singing—they had come, then, only to hear him preach. He could not imagine what they were saying or thinking now. And he thought of tomorrow, when he would have to see her again.

  “Ain’t that the little girl that works at the same place with you?” Deborah asked him on the way home.

  “Yes,” he said. Now he did not feel like talking. He wanted to get home and take his wet clothes off and sleep.

  “She mighty pretty,” said Deborah. “I ain’t never seen her in church before.”

  He said nothing.

  “Was it you invited her to come out tonight?” she asked, after a bit.

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t think the Word of God could do her no harm.”

  Deborah laughed. “Don’t look like it, does it? She walked out just as cool and sinful as she come in—she and that mother of her’n. And you preached a mighty fine sermon. Look like she just ain’t thinking about the Lord.”

  “Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord,” he said, “one day He ain’t going to have time for them.”

  When they got home she offered to make him a hot cup of tea, but he refused. He undressed in silence—which she again respected—and got into bed. At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

  The next morning Esther said to him, coming into the yard while he was chopping wood for the woodpile: “Good morning, Reverend. I sure didn’t look to see you today. I reckoned you’d be all wore out after that sermon—does you always preach as hard as that?”

  He paused briefly with the axe in the air; then he turned again, bringing the axe down. “I preach the way the Lord leads me, sister,” he said.

  She retreated a little in the face of his hostility. “Well,” she said in a different tone, “it was a mighty fine sermon. Me and Mama was mighty glad we come out.”

  He left the axe buried in the wood, for splinters flew and he was afraid one might strike her. “You and your ma—you don’t get out to service much?”

  “Lord, Reverend,” she wailed, “look like we just ain’t got the time. Mama work so hard all week she just want to lie up in bed on Sunday. And she like me,” she added quickly, after a pause, “to keep her company.”

  Then he looked directly at her. “Does you really mean to say, sister, that you ain’t got no time for the Lord? No time at all?”

  “Reverend,” she said, looking at him with the daring defiance of a threatened child, “I does my best. I really does. Ain’t everybody got to have the same spirit.”

  And he laughed shortly. “Ain’t but one spirit you got to have—and that’s the spirit of the Lord.”

  “Well,
” she said, “that spirit ain’t got to work in everybody the same, seems to me.”

  Then they were silent, each quite vividly aware that they had reached an impasse. After a moment he turned and picked up the axe again. “Well, you go along, sister. I’m praying for you.”

  Something struggled in her face then, as she stood for yet a moment more and watched him—a mixture of fury and amusement; it reminded him of the expression he had often found on the face of Florence. And it was like the look on the faces of the elders during that far-off and so momentous Sunday dinner. He was too angry, while she thus stared at him, to trust himself to speak. Then she shrugged, the mildest, most indifferent gesture he had ever seen, and smiled. “I’m mighty obliged to you, Reverend,” she said. Then she went into the house.

  This was the first time they spoke in the yard, a frosty morning. There was nothing in that morning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechless before the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had left her not a moment’s peace.

  “That weren’t no reverend looking at me them mornings in the yard,” she had said. “You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the Holy Ghost.” But he believed that the Lord had laid her like a burden on his heart. And he carried her in his heart; he prayed for her and exhorted her, while there was yet time to bring her soul to God.

  But she had not been thinking about God; though she accused him of lusting after her in his heart, it was she who, when she looked at him, insisted on seeing not God’s minister but a “pretty man.” On her tongue the very title of his calling became a mark of disrespect.

  It began on an evening when he was to preach, when they were alone in the house. The people of the house had gone away for three days to visit relatives; Gabriel had driven them to the railroad station after supper, leaving Esther clearing up the kitchen. When he came back to lock up the house, he found Esther waiting for him on the porch steps.

  “I didn’t think I’d better leave,” she said, “till you got back. I ain’t got no keys to lock up this house, and white folks is so funny. I don’t want them blaming me if something’s missing.”

  He realized immediately that she had been drinking—she was not drunk, but there was whisky on her breath. And this, for some reason, caused a strange excitement to stir in him.

  “That was mighty thoughtful, sister,” he said, staring hard at her to let her know that he knew she had been drinking. She met his stare with a calm, bold smile, a smile mocking innocence, so that her face was filled with the age-old cunning of a woman.

  He started past her into the house; then, without thinking, and without looking at her, he offered: “If you ain’t got nobody waiting for you I’ll walk you a piece on your way home.”

  “No,” she said, “ain’t nobody waiting for me this evening, Reverend, thank you kindly.”

  He regretted making his offer almost as soon as it was made; he had been certain that she was about to rush off to some trysting-place or other, and he had merely wished to be corroborated. Now, as they walked together into the house, he became terribly aware of her youthful, vivid presence, of her lost condition; and at the same time the emptiness and silence of the house warned him that he was alone with danger.

  “You just sit down in the kitchen,” he said. “I be as quick as I can.”

  But his speech was harsh in his own ears, and he could not face her eyes. She sat down at the table, smiling, to wait for him. He tried to do everything as quickly as possible, the shuttering of windows, and locking of doors. But his fingers were stiff and slippery; his heart was in his mouth. And it came to him that he was barring every exit to this house, except the exit through the kitchen, where Esther sat.

  When he entered the kitchen again she had moved, and now stood in the doorway, looking out, holding a glass in her hand. It was a moment before he realized that she had helped herself to more of the master’s whisky.

  She turned at his step, and he stared at her, and at the glass she held, with wrath and horror.

  “I just thought,” she said, almost entirely unabashed, “that I’d have me a little drink while I was waiting, Reverend. But I didn’t figure on you catching me at it.”

  She swallowed the last of her drink and moved to the sink to rinse out the glass. She gave a little, ladylike cough as she swallowed—he could not be sure whether this cough was genuine or in mockery of him.

  “I reckon,” he said, malevolently, “you is just made up your mind to serve Satan all your days.”

  “I done made up my mind,” she answered, “to live all I can while I can. If that’s a sin, well, I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t you fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.”

  He moved and stood next to her, full of anger.

  “Girl,” he said, “don’t you believe God? God don’t lie—and He says, plain as I’m talking to you, the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

  She sighed. “Reverend, look like to me you’d get tired, all the time beating on poor little Esther, trying to make Esther something she ain’t. I just don’t feel it here,” she said, and put one hand on her breast. “Now, what you going to do? Don’t you know I’m a woman grown, and I ain’t fixing to change?”

  He wanted to weep. He wanted to reach out and hold her back from the destruction she so ardently pursued—to fold her in him, and hide her until the wrath of God was past. At the same time there rose to his nostrils again her whisky-laden breath, and beneath this, faint, intimate, the odor of her body. And he began to feel like a man in a nightmare, who stands in the path of oncoming destruction, who must move quickly—but who cannot move. “Jesus Jesus Jesus,” rang over and over again in his mind, like a bell—as he moved closer to her, undone by her breath, and her wide, angry, mocking eyes.

  “You know right well,” he whispered, shaking with fury, “you know right well why I keep after you—why I keep after you like I do.”

  “No, I don’t” she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity. “I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways without all the time trying to make her miserable.”

  He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. “I just don’t want to see you go down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old, and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.”

  But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done with talking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over.

  “Reverend,” she said, “I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I don’t do nothing I’m ashamed of, ever.”

  At the word “Reverend,” he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both her hands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and a guarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should move away. But he did not move—he could not move.

  “But I can’t help it,” she said, after a moment, maliciously teasing, “if you done things that you’s ashamed of, Reverend.”

  He held on to her hands as though he were in the middle of the sea and her hands were the lifeline that would drag him in to shore. “Jesus Jesus Jesus,” he prayed, “oh, Jesus Jesus. Help me to stand.” He thought that he was pulling back against her hands—but he was pulling her to him. And he saw in her eyes now a look that he had not seen for many a long day and night, a look that was never in Deborah’s eyes.

  “Yes, you know,” he said, “why I’m all the time worrying about you—why I’m all the time miserable when I look at you.”

  “But you ain’t never told me none of this,” she said.

  One hand moved to her waist, and lingered there. The tips of he
r breasts touched his coat, burning in like acid and closing his throat. Soon it would be too late; he wanted it to be too late. That river, his infernal need, rose, flooded, sweeping him forward as though he were a long-drowned corpse.

  “You know,” he whispered, and touched her breasts and buried his face in her neck.

  So he had fallen: for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life. Fallen: he and Esther in the white folks’ kitchen, the light burning, the door half open, grappling and burning beside the sink. Fallen indeed: time was no more, and sin, death, Hell, the judgment were blotted out. There was only Esther, who contained in her narrow body all mystery and all passion, and who answered all his need. Time, snarling so swiftly past, had caused him to forget the clumsiness, and sweat and dirt of their first coupling; how his shaking hands undressed her, standing where they stood, how her dress fell at length like a snare about her feet; how his hands tore at her undergarments so that the naked, vivid flesh might meet his hands; how she protested: “Not here, not here”; how he worried, in some buried part of his mind, about the open door, about the sermon he was to preach, about his life, about Deborah; how the table got in their way, how his collar, until her fingers loosened it, threatened to choke him; how they found themselves on the floor at last, sweating and groaning and locked together; locked away from all others, all heavenly or human help. Only they could help each other. They were alone in the world.

  Had Royal, his son, been conceived that night? Or the next night? Or the next? It had lasted only nine days. Then he had come to his senses—after nine days God gave him the power to tell her this thing could not be.

  She took his decision with the same casualness, the same near-amusement, with which she had taken his fall. He understood about Esther, during those nine days: that she considered his fear and trembling fanciful and childish, a way of making life more complicated than it need be. She did not think life was like that; she wanted life to be simple. He understood that she was sorry for him because he was always worried. Sometimes, when they were together, he tried to tell her of what he felt, how the Lord would punish them for the sin they were committing. She would not listen: “You ain’t in the pulpit now. You’s here with me. Even a reverend’s got the right to take off his clothes sometime and act like a natural man.” When he told her that he would not see her any more, she was angry, but she did not argue. Her eyes told him that she thought he was a fool; but that, even had she loved him ever so desperately, it would have been beneath her to argue about his decision—a large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease.