Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  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.

  No, she did not accuse him; but she accused her aunt, and this from the moment she understood that her aunt had loved her mother, but did not love him. This could only mean that her aunt could not love her, either, and nothing in her life with her aunt ever proved Elizabeth wrong. It was true that her aunt was always talking of how much she loved her sister’s daughter, and what great sacrifices she had made on her account, and what great care she took to see to it that Elizabeth should grow up a good, Christian girl. But Elizabeth was not for a moment fooled, and did not, for as long as she lived with her, fail to despise her aunt. She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt’s mind.

  And yet, tonight, in her great confusion, she wondered if she had not been wrong; if there had not been something that she had overlooked, for which the Lord had made her suffer. “You little miss great-I-am,” her aunt had said to her in those days, “you better watch your step, you hear me? You go walking around with your nose in the air, the Lord’s going to let you fall right on down to the bottom of the ground. You mark my words. You’ll see.”

  To this perpetual accusation Elizabeth had never replied; she merely regarded her aunt with a wide-eyed, insolent stare, meant at once to register her disdain and to thwart any pretext for punishment. And this trick, which she had, unconsciously, picked up from her father, rarely failed to work. As the years went on, her aunt seemed to gauge in a look the icy distances that Elizabeth had put between them, and that would certainly never be conquered now. And she would add, looking down, and under her breath: “ ’Cause God don’t like it.”

  “I sure don’t care what God don’t like, or you, either,” Elizabeth’s heart replied. “I’m going away from here. He’s going to come and get me, and I’m going away from here.”

  “He” was her father, who never came. As the years passed, she replied only: “I’m going away from here.” And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.

  But, yes—there was something she had overlooked. Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. She had not known this: she had not imagined that she could fall. She wondered, tonight, how she could give this knowledge to her son; if she could help him to endure what could now no longer be changed; if while life ran, he would forgive her—for her pride, her folly, and her bargaining with God! For, tonight, those years before her fall, in her aunt’s dark house—that house which smelled always of clothes kept too long in closets, and of old women; which was redolent of their gossip, and was pervaded, somehow, by the odor of the lemon her aunt took in her tea, and by the odor of frying fish, and of the still that someone kept in the basement—came before her, entire and overwhelming; and she remembered herself, entering any room in which her aunt might be sitting, responding to anything her aunt might say, standing before her, as rigid as metal and cancerous with hate and fear, in battle every hour of every day, a battle that she continued in her dreams. She knew now of what it was that she had so silently and so early accused her aunt: it was of tearing a bewildered child away from the arms of the father she loved. And she knew now why she had sometimes, so dimly and so unwillingly, felt that her father had betrayed her: it was because he had not overturned the earth to take his daughter away from a woman who did not love her, and whom she did not love. Yet she knew tonight how difficult it was to overturn the earth, for she had tried once, and she had failed. And she knew, too—and it made the tears that touched her mouth more bitter than the most bitter herb—that without the pride and bitterness she had so long carried in her heart against her aunt she could never have endured her life with her.

  And she thought of Richard. It was Richard who had taken her out of that house, and out of the South, and into the city of des
truction. He had suddenly arrived—and from the moment he arrived until the moment of his death he had filled her life. Not even tonight, in the heart’s nearly impenetrable secret place, where the truth is hidden and where only the truth can live, could she wish that she had not known him; or deny that, so long as he was there, the rejoicing of Heaven could have meant nothing to her—that, being forced to choose between Richard and God, she could only, even with weeping, have turned away from God.

  And this was why God had taken him from her. It was for all of this that she was paying now, and it was this pride, hatred, bitterness, lust—this folly, this corruption—of which her son was heir.

  Richard had not been born in Maryland, but he was working there, the summer that she met him, as a grocery clerk. It was 1919, and she was one year younger than the century. He was twenty-two, which seemed a great age to her in those days. She noticed him at once because he was so sullen and only barely polite. He waited on folks, her aunt said, furiously, as though he hoped the food they bought would poison them. Elizabeth liked to watch him move; his body was very thin, and beautiful, and nervous—high strung, thought Elizabeth, wisely. He moved exactly like a cat, perpetually on the balls of his feet, and with a cat’s impressive, indifferent aloofness, his face closed, in his eyes no light at all. He smoked all the time, a cigarette between his lips as he added up the figures, and sometimes left burning on the counter while he went to look for stock. When, as someone entered, he said good morning, or good day, he said it barely looking up, and with an indifference that fell just short of insolence. When, having bought what he wanted and counted his change, the customer turned to leave and Richard said: “Thank you,” it sounded so much like a curse that people sometimes turned in surprise to stare.

  “He sure don’t like working in that store,” Elizabeth once observed to her aunt.

  “He don’t like working,” said her aunt, scornfully. “He just like you.”

  On a bright, summer day, bright in her memory forever, she came into the store alone, wearing her best white summer dress and with her hair, newly straightened and curled at the ends, tied with a scarlet ribbon. She was going to a great church picnic with her aunt, and had come in to buy some lemons. She passed the owner of the store, who was a very fat man, sitting out on the sidewalk, fanning himself; he asked her, as she passed, if it was hot enough for her, and she said something and walked into the dark, heavy-smelling store, where flies buzzed, and where Richard sat on the counter reading a book.

  She felt immediately guilty about having disturbed him, and muttered apologetically that she only wanted to buy some lemons. She expected him to get them for her in his sullen fashion and go back to his book, but he smiled, and said:

  “Is that all you want? You better think now. You sure you ain’t forgot nothing?”

  She had never seen him smile before, nor had she really, for that matter, ever heard his voice. Her heart gave a dreadful leap and then, as dreadfully, seemed to have stopped forever. She could only stand there, staring at him. If he had asked her to repeat what she wanted she could not possibly have remembered what it was. And she found that she was looking into his eyes and where she had thought there was no light at all she found a light she had never seen before—and he was smiling still, but there was something curiously urgent in his smile. Then he said: “How many lemons, little girl?”

  “Six,” she said at last, and discovered to her vast relief that nothing had happened: the sun was still shining, the fat man still sat at the door, her heart was beating as though it had never stopped.

  She was not, however, fooled; she remembered the instant at which her heart had stopped, and she knew that it beat now with a difference.

  He put the lemons into a bag and, with a curious diffidence, she came closer to the counter to give him the money. She was in a terrible state, for she found that she could neither take her eyes off him nor look at him.

  “Is that your mother you come in with all the time?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “that’s my aunt.” She did not know why she said it, but she did: “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then: “Mine, too.” They both looked thoughtfully at the money on the counter. He picked it up, but did not move. “I didn’t think it was your mother,” he said, finally.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She don’t look like you.”

  He started to light a cigarette, and then looked at her and put the pack in his pocket again.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “Anyway, I got to go. She’s waiting—we going out.”

  He turned and banged the cash register. She picked up her lemons. He gave her her change. She felt that she ought to say something else—it didn’t seem right, somehow, just to walk out—but she could not think of anything. But he said:

  “Then that’s why you so dressed up today. Where you going to go?”

  “We going to a picnic—a church picnic,” she said, and suddenly, unaccountably, and for the first time, smiled.

  And he smiled, too, and lit his cigarette, blowing the smoke carefully away from her. “You like picnics?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. She was not comfortable with him yet, and still she was beginning to feel that she would like to stand and talk to him all day. She wanted to ask him what he was reading, but she did not dare. Yet: “What’s your name?” she abruptly brought out.

  “Richard,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said thoughtfully. Then: “Mine’s Elizabeth.”

  “I know,” he said. “I heard her call you one time.”

  “Well,” she said helplessly, after a long pause, “Good-bye.”

  “ ‘Good-bye?’ You ain’t going away, is you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, in confusion.

  “Well,” he said, and smiled and bowed, “good day.”

  “Yes,” she said, “good day.”

  And she turned and walked out into the streets; not the same streets from which she had entered a moment ago. These streets, the sky above, the sun, the drifting people, all had, in a moment, changed, and would never be the same again.

  “You remember that day,” he asked much later, “when you come into the store?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, you was mighty pretty.”

  “I didn’t think you never looked at me.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you never looked at me.”

  “You was reading a book.”

  “Yes.”

  “What book was it, Richard?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. Just a book.”

  “You smiled.”

  “You did, too.”

  “No, I didn’t. I remember.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t. Not till you did.”

  “Well, anyway—you was mighty pretty.”

  She did not like to think of with what hardness of heart, what calculated weeping, what deceit, what cruelty she now went into battle with her aunt for her freedom. And she won it, even though on certain not-to-be-dismissed conditions. The principal condition was that she should put herself under the protection of a distant, unspeakably respectable female relative of her aunt’s, who lived in New York City—for when the summer ended, Richard said that he was going there and he wanted her to come with him. They would get married there. Richard said that he hated the South, and this was perhaps the reason it did not occur to either of them to begin their married life there. And Elizabeth was checked by the fear that if her aunt should discover how things stood between her and Richard she would find, as she had found so many years before in the case of her father, some means of bringing about their separation. This, as Elizabeth later considered it, was the first in the sordid series of mistakes which was to cause her to fall so low.

  But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the jour
ney; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place. In those days, had the Lord Himself descended from Heaven with trumpets telling her to turn back, she could scarcely have heard Him, and could certainly not have heeded. She lived, in those days, in a fiery storm, of which Richard was the center and the heart. And she fought only to reach him—only that; she was afraid only of what might happen if they were kept from one another; for what might come after she had no thoughts or fears to spare.

  Her pretext for coming to New York was to take advantage of the greater opportunities the North offered colored people; to study in a northern school, and to find a better job than any she was likely to be offered in the South. Her aunt, who listened to this with no diminution of her habitual scorn, was yet unable to deny that from generation to generation, things, as she grudgingly put it, were bound to change—and neither could she quite take the position of seeming to stand in Elizabeth’s way. In the winter of 1920, as the year began, Elizabeth found herself in an ugly back room in Harlem in the home of her aunt’s relative, a woman whose respectability was immediately evident from the incense she burned in her rooms and the spiritualist seances she held every Saturday night.

  The house was still standing, not very far away; often she was forced to pass it. Without looking up, she was able to see the windows of the apartment in which she had lived, and the woman’s sign was in the window still: MADAME WILLIAMS, SPIRITUALIST.

  She found a job as chambermaid in the same hotel in which Richard worked as elevator boy. Richard said that they would marry as soon as he had saved some money. But since he was going to school at night and made very little money, their marriage, which she had thought of as taking place almost as soon as she arrived, was planned for a future that grew ever more remote. And this presented her with a problem that she had refused, at home in Maryland, to think about, but from which, now, she could not escape: the problem of their life together. Reality, so to speak, burst in for the first time on her great dreaming, and she found occasion to wonder, ruefully, what had made her imagine that, once with Richard, she would have been able to withstand him. She had kept, precariously enough, what her aunt referred to as her pearl without price while she had been with Richard down home. This, which she had taken as witness to her own feminine moral strength, had been due to nothing more, it now developed, than her great fear of her aunt, and the lack, in that small town, of opportunity. Here, in this great city where no one cared, where people might live in the same building for years and never speak to one another, she found herself, when Richard took her in his arms, on the edge of a steep place: and down she rushed, on the descent uncaring, into the dreadful sea.