Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

Between the two faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate her.

He watched her face, his heart swollen with love for her and with an anguish, not yet his own, that he did not understand and that frightened him.

At this there sprang into his mother’s face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad—as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveller in perpetual danger.

Her face, as she watched, was full of pain and fear, of tension barely supported, and of pity that could scarcely have been expressed had she filled all the world with her weeping.