Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.

And certainly perdition sucked at the feet of the people who walked there; and cried in the lights, in the gigantic towers; the marks of Satan could be found in the faces of the people who waited at the doors of movie houses; his words were printed on the great movie posters that invited people to sin. It was the roar of the damned that filled Broadway, where motor-cars and buses and the hurrying people disputed every inch with death.

His father said that all white people were wicked, and that God was going to bring them low.

And so he stared at the price above the ticket-seller’s window and, showing her his coins, received the piece of paper that was charged with the power to open doors. Having once decided to enter, he did not look back at the street again for fear that one of the saints might be passing and, seeing him, might cry out his name and lay hands on him to drag him back.

He was a kind of fill-in speaker, a holy handyman.

The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer.

Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married. He had not changed at all.

‘Then it seem to me,’ he said, astonished at his boldness, ‘that if I got to look to you for a example, you ought to be a example.’

She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power.

He waited on folks, her aunt said, furiously, as though he hoped the food they bought would poison them.

The menfolk, they die, and its over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.