Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

Morning was at the window, and he blessed God, lying on his bed, tears running down his face, for the vision he had seen.

When he went to Deborah and told her that the Lord had led him to ask her to be his wife, his holy helpmeet, she looked at him for a moment in what seemed to be speechless terror.

One had been dead for nearly fourteen years—dead in a Chicago tavern, a knife kicking in his throat.

She answered, steadily: “I know you ain’t asking me to say I’m sorry I brought Johnny in the world. Is you?”

impetuosity

tumult?

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.”

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

You’s here with me. Even a reverend’s got the right to take off his clothes sometime and act like a natural man.”

Yet what frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again.

“Yes,” he answered, rising, and turning away, “Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.” “You be careful,” said Esther, “how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by a holy man, neither.”

wife, and the churchfolks, and everybody—suppose I did that, Reverend?” “And who you think,” he asked—he felt himself enveloped by an awful, falling silence—“is going to believe you?”

She laughed again. “But I ain’t the holy one. You’s a married man, and you’s a preacher—and who you think folks is going to blame most?”

“No,” she said, “and I reckon you wouldn’t marry me even if you was free. I reckon you don’t want no whore like Esther for your wife. Esther’s just for the night, for the dark, where won’t nobody see you getting your holy self all dirtied up with Esther.

“I … just want to go somewhere,” she said, “go somewhere, and have my baby, and think all this out of my mind. I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight.

He stole the money while Deborah slept.

One day God would give him a sign, and the darkness would all be finished—one day God would raise him, Who had suffered him to fall so low.

And he watched this son grow up, a stranger to his father and a stranger to God.

The sun did not rise or set but that Gabriel saw his lost, his disinherited son, or heard of him; and he seemed with every passing day to carry more proudly the doom printed on his brow. Gabriel watched him run headlong, like David’s

He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would call him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line—his son would be a royal child.

“I

declare,” she said, with the same cheerfulness, “sometime he remind me of you when you was a young man.”

Royal did not go to war, but he went away that summer to work on the docks in another town. Gabriel did not see him any more until the war was over.

While he walked, held by his caution more rigid than an arrow, he prayed, as his mother had taught him to pray, for loving kindness; yet he dreamed of the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the head wobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered nothing but the rushing blood.

Royal stared at him, uncertain whether to laugh or to take offense, and Gabriel said, more gently: “I just mean you better be careful, son. Ain’t nothing but white folks in town today. They done killed … last night

Not quite two years later Deborah told him that his son was dead.

Yet, trembling, he knew that this was not what he wanted. He did not want to love his father; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred, and give his hatred words one day. He did not want his father’s kiss—not any more, he who had received so many blows. He could not imagine, on any day to come and no matter how greatly he might be changed, wanting to take his father’s hand.

“Sister McDonald was over this afternoon, and Lord knows she was in a pitiful state.” He sat stock-still, staring at her. “She done got a letter today what says her grandson—you know, that Royal—done got hisself killed in Chicago.

It sure look like the Lord is put a curse on that family. First the mother, and now the son.”

look like he got to gambling one night with some of them northern niggers, and one of them got mad because he thought the boy was trying to cheat him, and took out his knife and stabbed him. Stabbed him in the throat, and she tell me he died right there on the floor in that barroom, didn’t even have time to get him to no hospital.”

“Yes,” he said, glad even in his anguish to hear the words fall from his lips, “that was my son.” And there was silence again. Then: “And you sent that girl away, didn’t you? With the money outen that box?” “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

“I been knowing,” she said, “ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come to church.”

I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and he might be living now.” “Deborah,” he asked, “what

Elizabeth very quickly suspected that this was because she was so very much darker than her mother and not nearly, of course, so beautiful.

But it was very different with her father; he was—and so Elizabeth never failed to think of him—young, and handsome, and kind, and generous; and he loved his daughter.

And he was dark, like Elizabeth, and gentle, and proud;

Her mother was dead, her father banished, and she lived in the shadow of her aunt.

Perhaps his life had been wicked, but he had been very good to her.

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 journey; 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

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.

MADAME WILLIAMS, SPIRITUALIST.

the problem of their life together.

and down she rushed, on the descent uncaring, into the dreadful sea.

There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.

She thought of herself as his strength;

Little-bit: it had been his name for her.

“Sure, they let niggers in,” Richard said. “Ain’t we got to be educated, too—to live with the motherfuckers?”

And when he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand.

incandescence,

sustenance