Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death.

She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him.

spuriously,

“Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.”

And he smiled, pleased, but he said: “Little-bit, I don’t know so much.” Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she had grown to know: “I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. Shit—he weren’t going to beat my ass, then. And if he tried to kill me, I’d take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.” Then he looked at her again, and smiled and kissed her, and he said: “That’s how I got to know so much, baby.” She asked: “And what you going to do, Richard? What you want to be?”

but she knew he spoke the truth.

fear over what had happened to Richard, who had never kept her waiting before; and fear involving all that was beginning to happen in her body.

While Elizabeth stood trembling and indecisive in the hall, two white policemen entered.

“And I tell you,” he said, not smiling, “that your boy-friend robbed a store and he’s in jail for it. He’s going to stay there, too—now, what you got to say to that?”

“Ah, yes,” he said, mounting the steps, “they all seem like real nice boys when they pay their rent.”

She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

He had not, of course, robbed the store,

And they were all, with no questions asked, herded upstairs, and into the wagon and to the station house.

identification. And Richard tried to relax: the man could not say that he had been there if he had never seen him before.

began. The three boys signed a confession at once, but Richard would not sign. He said at last that he would die before he signed a confession to something he hadn’t done.

He smiled a vicious smile—she had never seen such a smile on his face before. “Maybe you ought to pray to that Jesus of yours and get Him to come down and tell these white men something.” He looked at her a long, dying moment. “Because I don’t know nothing else to do,” he said.

She could not, that day, think of one decent white person in the whole world.

whom they treated with such condescension, such disdain, and such good humor, had hearts like human beings, too, more human hearts than theirs.

Against the testimony of the three robbers, and her own testimony, and, under oath, the storekeeper’s indecision, there was no evidence on which to convict him.

And it was the last time. That night he cut his wrists with his razor and he was found in the morning by his landlady, his eyes staring upward with no light, dead among the scarlet sheets. And now they were singing: “Somebody needs you, Lord, Come by here.”

Damn shame

Elizabeth, overnight, had become an old woman and was half mad with fear and grief.

Florence and Elizabeth worked as cleaning-women in a high, vast, stony office-building on Wall Street.

because, for some reason, she did not want them to know about Richard’s child;

The Elizabeth that she had been was buried far away—with her lost and silent father, with her aunt, in Richard’s grave—and the Elizabeth she had become she did not recognize, she did not want to know.

Florence, how badly people treated her, and how empty her life was now that her husband was dead.

It was no doubt this, Florence’s age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation, to take Florence into her confidence.

father, for one day he would be old enough to realize that it was not his father’s name he bore.

When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. Yes, down the line, through poverty, hunger, wandering, cruelty, fear, and trembling, to death.

ain’t seen him,” she said, musingly, “for more than twenty years.”

“That man,” said Florence, “would have to do a whole lot of changing before him and me hit it off. No,”—she paused, grimly, sadly—“I’m mighty sorry he’s coming. I didn’t look to see him no more in this world—or in the next one, neither.”

“Folks,” said Florence, “can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.”

These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers.

don’t believe the nigger’s been born what knows how to treat a woman right.

Well, I bought this ring myself. This boy ain’t got no daddy.”

He died, just like I say—he got in trouble, and he died—a long time before this boy was born.”

Then she met Gabriel, two or three weeks later, at Florence’s house on a Sunday.

Then Florence introduced them, saying: “Elizabeth, this here’s my brother I been telling you so much about. He’s a preacher, honey—so we got to be mighty careful what we talk about when he’s around.”

“Like my aunt used to say,” Elizabeth said, smiling timidly, “she used to say, folks sure better not do in the dark what they’s scared to look at in the light.”

What it made her feel, for the first time since the death of Richard, was hope;

“Sister Elizabeth,” he said, “the Lord’s been speaking to my heart, and I believe it’s His will that you and me should be man and wife.”

“And I’ll love your son, your little boy,”

And then the ironic voice spoke again, saying: “Get up, John. Get up, boy. Don’t let him keep you here. You got everything your daddy got.”

All niggers had been cursed, the ironic voice reminded him, all niggers had come from this most undutiful of Noah’s sons.

malevolent

“I going to tell you something, Gabriel,” she said. “I know you thinking at the bottom of your heart that if you just make her, her and her bastard boy, pay enough for her sin, your son won’t have to pay for yours.

“Maybe,” she said, “I ain’t long for this world, but I got this letter, and I’m sure going to give it to Elizabeth before I go, and if she don’t want it, I’m going to find some way—some way, I don’t know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord’s anointed is got on his hands.”

“It’ll make Elizabeth to know,” she said, “that she ain’t the only sinner … in your holy house. And little Johnny, there—he’ll know he ain’t the only bastard.”

Of all the men I ever knew, you’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—’cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking.”

mind on Jesus. He went that way—up the steep side of the mountain—and He was carrying the cross, and didn’t nobody help Him. He went that way for us. He carried that cross for

“But that’s the Devil’s price, too,” said Elisha, as silence came again. “The Devil, he don’t ask for nothing less than your life. And he take it, too, and it’s lost forever.