Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

was not an easy thing, said Father James, to be the pastor of a flock. It might look easy to just sit up there in the pulpit night after night, year in, year out, but let them remember the awful responsibility placed on his shoulders by almighty God—let them remember that God would ask an accounting of him one day for every soul in his flock. Let them remember this when they thought he was hard, let them remember that the Word was hard, that the way of holiness was a hard way.

That moment gave him, from that time on, if not a weapon at least a shield; he apprehended totally, without belief or understanding, that he had in himself a power that other people lacked; that he could use this to save himself, to raise himself; and that, perhaps, with this power he might one day win that love which he so longed for.

His father’s arm, rising and falling, might make him cry, and that voice might cause him to tremble; yet his father could never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that his father could not reach.

It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other. He lived for the day when his father would be dying and he, John, would curse him on his deathbed.

“I can climb back up. If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up.”

At the bottom of the hill, where the ground abruptly leveled off onto a gravel path, he nearly knocked down an old white man with a white beard, who was walking very slowly and leaning on his cane. They both stopped, astonished, and looked at one another. John struggled to catch his breath and apologize, but the old man smiled. John smiled back. It was as though he and the old man had between them a great secret; and the old man moved on.

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

He wanted to be like her, only more powerful, more thorough, and more cruel; to make those around him, all who hurt him, suffer as she made the student suffer, and laugh in their faces when they asked pity for their pain.

You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrongdoings.”

“You ain’t got but one child,” she said, “that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy. No, I can’t stop him, I done told you that, and you can’t stop him neither. You don’t know what to do with this boy, and that’s why you all the time trying to fix the blame on somebody. Ain’t nobody to blame, Gabriel. You just better pray God to stop him before somebody puts another knife in him and puts him in his grave.” They stared at each other a moment in an awful pause, she with a startled, pleading question in her eyes. Then, with all his might, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She crumpled at once, hiding her face with one thin hand, and Aunt Florence moved to hold her up.

Then Roy sat up, and said in a shaking voice: “Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

“What did you say?” his father asked. “I told you,” said Roy, “not to touch my mother.”

Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh.

“Yes, Lord,” Aunt Florence said, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”

she felt that if Gabriel was the Lord’s anointed, she would rather die and endure Hell for all eternity than bow before His altar.

In those days Florence and Deborah, who had become close friends after Deborah’s “accident,” hated all men. When men looked at Deborah they saw no further than her unlovely and violated body. In their eyes lived perpetually a lewd, uneasy wonder concerning the night she had been taken in the fields. That night had robbed her of the right to be considered a woman. No man would approach her in honor because she was a living reproach, to herself and to all black women and to all black men. If she had been beautiful, and if God had not given her a spirit so demure, she might, with ironic gusto, have acted out that rape in the fields forever. Since she could not be considered a woman, she could only be looked on as a harlot, a source of delight more bestial and mysteries more shaking than any a proper woman could provide. Lust stirred in the eyes of men when they looked at Deborah, lust that could not be endured because it was so impersonal, limiting communion to the area of her shame.

And Florence, who was beautiful but did not look with favor on any of the black men who lusted after her, not wishing to exchange her mother’s cabin for one of theirs and to raise their children and so go down, toil-blasted, into as it were a common grave, reinforced in Deborah the terrible belief against which no evidence had ever presented itself: that all men were like this, their thoughts rose no higher, and they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.

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.

But he was always swearing that he would do better; it was, perhaps, the brutality of his penitence that had kept them together for so long. There was something in her which loved to see him bow—when he came home, stinking with whisky, and crept with tears into her arms. Then he, so ultimately master, was mastered. And holding him in her arms while, finally, he slept, she thought with the sensations of luxury and power: “But there’s lots of good in Frank. I just got to be patient and he’ll come along all right.” To “come along” meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. 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.

Sometimes it occurred to him to do the Saturday shopping on his way home, so that she would not have to do it; in which case he would buy a turkey, the biggest and most expensive he could find, and several pounds of coffee, it being his belief that there was never enough in the house, and enough breakfast cereal to feed an army for a month. Such foresight always filled him with such a sense of his own virtue that, as a kind of reward, he would also buy himself a bottle of whisky; and—lest she should think that he was drinking too much—invite some ruffian home to share it with him. Then they would sit all afternoon in her parlor, playing cards and telling indecent jokes, and making the air foul with whisky and smoke. She would sit in the kitchen, cold with rage and staring at the turkey, which, since Frank always bought them unplucked and with the head on, would cost her hours of exasperating, bloody labor.

“I wish you’d tell me just how you think we’s going to live all week on a turkey and five pounds of coffee?” “Honey, I ain’t bought nothing we didn’t need!” She sighed in helpless fury, and felt tears springing to her eyes. “I done told you time and again to give me the money when you get paid, and let me do the shopping—’cause you ain’t got the sense that you was born with.” “Baby, I wasn’t doing a thing in the world but trying to help you out. I thought maybe you wanted to go somewhere tonight and you didn’t want to be bothered with no shopping.” “Next time you want to do me a favor, you tell me first, you hear? And how you expect me to go to a show when you done brought this bird home for me to clean?”

For he had no words when he knelt before the throne. And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength. For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the Son of God. He wanted to be master, to speak with that authority which could only come from God.

her tongue, like the tongue of a cat,

Then he looked directly at her. “Does you really mean to say, sister, that you ain’t got no time for the Lord? No time at all?” “Reverend,” she said, looking at him with the daring defiance of a threatened child, “I does my best. I really does. Ain’t everybody got to have the same spirit.” And he laughed shortly. “Ain’t but one spirit you got to have—and that’s the spirit of the Lord.” “Well,” she said, “that spirit ain’t got to work in everybody the same, seems to me.”

How many kinds of a fool you think I am? I got God’s work to do—my life don’t belong to you. Nor to that baby, neither—if it is my baby.”

Sacred secular divide

“You just think back,” she said, “to that first night, right here on this damn white folks’ floor, and you’ll see it’s too late for you to talk to Esther about how holy you is. I don’t care if you want to live a lie, but I don’t see no reason for you to make me suffer on account of it.”

“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. Esther’s just good enough to go out and have your bastard somewhere in the goddamn woods. Ain’t that so, Reverend?”

Integrity vs positional power

But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord.

the shadow in which she had lived was fear—fear made more dense by hatred.

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.

they all, hourly, daily, in their speech, in their lives, and in their hearts, cursed God.

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.

“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.”

“Yes,” said Florence, moving to the window, “the menfolk, they die, all right. And it’s us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it’s over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.

Then John saw the river, and the multitude was there. And now they had undergone a change: their robes were ragged, and stained with the road they had traveled, and stained with unholy blood; the robes of some barely covered their nakedness; and some indeed were naked. And some stumbled on the smooth stones at the river’s edge, for they were blind; and some crawled with a terrible wailing, for they were lame; some did not cease to pluck at their flesh, which was rotten with running sores. All struggled to get to the river, in a dreadful hardness of heart: the strong struck down the weak, the ragged spat on the naked, the naked cursed the blind, the blind crawled over the lame.

They were all there, save young Ella Mae, who had departed while John was still on the floor—she had a bad cold, said Praying Mother Washington, and needed to have her rest.

Now, in three groups, they walked the long, gray, silent avenue:

“you didn’t give her no bed of roses to sleep on, did you?—poor, simple, ugly, black girl. And you didn’t treat that other one no better. Who is you met, Gabriel, all your holy life long, you ain’t made to drink a cup of sorrow? And you doing it still—you going to be doing it till the Lord puts you in your grave.”

“God’s way,” he said, and his speech was thick, his face was slick with sweat, “ain’t man’s way. I been doing the will of the Lord, and can’t nobody sit in judgment on me but the Lord. The Lord called me out, He chose me, and I been running with Him ever since I made a start. You can’t keep your eyes on all this foolishness here below, all this wickedness here below—you got to lift up your eyes to the hills and run from the destruction falling on the earth, you got to put your hand in Jesus’ hand, and go where He says go.”

“And if you been but a stumbling-stone here below?” she said. “If you done caused souls right and left to stumble and fall, and lose their happiness, and lose their souls? What then, prophet? What then, the Lord’s anointed? Ain’t no reckoning going...

“The Lord,” he said, “He sees the heart—He sees the heart.”

“Yes,” she said, “but I done read the Bible, too, and it tells me you going to know the tree by its fruit. What fruit I seen from you if it ain’t been just sin and sorrow and shame?”

“You be careful,” he said, “how you talk to the Lord’s anointed. ’Cause my life ain’t in that let...

“Where is your life, Gabriel?” she asked, after a despairing pause. “Where is it? Ain’t it all done gone for nothing? Where’s...

“He speaks,” he said, “He speaks. All you got to do is listen.” “I been listening many a nighttime long,” said Florence, then, “and He ain’t never spoke to me.” “He ain’t never spoke,” said Gabriel, “because you ain’t never wanted to hear. You just wanted Him to tell you your way was right. And that ain’t no way to wait on God.” “Then tell me,” said Florence, “what He done said to you—that you didn’t want to hear?”

“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. But I ain’t going to let you do that. You done made enough folks pay for sin, it’s time you started paying.”

I done told you,” he said, “that’s all done and finished; the Lord done give me a sign to make me know I been forgiven. What good you think it’s going to do to start talking about it now?” “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.”

“It’s a long way,” John said slowly, “ain’t it? It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way.” “You remember Jesus,” Elisha said. “You keep your 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.