Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

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.

Before him, then, the slope stretched upward, and above it the brilliant sky, and beyond it, cloudy, and far away, he saw the skyline of New York. He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him.