Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  His first thought, nevertheless, was: “Will anyone remember?” For it had happened, once or twice, that his birthday had passed entirely unnoticed, and no one had said “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” or given him anything—not even his mother.

  Roy stirred again and John pushed him away, listening to the silence. On other mornings he awoke hearing his mother singing in the kitchen, hearing his father in the bedroom behind him grunting and muttering prayers to himself as he put on his clothes; hearing, perhaps, the chatter of Sarah and the squalling of Ruth, and the radios, the clatter of pots and pans, and the voices of all the folk nearby. This morning not even the cry of a bed-spring disturbed the silence, and John seemed, therefore, to be listening to his own unspeaking doom. He could believe, almost, that he had awakened late on that great getting-up morning; that all the saved had been transformed in the twinkling of an eye, and had risen to meet Jesus in the clouds, and that he was left, with his sinful body, to be bound in Hell a thousand years.

  He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak.

  And the darkness of John’s sin was like the darkness of the church on Saturday evenings; like the silence of the church while he was there alone, sweeping, and running water into the great bucket, and overturning chairs, long before the saints arrived. It was like his thoughts as he moved about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle that he hated, yet loved and feared. It was like Roy’s curses, like the echoes these curses raised in John: he remembered Roy, on some rare Saturday when he had come to help John clean the church, cursing in the house of God, and making obscene gestures before the eyes of Jesus. It was like all this, and it was like the walls that witnessed and the placards on the walls which testified that the wages of sin was death. The darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God’s power; in the scorn that was often his while he listened to the crying, breaking voices, and watched the black skin glisten while they lifted up their arms and fell on their faces before the Lord. For he had made his decision. He would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.

  For John excelled in school, though not, like Elisha, in mathematics or basketball, and it was said that he had a Great Future. He might become a Great Leader of His People. John was not much interested in his people and still less in leading them anywhere, but the phrase so often repeated rose in his mind like a great brass gate, opening outward for him on a world where people did not live in the darkness of his father’s house, did not pray to Jesus in the darkness of his father’s church, where he would eat good food, and wear fine clothes, and go to the movies as often as he wished. In this world John, who was, his father said, ugly, who was always the smallest boy in his class, and who had no friends, became immediately beautiful, tall, and popular. People fell all over themselves to meet John Grimes. He was a poet, or a college president, or a movie star; he drank expensive whisky, and he smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes in the green package.

  It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.

  They were learning the alphabet that day, and six children at a time were sent to the blackboard to write the letters they had memorized. Six had finished and were waiting for the teacher’s judgment when the back door opened and the school principal, of whom everyone was terrified, entered the room. No one spoke or moved. In the silence the principal’s voice said:

  “Which child is that?”

  She was pointing at the blackboard, at John’s letters. The possibility of being distinguished by her notice did not enter John’s mind, and so he simply stared at her. Then he realized, by the immobility of the other children and by the way they avoided looking at him, that it was he who was selected for punishment.

  “Speak up, John,” said the teacher, gently.

  On the edge of tears, he mumbled his name and waited. The principal, a woman with white hair and an iron face, looked down at him.

  “You’re a very bright boy, John Grimes,” she said. “Keep up the good work.”

  Then she walked out of the room.

  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. This was not, in John, a faith subject to death or alteration, nor yet a hope subject to destruction; it was his identity, and part, therefore, of that wickedness for which his father beat him and to which he clung in order to withstand his father. 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. And this was why, though he had been born in the faith and had been surrounded all his life by the saints and by their prayers and their rejoicing, and though the tabernacle in which they worshipped was more completely real to him than the several precarious homes in which he and his family had lived, John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father. On his refusal to do this had his life depended, and John’s secret heart had flourished in its wickedness until the day his sin first overtook him.

  In the midst of all his wonderings he fell asleep again, and when he woke up this time and got out of his bed his father had gone to the factory, where he would work for half a day. Roy was sitting in the kitchen, quarreling with their mother. The baby, Ruth, sat in her high chair banging on the tray with an oatmeal-covered spoon. This meant that she was in a good mood; she would not spend the day howling, for reasons known only to herself, allowing no one but her mother to touch her. Sarah was quiet, not chattering today, or at any rate not yet, and stood near the stove, arms folded, staring at Roy with the flat black eyes, her father’s eyes, that made her look so old.

  Their mother, her head tied up in an old rag, sipped black coffee and watched Roy. The pale end-of-winter sunlight filled the room and yellowed all their faces; and John, drugged and morbid and wondering how it was that he had slept again and had been allowed to sleep so long, saw them for a moment like figures on a screen, an effect that the yellow light intensified. The room was narrow and dirty; nothing could alter its dimensions, no labor could ever make it clean. Dirt was in the walls and the floorboards, and triumphed beneath the sink where roaches spawned; was in the fine ridges of the pots and pans, scoured daily, burnt black on the bottom, hanging above the stove; was in the wall against which they hung, and revealed itself where the paint had cracked and leaned outward in stiff squares and fragments, the paper-thin underside webbed with black. Dirt was in every corner, angle, crevice of the monstrous stove, and lived behind it in delirious communion with the corrupted wall. Dirt was in the baseboard that John scrubbed every Saturday, and roughened the cupboard shelves that held the cracked and gleaming dishes. Under this dark weight the walls leaned, under it the ceiling, with a great crack like lightning in its center, sagged. The windows gleamed like beaten gold or silver, but now John saw,
in the yellow light, how fine dust veiled their doubtful glory. Dirt crawled in the gray mop hung out of the windows to dry. John thought with shame and horror, yet in angry hardness of heart: He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. Then he looked at his mother, seeing, as though she were someone else, the dark, hard lines running downward from her eyes, and the deep, perpetual scowl in her forehead, and the downturned, tightened mouth, and the strong, thin, brown, and bony hands; and the phrase turned against him like a two-edged sword, for was it not he, in his false pride and his evil imagination, who was filthy? Through a storm of tears that did not reach his eyes, he stared at the yellow room; and the room shifted, the light of the sun darkened, and his mother’s face changed. Her face became the face that he gave her in his dreams, the face that had been hers in a photograph he had seen once, long ago, a photograph taken before he was born. This face was young and proud, uplifted, with a smile that made the wide mouth beautiful and glowed in the enormous eyes. It was the face of a girl who knew that no evil could undo her, and who could laugh, surely, as his mother did not laugh now. Between the two faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate her.

  Now she saw him and she asked, breaking off her conversation with Roy: “You hungry, little sleepyhead?”

  “Well! About time you was getting up,” said Sarah.

  He moved to the table and sat down, feeling the most bewildering panic of his life, a need to touch things, the table and chairs and the walls of the room, to make certain that the room existed and that he was in the room. He did not look at his mother, who stood up and went to the stove to heat his breakfast. But he asked, in order to say something to her, and to hear his own voice:

  “What we got for breakfast?”

  He realized, with some shame, that he was hoping she had prepared a special breakfast for him on his birthday.

  “What you think we got for breakfast?” Roy asked scornfully. “You got a special craving for something?”

  John looked at him. Roy was not in a good mood.

  “I ain’t said nothing to you,” he said.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Roy, in the shrill, little-girl tone he knew John hated.

  “What’s the matter with you today?” John asked, angry, and trying at the same time to lend his voice as husky a pitch as possible.

  “Don’t you let Roy bother you,” said their mother. “He cross as two sticks this morning.”

  “Yeah,” said John, “I reckon.” He and Roy watched each other. Then his plate was put before him: hominy grits and a scrap of bacon. He wanted to cry, like a child: “But, Mama, it’s my birthday!” He kept his eyes on his plate and began to eat.

  “You can talk about your daddy all you want to,” said his mother, picking up her battle with Roy, “but one thing you can’t say—you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.”

  “I been hungry plenty of times,” Roy said, proud to be able to score this point against his mother.

  “Wasn’t his fault, then. Wasn’t because he wasn’t trying to feed you. That man shoveled snow in zero weather when he ought’ve been in bed just to put food in your belly.”

  “Wasn’t just my belly,” said Roy indignantly. “He got a belly, too, I know it’s a shame the way that man eats. I sure ain’t asked him to shovel no snow for me.” But he dropped his eyes, suspecting a flaw in his argument. “I just don’t want him beating on me all the time,” he said at last. “I ain’t no dog.”

  She sighed, and turned slightly away, looking out of the window. “Your daddy beats you,” she said, “because he loves you.”

  Roy laughed. “That ain’t the kind of love I understand, old lady. What you reckon he’d do if he didn’t love me?”

  “He’d let you go right on,” she flashed, “right on down to hell where it looks like you is just determined to go anyhow! Right on, Mister Man, till somebody puts a knife in you, or takes you off to jail!”

  “Mama,” John asked suddenly, “is Daddy a good man?”

  He had not known that he was going to ask the question, and he watched in astonishment as her mouth tightened and her eyes grew dark.

  “That ain’t no kind of question,” she said mildly. “You don’t know no better man, do you?”

  “Looks to me like he’s a mighty good man,” said Sarah. “He sure is praying all the time.”

  “You children is young,” their mother said, ignoring Sarah and sitting down again at the table, “and you don’t know how lucky you is to have a father what worries about you and tries to see to it that you come up right.”

  “Yeah,” said Roy, “we don’t know how lucky we is to have a father what don’t want you to go to movies, and don’t want you to play in the streets, and don’t want you to have no friends, and he don’t want this and he don’t want that, and he don’t want you to do nothing. We so lucky to have a father who just wants us to go to church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar and stay home all nice and quiet, like a little mouse. Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don’t know what I done to be so lucky.”

  She laughed. “You going to find out one day,” she said, “you mark my words.”

  “Yeah,” said Roy.

  “But it’ll be too late, then,” she said. “It’ll be too late when you come to be … sorry.” Her voice had changed. For a moment her eyes met John’s eyes, and John was frightened. He felt that her words, after the strange fashion God sometimes chose to speak to men, were dictated by Heaven and were meant for him. He was fourteen—was it too late? And this uneasiness was reinforced by the impression, which at that moment he realized had been his all along, that his mother was not saying everything she meant. What, he wondered, did she say to Aunt Florence when they talked together? Or to his father? What were her thoughts? Her face would never tell. And yet, looking down at him in a moment that was like a secret, passing sign, her face did tell him. Her thoughts were bitter.

  “I don’t care,” Roy said, rising. “When I have children I ain’t going to treat them like this.” John watched his mother; she watched Roy. “I’m sure this ain’t no way to be. Ain’t got no right to have a houseful of children if you don’t know how to treat them.”

  “You mighty grown up this morning,” his mother said. “You be careful.”

  “And tell me something else,” Roy said, suddenly leaning over his mother, “tell me how come he don’t never let me talk to him like I talk to you? He’s my father, ain’t he? But he don’t never listen to me—no, I all the time got to listen to him.”

  “Your father,” she said, watching him, “knows best. You listen to your father, I guarantee you, you won’t end up in no jail.”

  Roy sucked his teeth in fury. “I ain’t looking to go to no jail. You think that’s all that’s in the world is jails and churches? You ought to know better than that, Ma.”

  “I know,” she said, “there ain’t no safety except you walk humble before the Lord. You going to find it out, too, one day. You go on, hardhead. You going to come to grief.”

  And suddenly Roy grinned. “But you be there, won’t you, Ma—when I’m in trouble?”

  “You don’t know,” she said, trying not to smile, “how long the Lord’s going to let me stay with you.”

  Roy turned and did a dance step. “That’s all right,” he said. “I know the Lord ain’t as hard as Daddy. Is he, boy?” he demanded of John, and struck him lightly on the forehead.

  “Boy, let me eat my breakfast,” John muttered—though his plate had long been empty, and he was pleased that Roy had turned to him.

  “That sure is a crazy boy,” ventured Sarah, soberly.

  “Just listen,” cried Roy, “to the little saint! Daddy ain’t never going to have no trouble with her—that one, she was born holy. I bet the first words she ever said was: ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ Ain’t that so, Ma?”

  “You stop this fo
olishness,” she said, laughing, “and go on about your work. Can’t nobody play the fool with you all morning.”

  “Oh, is you got work for me to do this morning? Well, I declare,” said Roy, “what you got for me to do?”

  “I got the woodwork in the dining-room for you to do. And you going to do it, too, before you set foot out of this house.”

  “Now, why you want to talk like that, Ma? Is I said I wouldn’t do it? You know I’m a right good worker when I got a mind. After I do it, can I go?”

  “You go ahead and do it, and we’ll see. You better do it right.”

  “I always do it right,” said Roy. “You won’t know your old woodwork when I get through.”

  “John,” said his mother, “you sweep the front room for me like a good boy, and dust the furniture. I’m going to clean up in here.”

  “Yes’m,” he said, and rose. She had forgotten about his birthday. He swore he would not mention it. He would not think about it any more.

  To sweep the front room meant, principally, to sweep the heavy red and green and purple Oriental-style carpet that had once been that room’s glory, but was now so faded that it was all one swimming color, and so frayed in places that it tangled with the broom. John hated sweeping this carpet, for dust rose, clogging his nose and sticking to his sweaty skin, and he felt that should he sweep it forever, the clouds of dust would not diminish, the rug would not be clean. It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill. He had John’s entire sympathy, for the longest and hardest part of his Saturday mornings was his voyage with the broom across this endless rug; and, coming to the French doors that ended the living-room and stopped the rug, he felt like an indescribably weary traveler who sees his home at last. Yet for each dustpan he so laboriously filled at the doorsill demons added to the rug twenty more; he saw in the expanse behind him the dust that he had raised settling again into the carpet; and he gritted his teeth, already on edge because of the dust that filled his mouth, and nearly wept to think that so much labor brought so little reward.