Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had so transformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere, and healing nowhere, and forgetfulness nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble. When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit on the Lord’s day, to behold things past, present, and to come, saying: “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still,” it was he who, crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherd boy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, while they shouted: “Amen!” and: “Hallelujah!” struggled once more in his chains; when he spoke of the day of Pentecost when the Holy Ghost had come down on the apostles who tarried in the upper room, causing them to speak in tongues of fire, he thought of his own baptism and how he had offended the Holy Ghost. No: though his name was writ large on placards, though they praised him for the great work God worked through him, and though they came, day and night, before him to the altar, there was no word in the Book for him.

  And he saw, in this wandering, how far his people had wandered from God. They had all turned aside, and gone out into the wilderness, to fall down before idols of gold and silver, and wood and stone, false gods that could not heal them. The music that filled any town or city he entered was not the music of the saints but another music, infernal, which glorified lust and held righteousness up to scorn. Women, some of whom should have been at home, teaching their grandchildren how to pray, stood, night after night, twisting their bodies into lewd hallelujahs in smoke-filled, gin-heavy dance halls, singing for their “loving man.” And their loving man was any man, any morning, noon, or night—when one left town they got another—men could drown, it seemed, in their warm flesh and they would never know the difference. “It’s here for you and if you don’t get it it ain’t no fault of mine.” They laughed at him when they saw him—“a pretty man like you?”—and they told him that they knew a long brown girl who could make him lay his Bible down. He fled from them; they frightened him. He began to pray for Esther. He imagined her standing one day where these women stood today.

  And blood, in all the cities through which he passed, ran down. There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did not call out, unceasingly, for blood; no woman, whether singing before defiant trumpets or rejoicing before the Lord, who had not seen her father, her brother, her lover, or her son cut down without mercy; who had not seen her sister become part of the white man’s great whorehouse, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that house herself; no man, preaching, or cursing, strumming his guitar in the lone, blue evening, or blowing in fury and ecstasy his golden horn at night, who had not been made to bend his head and drink white men’s muddy water; no man whose manhood had not been, at the root, sickened, whose loins had not been dishonored, whose seed had not been scattered into oblivion and worse than oblivion, into living shame and rage, and into endless battle. Yes, their parts were all cut off, they were dishonored, their very names were nothing more than dust blown disdainfully across the field of time—to fall where, to blossom where, bringing forth what fruit hereafter, where?—their very names were not their own. Behind them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire—a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!

  Yet, most strangely, and from deeps not before discovered, his faith looked up; before the wickedness that he saw, the wickedness from which he fled, he yet beheld like a flaming standard in the middle of the air, that power of redemption to which he must, till death, bear witness; which, though it crush him utterly, he could not deny; though none among the living might ever behold it, he had beheld it, and must keep the faith. He would not go back into Egypt for friend, or lover, or bastard son: he would not turn his face from God, no matter how deep might grow the darkness in which God hid His face from him. 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.

  Hard on the heels of his return that winter, Esther came home too. Her mother and stepfather traveled North to claim her lifeless body and her living son. Soon after Christmas, on the last, dead days of the year, she was buried in the churchyard. It was bitterly cold and there was ice on the ground, as during the days when he had first possessed her. He stood next to Deborah, whose arm in his shivered incessantly with the cold, and watched while the long, plain box was lowered into the ground. Esther’s mother stood in silence beside the deep hole, leaning on her husband, who held their grandchild in his arms. “Lord have mercy, have mercy, have mercy,” someone began to chant; and the old mourning women clustered of a sudden around Esther’s mother to hold her up. Then earth struck the coffin; the child awakened and began to scream.

  Then Gabriel prayed to be delivered from blood guiltiness. He prayed to God to give him a sign one day to make him know he was forgiven. But the child who screamed at that moment in the churchyard had cursed, and sung, and been silenced forever before God gave him a sign.

  And he watched this son grow up, a stranger to his father and a stranger to God. Deborah, who became after the death of Esther more friendly with Esther’s people, reported to him from the very beginning how shamefully Royal was being spoiled. He was, inevitably, the apple of their eye, a fact that, in operation, caused Deborah to frown, and sometimes, reluctantly, to smile; and, as they said, if there was any white blood in him, it didn’t show—he was the spit and image of his mother.

  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 headlong son, toward the disaster that had been waiting for him from the moment he had been conceived. It seemed that he had scarcely begun to walk before he swaggered; he had scarcely begun to talk before he cursed. Gabriel often saw him on the streets, playing on the curbstone with other boys his age. Once, when he passed, one of the boys had said: “Here comes Reverend Grimes,” and nodded, in brief, respectful silence. But Royal had looked boldly up into the preacher’s face. He had said: “How-de-do, Reverend?” and suddenly, irrepressibly, laughed. Gabriel, wishing to smile down into the boy’s face, to pause and touch him on the forehead, did none of these things, but walked on. Behind him, he heard Royal’s explosive whisper: “I bet he got a mighty big one!”—and then all the children laughed. It came to Gabriel then how his own mother must have suffered to watch him in the unredeemed innocence that so surely led to death and Hell.

  “I wonder,” said Deborah idly once, “why she called him Royal? You reckon that’s his daddy’s name?”

  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. And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her last breath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she had carried into eternity a curse on him and his.

  “I reckon,” he said at last, “it must be his daddy’s name—less they just given him that name in the hospital up North after … she was dead.”

  “His grandmama, Sister McDonald”—she was writing a letter, and did not look at him as she spoke—“well, she think it must’ve been one of them boys what’s all time passing through here, looking for work, on their way North—you know? them real shiftless niggers—well, she think it must’ve been one
of them got Esther in trouble. She say Esther wouldn’t never’ve gone North if she hadn’t been a-trying to find that boy’s daddy. Because she was in trouble when she left here”—and she looked up from her letter a moment—“that’s for certain.”

  “I reckon,” he said again, made uncomfortable by her unaccustomed chatter, but not daring, too sharply, to stop her. He was thinking of Esther, lying cold and still in the ground, who had been so vivid and shameless in his arms.

  “And Sister McDonald say,” she went on, “that she left here with just a little bit of money; they had to keep a-sending her money all the time she was up there almost, specially near the end. We was just talking about it yesterday—she say, look like Esther just decided overnight she had to go, and couldn’t nothing stop her. And she say she didn’t want to stand in the girl’s way—but if she’d’ve known something was the matter she wouldn’t never’ve let that girl away from her.”

  “Seems funny to me,” he muttered, scarcely knowing what he was saying, “that she didn’t think something.”

  “Why, she didn’t think nothing, because Esther always told her mother everything—weren’t no shame between then—they was just like two women together. She say she never dreamed that Esther would run away from her if she got herself in trouble.” And she looked outward, past him, her eyes full of a strange, bitter pity. “That poor thing,” she said, “she must have suffered some.”

  “I don’t see no need for you and Sister McDonald to sit around and talk about it all the time,” he said, then. “It all been a mighty long time ago; that boy is growing up already.”

  “That’s true,” she said, bending her head once more, “but some things, look like, ain’t to be forgotten in a hurry.”

  “Who you writing to?” he asked, as oppressed suddenly by the silence as he had been by her talk.

  She looked up. “I’m writing to your sister, Florence. You got anything you want me to say?”

  “No,” he said. “Just tell her I’m praying for her.”

  When Royal was sixteen the war came, and all the young men, first the sons of the mighty, and then the sons of his own people, were scattered into foreign lands. Gabriel fell on his knees each night to pray that Royal would not have to go. “But I hear he want to go,” said Deborah. “His grandmama tell me he giving her a time because she won’t let him go and sign up.”

  “Look like,” he said sullenly, “that won’t none of these young men be satisfied till they can go off and get themselves crippled or killed.”

  “Well, you know that’s the way the young folks is,” said Deborah, cheerfully. “You can’t never tell them nothing—and when they find out it’s too late then.”

  He discovered that whenever Deborah spoke of Royal, a fear deep within him listened and waited. Many times he had thought to unburden his heart to her. But she gave him no opportunity, never said anything that might allow him the healing humility of confession—or that might, for that matter, have permitted him at last to say how much he hated her for her barrenness. She demanded of him what she gave—nothing—nothing, at any rate, with which she could be reproached. She kept his house and shared his bed; she visited the sick, as she had always done, and she comforted the dying, as she had always done. The marriage for which he had once dreamed the world would mock him had so justified itself—in the eyes of the world—that no one now could imagine, for either of them, any other condition or alliance. Even Deborah’s weakness, which grew more marked with the years, keeping her more frequently in her bed, and her barrenness, like her previous dishonor, had come to seem mysterious proofs of how completely she had surrendered herself to God.

  He said: “Amen,” cautiously, after her last remark, and cleared his throat.

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

  And he did not look at her, though he felt her eyes on him: he reached for his Bible and opened it. “Young men,” he said, “is all the same, don’t Jesus change their hearts.”

  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.

  On that day, a day he was never to forget, he went when work was done to buy some medicine for Deborah, who was in bed with a misery in her back. Night had not yet fallen and the streets were gray and empty—save that here and there, polished in the light that spilled outward from a pool-room or a tavern, white men stood in groups of half a dozen. As he passed each group, silence fell, and they watched him insolently, itching to kill; but he said nothing, bowing his head, and they knew, anyway, that he was a preacher. There were no black men on the streets at all, save him. There had been found that morning, just outside of town, the dead body of a soldier, his uniform shredded where he had been flogged, and, turned upward through the black skin, raw, red meat. He lay face downward at the base of a tree, his fingernails digging into the scuffed earth. When he was turned over, his eyeballs stared upward in amazement and horror, his mouth was locked open wide; his trousers, soaked with blood, were torn open, and exposed to the cold, white air of morning the thick hairs of his groin, matted together, black and rust-red, and the wound that seemed to be throbbing still. He had been carried home in silence and lay now behind locked doors, with his living kinsmen, who sat, weeping, and praying, and dreaming of vengeance, and waiting for the next visitation. Now, someone spat on the sidewalk at Gabriel’s feet, and he walked on, his face not changing, and he heard it reprovingly whispered behind him that he was a good nigger, surely up to no trouble. He hoped that he would not be spoken to, that he would not have to smile into any of these so well-known white faces. 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. And he was thinking that it was only the hand of the Lord that had taken Royal away, because if he had stayed they would surely have killed him, when, turning a corner, he looked into Royal’s face.

  Royal was now as tall as Gabriel, broad-shouldered, and lean. He wore a new suit, blue, with broad, blue stripes, and carried, crooked under his arm, a brown-paper bundle tied with string. He and Gabriel stared at one another for a second with no recognition. Royal stared in blank hostility, before, seeming to remember Gabriel’s face, he took a burning cigarette from between his lips, and said, with pained politeness: “How-de-do, sir.” His voice was rough, and there was, faintly, the odor of whisky on his breath.

  But Gabriel could not speak at once; he struggled to get his breath. Then: “How-de-do,” he said. And they stood, each as though waiting for the other to say something of the greatest importance, on the deserted corner. Then, just as Royal was about to move, Gabriel remembered the white men all over town.

  “Boy,” he cried, “ain’t you got good sense? Don’t you know you ain’t got no business to be out here, walking around like this?”

  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 …”

  Then he could not go on. He saw, as though it were a vision, Royal’s body, sprawled heavy and unmoving forever against the earth, and tears blinded his eyes.

  Royal watched him, a distant and angry compassion in his face.

  “I know,” he said abruptly, “but they ain’t going to bother me. They done got their nigger for this week. I ain’t going far noway.”

  Then the corner on which they stood seemed suddenly to rock with the weight of mortal danger. It seemed for a moment, as they stood there, that death and destruction rushed toward them: two black men alone in the dark and silent town where white men prowled like lions—what mercy could they hope for, should they be found here, talk
ing together? It would surely be believed that they were plotting vengeance. And Gabriel started to move away, thinking to save his son.

  “God bless you, boy,” said Gabriel. “You hurry along now.”

  “Yeah,” said Royal, “thanks.” He moved away, about to turn the corner. He looked back at Gabriel. “But you be careful, too,” he said, and smiled.

  He turned the corner and Gabriel listened as his footfalls moved away. They were swallowed up in silence; he heard no voices raised to cut down Royal as he went his way; soon there was silence everywhere.

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

  And now John tried to pray. There was a great noise of praying all around him, a great noise of weeping and of song. It was Sister McCandless who led the song, who sang it nearly alone, for the others did not cease to moan and cry. It was a song he had heard all his life:

  “Lord, I’m traveling, Lord,

  I got on my traveling shoes.”

  Without raising his eyes, he could see her standing in the holy place, pleading the blood over those who sought there, her head thrown back, eyes shut, foot pounding the floor. She did not look, then, like the Sister McCandless who sometimes came to visit them, like the woman who went out every day to work for the white people downtown, who came home at evening, climbing, with such weariness, the long, dark stairs. No: her face was transfigured now, her whole being was made new by the power of her salvation.

  “Salvation is real,” a voice said to him, “God is real. Death may come soon or late, why do you hesitate? Now is the time to seek and serve the Lord.” Salvation was real for all these others, and it might be real for him. He had only to reach out and God would touch him; he had only to cry and God would hear. All these others, now, who cried so far beyond him with such joy, had once been in their sins, as he was now—and they had cried and God had heard them, and delivered them out of all their troubles. And what God had done for others, He could also do for him.