“Twenty years is a mighty long time,” Elizabeth said, “he’s bound to have changed some.”
“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.”
This was not, Elizabeth felt, the way a sister ought to talk about her brother, especially to someone who knew him not at all, and who would, probably, eventually meet him. She asked, helplessly:
“What do he do—your brother?”
“He some kind of preacher,” said Florence. “I ain’t never heard him. When I was home he weren’t doing nothing but chasing after women and lying in the ditches, drunk.”
“I hope,” laughed Elizabeth, “he done changed his ways at least.”
“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 Elizabeth, thoughtfully. “But don’t you think,” she hesitantly asked, “that the Lord can change a person’s heart?”
“I done heard it said often enough,” said Florence, “but I got yet to see it. These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with. I reckon the Lord done give them those hearts—and, honey, the Lord don’t give out no second helpings, I’m here to tell you.”
“No,” said Elizabeth heavily, after a long pause. She turned to look at John, who was grimly destroying the square, tasseled doilies that decorated Florence’s easy chair. “I reckon that’s the truth. Look like it go around once, and that’s that. You miss it, and you’s fixed for fair.”
“Now you sound,” said Florence, “mighty sad all of a sudden. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” she said. She turned back to the table. Then, helplessly, and thinking that she must not say too much: “I was just thinking about this boy here, what’s going to happen to him, how I’m going to raise him, in this awful city all by myself.”
“But you ain’t fixing, is you,” asked Florence, “to stay single all your days? You’s a right young girl, and a right pretty girl. I wouldn’t be in no hurry if I was you to find no new husband. I don’t believe the nigger’s been born what knows how to treat a woman right. You got time, honey, so take your time.”
“I ain’t,” said Elizabeth, quietly, “got so much time.” She could not stop herself; though something warned her to hold her peace, the words poured out. “You see this wedding ring? Well, I bought this ring myself. This boy ain’t got no daddy.”
Now she had said it: the words could not be called back. And she felt, as she sat, trembling, at Florence’s table, a reckless, pained relief.
Florence stared at her with a pity so intense that it resembled anger. She looked at John, and then back at Elizabeth.
“You poor thing,” said Florence, leaning back in her chair, her face still filled with this strange, brooding fury, “you is had a time, ain’t you?”
“I was scared,” Elizabeth brought out, shivering, still compelled to speak.
“I ain’t never,” said Florence, “seen it to fail. Look like ain’t no woman born what don’t get walked over by some no-count man. Look like ain’t no woman nowhere but ain’t been dragged down in the dirt by some man, and left there, too, while he go on about his business.”
Elizabeth sat at the table, numb, with nothing more to say.
“What he do,” asked Florence, finally, “run off and leave you?”
“Oh, no,” cried Elizabeth, quickly, and the tears sprang to her eyes, “he weren’t like that! He died, just like I say—he got in trouble, and he died—a long time before this boy was born.” She began to weep with the same helplessness with which she had been speaking. Florence rose and came over to Elizabeth, holding Elizabeth’s head against her breast. “He wouldn’t never of left me,” said Elizabeth, “but he died.”
And now she wept, after her long austerity, as though she would never be able to stop.
“Hush now,” said Florence, gently, “hush now. You going to frighten the little fellow. He don’t want to see his mama cry. All right,” she whispered to John, who had ceased his attempts at destruction, and stared now at the two women, “all right. Everything’s all right.”
Elizabeth sat up and reached in her handbag for a handkerchief, and began to dry her eyes.
“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. Yes, Lord—” and she paused; she turned and came back to Elizabeth. “Yes, Lord,” she repeated, “don’t I know.”
“I’m mighty sorry,” said Elizabeth, “to upset your nice dinner this way.”
“Girl,” said Florence, “don’t you say a word about being sorry, or I’ll show you to this door. You pick up that boy and sit down there in that easy chair and pull yourself together. I’m going out in the kitchen and make us something cold to drink. You try not to fret, honey. The Lord, He ain’t going to let you fall but so low.”
Then she met Gabriel, two or three weeks later, at Florence’s house on a Sunday.
Nothing Florence had said had prepared her for him. She had expected him to be older than Florence, and bald, or gray. But he seemed considerably younger than his sister, with all his teeth and hair. There he sat, that Sunday, in Florence’s tiny, fragile parlor, a very rock, it seemed to the eye of her confusion, in her so weary land.
She remembered that as she mounted the stairs with John’s heavy weight in her arms, and as she entered the door, she heard music, which became perceptibly fainter as Florence closed the door behind her. John had heard it, too, and had responded by wriggling, and moving his hands in the air, and making noises, meant, she supposed, to be taken for a song. “You’s a nigger, all right,” she thought with amusement and impatience—for it was someone’s gramophone, on a lower floor, filling the air with the slow, high, measured wailing of the blues.
Gabriel rose, it seemed to her, with a speed and eagerness that were not merely polite. She wondered immediately if Florence had told him about her. And this caused her to stiffen with a tentative anger against Florence, and with pride and fear. Yet when she looked into his eyes she found there a strange humility, an altogether unexpected kindness. She felt the anger go out of her, and her defensive pride; but somewhere, crouching, the fear remained.
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.”
Then he said, with a smile less barbed and ambiguous than his sister’s remark: “Ain’t no need to be afraid of me, sister. I ain’t nothing but a poor, weak vessel in the hands of the Lord.”
“You see!” said Florence, grimly. She took John from his mother’s arms. “And this here’s little Johnny,” she said, “shake hands with the preacher, Johnny.”
But John was staring at the door that held back the music; toward which, with an insistence at once furious and feeble, his hands were still outstretched. He looked questioningly, reproachfully, at his mother, who laughed, watching him, and said, “Johnny want to hear some more of that music. He like to started dancing when he was coming up the stairs.”
Gabriel laughed, and said, circling around Florence to look into John’s face: “Got a man in the Bible, son, who liked music, too. He used to play on his harp before the king, and he got to dancing one day before the Lord. You reckon you going to dance for the Lord one of these days?”
John looked with a child’s impenetrable gravity into the preacher’s face, as though he were turning this quest
ion over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it out. Gabriel smiled at him, a strange smile—strangely, she thought, loving—and touched him on the crown of the head.
“He a mighty fine boy,” said Gabriel. “With them big eyes he ought to see everything in the Bible.”
And they all laughed. Florence moved to deposit John in the easy chair that was his Sunday throne. And Elizabeth found that she was watching Gabriel, unable to find in the man before her the brother whom Florence so despised.
They sat down at the table, John placed between herself and Florence and opposite Gabriel.
“So,” Elizabeth said, with a nervous pleasantness, it being necessary, she felt, to say something, “you just getting to this big city? It must seem mighty strange to you.”
His eyes were still on John, whose eyes had not left him. Then he looked again at Elizabeth. She felt that the air between them was beginning to be charged, and she could find no name, or reason, for the secret excitement that moved in her.
“It’s mighty big,” he said, “and looks to me—and sounds to me—like the Devil’s working every day.”
This was in reference to the music, which had not ceased, but she felt, immediately, that it included her; this, and something else in Gabriel’s eyes, made her look down quickly to her plate.
“He ain’t,” said Florence, briskly, “working no harder up here than he worked down home. Them niggers down home,” she said to Elizabeth, “they think New York ain’t nothing but one long, Sunday drunk. They don’t know. Somebody better tell them—they can get better moonshine right there where they is than they likely to here—and cheaper, too.”
“But I do hope,” he said, with a smile, “that you ain’t taken to drinking moonshine, sister.”
“It wasn’t never me,” she said, promptly, “had that habit.”
“Don’t know,” he persisted, still smiling, and still looking at Elizabeth, “tell me folks do things up North they wouldn’t think about doing down home.”
“Folks got their dirt to do,” said Florence. “They going to do it, no matter where they is. Folks do lots of things down home they don’t want nobody to know about.”
“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.”
She had meant it as a kind of joke; but the words were not out of her mouth before she longed for the power to call them back. They rang in her own ears like a confession.
“That’s the Lord’s truth,” he said, after the briefest pause. “Does you really believe that?”
She forced herself to look up at him, and felt at that moment the intensity of the attention that Florence fixed on her, as though she were trying to shout a warning. She knew that it was something in Gabriel’s voice that had caused Florence, suddenly, to be so wary and so tense. But she did not drop her eyes from Gabriel’s eyes. She answered him: “Yes. That’s the way I want to live.”
“Then the Lord’s going to bless you,” he said, “and open up the windows of Heaven for you—for you, and that boy. He going to pour down blessings on you till you won’t know where to put them. You mark my words.”
“Yes,” said Florence, mildly, “you mark his words.”
But neither of them looked at her. It came into Elizabeth’s mind, filling her mind: All things work together for good to them that love the Lord. She tried to obliterate this burning phrase, and what it made her feel. What it made her feel, for the first time since the death of Richard, was hope; his voice had made her feel that she was not altogether cast down, that God might raise her again in honor; his eyes had made her know that she could be again—this time in honor—a woman. Then, from what seemed to be a great, cloudy distance, he smiled at her—and she smiled.
The distant gramophone stuck now, suddenly, on a grinding, wailing, sardonic trumpet-note; this blind, ugly crying swelled the moment and filled the room. She looked down at John. A hand somewhere struck the gramophone arm and sent the silver needle on its way through the whirling, black grooves, like something bobbing, anchorless, in the middle of the sea.
“Johnny’s done fell asleep,” she said.
She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.
She felt a great commotion in the air around her—a great excitement, muted, waiting on the Lord. And the air seemed to tremble, as before a storm. A light seemed to hang—just above, and all around them—about to burst into revelation. In the great crying, the great singing all around her, in the wind that gathered to fill the church, she did not hear her husband; and she thought of John as sitting, silent now and sleepy, far in the back of the church—watching, with that wonder and that terror in his eyes. She did not raise her head. She wished to tarry yet a little longer, that God might speak to her.
It had been before this very altar that she had come to kneel, so many years ago, to be forgiven. When the fall came, and the air was dry and sharp, and the wind high, she was always with Gabriel. Florence did not approve of this, and Florence said so often; but she never said more than this, for the reason, Elizabeth decided, that she had no evil to report—it was only that she was not fond of her brother. But even had Florence been able to find a language unmistakable in which to convey her prophecies, Elizabeth could not have heeded her because Gabriel had become her strength. He watched over her and her baby as though it had become his calling; he was very good to John, and played with him, and bought him things, as though John were his own. She knew that his wife had died childless, and that he had always wanted a son—he was praying still, he told her, that God would bless him with a son. She thought sometimes, lying on her bed alone, and thinking of all his kindness, that perhaps John was that son, and that he would grow one day to comfort and bless them both. Then she thought how, now, she would embrace again the faith she had abandoned, and walk again in the light from which, with Richard, she had so far fled. Sometimes, thinking of Gabriel, she remembered Richard—his voice, his breath, his arms—with a terrible pain; and then she felt herself shrinking from Gabriel’s anticipated touch. But this shrinking she would not countenance. She told herself that it was foolish and sinful to look backward when her safety lay before her, like a hiding-place hewn in the side of the mountain.
“Sister,” he asked one night, “don’t you reckon you ought to give your heart to the Lord?”
They were in the dark streets, walking to church. He had asked her this question before, but never in such a tone; she had never before felt so compelling a need to reply.
“I reckon,” she said.
“If you call on the Lord,” he said, “He’ll lift you up, He’ll give you your heart’s desire. I’m a witness,” he said, and smiled at her, “you call on the Lord, you wait on the Lord, He’ll answer. God’s promises don’t never fail.”
Her arm was in his, and she felt him trembling with his passion.
“Till you come,” she said, in a low, trembling voice, “I didn’t never hardly go to church at all, Reverend. Look like I couldn’t see my way nohow—I was all bowed down with shame … and sin.”
She could hardly bring the last words out, and as she spoke tears were in her eyes. She had told him that John was nameless; and she had tried to tell him something of her suffering, too. In those days he had seemed to understand, and he had not stood in judgment on her. When had he so greatly changed? Or was it that he had not changed, but that her eyes had been opened through the pain he had caused her?
“Well,” he said, “I done come, and it was the hand of the Lord what sent me. He brought us together for a sign. You fall on your knees and see if that ain’t so—you fall down and ask Him to speak to you tonight.”
Yes, a sign, she thought, a sign of His mercy, a sign of His forgiveness.
When they reached the church doors he paused, and looked at her and made his promise.
“
Sister Elizabeth,” he said, “when you go down on your knees tonight, I want you to ask the Lord to speak to your heart, and tell you how to answer what I’m going to say.”
She stood a little below him, one foot lifted to the short, stone step that led to the church entrance, and looked up into his face. And looking into his face, which burned—in the dim, yellow light that hung about them there—like the face of a man who has wrestled with angels and demons and looked on the face of God, it came to her, oddly, and all at once, that she had become a woman.
“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 he paused; she said nothing. His eyes moved over her body.
“I know,” he said, trying to smile, and in a lower voice, “I’m a lot older than you. But that don’t make no difference. I’m a mighty strong man yet. I done been down the line, Sister Elizabeth, and maybe I can keep you from making … some of my mistakes, bless the Lord … maybe I can help keep your foot from stumbling … again … girl … for as long as we’s in this world.”
Still she waited.
“And I’ll love you,” he said, “and I’ll honor you … until the day God calls me home.”
Slow tears rose to her eyes: of joy, for what she had come to; of anguish, for the road that had brought her here.
“And I’ll love your son, your little boy,” he said at last, “just like he was my own. He won’t never have to fret or worry about nothing; he won’t never be cold or hungry as long as I’m alive and I got my two hands to work with. I swear this before my God,” he said, “because He done give me back something I thought was lost.”
Yes, she thought, a sign—a sign that He is mighty to save. Then she moved and stood on the short step, next to him, before the doors.
“Sister Elizabeth,” he said—and she would carry to the grave the memory of his grace and humility at that moment, “will you pray?”
“Yes,” she said. “I been praying. I’m going to pray.”
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