Go Tell It on the Mountain (25 page)

But one night, when work was ended, Florence invited her to share a cup of coffee in the all-night coffee shop near by. Elizabeth had, of course, been invited before by other people—the night watchman, for example—but she had always said no. She pleaded
the excuse of her baby, whom she must rush home to feed. She was pretending in those days to be a young widow, and she wore a wedding ring. Very shortly, fewer people asked her, and she achieved the reputation of being “stuck up.”

Florence had scarcely ever spoken to her before she arrived at this merciful unpopularity; but Elizabeth had noticed Florence. She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous. She was extremely unpopular also and she had nothing whatever to do with any of the women she worked with. She was, for one thing, a good deal older, and she seemed to have nothing to laugh or gossip about. She came to work, and she did her work, and she left. One could not imagine what she was thinking as she marched so grimly down the halls, her head tied up in a rag, a bucket and a mop in her hands. Elizabeth thought that she must once have been very rich, and had lost her money; and she felt for her, as one fallen woman for another, a certain kinship.

A cup of coffee together, as day was breaking, became in time their habit. They sat together in the coffee shop, which was always empty when they arrived and was crowded fifteen minutes later when they left, and had their coffee and doughnuts before they took the subway uptown. While they had their coffee, and on the ride uptown, they talked, principally about Florence, how badly people treated her, and how empty her life was now that her husband was dead. He had adored her, she told Elizabeth, and satisfied her every whim, but he had tended to irresponsibility. If she had told him once, she had told him a hundred times: “Frank, you better take out life insurance.” But he had thought—and wasn’t it just like a man!—that he would live forever. Now here she was, a woman getting along in years, forced to make her living among all the black scum of this wicked city. Elizabeth, a little astonished at the need for confession betrayed by this proud woman, listened, nevertheless, with great sympathy. She was very grateful for Florence’s interest. Florence was so much older and seemed so kind.

It was no doubt this, Florence’s age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation, to take Florence into her confidence. Looking back, she found it hard to believe that she could have been so desperate, or so childish; though, again, on looking back, she was able to see clearly what she then so incoherently felt: how much she needed another human being, somewhere, who knew the truth about her.

Florence had often said how glad she would be to make the acquaintance of little Johnny; she was sure, she said, that any child of Elizabeth’s must be a wonderful child. On a Sunday near the end of that summer, Elizabeth dressed him in his best clothes and took him to Florence’s house. She was oddly and fearfully depressed that day; and John was not in a good mood. She found herself staring at him darkly, as though she were trying to read his future in his face. He would grow big one day, he would talk, and he would ask her questions. What questions would he ask her, what answers would she give? She surely would not be able to lie to him indefinitely about his father, for one day he would be old enough to realize that it was not his father’s name he bore. Richard had been a fatherless child, she helplessly, bitterly remembered as she carried John through the busy, summer, Sunday streets.
When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line
. Yes, down the line, through poverty, hunger, wandering, cruelty, fear, and trembling, to death. And she thought of the boys who had gone to prison. Were they there still? Would John be one of these boys one day? These boys, now, who stood before drugstore windows, before poolrooms, on every street corner, who whistled after her, whose lean bodies fairly rang, it seemed, with idleness, and malice, and frustration. How could she hope, alone, and in famine as she was, to put herself between him and this so wide and raging destruction? And then, as though to confirm her in all her dark imaginings, he began, as she reached the subway steps, to whimper, and moan, and cry.

And he kept this up, too, all the way uptown—so that, what with
the impossibility of pleasing him that day, no matter what she did, what with his restless weight, and the heat, and the smiling, staring people, and the strange dread that weighed on her so heavily, she was nearly ready to weep by the time she arrived at Florence’s door.

He, at that moment, to her exasperated relief, became the most cheerful of infants. Florence was wearing a heavy, old-fashioned garnet brooch, which, as she opened the door, immediately attracted John’s eye. He began reaching for the brooch and babbling and spitting at Florence as though he had known her all of his short life.

“Well!” said Florence, “when he get big enough to
really
go after the ladies you going to have your hands full, girl.”

“That,” said Elizabeth, grimly, “is the Lord’s truth. He keep me so busy now I don’t know half the time if I’m coming or going.”

Florence, meanwhile, attempted to distract John’s attention from the brooch by offering him an orange; but he had seen oranges before; he merely looked at it a moment before letting it fall to the floor. He began again, in his disturbingly fluid fashion, to quarrel about the brooch.

“He likes you,” said Elizabeth, finally, calmed a little by watching him.

“You must be tired,” said Florence, then. “Put him down there.” And she dragged one large easy chair to the table so that John could watch them while they ate.

“I got a letter from my brother the other day,” she said, bringing the food to the table. “His wife, poor ailing soul, done passed on, and he thinking about coming North.”

“You ain’t never told me,” said Elizabeth, with a quick and rather false interest, “you had a brother! And he coming up here?”

“So he say. Ain’t nothing, I reckon, to keep him down home no more—now Deborah’s gone.” She sat down opposite Elizabeth. “I ain’t seen him,” she said, musingly, “for more than twenty years.”

“Then it’ll be a great day,” Elizabeth smiled, “when you two meet again.”

Florence shook her head, and motioned for Elizabeth to start eating. “No,” she said, “we ain’t never got along, and I don’t reckon he’s changed.”

“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?”