“Oh, no, you ain’t,” said Aunt Florence. “You ain’t going to be starting none of that mess this evening. You know right doggone well that Roy don’t never ask nobody if he can do nothing—he just go right ahead and do like he pleases. Elizabeth sure can’t put no ball and chain on him. She got her hands full right here in this house, and it ain’t her fault if Roy got a head just as hard as his father’s.”
“You got a awful lot to say, look like for once you could keep from putting your mouth in my business.” He said this without looking at her.
“It ain’t my fault,” she said, “that you was born a fool, and always done been a fool, and ain’t never going to change. I swear to my Father you’d try the patience of Job.”
“I done told you before,” he said—he had not ceased working over the moaning Roy, and was preparing now to dab the wound with iodine—“that I didn’t want you coming in here and using that gutter language in front of my children.”
“Don’t you worry about my language, brother,” she said with spirit, “you better start worrying about your life. What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see.”
“What they see,” his father muttered, “is a poor man trying to serve the Lord. That’s my life.”
“Then I guarantee you,” she said, “that they going to do their best to keep it from being their life. You mark my words.”
He turned and looked at her, and intercepted the look that passed between the two women. John’s mother, for reasons that were not at all his father’s reasons, wanted Aunt Florence to keep still. He looked away, ironically. John watched his mother’s mouth tighten bitterly as she dropped her eyes. His father, in silence, began bandaging Roy’s forehead.
“It’s just the mercy of God,” he said at last, “that this boy didn’t lose his eye. Look here.”
His mother leaned over and looked into Roy’s face with a sad, sympathetic murmur. Yet, John felt, she had seen instantly the extent of the danger to Roy’s eye and to his life, and was beyond that worry now. Now she was merely marking time, as it were, and preparing herself against the moment when her husband’s anger would turn, full force, against her.
His father now turned to John, who was standing near the French doors with Ruth in his arms.
“You come here, boy,” he said, “and see what them white folks done done to your brother.”
John walked over to the sofa, holding himself as proudly beneath his father’s furious eyes as a prince approaching the scaffold.
“Look here,” said his father, grasping him roughly by one arm, “look at your brother.”
John looked down at Roy, who gazed at him with almost no expression in his dark eyes. But John knew by the weary, impatient set of Roy’s young mouth that his brother was asking that none of this be held against him. It wasn’t his fault, or John’s, Roy’s eyes said, that they had such a crazy father.
His father, with the air of one forcing the sinner to look down into the pit that is to be his portion, moved away slightly so that John could see Roy’s wound.
Roy had been gashed by a knife, luckily not very sharp, from the center of his forehead where his hair began, downward to the bone just above his left eye: the wound described a kind of crazy half-moon and ended in a violent, fuzzy tail that was the ruin of Roy’s eyebrow. Time would darken the half-moon wound into Roy’s dark skin, but nothing would bring together again the so violently divided eyebrow. This crazy lift, this question, would remain with him forever, and emphasize forever something mocking and sinister in Roy’s face. John felt a sudden impulse to smile, but his father’s eyes were on him and he fought the impulse back. Certainly the wound was now very ugly, and very red, and must, John felt, with a quickened sympathy toward Roy, who had not cried out, have been very painful. He could imagine the sensation caused when Roy staggered into the house, blinded by his blood; but just the same, he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t changed, he would be in the streets again the moment he was better.
“You see?” came now from his father. “It was white folks, some of them white folks you like so much that tried to cut your brother’s throat.”
John thought, with immediate anger and with a curious contempt for his father’s inexactness, that only a blind man, however white, could possibly have been aiming at Roy’s throat; and his mother said with a calm insistence:
“And he was trying to cut theirs. Him and them bad boys.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Florence, “I ain’t heard you ask that boy nary a question about how all this happened. Look like you just determined to raise cain any how and make everybody in this house suffer because something done happened to the apple of your eye.”
“I done asked you,” cried his father in a fearful exasperation, “to stop running your mouth. Don’t none of this concern you. This is my family and this is my house. You want me to slap you side of the head?”
“You slap me,” she said, with a placidity equally fearful, “and I do guarantee you you won’t do no more slapping in a hurry.”
“Hush now,” said his mother, rising, “ain’t no need for all this. What’s done is done. We ought to be on our knees, thanking the Lord it weren’t no worse.”
“Amen to that,” said Aunt Florence, “tell that foolish nigger something.”
“You can tell that foolish son of yours something,” he said to his wife with venom, having decided, it seemed, to ignore his sister, “him standing there with them big buckeyes. You can tell him to take this like a warning from the Lord. This is what white folks does to niggers. I been telling you, now you see.”
“He better take it like a warning?” shrieked Aunt Florence. “He better take it? Why, Gabriel, it ain’t him went halfway across this city to get in a fight with white boys. This boy on the sofa went deliberately, with a whole lot of other boys, all the way to the west side, just looking for a fight. I declare, I do wonder what goes on in your head.”
“You know right well,” his mother said, looking directly at his father, “that Johnny don’t travel with the same class of boys as Roy goes with. You done beat Roy too many times, here, in this very room for going out with them bad boys. Roy got hisself hurt this afternoon because he was out doing something he didn’t have no business doing, and that’s the end of it. You ought to be thanking your Redeemer he ain’t dead.”
“And for all the care you take of him,” he said, “he might as well be dead. Don’t look like you much care whether he lives, or dies.”
“Lord, have mercy,” said Aunt Florence.
“He’s my son, too,” his mother said, with heat. “I carried him in my belly for nine months and I know him just like I know his daddy, and they’s just exactly alike. Now. You ain’t got no right in the world to talk to me like that.”
“I reckon you know,” he said, choked, and breathing hard, “all about a mother’s love. I sure reckon on you telling me how a woman can sit in the house all day and let her own flesh and blood go out and get half butchered. Don’t you tell me you don’t know no way to stop him, because I remember my mother, God rest her soul, and she’d have found a way.”
“She was my mother, too,” said Aunt Florence, “and I recollect, if you don’t, you being brought home many a time more dead than alive. She didn’t find no way to stop you. She wore herself out beating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here.”
“My, my, my,” he said, “you got a lot to say.”
“I ain’t doing a thing,” she said, “but trying to talk some sense into your big, black, hardhead. You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrongdoings.”
“Never mind, Florence,” his mother said, “it’s all over and done with now.”
“I’m out of this house,” he shouted, “every day the Lord sends, working to put the food in these children’s mouths. Don’t you think I got a right to ask the mother of these children to look after them and see that they don’t break their
necks before I get back home?”
“You ain’t got but one child,” she said, “that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy. No, I can’t stop him, I done told you that, and you can’t stop him neither. You don’t know what to do with this boy, and that’s why you all the time trying to fix the blame on somebody. Ain’t nobody to blame, Gabriel. You just better pray God to stop him before somebody puts another knife in him and puts him in his grave.”
They stared at each other a moment in an awful pause, she with a startled, pleading question in her eyes. Then, with all his might, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She crumpled at once, hiding her face with one thin hand, and Aunt Florence moved to hold her up. Sarah watched all this with greedy eyes. Then Roy sat up, and said in a shaking voice:
“Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
In the moment that these words filled the room, and hung in the room like the infinitesimal moment of hanging, jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other’s eyes. John thought for that moment that his father believed the words had come from him, his eyes were so wild and depthlessly malevolent, and his mouth was twisted into such a snarl of pain. Then, in the absolute silence that followed Roy’s words, John saw that his father was not seeing him, was not seeing anything unless it were a vision. John wanted to turn and flee, as though he had encountered in the jungle some evil beast, crouching and ravenous, with eyes like Hell unclosed; and exactly as though, on a road’s turning, he found himself staring at certain destruction, he found that he could not move. Then his father turned and looked down at Roy.
“What did you say?” his father asked.
“I told you,” said Roy, “not to touch my mother.”
“You cursed me,” said his father.
Roy said nothing; neither did he drop his eyes.
“Gabriel,” said his mother, “Gabriel. Let us pray.…”
His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tears were in his eyes.
“Gabriel,” cried Aunt Florence, “ain’t you done playing the fool for tonight?”
Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream.
“My Lord, my Lord,” his father whispered, “my Lord, my Lord.”
He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning.
His Aunt Florence and his father faced each other.
“Yes, Lord,” Aunt Florence said, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”
John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed.
John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step farther. The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world. John moved forward, hearing his feet crack against the sagging wood, to where the golden cross on the red field of the altar cloth glowed like smothered fire, and switched on one weak light.
In the air of the church hung, perpetually, the odor of dust and sweat; for, like the carpet in his mother’s living-room, the dust of this church was invincible; and when the saints were praying or rejoicing, their bodies gave off an acrid, steamy smell, a marriage of the odors of dripping bodies and soaking, starched white linen. It was a storefront church and had stood, for John’s lifetime, on the corner of this sinful avenue, facing the hospital to which criminal wounded and dying were carried almost every night. The saints, arriving, had rented this abandoned store and taken out the fixtures; had painted the walls and built a pulpit, moved in a piano and camp chairs, and bought the biggest Bible they could find. They put white curtains in the show window, and painted across this window TEMPLE OF THE FIRE BAPTIZED. Then they were ready to do the Lord’s work.
And the Lord, as He had promised to the two or three first gathered together, sent others; and these brought others and created a church. From this parent branch, if the Lord blessed, other branches might grow and a mighty work be begun throughout the city and throughout the land. In the history of the temple the Lord had raised up evangelists and teachers and prophets, and called them out into the field to do His work; to go up and down the land carrying the gospel, or to raise other temples—in Philadelphia, Georgia, Boston, or Brooklyn. Wherever the Lord led, they followed. Every now and again one of them came home to testify of the wonders the Lord had worked through him, or her. And sometimes on a special Sunday they all visited one of the nearer churches of the Brotherhood.
There had been a time, before John was born, when his father had also been in the field; but now, having to earn for his family their daily bread, it was seldom that he was able to travel farther away than Philadelphia, and then only for a very short time. His father no longer, as he had once done, led great revival meetings, his name printed large on placards that advertised the coming of a man of God. His father had once had a mighty reputation; but all this, it seemed, had changed since he had left the South. Perhaps he ought now to have a church of his own—John wondered if his father wanted that; he ought, perhaps, to be leading, as Father James now led, a great flock to the Kingdom. But his father was only a caretaker in the house of God. He was responsible for the replacement of burnt-out light bulbs, and for the cleanliness of the church, and the care of the Bibles, and the hymn-books, and the placards on the walls. On Friday night he conducted the Young Ministers’ Service and preached with them. Rarely did he bring the message on a Sunday morning; only if there was no one else to speak was his father called upon. He was a kind of fill-in speaker, a holy handyman.
Yet he was treated, so far as John could see, with great respect. No one, none of the saints in any case, had ever reproached or rebuked his father, or suggested that his life was anything but spotless. Nevertheless, this man, God’s minister, had struck John’s mother, and John had wanted to kill him—and wanted to kill him still.
John had swept one side of the church and the chairs were still piled in the space before the altar when there was a knocking at the door. When he opened the door he saw that it was Elisha, come to help him.
“Praise the Lord,” said Elisha, standing on the doorstep, grinning.
“Praise the Lord,” said John. This was the greeting always used among the saints.
Brother Elisha came in, slamming the door behind him and stamping his feet. He had probably just come from a basketball court; his forehead was polished with recent sweat and his hair stood up. He was wearing his green woolen sweater, on which was stamped the letter of his high school, and his shirt was open at the throat.
“Y
ou ain’t cold like that?” John asked, staring at him.
“No, little brother, I ain’t cold. You reckon everybody’s frail like you?”
“It ain’t only the little ones gets carried to the graveyard,” John said. He felt unaccustomedly bold and lighthearted; the arrival of Elisha had caused his mood to change.
Elisha, who had started down the aisle toward the back room, turned to stare at John with astonishment and menace. “Ah,” he said, “I see you fixing to be sassy with Brother Elisha tonight—I’m going to have to give you a little correction. You just wait till I wash my hands.”
“Ain’t no need to wash your hands if you come here to work. Just take hold of that mop and put some soap and water in the bucket.”
“Lord,” said Elisha, running water into the sink, and talking, it seemed, to the water, “that sure is a sassy nigger out there. I sure hope he don’t get hisself hurt one of these days, running his mouth thataway. Look like he just won’t stop till somebody busts him in the eye.”
He sighed deeply, and began to lather his hands. “Here I come running all the way so he wouldn’t bust a gut lifting one of them chairs, and all he got to say is ‘put some water in the bucket.’ Can’t do nothing with a nigger nohow.” He stopped and turned to face John. “Ain’t you got no manners, boy? You better learn how to talk to old folks.”
“You better get out here with that mop and pail. We ain’t got all night.”
“Keep on,” said Elisha. “I see I’m going to have to give you your lumps tonight.”
He disappeared. John heard him in the toilet, and then over the thunderous water he heard him knocking things over in the back room.
“Now what you doing?”
“Boy, leave me alone. I’m fixing to work.”
“It sure sounds like it.” John dropped his broom and walked into the back. Elisha had knocked over a pile of camp chairs, folded in the corner, and stood over them angrily, holding the mop in his hand.