Go Tell It on the Mountain
James BaldwinGo Tell It on the Mountain Quotes
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“The Devil,” he said, frowning and staring, “the Devil. How many faces is the Devil got?”
Now, you let your big brother tell you something, baby. Just as soon as you’s able to stand on your feet, you run away from this house, run far away.
That’s how the black people feel.
Once, she asked him:
‘Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?’
And he looked at her a long moment. Then:
‘Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.’
‘Then how come you got to be so smart? how come you got to know so much?’
And he smiled, pleased, but he said: ‘Little-bit, I don’t know so much.’ Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she had grown to know: ‘I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of a- bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. He weren’t going to beat my arse, then. And if he tried to kill me, I’d take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.’ Then he looked at her again, and smiled and kissed her, and he said: ‘That’s how I got to know so much, baby.’
And still, on the summit of that hill he paused. He remembered the people he had seen in that city, whose eyes held no love for him. And he thought of their feet so swift and brutal, and the dark grey clothes they wore, and how when they passed they did not see him, or, if they saw him, they smirked. And how their lights, unceasing, crashed on and ofƒ above him, and how he was a stranger there. Then he remembered his father and his mother, and all the arms stretched out to hold him back, to save him from this city where, they said, his soul would find perdition.
And he wanted to be one of them, playing in the streets, unfrightened, moving with such grace and power, but he knew this could not be. Yet, if he could not play their games, he could do something they could not do; he was able, as one of his teachers said, to think. But this brought him little in the way of consolation, for to-day he was terrified of his thoughts.
Yet what frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier to fall again. Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere.
He loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter. He might, he knew, for he was a member of the branch in Harlem and was entitled to take books from any library in the city. But he had never gone in because the building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted. And then everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity.
Not for a moment had she judged her father; it would have made no difference to her love for him had she been told, and even seen it proved, that he was first cousin to the Devil.
These glories were unimaginable—but the city was real. He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: ‘I can climb back up. If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up.’