Go Tell It on the Mountain: Part One

The pastor, Father James, was a genial, well-fed man with a face like a darker moon.

John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own...

And this was why, though he had been born in the faith and had been surrounded all his life by the saints and by their prayers and their rejoicing, and though the tabernacle in which they worshipped was more completely real to him than the several precarious homes in which he and his family had lived, John’s heart was hardened against the Lord.

It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again — and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.

Today in his apathy John stared at them, not seeing.

...the green metal serpent, perpetually malevolent, raised its head proudly in the midst of these trophies, biding the time to strike.

The cold sun made their faces like copper and brass, and through the closed window John heard their coarse, irreverent voices.

...this avowal of her love for him lent to John’s bewilderment a reality that terrified and a dignity that consoled him.

He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him.

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.

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.

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...

...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.

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.

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.