Go Tell It on the Mountain: Part 2: The Prayers of the Saints: Florence’s Prayer Summary & Analysis

Sitting in the church, Florence begins to sing the only religious song she knows, one she can remember her mother, Rachel, singing long ago. “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh, Lord, / Standing in the need of prayer,” Florence sings. Gabriel looks to his sister and “rejoices” that she has finally come to the Lord. He is happy not because Florence has found God but because she is obviously “suffering,” which makes him delighted. Florence’s “pride” stands up and the “resolution” that had brought her to the church begins to “falter.” If Gabriel is really “the Lord’s anointed,” Florence thinks, “she would rather die and endure Hell for all eternity than bow before his alter.”

Florence continues to sing and thinks about Rachel. Florence’s entire life, “sixty groaning years,” has led her to her “mother’s starting-place, the alter of the Lord.” But Florence has forgotten how to pray. Her heart is full of “hatred and bitterness,” and her “pride refuses to abdicate from the throne it had held so long.” It is not Florence’s “humility” that has brought her to church tonight—it is “only fear.”

Florence believes that crying and throwing one’s self on the alter is “indecent” behavior and is something only “common [n_____s]” do. She herself has never done this, and now she feels it is “too late.” Florence remembers a biblical phrase and whispers it now: “Lord, help my unbelief.” She has recently been thinking of Hezekiah’s message, “Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live,” and it has been keeping her up at night. There has been plenty of time to “turn to God,” but Florence has “thought to evade him.” Florence’s “pain” and “sickness” has been increasing. Her bowels “burn,” and she “vomits up her food.” Lately, “death” has been “standing in the room,” and while it has gone for now, “it will be back.”

Florence can still hear Rachel praying late at night in their cabin in the South. “We come before You on our knees the evening to ask You to watch over us and hold back the hand of the destroying angel,” Rachel would say. One night, Rachel began to pray especially hard. Deborah, a local sixteen-year-old girl, had been attacked by “many white men” who made her “cry and bleed.” Deborah’s father had threatened to kill the men, and they had beat him and “left him for dead.” The white men threatened to “set fire to all the houses, as they had done before.”

“I ain’t afraid,” a young Gabriel proudly asserted. “You hush, now!” Rachel yelled, listening to the fading horse hoofs outside. “They’s gone,” she said, relieved. Rachel had been born during slavery, and she always referred to Florence and Gabriel “as the children of her old age.” She had given birth to four children before Florence and Gabriel, but they had all been taken from her. Still, she believed that the Lord would “send deliverance,” and he did. “Rise up, rise up, Sister Rachel, and see the Lord’s deliverance!” a fellow slave yelled into her door one day. “He done brought us out of Egypt, just like He promised, and we’s free at last!” Rachel gathered a small bag of belongings and left the plantation, “never to see that country any more.”

It had become Florence’s “deep ambition” to walk out of the cabin the same way Rachel had walked off the plantation. Florence’s own father had left too, not long after Gabriel was born, and for as long as she can remember, Florence had always wanted to move North. Rachel was “content” to stay in the South and work for “white folks,” and she wanted Florence “to be content” as well, but she had refused. Rachel expected Florence to cook and clean and keep Gabriel “quiet.”

Gabriel “was a manchild” and therefore more important than Florence. Rachel thought of this as “logic,” since Gabriel would grow up to be a man and “do man’s work.” He was given meat and new clothes (it there was any to be had), and Florence was given nothing but work. Rachel claimed that Gabriel needed the “indulgence of his womenfolk,” and he was given the education that may have been Florence’s had he not been born. Florence desired an education “far more” than Gabriel, and he managed to lean “almost nothing at all.”

Gabriel was an awful child who often got into “mischief.” Rachel would beat him with a “switch from a tree,” and afterward, when he was left crying, his face wet with “mucous” and his pants around his ankles, Rachel would force him to kneel as she prayed.

Florence had become good friends with Deborah after Deborah’s “accident,” and together they “hated all men.” Both men and women considered Deborah “a harlot” and looked no further than “her unlovely and violated body.” The white men had “robbed her of the right to be considered a woman,” and she had become a “living reproach.” Deborah was convinced that “all men” were awful, and that “they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.”

Florence can still remember when Gabriel was baptized. He had “not wished to be baptized,” and as he was, he began to “kick and sputter.” He would come late at night, “vomit-covered,” and Florence despised him. “I hate him!” she would yell. “Big, black, prancing tomcat of a [n_____]!” Deborah would try to talk sense to her. “You know, honey,” Deborah would say, “the Word tells us to hate the sin but not the sinner.”

When Florence was twenty-six in 1900, she decided to go North. “Ma,” Florence said. “I’m going. I’m a-going this morning.” Both Rachel and Gabriel were shocked. Rachel’s health had been failing for some time, and she wasn’t expected to live. “You mean to tell me the Devil’s done made your heart so hard you can just leave your mother on her dying bed, and you don’t care if you don’t never see her in this world no more?” Rachel asked. “I’m going, Ma,” Florence said. “I got to go.”

Gabriel begged Florence to stay. Rachel “needs a woman” to care for her, he said. “Girl, ain’t you got no feelings at all?” Gabriel asked Florence. As Florence walked out of the cabin, Rachel cried and prayed. “Lord, Lord, Lord! Lord, have mercy on my sinful daughter!” Florence turned and faced Gabriel one last time before she left. “If you ever see me again, I won’t be wearing rags like yours,” she said.

In the church in Harlem, all is silent except for the sound of prayer, but John’s mind is full of “doubt and searching.” Mother Washington and her granddaughter, Ella Mae, have just arrived, and Mother Washington is behind Florence, “helping her to pray.” Florence is completely still and silent, and John thinks she is sleeping. He looks around the church and wonders why the saints all come here, “night after night after night, calling out to a God who cares nothing for them.” John’s eyes circle back around to Florence and Mother Washington, who is staring directly at him.

Florence’s late husband, Frank, “drank too much” and “sang the blues.” Once he grew a “tiny mustache,” but Florence said it made him look “like a half-breed gigolo” and made him shave it. He was always good that way, cutting his hair or changing his clothes when she said, and he even went to “Uplift meetings” with her and listened to “prominent Negroes” talk. Florence had thought “she controlled him” but this was “entirely and disastrously false.”

Frank had left Florence after ten years of marriage, over twenty years ago now. Back then, he was rarely home, and they frequently fought. One day he came home after being gone for two days. “All right, baby,” Frank said. “I guess you don’t never want to see me no more, not a miserable black sinner like me.” And then he left. “He’ll come back,” Florence had thought, “and he’ll come back drunk.” But Frank never came back. He lived with another woman for a while and then died in France during World War I.

It had been Florence’s “great mistake” to love Frank “so bitterly.” She believes that “all women” have been “cursed from the cradle” to “suffer the weight of men,” but Frank had believed otherwise. He said it “was men who suffered because they had to put up with the ways of women.” But Florence knows now as she did then that she is right, and that Frank had been “determined to live and die a common n____.”

Frank had never been able to buy Florence a house, or anything else for that matter. It wasn’t that Frank “could not make money, but that he could not save it,” and he frequently spent their money on “useless objects.” Once, “half drunk,” he had spent all their money on a vase for Florence, “she who never noticed flowers” and “certainly” would not buy any. Another time, he spent all their grocery money for the week on a whole turkey (still with a head and feathers) and five pounds of coffee. He thought it would be a surprise. “The only surprise I want from you is to learn sense! That’d be a surprise!” Florence had yelled at him. “You think I want to stay around here the rest of my life with these dirty [n_____s] you all the time bring home?”

Florence’s harsh words had trailed into the next room where Frank’s friends sat. “And what you want me to do, Florence?” Frank had asked her. “You want me to turn white?” He continued. “Who’s acting like a common [n_____] now?” he asked his wife. His friends are in the next room, Frank reminded her, probably thinking: “Poor Frank, he sure found him a common wife.”

While Frank and Florence frequently fought, she often felt his “love” and “tenderness” was “real.” He would often come to her at night in bed, and she would try to refuse him. “Let me alone Frank,” she would say. “Stop.” Frank would kiss her face and breasts, smelling of whiskey. “I ain’t going to stop,” he would say. “This is sweet talk, baby.”

For ten years Frank and Florence fought, and now she wonders if she had “been wrong to fight so hard.” Florence is an “old woman, and all alone,” and she is dying. She thinks of Deborah, who married Gabriel and kept in touch after Florence moved North. Florence has a letter in her purse now that she always wanted to show Gabriel but never did. Florence had even told Frank about the letter one night when she was rubbing “bleaching cream” on her skin.

“[Deborah] say she think my brother’s got a bastard living right there in the same town what he’s scared to call his own,” Florence told Frank. Frank was immediately confused. Gabriel is supposed to be a preacher. “Being a preacher ain’t never stopped a [n_____] from doing his dirt,” Florence said. Anyway, Gabriel has “no right to be preacher,” Florence told Frank, and if the letter is true, he is “no better than a murderer.” Gabriel sent the girl, Esther, away, Florence told Frank, and she died after giving birth.

Frank was silent. “I don’t know why you keep wasting all your time and my money on all them old skin whiteners,” he said to Florence. “You as black now as you was the day you was born.” Florence said he wasn’t there when she was born. “And I know you don’t want a coal-clack woman.” Frank disagreed. “I’ll make you to know that black’s a mighty pretty color,” he said.

Holding the letter now, Florence considers it “an instrument” to “complete [Gabriel’s] destruction.” Florence grows angry, filling with “terror and rage.” Why had God “preferred [Rachel] and [Florence’s] brother, the old, black woman, and the low, black man,” while Florence is made to “die, alone and in poverty?” Florence gathers her anger and slams her fists onto the church’s altar. “Call on Him, daughter!” Mother Washington yells from behind her. “Call on the Lord!”