Moses, Man of the Mountain

Zora Neale Hurston

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062010568
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"A narrative of great power. Warm with friendly personality and pulsating with... profound eloquence and religious fervor." —New York Times

In this novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.

CHAPTER 1

Have mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!” Women gave birth and whispered cries like this in caves and out-of-the-way places that humans didn’t usually use for birthplaces. Moses hadn’t come yet, and these were the years when Israel first made tears. Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The birthing beds of Hebrews were matters of state. The Hebrew womb had fallen under the heel of Pharaoh. A ruler great in his newness and new in his greatness had arisen in Egypt and he had said, “This is law. Hebrew boys shall not be born. All offenders against this law shall suffer death by drowning.”

So women in the pains of labor hid in caves and rocks. They must cry, but they could not cry out loud. They pressed their teeth together. A night might force upon them a thousand years of feelings. Men learned to beat upon their breasts with clenched fists and breathe out their agony without sound. A great force of suffering accumulated between the basement of heaven and the roof of hell. The shadow of Pharaoh squatted in the dark corners of every birthing place in Goshen. Hebrew women shuddered with terror at the indifference of their wombs to the Egyptian law.

The province of Goshen was living under the New Egypt and the New Egyptian and they were made to know it in many ways. The sign of the new order towered over places of preference. It shadowed over work, and fear was given body and wings.

The Hebrews had already been driven out of their well-built homes and shoved further back in Goshen. Then came more decrees:

1. Israel, you are slaves from now on. Pharaoh assumes no responsibility for the fact that some of you got old before he came to power. Old as well as young must work in his brickyards and road camps.

• a. No sleeping after dawn. Fifty lashes for being late to work.
• b. Fifty lashes for working slow.
• c. One hundred lashes for being absent.
• d. One hundred lashes for sassing the bossman.
• e. Death for hitting a foreman.

2. Babies take notice: Positively no more boy babies allowed among Hebrews. Infants defying this law shall be drowned in the Nile.

Hebrews were disarmed and prevented from becoming citizens of Egypt, they found out that they were aliens, and from one new decree to the next they sank lower and lower. So they had no comfort left but to beat their breasts to crush the agony inside. Israel had learned to weep.

CHAPTER 2

The sun was setting. Under the brilliant, cloudless Egyptian sun thousands of Hebrew workers were struggling with building stones. Some of their backs were bloody from the lash; many of them were stoopy from age and all of them were sweaty and bent and tired from work. The Egyptian foreman gazed at the drooping sun in awe and breathed with reverence: “Ah, Horus, golden god! Lord of both horizons. The weaver of the beginning of things!”

Amram, struggling with the help of another man to move a heavy stone into place in the foundation, heard him and looked up.

“Horus may be all those good things to the Egyptians, brother, but that sun-god is just something to fry our backs.”

“I heard him what he said,” the other worker whispered back. “If Horus is the weaver of the beginning of things, he’s done put some mighty strange threads in his loom.”

“And still and all I used to admire him too, before this new government come in, didn’t you?”

“Uhuh. I used to admire everything in Egypt. But the palms and the plains ain’t scenery to me no more. They just look like suffering to me now.”

“They look that way to me too, now,” Amram whispered back, “and the worst part about it is, my wife is going to have another baby.”

“I heard about it, Amram. What you going to do? Take her off in the wilderness like I did mine?”

“Don’t know exactly, Caleb. One man was telling me he hid his wife out in a boat until it was all over. Turned out to be a girl so it was all right.”

“How soon you expecting?”

“Of course you can’t never be sure exactly, but we figure in two or three days more. I’m planning on hunting up some good cave or some place like that the secret police don’t know about yet. Thought I’d take tonight to locate a place. Will you go along with me?”

“Sure I will. You got the midwife engaged?”

“Yes, that’s all fixed up. Going to send my boy Aaron and my girl Miriam along to help around generally. They can do little things around and watch out for spies. Old Puah, the midwife, knows her business all right and she’s just as loyal as she can be, but she’s getting kind of old, you know.”

“That’s right. It’s good you got a sizeable boy and girl to run errands and to stand watch. It’s liable to happen while we are at work, you know.”

“Oh, yes, and that’s how come I want to find a place and get it sort of fixed up with a quilt or two for my wife to rest on and some water and things like that so when the time comes I won’t need to worry. It’s a sin and a shame our wives can’t even have a baby in peace.”

“And that’s just the reason I want to go with that delegation to see old Pharaoh tonight. You know a bunch of us are going tonight to see him to protest these new decrees, don’t you?”

“Sure, but I don’t believe it’ll do a bit of good. Still and all I want to go just to see what he’s going to say this time. But it makes me fighting mad to see him sit up there, him and his so-called advisors, and laugh right in our faces. Reckon we’ll get back from our little cave hunt in time to go along with the rest?”

“Hope so. I just don’t see how he can keep on putting out all these decrees and making ’em meaner all the time. He’s got to give us some kind of a justice sooner or later.”

“You think so, Caleb? I don’t. I saw his eyes last time. That man loves to see us suffer. He loves to see us hurt and ache. That’s how come he lets us come—to be sure he’s griping us good. I’ve about made up my mind that these protests ain’t doing us no good at all.”

“You reckon, Amram?”

“Sure. You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don’t know nothing about ’em. He makes ’em his own self and he’s glad when we come tell him they hurt. Why, that’s a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, he’s got a law about everything under the sun! Next thing you know he’ll be saying cats can’t have kittens. He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we’re the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put ’em on. He aims to keep us down so he’ll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.”

“Well, it’s his time now, be mine after while, maybe.”

“Maybe is right. He’s got us in the go-long and I just don’t see no way out unless he was to die and a better man come along.”

“It certainly is hard, Amram, getting use to being a slave.”

“And look what he done done! Passed a law we can’t go in the temples no more. He says their gods ain’t our gods.”

“Like what other gods do we know anything about. It gives you a real empty feeling not to have no gods anymore. If we can’t go to the temples in Thebes and Memphis and Luxor, we could build us one in Goshen and sacrifice, Amram. Maybe if we do that they might help us to get our rights back again.”

“Caleb, those temples were built by Egyptians and those gods were made by Egyptians. Gods always love the people who make ’em. We can’t put no faith in them.”

“Don’t say that, Amram. That don’t leave me no way to turn at all. Makes me feel like my insides been ripped out.”

“Well, Caleb, I’m giving it out just like I figured it out. We just ain’t got no out that I can see. Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens. I don’t see no way out but death and, Caleb, you are up against a hard game when you got to die to beat it.”

The foreman was coming so they quit whispering and speeded up their work for a while. It was about dark and they knew they couldn’t work much longer anyway. The foreman glanced at them in passing and went on. They began to whisper again right away, under pretense of adjusting a rope for lifting a stone.

“Caleb?”

“I hear you, Amram.”

“Wouldn’t it be swell if some of us hid knives in our clothes when we went to see Pharaoh?”

“It sure would. But they always search us, don’t they, before they let us in.”

“I know, but it is something nice to think about, ain’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“Right now, everybody’s nerve is gone, but someday, maybe not in our time, but, he’s bound to meet his match first and last.”

“That’s a long time to wait, Amram, but I reckon it is the best we can do. I hate myself for not trying it even if they all kill me for it.”

“That’s what I hate ’em for too, making me scared to die. It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing—nothing.”

“Where’d you get that good word from, Amram? It sure is the truth. I know it by myself.”

“Oh, you learn things as you go along. I hope I don’t have another boy, Caleb. Even if the soldiers don’t find him and kill him, I don’t want him feeling like I feel. I want him to be a man.”

CHAPTER 3

Amram and Caleb got off and plodded on home. Amram was full of feelings about his wife’s condition and Caleb talked about the protest meeting. He wanted Amram to go if he could.

“I guess you’re right about it not doing no good and I reckon we all know it. But I guess the reason we go is it makes us feel like we still got some say-so over our life. In that way we don’t feel quite so much like mules.”

Amram said, “Eat your supper just as quick as you can if you going with me and let’s go locate a hiding place for my wife.”

They said goodbye at the door of Amram’s hut and Caleb went on home. Amram stepped inside to fate. Jochebed’s water had broken and she was in labor. Old Puah was in the back room squatting down by the straw pallet of Jochebed whispering to her to “bear down!” in her harsh old voice.

Amram knelt by his wife and kissed her. She lifted her arms about his neck and hung there.

“Amram,” she whispered, “You won’t have no time to move me at all. But you mustn’t let me scream, hear? No matter how hard the pain gets you mustn’t let me scream. Pharaoh’s secret police don’t never stop prowling.”

“I know that. Oh, honey, I hate for our child to come like this. I don’t feel like no man at all.”

“You can’t help it, honey. You done the best you could. Just don’t let me scream out when I get so bad I don’t know what I’m doing. Hold my mouth good, Amram. Don’t let me expose our child to murder, in case it’s a boy.”

“I promise, Jochebed, but this is a mean moment in life.”

She hugged him faintly and smiled up. “The pains took me hard once or twice. I was afraid it was going to come before you got here,” she said with a sort of happiness in her voice because her husband was there at her time.

In a little while Amram started to eat his supper. But no sooner did he begin than Jochebed uttered a cry. He flew back to her side and lifted her head in his arms and put one hand over her mouth. She tried hard to scream, but Amram was there.

The back of Amram’s hard hand filled her mouth. His rough hand clamped down fiercely over her lower face. Jochebed fought for her breath and for the boon of shrieking out her agony and suffering.

“Shhh! The Egyptians will hear you!”

The woman may have heard, but she struggled harder to release the agony of her loins through cries. Her lungs almost exploded with the pent-in air. She clawed at her husband’s hands which so relentlessly smothered her gasping cries. She drew up her knees violently and arched her back.

Now old Puah, the midwife, knelt over Jochebed and laid helping hands upon her belly. “Bear down!” the midwife commanded sternly. “Bear down, Jochebed, and have done with this birthing. It is taking much too long. Bear down, I tell you!” The command was stern but whispered. It was muted by fear like every other sound in the house. Old Puah put her lips to the other’s ear and beseeched, “Ah, Jochebed, will you not hurry up with this child before the s...