Gabriel does not accept blame or take responsibility for his actions. He blames Ester for their affair, asserting that she tempted him. Ester believes that it was he who instigated the relationship. She later tells him, “That weren’t no reverend looking at me them mornings in the yard.” Remember that Gabriel reached out to Ester first that night in the kitchen and that Ester protested that they not have sex on the kitchen floor of their employer’s home. Even after Ester tells him of her pregnancy, Gabriel denies the possibility that the child can be his. When Ester finally convinces him that the child is indeed his and asks what they should do, Gabriel councils her to “get one of these boys you been running around with to marry you. Because I can’t go off with you nowhere.” Only after she threatens to expose their affair to the townspeople does Gabriel agree to help her. He steals money from his wife, not to help his mistress, but to save his own reputation.
After the death of Ester and her son, Gabriel blames both tragedies on Deborah, implying that both could have been prevented if it were not for their marriage and his obligation to her. Even his refusal to claim his own motherless child he blames on Deborah, claiming that she never gave him an opportunity to tell the truth, a claim that is blatantly untrue. Deborah gave Gabriel the chance when she speculated about the father’s identity and commented how much Royal reminded her of Gabriel at the same age. Deborah knew the truth, but she was waiting to hear it from Gabriel.
Here Gabriel distorts history to suit his own needs. He never intended to run off with Ester. Even had he not been married at the time of the affair, he still would not have made Ester his wife. Nor would he have accepted Royal as his son. Had he taken on the responsibility of raising his son, people would then have known that he, their reverend, had sinned, and he was unwilling to lose the esteem of his flock. Implying that he would have married the girl if not for his marriage to Deborah or that he would have claimed his son if he had only been given the opportunity are his ways of shifting responsibility away from himself and on to the shoulders of someone else, in this case to Deborah.
Gabriel blames Elizabeth for Roy’s stabbing, implying that she is a bad mother because she cannot control the rebellious boy. He says that his own mother would have found a way to keep the child out of harm’s way. Florence counters that even their mother could not stop Gabriel’s wild ways and only “wore herself beating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here.” Gabriel cannot deny the truth in his sister’s statement, but neither can he look at his own ways to find a solution to the problem. It does not occur to him that perhaps it is because he is a poor role model or that his parenting leaves much to be desired. He is a provider but not a real father, although the two terms are synonymous to him.
Gabriel hides behind his religious conversion and uses it to deflect responsibility. When people question his actions, he hides behind his Bible and position as preacher. His attitude, akin to “God has forgiven me so I don’t need to answer to anyone else,” shields him from feelings of guilt. The obstacle Gabriel must overcome to find salvation (his personal mountain, so to speak) is his struggle with sin, which manifests itself in arrogance. His very insistence on his personal innocence leads the reader to believe that unconsciously he is not so comfortable with the status of his soul. He repeats over and over that God has forgiven him, but he does not appear to have forgiven himself. Ester’s words to Gabriel shortly before they have intercourse for the first time foreshadow Gabriel’s predicament throughout the rest of the novel. She teased, “But I can’t help it if you done things that you’s ashamed of, Reverend.”
People who have come to terms with past mistakes do not feel the need to make excuses for their actions the way that Gabriel does. Deborah sees that Gabriel is tormented by guilt the day that she tells him of Royal’s death. When Gabriel argues that he could not have helped Ester because she would have led him to hell, Deborah counters that the dead woman “mighty near has.” She knows that, if Gabriel does not find forgiveness, he will be forever in his own hell of guilt.
Gabriel believes that his marriage to Elizabeth is a sign that God has forgiven him, but it is obvious that he is still not comfortable with his past. If he were not still ashamed about his actions, he would have told Elizabeth about his first son. He has not. His guilt manifests itself in fury after Roy is stabbed. Elizabeth says that they should pray for God to change Roy’s heart before he is stabbed again. Her unwitting allusion to the death of Gabriel’s first son provokes such an avalanche of guilt that Gabriel strikes out at her. He cannot change the past, but he can punish anyone who reminds him of it.
Gabriel wants to be sure that Elizabeth has repented for her sin of having had a child (John) out of wedlock. It is a mistake that they have both made, but only Gabriel knows this; Elizabeth does not. Gabriel asks Elizabeth again and again if she is sorry for her actions because to know that she has fully repented for her sin and found forgiveness would make it easier for him to forgive himself. However, Gabriel realizes that Elizabeth would do nothing differently if she were able to relive her time with Richard (her first love and John’s biological father) and that she refuses to be sorry that Richard’s child was born. It is only after this realization that Gabriel begins to treat Elizabeth and John so poorly. Gabriel hates John not because he is another man’s child or for anything that John himself has done, but because John is a constant reminder of his own sin for which he cannot forgive himself. Gabriel believes, as Florence says at the end of the novel, that if he can make Elizabeth and John pay enough for Elizabeth’s sin, then Roy will not have to pay for Gabriel’s.
Gabriel has, in the past, been able to overcome his shame about his actions. In the first dream he had before asking Deborah to be his wife, he revisited his past sinful life. In the next dream, he had to climb a steep mountain to reach heaven. That mountain was made of all his former sins piled one on top of the other, but Gabriel was able to overcome them. When he speaks of the sinful life he lived prior to his religious conversion, he is not proud of his actions, but he is able to talk about them. But the sin he committed after his conversion—his affair with Ester and the child that resulted from it—he cannot outwardly acknowledge. He has told no one of his link to Royal, and he admitted the truth to Deborah only when she confronted him.
Finally, the powerful image of the castrated African-American soldier in this section graphically illustrates the racism-in-America theme. Issues of sex and sexuality (usually taking the form of white fears and myths related to sex organs, interracial rape, and so on) have forever been linked to the issues of race in America, and they persist even into this new millennium.
