“You remember Jesus,” Elisha said. “You keep your mind on Jesus. He went that way—up the steep side of the mountain—and He was carrying the cross, and didn’t nobody help Him. He went that way for us. He carried that cross for us.”
“But He was the Son of God,” said John, “and He knew it.”
“He knew it,” said Elisha, “because He was willing to pay the price. Don’t you know it, Johnny? Ain’t you willing to pay the price?”
“That song they sing,” said John, finally, “if it costs my life—is that the price?”
“Yes,” said Elisha, “that’s the price.”
Then John was silent, wanting to put the question another way. And the silence was cracked, suddenly, by an ambulance siren, and a crying bell. And they both looked up as the ambulance raced past them on the avenue on which no creature moved, save for the saints of God behind them.
“But that’s the Devil’s price, too,” said Elisha, as silence came again. “The Devil, he don’t ask for nothing less than your life. And he take it, too, and it’s lost forever. Forever, Johnny. You in darkness while you living and you in darkness when you dead. Ain’t nothing but the love of God can make the darkness light.”
“Yes,” said John, “I remember. I remember.”
“Yes,” said Elisha, “but you got to remember when the evil day comes, when the flood rises, boy, and look like your soul is going under. You got to remember when the Devil’s doing all he can to make you forget.”
“The Devil,” he said, frowning and staring, “the Devil. How many faces is the Devil got?”
“He got as many faces,” Elisha said, “as you going to see between now and the time you lay your burden down. And he got a lot more than that, but ain’t nobody seen them all.”
“Except Jesus,” John said then. “Only Jesus.”
“Yes,” said Elisha, with a grave, sweet smile, “that’s the Man you got to call on. That’s the Man who knows.”
They were approaching his house—his father’s house. In a moment he must leave Elisha, step out from under his protecting arm, and walk alone into the house—alone with his mother and his father. And he was afraid. He wanted to stop and turn to Elisha, and tell him … something for which he found no words.
“Elisha—” he began, and looked into Elisha’s face. Then: “You pray for me? Please pray for me?”
“I been praying, little brother,” Elisha said, “and I sure ain’t going to stop praying now.”
“For me,” persisted John, his tears falling, “for me.”
“You know right well,” said Elisha, looking at him, “I ain’t going to stop praying for the brother what the Lord done give me.”
Then they reached the house, and paused, looking at each other, waiting. John saw that the sun was beginning to stir, somewhere in the sky; the silence of the dawn would soon give way to the trumpets of the morning. Elisha took his arm from John’s shoulder and stood beside him, looking backward. And John looked back, seeing the saints approach.
“Service is going to be mighty late this morning,” Elisha said, and suddenly grinned and yawned.
And John laughed. “But you be there,” he asked, “won’t you? This morning?”
“Yes, little brother,” Elisha laughed, “I’m going to be there. I see I’m going to have to do some running to keep up with you.”
And they watched the saints. Now they all stood on the corner, where his Aunt Florence had stopped to say good-bye. All the women talked together, while his father stood a little apart. His aunt and his mother kissed each other, as he had seen them do a hundred times, and then his aunt turned to look for them, and waved.
They waved back, and she started slowly across the street, moving, he thought with wonder, like an old woman.
“Well, she ain’t going to be out to service this morning, I tell you that,” said Elisha, and yawned again.
“And look like you going to be half asleep,” John said.
“Now don’t you mess with me this morning,” Elisha said, “because you ain’t got so holy I can’t turn you over my knee. I’s your big brother in the Lord—you just remember that.”
Now they were on the near corner. His father and mother were saying good-bye to Praying Mother Washington, and Sister McCandless, and Sister Price. The praying women waved to them, and they waved back. Then his mother and his father were alone, coming toward them.
“Elisha,” said John, “Elisha.”
“Yes,” said Elisha, “what you want now?”
John, staring at Elisha, struggled to tell him something more—struggled to say—all that could never be said. Yet: “I was down in the valley,” he dared, “I was by myself down there. I won’t never forget. May God forget me if I forget.”
Then his mother and his father were before them. His mother smiled, and took Elisha’s outstretched hand.
“Praise the Lord this morning,” said Elisha. “He done give us something to praise Him for.”
“Amen,” said his mother, “praise the Lord!”
John moved up to the short, stone step, smiling a little, looking down on them. His mother passed him, and started into the house.
“You better come on upstairs,” she said, still smiling, “and take off them wet clothes. Don’t want you catching cold.”
And her smile remained unreadable; he could not tell what it hid. And to escape her eyes, he kissed her, saying: “Yes, Mama. I’m coming.”
She stood behind him, in the doorway, waiting.
“Praise the Lord, Deacon,” Elisha said. “See you at the morning service, Lord willing.”
“Amen,” said his father, “praise the Lord.” He started up the stone steps, staring at John, who blocked the way. “Go on upstairs, boy,” he said, “like your mother told you.”
John looked at his father and moved from his path, stepping down into the street again. He put his hand on Elisha’s arm, feeling himself trembling, and his father at his back.
“Elisha,” he said, “no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember—please remember—I was saved. I was there.”
Elisha grinned, and looked up at his father.
“He come through,” cried Elisha, “didn’t he, Deacon Grimes? The Lord done laid him out, and turned him around and wrote his new name down in glory. Bless our God!”
And he kissed John on the forehead, a holy kiss.
“Run on, little brother,” Elisha said. “Don’t you get weary. God won’t forget you. You won’t forget.”
Then he turned away, down the long avenue, home. John stood still, watching him walk away. The sun had come full awake. It was waking the streets, and the houses, and crying at the windows. It fell over Elisha like a golden robe, and struck John’s forehead, where Elisha had kissed him, like a seal ineffaceable forever.
And he felt his father behind him. And he felt the March wind rise, striking through his damp clothes, against his salty body. He turned to face his father—he found himself smiling, but his father did not smile.
They looked at each other a moment. His mother stood in the doorway, in the long shadows of the hall.
“I’m ready,” John said, “I’m coming. I’m on my way.”
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was born in 1924 and educated in New York. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987.
ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Giovanni’s Room (1956)
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Another Country (1962)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon) (196
4)
Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)
Going to Meet the Man (1965)
The Amen Corner (1968)
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)
One Day When I Was Lost (1972)
No Name in the Street (1972)
If Beale Street Could Talk (1973)
The Devil Finds Work (1976)
Little Man, Little Man (with Yoran Cazac) (1976)
Just Above My Head (1979)
The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)
Jimmy’s Blues (1985)
The Price of the Ticket (1985)
ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN
THE AMEN CORNER
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when her estranged husband, Luke, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. The Amen Corner is an uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.
Drama
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at their most elemental and sublime.
Fiction/Literature
BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a “boy” like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. In Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
Fiction/Literature
THE DEVIL FINDS WORK
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.
African American Studies
THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION
The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity.
Essays/African American Studies
THE FIRE NEXT TIME
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.
Social Science/African American Studies
GIOVANNI’S ROOM
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Fiction/Literature
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN
Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.
Fiction/Literature
GOING TO MEET THE MAN
“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
Fiction/Literature
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope.
Fiction/Literature
NO NAME IN THE STREET
A searing memoir and an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies, No Name in the Street is James Baldwin’s powerful commentary on the political and social agonies of America’s contemporary history. The prophecies of The Fire Next Time have been tragically realized—through assassinations, urban riots, and increased racial polarization—and the hope for justice seems more elusive than ever. Through it all, Baldwin’s uncompromising vision and his fierce disavowal of despair are ever present in this eloquent and personal testament to his times.
Nonfiction
NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME
Nobody Knows My Name is a collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United States—including a passionate attack on William Faulkner for his ambivalent views about the segregated South—to the role of the writer in society, with personal accounts of such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.
Literature/African American Studies
TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN’S BEEN GONE
In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters, a man struggling to become himself even as he juggles multiple identities—as black man, bisexual, and artist—on the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life. At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.
Fiction/Literature
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