“I can just see them.”
“Lord, I hope that train fairly races. This city makes me nervous. All the autos jar me so. Feel like a bell ringin’ in me.”
Coin saw it all and wished he could just leave everybody and thing and get on that train with Ferris. And he could send for Esther maybe. Esther could teach both of them after regular school.
Ferris was singing:
Honey in the bee ball,
I can’t see ya’ll. A bushel of ree,
A bushel of rye,
All that ain’t hid
On judgement day,
Better holler I.
“What’s that, Ferris?”
“Hide-and-seek song.”
“We play that all the time. Hide and go seek.”
“Boy, don’t cut out the monkey with me. I made that game up myself.” “After you got there you wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. My Aunt Hallie and me do right well…”
“Don’t you live with your mother?”
“My Mama…oh, my Mama’s up in Chicago. She do right well too. She went away a long time ago, took the brass bed and a big yellow leg-horne hat and dressed in yellow, but she send big boxes for Christmas and love and kisses.”
Coin looked swiftly at his friend and heard the crying underneath the cocksure voice.
“My Mama’s name is in the Bible, too, Anna Matilda Robinson. Teacher say Anna mean full of grace. Is your Mama’s name in the Bible?” “I never looked. I don’t know.”
They walked along in silence. Coin began to try to think of all the time he had looked in the Bible and whether he remembered the name Naomi on any page or under a picture. He remembered fifty names at once but not Naomi anywhere. Anna mean full of grace. Naomi mean…? What does Naomi mean?
“I was sayin’ Coin, if you got there…my Aunt Hallie and me do right well. We got a oriental rug on the floor. You can tell it’s genuine, too, because it got oriental stamped right on the back of it. Chinese people wove it all by hand. We got a gold chair, too, come out of the Jewish people’s church. My aunt paid fifty dollars for it. Come all the way from Louisville. Come out to our house in a car. Course the gold’s worn off a little. But we gonna fix that. I seen some gold paint in the Five an’ Ten Cent Store. Only thing we people down in Kentucky don’t have that city people got is electric and gaslights and house toilets that people sit on.” “What kind of toilets have you?” Coin was thinking of all that number one and number two in the fields and everywhere.
“Wood ones out in the back yard. Ours close to the water well. Make it convenient, too.”
“Who else is in your family that lives with you besides your Aunt Hallie?”
“Nobody. Sometimes my Mama send somebody down from Chicago. But they don’t do nothing much but laugh with Aunt Hallie and sit on the back porch eating Concord grapes in September. Don’t stay but a few weeks and then Aunt Hallie and me settle down to winter talking. Mostly about my Uncle Wayne Anthony. He’s dead now. He was something, now let me tell you. He was a moonshiner of reputation. Use to go about with Reverend Talifer. Reverend Talifer was a preacher with gravy and moans. Could preach up a storm. Sometimes he’d preach a funeral and have the whole family fallin’ out and nobody left to walk with the coffin but pallbearers and they’d be cryin’ so hard almost drop the casket. Ever go to a funeral, Coin?”
Coin nodded his head. He didn’t want to think about funerals. There would be no more funerals with him. But he couldn’t help listening to Ferris. He wondered if all it was true. But it didn’t matter much. He felt happy like when he was in the movies and everything happened you never saw happen in daylight and probably never could. Ferris talked on like piano music.
“In this one funeral Mrs. Messiah from Bucket Crick. They was car-ryin’ her to the grave singing Now We Take This Feeble Body. She were no more feeble. Weighed almost a ton of stones. The day was rainin’ and windy. Pallbearers’ white gloves filled with red mud and all. They started lowerin’ the body down and got it down when one of the men’s gloves slipped off and got caught in the wind. Got full of wind and puffed out and flew away like a dove. Folks got down on their knees and prayed… they hustled up collections and in a month hired the gravestone cutter from Louisville to carve a dove of peace to place on the grave. Folks keep it decorated with flowers. Afraid not to. And Reverend Talifer died of the shakes two weeks after. Fell into a coma callin’ for Uncle Wayne Anthony’s moonshine. Before he took sick he baptized me in the river. The water was cold. I trembled, boy. He wore a furlined robe. Think probally that’s why he died. He had the crossed eyes. You ever drink moonshine, Coin?”
“No.”
“I only did once, tasted pretty good. Like molasses with somethin’ sharp in it. Sassafras taste. Made me feel like I was risin’ and fallin’ and everythin’ I wanted seem to come true. Felt like I was walkin’ the waters and standin’ on quicksand an’ never sink one inch. Didn’t drink it but the one time. Reverend Talifer sent me out to Uncle Wayne Anthony’s. You leave fifty cents on a stump in the woods and go away to drink from a cool stream an’ when you come back your gallon jug is full. Asked Uncle Wayne Anthony how he made it. You put your molasses barrel in the cellar and sprinkle kerosene on the inside and then light it.”
“Didn’t the barrel burn?”
“You sure can cut the monkey in your mind, Coin; no, it didn’t burn, that made the agin’ charcoal. Then you pour in your corn whiskey and let it get strong for a year. Sometimes they take it out sooner. Tasted better, they tell me. Lord, never forget Reverend Talifer moanin’ before he died, moanin’ that he didn’t want to die and go to hell before he got to go to Chicago. Uncle Wayne Anthony went once. When he come back they said he was crazy. But I just listened to his stories. Say they got enough lights there to fairly blaze up the sky. What time you reckon it is, Coin?”
There was no time on any of the buildings they passed. Coin could see the arches of the station and the statues standing around the top. The capitol dome in the distance looked like a wedding cake. An auto honked as they raced across the clearing leading to the station and they stood stock-still while the driver laughed. Ferris poked out his tongue and muttered something.
Afterwards Coin could never quite figure how Ferris got his lunch box before the train pulled out. It all happened so fast. The conductor was yelling out “all aboard” when he remembered the melted chocolate bar he bought to give Ferris. Steam was rising from the wheels and people were running and hopping up the steep steps. Ferris was behind a dusty window with his nose pressed looking at him and waving. Suddenly Coin ran up the steps and into the hot coach. Thrusting the wet Hershey bar into Ferris’ free hand he ran out to the platform again. A whistle blew and he heard the first chunk-chunks before the train started. His heart was in his mouth. Ferris was going. Coin cupped his hands suddenly and called, “What’s your address?”
Ferris pointed to his ears and shook his head. Coin made out like he was writing as he called the question another time. Ferris began to write in the dust of the windowpane as the train started moving. Coin trotted by the side and as the chunk-chunks got louder, the wheels whirled faster. Coin could hardly keep up. He couldn’t read a thing Ferris was writing. Something like a W but it was all backwards. No. It was an M—M-A-D—if he was cross-eyed he could read it in no time. The train was going lickety-split and he could hardly keep up with the tears running down his eyes and he couldn’t see even if he could read backwards. M-A-D…what’s the next letter? He couldn’t make out if it was a C or an X or what. The last thing he remembered was Ferris’ face behind letters and dust; the big eyes looking at him. The questions about Concord grapes and how far was Kentucky, where his mother’s name was in the Bible, the answers were running away.
“Ferris, Ferris, Ferris, write me, write me a letter, write me…” He bunked into a post. When he sprang up the train was turning around the bend and he couldn’t tell which coach Ferris was on.
JAMES BALDWIN
[1924–19
87]
BORN THE ELDEST OF EIGHT CHILDREN, JAMES BALDWIN grew up in an emotionally and physically abusive home where he was ridiculed as ugly and unintelligent by his mother’s second husband, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher. Baldwin coped with these difficult circumstances in part by turning to books, becoming a voracious reader throughout adolescence. In the process he distinguished himself as a gifted pupil. By the age of fourteen, the poverty and sordid environs of Depression-era Harlem drove Baldwin to the safety of the Pentecostal Church. There he served as a child minister for three years, before resigning over his distaste of the hypocrisy of organized religion. This brief tenure in the pulpit shaped the author’s literary style, which reflected biblical imagery, cadences, and rhetoric.
After his stepfather’s death in 1943, Baldwin moved from Harlem to Greenwich Village, where he hoped that the bohemian climate would encourage his writing. During this period, he began a tentative first novel that later evolved into his debut book, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and made the acquaintance of author Richard Wright. As a black gay writer, however, Baldwin found the racial prejudice of the Village to be as fundamentally limiting to his career as the homophobia he had fled in Harlem. Thus, he bought a one-way ticket to France in 1948, leaving the United States for what he hoped would be a more socially tolerant culture. It was while living as an expatriate that Baldwin published his first wave of landmark works, including his essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955). He also wrote his first public defense of homosexuality, “The Preservation of Innocence,” his boldest declaration of gay identity politics until he published the gay love story Giovanni’s Room in 1956.
Baldwin’s agent suggested that he burn the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room, rather than risk the critical fall-out that traditionally accompanied the publication of an openly homosexual work by an American author. Never before had an explicitly gay novel been published by an African American author. Baldwin softened the critical blow by denying that Giovanni’s Room was a homosexual book, insisting instead that it was really about the fear to love. He also did not identify himself as homosexual, nor for that matter did a number of gay authors of the period. Indeed, Baldwin, like so many other homosexuals, had even been engaged to be married. Still, his most intimate relationships were with men, notably his partner Lucien Happersberger.
Baldwin resided in France until his death from cancer in 1987, only returning to America briefly in 1957 and again in 1960 to participate in the burgeoning African American civil rights movement. In fact, his controversial third novel, Another Country (1962), tells the story of a racially and sexually diverse cast of young Americans, who struggle to understand each other despite their differences. This pre–Stonewall era novel is remarkable not only for its absence of shame around explicitly gay subject matter but also for its graphic depiction of African American homosexuality—a significant departure for the author, who cautiously had chosen white protagonists in Giovanni’s Room.
In these two excerpts from Another Country, Rufus, a penniless, black bisexual musician, has momentarily turned to hustling to survive. Vivaldo, his white writer friend, recalls the tensions that have marked their often troubled friendship.
from Another Country
[1962]
Now, bowed down with the memory of all that had happened since that day, he wandered helplessly back to Forty-second Street and stopped before the large bar and grill on the corner. Near him, just beyond the plate glass, stood the sandwich man behind his counter, the meat arrayed on the steam table beneath him. Bread and rolls, mustard, relish, salt and pepper, stood at the level of his chest. He was a big man, wearing white, with a blank, red, brutal face. From time to time he expertly knifed off a sandwich for one of the derelicts within. The old seemed reconciled to being there, to having no teeth, no hair, having no life. Some laughed together, the young, with dead eyes set in yellow faces, the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation. They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this new condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled. And the hunters were there, far more assured and patient than the prey. In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets.
Rufus shivered, his hands in his pockets, looking through the window and wondering what to do. He thought of walking to Harlem but he was afraid of the police he would encounter in his passage through the city; and he did not see how he could face his parents or his sister. When he had last seen Ida, he had told her that he and Leona were about to make it to Mexico, where, he said, people would leave them alone. But no one had heard from him since then.
Now a big, rough-looking man, well dressed, white, with black-and-gray hair, came out of the bar. He paused next to Rufus, looking up and down the street. Rufus did not move, though he wanted to; his mind began to race, painfully, and his empty stomach turned over. Once again, sweat broke out on his forehead. Something in him knew what was about to happen; something in him died in the freezing second before the man walked over to him and said:
“It’s cold out here. Wouldn’t you like to come in and have a drink with me?”
“I’d rather have a sandwich,” Rufus muttered, and thought You’ve really hit the bottom now.
“Well, you can have a sandwich, too. There’s no law that says you can’t.” Rufus looked up and down the street, then looked into the man’s ice-cold, ice-white face. He reminded himself that he knew the score, he’d been around; neither was this the first time during his wanderings that he had consented to the bleakly physical exchange; and yet he felt that he would never be able to endure the touch of this man. They entered the bar and grill.
“What kind of sandwich would you like?”
“Corned beef,” Rufus whispered, “on rye.”
They watched while the meat was hacked off, slammed on bread, and placed on the counter. The man paid and Rufus took his sandwich over to the bar. He felt that everyone in the place knew what was going on, knew that Rufus was peddling his ass. But nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked at them. The noise at the bar continued, the radio continued to blare. The bartender served up a beer for Rufus and a whiskey for the man and rang up the money on the cash register. Rufus tried to turn his mind away from what was happening to him. He wolfed down his sandwich. But the heavy bread, the tepid meat, made him begin to feel nauseous; everything wavered before his eyes for a moment; he sipped his beer, trying to hold the sandwich down.
“You were hungry.”
Rufus, he thought, you can’t make this scene. There’s no way in the world you can make it. Don’t come on with the man. Just get out of here. “Would you like another sandwich?”
The first sandwich was still threatening to come up. The bar stank of stale beer and piss and stale meat and unwashed bodies.
Suddenly he felt that he was going to cry.
“No, thank you,” he said, “I’m all right now.”
The man watched him for a moment.
“Then have another beer.”
“No, thank you.” But he leaned his head on the bar, trembling.
“Hey!”
Lights roared around his head, the whole bar lurched, righted itself, faces weaved around him, the music from the radio pounded in his skull. The man’s face was very close to his: hard eyes and a cruel nose and flabby, brutal lips. He smelled the man’s odor. He pulled away.
“I’m all right.”
“You almost blacked out there for a minute.”
The bartender watched them.
“You better have a drink. Hey, Mac, give the kid a drink.”
“You sure he’s all right?”
“Yeah, he’s all right, I know him. Give him a drink.”
The bartender filled a shot glass and placed it in front of Rufus. And Rufus stared into the gleaming cup, praying, Lord, don’t let it happen. Don’t let me go home with this man.
I’ve got so little left, Lord, don’t let me lose it all.
“Drink. It’ll do you good. Then you can come on over to my place and get some sleep.”
He drank the whiskey, which first made him feel even sicker, then warmed him. He straightened up.
“You live around here?” he asked the man. If you touch me, he thought, still with these strange tears threatening to boil over at any moment, I’ll beat the living shit out of you. I don’t want no more hands on me, no more, no more, no more.
“Not very far. Forty-sixth Street.”
They walked out of the bar, into the streets again.
“It’s a lonely city,” the man said as they walked. “I’m lonely. Aren’t you lonely, too?”
Rufus said nothing.
“Maybe we can comfort each other for a night.”
Rufus watched the traffic lights, the black, nearly deserted streets, the silent black buildings, the deep shadows of doorways.
“Do you know what I mean?”
“I’m not the boy you want, mister,” he said at last, and suddenly remembered having said exactly these words to Eric—long ago.
“How do you mean, you’re not the boy I want?” And the man tried to laugh. “Shouldn’t I be the best judge of that?”
Rufus said, “I don’t have a thing to give you. I don’t have nothing to give nobody. Don’t make me go through with this. Please.”
They stopped on the silent Avenue, facing each other. The man’s eyes hardened and narrowed.
“Didn’t you know what was going on—back there?”
Rufus said, “I was hungry.”
“What are you, anyway—just a cock teaser?”
“I was hungry,” Rufus repeated; “I was hungry.”
“Don’t you have any family—any friends?”
Black Like Us Page 19
