Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  And now, Barbara, as though conjured up by the twilight, as silently as a reverie, entered my hospital room. “Hi, my love,” she said, and came to the bed and kissed me. “How nice to have you back.”

  “It was worth the journey,” I said, “just to have you say that.”

  She looked at me. “I trust,” she said, “that one day soon you’ll find less drastic ways of being reassured.” Then she smiled. “But I haven’t come to lecture you. Dr. Evin has promised to take over that department from me. He’s a very nice man, don’t you think?”

  “Very nice. Have you told him a lot about me?”

  “No more than I had to. And much less than I know.” I laughed. She walked to the window and touched my flowers. “I hope the nurse knows that these must be taken out of here at night. She doesn’t seem to know much, I must say. Would you like me to read some of your telegrams to you? These silent messengers seem to be merely piling up dust over here. I must speak to that nurse.”

  “Leave her alone. She’s a nice kid.”

  “She is far too easily dazzled by fame. She looks on me as a combination of Queen Victoria and Madame X. And the good Lord knows what delicious nightmares you are evoking in those covered-wagon breasts. So naturally she can’t do her work properly.” She picked up the telegrams and came back to the bed.

  Time had not done much for Barbara’s figure, though she no longer, as one of her directors had put it, promised only a bony ride. Time had thinned her face and dimmed its color; the theater had put her hair through so many changes that the color which it had now adopted—due to the demands of her present role—was probably as close to the original as she would ever again be able to get; and, though there were no silver locks in it yet, there were, perceptibly, silver strands. Her elegance was swinging and it was also archaic; perhaps elegance is always archaic. She was rather splendidly dressed, in something dark, with a dull, heavy brooch at the neck; her hair was piled very tightly up, in the fashion in which she wore it in the play. She caused one to think, I don’t know why, of sorrow and fragility: she caused one to think of time. Her splendor seemed extorted, ruthlessly, from time, and she wore her splendor in that knowledge, and with that respect, and also with that scarcely perceptible trembling. One wondered how such a fragility bore such a ruthless weight. This wonder contributed to her force as an actress. Barbara had become a very good actress—one of the best on a scene which she knew, however, to be barren. Since she knew the scene to be barren, she was not much impressed by her eminence. She tried to work with as little show, and, she hoped, to as decent an effect, as any honorable cook or carpenter—though she knew very well that there were not many of these left, either. This lonely effort had stripped her of her affectations. Of course, on the other hand, the authority with which this effort had invested her caused many to insist that her affectations had all been disastrously confirmed, and constituted, furthermore, her entire dramatic arsenal. Barbara went on her swinging way. She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss. If life had endlessly cheated her, she had resolved not only never to complain, but to take life’s performance as an object lesson and never to cheat on life.

  “How’s the show going?”

  “Oh, the show’s okay. Your understudy is still going through his all-white-men-to-the-sword-and-all-white-women-to-my-bed bullshit—but—oh, well, you can hear him across the Hudson River and he doesn’t bump into the furniture. Anymore. He’s the only person who doesn’t miss you. Naturally.” She opened one telegram. “Do you know anybody named Joan Nelson?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she knows you and she wants you to get well.” She opened another telegram. “So does someone named Bradley Timkins. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “You impress me as being a somewhat solitary type. Not that it’s any wonder, as heartless as you are.” She opened another. “Oh. This is from Marlon—you do know him?”

  “Oh, yes. The friend of my youth.”

  “I think that he really does want you to get well. He wants everyone to get well.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yes. Well, we haven’t got a prayer, sweetheart.”

  “How goes the nation?”

  “The nation goes abominably. And it’s no subject for a sick man to discuss—or a well one, either.” She smiled. “Oh. Here’s one from Lola. Show business!”

  “Christopher sent the basket of fruit,” I said.

  She looked up. The light in the room seemed to change; or, a more tremendous light than the twilight entered it. Perhaps it was Barbara’s face at that moment which finally reconciled me to life. “Did he? Oh, let me see.” And I handed her Christopher’s telegram. She read it and she laughed. “Oh. That black mother. He’ll never change. Christopher.” And then she was far from me. I watched her face. Although I knew her face so well, I did not know it now at all. It was incredibly trusting and triumphant; it existed in another realm, which spoke another language; there is truly something frightening in a woman’s face. And yet—how can I say it?—the mystery that I saw there contained a help for me, and promised me my health. “Dear Christopher.” Then she looked down at me. “Leo, I think we have done something very rare.” She smiled. But I cannot describe that smile. It was neither sorrowful nor joyful, neither was it both: it spoke of journeys. I cannot describe it because I could not read it. Then she spoke, very carefully, testing, as it were, each word. “I think we have managed to redeem something. I think it’s our love that we redeemed. Who could have guessed such a thing? Black Christopher!” She walked back to my flowers. “And I was afraid it was too late—that it had all been for nothing—that we’d betrayed and discarded all the best of us—for—what anyone with five dollars can buy at the box office.” She laughed and turned and looked at me again. “Well. Thank you, Leo. We made it one time.”

  “What,” I asked, a little frightened, and at the same time amused and moved, “are you talking about, Barbara?”

  “I’m talking about our journey through hell. I’m talking about Christopher. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “you’re making too much of it.”

  “That’s possible. But you’re making too little. You always do.” She laughed softly again, looking, against the yellow blinds and in the dimming, changing light, exactly like the Barbara of Paradise Alley—and yet not, that laugh had cost her everything—and then became grave again. “We have come a long way together, you and I,” she said. “Des kilomètres.” She looked out of the window for a second, then closed the blinds. She looked briefly at her watch. The room was dark. She switched on the light. “Well. I must get to the theater. The show must go on.”

  “Those days with Christopher must have been very hard on you,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Oh. They were brutal. But why do anything easy? Those days were very hard on you, too.”

  “But I always felt,” I said, smiling, “that you’d done nothing to deserve it.”

  “But you had. Of course!” She laughed again. “Dear Leo!”

  “I have the feeling that you’re making fun of me. But I don’t know why.”

  “Because you’re funny,” she said.

  “Bon. Bravo pour le clown.”

  “Well. It’s true. When you were at your funniest, I didn’t laugh. I’m sorry for all the things I didn’t see. And for all the things you didn’t see. What you didn’t see, I saw, it seemed to me, very clearly. Leo, you always want people to forgive you. But we, we others, we need forgiveness, too. We sometimes need it, my dear”—she smiled—“even from so wretched a man as you.” And she watched me very steadily, with that steady smile.
>
  I said, after a moment, with difficulty, “True enough, dear lady. True enough. But I wonder why I feel so depressed.”

  “I should think,” she said, dryly, “that the state of your health might have something to do with that. And I’ve stayed longer than I promised Dr. Evin I would.” She leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “Bye-bye. Is there anything you want me to bring you tomorrow?”

  “Only the heads,” I said, “on pikes, of many politicians.”

  “Now you sound like Christopher.”

  “He’d be proud of me.”

  “He was always proud of you. He couldn’t understand why you couldn’t understand that. Christopher had a rough time, too.”

  “How have you,” I asked suddenly, “managed to put up with me for all these years?”

  “I love you,” she said, “and so I can’t really claim to have had much choice in the matter.” She looked at her watch again. “Leo, now I really must run. If the heads of politicians prove to be scarce tomorrow, is there anything else you want?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “I’m honored. I’m one of the few people left in the world who can still do that. To you. Throw everything out of your mind, Leo, eat your supper, read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do. Good-night.”

  “Good-night.”

  She left, closing the door carefully and softly behind her.

  But she had left me, as our much loved Bessie Smith would have been prompt to inform her, with everything on my mind. Christopher had always wished to see Africa; we became friends partly because I had. I told him once that he was certainly black enough to be an African, and even told him that the structure of his face reminded me of faces I had seen in Dakar. This enchanted him: which meant, fatally, that he then invested me with the power of enchantment. I did not want this power. It frightened me. But my fright frightened him, and it made him cruel: for to whom was he to turn, in all this world, if not to an elder brother who was black like him? And I began to see, though I did not want to see it, the validity of Christopher’s claim. If it is true, as I suspect, that people turn to each other in the hope of being created by each other then it is absolutely true that the uncreated young turn, to be created, toward their elders. Thus, whoever has been invested with the power of enchantment is guilty of something more base than treachery whenever he fails to exercise the power on which the yet-to-be-created, as helplessly as newborn birds, depend. Well, yes, I saw at last what was demanded of me. I would have to build a nest out of materials I would simply have to find, and be prepared to guard it with my life; and feed this creature and keep it clean, and keep the nest clean; and watch for the moment when the creature could fly and force those frightened wings to take the air.

  On the other hand, any threat to their enchanter, which is simply a threat to life itself, is answered by the young with the implacable intention to kill.

  I first realized this—through Christopher—at a monster rally in downtown New York. Thousands of people were gathered in a park near City Hall. We were there to protest the outrages taking place in the city (and also in the nation) against those who, already poor and defenseless, were rendered even more so by the apathy and corruption of the municipality, and by the facts of their ancestry, or color. The rally was guarded by the police, whom we were, in fact, attacking. They were there to make certain that none of the damage which we asserted was being done to the city’s morals would so far transform itself as to become damage to the city’s property.

  I was one of the speakers at this rally. I would have been there anyway, but not as a speaker, as one of the oppressed: but I was seated on the wooden platform because my name can draw crowds. Having never been quite able to consider my name my own, this fact meant something else for Christopher, and also for the crowds, than it could have meant to me: but opportunity and duty are sometimes born together. There I sat on the platform, then, uneasy and indignant, and not altogether at my ease with the other luminaries, who were certainly not at their ease with me. Our common situation, the fact of my color, had brought us together here; and here we were to speak as one. But our intensities, our apprehensions, were very different. In many ways, perhaps in nearly all ways, they disapproved of me, and I knew it; and they knew that in many ways I disapproved of them. But we were responsible, commonly, for something greater than our differences. These differences, anyway, could be blamed on no one and could never have risen to the pressure of a private quarrel had it not been for the nature of our public roles. Our differences were reducible to one: I was an artist. This is a very curious condition, and only people who never can become artists have ever imagined themselves as desiring it. It cannot be desired, it can only—with difficulty—be supported, and one of the elements to be supported (along with one’s own unspeakable terrors) is the envy, rage, and wonder of the world. Yes, we on the platform were united in our social indignation, united in our affliction, united in our responsibility, united in our necessity to change—well, if not the world, at least the condition of some people in the world: but how different were our visions of the world! I had never been at home in the world and had become incapable of imagining that I ever would be. I did not want others to endure my estrangement, that was why I was on the platform; yet was it not, at the least, paradoxical that it was only my estrangement which had placed me there? And I could not flatten out this paradox, I could not hammer it into any usable shape. Everyone else desired to be at home in the world, and so did I—or so had I; and they were right in this desire, and so had I been; it was our privilege, to say nothing of our hope, to attempt to make the world a human dwellingplace for us all; and yet—yet—was it not possible that the mighty gentlemen, my honorable and invaluable confreres, by being unable to imagine such a journey as my own, were leaving something of the utmost importance out of their aspirations? I could not know. I watched Christopher’s face. He trusted none of the people with whom I was sitting. Most of them were from five to ten years older than I, and from twenty to thirty years older than Christopher. And nothing we had done, or left undone, had been able to save him.

  There was a little black girl on the platform, she was part of a junior choir from a Brooklyn church. They were singing. I knew that when the choir finished singing, I would be on, and this is usually a very difficult moment for me, but the little girl’s voice pushed my stage fright far to the side of my mind. They were singing a song about deliverance; she had a heavy, black, huge voice. She was the leader of the song, and her voice, in all that open air, rang against the sky and the trees and the stone walls of office buildings and the faces of the open-mouthed people and the closed faces of the cops, as though she were singing in a cave. Deliverance will come, she sang, I know it will come, He said it would come. And, again, Deliverance will come. He said it would come. I know it will come. I watched her face as she sang, a plain, black, stocky girl, who was, nevertheless, very beautiful. Deliverance will come. I wondered how old she was, and what songs she would be singing, and in what company, a few years from now. Deliverance will come. Would it? We on the platform certainly had no patent on deliverance—it was only because deliverance had not come that we sat there in all our uneasy rage and splendor. Deliverance will come: it had not come for my mother and father, it had not come for Caleb, it had not come for me, it had not come for Christopher, it had not come for this nameless little girl, and it had not come for all these thousands who were listening to her song. I watched the little girl’s face, but I saw my father’s face, and Caleb’s, and Christopher’s. Christopher did not believe that deliverance would ever come—he was going to drag it down from heaven or raise it up from hell—for Christopher, the party, that banquet at which we had been being poisoned for so long, was over. Yet, he watched the little girl, and listened to her, with delight. And all my speculations began to paralyze me again, and again I wondered what I could say when I rose. I wanted deliverance—for others even
more than for myself: my party, my banquet, in ways which Christopher could not possibly imagine, was over, too. But I wondered if it was possible, and not only for me, to live without the song. No song could possibly be worth the trap in which so many thousands, undelivered, perished every day. No song could be worth what this singing little girl had already paid for it, and was paying, and would continue to pay. And yet—without a song? Was Christopher’s manner of deliverance worth the voices it would silence? Or would new songs come? How could I tell? for the question engaged my life and my responsibilities and perhaps even my love, but it no longer engaged my possibilities. I was defined. I was relieved to recognize that I was not cast down by this quite sufficiently weighty fact, only troubled by the question of how not to fail this little girl, and Christopher. Whatever had happened to me could have no meaning unless it could help to deliver them. But the price for this deliverance, this most ambitious of transactions, could only be found in a wallet which I had always claimed was not mine. I began to sweat. The little girl’s voice rang out. Caleb’s face hung steadily in the center of my mind. Deliverance will come. Well, if she believed it, then it had to be made possible; though only she, after all, plain, stocky, beautiful, black girl, could really make it true.