Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  I had never been on a real stage before, and the first time I stepped on the stage of The Green Barn, one stormy summer afternoon when the sky was wailing as though heaven had gone mad, sending down water in merciless, blinding sheets, and drumming on the roof like all of Africa, I looked up before I looked out, and was astonished to realize how high a stage could be. I looked up and up, into dust and darkness, scaffolds and ropes. It would be terrible to fall from there. I was all alone that afternoon. I had been sent on some kind of errand—I was always being sent on errands. But I had to wait for the summer storm to end, and, in the meantime, no one was very likely to be able to get to me. I looked out at the dark, spooky theater—very spooky now, with the rain roaring—and wondered if my destiny could be involved in such a place. But destinies, as I was beginning to discover, are strange—and must be, being so mysteriously hung up with desire. For I desired, I realized one day—if these bones could live—to stand here before those living with whom I would fill this dusty void, and hear them bearing witness as I now heard the sound of the rain. I had never before thought of my desire as a reality involving others; neither had I thought of others as needing my desire; but I, now, for the first time, in that dusty barn, suspected that this coupling defined one’s destiny, and that on this coupling depended the mysterious life of the world. I was young. Perhaps it is hard, now, to credit, still less to sound, the depth of my bewilderment. I merely suspected in the chilling height, the dusty, roaring darkness, the presence of others, each of whom was myself. But these others could not know it, and neither could I, unless I was able, being filled by them, to fill this theater with our lives. This was, perhaps, my highest possibility of the act of love. But I did not say it that way to myself that afternoon. I merely walked up and down the stage. I measured its length, breadth, and depth, and threw my voice to the topmost balcony. In that empty space, I thought, in spite of the rain, that I heard it echo back; and I wished that I had brought my guitar with me.

  In spite of all our manual labor—which included hanging drapes for the San-Marquands—we, by which I mean principally Barbara and I, read and studied and argued. Saul had explicitly informed us that our improvisations were to be solo, that we were not to work together on them, or even to discuss them—which we couldn’t, anyway, have done since he hadn’t given either of us a theme. We were to choose our scenes and we were free to do them solo or not, as we liked; but we didn’t know if Saul wanted to see the scenes before he saw the improvisations or wanted to see the improvisations before he saw the scenes. We were aware that our improvisations might disqualify us for any scenes, and this made us rather edgy with each other sometimes—we both dreaded our first test, especially as it had come about so improbably and promised to be so definitive. I had refused to consider doing anything from All God’s Chillun Got Wings; Barbara, when the chips were down, conceded that we would probably disgracefully disappear beneath the quicksand of Miss Julie—which I had read by now; and we had compromised, I guess, on the scene between the young hack and his girl in Waiting for Lefty. It was a scene which we felt we could play. Then, when we began to work on it, the scene began to be, in a wordless way, a terrifying challenge. I soon began to wish that we had chosen some other scene, the scene between the gangster and his girl-friend turned whore, in Dead End, for example, but once we had begun work, my pride wouldn’t let me back down. We had felt ourselves very bold to choose this scene, and had also felt that our doing it would put the liberal San-Marquands to a crucial test—we hadn’t realized that it would also put us to a crucial test. It was a scene which gave us both a chance to show off a little; we had to dance with each other and I got a chance to whistle and do a short tap dance routine. The young hack, Sid, and his girl, Florrie, can’t marry because it’s the depression and they don’t have any money and this is the scene in which they give each other up. We couldn’t make it and we couldn’t let it go—I had not known make-believe could be so painful, and, indeed, I now began to learn something about make-believe. At one point in the scene, after remembering their furtive lovemaking in parks and hallways, the girl offers to go with Sid to a room somewhere. But he refuses; he says there is no future for them. There is great tension in the scene, which connected with an unspoken tension in us, and we began to be appalled. For it is also the most crucial of love scenes, the moment of loss and failure: perhaps a great deal of superstition was mixed with our recoil. I don’t, in detail, remember the scene very well anymore, but perhaps I’ll never forget how it choked me, made me stammer, how it caused me, sometimes, almost to hate Barbara. This I saw in her bewildered and slowly divining eyes: which both helped the scene and hurt it. Anyway, this scene was very much on my mind the first time, that rainy afternoon, when I paced the stage of The Green Barn and threw my voice to the balcony. For, by this time, I had become impatient with all my hard labor and wanted to be tested. Though I tried to be gallant, I was nevertheless watchful, and I knew that there was something ambiguous, at best, about the uses, the errand boy uses, to which I was permitting myself to be put. I realized how unlikely it was that I would ever work on a stage, and I also realized that my future did not really matter to the San-Marquands at all. My future mattered, really, only to me. That was why I had bought my guitar. I didn’t expect much of the summer, it was a stop-gap: but I had to be ready for the winter.

  I stopped the car in front of the diner. I was wearing an old T-shirt and some old pants and sneakers—this was one of my uniforms; the other was a devastating blue serge suit, with which, however, I was careful never to wear a white shirt. The diner was in the shape of a Pullman car, booths on one side, counter on the other. It was late in the afternoon, and there were only about half a dozen people there, all of them older than I, and all of them evil, and all of them, as they supposed, white. They looked at me as I came in, and turned away. I smiled at the waitress, whose eyes were as fixed as varnished brown buttons, and who rose slowly, as though pulled up by the hair, as I and my smile—or my smile and I—walked over to the counter.

  “Hello,” I said—my smile was loud, but my voice was low—“can you fill this order for me, please?” And I handed her the list. She looked at it as though it were a chemical formula. I looked pleasantly around me, and sat down at the counter. “You’ve got great weather in this town. Could I have a beer while I’m waiting, please?” I knew she wouldn’t refuse me because the one time she’d dared to ask my age, I’d been with Jerry who had told her his age and sworn that I was his older brother. She handed my order over into the short-order cook’s domain—who peeped out of his cage at me—and then, slowly, frowning as over a knotty theological question, produced a bottle of beer, placed it before me, and slowly opened it. Then she walked away and got a glass and placed it on the counter before me.

  “Thank you,” I said. I poured myself a beer. I began to hum: “Sinner man, where you going to run to?” I lit a cigarette. I heard the hamburgers begin sizzling over yonder.

  “I don’t care,” one of them said, “right is right.”

  “Don’t get yourself upset, Bill,” one of them said.

  “It ain’t worth it,” one of them said.

  They were talking to each other. I continued to hum. The waitress, whose name was Sally, began putting coffee in the cardboard containers.

  “Did you ever hear the story about a nigger fucking a elephant?” one of them said.

  They looked sideways at me. I continued to hum. They whispered, they laughed; then they shouted. “That was the end of that elephant!” I had heard the story before. “Sally,” I asked, in my mildest voice, “could I please have another beer?”

  She looked at me with something very like hatred in her button eyes—but hatred makes one servile. “Your hamburgers is almost ready. You might not have enough time to finish it. Before they get cold, I mean.”

  “I’ll manage.” I finished, nearly gagging, my tasteless beer—but pride can control one’s reflexes, though I also suspect that one’s reflexes ar
e, sometimes, what one takes to be one’s pride—and set my glass down. “There. Okay?”

  “Come on, Bill,” said one of them. They took him out. The diner was empty. She stared after them. Then, in a genuine, bewildered sorrow, she looked at me, found a bottle of beer, opened it, set it before me, and started picking up the hamburgers.

  “I hope you have a box for all this,” I said. “I don’t. Mrs. San-Marquand said that she was sure you would.”

  “I’ll see,” she said—after a considerable pause.

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you.” And I drank my beer.

  The short-order cook produced the box. I let her put everything in the box herself. I finished my beer. Then I wanted to piss, but I calculated where I could piss on the road. I paid her. She rang up the money. “I must have a receipt,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, “just a minute. I know the people you work for always want a receipt.” And she gave me one. She had won. But I went down smiling. “Bye-bye, Sally. See you tomorrow, God willing.” And I picked up the box and carried it out to the jalopy. I placed it on the front seat next to me. This was sometimes the trickiest moment of all my days, for, since I couldn’t spill the coffee or the Coke, couldn’t fail to feed the hungry, I couldn’t let my fury release itself on the road.

  I drove up the San-Marquand driveway. They had rented a pretty house, big and rambling—much too big for the two of them, but, then, on the other hand, they were never alone. Their house was always full of people, and Rags Roland was spending the summer with them. Rags was very impressive; big, and so ugly that she was positively splendid. In fact, a woman who looked like Rags had scarcely any choice but to become splendid if she were to achieve any bearable human quality at all. She was bigger than most men, with a face as square and as expressive as a block of granite—a block of granite veined with fine red lines. She had been given, in belated and incongruous compensation, a great deal of very bright, curling hair which was red by the time I met her. She wore it as though it were a helmet, not, I must say, that she could have worn it in any other way. Her clothes all seemed, on her, to be made of metal—relentless two-piece tweed suits, sometimes somber but sometimes startlingly plaid, which gave way, come summer, to equally relentless, sacklike prints. They boomed like trumpets, they hurt the eye. She was incredibly energetic, one of the people whose relentless good-nature at length becomes rather frightening. She was always smoking and joking; one wondered if she could ever be still. She had told me once, sitting on the San-Marquand porch, in a large, ornate double swing made of South American straw, that she could not get through a single day without listening to music. I wondered when. I wondered how she could ever turn off all the noise she lived with long enough to hear anything: I should have thought that her spiritual eardrums had long ago been broken. But photographs of herself and the San-Marquands, taken years before when they had just begun the Workshop, showed another Rags, a Rags unreconciled. These photographs were on the walls of The Green Barn office, and in Saul’s study at home. The photographs showed them sitting around under trees, reading scripts, or in rehearsal. Saul looked very different, his hair had not been white then; in one of the photographs he was without his glasses and he looked like a startled boy. Lola had been round but not shapeless, her hair had been long, and her face very earnest and girlish. And Rags—Rags had worn her hair very long then, and braided into a crown. The big face, the big mouth, the great square mass of her, seemed, somehow, vulnerable. And she was wearing something which looked gray in the photographs, long and soft and full. She had been trying to be an actress in those days, and she wrote poetry. “Wretched poetry,” she said, “but I’ve never had the heart to burn it. It’ll turn up in my private papers after I’m dead. Don’t let the world laugh at me too much.” This was when she was drunk, at one of the San-Marquand parties.

  I had arrived during a break. The cast was on the lawn and when they saw the car toiling toward the house, they sent up a great cheer. Rags was standing on the porch.

  “Boy,” she said, “that’s by far the most exciting business we’ve got out of them all day. I wonder what makes you so popular. Could it be the grub?”

  “It could be,” I said, “but, then, again, it might be my pretty brown eyes.”

  “Come on, Leo. Your eyes can’t begin to compete with those hamburgers.”

  “Are you going to sit here on all this—food—all afternoon?” asked Madeleine, the company’s leading lady, “or are you going to get up off it and give us some?” She winked at me. “And I know you know what I mean, honey. How are you? I hope you’re not forgetting your red-hot mama?”

  “How could I forget you? Sugar, you know I got to give you some.”

  “Promises, promises. And I’ve been so ravenous for so long.” We laughed together. Madeleine and I always carried on like this, but I didn’t know to what extent it was for real and I didn’t know how to make the first move. She was about thirty, which was intimidating, blonde, rather hefty, but very nice. She was a respected minor actress, who had never been a leading lady before, divorced, with an eight-year-old daughter. The daughter was in the city, with Madeleine’s parents.

  The other kids came over and took away the boxes of food and drink and put them under a tree. They picked up their Cokes and hamburgers and dispersed. I got out of the car, and stretched, and sat down on the bottom step of the porch.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Rags asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I ate a big breakfast.” I looked up at her. “Aren’t you?”

  “God, no,” she said. “I’m directing this shambles. I can’t eat until they’ve all gone home. Actors take away my appetite.”

  “I smiled. “You’re always with them,” I said. “You must eat an awful lot after they’ve gone home.”

  “I think you’re being impertinent,” Rags said, and laughed, and ground out her cigarette in the grass. She sat down on the porch step beside me.

  “Is it a shambles?” I asked her. “I thought Lola said that it was going very well.”

  “Lola daren’t say anything else. It’s her job to keep up everybody’s morale—poor Lola. She’s been walking around here these last few days like the white angel—the lady with the lamp.” She lit another cigarette and offered one to me, and lit it for me. “But it’s got to be a shambles, boy, if you’re dealing, on the same stage, with a group of untried amateurs and a group of aging, uncertain professionals. You spend half the time keeping them from each other’s throats. And the play, just between you and me, is not exactly Hamlet. Oh, well.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” I asked.

  “Well—we think the play has something important to say. And why not try to jolt this town a little bit? Besides, it’s a play they’ve heard of—it was done on Broadway. With Sylvia Sidney.”

  Lola came over and sat down in the grass before us, like a girl.

  “How’d you like that cheer you got?” Lola asked. “Wasn’t that something? We rehearsed it all morning.”

  “We might as well have,” Rags said grimly.

  “Rags,” Lola said, “it didn’t go badly. Really.”

  “Madeleine will never learn how to hold that letter,” Rags murmured. “What’s the matter with her? Doesn’t she ever get any mail?”

  “In my class this morning,” Lola said, “I told her to hold the letter as though the letter were her final divorce papers—Madeleine’s divorced, you know,” she said to me—“and to realize that now that she is divorced, she doesn’t really want to be. I thought it began to make a difference in the way she held the letter. I really did.”

  “Maybe,” Rags said, gloomily. “I still think she looks as though she were holding a raw pork chop.”

  “Oh. You are such a perfectionist,” Lola said.

  I ground out my cigarette and stood up. “I have to go,” I said.

  “I hope we have those signs all over town,” said Lola.

  “We don’t yet,” I said, “but we will.”<
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  “But they should have been up by now!”

  “The kids are just getting finished. I’m going to collect them now. They’ll be all over town in a couple of hours. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh! I’m not complaining about you,” said Lola. “You are really an exemplary model of industry and devotion. It’s just—”

  “Opening night nerves,” said Rags, and laughed grimly.

  “Well. I think it will prove to be a very exciting theater experience.”

  “Especially,” said Rags, “if he’s sober.”

  “How is it going over there today?” Lola asked me.

  “He’s sober today,” I said. I got into the car.

  “And the others? How are they?”

  “Like they’ve always been. No better. No worse.” I started the motor. “But, you know, I don’t really have much time to watch rehearsals.”

  “Leo! You are the rock on which we all depend. I trust that you are not also about to have an attack of temperament. You know that as soon as this grueling week is over, we will begin serious work. You have my word for that. And Saul’s word.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m glad. Because I sure am tired of being a rock.”

  I turned the car around.

  “Boy,” Rags said, “you don’t seem to realize that you’re getting a college education in the theater.”

  “I’d feel better about being in college,” I said, “if somebody would give me a test.”

  “All right,” Lola said, “you shall have your test. Now, off with you. Good-bye.”

  “Good-night, ladies,” I said, and I drove away.