Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  By this time it was nearly midnight, and we were just about the last people in the place. As soon as we left, Salvatore would throw out the unattractive adolescents who were playing the pinball machine, and Salvatore and his tribe would lock up and go to bed. I did not feel like going to bed at all. I scarcely knew what I felt like doing, but I didn’t want the night to end. It was a marvelous night, blue-black, with a crescent moon, the air was fine and soft. It was unbelievably silent. There was not a soul on the streets.

  “This is one hell of a wide-open town,” Matthew said. He was a little drunk.

  “Oh, there’s a whole lot happening in this town,” Fowler said. “You just got to know where to find it.”

  “Well, if you know where to find it,” said Matthew, “take me there.”

  I almost suggested that we have a nightcap on the other side of town, but then I hesitated. Only Fowler could make this suggestion, for only Fowler could take us there. I could not say, Take me, too, for this would be abandoning the people I was with. It was the presence of Madeleine which was most inhibiting, for I did not know what—if anything—she wanted from me, and I did not know if I really wanted anything at all from her. Fowler and Matthew, Barbara and Jerry, and Madeleine and I, walked in twos together down the slumbering street.

  If Madeleine had not been there, I would have driven Barbara and Jerry home, and then driven back to meet Matthew and Fowler on the Negro side of town.

  Madeleine held my hand loosely, and we walked very slowly. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “Oh. They’re not worth a penny. I was just—thinking—of—of some people I used to know.”

  “So was I.” Then, “That Matthew’s a nice kid.”

  “Yes. Very nice.”

  We walked in silence. I heard Fowler and Jerry laugh.

  “But where,” asked Madeleine, “do you suppose we’re going? Where’s the car?”

  “Behind us. I guess we’re just taking a walk.”

  “Well. It’s a nice night for walking,” Madeleine said, and it seemed to me that she held my hand a little tighter.

  We reached a kind of lookout point, above the river. Straight before us was a stone wall; between us and the wall, road signs; the road to New York City was on the right, the road to New England was on the left. The road was very wide, and, on the far side of the road was a large space, for motorists who wished to rest, or possibly picnic, or simply look at the river. We crossed the road and stood in silence at the wall, looking down at the river. The river was black, with a thin coating of silver. Tonight it seemed still, yet it was moving. The sound of this movement, which made me think of pebbles being overturned, great boulders being carried, logs crashing against each other, filled all the night air and seemed very far away.

  “Did you grow up in this town?” I asked Fowler.

  “That’s right,” he said peacefully, “this is my town.”

  “Do your folks come from here?”

  “No, my folks is from the South.” He lit a cigarette, leaning on the wall, and threw the match into the void. “Where your folks from?”

  “My daddy’s from Barbados,” I said.

  “And your mama?”

  “Louisiana.”

  We leaned on the wall, looking at the river. Jerry had his arm around Barbara, who was very still. Her profile looked childlike and defenseless under the crescent moon. Madeleine’s hand in mine felt wet. I felt a sudden fear, as present as the running of the river, as nameless and as deep.

  “Fowler,” said Matthew carefully, “look here. If you ain’t too tired, don’t you reckon we might have a nightcap—somewhere?”

  “We might,” said Fowler, looking at the water.

  “You got any idea where?”

  “Yeah. I know where.” He turned to Barbara. “You folks tired, or you want to have a drink with us?”

  Barbara looked at him. Her eyes were so bright that I thought for a moment that there were tears in her eyes. But she was smiling, and the moonlight made her more beautiful than she had ever seemed to me before. “Of course,” she said, “we’d love to have a drink with you. Even though it means”—and she smiled at me—“that we won’t get any work done tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Matthew said.

  “Not in the theater,” Barbara said. She took Jerry’s arm, and Fowler’s arm. She smiled up at Fowler. “Will you lead the way? Kind sir?”

  “I’ll be happy, young lady.”

  And so we turned from the wall and the river and we crossed the road again, Fowler, Barbara, and Jerry arm in arm, and Matthew, Madeleine, and me. The other side of town, at this hour, was only about a five-minute drive away. Fowler insisted, once he had seen our jalopy, that we all go together in his car, which was an enormous Ford station wagon. We were not pleased by this, it seemed impractical for Fowler to drive us back to our car; but we had already gone too far to turn back and we did not dare to speculate on the reasons for Fowler’s vehemence. We piled into Fowler’s car, Fowler, Jerry, and Barbara in front, Matthew, Madeleine, and I behind, and crossed the sleeping town.

  I have crossed many a frontier since then, have had my passport stamped, say, at the French-Swiss border, at the Swiss-Italian border; and I am beginning to believe that a landscape is not a landscape at all, merely a reflection of the sensibility of the people who live in it—certainly this is what one is watching as one crosses their forests and plains, vineyards and mountains, cities, tunnels, towns. French towns are mostly hideous, all French trees are mercilessly cropped, with a view, presumably, to the landscape, the larger vision—in the way French poodles operate as accessories to the wardrobes of their owners. There is absolutely no nonsense about it, whatever does not fit in is out, down to the merest flickering flower, the puniest, struggling branch. I suppose the French impose such a violent topographical order in order to compensate for an extreme untidiness, indeed, disorder, which the nature of their history—their passion—does not allow them to attack in any other way. The man at the frontier has cigarette ashes all up and down his uniform, and a cigarette is established between his lips. He has not the remotest interest in the voyager, or his passport: he forces himself to squint at both. Sometimes he looks at the baggage, sometimes not. Sometimes he stamps the passport; sometimes one has to ask him to stamp it. His office, were it not in France, would remind one of nothing so much as a cell in purgatory; and he and confreres seem to feel that they are serving a sentence which they probably, after all, deserve. Within seconds, the time it takes to cross a small backyard, one has left this outpost, the last witness to this indisputably dour and extraordinarily interesting people, and one is facing the apple-faced Swiss. Their quarters are impeccable, as are their uniforms. The Swiss do not smoke their cigarettes, but leave them quietly burning in one of their millions of ashtrays. Their uniforms are ironed every morning and laundered every night; and the man within the uniform would find himself in something much worse than purgatory if he were not laundered and ironed, too. He examines everything very carefully, passport, luggage, voyager; causes one to think of the dirty socks and shorts in one’s baggage, one’s filthy armpits, and abruptly active intestines; is unspeakably polite, as patient as a ferret, as distrustful as a thief; and when one has escaped the Swiss correctness, one feels that one is being pursued—they are hoping to delude you into leading them to your accomplice. And then, abruptly, one is at the Italian frontier. They seem extremely surprised, but, on the whole, delighted, that you decided to drop by. Between extravagant offers of extravagant dinners, and impassioned questions as to what drove you from your part of the world, they are perfectly willing to glance at your passport and stamp it on any random page. They swear eternal brotherhood, and so you pass out of their offices and out of their lives. The French landscape is cerebral, this being the form that the French passion deludes itself into taking. The Swiss landscape is ordered, nothing could be more remote from passion—people who cannot make love make money—and it is desig
ned to advertise one of the most flagrantly fraudulent Edens in our unhappy history. The Italian landscape is ragged, wild, unpredictable, like the landscape of Spain, the landscape of Africa. And something in me answers to such a landscape. Something in me is caught and held and solaced. I am profoundly repelled by the smug angularities of northern Europe, the cold sky and the spiteful lips of New England. A day may come, but not for me, when the American South will be habitable. Till then—well, I am wandering. But I was about to say that, however dramatic the frontiers I have mentioned, the most dramatic, the most appalling, remains that invisible frontier which divides American towns, white from black.

  We drove through the sleeping town, mostly in silence now, our thoughts more than ever flesh. Barbara’s head was on Jerry’s shoulder, Madeleine had her hand in mine, Fowler whistled as he drove, Matthew’s thigh was against my thigh. Perhaps for the first time, certainly not for the last, I had a sudden, frightening apprehension of the possibilities every human being contains, a sense of life as an arbitrary series of groupings and regroupings, like the figures—if one can call them figures—in a kaleidoscope. I think we all felt this, in our different fashions. Barbara hid her head in Jerry’s warm and gentle shadow. Fowler whistled, Matthew hummed, shifting his weight from time to time, Madeleine held my hand. I was very grateful for her hand. As the car rushed through the darkness, I felt myself being hurtled into some crucial confrontation; with Madeleine; or with Matthew; or with my past. We were approaching a bridge which spanned a narrow creek. On the other side of this bridge lived the dark people to whom I belonged. Matthew moved, and touched me, and I wondered what was in his mind. Then I wondered what was in my mind. I held on to Madeleine—but I was terribly aware of her color; for the first time, or so, at least, I wished to think. The car rushed forward, and we heard music. People, black, walking and talking, began to populate the landscape. The streets narrowed, the houses clustered, the music became louder. Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers. They were on porches, playing jacks, a light behind their heads, two boys were rolling around in their yard, a couple of boys and girls were singing. I felt myself in the middle of a turning wheel. It felt like that, as one might feel at a circus, with all its shifting, multicolored, terrifying lights, and with all that sound; or as one might feel walking on the tightrope, with all the lights and sounds and people, mortally, hideously, unbelievably beneath; everything depending on what one was able to achieve of balance. Lord, I wondered—wondered: and Matthew, with one great hand, lightly touched the back of my neck, Madeleine’s hand tightened, and Jerry lowered his head to Barbara’s. The car sped into the impasse created by a bar on the right hand, a closed warehouse on the left, and that terrifying bluff above the terrifying river directly before us. Fowler turned the car around, and we parked before Lucy’s Place. We had crossed from death into what certainly sounded like life. And not only did it sound like life, it looked like life; and not only did it look like life, it looked like a particular life, a life which was a particular reproach to me. I saw, with a peculiar shock, the root of the despicable and tenacious American folklore concerning the happy, prancing niggers. Some of these people were moving, indeed, and the jukebox was loud; their movements followed the music which their movements had produced; but prancing scarcely fairly described their uses of their vigor. Only someone who no longer had any sense of what constituted happiness could ever have confounded happiness with this rage. Yet, the scene we entered had been tirelessly reproduced, in stale and meticulous, absolutely libelous detail, in countless musical comedies and innumerable pork-chop-in-the-sky films: the nigger, moving in uncanny time to the music, hips, hands, and feet working, all flashing teeth and eyes, without a care in the world. It was my own uneasiness as we entered which afforded me my key to the domestic fantasy. The music was loud and aggressive. If it held the heat of love, it equally held the heat of fury, and it could not be described as friendly. Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as the very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a mighty, intimidating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope. It contains a comment on all human beings, and the comment is not flattering. How logical, then, that those who had been saved by those exquisite qualities with which they had invested the fact of their color and the accidents of their history, should, immediately, inevitably, and helplessly, regard the passion of their servitors as proof that their servitors were less than human and deserved the sentence meted out to them by that God whom the saved had purchased. “God, what I wouldn’t give to dance like that,” Madeleine muttered—but the history which produced one cannot be given away: so I told myself as we entered, as I saw the faces change, heard Fowler’s much too hearty, “Brought some friends by to see you,” and forced myself not to let go Madeleine’s hand. Some of the women looked at me with a terrible contempt. Some of the men looked at me as though I were a fool, but, just possibly—looking at Madeleine with a cool, speculative, lewd contempt—a lucky fool. Their eyes said they wouldn’t mind, maybe, taking my place in Madeleine’s bed, oh, maybe, four or five times. I knew that some of them wouldn’t scruple to suggest this. If a white woman would sleep with one black man, then, obviously, she had no self-respect, and would sleep with an entire black regiment. I had not yet learned, though time was to teach me, how hideous it is to be always in a false position. I was hurt for Madeleine, and bewildered—and I was glad that I had not come in holding Barbara’s hand—but I was hurt for them, too. It seemed to me that their swift estimate of Madeleine revealed their estimate of themselves, and this revealed estimate frightened me as being, perhaps, after all, at bottom, my own. But—they saw what they saw. They saw themselves as others had seen them. They had been formed by the images made of them by those who had had the deepest necessity to despise them. The bitterly contemptuous uses to which they had been put by others was the beginning of their history, the key to their lives, and the very cornerstone of their identities: exactly like those who had first maligned them, they saw what their history had taught them to see. I did not know then, and I do not know now if one ever sees more than that. If one ever does, it can only be because one has learned to read one’s history and resolved to step out of the book. Piloted by Fowler, watched ironically by the bartender, threading our way through the dancers, we arrived at a table in the back.

  “Well,” said Matthew, “look at us!” And he grinned, and I realized that he knew more than I had thought he knew. He was no one to play with—as the dark lady making it over to our table would have been the first to observe.

  “Here’s Miss Lucy,” Fowler said, and Jerry rose at once, and I rose.

  “Sit down,” said Miss Lucy—she had a voice like a man—and she didn’t shake my hand, she rubbed her hand over my head. “Fowler, does this boy’s mama know he’s out? And out with you? Sit down,” she said to Jerry, “make yourself at home. Good evening, you young ladies,” and she smiled at Barbara and Madeleine. “What brings you by here this time of evening, Fowler? I thought you was a respectable, church-going man. And you know tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “We’re strangers in town, ma’am,” Matthew said, “and old Fowler was kind enough to do us a favor and show us that his town wasn’t dead, like I was beginning to think. He said all the life in the town was right here.”

  Miss Lucy laughed. “Fowler’s full of the devil. You liable to get yourself in trouble, hanging out with Fowler.”

  “But it appears like he was right this time, ma’am,” Matthew said.

  “Oh, this ain’t nothing but a little friendly place,” said Miss Lucy, proudly. “Everybody’s welcome here. All the time.”

  “These here young ladies,” Fowler said, “they both in that theater come to town—”

  “The Green Barn,” said Madeleine. “We’re actresses. We hope.”

  “And this young man,” said Fowler, indicating me, “he’s with the theater, too.”


  “He’s an actor,” Barbara said.

  “I hope,” I said.

  A brief, uneasy silence fell before Miss Lucy recovered. “Well. The Green Barn. I’ve heard of it—”

  “Out Bull Dog Road way,” Fowler said.

  “Oh, yes! Out Bull Dog Road. I’ve heard of it. My, that’s real nice,” she said, and smiled again. “You folks going to be with us long?”

  “Till the end of the summer,” Madeleine said.

  “Well, I sure hope you won’t let yourselves be no strangers here,” said Miss Lucy. “You welcome any time. Where you from?” she asked me.

  “I’m from Harlem,” I said.

  “Oh, you a Harlem boy! I used to go to Harlem a whole lot. But, now, this place keeps me so busy.” She sighed. “Where you from in Harlem?”

  I told her.

  “I used to have folks lived around there.” She looked at me with a quick, speculative interest. “But that was before you was born.” She turned to Fowler. “Fowler, let me offer you and your friends a round. What you folks drinking?”

  “Will you sit with us, Miss Lucy?” Fowler asked.

  “Sure,” said Miss Lucy, “I’ll come back just as soon as I tend to a couple of folks. Let me just send Andy over. He’ll take real good care of you. You all have a good time, now,” and she smiled again, and left us. I watched her talking to the bartender, who nodded several times, not looking in our direction. Then she was very cheerful and proud with several other people, who glanced in our direction once or twice: it was established that the form our madness took was not malevolent, that we might be distinguished, or, even, not impossibly, charming.