Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  “In that cellar, there wasn’t no window, there was just a door with bars on it and if you sat near the bars, then light came down on you, a little light, in the daytime. In the nighttime, there wasn’t no light at all. But you could hear for awhile. Couldn’t nobody come near you. They shoved the food in through the bars. The food was bread and water. I mean it, man. Stale bread and cold water. You had to shit and piss in a pail. And you had to empty the pail and that was the only time you ever got out of there and then there was two men with you. And, sometimes they made like they was going to spill the pail on you, they had a lot of fun that way and sometimes these mother-fuckers was white, baby, and sometimes they was black. Shit. When they first threw me in there I was in pretty bad shape and what saved me was the rats. I mean it. The rats. I was flat on my back, I guess I was half unconscious, I don’t know, and I was thinking of my home and all and I was hardly breathing. Then, I heard this sound, this rattling sound and I wondered what it was and I don’t know how to explain this but all of a sudden I felt like I was being watched, like there was eyes on me. And I looked toward the bars, but weren’t nobody there. My mouth was caked with blood and I wiped my mouth and I heard the sound again. It was near me, it wasn’t at the bars. Then, I saw their eyes. I was so sick I didn’t know if I could move. But if I didn’t move—oh, man—if I didn’t move and there was a whole lot of them and I knew if I didn’t move—and I screamed and I got to the bars and I heard them scurrying away because, then, they knew I was alive and I hung on the bars all night. I was afraid to lie down again. I’d feel myself dropping off, you know, and I’d hold on the bars and drag myself up again. And they was still there, scurrying here and yonder. And didn’t nobody come near me, nobody, all night long.

  “I don’t know how long I was down there, Leo, I swear to God I don’t, I’ll never know. But, one morning, here he come, like I’d known he was going to, Old Martin Howell, red-haired mother-fucker with his whip. He said, Don’t you want to see your friends upstairs? and I said, I got no friends upstairs. He said, Ain’t you tired of bread and water? and I said, I’m getting used to it, thanks. The thing is, I was scared of him and he was scared of me. But I really believe that he was a little more scared of me than I was of him, because I knew, if it really got down to it, I was going to have to kill him. Yes. I really don’t want to be no man’s murderer, but, for me, he wasn’t a man, I don’t know what he was, but I knew he wasn’t never going to get me on my knees. He had his boys and all, though, I knew it, just upstairs.

  “He said, Nigger, you remember that question I asked you? He was smiling. I didn’t say nothing. He walked up and down, kind of weighing his whip. He was trying to scare me with that whip. He wanted me to beg him not to beat me. I watched him. I knew what he didn’t want to do was have to call in nobody. He wanted me all to himself. I didn’t give a shit. I was going to get beaten, anyway. So I called him every name I could think of, just to get it started, just to get it over with, and he raised his whip to strike me and I ducked and he raised it again and I grabbed his hand. I battled him to the bars and, you know, I’m pretty strong but I was weakened by being on bread and water for so long and he cracked me across the back of the head with the whip handle and I fell down to my knees. When I fell, he came at me again, but I managed to roll out of his way and when he came back at me I pulled him down, hard, and I got him by the balls and, believe me, I made that mother scream. Oh, yeah, he screamed that morning. I beat him with the handle of his whip and I made his red hair a little bit redder. I heard them coming and I tried to hold them off with my whip but of course they got me and when they got through with me I was lying against a wall. He was standing over me. He said, Nigger, you ain’t worth shit. Ain’t that right? And he kicked me. I could hardly see anything, I could hardly see his eyes. I said, You ain’t worth shit, and he kicked me again. Then, one of the black trusties spit on me and so I said, You right, Mr. Howell. I ain’t worth shit. And they left me. And I was alone down there for a long time. On bread and water.”

  His voice stopped: his silence created a great wound in the universe. There was nothing for me to say: nothing. I held him, held what there was to hold. I held him. Because I could love, I realized I could hate. And I realized that I would feed my hatred, feed it every day and every hour. I would keep it healthy, I would make it strong, and I would find a use for it one day. I listened to Caleb’s breathing and I watched him in the slowly growing light of the morning. He picked up a cigarette and lit it and I watched the glow, watched his nose, watched his eyes. Neither did he have anything more to say. We lay there, in silence. I knew that he had to get up soon, to go down to the garment center. He put out his cigarette. I put my arms around him. And so we slept.

  Caleb went downtown with our father in the morning, but by noon, he had left the garment center, forever, and he left New York the early morning of the following day. This is one of the encounters with Caleb which is most dim in my memory, one of the moments which inexorably recedes; most dim, because it was to prove so crucial; most dim, because so painful. I was home around midday, I think. I suppose I had been to school, though I have no recollection of having been at school. Our mother was silent, but I knew she had been crying. Caleb was throwing socks in a bag.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I was standing at the door of our room. I hadn’t asked my mother anything.

  “I’m going.”

  I sat down on the bed.

  “You going? Where?”

  “California.”

  I didn’t say anything. I watched him throw some shirts into a bag—a little cardboard bag.

  “California?”

  “Yes.”

  He threw some more stuff into the bag.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Daddy,” he said, “is at work.”

  “When are you going?”

  “I’m taking a bus out of here in the morning.”

  “You want to take me with you?”

  “No.”

  I sat there. I watched him. I didn’t want to cry, and I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t cry. He kept on doing what he was doing. I sat on the bed.

  “All right,” I said. And I walked out of the room. Then I walked out of the house. I had nothing in my mind. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going.

  There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation: I had never seen it before this day. Everything seemed scrubbed, scoured, older than the oldest bones, and cleaner. Everything lay beneath a high, high, immaculate sky, and was washed as clean as it could be. Everything—and everything was still: the stairs down which I walked, the doors I passed, the garbage, the cats, the old wine bottles, the radiators, the drying scum-bag on the steps, the light in the doorway of the vestibule, the boys in the doorway, the white curtains in the window across the street, the blue sedan which briefly cut off the sight of the curtains, the street, long, long, long, the grocery store, the tailor shop, the candystore, the church which faced us when I reached the end of the block, the red lights, the green lights, the long, loaded buses and the people in the buses, the subway kiosks and the people coming upstairs and downstairs, the policeman’s badge catching the light, his club swinging, his holster glowing, the vegetable stand, with greens, with turnips, potatoes, okra, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, apples, pears, the sign over another church, saying THE YOU PRAY FOR ME CHURCH OF THE AIR, the liquor store and all the bottles in the window, the bar signs, and the women outside the bar, the men standing at the corners, the lampposts, the undertaker parlors, the grain of the sidewalk pavement, the light in the water of the gutter, the polish of the asphalt street, the grating over the sewer’s black and fearful depths, the singing of tires and the crying of brakes, the shape of doorways, the monotony of steps, the order and age of cornices, the height of roofs, the unspeaking sky, the tree, the sparrow, the Public Library, and the plaque there which held the name, CARNEGIE, the stone wall of the park, the people scattered about like b
ones, the hill, the dying flowers, the height, the sun, all, all, all, were clean as I was not, as I could never be, and all—all—were as remote from me as they would have been had I been in my grave and had drilled a hole through my tombstone to peep out at the world. I cared no more than that. I sat down somewhere in the park.

  The stars came out. I watched the stars, and I counted them. I was really surprised to realize that the sky could be so black, that the sky could be so closed. I looked for the moon, but it wasn’t there. The moon. For no reason at all, I suddenly missed the moon; and because I missed the moon so much, I started to cry. But I think that I had never cried this way before. I did not cry in the hope of being comforted. I had no hope. I am not even certain that there was anything at all in my mind—what we call the mind. I cried because I could not help it, exactly like the stars were shining; they couldn’t help it, either. Perhaps, like me, they couldn’t believe that their sentence had been passed, and that now they were to serve it. I am sure that there was nothing in my mind, because, otherwise, my mind would have cracked and I would have had to go mad. I had walked to the very top of the park. Now, I rose, for no particular reason, and started walking back down the hill. It had been daylight when I entered the park, and now it was night; but I did not start walking uptown toward our house, but downtown, away from it. It may be odd, I don’t know, but I didn’t think of what was happening at the house, and I was not afraid to walk through the city, though I had always been afraid before. I did not feel, either, even remotely defiant. I don’t think I even saw the cops: I simply walked.

  I walked down Harlem’s Madison Avenue, which in no way resembles the American one. I watched the boys and girls, who, oddly enough, did not challenge me or make any move to menace me, though I walked very slowly and must surely have looked very odd. But, no, they went on with what they were doing and I went my way; and only when I got to the outskirts of Harlem—only when the streets began to be sedate and quiet, and the faces began to turn pale—did I think that, by now, at my house, they must really be worried. I realized that I could not, after all, spend the night walking the streets. So I walked west, and I started back uptown.

  But I did not, in fact, get home that night. It may be that, at the very bottom of my mind, I had never intended to go home. Or, that, as home came closer, my nerve deserted me. It may be that I had a tremendous need to hurt Caleb, or it may be that I was afraid of seeing Caleb. But my memory, for reasons which are not at all mysterious, blurs everything here, resists going over the ground again. This was the night that I discovered chaos, or perhaps it was the night that chaos discovered me; but it certainly began the most dreadful time of my life, a time I am astounded to have survived. It was the first of my nights in hell. It was this night, or a night very soon after it, that I first smoked marihuana, in a cellar with some other, older boys, and a very funky girl. I know that it was around this time that I became friends with an older boy, named Francis, who helped to protect me in the streets; I know that the first time I ever smoked marihuana, I was with him and his friends, and I remember the cellar, which was near the Apollo Theater. Francis later turned into a junkie, and, after many attempts to break his habit, went to his room one morning and cut his wrists. But we had traveled the same road together for awhile. And neither of us had had any reason for not doing whatever came to mind. Or, it may have been this night, or a night very soon thereafter, that I was picked up by a Harlem racketeer named Johnnie, big, Spanish-looking, very sharp, and very good-natured—good-natured with me, anyway—who took me home and gave me my first drink of brandy, and took me to bed. He frightened me, or his vehemence, once the lights were out, frightened me, and I didn’t like it, but I liked him. I had to keep him from buying things for me which I couldn’t take home; he was an even greater protection than Francis, and it took me a long time to break with him, simply because he was fond of me—he was often the only person to whom I could turn. Eventually, Johnnie and another pimp tangled, and Johnnie was killed. But we, too, had traveled the same road together for awhile.

  After the beating, the shouting, the tears, when I got home next day, my mother handed me Caleb’s note. I took it in the room and lay down on the bed.

  Little Brother,

  You shouldn’t have walked out on me like that. I must have sounded pretty mean, but you should have known I didn’t mean it for you. I just couldn’t take working on that job. It wasn’t so much for me. It was for Daddy. I couldn’t stand the way they talked to him, like he was somebody’s hired clown. But I didn’t say nothing. Just, when the twelve o’clock blew, I walked out. And I decided that I would have to leave this city. I think I’ll be better off someplace else and I’m going to work in the shipyard in California. And I couldn’t take you with me, Leo, you know that. You got your schooling to finish and you say you want to be an actor, well what kind of life would it be, when you hanging out with me? You’ve got very good sense, Leo, like I’ve always said. You’re much smarter than I am and so I know you’ll see it my way as soon as you cool off.

  But I’m mighty sorry I had to leave without saying good-bye to you like I wanted to do.

  Take care of Mama and Daddy as well as you can and take care of yourself. I’ll write you as soon as I get an address and please write to me. Don’t be mad at me. When you get older, you’ll see that this was the best way. I guess I love you more than anything in this world, Leo, and I want you to grow up to be a happy healthy man. So, no matter how I thought about it, it seemed to me that this was the best way for everybody concerned.

  And I want you to have some flesh on your bones when I look in your face again. Please don’t forget me.

  Your brother,

  Caleb

  Caleb got into some trouble in California, and he joined the Army. I hit the streets.

  I realized I was shivering, and I pulled Madeleine’s big towel closer around me. Then I dropped it and left her kitchen and crawled, naked, into bed beside her. I slept. She woke me up. We made, as the saying goes, love. Then, I slept again.

  Like in the movies, I woke to the smell of coffee and the sound and smell of bacon. I don’t really know how it goes in the movies, but I know that I lay there on my back, apprehensive, drained, empty—drained and empty without having, really, touched, or been touched. Then, as she entered the room, smiling, in a scarlet negligée, and before I had had time to pretend that I was still sleeping, I realized that I had a performance to give. I realized that I rather liked her, and that was certainly a relief. But, mainly, I wanted to get that white flesh in my hands again, I simply wanted to fuck her: and this was not because I liked her.

  “You awake?”

  My God, she was cheerful. She sat down on the bed.

  I made a sound, it was meant to convey, No, and I turned away and then I turned toward her again and I pulled her down on top of me.

  “I got breakfast on the stove, sugar.”

  “I got breakfast here.” And, after a moment, I said, “All you got to do is reach out your hand.”

  “Let me turn down the fire under the bacon.”

  I laughed. “You do that.”

  She wavered into the kitchen. She came back. I took her hand. “Did you put out the fire? under the bacon?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you didn’t. Put it out now. Right here. Right now.” I took off her robe. “I want to watch you do it.” I laughed. But Madeleine certainly wasn’t anybody’s freak. She claimed it wasn’t because she was unwilling. It was because I was too big. Well, all right. And we fooled around, while I became more and more aware of the smell of coffee and more and more, rather, worried about the disappearing bacon, and we ended up doing it like mama and daddy. Well. All right. And she went away again, and I fell asleep again.

  When I woke up again, she was dressed, in blue.

  “Listen, my love,” she said—my love!—“everything you need is out there in the kitchen. I’ve got a rehearsal, and I’ve got to run. Here’s an extra set of keys.�
� She put them on top of my jeans. She looked at me. “So. Will you be here when I get back? Or—?”

  “I don’t know. What time do you get back?”

  She looked at her watch. “Well. It’s nearly two now. Not before six or seven.”

  Slowly, and most reluctantly, my head began to clear. “I might go home. But I think I’ll sleep awhile. I think I’ll be here when you get back. But, if I’m not going to be here, I’ll call you at Lola’s.”