“I must tell you,” she said, “it has not been easy for me. It has not been easy at all to have lived all these years the life I’ve lived and to know, no matter who I was with, no matter how much I loved them or hoped to love them and no matter what they offered me, it has not been easy to know that if you whistled, called, sang, belched, picked up the telephone, sent a wire, I’d be there. I’d have no choice, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’ve not been free—not all these years. And with time flying—and time’s worse for a woman than it is for a man. No, it’s not been easy. And sometimes I hated you and hated myself and hated my life and wanted to die, to die!”
Her words and her voice rang in my ears, they always will, and her face burns in my mind.
I said, from the depths of my terrible fatigue, “I couldn’t have done otherwise. I couldn’t have done otherwise—then! And once we’d made that turning—could we have done otherwise later, Barbara? Could we?”
“I know,” said Barbara. “I know.” She sat down on the barstool again. She picked up her glass and raised it in a sorrowful, gallant, mocking toast. “Let us drink to the new Jerusalem.”
She left, and I went to sleep, wearier than I’d ever been in all my life. Sometime that morning, Christopher came crawling into bed beside me. He was as cold as sweating metal, almost that dangerous to touch, as funky as a fishstall. God knows where he had been. I never asked him. He crawled into my arms, sighing like a mother, found a place for his head, and then lay still. And then we slept.
On our last night but one in San Francisco, I was allowed to go out. It was to be a very quiet evening; the idea was for me to be bothered as little as possible by people who might recognize my face. We were to pick up Pete and Barbara at the theater, after the show. Pete loaned Christopher his car, and we drove to a Chinese restaurant, crowded and fashionable, but very good. It was strange to be out. I felt, well, rested is perhaps the only word, and for the very first time in my whole life. I was not, so to speak, running, but was learning how to walk. At the door to the restaurant, my notoriety suddenly hit me, like a glove—a not unpleasant tap, but a definite one. I had been exulting in the glory of having had my sight returned to me, I was going to be able to see the world again, for awhile. I hadn’t thought about the world seeing me. Yet, here the world was, in the headwaiter’s face, in the faces turning toward us, in the hum, the buzz, the rustle, which marked our passage through the room. Christopher marched before me, stern, elegant, and tall like a chieftain or a prince, taking very seriously his role of lieutenant and bodyguard. We found our table, and sat down, and people smiled at us, and it was a rather nice feeling, that evening, to feel oneself recalled to life. We ordered two dry martinis, and our menus came, bigger than the most thorough map of the world, and Christopher grinned, and said, “This is certainly not the moment to start thinking of the starving Chinese. You know what some of my friends would say if they saw me in a place like this?”
“Well, then, order your usual bowl of rice, baby, and eat it in the kitchen. The starving peasants will rejoice, believe me, to have you swell their ranks.”
“Later for the kitchen. I know that I can always make it in the kitchen. But let me see what I can do out here with—let’s see now—some sweet and sour pork, how does that strike you? You know, we mustn’t forget our roots, they ain’t hardly got no grits, but how about some egg foo young?” And he went on like this, until mercifully, our waiter suggested that we put ourselves in his hands and allow him to order our meal. So we did that, and he didn’t let us down. Perhaps it was because I’d been away so long, but everything tasted wonderful, and the room, the people, the rise and fall, the steady turning, as of a wheel, of many voices, the laughter, the clink of glass and silver, the shining hair, the shining dresses, the rings and earrings and necklaces and spangles and bangles and bracelets of the women, the tie clasps and watches and rings of the men, all created an astounding illusion of safety and order and civilization. Evil did not seem to exist here, or sorrow, or intolerable pain, and here we were, a part of it. I was a celebrity, with a bank account, and a future, and I had it in my power to make Christopher’s life secure. We were the only colored people there. I had worked in the kitchen, not a hundred years ago; outside were the millions of starving—Chinese. I’m going to feast at the welcome table, my mother used to sing—was this the table? This groaning board was a heavy weight on the backs of many millions, whose groaning was not heard. Beneath this table, deep in the bowels of the earth, as far away as China, as close as the streets outside, an energy moved and gathered and it would, one day, overturn this table just as surely as the earth turned and the sun rose and set. And: where will you be, when that first trumpet sounds? I watched Christopher, making out with the chopsticks, smiling, calm, and proud. Well. I want to be with Jesus, when that first trumpet sounds. I want to be with Jesus, when it sounds so loud.
I signed the restaurant’s golden book, and I signed a couple of autographs—but the people were nice, they remembered I’d been sick—and we walked out to the car. It was a beautiful, dark-blue, chilly night. We were on a height, and San Francisco unfurled beneath us, at our feet, like a many-colored scroll. I was leaving soon. I wished it were possible to stay. I had worked hard, hard, it certainly should have been possible by now for me to have a safe, quiet, comfortable life, a life I could devote to my work and to those I loved, without being bugged to death. But I knew it wasn’t possible. There was a sense in which it certainly could be said that my endeavor had been for nothing. Indeed, I had conquered the city: but the city was stricken with the plague. Not in my lifetime would this plague end, and, now, all that I most treasured, wine, talk, laughter, love, the embrace of a friend, the light in the eyes of a lover, the touch of a lover, that smell, that contest, that beautiful torment, and the mighty joy of a good day’s work, would have to be stolen, each moment lived as though it were the last, for my own mortality was not more certain than the storm that was rising to engulf us all.
I put my hand on Christopher’s neck. We stood for a moment in silence. We got into the car.
We drove through the streets of San Francisco, though I wanted to walk. “You can’t,” said Christopher flatly, “you’ll be mobbed on every streetcorner. I promised Barbara and Pete to take real good care of you, so stop giving me a hard time, all right? Be nice.”
“I really would like,” I said, “to know more than I do about what’s going on in the streets.”
He looked at me. “You do know. You want to know if they still love you in the streets—you want to know what they think of you.” He sighed. He was driving very slowly. “Look. A whole lot of cats dig you, and some of them love you. But, Leo—you a fat cat now. That’s the way a whole lot of people see you, and you can’t blame them, how else can they see you? And we in a situation where we have to know which people we can trust, which people we can use—that’s the nitty-gritty. Well, these cats are out here getting their ass whipped all the time, Leo. You get your ass whipped, at least it gets into the papers. But don’t nobody care what happens to these kids—nobody! And all these laws and speeches don’t mean shit. They do not mean shit. It’s the spirit of the people, baby, the spirit of the people, they don’t want us and they don’t like us, and you see that spirit in the face of every cop. Them laws they keep passing, shit, they just like the treaties they signed with the Indians. Nothing but lies. they never even meant to keep those treaties, baby, they wanted the land and they got it and now they mean to keep it, even if they have to put every black mother-fucker in this country behind barbed wire, or shoot him down like a dog. It’s the truth I’m telling you. And you better believe it, unless you want to be like your brother and believe all that okey-doke about Jesus changing people’s hearts. Fuck Jesus, we ain’t about to wait on him, and him the first one they got rid of so they could get their shit together? They didn’t want him to change their hearts, they just used him to change the map.” Then he stopped. He said, in another tone, “I’m
just trying to tell it to you like it is. We can’t afford to trust the white people in this country—we’d have to be crazy if we did. But, naturally, a whole lot of black cats think you might be one of them, and, in a way, you know, you stand to lose just as much as white people stand to lose.” He paused again, and he looked at me again. “You see what I mean?” he asked me very gently. I nodded. He put one hand on my knee. “You’re a beautiful cat, Leo, and I love you. You believe me?”
“Yes. I believe you.”
“Then don’t let this other shit get you down. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be for awhile.” He looked at his watch. “Hey. I know a place I’ll take you.”
He stopped the car on a very crowded street, a street crowded with young people, black and white. They seemed to me to be very, very young; no doubt I seemed to them to be very, very old. There was something oddly attractive about them. Perhaps they reminded me, distantly, of myself, long ago. Perhaps they reminded me, dimly, of something we had lost. I had never worn such costumes, surely, beads, robes, sandals, and earrings, or walked quite so slowly, or dared to embrace another in the sight of all the world, or been so oblivious to the presence of the cops, who patrolled the streets in twos, or stood in doorways, holding their clubs motionless, with their eyes fixed on something straight ahead, and their lips recollecting a sour taste. It was late, but store windows were lighted, with very strange things in the windows, and the stores seemed to be open—but I was not allowed to investigate, for Christopher was walking fast, one hand under my elbow. A couple stopped, looking at me, and Christopher turned me into the entrance of what had once been a movie theater. Unavoidably, he had to stop to get tickets, and I could feel a crowd gathering behind us. I felt terribly uneasy. I turned, once, to look behind me, and I smiled. A colored cat called my name, and laughed, and said, “Be careful, man. You’re under surveillance!”
“I know,” I said, and Christopher and I walked into the theater. I wondered if the boy had meant to tell me that I was under surveillance by the cops, or under surveillance by the people.
Whatever he had meant, I was under surveillance by both.
We entered a dark and noisy barn. All of the seats had been removed from the orchestra of this theater, and hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls filled this space. Some were standing, some were lounging against the walls, some were sitting on the floor, some were embracing, some were dancing. The stage held four or five of the loudest musicians in the world’s history. It was impossible to tell whether they were any good or not, their sound was too high. But it did not really matter whether their sound was any good or not, this sound was, literally, not meant for my ears, and it existed entirely outside my capacity for judgment. It was a rite that I was witnessing—witnessing, not sharing. It made me think of rites I had seen in Caleb’s church, in many churches; of black feet stomping in the mud of the levee; of rites older than that, in forests irrecoverable. The music drove and drove, into the past—into the future. It sounded like an attempt to make a great hole in the world, and bring up what was buried. And the dancers seemed, nearly, in the flickering, violent light, with their beads flashing, their long hair flying, their robes whirling—or their tight skirts, tight pants signifying—and with the music assaulting them like the last, last trumpet, to be dancing in their grave-clothes, raised from the dead. On the wall were four screens, and, on these screens, ectoplasmic figures and faces endlessly writhed, moving in and out of each other, in a tremendous sexual rhythm which made me think of nameless creatures blindly coupling in all the slime of the world, and at the bottom of the sea, and in the air we breathed, and in one’s very body. From time to time, on this screen, one recognized a face. I saw Yul Brynner’s face, for example, and, for a moment, I thought I saw my own. Christopher touched me on the shoulder.
“I came here a couple of times with Pete. It’s a gas and there are some real people here and they’re making some very nice things happen. I just wanted you to see it. But we have to flee in a minute. The people are starting to recognize you, and, anyway, it’s almost curtain time.”
“Okay.”
But I stood there a few moments longer, and tried to understand what was happening.
“Guns,” said Christopher. “We need guns.”
It was the next day, we were driving down from Hunter’s Point.
I said nothing.
We drove across the Golden Gate. We had no particular destination in mind. It was a bright, windy day, and I liked watching Christopher handle the car. Christopher liked cars—I don’t; possibly because of the Workshop days. The bridge rushed at us, and the sky seemed to descend, and the water was at our feet. Christopher laughed, and looked at me, then looked around him. “This could be so beautiful,” he said, “for all of us.”
“Yes,” I said. Then, “But all I want is for you to live.”
“Alone?” he asked.
I did not know what he meant.
“Alone?” he repeated. “Walking over the bodies of the dead? Is that what you want for me, Leo? Is that what you mean when you say you want me to live?” He looked out over the bay again. “Look. I’m a young cat. I’ve already been under the feet of horses, and I’ve already been beaten by chains. Well. You want me to keep on going under the feet of horses?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me. We swung off the bridge, and ended up in some fishing town, the name of which I don’t remember. We entered the town, very slowly: “If you don’t want me to keep going under the feet of horses,” Christopher said, now with his dreadful distinctness, his muffled urgency, “and I know that you love me and you don’t want no blood on my hands—dig—but if you don’t want me to keep on going under the feet of horses, then I think you got to agree that we need us some guns. Right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I see that.” He parked the car. I looked out over the water. There was a terrible weight on my heart—for a moment I was afraid that I was about to collapse again. I watched his black, proud profile. “But we’re outnumbered, you know.”
He laughed, and turned off the motor. “Shit. So were the early Christians.”
That evening, Barbara and Pete put us on the plane to New York. Caleb met us at the plane, with Louise, and one of the children, growing up now, a perfectly respectable, black family—and respectable, mainly, because their name was mine. As we say in America, nothing succeeds like success—so much for the black or white, the related respectability. Christopher and my father and I spent a day together, walking through Harlem. They looked very much like each other, both big, both black, both laughing. Then, I went away to Europe, alone. Then, I came back. I first did the movie, Big Deal, not a very good movie, really, and then I did a new play, and so found myself, presently, standing in the wings again, waiting for my cue.
NEW YORK, ISTANBUL, SAN FRANCISCO, 1965–1967
JAMES BALDWIN
James Baldwin was born in 1924. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987.
ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Giovanni’s Room (1956)
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Another Country (1962)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon) (1964)
Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)
Going to Meet the Man (1965)
The Amen Corner (1968)
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)
One Day When I Was Lost (1972)
No Name in the Street (1972)
If Beale Street Could Talk (1973)
The Devil Finds Work (1976)
Little Man
, Little Man (with Yoran Cazac) (1976)
Just Above My Head (1979)
The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)
Jimmy’s Blues (1985)
The Price of the Ticket (1985)
ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN
THE AMEN CORNER
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when her estranged husband, Luke, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. The Amen Corner is an uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.
Drama
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at their most elemental and sublime.
Fiction/Literature
BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a “boy” like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. In Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
Fiction/Literature
THE DEVIL FINDS WORK
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.
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