“You think I’m going to be famous?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do!” and, for the first time, I felt that it was as though a cold wind blew, for an instant, between Arthur and myself: into this void rushed the sound of the jukebox and the voices of the people at the bar.
And Arthur raised his eyes and looked out over the bar, as though he were seeing something for the first time, as though he were hearing a new sound.
I was facing Arthur, my back was to the bar, and so I could not see what he was seeing. Well: there was the gray-haired man, with the yellow teeth, and the foolish grin, who had been standing at the end of the bar as we entered, both hands wrapped around his glass, leaning inward, wearing a torn, black raincoat. Seated on the stool next to him was a heavy black lady, with long, curling, bright red hair, and deep purple lipstick, which made her lips look bruised. She seemed to be more than acquainted with, and to be hoping to escape from, the gray-haired man: his patience, though, was probably as ruthless as his grin. Next to this discontent stood a high yellow dude, in a brown suit, staring into his drink, and ignoring, equally (with an equal effort) the lady of the bruised lips and the tall man standing next to him; who wore a bright mustard jacket, suggesting tweed, and had an unlit pipe, eyeglasses brighter than the wrath of God, a long chin, and heavy rings flashing from compulsive fingers: he tapped his feet in the same way, to no particular music. Two girls and two boys stood next to him, as high as they were weary, playing the jukebox, while waiting for a change in the weather. A fat man stood all alone, nursing a beer. A silent girl sat next to him, wearing a yellow blouse and a long, blue skirt. Two schoolteacher types stood against the wall, chattering and grinning, and very aware of the tall boy in the corduroy pants, who stood alone at the bar, and who seemed to be a friend of the bartender’s—the bartender was short, round, and cheerful, with a mustache, and he and the tall boy talked together, whenever the bartender was free. A woman and a man sat silently together, near the window, the rain falling endlessly behind them. The barmaid talked to everyone and saw everything, moved placidly behind the bar, rinsing glasses, checking stock, sometimes sending the bartender into the basement, for this or that. The music played, endlessly, as endlessly as the rain fell. The voices rose and fell like a river, a swollen river, searching the dam. The bottles glittered like malice against the crowded mirror. The cash register clanged, at intervals, like a bell alerting prisoners to judgment, or release. The door kept opening and closing, people entered and people left, but mainly, people entered. The dock on the wall said quarter past two. There was a pencil portrait of Malcolm X beneath it.
Arthur looked back at me.
“Well,” he said, “whatever it is—you’ll see me through it, won’t you? I got nobody but you.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
He grinned. I felt that the grin hurt him, and it hurt me. “It’s true. You, you’ve got Ruth, and, now, you’ve got little Tony, lying up there in his name tag and his diapers—but me, I’ve only got you.” He grinned again, a brighter grin this time. “Don’t be upset. My demands are very modest.”
“Baby, do you know that you are full of shit?”
“That is no way to talk to a gospel singer.”
We both started laughing. “Buy me another drink, you stupid motherfucker; hanging out with you, man, I better get drunk.”
“Right. And you—we—have a new life to celebrate.”
He looked toward the bar, and, as though she had been waiting for this light from the lighthouse, the barmaid immediately appeared.
“Now I warned you,” she said, picking up the glasses, “to be careful about that voice.”
“It’s all right. I’m with my brother.”
She did not exactly smile, but she looked at me again, and then looked back at Arthur. “He the only brother you got?”
“That’s right.”
Then she looked at me. “Don’t you worry about it, then.”
• • •
We went, eventually, from the poor bar—and the rain kept pouring down—into the after-hours joint, in a cellar, somewhere way west on 118th Street, where everyone knew Arthur. Or, so it seemed to me. This was one of the very last times I was ever to be confused as to who knew Arthur, and who didn’t. It was one of the very last times I was ever to allow myself to get drunk when I was out with Arthur. It was the first time I ever watched my brother in a world which was his, not mine. I was drunk that night, and I knew that Arthur was trying to show me something, something which I might not have been able to see if I had not been drunk.
Or, if Tony had not been born two nights before. That joy and wonder and terror and pride surged and danced in me that night, making my life new, making my brother new. It was incredible to me that the first time I had seen him, he had been as helpless and tiny and furious as Tony was now, his eyes as tightly closed, his fists and legs as futile, every inch of him resisting the violence of his meeting with the air.
BOOK TWO
Twelve Gates to the City
Come on in the Lord’s house:
It’s going to rain.
TRADITIONAL
“MY text, this morning,” Julia said, “comes from the Psalms of David. Please turn, with me, to the Thirty-first Psalm, and we will all read together the twenty-first verse.”
She was dressed all in white, and standing on a platform which was hidden by the pulpit. This was a special, collapsible platform, constructed by her father, and she looked at him as she stood there, and as he stood up to read. The hidden platform looked like a wooden box, with a rope handle. When her father opened it, with his boyish flourish, the box became a platform with one short step, and the rope handle became a handrail, sometimes painted gold. This contraption, and her father, traveled with Julia everywhere: and made Julia’s appearance in the pulpit seem mystical, as though she were being lifted up.
Her mother and father were before her, in the front row, with Jimmy restless between them. They hadn’t long arrived from New Orleans, and our mother and father had known Julia’s grandmother. We sat right behind them, our mother and father, and Arthur and me, on a Sunday morning. It was weird to have been dragged out to this church to hear a child, who was nine years old, preach the Gospel. Somebody was jiving the public, and I knew it had to be her father and mother, who surely did not look holy to me.
Julia’s mother put up the better show, though her hats were flaunting, and her skirts were tight. She had one beautiful ass, and high, tight, demanding breasts, and long legs, and she always wore high heels—just to make sure you didn’t miss those legs. When she got happy, she would stroke her breasts, and I would watch her thighs and her legs and that ass of hers as she started to shout, and I would get such a hopeless, unregenerate, eighteen-year-old hard-on in the holy place that you could certainly hear this sinner moan.
Her father made very little pretense—he didn’t have to, being her father. He was the zoot-suited stud of studs—a mild zoot suit, driving ladies wild wondering what he’d be like wild. He had the cruel, pearly teeth, and the short, black, tickling mustache, and that grin of the sinner man just waiting for the touch which would bring him salvation, and thick, curly, good black hair. His eyes were like Mexican eyes, and he seemed, in all things, indolent, waiting for you to come to him.
I was not the only one who would see all this change, but, at that time, Brother Miller had the world in a jug and the stopper in his lean brown hand.
The church was packed, for a child evangelist was, after all, something in the nature of a holy freak-show, and also, something more than that, something which spoke of the promise and the prophecy fulfilled. And this child came from the Deep South, which we, the children, had never seen but which all our parents remembered, with yearning and fear and pain.
She was a small child, darker than her father, with hair coarser than his, hair now mainly covered by the crocheted holy cap. Her father’s eyes were bright. Her eyes were dark, flashing, and seemed unbelievably anci
ent in the tiny, untouched face. Arthur said she was a witch, and could put a spell on you, or else she was a dwarf about a hundred years old, and Brother and Sister Miller had stolen her from Egypt.
She did not sound like a child as she read, and we read behind her—and I still remember feeling very strange, as though I were making, simply by the sound of my voice, some relentless, mysteriously dangerous vow:
“Blessed be the Lord,” we read, “for he has shown me his marvelous kindness in a strong city.”
Her father sat down—he always stood to read, the congregation sat—and she stared out over us, suddenly very far above us, something like a high priestess, that was true, from some other time and place.
“Amen!” said Julia. “Now that was David talking. You all know who David was? David wrote these psalms and I believe they was put to music in the olden times and the people just sang and made a joyful noise unto the Lord with the psalms. This is David talking, and you know who David was? Well, David went out, one day, looking for this wicked giant, looking for this big, terrible looking, wicked giant had everybody in the neighborhood scared to death of him, this giant they called Goliath, and little David went out with his slingshot one day, and he slew this wicked giant! You all still don’t know who David was? David was a shepherd boy, he fed the hungry sheep! I hear some of you saying, Who was this David? tell me more about this David! Well, David was a King—you hear them call King David, and the multitudes bowed low, oh, yes! I hear somebody asking, who was this David? Well, let me tell you, this David had a son, and this son went a-stray, he was running through the forest, trying to hide from the wrath of God, and this son had all this long, beautiful hair, I believe he was mighty proud of his hair now, and the Lord just let all that beautiful hair get all tangled up with the vines and the bushes and the thorns from the trees and David’s son died there, trying to hide from the wrath of God, and we hear David going down on his knees, crying out loud, crying like a baby, church, I can hear him crying, can you hear him crying now, church? King David humbled on his knees, crying, crying, ‘oh, my God, I wish you would have let me die for my son, I wish you would have let me die in my son’s place,’ oh, hear King David crying, ‘my son, my son’! Now you want to know something more about David? I believe I’ll tell you just a little bit more about King David this morning! The Lord put His hands on David—out of the house of David, comes our Savior, Christ, the Lord!”
Whatever she was doing, she surely wasn’t jiving: and that church seemed just about ready to take off and meet Jesus in the middle of the air. She couldn’t move and pace the pulpit like a grown-up preacher, because you wouldn’t be able to see her once she stepped down off that box. And yet, she moved as I have seen few people move, her hands, those eyes, those shoulders, that pulsing neck, and the voice which could not be issuing from a tiny, nine-year-old girl. For me, there was something terrifying about it, as terrifying as hearing the dumb stones speak, or being present at the raising of the dead. For, if the dead could be awakened, this small child’s voice could do it—but who wants, really, to be present when the dead rise up?
And, while she spoke, the church Amen’d! and cried, Bless your name! and Holy! Holy! and Speak, Lord Jesus!—but, when she paused, the church paused, and a mighty silence trembled then, a mighty music gathered in the silence, waiting to break, like a storm.
Her mother and father were still, and little Jimmy was still. Arthur sat straight up, his mouth open, his eyes wide.
“Now you all getting an idea who David was? David is the one who said, ‘Blessed be the Lord: for He has shown me His marvelous kindness in a strong city’! Oh! a strong city! David is the one who said, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’! David was a shepherd, and I believe he was a good shepherd, he never let his sheep go hungry, amen, and that’s how come he could say, ‘I shall not want’—not even in this strong city! Oh, church, I believe he might have had to eat the bread of affliction sometimes. I believe I can hear him saying, this morning, ‘I will lift mine eyes up to the hills from whence cometh my help.’ I believe I can hear him saying, this morning, ‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers’—can you hear him, church? this morning, in this strong city, Oh, and, yes, I believe I hear him saying, ‘he that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty,’ oh, yes, right here in this strong city! I believe I can see him, looking down the line to Jesus, amen, and crying out, ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’ in this strong city! I believe I can see him walking the streets and riding the subways and mopping the floors, amen! in this strong city, and emptying the garbage pails, and saying ‘Yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’! in this strong city, I believe I hear his babies crying out for bread in this strong city, I believe I hear the wicked laughing in this strong city, just like Goliath might have been laughing when he saw this little boy with nothing but a slingshot, oh, yes, laughing just before he went to meet his Maker, church, oh, yes, you better not be laughing at God’s anointed, ain’t going to be no laughing in front of the judgment seat. One day—”
My heart thundered, and the church, in silence, thundered.
“—one day! we going to wake up in this strong city and see the Lord’s deliverance! Our children won’t be hungry no more! no more! We won’t see the old folks all twisted up with the rheumatism, water running down their face—no more! Blessed be the Lord! for His marvelous kindness, in this strong city. This strong city. Oh, but I hear another voice, this morning, saying, ‘Except the Lord watch the city, the watchman watcheth but in vain’! Don’t you hear that voice, this morning, church? I hear David saying, ‘Clap your hands, all ye people! clap your hands!’ I hear David, saying, ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord’! And, now, I believe I can hear one of David’s kin-folk, old Brother Joshua, marching around the walls of a strong city, blowing his trumpet outside the walls of a strong city, and I hear somebody telling me how the walls of that city come tumbling down. That strong city. I hear David, saying, again, ‘Lift up your heads, oh, ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in’! I hear somebody singing, I cried—!”
My voice answered, and the church answered, “and He delivered me.”
“I cried!”
“and He delivered me.”
“I cried!”
“and He delivered—me. He delivered: my poor soul.”
The floor beneath my feet shook, the very walls seemed to rock, the storm burst in a thunder of hands and feet and the wrath of the piano, the racing—like horses!—of the tambourines, and the people started to shout. Julia stood there, above it, watching, like a high priestess. She had caused this storm, or it had come through her, but she was neither singing nor shouting, and her eyes might have been fixed on Egypt. Her father mounted the pulpit and stood next to her and wiped her brow—and, yes, you could see then, that he loved her—and led her down, out of our sight, to her royal seat up there.
The light in the church seemed very strange to me, and, for the first time, the shouting people scared me. I didn’t even think of watching Sister Miller’s ass the way I had before. Little Jimmy sat alone in a corner, looking the way I felt—I wanted to get out of there. But I knew that Julia and her parents were coming to our house as soon as service was over and it would just not have been very nice of me to run away. So I sat next to my parents, next to Arthur, and just behind Jimmy, watching the redeemed rejoice.
But the redeemed do not seem so irrevocably redeemed when they are no longer standing in the light of the temple. Brother and Sister Miller came to our house, with their son and daughter: a young couple, merely, she very much in love with him, he very much in love with their daughter. They teased each other, and made a great fuss over Julia—who was a beautiful little girl. What surprised me was that she was a very cheerful little girl. She loved to laugh, especially in her daddy’s lap, and her daddy loved to make her laugh. Our mama and daddy—Paul and Florence—fussed over Amy and Julia a
nd Joel, and, to a lesser extent, over Jimmy, who was not cheerful. He was sullen; he was, indeed, left out. Arthur was too old for him, and snubbed him, I was no help, and every time Jimmy’s mother spoke to him, he glanced at her murderously, and seemed to want to run. Julia did not appear to have heard of his existence: she had not yet been given the revelation.
If one wishes to be instructed—not that anyone does—concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one’s head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems. The word, event, has no meaning, except in a ritual sense: in the sense, that is, of a vow, a bowing down low between the earth of the future and the sky of the past: with joy. You cannot see when you look back: too dark behind me. And the song says, merely, with a stunning matter-of-factness, “There’s a light before me. I’m on my way.”
How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon? Memory does not serve me, I had nothing to remember then. Julia was a nine-year-old girl; I was eighteen. I did not know that she would leave the pulpit, turn into a whore and then, the mistress of an African chief, in Abidjan. I did not know that we would become lovers, and that she would become one of the pillars holding up my life. I knew nothing about Arthur, who was then eleven, and less about Jimmy, who was then seven, who would become Arthur’s last and most devoted lover. Who could know that then? Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true—anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other—beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn’t, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you’re out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.
Just Above My Head Page 7
