Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
JUST ABOVE MY HEAD
James Baldwin was born and educated in New York. Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, was published in 1953. Evoking brilliantly his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, it was an immediate success and was followed by Giovanni’s Room, which explores the theme of homosexual love in a sensitive and compelling way. Another Country (1963) created something of a literary explosion and was followed in 1964 by two non-fiction books, Nobody Knows My Name and Notes of a Native Son, which contain several of the stories and essays that brought him fame in America. Nobody Knows My Name was selected by the American library Association as one of the outstanding books of its year. Going to Meet the Man was James Baldwin’s first collection of stories. He also published several collections of essays, including The Fire Next Time (1963), Nothing Personal (1964), No Name in the Street (1971), The Devil Finds Work (1976) and Evidence of Things Not Seen (1983), and wrote two plays, The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mr Charlie (1965). His later novels include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Little Man, Little Man (1975). Many of his books are published by Penguin.
James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987.
The Times obituary declared, The best of his work … stands comparison with any of its period to come out of the United States,’ while Newsweek described him as ’an angry writer, yet his intelligence was so provoking and his sentences so elegant that he quickly became the black writer that white liberals liked to fear’.
Books by James Baldwin
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Notes of a Native Son
Giovanni’s Room
Nobody Knows My Name
Another Country
The Fire Next Time
Nothing Personal
(with Richard Avedon)
Blues for Mister Charlie
Going to Meet the Man
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
The Amen Corner
A Rap on Race
(with Margaret Mead)
No Name in the Street
A Dialogue
(with Nikki Giovanni)
One Day When I Was Lost
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Devil Finds Work
Little Man, Little Man. A Story of Childhood
(with Yoran Cazac)
JAMES BALDWIN
JUST ABOVE MY HEAD
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Michael Joseph 1979
Published in Penguin Books 1994
Copyright © James Baldwin, 1978,1979
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Portions of this book first appeared in Penthouse
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196380-8
Contents
BOOK ONE: Have Mercy
BOOK TWO: Twelve Gates to the City
BOOK THREE: The Gospel Singer
BOOK FOUR: Stepchild
BOOK FIVE: The Gates of Hell
For
My brothers,
George
Wilmer
and
David
and my sisters,
Barbara
Gloria
Ruth
Elizabeth
and
Paula Maria
and
Bernard Hassell
and
Max Petrus
Daniel
saw the stone
that was
hewed out the mountain.
Daniel
saw the stone
that was
rolled into Babylon.
Daniel
saw the stone
that was
hewed out the mountain,
tearing down
the kingdom of this world!
TRADITIONAL
BOOK ONE
Have Mercy
Work: for the night is coming.
TRADITIONAL
THE damn’d blood burst, first through his nostrils, then pounded through the veins in his neck, the scarlet torrent exploded through his mouth, it reached his eyes and blinded him, and brought Arthur down, down, down, down, down.
The telephone call did not go into these details, neither did the telegram: urgently demanding my arrival because my brother was dead. The laconic British press merely noted that a “nearly forgotten Negro moaner and groaner” (this is how the British press described my brother) had been found dead in a men’s room in the basement of a London pub. No one told me how he died. The American press noted the passing of an “emotion-filled” gospel singer, dead at the untidy age of thirty-nine.
He had been losing his hair, that rain forest of Senegalese hair, I knew that. Jimmy had not been with him; Jimmy had been waiting for him in Paris, to bring him home. Julia had been clearing up their rooms in her house in Yonkers.
I: sat by the telephone. I looked at the marvel of human effort, the telephone. The telephone beside my bed was black—like me, I think I thought, God knows why I thought it, if I did. The telephone in the bathroom was gray. The telephone in the kitchen was blue, light blue.
The sun was shining that morning, like I’ve never known the sun to shine before.
He had been found lying in a pool of blood—why does one say a pool?—a storm, a violence, a miracle of blood: his blood, my brother’s blood, my brother’s blood, my brother’s blood! My blood, my brother’s blood, my blood, Arthur’s blood, soaking into the sawdust of some grimy men’s room in the filthy basement of some filthy London pub.
Oh. No. Arthur. I think I laughed. I think I couldn’t cry. My brother.
The house was empty. Ruth was out shopping, Tony and Odessa were at school: it was a Thursday morning.
My brother. Do you know, friend, how a brother loves his brother, how mighty, how unanswerable it is to be confronted with the truth beneath that simple word? Simple. Word. Yes. No. Everything becomes unanswerable, unreadable, in the face of an event yet more unimaginable than one’s own death. It is one’s death, occurring far beyond the confines of one’s imagination. Or, surely, far beyond the confines of my imagination. And do you know, do you know, how much my brother loved me? how much he loved me! And do you know I did not know it? did not dare to know it: do you know? No. No. No.
I looked and looked and looked at the telephone: I looked at the telephone and I looked at the telephone. The telephone was silent. This was the black telephone. I stumbled to the gray telephone, in the bathroom. Perhaps I thought that it might have mercy on me if I humbled myself on the toilet. Nothing came out of me, not even water, and the ph
I did not cry. Nothing came out of me, not even water. I stood, as dumb and naked as a horse, under the shower. I dried myself, and I shaved—very very slowly, very very carefully: I was shaving someone else. I looked into my eyes: they were someone else’s eyes. I combed my hair. The phone did not ring. Soon I would have to pick it up and dial a number and get on a plane. London Bridge is falling down. My fair lady.
Ruth found me naked, flat on my back, on the bathroom floor, my razor in my hand: and the phone was ringing.
Two years ago: if Arthur were alive now, he would be approaching forty-one. I am the older brother, and I will be forty-eight this year.
My name is Hall: Hall: Montana. I was born in California, but Arthur was born in New York and we grew up in New York.
Our father, Paul, died several years back—died, I think, from having crossed a continent to find himself in New York. He had been born in Tallahassee, grew up in New Orleans, and had had a rough, rough time in California. He died, anyway, while Arthur was still Arthur, thank God; he split the scene before Arthur started down. Florence, our mother, once Arthur was in the ground, went back to New Orleans—where she and Paul had met—and she’s staying there now, with one of her younger sisters. Ruth, and myself, and the kids try to make it down there for a couple of weeks every summer, and sometimes I bring Mama up here, for Christmas. But she doesn’t like it up here. Maybe she never did—but now, when she visits, I can feel her flinching. She doesn’t say anything, the pain is at the very bottom of her eyes. I catch it sometimes, when she’s just sitting still, looking at television or looking out of the window, or sometimes, when she’s walking along the street. She doesn’t like to go to church up here. She says that the people don’t have any spirit, that their religion ain’t nothing but noise and show: they’ve lost the true religion. That may be true. I don’t go to church myself. But even if what she says is true, and I remember, too, how these people treated Arthur when he branched out from gospel, that’s not the reason. Any church up here might have Jesus on the main line all day and all night long, and Mama would never so lower herself as to go anywhere near that phone. No, never. She doesn’t like this city because it robbed her of her son, and she feels that the people in the church, when they turned against him, became directly responsible for his death. She goes to church down home, though, where she can grieve and pray, away from all the spiteful people whose tongues so lacerated her boy. She can sing to herself, without fear of being mocked, and find strength and solace in the song that says, They didn’t know who you were. And she’s not singing about Jesus then, she’s singing about her son. Maybe all gospel songs begin out of blasphemy and presumption—what the church would call blasphemy and presumption: out of entering God’s suffering, and making it your own, out of entering your suffering and challenging God Almighty to have or to give or to withhold mercy. There will be two of us at the mercy seat: my Lord, and I!
Two years ago: and I have never really talked about it: not to Ruth, not to my children, Tony and Odessa (who love their uncle), not to Julia, not to Jimmy: and they can’t talk about it until I can talk.
I know I’m wrong to trap them in my silence. Maybe it’s partly because I was Arthur’s manager. I had to talk about him for years, living, and then, dead, as a property, as a star: I had to protect him because Lord have mercy that nappy-headed mother did not know how to protect himself. That made me afraid that I’d lose him as my brother: that he would think that I also thought of him as the can of beans anybody could buy and which everybody sold—and down the river, baby, at a mighty handsome profit.
I don’t think that he thought of me that way. I know he didn’t. If he had, he would have died much sooner. I know it because I know that he never tried to hide anything from me, though sometimes, he tried to protect me, too. I know I loved him, and he knew it; with all my heart, I loved him; even when he made me so mad sometimes that I felt like I wanted to beat his brains out. He made his life so hard! Well. That’s not true, either. He lived the life he lived, like anybody, I guess, and he paid his dues, like everybody. Maybe what I mean when I say, he made his life so hard was that he always tried to pay his dues in front. That isn’t always possible: it can even be called a bad habit. Maybe some dues are paid. Some dues may be just a bad memory; but you can’t really take that for granted unless you can trust your memory. The truth, anyway, is that I wouldn’t really give a shit about all these abstract speculations if I weren’t trying to talk about my brother. He was on stage. He caught the light, and so I saw him: more clearly than I will ever see myself.
I had this dream this morning, this Sunday morning, just as I was beginning to come up out of the cave of sleep, just at the moment, down in that cave, I heard Ruth sigh and turn toward me and, in my sleep, but beginning to rise up out of it, I turned toward her.
But the dream still held me. Me and Arthur and Jimmy and Julia were all someplace together, some insane place, like Disneyland, or Coney Island. But the children weren’t with us. It was night, and Jimmy said something to Arthur, something funny, which I didn’t catch, because, at that exact moment, I felt Ruth move.
I kind of shifted my weight, so that Ruth could move as she pleased, closer to me, closer: I was waiting. Waiting. Arthur answered Jimmy, and Julia held between them a doughnut covered with white icing, and Ruth put her head on my chest, and my hand got tangled in Ruth’s hair. Julia threw the doughnut way up in the air and then my mother came along—she was carrying some breakfast dishes—and she said, You better let that doughnut stay up yonder, where it belongs. You don’t know doughnuts like I know doughnuts. Then we all went away to the country. I was in a wagon, going up a hill. There were lots of trees on the hill. Arthur was in the road, with his big shoes flapping in the dust. He was running to catch up with the wagon. He was just a little boy, about five, and he was crying, and snot was coming out his nose. I was trying to stop the wagon, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t make the driver hear me. Every time I tried to crawl to the back of the wagon to bang on the window of the cab and beg the driver to stop and let me pick up my brother, the truck shook and zigzagged all over the road and it threw me from side to side.
Arthur was still running and crying and the trees were moving right behind him: some trees had moved right up close beside him and a few trees were a little bit ahead of him. I decided to jump off the wagon and grabbed for a tree to break my fall, but the tree moved aside. I grabbed for another tree, but this tree knocked me back against the cab window. I was determined to jump and I crawled forward on my face and belly to the front of the wagon, but then, the truck leaped upward, starting down a steep hill, throwing me all the way back again. The trees were laughing: I could still hear Arthur screaming. I crawled up, up, up to the very edge of the wagon and the wagon rushed down this hill and then water rose over my head, gray, salty water. M