Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

A yellow light hung around her, the light from the streetlamps and a dimmer light from the vestibule behind her. Both hope and bewilderment stared out of those eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what I said, little sister.”

  She said, “Listen. You can tell when someone loves you.”

  “Can you?”

  Since I wouldn’t let go her hand, she couldn’t turn away from me, but she turned her face away.

  “Can you, Julia? Can you?”

  She said nothing, kept looking away. She looked down the dark street.

  I watched her. I said, “Now, take me, for example—”

  Astoundingly, the words, take me rang and rang. She turned her head, and looked at me.

  I moved up the one step, still holding her hand, and stood beside her. The streets were empty, except for us.

  I said, “For example. In my case—”

  She tried to smile. “Yes? In your case?”

  “What would you do, in my case—to keep from making me think I loved you?”

  “Oh. Hall—”

  “Don’t Hall me. What would you do?”

  “This is the first time you’ve seen me—since—” She tried to move; I held on. “Hall. Please.”

  “It’s the first time you’ve seen me, too,” I said. She looked away. “This is not the first time—since—whatever happened. Maybe I don’t care what happened. Maybe I think that whatever happened is something you and I can handle. Maybe I think that what may happen is more important than what has happened. I know this: this is the very first time that you and I have ever seen each other.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. She looked down. I put one fist, very gently, under her chin, and tilted her face upward to look into my own. Then I saw in her eyes hope, bewilderment, and fear.

  “That’s true,” she said. “That means that you don’t know me.”

  “I want to know you. Don’t you want to know me?”

  She took one hand away, and opened her handbag. “It’s late. I’ve got an early morning.”

  “Okay. I’ll climb the mountain with you.”

  She opened the front door, and we started up those steep stairs. We walked side by side.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “You don’t know where I’ve been, what I’ve done—you don’t know what I’ve been.”

  “Keep talking, mama. You going to have to serve me a drink when we get up yonder.”

  She giggled. “We’ll wake up Jimmy.”

  “You using up the last of your oxygen, old married lady from Timbuktu.”

  We laughed together, and reached the first landing. I said, “Jimmy won’t mind if we wake him up.”

  I wanted to take her in my arms but I was afraid—afraid that she would be afraid. We started climbing again. I said, “I don’t want you to think that I expected Jimmy to find me there when he wakes up. This morning. But you got to think about what I said because I meant what I said. If I can make you happy, and I would dig making you happy, then I’ll be a happy man, baby, and Jimmy will be happy, too.” She said nothing. We reached her door. I kissed her lightly on the forehead, on the lips. She watched me with those trusting eyes. “Think about it.”

  She turned and put the key in the lock. I put one hand on her arm.

  “Will you think about it?”

  She said, so low I could hardly hear her, “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  “Do you promise?”

  Then she turned to me and smiled and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Yes. I promise.”

  “Then unlock the door, woman, and let’s try not to wake up your brother—at least not right away.”

  She opened the door very quietly, and switched on the light. The wide, long loft was utterly still; but Julia listened for a moment before she threw her handbag on the sofa.

  “Ah, Jimmy’s home.” She grinned. “Sit down. Let’s have a drink.”

  I sat down. I wondered, then I didn’t wonder, how she knew Jimmy was home. The first bedroom door was closed: perhaps it would have been open if he were not at home. But it wasn’t, on the other hand, a matter of signals, not a code to be deciphered, broken—she knew, simply, that he was home because she would certainly have known if he wasn’t. She was behind me, at the bar. I felt, in her curious tranquillity, menaced, as I feared, or confirmed, as I hoped, by my presence, that she knew Jimmy was home because, otherwise, she would not be home, would not peacefully be preparing two drinks. It is true that I then heard a faint snore from beyond the closed door of the first bedroom: but I could not possibly have heard this if she had not already known that I might.

  It was now a quarter to two in the morning. She came back and handed me my drink, took hers, and sat down on the sofa opposite me.

  I looked at her and lifted my glass and she lifted hers.

  “Welcome home,” she said, and we touched glasses, looking each other in the eye.

  And I was suddenly in torment. With no warning, my prick suddenly stretched, thundering upward against my shorts, my trousers, reaching for my navel: reaching for her. This was not at all like the familiar swelling created by the anticipation of a more or less calculated conquest, not at all. I could not remember ever having been so violently shaken before—perhaps I never had been. The past drowned in that moment, it was as though I had no past. It was terror that I felt, a terror both warm and icy. It was not merely that I felt at the mercy of my cock, but that my cock, all of me, was at the mercy of a force unnameable, and why do I say mercy? This force had no mercy. I shifted on the sofa, more unhappy than a boy trying not to wet his pants, and, before I knew it, I had said, “Julia. Julia. Please welcome me home. Please.”

  It is rare that a cry is heard, and I think we l’ve forever those who hear the cry. Julia looked at me. Even today, until the day I die, in a way that has nothing to do with Ruth, whom I had not yet met (and yet, this moment prepared me for her!) and my children, not yet dreamed of, and Birmingham, and Peanut, and all those other corpses, and Arthur, my God, my God, my God, my God, I remember how Julia looked at me, and set her glass down on the table and stood up.

  “Write down your phone number—I know you got a phone number, Mr. Young Executive! Is it listed?—so Jimmy will know where to find me and, while you doing that, I’ll find a toothbrush.” She laughed, then she sat back down and took my hand in hers. “I’m difficult,” she said, “but I’m not evil. You and me can stay here together any night but tonight you understand—I don’t want Jimmy to find out.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders. Lord. Lord. Lord. I didn’t move, but I trembled. Lord. She trusted me.

  “I just want to tell him, myself. I think that’s fair—okay?”

  I said, “Okay.”

  She started to rise. I didn’t know that I was going to do it, but I put one hand on her wrist and pulled her to me. I was then invaded by her odor. She entered me: love is a two-way street. I put my arms around her, she put her arms around me. I had never, never, been held that way, never. I kissed her, or, rather, I sighed myself into her. She held me, then I looked into her eyes.

  I said, “If you can find me a piece of paper, mama, I got a pencil.”

  “I thought,” she said, “you’d have a fountain pen by now,” and we laughed, I let her go, and she stood up.

  I did have a fountain pen. She brought me a piece of paper, and I scribbled my name and address on it. She scribbled above it, Am with Hall. Love, Julia, and put the piece of paper in the center of the table, weighing it down with the clock.

  She looked at me again, disappeared, and came back with a small overnight bag. I took it from her. She opened the door and turned out the lights and locked the door behind her and we went on down the stairs.

  For a wonder, we got a taxi right away, and we went to my place on West End Avenue, in the Seventies.

  And, now—now, I find myself before many things I do not want to face. I feel a dread reluctance deep inside me and I would end my story here, if I could. But—what
is coming is always, already on the road and cannot be avoided.

  Some days after Julia and I had begun, as we now say, to “make it”—and several years before we could face what we meant to each other—Arthur came in from Canada with his nappy-headed self. He had been very successful in Canada, and very happy—one of the reasons that he was so nappy-headed: he hadn’t had time to do more than wash and comb his hair. He was now, decidedly, tall, and not only from the paranoid view of the older brother. He was tall and rangy and would remain, for the rest of his days, too thin.

  Anyway, he had a pad way downtown on Dey Street, where his practicing didn’t bother the neighbors because he didn’t have any. When he dropped his bags at his pad and ran a comb through his hair, he called our father and mother, who told him I was back in the city and would probably like to see him. And so he put down the comb with which he had still been combing his hair, and called me.

  “Hey! how you doing?”

  “If this is a collect call from Canada, operator, would you please reverse the charges?”

  “Don’t be like that. I’ll pay you when I see you.”

  “And when you counting on seeing me, brother?”

  “You want to look at your calendar while I look at my calendar? I don’t know about you, brother, but I’m booked.”

  “About time. What you doing, oh, in the next five minutes? I believe I can steal five minutes because I have been booked. I’ll steal five minutes for you, you understand, but you going to have to shake your ass.”

  “Shaking it right now, brother. Here I come.” Then, “Love you”

  “Love you, too.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Right. In a minute.”

  I hung up, and looked around my pad. I never quite knew what I was doing on West End Avenue, but that’s another story. This was a Saturday. Julia and I were not yet living together—that was to come, so much was to come—but we spent a lot of time together. Jimmy had keys to both our doors, and pranced in and out—mainly, as it seemed to me then, in and out of our Frigidaires. All I really remember of Jimmy, then, is sneakers, beer, sandwiches, and ice cream. He was always eating; his legs seemed to grow by the hour. I did not, then, recognize this riot as his happiness. The keys to our houses, which he sometimes threw in the air and caught with one hand were, for him, the keys to the kingdom. He saw his sister as happy and himself as mightily protected. He had her and he had me, and, as to that, I will tell you now, he was absolutely right. But I did not know if Julia and I really had each other. Jimmy could believe that I made his sister happy, and again, as to that, he may have been closer to the truth than I: I couldn’t have known that, then. We both had too much to do.

  And I loved her. She made me happy: but I was beginning to be too old to trust the ease sleeping behind that word: happiness. I was being forced to see that real love involves real perception and that perception can bring joy, or terror, or death, but it will never abandon you to the dream of happiness. Love is perceiving and perception is anguish.

  So I learned, for mighty example, and long before Julia told me, how she had made the money to bring her brother and herself out of New Orleans. I was looking at ceilings, she told me, much later—while men pounded themselves into her, less brutally, after all, than her father had, and she picked up the money and took it home and put it aside. She had taken it all on: she had taken on too much. So I had said, and so I was to say again, until my heart was broken: but, in the meantime, there was Jimmy, lying on the sofa, with his sneakers on.

  There was, also, Arthur, now, leaning on the doorbell. I buzzed him in. I lived on the fifth floor. I walked to my door, and opened it and stood in the doorway, waiting to see Arthur erupt from the elevator, which was a long way down the hall.

  Here he came, presently, loping like a heathen, bright and sharp in a beige gabardine suit. Nappy-headed, grinning, with those eyes, and all those teeth. Seeing him was always new: I always wondered if he still liked me. A childish wonder, true, but not uncommon. His elegance was scarcely at all compromised by his adolescent lope and the fact that he was carrying a large shopping bag.

  He got to the door and put the bag in my hand, then kissed me on the cheek.

  “Contraband from Canada,” he said. “Blazing hot. Close the door, I think I’m being followed.”

  I closed the door, laughing. “You are a fool. You know that?”

  “Well. I can’t say I haven’t been told.”

  I put the shopping bag on the sofa. He walked around the living room, then stopped and looked at me.

  “You look great, I’m glad to see you. What’s been happening?”

  “Nothing new. Well. A couple of things I’ll tell you about. How was Canada? You want a drink?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have a little taste—here,” and he picked up the shopping bag, and we walked into the kitchen. He started unloading the bag. He had brought down cigars, a carton of cigarettes, a tin of ham, and bottles of whiskey and vodka and gin. He put all this on my kitchen table and he was, really, a little like a child who had managed to steal this contraband and bring it all on home.

  “Canada was beautiful,” he said. He looked at me, with that smile. “Pour us a drink,” and he handed me the vodka, “while I go to the bathroom. I’ll tell you about it. And then, you got to tell me something. You know—we ain’t seen each other in a while.”

  He went to the bathroom. I made drinks for both of us. I heard him singing to himself in the bathroom.

  He came back, and we sat down in the two easy chairs near the window. This big window was the nicest thing in the apartment I lived in then. Not much could be seen from this window except the houses across the street, and the street itself, if you sort of leaned up and looked down. Still, one sensed the nearby river and one was aware of the sky and the light changed all the time.

  “So—? Tell me about Canada.”

  “I had the feeling that they hadn’t heard anybody like me up there. Of course that’s not true, they must have heard just about everybody. But, look like, they hadn’t seen anybody like me. They damn sure didn’t want to let me go.” He smiled. “It was nice.”

  I watched his face. “What kind of places did you sing in?”

  He grinned. “I might be wrong, brother, but I had the feeling that niggers didn’t put down roots in Canada the way it happened here.” He sipped his vodka, which was straight, over ice. “I might be wrong. You got to remember, there was a whole lot of shit I didn’t see, because I was on the road. But—it was different. It was nice, like I say, but it was different.” He took another sip of his drink, frowning. “I just didn’t see as many of us. I didn’t see as many churches—their churches are different. I sang in civic centers, you know, and some white churches, and”—he laughed—”a football stadium, and, you know?”—his proud, astonished eyes now searching mine—”it was full, that stadium was damn near full, there was ump-teen thousand people there, baby, and it was beautiful, I left them rocking to the gospel as I went off, they might have stayed there all night, for all I know.” He laughed. “I had to get to my hotel and get some sleep because I was off again in the morning.”

  He paused again, narrowing his eyes, looking through my window at the buildings across the street. “Maybe that’s what I mean when I say I had the feeling that they hadn’t seen nobody like me before. They seemed so—surprised—you know what I mean? Anyway,” and he put his drink down on the table before us, “I hadn’t seen anybody like them, either, and it was something, I think it was good for me, to sing before such a strange audience. They react”—clasping his hands together, looking at me—“in such strange places, it throws you, you don’t know where you are. Then—well, you go with it—you have to go with it—and you find out things.” He nodded his head, looking down, like an old man talking to himself. “It was nice. I didn’t see a lot of niggers. But I saw some Indians.”

  “How’d you get along?”

  “We got on fine. I had the feeling—you know??
??that we were learning something from each other. And some of those cats, man, they know more about what’s happening in the States, with Martin Luther King, and Malcolm—man, they knew more than I know. I just listened to them, and I’m real glad I was up there.”

  “Spreading the gospel,” I said, and smiled.

  He looked at me as though he were afraid that I was making fun of him, but then he saw that I wasn’t. “Well, yes,” he said finally. “Maybe. But, to tell you the truth, I never thought of it that way before.” He frowned and grinned. “I never had to listen to other people listening to it before. So, I began to hear something because I was listening to them listen—does that make sense?” And again, he grinned and frowned, looking into my yes.

  “It makes perfect sense to me,” I said. “But, really, you’ve been doing that—listening, I mean—ever since you started singing. You’re just beginning to realize it.”

  He was leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. He said, “Daddy always told me that.” Then, “And I played piano for myself—accompanied myself—much more than I ever had before, just like Daddy said I would. I had to,” and he looked at me with a wonder at once personal and remote, “because, you know, it’s another beat they got up yonder. And I can’t really find the words for what I’m trying to say—it’s like another—pulse—the beat inside the beat.”

  He rose and seemed to prowl, like a hunter, as though whatever was eluding him was certainly quivering somewhere in this room.

  “I’d be up there, you know, singing, and the cats behind me would be keeping time—but—they couldn’t-anticipate—you know, when you leap from one place to another—they couldn’t be with me, I was alone—oh, brother, you’ve heard it all your life, like me, but I don’t know how to say it—the changes some of the old church choirs could ring on ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ make you hold your breath and you’d hold your breath until they let you know you could let it out—” he turned to me, and grinned, his hands spread wide—“you know, like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith can just leave a note hanging somewhere while they go across town and take care of business and come back just in time and grab that note and swing out with it to someplace you had no idea they were going—and carry you with them, that’s when you say Amen! and Mahalia can do that, too, and Cleveland, and some of those people I heard down South, and”—he grimaced, and walked to the window, hands on hips—“quiet as it’s kept, Miles and Dizzy and Yardbird, and”—pointing a triumphant finger at me—“Miss Marian Anderson, baby, people say she can’t sing spirituals but she can damn sure make Brahms sound like that’s all he wrote.” He turned from the window. “I better have another drink,” and he grinned. “You must think I’m going crazy.”