Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
Paul asks, “What do you guys want to start with?”
Crunch strums the guitar, and suggests “When Was Jesus Born?”
“We don’t need so much work on that,” Arthur says. “We ought to work on ‘O, Come All Ye Faithful’—we ain’t together on that, at all.”
“That’s true,” Peanut says, glumly—being the lead singer on that number.
“Well, I agree,” says Crunch quickly. “I just thought that we could use it to loosen up with, you know, get some fire falling—it’s cold, and ‘Come Ye’ is a cold song.”
“Why you say that, man?” Red asks. “It’s slow, but it ain’t necessarily cold.”
“Oh, we going to pump some heat into it, niggers can pump heat into anything—but the song is cold—‘joyful and triumphant’—I always have a little trouble with that line,” and Crunch grins.
“You don’t feel joyful and triumphant, son?” Paul asks mildly, and grins, striking the opening chord on the piano. “Well, anyway, if that’s the hard one, let’s start with that. How we doing it?”
They are in trouble with the long, solemn opening. They are trying to find a way to make it less solemn and more sacred. Arthur finally substitutes a come on, you all for come ye, which cracks everybody up, and they have to start all over again, but Arthur’s invention has helped.
I can’t describe it, I wasn’t there. It’s futile for me to try to describe it: at bottom, perhaps, I really feel that such an attempt is very close to insolence. I have too much respect for the people out of whom the music comes. Well. By the time I got home, that particular Saturday afternoon, they were well into their final number, “Savior, Don’t Pass Me By.” Arthur sang the lead on this number, and I heard his voice, above all others, as I climbed the stairs.
Paul looked wringing wet, and weary, and his hair was standing up. Now he was following the children, whose voices filled the room:
Savior!
And then, again, Savior!
A pause, then the guitar and the piano, then the soloist, Savior, don’t you pass me by!
All of the voices, forming a kind of rumbling, witness wailing wall: Savior. Savior.
Arthur, alone, eyes closed, meaning every instant of it, beginning high, like a scream, then dropping low, like a whispered prayer, a prayer whispered in a dungeon, don’t you pass me by!
Whatever I know or don’t know, I will never forget the faces I saw that afternoon, as I walked into the room, unnoticed. These were boys, street boys, rough and ugly—in the streets, anyway. They stole, they lied, they fought—they cheated. When they stole, they ran; when they were caught, they lied; when they were beaten, they cursed and cried, they pissed their pants. Yes. I was there. I know. They played handball, football, basketball, boxed, dreamed of becoming champions. They had started to smoke. Some smoked marijuana. Some had gone further than that. They believed that they hated white people, and that’s no wonder. They were far from the hard apprehension that they simply could not endure being despised, far from the knowledge that almost everybody is, could not conceive that the world, or, at least, the world we know, could be so tremendously populated by people who despise each other because each despises himself. No. They dreamed of safety—I was dreaming, too. They could not know that they stood in a kind of timeless and universal danger, being, like all men, the Word made flesh. Thus, they imagined that they hated white people because they were not black, and could not imagine that they terrified white people because white people are not white. Their, faces and their voices held the promise of the promised Land; but we never see our faces, the singer rarely hears his song. They had started to fuck: on the flaming, outer rim of love.
Paul stands up, saying, “Well, that’s all for now,” and takes a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wipes his face.
“What about our encores?” Arthur asks, and Paul, and the others, laugh.
“There going to be three quartets up there,” Paul says, “and you all the youngest and the newest, you going on first and you coming off first—believe me, you coming down from there—and little Sister Julia Miller waiting to preach her sermon, too? You ain’t going to be having too much time for encores.”
“And,” says Crunch, “them Silver Nightingales got their mojo working. We try to do encores, our tonsils liable to pop all over the altar.”
“We ought to be ready,” Arthur says, “anyway.”
He stares at the boys, who stare at him, and then, they all turn, helplessly, toward Paul.
“Don’t look at me,” Paul tells them. “Go on and have your summit meeting and when you got it all together, let me know.” He walks to me, and winks. “Come on, buddy, let me buy you a drink.”
For I was of age now, and we sometimes hung out a little on Saturday afternoons. Mama often worked late on Saturday because the lady of the family that loved her so much had bridge parties or bingo games or God knows what—orgies, who gives a shit—at her house on Saturdays, the proceeds to go to charity; and Mama had to stay and clean up.
Paul got his coat, and we started down the stairs, leaving the boys shouting at each other.
Paul let out his breath, and I was about to sympathize with his weariness, but he said, “They’re not bad, those little bastards. Maybe something will come of it, after all. One thing,” he said. “They work. I’ll give them that.”
And he was smiling as we hit the streets, which were bitter cold, and almost empty. We started down the avenue toward Paul’s favorite bar, which is still standing, thank the Lord, one of the few remaining witnesses to my youth.
But I have hardly ever drunk with Arthur in this bar; perhaps because the younger brother can never be a witness to the older brother’s youth. These were my afternoons, with my father.
The cancer of television had not yet attacked every organ of the social body, and so the bar was quiet, with muted conversation, a laugh here and there, the jukebox may have been playing, low. A few of Paul’s buddies were there, and, on those afternoons, Paul always said, “and this is my son, Hall,” like it was nothing at all. But I could see in his buddies’ eyes that they dug he didn’t think it was nothing at all. They looked at him with a quickening of love, and a little jealousy. Then they looked at me and I could see, in their eyes, that my father was proud of me. I didn’t know why he was proud of me, I didn’t know what I’d done to make him proud. But he was, I could see that in the eyes of his friends, and it filled me with a happiness I feel until today. I swore I’d never do anything to make him ashamed. And I don’t think I did. I really don’t believe I did—thank God, I can say that.
And the moment I say that, I think of Arthur, and I know, if I’m honest, that Arthur didn’t think that he could say that. I know better, but I would: I knew our father better than he did. That was because my life as a man had begun, my suffering had begun. I had my father to turn to, but Arthur had only me, and I was not enough.
We sat down at a table near the window. Paul took off his hat. His hair was still untidy; in spite of the cold air through which we had passed, his face was still a little damp.
“What are we going to do with your brother?” he asked. “I think he might turn into a real musician—I mean, a real one,” he added, “not like me.”
I didn’t want to pick him up on his not tike me. I felt a chill go through me, as hard as the streets outside, because I knew he knew that I understood perfectly well what he meant. Paul made his living as a pianist, when he could; when he couldn’t, he did other things; but he wasn’t talking about making a living.
At the same time, I was far more skeptical than Paul concerning Arthur’s being a musician. I knew that Paul knew more about music than Arthur, or than anybody, for planets around: what I didn’t see was that it was this authority which informed his judgment—he, Paul, would know. I really believed that all this was merely a part of Arthur’s adolescence, that he would outgrow it, and become a somewhat more predictable creature, but Paul only pretended to believe it, which was probably wh
Paul ordered, and we waited for our drinks in silence, a silence charged, yet peaceful. Our drinks came, and Paul said, “I’ve been close to music all my life—loved it all my life. But, I swear, I never hoped to see no son of mine turn to music.” He laughed, and lifted his glass to me, and sipped his bourbon. “I guess you think I better be glad I’m talking about my son and not my daughter.” He stopped laughing, and looked down. He took another sip of bourbon. He sighed what almost sounded like a mortal sigh: Ah.
“You’re worried,” I said. “Why? If he wants to be a musician, a singer—what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Paul said, “except it’s going to burn him up, burn him every hour that he lives, char the flesh from the bone, man, and leave that for someone to gather up and bury, and” —he finished his bourbon, and looked at me— “that someone is most likely going to be you.”
I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t laugh. I watched my father’s face. He looked into the streets.
“Music don’t begin like a song,” he said. “Forget all that bullshit you hear. Music can get to be a song, but it starts with a cry. That’s all. It might be the cry of a newborn baby, or the sound of a hog being slaughtered, or a man when they put the knife to his balls. And that sound is everywhere. People spend their whole lives trying to drown out that sound.”
As the kids would say today, Paul was taking me on a far-out trip and I wasn’t sure I wanted to make it. But laughter closed her stone gates in my face, I could almost hear the boom.
“Oh,” said Paul looking at the street—but he might have been looking at a river—”there are other sounds—the sound of water, but that can drive you crazy. It has been used to drive people crazy. I bet, if you think about it, you can’t think of a single sound that you can drive with. That’s why we live with so many—each drowns out the other.” He looked down into his empty glass. “I bet you think your old man’s crazy.”
I started to make a joke, but I couldn’t, and then I said, “No. I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“If you ever had to think about it—how we get from sound to music—Lord, I don’t know—it seems to prove to me that love is in the world—without it—music, I mean—we’d all be running around, with our fangs dripping blood.” He laughed. He could. “Maybe I am crazy. But that’s why all military music is just cold jerking off. The niggers in New Orleans figured that out, baby, and didn’t they ramble!”
He was frightening me, suddenly, and he realized it. He ordered another round, and sat staring out of the window again, and I realized, for the first time, how mightily he was troubled.
“What about Arthur?” I asked—lamely, and, without knowing why, dreading the answer.
He was silent for a while. Our drinks came, and still he sat there, leaning on his elbows, looking out of the window.
“I used to run with some girls and boys, when I was young,” he said, “and they were beautiful, let me tell you. I won’t go into what happened to some of them—some are still around. They were beautiful, like I say. Trouble was, when they weren’t singing or playing, didn’t nobody know what to do with them. They didn’t know, either—those that found out—something—when they weren’t singing or playing, well, it took them awhile, and they paid some dues. God knows they loved, and God knows they hurt, but, look like, they could only do it in public.” He grinned, suddenly, a strange, sad grin, which made him look very young, almost as young as Arthur, and there was, swiftly, a resonance of Arthur in his face. This was Arthur’s father, too, we were the issue of this man’s loins. Now, I felt my face beginning to be damp.
“Some, like me, knew what to do and how to do it. It was sweat, but it was no sweat, if you see what I mean—or sweat was all it was. But some did not know, did not know, from one note to the next, if they were going to make it. They almost never failed, but they never knew. They always looked like a kid who got what he wanted for Christmas, when they left the last notes hanging out there in the air and they came off the stage, or the floor. Lord, they were beautiful. But they damn sure couldn’t count to ten, and they couldn’t keep house. They loved their kids, but their kids didn’t always know it, they didn’t always remember the kid’s name, they didn’t always remember the wife or the husband or the sweetheart’s name: and that didn’t mean that they didn’t love them. But who’s going to be able to figure that out? How you going to believe that somebody loves you, when they way off someplace, getting some wild shit together, and look at you like you some bit of dust in the desert, about two thousand miles away? How you going to imagine that, if you leave that person, she going to cry her eyes out, and maybe try to die? No, you see them in the dub next Saturday, singing their ass off, and they lift you up, they hit you someplace, inside you, hard, and maybe they even make you cry—but—you don’t know.”
He looked down, and sipped his bourbon, and looked out of the window again. Then he looked at me, looked me directly in the eye.
“You understand me, son?”
“I think I do,” I said. “I think I do.”
“I think you do,” he said. Then, “I had a girl like that, down yonder, when I was about your age, before I met your mama. That’s what started me playing. I played for her.”
I asked, “What happened to her?”
Paul said, “I don’t know. We had a fight, she went away. I tried to find her, but—I never heard from her again.”
“Is that why you’re talking about Arthur?”
“Yes. No.” Then, “Listen. I’ve been telling you something I got to tell you, because time is what time is, man, and I know you love your brother. I know that—much better than you do. But I don’t want you to think that I married your mother because some wild chick left me. That ain’t the case. Lord, if life was that simple, wouldn’t be no need for music, nor no need for prayer. I loved the girl, that’s true—the way a youngster loves. But don’t think I don’t love your mother. Don’t think I don’t love you.”
“I might never have been born,” I said, smiling, “if she hadn’t left you.”
“I asked you before,” he said, “if you understood me.”
“Yes,” I said. “And I said yes.”
“And—do you?”
“Yes,” I said, and I looked at him. “Yes, I do.”
He said, after a moment, “I tell you all this because, yes, I am talking about Arthur. Lord, it’s a mystery.” He looked down, looked out, and then looked at me. “Son. Let me tell you one thing. Don’t never run from nothing. I swear to you, whatever you run from will come back, one day, armed to the teeth, man, will come back in a shape you don’t know how to run from, will come back in a shape you can’t deny!” He swallowed his bourbon. “I look at Arthur, and I think of that girl—that girl I ain’t seen since I was twenty-odd. And I have to see that what drove me to her is exactly what brought Arthur here. And I’m going to carry it just as far as I can, but I know, by and by, I’m going to have to leave it with you—my time ain’t long.”
He scared me so badly that I hardly knew what I was saying: “What the fuck are you talking about—your time ain’t long?”
“I know what the fuck I’m talking about. A father’s time ain’t never long, no matter how long it is. That’s why”—he raised his glass, and grinned—”I’m taking the liberty of borrowing some of yours.”
Then I laughed, it was his grin that did it; I was both terrified and relieved. We touched glasses, and drank, and, at that moment, the streets outside seemed to invade our haven, began resounding in my skull. I looked out of the window. Standing on the corner, their backs to us, waiting for the lights to change, were Peanut, Arthur, Crunch, and Red, still arguing—now, in pantomime. Paul looked up, looked out, and saw them: he smiled, and nodded his head from an unimaginable distance, and with a light in his eyes that I had never seen in anybody’s eyes before. Something happened to make the boys laugh. Arthur lunged at Crunch. Crunch grabbed Arthur by
On the day before Christmas Eve, I had a whole lot of cash in my pocket from the stuff I had stolen, and sold; and I took a walk through the city.
I had to buy some presents for Paul and Florence, for Arthur, and for my girl friend, a black college graduate welfare worker, Martha: who didn’t have a sister named Mary, but who really should have picked up on the gospel line, tell Martha not to mourn no more. The child did tend to mourn, and I couldn’t blame her: I didn’t spend as many hours as she did, for example, in the corridors of Harlem Hospital; wasn’t surrounded, as she was, by the stink of blood, the rattle of expiring life, the cool, brutal, high-pitched siren of our indifference: On Saturday nights, they pick up a torso here, some legs there, over yonder, a head, one eye here, another eye there, some guts draping the garbage can, and they dump everything else they can find into a croker sack and bring it to the hospital and say, sew it up! And, you know? it’s hard to believe it, but—sometimes we do. And they walk out in the morning, don’t even say thank you. Yes, the child did tend to mourn, and I couldn’t blame her. I wanted her to quit her job, but she wouldn’t find another one in a hurry, and I knew I wasn’t going to marry her. I didn’t want to find myself in a croker sack, and have her sew me up.
Since we were all going to be together at church, on Christmas Day, I also had to find something for Julia and Jimmy and their parents. This was a drag, because I really didn’t like the Millers at all. But I had to do it, because I also had to find something for the boys in The Trumpets of Zion. I could not give Arthur a present, and fail to remember them.
So. I walked through the city, my hands in my pockets. It was cold, and I felt it, and yet, I wasn’t cold. But there was nothing in the windows I wanted to buy for anyone I loved—and what I saw in the windows that might have suited the Millers would have told them something I knew I didn’t have the right to say.