Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“Cool, Mister Little Cool. Very cool.” We shook hands again, and I joined Paul and Joel at the door.
“Good night, son,” Paul shouted to Sidney. “Have a real merry one, you hear? God bless.” And Joel waved, and I waved.
“God bless you,” said Sidney, and came to the end of the bar. “You all really made my day, you know that?” And to me, “See you later, baby, be waiting right here. Bye-bye!”
“Bye-bye,” I said, and we split.
We walked up the street in silence, until Paul said, “So when did you make the appointment—to take Amy to the doctor?”
“Well, like I tried to tell you, just now—we didn’t really make an appointment—we started to, but then, Amy look like she can’t make up her mind.”
“She ain’t got to make up her mind. All she got to do is get in a taxi with you and let you take her to the doctor. That’s all.” He looked at Joel. “Can’t you do that?”
“Oh. Sure. But she says she’s feeling better. And she looks better. Maybe—”
Paul sighed. “I swear. I ain’t never seen nothing like it. You both scared of that child. And you both done let something happen to that child—that ain’t supposed to happen—to a child.”
“Paul, the Lord can work miracles through that child!”
“I know some people who believe in miracles. And I know some who don’t. You in the latter category—I know what you believe in, and it ain’t hardly miraculous.” We got to the house, and started up the steps. “And the Lord ain’t going to work this miracle”—Paul stopped, grunting, before the door—“I can guarantee you that.”
Joel had forgotten his keys, and so he rang the bell. Then, as though to give the lie to all Paul’s gloomy prophesying, Julia came to the door, as radiant as an archangel, in her lyric, ineffable blue; and it was clear—I saw this for the first time—that she was going to be beautiful.
“Thought you’d never get here,” she said, and threw her arms around her father, holding him close.
Like a witness to the miraculous, Amy stood in the hall, beaming, almost as radiant as her daughter. It hadn’t registered before, but now, seeing them together, I realized that both the mother and the daughter were dressed in blue, Amy’s blue harsher, darker, more electrical.
Paul and I closed the door behind us, and moved on in.
I did not want to be here, I almost asked leave to go, but I didn’t. Somehow I knew, and I didn’t know why, my father and my mother and my baby brother—yes, and Jimmy, too—needed me to stay.
“We’ve been with the Lord,” said Amy to Joel, “and it was so beautiful, so beautiful—He blessed my soul. I feel like I could walk a hundred miles, and never get tired.”
Julia released Joel—he went to Amy. “He said, ‘Believe.’ Only, ‘Believe,’ ” Amy whispered, her eyes blazing and beautiful in the dim hallway light. She threw back her head and laughed, like a little girl. Julia, arms folded, stood watching her father and mother, with a smile. “Oh!” Amy took Joel’s hand. “Come on in the house, sugar. Let us break bread together, and say, ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord’!”
And so we walked through the room where the table was set—”I set the table,” Julia said to me, “this morning”—to the room where Florence sat on the sofa, relaxed, smiling, not yet resigned, the mother-of-pearl comb sitting in her hair, with Arthur’s head on her shoulder, and Jimmy’s head in her lap.
She looked up as we entered, my mother, and smiled the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. “Ah. Now, everybody’s here,” she said. “I don’t care how many times you walk around the block, don’t you never forget how much I love you, you hear? I mean it. I’m blessed.”
Gently, she lifted Jimmy’s head from her lap, and Arthur moved, and Florence rose. “Let’s sit down at the welcome table. Hall, I’m going to ask you to say grace.”
Paul was to be proven right: the Lord did not work the miracle, and that day was the last time I saw Amy Miller on her feet. That day marked the beginning of the terrifying end of Julia’s ministry, the beginning of the end of Joel, and almost the end of little Jimmy: that silver, stinging Christmas Day.
All I’ve indicated about Martha is that she tended to mourn, and worked in Harlem Hospital; but there was more to the girl than that; and if I’d been more the man and less the frightened boy in those days, we might really have got something going. So I say now: but I can also see that, in some way, she helped prepare me for love, she helped prepare me for Ruth. She’s a part of my life anyway though, forever, even though I haven’t seen her since those years and don’t know what’s become of her.
I didn’t know it then, but my life was really controlled by some profound and wordless sense of the role I was to play in Arthur’s life. I can’t explain that, I won’t try; but I know it’s true. It was one of the reasons—I realized, when I thought about it—that I had no friends my age. I wasn’t free. That’s one of the reasons Martha mourned.
When I left the Miller house that night, the pattern of a dreadful future had been established. No one knew that then, though, not even Paul and Florence. Paul and Florence knew just enough to be reduced to hoping against hope that one of the Millers would find the strength to take up arms against their sea of troubles. But, if the Lord works in mysterious ways, nothing is more mysterious than the ways His creatures find to take their burdens to the Lord: and leave them there.
All during the Christmas dinner, there was much talk of the faith that moves mountains, of the glory of the Holy Ghost—relentless, stupefying: in self-defense, I ate like a pig, hoping to stop my ears with food. Joel and Any were radiant, Julia was serene, Paul and Florence were dumb. I watched Florence’s eyes on Jimmy from time to time—not quite resigned, my mother, she yet was calculating as to how, when disaster struck the others, Jimmy might be saved.
She was resigned, now, in any case, to alerting Julia’s mother.
And what did I think, feel, I, who am trying to piece together this story, I, who am attempting to stammer out this tale? Terrified against my will, hoping to be able to face what I know I scarcely dare to face, myself in all of this, myself, and the self trapped in that brother I so righteously adored. Is adoration a blasphemy or the key to life, to life eternal, our weight in the balance of the grace of God? (Must Jesus bear the cross alone!)
I do not know. The Miller family was far from the center of my attention. Arthur was my heart, the apple of my eye. I worried about cops and billy clubs and pushers, jails, rooftops, basements, the river, the morgue: I moved like an advance scout in wicked and hostile territory, my whole life was a strategy and a prayer: I knew I could not live without my brother.
So Joel, Amy, Julia, even little Jimmy, didn’t really mean anything to me, didn’t trouble, as Martha would have put it, my “smallest” mind. I wasn’t horrified, that came much later, when Julia herself told me what she had been doing, and the price she paid, thereafter, for her crime. By that time, horror was mixed with love and pity: it made me see the horrifying underside of adoration.
No. I didn’t think, or feel, very much about them at all. Joel and Amy bored me shitless, Julia was a holy freak and a royal pain in the ass; little Jimmy was her cute, snot-nosed little brother. He was the only one I gave a shit about, but that was partly because he was a baby, and I knew Arthur liked him.
Amy’s radiance began to falter, near the end of dinner, and Julia and Florence took her upstairs to bed. I sensed a showdown coming, and I left to pick up my girl.
• • •
Martha lived on 139th Street and Seventh Avenue, not too far from Harlem Hospital. Her aunt, a very heavy and handsome lady from the islands, “kept an eye out” for her from across the street; and I was picking Martha up at this lady’s house.
I heard the beat of the West Indian ballads and of dancing feet as I heavily climbed the stairs. I really had eaten too much, and I simply wanted to lie down somewhere, with the covers over my head, and sleep until I had to get up and go to the bathroom. But
She opened the door for me, dressed in a tight, white blouse, and a flaring dark red skirt, with big, silver hoops dangling from her ears. Her hair was piled high, with a white carnation in it. She looked very, very together, her copper skin bringing to mind the sun.
I really dug her very much, I did, but I was frightened, too. Some small stubborn gulf—my fear?—prevented the communion and commitment which is love.
She danced into my arms, and held me and kissed me.
“Glad you got here, sugar,” she said. “Some folks had the nerve to start taking bets.”
And she grinned triumphantly and pushed the door shut behind me, and guided me into the small room where coats were piled high on a bed.
“Hey!” some chick yelled behind us. “He’s finer than Harry Belafonte!”
“That’s right, honey,” Martha yelled, “and Harry just called and he said to tell you to wait!”
She took off my coat and held it against her face for a moment. “Beautiful,” she said. “Real sharp.”
“My daddy,” I said. I kissed her. I touched my sweater. “My mama.” I showed her the silver acorn. “My baby brother.”
“I got something for you across the street,” she said.
“And I got something for you,” I said, “in my coat pocket.”
She gave me a laughing, speaking look and we walked out of the little room, holding hands, into the larger room which rocked and rang with colors, with music, and which was tight with the odors of spices, perfumes, and flesh.
I knew some of the people in the room, didn’t know most of them, but there was certainly no point in attempting introductions. We made our way to the kitchen, where we found Aunt Josephine, who was surrounded by platters of food, and who rather resembled a platter herself. She was piled high like that, was promising and bright like that—it may even be worth pointing out that she had certainly endured a fire. Her color was charcoal brown, and she was wearing a lavender satin dress. I don’t know how old she was. She grinned, showing her dimples just like a little girl; her hair was no longer charcoal black and yet, it wasn’t gray.
“Oh! Here he is! Here’s Prince!” she cried. Prince was her nickname for me; I was never to find out why. “Just a minute,” she said, disentangling herself from various domestic utensils she had been using. “Merry Christmas.” And she put her hands in mine and kissed me on the forehead. I kissed her on the dimple of her left cheek. “Ooh!” she cried. “You go on back to Martha! Martha, you better hurry up and feed and drink this child, you hear me? before he get too entirely out of hand.”
“I’m not sure I can drink,” I said, “and I know I can’t eat.”
“Get this fool out my face,” said Aunt Josephine, and poured me an enormous Island punch. She put the glass in my hand and picked up her glass and touched my glass to hers. “And a happy new year, too,” she said. “Now Martha, take this child out of my presence before I can no longer control myself.”
She always carried on like that, but she was really a respectable Kingston lady, who had buried between three and four husbands. “Every one of them,” she would say, when her rum started getting to her, “died on my hands and died poor!” Then she would throw her head back and laugh—a laugh free of any bitterness, at least as far as I could tell.
But they were all, to hear her tell it, underrated fools—fools because they allowed themselves to be so underrated; yet a little finer, just the same, than the day into which their kinky hard heads had been driven. “I was real proud of so-and-so,” she would say, naming one of them “Even when we didn’t have nothing—they beat that man so bad, they busted his kidneys. He couldn’t piss but blood.” This particular husband—who would appear to have been her favorite, since she talked about him the most—had not been a roustabout tomcat, but a doomed labor organizer. “Then I packed my bags and come up here to my brother.” Her brother is Martha’s father. “He tried to warn me about up here. I couldn’t listen. But, shoot—now I know this white man ain’t never going do right. Ain’t in him.”
And takes another swallow of her rum and throws her head back, and laughs.
Martha used to irritate me by leaving—or by seeming to leave—everything to me: she knew perfectly well that I was incapable of any other arrangement. But I pretended to believe, in those years, in a kind of doomed sexual equality as though the man and the woman held the same vision, carried the same load. This pretense simply revealed to Martha how little prepared I was to assume my own burden, that of the man, how little prepared I was to help her be a woman.
Rarely indeed, and there is a reason for this, is a woman, when she fails a man, called a coward. A man can never call a woman a coward: for the same reason, perhaps, that he can never, without a devastating loss of self-esteem, call her a pussy. He can call another man a pussy, for reasons also involved with his self-esteem. How women deal with each other men don’t, really, until this hour, know.
We danced the dances of the islands, the one far away, and the one on which we struggled.
I got sun-shine
on a cloudy day,
I cannot swear to you that that song was written then, that I had heard the song, then: yet, every time I hear it, I think of Martha, moving so beautifully, so gently, against me and with me, on that long ago Christmas night,
and when it’s cold outside,
and I remember, feel again, her tight black breasts against the tight white blouse, feel again, my hands at the waistband of the flaring skirt,
I’ve got the month of May.
I remember her breath, those lips, and those eyes, eyes holding a depth—or depths—of despair, longing: a terrified blind beauty for which I had no eyes.
What can make me feel this way?
My girl!
Talking about
My girl!
Another girl, later, whatever later means, is, for me, the eyes of “I Want a Sunday Kind of Love.”
And I remember Arthur and Jimmy telling me about “Since I Fell for You”: how they played and sang it when it looked like they were falling out, how they played and sang it when they fell back in.
So I, myself, the mighty Hall—who knew everything: who he was: and, certainly, who you were, and how to handle it—ah, I, Hall, eventually, inexorably, found himself—and found, I think, is the right word, it must have some connection with the word foundation—in that utterly chartless territory in which Huck Finn was lost.
But I did not know anything then. She moved against me and with me; she got my dick hard.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Okay, sugar,” she said, and moved against and with me again, for one more of the island dances. My dick had started to pray, and she heard it, moving with me and against me—mine: and the music of the islands now drummed louder, signifying, signifying, than all the drums of the signifying world.
It was midnight.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink, and I’ll take you home.”
For I didn’t want to break my promise to Sidney, and I knew that we would stay at Martha’s house all night.
And I thought Martha might dig this small excursion, just the two of us alone in some funky black bar, on this far-from-white Christmas. It wasn’t all that cold. If we walked together like we knew where we were going, it wasn’t too far to walk.
So each put an arm around the other’s waist, hopping, skipping, and jumping, singing bits of Christmas carols, laughing, talking to each other, fools, wishing everyone who passed a Merry Christmas! We were each capable of a great, childish gusto and merriment which no one else suspected to be in either of us, and which no one else could touch. We were not losers then, mourning Martha and her lugubrious Hall: we were what we had been once, briefly, and were never to become again.
In the bar window now was a small Christmas tree, all tinsel and flashing lights, which I had not noticed there in the afternoon, and these lights and the music from the bar spilled out over the
I called, “Hey, Sidney!” and he turned. His grin deepened, becoming yet more real and far less public, and he motioned us to the far end of the bar. I pressed Martha in before me, and Sidney leaned over the bar, and grabbed my hand.
“Merry Christmas, again, old buddy,” he said. “I’m mighty glad you made it.” Then, he looked down at Martha. “So this is your girl, huh? You lucky so-and-so—and-so,” and he took Martha’s hand in both of his. Martha grinned up at him. I felt that she liked him right away, was, somehow, because of Sidney, seeing me in a new light, and I was absurdly pleased and proud.
“I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “I didn’t know Hall had any friends.”
“Well, he don’t have many,” Sidney said. “He don’t know how to treat them. But now that I see you,” and he grinned, “I think there might be some hope for poor Hall after all—did you dig that rhyme?” He turned to me. “I saved you a table in the back.” He yelled to someone, “George! Please show my friends to their table, man?” And then to us, “Go on in there, I’ll see you in a minute.” Then wickedly, to me, “You mind if I give Martha a brotherly, friendly kiss, man?” And he kissed Martha on the forehead; she leaned up, on tiptoe, but could only reach the tip of his nose—we laughed, and George, the waiter, Sidney’s buddy, our guide, a kind of off-mahogany color, white-haired, in his fifties, and flat-footed, laughed, too, and nudged me and we followed him to the area behind the jukebox where the tables were set up and there was, indeed, one table, as the small sign proclaimed for all to see, reserved for: Hall.