Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“Oh. And the clock, it keeps on ticking. And you ain’t got back to the bed to make it up yet—your dying bed. Then maybe there’s a mirror on the wall, a mirror you ain’t looked in for many a long year. And maybe you say to yourself, ‘I better clean that mirror.’ And so you walk to that mirror, with time ticking away, and you look in that mirror and you see your face. But you don’t see it right, it looks real strange, real far away. And so you start to rub on that mirror and you start to see the face in the mirror and while you rub, you wonder how you are going to face your Maker. ‘Lord, Lord, did I hurt somebody?’ And the mirror don’t answer and time keeps ticking. ‘Lord, I’ll wash off my makeup’—and time keeps ticking. ‘Lord, I’ll take the dye out of my hair’—and time keeps ticking. Maybe you got some earrings in your ears, and you ain’t really seen them since you was a baby and somebody put them in your ears and you say, ‘Lord, if these offend You I’ll take them off, but help my trembling hands, my blinded eyes, I cannot see.’
“And the Lord say, ‘I see what you done with your kitchen. I see what you done with your stove. I see how you scrubbed your floor. I see ain’t no roaches in here. I see how you made that windowpane to shine. I see how you scrubbed that mirror because you didn’t want Me to be ashamed of you and so we could see each other face to face. You can come into my kingdom with your earrings on! I told you to set your house in order, and I see your house in order!’
“ ‘Now put your hand in my hand, child, and walk with Me to the next room, and let Me make up your dying bed.’ ”
Then she paused and looked down at Sister Bessie’s bier.
“She’s walking and talking with the Lord,” said Julia. “Our Heavenly Father, who sees all the secrets of our heart, who knows all His children, and who promised never to leave us alone. She was born in the time of slavery: and she walked every step of the way with the Lord. Let us remember the text: Set thine house in order. And let us all say: Amen.”
She bowed her head, and the congregation said, Amen! Julia went back to her seat in the pulpit. The pastor rose. The congregation sang. Arthur wondered where Jimmy was—either at school, or in the movies: that was, mainly, how the time was spent.
And after Sister Bessie’s coffin was carried out, he walked out on the steps and said good-bye to Julia and walked out of her life for a while.
He watched Julia and her father walk slowly up the block, away from him—for Julia did not go to the cemetery. Her job was done.
That was in the spring. In the summertime, Julia and Joel found themselves alone in the house, a day or two after Amy’s funeral.
Jimmy had gone south with his grandmother. Paul and Florence had their two absent sons to worry about. Martha was being consoled by Sidney, though I didn’t know this yet.
Julia had not preached since Sister Bessie’s funeral. She had not yet begun, as we put it, to “backslide”: on the contrary, she was more flamelike, more revered than ever, and this was because of her passionate devotion to her mother. This led her into a fast which very nearly broke her health—no one had ever been seen among us to labor so mightily for the soul of another! In the spring, Amy had been resting: could no longer, that is, rise from her bed, and Julia spent every waking hour at her mother’s side. Amy was carried to the hospital—to Harlem Hospital—at the beginning of the summer, but it was already, said Martha, too late. Death enters a face and sits there, in the forehead, the cheekbones, the lips, and inundates, like blood or water, the inside of the eye. The eye seems to have clouded over, but it is also looking straight out, there is fire at the center of the cloud. Julia had become gaunt indeed, but death refused to prefer her over her mother: life, inexorably, sat in Julia’s face and her eyes held the furious, driven repentance of the living.
She sat in the hospital all day, and sometimes, all night long. She washed her mother’s body; she would have cleaned it with her tongue if she could have. Thus, no one yet considered that she had abandoned her ministry. She was far removed from our concerns, she was striving on holy ground.
And this was true—Florence, with tears in her eyes, confessed it: She sees the angel, now. Too late. What’s done cannot be undone. And never thought I’d be weeping for that poor child. Paul was more laconic, but Julia was, indeed, a child—or was now discovering what it meant to be a child.
Jimmy, however, simply loathed his sister and would not speak to his father, spent all his time in the streets, in the movies, in the parks; began to steal, to smoke, to be fondled and jerked off in subway toilets; and sat on a bench in Harlem Hospital every night, waiting for his sister to let him see his mother.
He never spoke. Martha appointed herself his go-between. When he arrived, and took up his incredible vigil a few feet from the door beyond which he knew his mother lay, Martha would go to Amy’s bedside—Amy was behind a screen—and whisper, “Your son is here.”
Julia would rise without a word, and so would Joel, if he were present. Julia walked straight out, not seeming to see Jimmy, who refused to see her. Sometimes Joel would wait, but he had no real authority over his son anymore—even though Jimmy was only around twelve—and he did not like looking into Jimmy’s eyes.
Jimmy would simply sit still until his sister and his father had passed.
His father might say, “Expect to see you home in a minute,” and Jimmy might react or not react—but in any case, only with his eyes—and then run to see his mother. Even then, he did not say very much—except again with his eyes, which seemed to register every shade that crossed his mother’s face—but he answered all her questions, or seemed to: his brave attempt at candor sometimes forcing him to volunteer distracting information. Amy saw through this, and teased him, and sometimes looked somber, as though she were struggling to find a way to tell him something. But she could tell him something, or she knew he would find it out. She knew that her mother would be taking him away, out of the hands of her daughter, and her husband. And she seemed to have nothing, any longer, to say to her husband: but she had something to say to her daughter.
One afternoon—a Sunday—when Julia was there alone, she tried.
“How’s your father doing these days?”
Julia had been sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, looking at the floor. Now she looked up.
“My father?” She smiled: then her smile made Julia feel that her face was frozen. Children were told never to make ugly faces, the Devil might come along and freeze the face into the ugly expression forever. She tried to unfreeze the face and lose the smile. She said, “He’s worried about you, Mama, but other than that, he’s fine.”
“Oh, shucks,” said Amy. “Ain’t no need to be worried about me.”
She looked down, and played with the thin bedclothes. She looked at the screen and dropped her voice.
“You going to continue with the Lord’s work? you going to keep on preaching?”
“Why—” said Julia, and looked at her mother. Her throat closed, her mouth became dry—she had, suddenly, nothing to say.
But Amy nodded, as though Julia had answered the question.
“I want you to know one thing,” Amy said. “If I didn’t know it before, and if don’t never find myself able to say it to you again, I found out something about the Lord’s will.” She smiled. That face, like parchment, stretched, the teeth came jutting out: she held Julia’s wrist in one frail and mighty claw. “Trust the Lord’s will. When it comes down on you, don’t blame the Lord. Just go where He sends you.” She leaned back, in all the wretched bedclothes. “Take care of your brother—he’s my heart. I used to think he was jealous of you. I was as wrong as wrong could be.” She had let go of Julia’s wrist; Julia missed her mother’s touch. Amy looked up at her. “The truth was just exactly the other way around.” She looked up at her daughter now with something very close to hatred, and Julia began to cry.
Amy watched her from her strange, unconquerable, and, somehow, triumphant distance—she did not move to touch her. But she said, as Julia ros
Julia moved back to her mother’s side, still weeping. She was blind, and in terror, and utterly alone, held upright by a freezing wind—and her mother’s voice came to her out of this wind.
“Save them tears, daughter. You going to need them. Quit fasting and praying for me—you don’t mean it, and the Lord know it; He ain’t never yet accepted a sacrifice that wasn’t real. You think the Lord don’t see your heart? When I see it? Stop them tears, and sit down.”
Julia sat down on the bed. Amy’s hand grasped her wrist again, her hand was as hot as fire, and made the cold wind colder. Through a freezing storm, with fire at the center, she watched her mother’s face.
“You start fasting and praying—today—for your father, and for you. The Lord ain’t pleased with you. He going to make you both to know it. How come you think you can fool the Lord? You might done had me fooled. But I wanted to be fooled! How come you think the Lord don’t see? when I see!”
And she flung her daughter’s hand away from her, it was a curse. She lay back on the bed, and pulled the bedclothes up around her.
“Go home, daughter,” she said. “Run. Full the curtains, and fall down on your knees. And don’t forget you got a brother. That’s how you’ll get the Lord’s forgiveness.”
Then she hid her face from her daughter’s eyes, she covered her face—like Hezekiah, she turned her face to the wall.
Julia turned away, walked beyond the screen, through the freezing ward, the freezing hall, down steps like ice, into the blazing Sunday streets.
Tell the wicked daughter, and the prodigal son, they can make it home, if they run!
Never had she avoided her father, or dreaded being alone with him: but now, alone in the house with him, a day or two after Amy’s funeral, terror sat in her bowels and rose and fell in her throat.
“Well,” he said, “it’s just the two of us now.”
He had been looking at a photograph of Amy, which he, now, with other mementos, placed in a cardboard box—they had been putting things away.
She had been wearing a bathrobe, with her hair tied up in an old black rag. She had old, gray slippers on her feet, and was so tired she felt faint.
He had been wearing his undershirt and old, blue, dirty workpants. She sat down, suddenly, on the sofa, and he turned and looked at her.
He said gently, “I know how you feel, daughter—think how I must feel. But we got to discuss practical matters.”
She put her head in her hands and said, “Oh, Daddy, not today.”
“I think it’s best,” he said, as though she had not spoken, “that you get back in the pulpit right away. It’s a right long time you ain’t been preaching—people keep asking me about you, girl, we got churches lined up for more than a year! And it’ll help you get your mind off all this sorrow. You’ll see. It’s what your mother went away from here praying for—it was her last words to me. She was always so proud of you.”
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a small glass of wine, and came back, standing at the window, with his back to her.
“So I’ll start setting up dates tomorrow—or this afternoon, maybe, why not? We could start next Sunday, that’s not too soon, we could start in Bishop Pritchard’s church in Philadelphia, you remember, that’s a great big tabernacle, what do you think?”
Although Julia always said that she knew Sister Bessie’s funeral sermon was the last sermon she would ever preach, I really wonder if, until this moment, Julia’s conscious mind had made any decision at all concerning her future as an evangelist. I don’t doubt that her decision had already, in the inexorable depths, been made: but I think that it was only now that it revealed itself as merciless, unchanging, far beyond the dictates of her will, or her father’s ease. It was only now, for that matter, and for the very first time, that she thought of her father’s ease: it was in his stance, as he stood at the window, his back to her, with his small glass of wine in his hand. The shape of his skull, the curl of his hair, etched themselves into the gray day pounding at the windowpane; and the broad, bony shoulders, the hair and the bone, at the nape of his neck, the thin, dirty undershirt, the hair in his armpits, the broad black belt at his waist, his narrow buttocks, his long, wiry thighs and legs, all bore witness to a mystery she had never considered before, which frightened her. She was suddenly in a room with a stranger: she felt her mother watching, she who had known the stranger’s naked body.
Joel turned, and looked at her—with his little smile, a smile she was seeing for the first time. Julia stood up.
“No,” she said.
“No? No—what?—no?”
Her throat closed, she could not answer.
“No,” she said again, and put her hands in her bathrobe pockets. She longed to run to her father; she longed to run out of the room.
It came to her that she was not going to run anywhere, it was too late to run.
“I don’t understand you, girl. What are you saying?”
“I’m not going to preach anymore,” she said. “Never, never, never anymore.”
He put his glass of wine down on the table in front of the sofa.
He smiled again.
“You upset, daughter—you think I don’t know how you feel? I know how you feel. But you’ll get over it. You have to get over it. I’m going to go ahead and make those dates, you’ll see I’m right. And daughter, you just go upstairs and get some rest—you upset, that’s all, and you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do know what I’m saying!”
But her voice held no conviction, and, to make matters worse, she began to cry.
He moved toward her, and to avoid his touch, she curled up on the sofa, with her back to him, crying. He stroked her back, and the back of her neck. She smelled his armpits, and the wine of his breath.
“Little girl,” he said, “we got a lot to do, in a hurry. You go upstairs and get some rest and let me take care of business.”
She stood up again, and walked away from him, to the window.
She looked out at the backs of other houses, into a longing and a dread intolerable. She thought, I’m just fourteen. She wondered why she thought this. Her father was watching her, and she shivered. I’m just fourteen. I can’t preach anywhere, ever, again. Why? She did not know why.
“Daddy,” she said, “I’m through with preaching. The Holy Ghost has left me.”
She felt his furious impatience rising, as he stared at her back, and again she wanted to run out of the room.
“You always told me,” he said, “that the Holy Ghost don’t never leave none of His children alone.”
“But you can sin against the Holy Ghost,” she said. “You can sin a sin that can’t be forgiven.”
He was silent.
“Sin?”
Then, again,
“Sin?”
Then,
“What sin you talking about?”
She was silent because she knew she had used the wrong word—at the same time, she was calculating how she might use his swift misunderstanding to her advantage.
He came to her and took her roughly by the shoulders and turned her to face him.
“What sin? what you been doing?”
“It’s not,” she said, terrified, “a sin of the flesh.”
“You been fooling around? One of them boys that come to this house?”
“No.”
“What sin?”
“Pride.”
He laughed. “Go on upstairs. Get some sleep. You’ll be all right. You lost your mama, honey, but you still got your daddy. I know when you tired and upset.”
“You don’t understand me—please try to understand me,” and she began to cry again, with a quiet helplessness, which caused him to begin to listen—in his way.
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“No. I just”—and now she wondered, wondered at what she was saying, felt an icy wind blow into her face at the same time that she smelt the wine of his breath again—“I just don’t believe it—I don’t believe—I don’t believe—” And she stared at her father.
“You said you were called to preach—you said God called you to preach. You don’t believe—you made us believe!”
“I did believe! I did! But—now—”
She stared at her father, he stared at her: neither could move.
“And now? Now? Now—what?”
She stared into his eyes, it might have been for the first time, she began to tremble, he tightened his hold on her shoulders, she felt herself drowning in his breath.
“If you don’t hit them churches, girl, how we going to eat? Tell me that. You know how much money I make—you been keeping this house going. You going to turn your father into a beggar now?”
As in the nightmare when a nameless terror approaches and the dreamer cannot move, she stared into her father’s eyes.
“You always liked to see me real sharp and pretty—I know you did. What you mean, you don’t believe no more? Don’t you believe in me?”
“I did it for you,” she said—and did not hear herself, did not know what she said.