Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“Then keep on doing it for me. Ain’t but the two of us now.”
His arms had tightened on her shoulder. She wanted to put her arms around him, and pull him to her, as she had always done—as she had done when her mother was alive. Then she had been safe.
But he was her father—her father, still. She forced herself to trust him, and she put her arms around him. His arms tightened around her, and his stubble grazed her cheek.
“Just keep on doing it for me,” he said. “You keep on believing in me, we’ll be very happy, we’ll live off the fat of the land.” He pressed her face into his shoulder, stroked the rag which covered her hair. “Nobody will ever have to know, baby, you’d be surprised; it happens all the time. Love is a beautiful thing, darling; something in every man, I believe, wants to turn his daughter into a woman.” She felt his sex stiffen against her, and, somehow, she broke away, for some reason she was terribly aware of the gray window at her back, and the yearning houses. No place to run. No place to hide. She knocked over the glass of wine, and the smell of the wine, the scream she could not deliver, nearly burst her brain. She fell on the sofa, and he fell on top of her. Still she could not scream. She knew that something in her had always wanted this, but not this, not this, not this way, she wanted to say, Please. Please wait, but he said, in a low, laughing growl, “You and the Holy Ghost been after my ass awhile; you wanted me, you got me.”
She made one last effort to rise, but he slapped her back; she heard the heavy belt fall to the floor. She knew one thing clearly—she had never wanted this, this rage and hatred. She had always wanted his love. She had, herself, brought about this moment—yes, she had, but not this moment. He held her down with one hand while he got one leg out of his dirty blue work pants. She fell into a silence far more real than the silence of the grave. He covered her entirely; she heard, from far away, his moan; he put both hands under her hips, and thrust. Not even when the great grave blood-filled weapon which had given her life came pounding into her was she able to utter a sound. Every thrust of her father’s penis seemed to take away the life that it had given, thrust anguish deeper into her, into a place too deep for the sex of any man to reach, into a place it would take her many years to find, a place deeper than the miracle of the womb, deeper, almost, than the love which is salvation.
BOOK THREE
The Gospel Singer
Work: for the night is coming.
TRADITIONAL
IN a small town in Tennessee, Peanut and Red and Crunch and Arthur have finished their last number: “Hush, Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name.” Crunch is the lead on this song, Arthur the principal backup man. Oh, sings Crunch, you may call for your mother, but, sings Arthur, your mother won’t do you no good! Peanut is at the piano, Red is moaning: Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. What shall I do?
Which is exactly the way they feel.
The last offering had been taken up, and carried off, God knows where. They are anxious to be paid—for they are not always paid—but they mask this terror with their juvenile smiles: smiles more juvenile than they can possibly know, which is why they are not always paid. They have never been South before. They do not really like Nashville, but, at least, it looks like a city. This is a town, about twenty miles from Nashville—not far, unless you have to walk it.
They are in the hands of a Mr. Clarence Webster, a black music teacher, about forty-seven years old, who is their impresario, operating out of Harlem. They realize, incoherently, that he has never been an impresario before, and they also realize, incoherently, that he is yet more frightened down here than they are. This is chilling, for Mr. Webster was born in the South, and knows it better than they do. Yet any white man can make him smile a smile which makes him look like he is holding cold oatmeal—or rather, cold hominy grits, which none of them will ever, if they ever get out of here, eat again—at the bottom of his tongue. Oh, how he smiles! And how proud he is of his boys—dragged out of the streets, by him alone, to their present eminence! They cannot bear being called boys. They cannot bear Mr. Webster, shortly. But they had liked him up North, and he is not, in fact, a bad teacher at all. His attitude with black people is yet more frightening, for he appears to despise them for never having braved the North. They, on the one hand, counter that they have friends and relatives in the North, and, on the other hand, appear to despise him because he lacked the courage to remain in the South.
The boys cannot follow these acrid exchanges, sensing, incoherently, that they are, in some way, at the center of this storm.
The pastor has delivered the benediction, and the boys, the choir, and the congregation have sung together “God Be with You till We Meet Again.”
The elderly ladies, in one way, in their remarkable hats and brooches and heirlooms and with smiles as compelling as the sun, bless the boys for their song; and so do the younger ladies, in quite another way. The pastor, the deacons, the preacher of the morning, the visiting preachers, all in the same melancholy suits, with matching ties and white shirts, are hearty and cheerful and incomparably more distant—presenting the boys with the choice of becoming accomplices, or pariahs.
In Harlem, they knew where they were, and were proud of their accumulating age—they contested each discovery with each other. Here they are confronted with the devastating reality of their youth. Here they begin to suspect, for the first time, that the world has no mercy and that they have no weapons. They have only each other, and may, soon, no longer have that.
They are all, now, descending the steps to the church basement, where the church sisters have set up a feast. At this time in his life, Arthur is always hungry, and his stomach is growling as he keeps on smiling. If he can’t keep smiling, he’ll moan. A young church sister, Sister Dorothy Green, is walking down the stairs beside him. She is dressed the way she thinks girls in the North are dressed. She’s not entirely wrong. Girls in the North did dress like that, some time ago.
Arthur, without knowing it, begins to feel historical.
“How do you like our town?” asks Sister Dorothy Green.
Crunch is just behind him, with another sister, prettier, naturally, than Sister Dorothy Green, and appears to be having no trouble at all. They have reached the booming bottom of the stairs, are now in the church basement, wide and deep and—beautiful is the word that comes to Arthur’s mind—for the light comes in through the basement windows like the immeasurable love of Jesus, blessing all the tables which are draped in white and covered with food for the hungry; and the many warm odors are the proof of safety. No harm can come to anyone here. He looks behind him. Peanut and Red are at the top of the stairs, surrounded by older sisters.
He looks for Clarence Webster, but Webster is already seated at a table, surrounded by sisters and deacons, and is concentrating on the biscuits, the chicken, the rice, the gravy, the yams, the ham, the pineapples, and the applesauce.
He has not answered Sister Dorothy Green’s question.
“Why—I don’t really know it,” he says—foolishly; obviously, he doesn’t know it—”I—we—only came in this morning. But it’s a pretty town.”
“It’s prettier than towns in the North, now, isn’t it? Tell me the truth.”
He has never seen so insistent a smile. He does not, consciously, think it—it does not come to the forefront of his mind—but the smile makes him aware of his virginity, and all the hair of his flesh begins to itch. A little sweat begins at his hairline. He looks for Crunch, who has disappeared. Sister Dorothy Green is leading him, relentlessly, to a table.
Webster is eating, and Arthur loathes him. He is surrounded by sisters and brothers. So are Peanut and Red. As for Crunch, he has probably already split with his church sister, and is already making it with her in some other basement.
“I don’t really know any northern towns,” he says. “I was born in Harlem.”
“Well. It’s prettier than Harlem. Isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Arthur says, helplessly, after a moment, “it sure
He begins to resent Sister Dorothy, and looks at her for the first time.
She is not a pretty girl, but she is not a bad-looking girl, either, and she is not very much older than he—between eighteen and nineteen, perhaps. She is the color of gingersnaps, with curly, sandy hair: when he looks at her, he realizes that her eyes are green—like the eyes of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Somehow, and he cannot help it, her eyes, or rather, the color of her eyes, profoundly repels him—starving as he is, he begins to lose his appetite, as the table comes closer and closer. Irrationally, he begins to hate Crunch, whose idea it had been to come here.
He wishes I were there. He wonders (as he wonders every day) if I’m still alive. Then he’s glad I’m not there. He’ll tell me about it later—if he ever gets out of here, if I’m still alive.
Somehow, this panic lends him a certain force.
Dorothy seats him at a table.
“You sit,” she says. “I’ll serve you. What do you want?”
“Everything,” says Arthur, and looks up at her, and grins.
Somehow, this grin demolishes the distances between them. She grins, too, and her grin is mischievous with promise. She, suddenly, for Arthur, becomes a presence, stepping absolutely out of her curling, straightened, sandy hair, her beige pillbox hat, her beige suit, her green eyes. She puts her handbag down on the table.
“Watch this,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m from Harlem,” he says. “Remember? I might steal it.”
“I dare you,” she says, again with that grin. “And anyway, believe me, you will not be stealing very much.”
He hears her accent, for the first time, really, for the first time without fear, and begins to like her as she vanishes into a cloud of witnesses.
He looks around him. The church basement is wide and low. I very dimly remember the days in Harlem of Father Divine—when the Father fed the hungry: and let the record show, baby, upon my soul, that he really did do that. (Nobody has since, not one of the grim motherfuckers placed in various offices since then, not one: and let the record also state that, if I didn’t love the people I love, I’d think nothing of blowing the unspeakably obscene mediocrities who rule the American State into eternity—and go to meet them there.) Well. Arthur came along later. He has no way of recognizing the wide, low church basement. He does not know what it cost—the blood that bought it, the pain and sweat and danger which built it, the passion which holds it up. He does not know what genius goes into the boiling and baking, the frying and broiling, the scouring—how hard it is to make oneself clean every day, how hard it is to find and prepare the food. He feels only, mysteriously, warm and protected. The voices around him, though the accent is so strange, somehow affirm him. He looks around him. He has never seen any of these people before; and yet, he has, has always known them. He watches Webster. In Harlem, Webster seems very sharp and hip, not old but not young. Here he has no age at all. Dimly, dimly, he begins to suspect something: in all that acrid chatter concerning northern cities and southern towns, of which, indeed, the boys were the center and the intolerably menaced prize, there was a connection as deep as that inarticulate connection between himself and Peanut and Crunch and Red when they sang. It was all in the twinkling of an eye, a beat, a pause, an unspoken question, which got them, carned them, from one moment to the next. He thinks of his father and mother, and he thinks of me. He wonders—now, for the first time, really—how he could possibly live, or have lived, without us: and the wonder brutally reverses itself, for that is why we beat him and bathed him and shouted at him and sometimes made him hate us and sometimes made him feel so bad—we love him. We love him. We also wonder how we can possibly live without him. He looks around the church basement again, seeing something for the first time. All those sisters, and all that cheerful noise, a warmth, as dangerous as lightning, and as comforting as a stove, fills the space. Laughter rings, gossip abounds: obliterating, for the moment, the endless grief and danger. He sees, but does not see, the swollen ankles, the flat feet, the swift, gnarling fingers, serving the deacons, repudiating the helpless condition, refusing, with a laugh, despair. He watches the faces of the men—more bitter, in an unguarded moment, than the faces of the women, and at the very same moment, more innocent, more trusting. He wonders, and Dorothy comes back, with
“Everything!” she says triumphantly, and sets his plate before him.
“Ain’t you going to eat?” he asks her.
“I got to watch my waistline,” she says. His look, then, makes her laugh. “I’ll nibble a little off your plate—I don’t want but a chicken wing. What do you want to drink?”
Her look, then, makes him laugh.
“Pepsi-Cola?”
“In just one second, mister,” she says and she whirls away again.
He looks around him again. Red and Peanut are at a table far away, with somewhat older sisters. Crunch is nowhere to be seen. He is aware, though the word is not in him, that he has made a conquest—that chick digs you, man—and that he will be expected to report on it later, the way the others do. But he has never believed their reports: he realizes this for the first time. And he realizes, also for the first time, dimly, that he does not want to take Sister Dorothy Green into some dark corner and put his hands up her dress, and then talk about it, later—he does not want to do that. He has had his hard-ons, and he’s started jerking off—with no object in his mind at all, his mind as blank as a stone. He has a holiness complex—perhaps that is the best way to put it. He is full of wonder. He knows nothing about others: he knows he knows nothing. Love has presented no image yet—no image at all. The man who tried to suck him off that far-off day has dropped to the bottom of a well, deeper than that: that violation, terror, humiliation, is as distant from any idea of love as Kansas from Alaska. Yet a need is growing in him, a tormenting need, with no name, no object. He is beginning to be lonely—we, who love him, are not enough.
For the moment, the song is enough—almost enough: everything, or almost everything, goes into the song.
Still he feels his prick stiffen when Dorothy comes back to the table, bearing her Pepsi-Cola like an offering: and he feels the vanity of the very young male.
She sits, and he smiles.
“How would you like your chicken wing?”
“In my napkin. If you please.”
He places the chicken wing, elaborately graceful, into her napkin, and he likes her more and more and wants her less and less. For the very first time, he wonders, with a kind of falling terror, what in the world is wrong with him.
He begins to eat. He watches her breasts, beneath the beige cloth. His prick stiffens a little, twitches, but in a vacuum: he has no real curiosity about those breasts. Her thighs move, and, in his mind’s eye, he sees the pubic V between her thighs. He would, perhaps, like to go there: but where to go from there? He likes her. She is not a plaything. Dimly, dimly, and with mounting terror, something tells him that he is not for her.
He wishes I were there, so that he could ask me questions; at the very same moment, it is borne in on him that there are, now, some questions that he will never be able to ask anyone. But he smiles at Dorothy, and, ferociously, as though to give himself something to do, he begins to eat. He takes a long swallow of his Pepsi-Cola.
“I knew you must be hungry—singing like you do.”
“You like the way I sing?”
He is both comfortable and uncomfortable. He likes her. But for the very first time, he wonders what she wants, why she likes him, if she does—but he knows that she likes him.
He wonders where Crunch is, and what he is doing, and he feels his prick twitch again and sweat, lightly, breaks out again, on his forehead.
“You sing—right beautiful. Really, you the best of them all.”
“Oh, come on. My buddies, they can sing. They older than me. They taught me.”
He grins at her, with a mouthful of cornbread. “What do you do?”
“Me?” She puts the bones of the chicken wing into her napkin, and folds it. “Next year, when I finish school, I’m going to be a schoolteacher. In elementary school. With real young children, you know? I think I’d like that because I really like children.” She grins. “Try to teach them to be wiser than me.”
“You going to teach down here?”
“Well. I don’t think they going to let me teach up where you come from.”
“Why not?”
She laughs, then stops laughing, looking at him. “Do they have any black schools, up yonder, where you come from?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Dorothy laughs again. “Think about it. Were your teachers white or colored?”
He has never really thought about it. He thinks about it now. “Why—both. I mean”—he thinks about it—”I had—I had some colored teachers—”
“How many?”
“Well—not many—”
“Most of them were white?”
“Well—yes—”
“So you’ve answered your own question.”
“You mean—you’re going to teach down here because—” He looks at her. She looks at him, with a small, tight smile, and says nothing. He forces a laugh, feeling oddly, and violently ashamed, not knowing why. “You must want to teach real bad.”
“Don’t you want to sing real bad?”
This time, he cannot manage the laugh. He looks into her proud face. It is the first time he realizes that the face is proud. That is why the face is not pretty. It cannot afford to be pretty. And, though she likes him, and wants him to know that she likes him, she is watching him, too, and holding him outside. He chews something, swallows something. Helplessly, he watches her.
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he says, at last. “I guess I do,” and watches her.