Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
Ruth got out of bed, and I watched her move away from me, into the bathroom. Ruth’s a big chick, heavy, with a color somewhere between mahogany and copper, with a lot of steel-wool hair, just beginning to turn gray. I always watch her buttocks when she moves—she says I’m an ass freak. Her buttocks are big, but firm and heavy and beautiful—juicy, I say sometimes, and that’s when she calls me an ass freak.
I didn’t know what time of morning it was. Then I remembered that I didn’t have to get up today, it was Sunday. Tony and Odessa had spent the night at Julia’s house. Ruth was going to pick them up. She’d call me from there, later.
She would say, “How you feeling, babe?”
“I damn sure don’t feel like driving.”
“You never do. That’s why I took the station wagon, just in case. But, come on, baby, Julia’d love to see you, and the kids always dig it when you come get them. Tony gets to ride with you and Odessa gets to ride with me and then, they feel, you know, like they got real grown-up secrets from each other.”
She would laugh.
“Actually, Odessa would much rather ride with you, but Tony’s getting big now and he don’t want to have nothing to do with girls, neither his mama, and certainly not his sister.”
Tony is fifteen. It certainly doesn’t look to me like he’ll ever get to be heavy, like Ruth; but Ruth says that he will. Ruth isn’t fat. She’s big-boned, and solid. She says that she looked even worse than Tony when she had been Tony’s age and there hadn’t been enough flesh for the bones. Right now Tony looks like an Erector set, waiting for someone to put it together. Like, he might turn into a train or a train station or a skyscraper or a truck or a tractor or a steam shovel, it all depends on whose hands touch it. The poor boy’s ankles are raw from the war going on between them, and, every once in a while, the ankles seem, somehow, to attack his knees, which are in a pitiful state. Tony’s knuckles and wrist bones and elbows and shoulder blades are simply an immense magnetic field for all of the most brutal inanimate objects of this world. I’ve seen tables and table legs leap at him; open windows, when he touches them, turn themselves into guillotines; doorways just grin when they see him coming; he is most eagerly awaited by stairs. I hurt for that child almost every time I see him move. He’s got no flesh on his ass yet, either; in fact he’s got no behind at all, and floors, especially old ones, with splinters, won’t let his behind alone.
Yet he can dance—very, very beautifully, I think; it’s strange to see all that awkwardness transformed, transcended, by something my son is hearing in the music, beneath the bone. He has enormous dark eyes—like his uncle Arthur—and hair somewhere between the Africa of Mississippi, where Ruth comes from, and the Indian-stained Africa of California, where I come from. He looks more like his mother than his father. He has Ruth’s high cheekbones and her wide mouth, but he has my nostrils and my chin.
I have the uneasy feeling that I am probably a rotten father—my son is made of mercury, but I am not—but I hope that Tony does not feel that. I don’t know if my son loves me—you always feel that you must have made some really bad mistakes—but I know that I love my son. I know this, somehow, because I loved my father; I know the two things don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. I tried to be a good son to him, but—I don’t know: he was formed in a world I never really saw. I tried to be a good brother to my brother, too—but—I don’t know. Arthur lived in a world I only glimpsed, sometimes, through him: I didn’t really pay my dues in that world, not the way he did. But I’m not sure that the people who live in Arthur’s world were really very good to him, either. I always felt that there was something about Arthur that frightened them.
Tony’s not very nice to his sister, either, as far as I can tell. Odessa is thirteen. She and Tony agree on nothing, except that each agrees that the sex of the other is loathsome: if that can, be called agreement. Odessa, I’m going to kill you! I once heard Tony shout this from the kitchen, while Ruth and I sat in the living room. I looked up. Ruth looked at me. She yelled, “If you two don’t come out of that kitchen, I’m going to come in there and kill both of you! And I got the butcher knife. Now come on. If you can’t be quiet, go to bed. Lord!” And she went back to her book.
But sometimes they seem to get on very well, especially if they are both mad at us. Odessa is going to be beautiful. I’ve always thought so, though I have never been sure what my son will look like. For me, my son takes more after his mother. Odessa takes after nobody, really—well, maybe my mother, a little bit. My Indian ancestors have gracefully bent Odessa’s nose, and slanted, slightly, her eyes. It can be said that she’s got my high forehead. And I’m taller than Ruth, but not as heavy; people probably take me as a pleasant-enough-looking dude, dark-brown-skinned, built a little on the lightweight side, and just beginning to pick up some weight. Odessa is going to be beautiful, and she is going to be tall; like me. As I’ve said, I’m forty-eight. Ruth is forty-two. We married each other when she was twenty-seven, and pregnant with Tony. I was then thirty-three.
Ruth is the first real commitment I have ever made, outside of my commitment to Arthur, and this commitment was possible only because, loving me, she knew how much I loved my brother, and, loving me, she loved Arthur, too.
Now, not awake, not asleep, I listened as she finished in the bathroom. Not awake, not asleep, I was aware of her getting dressed in the adjoining room.
We live in a fairly old stone house, on the edge of The Bronx, near Yonkers; and Julia lives in Yonkers. I was my brother’s manager and I’m still in show business. I bought the house during one of Arthur’s more spectacular years; one of the very last spectacular years, before I had to face the beginning of the end of my brother. Arthur had been talking about buying a house in Istanbul—he had been there a few times, sometimes to work and sometimes to rest, and he liked it there. It was a nutty idea, which I neither encouraged nor discouraged. Luckily, he had hooked up with Jimmy by this time, and Jimmy agreed with me: this particular American citizen wouldn’t long be able to get to his grits in the principal city of an American satellite, with borders on both Greece and Russia: to name but two of the borders. He would be squeezed to a lonely death there; his song would cease. I didn’t really give a shit if Arthur bought a house in East Hell, Tahiti, or Lower Switchblade, Iceland. My role was just to make sure that he had the bread to pay for the house—he’d never live in it, anyway—because he damn sure worked hard enough to pay for what-ever the fuck he wanted to do. I once heard myself shouting at some asshole white producer, who was giving me some mealy-mouthed crap about my brother’s private life being a problem, If he likes boys, then buy him a bathtubful, you hear? Buy him a boatload! What the fuck do you like? I’ll never forget that cat’s face: some people look at you like you’ve farted when you try to tell them the truth, or when they know you mean what you say. And I remember, saying to him, in simple fairness to Arthur, Anyway, that’s not exactly my brother’s problem: and it wasn’t. I bought this house with Arthur in mind, it was supposed to be the place where Arthur could always crash. He didn’t see it that way, though, he didn’t want his sorrow to corrode my life, or menace my children’s lives.
I say, it’s funny how we never talk about it, but that’s not true. Ruth can’t talk about it, nobody can really talk about it until I can talk about it. It’s nearly two years ago. I’ve been so busy, covering up for Arthur, strong-arming the press, flying half over the goddamn globe—I was so busy getting my brother into the ground right that I’ve hardly had time to cry, much less talk.
• • •
Ruth comes into the room, dressed, her Sunday high-heeled shoes clicking lightly.
She leans over me. She has on her green fall suit, and a light gray topcoat. She is bare-headed—that beautiful, spinning, black-gray hair seems to be a gift she is offering to me. She has put on a little makeup, and a little perfume. I like the smell. I like the way she looks.
“There’s hot stuff in the oven,” she says. “It??
I kiss her. She tugs at my hair, lightly, and straightens.
“You go on back to sleep,” she says. “I’ll call you in plenty of time.”
“Okay, mama.”
I watch her face, and there stirs in me, again, the overwhelming gratitude I had felt in her arms in the morning.
“Okay. But, you know, I might not really feel like driving over to Julia’s. I might just lie around the house.”
“We’ll see. I’ll call, anyway. Okay?”
“Okay, babe.”
“Later,” she says, and kisses me again, and leaves me. I hear the door close lightly behind her.
I lay there, in a torpor which was not physical—a charged torpor, in the depths of which something slowly gathered, to crouch, to spring. Ruth. Sometimes, especially when we were younger, but even now, I wake up while she is still sleeping, and stare at her; at all that I can, physically, with my eyes, see of her; which is her body. Yet, invisible antennae register something deeper than my eyes can see. I am happy with her, simply. I never knew that I could be happy. It never occurred to me; I had never seen it. I knew no one who was happy, God knows, in that world of the gospel singer: the musicians, the buses, the costumes, the theater owners, the churches, the pastors, the deacons, the backing choir, the booking agents, the hotel rooms, the cars, the buses, sometimes the trains, eventually the planes, the fucked-up schedules, the fucked-up nerves, Red and Crunch and Peanut and Arthur, in their early quartet days when Arthur, at fifteen, was lead singer. Jesus is all this world to me motherfucker hold on this tittle tight of mine oo-ba oo-ba shit man oo-ba oo-ba if I don’t get my money hal-ay-lyu-yah! I don’t want to hear that noise Jesus I’ll never forget you going to have you a brand-new asshole you can’t crown him till I oo-ba oo-ba boom-boom-boom yeah and how would you like till I get there a brand-new cock and when the roll is why? you don’t like called up yonder oo-ba oo-ba swinging on sweet hour of prayer my old one no hiding place! No more? Jesus I’ll never forget man dig them oh they tell me titties man oo-ba oo-ba oh shake it off Mama an uncloudy cat’s digging day you down below how did you man feel when you yeah baby keep digging come it ain’t half hard yet out the wilderness oh baby! leaning don’t go nowhere leaning yeah sister fox oo-ba oo-ba yeah leaning oh you precious freak you leaning on oh don’t it look good to leaning you now on the Lord come on back here ‘tis the old yeah you stay ship right there of Zion it going be beautiful my soul I’m going let you have looks up a little taste to Thee.
Lord. And yet: they walked by faith.
I lit a cigarette, and turned on my side, inhaling the memory of Ruth’s odor, staring at the place her body had lain—I’m happy with her. Every inch of her body is a miracle for me; maybe because her body has taught me so much about the miracle of my own. Sometimes, when I wake before she wakes, I lay as I lie now, and watch her: the square feet, which love walking the naked earth, the blunt stubborn, patient toes. And I kiss them. Kneeling, I kiss her legs her thighs, my lips, my tongue, move upward to her sex, her belly button, her breasts, her neck, her lips, and I hold her in my arms, like some immense, unwieldy treasure. I, at least, thank God that I come out the wilderness. My soul shouts hallelujah, and I do thank God.
I put out my cigarette. I fall to sleep.
A thunder rolled inside my head, a stunning thunder, and I woke up. My whitewashed ceiling, with the heavy, exposed, unpainted beams, had dropped to crush me—was not more than two inches, just above my head. This weight crushed, stifled, the howl in my chest. I closed my eyes: a reflex. Then I opened my eyes. The ceiling had lifted itself, and was where it had always been. I blinked. The ceiling did not move, neither up nor down. It looked like it was fixed there, forever, like the sky outside, fixed, forever, just above my head.
And I trembled, as I had never trembled before. My ceiling will not succeed forever in holding out this sky. That sky will be there just above my head, forever, long after my ceiling crashes, and long after I descend beneath that darker sky, the earth, which has borne my weight until this hour. That darker sky, the earth, will scour me to bone, then powder: powder in the bowels of the earth. For pure terror now, my bowels rumbled, and I got up. My piss and shit were already a part of the earth, dropping into it daily. Every day a little bit of oneself drops into that darkness, accumulating patiently there the terms of an ultimate rendezvous: one day, one’s shit will hit the earth an hour or so before one joins it, or, maybe, less.
Arthur had sometimes sung a takeoff on an old church song,
Went to the gypsy
and she said
rejoice
you’ll know your lover
by the sound of his voice
she said, hush hush
somebody’s calling
your name!
Well, down yonder, you’ll know yourself by your stink, and keep your rendezvous by following your nose. This rendezvous had been made in the womb, with your mother’s shit and piss, before that, with the food your father ate, which gave his sperm its texture and its taste, and long, long before that, and the dread, the mighty, the unavoidable rendezvous continues long, long, long thereafter, forever. I thought, wiping myself, flushing the toilet, watching my dark messengers being whirled under by the tide, turning on the water to wash my hands and to prepare to shave, watching myself in the mirror, of Arthur’s favorite verse from the Bible: Oh, Lord, Arthur said often, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.
I have a cold, still feeling that that moment when my ceiling had seemed to descend to crush me—will never leave me. I do not trust my ceiling anymore, I will never trust it again, and I, consciously, do not look up at it when I walk back into the bedroom. I do not even try to laugh at myself about this. I am far too frightened to try to laugh. I am too frightened to take consolation from the fact that the descent of the ceiling was nothing more than an optical illusion, produced by fatigue, by failing eyesight.
I come out of streets where life itself—life itself!—depends on timing more infinitesimal than the split second, where apprehension must be swifter than the speed of light. I have spent a lot of my life on rooftops. I do not dare go back to bed. Reluctantly, I begin to get dressed, and face what is left of this Sunday: and the phone has yet to ring: it is two thirty in the afternoon: Ruth is giving me all my time: I think, Shit. Suppose I’d been lying on my belly on the roof, and the street had seemed that close and I’d tried to snuggle up to it? I heard my cry, and saw my fall, as, too late, awakened—in the middle of the air; and the palms of my hands, my armpits, my balls, and my asshole are wet as I begin dragging myself into my clothes.
By and by, I sat sipping coffee in the kitchen, staring through the kitchen windows at the exiled trees which lined the sad streets of a despairing void. It’s better than the city—that’s what we say; it’s good for the children—my royal black ass. It’s one of the blood-soaked outposts of hell. The day is coming, swiftly, when we will be forced to pack our things, and go. Nothing can live here, life has abandoned this place. The immensely calculated existence of this place reveals a total betrayal of life.
So the trees, daily, with their expiring breath, warn me. They, too, are about to be cut down, will soon go to join their ancestors in the happy hunting grounds.
I see Arthur standing in this kitchen, looking through the windows.
“I know,” he said, “that you think I ain’t never satisfied with nothing, and—I guess—that’s true. In a way.”
Then he stopped, and looked at me. I was sitting where I’m sitting now.
“You don’t know, and I don’t know what that means—never to be satisfied with nothing. But man”—then he had laughed; he had been drinking Scotch and milk; all of the landscape’s waning colors turned to fire in his glass—”this place sucks. With a straw. You ever look into the faces of these people? Oh, baby. Shit. How did that ha
“We just want to be free,” I said. “We couldn’t all make it to Canada. Some of us had to stop here.”
Arthur laughed, walking up and down this kitchen, but the sound was not the sound of release. Then he stood still before the window, his glass in one hand, his back to me, as still and as astounded as a prisoner.
The failing sun abruptly burned him, then, into what I would come to call my memory.
“Nobody,” Arthur said, “is happy here.” He sounded, really, like a child. I wanted to say—I think I wanted to say, Oh, shit, man, get over that: but I didn’t say anything. “I wonder what goes on behind all these careful shutters. It can’t be—nothing. But”—he finished his drink and turned to face me—”it sure don’t seem to be something. It would show.” He raised his eyes to mine. “Wouldn’t it?”
“I show,” I said. “I’m something.”
He grinned a dry grin, and poured himself another drink.
“I’ll fucking well give you that,” he said. “You a mother fucker’s motherfucker.”
• • •
Beams of heaven, as I go.
That was Arthur’s favorite song, the first song he ever sang in public, in Julia’s church. Our parents, Paul and Florence, had been there, though they were not members of this church. But Julia was the granddaughter of a neighbor, a friend of our mother’s from New Orleans. Julia was a child evangelist, about eleven years old, and this was her home church. Her younger brother, Jimmy, was then about nine.