Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“I guess so, too,” she says. “That’s why you sitting in this basement, trying to figure me out.” And she laughs. He likes her very much when she laughs—he laughs with her.
“So,” she says soberly, “you on your journey now”. And you know, just like I know—if you white, all right, if you brown, you can hang around. But, if you black—step back, step back, step back! Singing or teaching, North or South, it don’t make no difference. That’s the way it is.”
Her face, and her voice, now, are bitter indeed, and it strikes him that this is a strange conversation to be having with a strange, perhaps not altogether black girl, in a church basement in a small town, just outside of Nashville.
He wonders what has happened to Crunch. From far away, through the still summer air, he hears the sound of someone sawing wood.
“We can’t let that stop us,” he says.
“It’s put a stop to many. But I don’t believe I’ll let it stop me.”
There is silence. Then, “When you all going back?” she asks.
“We going back to Nashville, right after lunch. Then we go to Birmingham.”
“You been there before?”
He shakes his head no.
“Every time I go there,” she says, “I think about that story in the Bible, I forget just who it was, has to go to this wicked city. The Lord wants to destroy this city, but the prophet asks Him—asks the Lord—if the Lord will spare the city if he can find fifty righteous men. And the Lord says, yes, He’ll spare the city if the prophet can find fifty righteous men. But the prophet knows good and well he can’t find fifty righteous men and so he asks if the Lord will spare the city if he can find just one—just one righteous man. The Lord says, Yes, he’ll spare the city if the prophet can find just one righteous man. But he knows he won’t find one righteous man. She laughs. “I always think of that story when I go to Birmingham. I reckon there must be one righteous man in Birmingham, although I’ve never met him. And the Lord hasn’t destroyed the city.” Then she says, “Be careful. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t say no more than you have to—just yes sir and no sir. Them people are just like the herd of swine in the Bible, only there ain’t no sea for them to rush down into.” She sighs, then she laughs, then she sobers. “If I didn’t trust the Lord,” she says, “I don’t know what I’d do.” She grabs him by one wrist. “You be careful, you hear me? You a mighty pretty, young colored man. They don’t like that. They kill boys like you, just for fun, every Saturday night.”
She is scaring the shit out of him—it is something in those green eyes. He is not yet afraid of Birmingham, though, God knows, he will be. He is afraid of her. Before his eyes, she has grown old and mad—in her beige pillbox hat, her handsome beige suit.
Call. Call, for your mother. But your mother can’t do you no good.
Again he hears, over all the other sounds, through the still summer air, the sound of someone sawing wood. He imagines, insanely, that it might be Crunch, somewhere in the fields outside, just relaxing and using his muscles.
He wants to get out of this basement.
“Can’t we take a walk somewhere?” he asks. “Just for a few minutes?”
“If you got a few minutes,” she says promptly, and rises, as though she had been waiting for this moment.
He rises, too, and looks around him. Webster is deep in conversation with the elders—astoundingly, he is still pushing food into his face. Arthur feels faintly nauseated. Red and Peanut are with some other girls. He can tell that they are dreadfully uncomfortable. No, Crunch is nowhere to be seen. Sister Dorothy Green picks up her handbag, and takes his arm, guiding him toward the steps.
He winks at Red and Peanut.
“Be right back,” he says calmly, scared to death.
They walk up the steps, through the empty church, through the doors, into the silent streets of this country town. He looks at the station wagon, which will be carrying them, soon, to Birmingham. Maybe Crunch is in the station wagon.
He has the feeling that he is losing his mind. The streets are bright and angular and empty, stretching into a dreadful future. The houses are low, conspiratorial, trees are everywhere—he has never seen so many trees. He is hanging from any one of them—from every one of them, turned, lightly, from moment to moment, by the still, heavy, ominous air. He can almost feel the rope burning his Adam’s apple. He feels the weight of his feet in the air, pulling downward against his snapped neck. A wind blows through his hair, a wind from the glacial mountaintops, the haze, the palpable, wavering summer heat causes the landscape to shiver, to drip like water. He would like to run, forever—where? The sound of someone sawing wood has stopped.
He sees the outhouse at the side of the church. Out of many needs, the physical one being the least pressing, he stops, and says to Dorothy, with a smile, wondering how he is managing to smile, “Will you excuse me just for a moment, Sister?” and he moves his head in the direction of the outhouse.
Maybe Crunch is in the outhouse!
“Why, certainly, brother,” she says and smiles, looking away, down those long streets.
He hurries to the whitewashed outhouse, opens the door, and locks himself in. The whitewashed outhouse is scoured, toilet paper hanging by a string. He pees, looking down into the lime-covered depths—there is a bag of lime at the side of the latrine. He would like to shit, actually, if only life were different, but he knows that he cannot possibly manage it here and now, with Sister Dorothy Green waiting, and where would he wash his hands? So he pees, looking at his prick as though it does not belong to him, and wondering where Crunch is. He buttons up. He is alone. He would like to stay alone here, forever, but the smell is beginning to get to him. He opens the door and walks out into the sunlight, smiling, and Is this life? he wonders incoherently, Is it? Is this my life?
Sister Dorothy Green leans against a tree, smiling like a movie star, as he moves toward her.
“Feel better, big boy?” she asks, and, now, he wonders if he likes her at all.
“Much better,” he says, and suddenly, against this tree, in the sight of all the world, her arms are around him, and she is in his arms.
Her tongue in his mouth locks his terrified howl within him, and her breasts, against his chest, create a thunder in his skull. Yet there is a terrifying pleasure in it, too, and her hands are everywhere. Didn’t know nobody had so many hands, he thinks insanely, and that limp bit of flesh which he has just used to pee with suddenly becomes rigid and enormous, and he grinds himself against her. He almost drops his load then and there, in the sunlight, and they pull away from each other, shaking.
But she seems very calm. She touches his cheek with one long, thin hand.
“That was just to let you know that I sure hope you’ll come back through here one day.” She smiles the loneliest, most avid smile he has ever seen. “I’ll sure be here.” She straightens her skirt and touches her hat. She takes his hand. “We better go back in.”
And, just like that, they walk back into the church, and down the steps, into the basement.
“Crunch, what happened to you this afternoon? Where’d you go?”
“Young lady took me driving in her daddy’s automobile.”
In fact they had had to leave without Crunch, and the young lady obligingly drove him all the way into Nashville—where they are now, in a rooming house run by some friends of Webster. They are two to a room, Peanut and Red, and Crunch and Arthur. The boys had been so stunned by Crunch’s exploit that they hadn’t even teased him about it. They had met the young lady, very sharp and cool, and she had had a cup of coffee with them before going back home. And she certainly liked Crunch; she didn’t care who knew it.
Arthur doesn’t feel like teasing him, either, is just glad he turned up again. And they all react like that down here, to each other’s absences. They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York—they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the ot
He watches Crunch in the other bed, yawning, his hands clasped at the back of his head.
The window next to Crunch’s bed gives onto the road—through the shade and the closed curtain, Arthur senses the trees. Arthur’s bed is on the wall, and gives onto the hall and the bathroom and the kitchen.
It is absolutely silent; the heavy, charged, southern silence. It should be peaceful, but it isn’t; you wait for the scream which will break the silence, you dread the coming day.
“What time we moving out of here tomorrow, Crunch?”
“I think the old man wants us to be ready to haul ass around six.”
“You glad we came down here? I mean, it was really kind of your idea.”
Crunch turns on his side, facing Arthur, smiling.
“You want to blame me for something?”
“Oh, come on, man, don’t be like that, I’m here, ain’t I, and you didn’t put no gun to my head, what have I got to blame you for? I just asked you a question.”
“Well, look at it this way, Arthur—we working, we making a little bread—a very little, I grant you, but we wouldn’t be doing no better up in the city—and we learning, at least I think we learning—and we ain’t starving and we in the fresh air, baby, don’t forget that, that’s very important—and some of us can get fine young ladies to drive us around the town in their daddies’ automobiles!”
Arthur throws a pillow at him, and Crunch laughs and throws it back. “So I’m glad I came, yeah.” He looks at Arthur with a gentle, rueful smile. “We just drove around, really, that’s all—she was showing me sights and monuments. She was real nice. I learned a little bit, today, about down here.” He sits up and lights a cigarette, throws the pack and the matches to Arthur. Arthur lights a cigarette, throws the pack and the matches back. “You see, I understand your real question. I can’t answer it. This place is a mystery for me, too.”
“Does it scare you?”
“All mysteries scare me. The only way not to be scared is to be too dumb to be scared.”
Arthur thinks about this, drawing on his cigarette. They have one dim night-lamp on in the room, and their cigarettes glow a rusty orange against the gloom. They have been speaking in very low voices.
A car passes, swiftly, on the road outside, making a whishing, crackling sound, like the roar of a flame.
Then, silence. Crunch sits looking straight ahead, his elbows on his knees, the cigarette held loosely between the fingers of one hand.
“But something in me comes from down here,” he says, “even though I’ve never been here. That’s a mystery, too, but”—he turns and looks at Arthur—”don’t you feel like that, too? Like something’s just been waiting here for you, all the time?”
“Yes,” Arthur says—but does not know how to say more. Something is turning in him, like the little wheel in the song.
He thinks of Sister Dorothy Green.
“I was with a girl, too, this afternoon,” he says, “but she didn’t have no automobile.” And he laughs.
“What did she have, then?”
He knows now, that he cannot ever really talk about it. He does not know how—dimly, he feels he has no right.
“I don’t know.” He looks at Crunch in a genuine helplessness. Crunch watches him gravely. Arthur realizes, for the first time, consciously, that Crunch listens to him, responds to him, takes him seriously—takes him seriously, even though he always makes fun of him. That, perhaps, is as great a mystery as this region, the people of this region. The surface is misleading, is perhaps meant to be misleading, or cannot help but be—the truth is somewhere else, far beneath the surface: like the tenderness, now, at the very bottom of Crunch’s eyes, as he watches Arthur.
“I don’t know,” he repeats. “Pain,” he says senselessly. “I felt—her awful pain.” He looks over at Crunch. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do,” says Crunch gravely. “Yes, I think I do.”
“Is that the way it is? I mean—for everybody?”
“Sometimes,” says Crunch. “Sometimes. For everybody.”
“For you too?”
“Little fellow. You mighty solemn tonight.” Then, “Yes. For me too.”
He puts out his cigarette.
“Every time I see my mama,” he says quietly—so quietly that Arthur’s heart leaps, almost in terror. Crunch leans back on the bed, looks over at Arthur. “My mama’s a whore, really. I love her, but—that’s what she is.” He makes a sound between a sob and a grunt. “It’s funny—I don’t think I’d mind—if she didn’t. I don’t think the other kids would mind—she’s our mama. She ain’t got nothing to be ashamed of—I’m no fool, I know what happened—and the men came and went, but she stayed, she raised us. She did everything she could for us, it ain’t her fault the world is like it is.”
Arthur holds his breath, hearing the heavy tears at the bottom of Crunch’s voice.
“But she’s so ashamed, she thinks we ashamed—she thinks I’m ashamed, for Christ’s sake, and I can’t get through to her, and I love her.”
Now Crunch is weeping, a strangling sound, and Arthur cannot move.
“That’s why I want to do something, make her happy, buy her some fine clothes, make a lot of money and put it in her hand, treat her like a beautiful woman. She is a beautiful woman!”
Now Arthur dares to look and sees the tears rolling, boiling, out of the side of Crunch’s eye, into his ear. Crunch’s bed shakes gently, he is holding his breath—but this only makes it worse, it is as though he is bleeding inside.
“Crunch, Crunch,” he whispers. “Crunch!”
Crunch does not answer, does not seem to hear him. Arthur gets out of bed and crosses the floor and leans on Crunch’s bed and puts his arms around him.
“Crunch,” he says again. “Please, Crunch. Please, man. Please.”
He strokes the wet face, he kisses the tears. “Please, Crunch. You going to make me cry, man.”
And this is true: in another moment, his own tears will begin to fall. He does not want to cry. He wants to comfort Crunch, to bring the dark face back to itself, back to him, to hold the shaking body until it ceases to shake.
He takes off his pajama top, and wipes Crunch’s face. He holds the cloth at Crunch’s nose.
“Blow your nose,” he says. “Come on, now.”
Crunch weakly blows his nose, then takes the cloth from Arthur and blows his nose again.
He opens his eyes, and looks into Arthur’s eyes.
“Thank you,” he says, “little fellow.”
They cannot stop looking into each other’s eyes. They have discovered something. They have discovered how much each cares about the other. Something leaps in Arthur, something like terror leaps in Arthur: something in him sings. He smiles. He whispers, “You all right?”
“I am, now, yes. Thank you.” And Crunch smiles.
“You ain’t got nothing to thank me for,” says Arthur, now feeling very shy, holding the pajama top between his hands.
Crunch looks at him endlessly, very, very gravely, as though he has never seen him before, and Arthur stares at Crunch, blinded by his beauty, by the revelation of his beauty. Deep, deep within him, an absolutely new trembling begins. He does not know if this is ha
Crunch kisses him on the forehead gravely, then leans up and takes Arthur in his arms. Arthur puts his arms around Crunch. They hold each other, tight, a wonder of joy rising in them like a flood, a wonder of sunlight exploding behind their eyes, everywhere, a great new space opening before them. They need nothing more now, nothing, everything will come, and they know it, everything; they are in each other’s arms. They open their eyes at the same moment and look into each other’s eyes and laugh.
Crunch kisses Arthur, lightly, on the lips.
“We be alone together soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
He has never seen any eyes like Crunch’s eyes.
Crunch says gravely, “I love you, you know?”
“I love you,” says Arthur. “With all my heart, I love you.”
“You and me, then?”
“You and me.”
Crunch holds Arthur by the shoulders, then touches his chin lightly with one fist.
“Get some sleep.”
“You too.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
And Arthur crosses the room, and gets into his bed, holding the pajama top in his arms. Crunch turns out the light, they go to sleep.
They have spent a lot of time alone together, in one way or another: the next morning, they are alone with each other for the first time in their lives. They must hide this secret from all the others—this is strange, and new, and it even hurts a little, for in truth, they would like to rise up, shouting, Hey, baby, you know what happened? They cannot shout hallelujah! dare not cry hosanna!—yet a tremendous, hurting joy wells up from the belly and the loins.
They lay in their separate beds, not daring to look at each other—and also, mysteriously, with no need yet, to look at each other—as the morning light attacked the window shade and crawled across the ceiling, as cars growled by on the road outside, as they listened to Peanut and Red and their hosts, and Webster, in the toilet, in the kitchen, in the hall.
Crunch looked over at Arthur.
“Bathroom’s empty. Who goes first?”