Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

  Our father, Paul, played the piano behind Arthur.

  Through this wilderness below.

  Pentecost Sunday: Arthur, at thirteen.

  Guide my feet in peaceful ways,

  Turn my midnights

  Into days.

  Julia’s church had then been located in a dilapidated brownstone on 129th Street and Park Avenue, in the shadow of the elevated New York Central Railroad tracks: and a train roared by as Arthur was singing.

  When in the darkness

  I would grope,

  Faith always sees

  A star of hope:

  And soon from all life’s grief

  And danger, I shall be free,

  Someday.

  It was a very grown-up song for such a tiny figure. I remember him as wearing a dark-blue suit, and a white shirt, and a blue bow tie, and he was wearing highly polished black pumps with pointed toes, and he had waves in his hair. The waves were very grown-up, too, for a boy so young, but it was the fashion dictated by his peers, and no one knew on what grounds to dissuade him from wearing his hair that way.

  For that matter, our father, Paul, who was sturdy and attentive at the piano, wore his graying hair after the fashion of his peers, slicked down flat with Vaseline, seeming, almost, to be straightened.

  But I do not know

  How long it will be

  Or what the future may hold

  For me:

  But this I know,

  If Jesus leads me,

  I shall get home,

  Someday.

  This was Arthur’s debut, and it was a great success; the women’s hats moved like breakers on the sea; the church was filled with the thunder of adoration. I was older, I was uneasy, I did not know why I was happy for my father and mother, because they were happy. I told my brother that the way he wore his hair made him look like a sissy, and that may be the first time I ever really looked at my brother. He cracked up, and started doing imitations of all the most broken-down queens we knew, and he kept saying, just before each imitation, “But I am a sissy.” He scared me—I hadn’t known he was so sharp, that he saw so much—so much despair, so clearly. But he made me laugh until tears rolled down my face, and I ended up on the floor, both arms wrapped around my belly.

  Perhaps then we really began to be friends.

  Arthur wore his hair that way for a while, but then, abruptly, he cut it, and he never conked it: during his professional heyday, he looked, with his rough rain forest of Senegalese hair, like a good-natured basketball player.

  HALL MONTANA PRESENTS:

  (limited engagement)

  and here was Arthur’s picture, full face, close-up, my baby brother’s long, lean face, singing, the nostrils quivering like a stallion’s nostrils, the big teeth faintly gleaming, the short upper lip, the wide lower lip, the cleft chin, the enormous eyes, looking upward—my faith looks up to Thee!—I always saw the sweat pearling, curling, making a splendor of the hairline, I always see, beneath the unanswerable glory, the unanswerable fatigue—Arthur loathed his photographs, and always insisted, because he did not want to be dishonest—that’s what he said—on being photographed as he looked now and not as he had looked then, and I always did as he insisted, at least in the public domain: but the photograph, though Arthur never seemed to realize this, was always, somehow, the same.

  Time attacked my brother’s face, as time attacks all faces; but it was wonderful indeed for me, and strange, to be forced to see (since publicity was my department) how the enemy, time, could also be an ally, a friend, and a witness. Arthur was photographed endlessly for more than ten years, but whatever held the face together held, changing all the time, yet never changing; and, insofar as Arthur, eventually, was forced to suspect this, he was made mightily uneasy. Time could not attack the song. Time was allied with the song, amen’d in the amen corner with the song, inconceivably filled Arthur as Arthur sang, bringing Arthur, and many thousands, over. Time was proud of Arthur, so I dared whisper to myself, in the deepest and deadliest of the midnight hours; a mighty work was being worked, in time, through the vessel of my brother, who, then, was no longer my brother, belonging to me no longer, and who was yet, and more than ever, forever, my brother, my brother still.

  Indeed: for I had to make certain that Arthur got out of his wringing wet clothes and took a bath or a shower and had a stiff drink, Scotch or vodka, depending on the night and the city, and got something to eat, and crashed somewhere. Until Jimmy came along—or, I guess I should say, until he came back into our lives—this had been an enormous problem for me, for Arthur was capable of picking up anybody, and I, after all, couldn’t sleep in the same room. Many times I didn’t sleep at all and many times it was very rough, since Arthur had to be up around showtime: but I had to be up in the morning, the same morning.

  Yet in spite of all the shit, we always loved each other. I was always able to make Arthur listen to me because Arthur always trusted me. I miss him, miss, miss, miss, miss him, miss him worse than you miss a toothache, worse than you miss the missing tooth, worse than you miss the missing leg, even worse than you miss the stillborn baby. His voice is everywhere, but not even the voice can fill that space in which Arthur moved and walked and moaned and talked and belched and farted and pissed and shit and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and cried sometimes and laughed sometimes and sometimes—making me know he loved me—put his big hand upside my head and tangled his fingers in my hair and said, Shit, man, we don’t get to hang out together most often, have another one! On me. Come on, now: striding, striding, striding, in his big, flapping traveling shoes, all, all over my heaven.

  HALL MONTANA ENTERPRISES

  IS PROUD TO PRESENT

  THE SOUL EMPEROR

  ARTHUR MONTANA

  Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great delight and a mighty privilege to bring on The Soul Emperor, Mr. Arthur Montana!

  And the theme which brought Arthur on, however disguised, was always the same:

  Let the church say

  Amen

  Let the brothers say

  Amen

  Let the sisters say

  Amen

  —And, all together, now!

  Amen

  Amen

  Amen!

  And, yes, the church, wherever it was, whatever it was, a football field in Montgomery, Alabama, a stadium in Tokyo, a music hall in Paris, Albert Hall in London, or as far away as Sydney: rocked.

  It was nearly four o’clock when I finally got into the car and started driving toward Julia’s house. I might have got into the car by that time only because Ruth hadn’t called me—or because I was afraid to sit in the house. I suddenly wanted to see Ruth and my children.

  From my house to Julia’s house takes about half an hour, through a placid and terrifying landscape. It’s terrifying because it isn’t true. It’s here, but it’s not; it’s present, but it’s gone. Some people, some faces, make you feel this, like the face of a woman who knows that she is beautiful. If she knows that, then you wonder what else she knows, or if she knows anything else; for it is not easy to know that you are beautiful. And she can be beautiful, really, smiling with you in the evening, or crying beneath you at night, or naked, in the morning, with no makeup on: she can get your dick hard, she’s got your nose wide open. And yet, and still, at the very bottom of the clear and candid eyes, something lives which gives the lie to the beauty of the surface, and which, when you really must deal with it, troubles the beauty of the deep. You begin to sense, dimly, but powerfully, a lack of coherence—a smile on the wrong line, a cigarette awkwardly relit, an earring which should not be on that ear, one chewed fingernail—and only one—and you wonder what this incoherence hides and begin to be frightened of what it may reveal. Finally, you begin to recognize that there is nothing you can do with this absolutely sincere incoherence; it is a desperate sincerity. Sincerity is so cheap a virtue, haggled over, daily, in every public square, written on walls, in toilets, on flags-so cheap a v
irtue that, mainly, it is not a virtue at all, but an abject reflex—that one finally looks hard at the person who bought this particular consumer item at so extravagant a price. There is something unreal, then, about the reality of this beauty, something profoundly willed. Anything brought into existence by so powerful an act of the will is nothing less than a mask, a disguise, a lie, is hiding something—from itself: this suspicion fucks with the mind, and leads to terror. Or, for example, I remember a white boy Arthur knew once—briefly, thank God—a boy named Faulkner, who was as beautiful and limpid as a Viking saga, and as ruthless as the Russian steppes. He could not help it. He was a liar and a thief and a cock-teaser; he was searching for the prison in which he could be raped forever by an army of black studs. Rape does not come naturally, and that child was hell unloosed. The only times I ever knew him not to be smiling was when he was sobbing out his innocence, and begging not to be beaten to death. At least, I thought that’s what he was begging for. I once had to beat the living shit out of him, turned him upside down, and shook Arthur’s money out of his pockets; but now, I think that he was maybe begging me to kill him. Life in death, or death in life: but a change is got to come.

  The streets I am driving through to Julia’s house are, somehow, something like that. They frighten me like that, because nothing I am seeing is true. These houses, these penny-pinched lawns, the angular streets; for one thing, it was never intended that we should live here. This is not yet forgotten. The trees and the houses and the grass remember; the stoplights remember, the fire station, the churches, and the courthouse. The people do not seem to remember—very few are out—but, then, they have had to remember so little for so long, that one simply awaits, now, numbly, their next convulsion—and indeed, the smiles of the few people out walking, or riding, reveal clenched teeth and leaping jaw muscles. Their placid eyes reflect their placid surroundings (the church spire wavering at the bottom of the cheerful eye) and, by this time, for me in any case, are capable of reflecting nothing more.

  There was a time when I found this sad. Perhaps I still do, but pity is a dead-end street, a useless doom; sympathy, repudiated, turns to bile: forget it. Some hale and hearty white people walking around today are going to be butchered corpses soon—like tomorrow, but it is utterly absurd to pity them. The song asks, Sinner man, where you going to run to? and advises against heading for burning rock or boiling sea, and wonders, from a distance, Who shall be able to stand?

  The car ahead of me has a bumper sticker reading, AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, and I want to get as far away from that car as I can. (Peanut’s body was never found, after that trip to Georgia.) I want to see my wife and my children. Each stoplight takes forever; I cannot shake the car with the bumper sticker, it is traveling in my direction. I am ridiculously aware of the Sunday policemen, scattered sparsely over the landscape. I do not look at them. But I know that they see me. I know that they never expected to, never intended to, and are smoldering with the need to be revenged for this violation. Up yours, mac, and I hope it puts a hurting on you: but I do not usually feel this way.

  I park the car in Julia’s front yard, and stumble up her steps—red brick steps, which I hate, but Julia’s very fond of them. I ring the bell, but the record player’s going—Esther Phillips, From A Whisper To A Scream—and I stumble down the steps, and go around to Julia’s backyard.

  It’s early spring, a little after five in the afternoon, it’s beginning to be chilly but it’s not really cold yet.

  Julia’s standing alone in the yard, at the Bar-b-q range, turning the ribs over. The hot, funky smell of the meat is marvelous, and Julia, standing alone, head down, in profile to me, studying the meat, judiciously adding her spices and sauce, a drink—gin—standing on the edge of the Bar-b-q range, a cigarette burning in an ashtray next to the glass; Julia, dressed in a loose, vaguely African robe, her hair tied up in a gaudy cloth, one talismanic bronze earring dangling, eyes narrowed against the smoke from the cigarette and the smoke from the fire, standing in the shadow of the menaced trees of her backyard, platform sandals on her feet, picking up her cigarette, dragging on it, putting it back in the ashtray, picking up her drink and sipping from it, and turning over about three or four more ribs, was marvelous, too, and I said, “I guess I got here just in time.”

  She turned, with that smile, a child’s smile, which had made her so moving a child evangelist, and, later on, so moving. “Ruth’s just been on the phone to you,” she said. “She figured you were on your way. How you keeping?” And she laughed. “You look all right.”

  “So do you,” I said, and I went over to her, and kissed her.

  Julia and I had a big thing, a brief thing, a big thing, a long time ago, long, long after she had left the church, and both of us were wandering, a long time ago. It gave us something which we’ll never lose, a genuine freedom with each other, a genuine love, born of the fire and sorrow of our long ago. Be seeing you, baby. Please take care.

  Then I was much older than she; now I’m not. If Arthur were living, he would be forty-one. Julia is thirty-nine.

  She doesn’t look it. If she looked her real age, whatever it is, she’d turn to dust.

  “Come on in the house,” she said. “These be ready soon.” She turned over a couple more ribs, picked up her drink, and stubbed out her cigarette. She took my arm.

  Billy Preston has, at last, thank heaven, dethroned James Brown in Tony’s soul- or value-system—not that I ever insisted—for it is certainly Tony who has put on the Billy Preston record which greets Julia and I as we enter the house. Tony is dancing with his mother, doing a bump to Billy’s “Nothing From Nothing.”

  “Hi, Dad,” says Tony, not missing a beat, and, “Hi, Dad,” says Ruth, grinning, and not missing a step, and bumping Tony’s fleshless behind. Odessa runs over, and throws herself into my arms. “Come on, dance with me, Daddy,” she says, and “Why not?” I say, and so we join Ruth and Tony, clapping and bumping, while Julia lights another cigarette, and stands watching us, at the door. How strange and beautiful—it must be one of the few real reasons for remaining alive, of desiring to—to dance with your daughter, your son, and your wife; touching, really digging it, laughing, and keeping the beat, free. Odessa is a very aggressive dancer, or so, at least, she is with her father, whom she is using as rehearsal for an event of which she, as yet, knows nothing. Ruth is very gentle with her son, who is at once very mocking and gentle with her—he, too, is involved in a rehearsal. Yesterday, we were the children, Ruth and I and Julia: we’re the old folks now, and this is what will happen to Tony and Odessa, please God be willing. Oh, life may be a field of corn and one ear of corn may look very like another: but I’d a whole lot rather dig it as a cornfield than lie about it as a crock.

  The number ended; Julia clapped. Tony said thank you to his mother, and I said thank you to Odessa. I sat down on one of Julia’s cushions. Julia’s house is dominated by cushions and pallets and low tables and African sculpture: genuine. I said that I needed a drink, and Ruth brought me a Scotch on the rocks.

  “Ruth,” says Julia, “I think we better eat inside, don’t you?” and Ruth and Julia immediately disappear, followed after a moment by Odessa, leaving Tony and I alone.

  And, in the split second before Tony has actually said, “I want to talk to you, Daddy,” I realize that this is a moment which Tony has been attempting for a long time: and I have been avoiding it.

  I sip my drink, and look into his eyes and say, “Okay.”

  Tony looks down at his enormous hands, and then wraps them around his enormous feet; and I feel a rush of helpless love for my growing boy.

  But then, there are sounds from the kitchen, and, just like a man, Tony stands and looks at me, and says, “Let’s go outside a minute.”

  We walk to the door, and I yell, “Tony and me taking a walk in the yard,” and we step outside. The air carries the sound of the growling meat, of spices, and dimly, beneath all, the odor of the earth after the rain has fallen.


  We walk around the house to the front yard. We have not spoken. We pass the brick steps and stop at the car, and we look at each other.

  “What was my uncle—Arthur—like?”

  “Well—why do you ask? You knew him.”

  “Come on. I was a baby. What did I know?”

  “Well—what are you asking?”

  “A lot of the kids at school—they talk about him.”

  I wish I had thought to bring my drink with me.

  “What do they say?”

  “They say—he was a faggot.”

  And Tony looks at me. I think I hear a dog bark somewhere. A woman screams at her child. A motorcycle farts monstrously down the street, into infinity.

  “Well—you’re going to hear a lot of things about your uncle.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Your uncle—a lot of people—”

  “No. I’m asking you.”

  “Okay. Your uncle was my brother, right? And I loved him. Okay? He was a very—lonely—man. He had a very strange—life. I think that—he was a very great singer.”

  Tony’s eyes do not leave my face. I talk into his eyes.

  “Yes. I know a lot of men who loved my brother—your uncle—or who thought they did. I know two men—your uncle—Arthur—loved—”

  “Was one of those men Jimmy?”

  Lord. “You mean—Julia’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  Good Lord. “Yes.”

  Tony nods.

  “I know—before Jimmy—Arthur slept with a lot of people—mostly men, but not always. He was young, Tony. Before your mother, I slept with a lot of women”—I do not believe I can say this, his eyes do not leave my face—“mostly women, but—in the army—I was young, too—not always. You want the truth, I’m trying to tell you the truth—anyway, let me tell you, baby, I’m proud of my brother, your uncle, and I’ll be proud of him until the day I die. You should be, too. Whatever the fuck your uncle was, and he was a whole lot of things, he was nobody’s faggot.”