Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“You don’t like Washington?”
“Well, I’m lucky, let’s face it, that the army decided I was half blind and so they didn’t send me where they sent you. Hallelujah, bless the Lord,” and he laughed and moved across the avenue. We started inching along the side street. “But, no, I don’t like Washington. I like some of the folks I met there, but—it’s a real ugly, racist little town, man. You know that,” he said to Arthur. “You and Crunch found that out.”
“Yeah,” said Arthur. “We found that out, all right.”
“I remember,” I said. “Arthur wrote me that you all was down there.”
“Crunch had some people to see, so he and Arthur stayed on a couple of days. Us, we couldn’t wait to get out of there.” We stopped, hoping to be able to make the next light. “But it’s just been desegregated. Say a nigger can go anywhere now, anywhere you please. Ain’t that something? Ain’t you glad? Now you can eat in the same room with them funky white cunts and their ball-less men. I can’t hardly wait, myself—but, at the same time, I don’t believe I’Il try it alone. I’ll come up here and get some rough, Harlem cats to test the waters with me.” He laughed again, and we made the light.
“You have changed,” I said.
“Of course. So have you. You was over yonder, I was in Washington. What you see, what you go through, what you see others go through—it changes you, all right. Hey, Arthur, will you light me a cigarette, please?”
Now I know this sounds insane, but that—Peanut’s request that Arthur light him a cigarette—came as a shock: a small shock, but a real one. It made me realize how long I’d been gone, how much had happened since I’d been gone. I turned to watch Arthur light the cigarette and hand it to Peanut.
“Would you light one for me, too, please?”
Arthur gave me a quick, bright look, a wink—and lit the cigarette and handed it to me.
“You don’t smoke?”
“Sometimes.” He lit a cigarette, put the pack back in his pocket. “I don’t smoke much. It’s not too good for the voice.”
We finally got out of the press of traffic, and started up toward our house.
It was a day full of sunshine, a lot of traffic, a lot of people, all moving with what seemed like purpose. Everyone seemed, to my wondering, slowly refocusing eye, exceedingly well dressed. No one looked up, it is true, but then, that was also because they did not expect bombs to come raining down on them from the sky. I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever here may be, it must always happen here before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves. What happened here, for example, was not stopped at Shiloh, still less at Harper’s Ferry: it is happening in our children’s lives today. I name the domestic monuments, not because I am being chauvinistic but in my role of Sambo, the tar baby.
It must have been a Sunday—Columbus Circle, with banners on, balloons and horse-drawn carriages, black women pushing baby carriages, young people draped around the base of one of the statues at the entrance to the park, and the park seemed to be full, although the air was brisk—and the mourners on the benches: rigid, silent women, white, sometimes with a book; men as still as cats; and boys as lithe: we inched across the Circle and picked up speed. The houses began to change.
“This place is really becoming Spanish,” I said.
“Naturally,” said Peanut. “This place was a Spanish queen’s idea.”
“Watch your language,” Arthur said, and we laughed, and I was, suddenly, in spite of everything, apart from everything, happy to be back home.
We reached our block, and began rolling toward the house. Arthur leaned forward and put both arms around my neck. I put one hand on his forearm, and held it tight. The streets were full of people I didn’t recognize. But I would soon be seeing faces I remembered, later tonight, tomorrow. I wondered what I was about to find out.
Peanut stopped the car in front of our house. “Arthur,” he said, “you take Hall and the bags on up, and I’ll park this car someplace and I’ll be right with you.”
“Okay.” We got out, and got the bags. We slammed the trunk shut, and Peanut drove off. Some of the kids on the street looked at me curiously, or rather, looked at the uniform curiously. A black lady whom I didn’t know walked by, and said very quietly, “Welcome home.” We started climbing the stairs. Paul and Florence stood in the open doorway, and then I was their little boy again, young, younger even than Arthur, that day, because I had been spared.
I didn’t want to eat, or do anything, until I had taken off my uniform and had a bath and washed off the stink of battles and barracks, of millions of men. Arthur came in, at the end, to scrub my back and to rinse my hair.
“What you going to do later?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. I might not do anything. I’d buy you a drink if you was old enough, but you ain’t.”
“Depends,” said Arthur, carefully pouring water over my head.
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on where you want to buy me a drink.”
“So you been breaking the law already?”
“Just a little light lawbreaking. Nothing extravagant.”
“Well—I might check out Jordan’s Cat.”
Arthur, without actually doing so, seemed to sniff ironically, as if to say, You know damn well you going to check out Jordan’s Cat. He said, “They won’t ask me for my draft card in there. And anyway, I can drink ginger ale. You glad to be home?”
“Yeah. Only I don’t know what I’m going to do—”
“Oh, you’ll figure that out, don’t worry about it now. I’m sure glad you’re home. I missed you, brother.”
“I missed you, too, man. Hand me a towel?”
He handed me a towel and I dried my streaming face and hair and stood up.
“See you in a minute, man,” Arthur said, and left me alone.
I pulled the plug and the water began to slop in thunder through the pipes. I dried myself, staring into the mirror.
Martha had written me, saying that she had something to talk to me about but didn’t want to go into it in a letter. I wondered what it was; I thought I could guess, and I wondered how much I cared. I hadn’t, anyway, cared enough to prevent it, whatever it was: we had agreed, tacitly, that we had no claims on each other. That had been fine, before I went away: it was not so fine once I was far away from home and my imagination began to pulse out great jungle flowers in the garden of what might have been. Close up, you see the person’s wrinkles, warts, and pimples; when close to you, the person has innumerable ways of driving you up the wall: but when far from you, these very same imperfections become irreplaceable and beautiful, testifying, after all, to how much each cared about the other. Close up, the person’s imperfections matter, but, from far away, you see your own. The question then is not How did I stand her? but How did she stand me?
Well. I wrapped my towel around me, and walked into the incredible luxury of my own bedroom. If it seemed smaller than before, it also seemed more mine than before. It had been scoured, had been put through some changes to be ready for today; all my things were as I had left them. I had the feeling that no one had been allowed to sleep in this room while I had been away, not even Arthur.
And yet, as I started putting on my own clothes, my own underwear, my own socks, I knew that the time had come for me to leave this room, this house, the time had come for me to leave my father’s house. I realized that, had it not been for the interruption of the war, I might have left already. I was a certain kind of cat. I needed my own place, my own lair, my woman, my cubs: I had bounced around enough t
I was anxious to begin my journey. And now that I was home again, free, my brother was no longer in my way. I felt that I could handle it all—cautious I am, but stubborn, too.
There was laughter in the living room, and music. Peanut and Arthur were playing records of other quartets. Paul was commenting and, from time to time, I heard my mother’s laughter, sounding the way she must have sounded as a girl.
I had brought presents for everyone—for everyone, that is, except Peanut—and now, not yet completely dressed, I rummaged around in my luggage for something he might like. I had brought jade earrings for my mother, a marvelously, monstrously carved pipe for Paul, and a three-quarter length black-and-gold dressing gown for Arthur. I had brought something for Martha and Sidney and Aunt Josephine, but all that I could find for Peanut was a large poster of an Oriental battle which I had liked because of the violence of colors and the fragility of the line.
I took all these objects out anyway, and put them on the bed, put on my shirt, put on my shoes, and looked at myself in the mirror as I combed and brushed my hair.
You don’t always like what you see in the mirror, but I did that day, since I was home and everything, once again, was up to me. This proves, I imagine, that all you ever really see in your mirror is your state of mind. Leaving that alone: I felt that I, Hall, would be all right, would make no one ashamed of him. At the same time, I was a little afraid to leave the room, to go into the living room, and eventually the streets, and pick up my life again. Behind my face, there was music, the music from the living room. It was a quartet. I heard,
Nicodemus
went to the Lord,
he went to the Lord
by night.
He said, Rabbi,
which means Master,
won’t you lead me
to the light?
He said, Nicodemus,
let me tell you
like a friend
you must be
born again,
and I never heard
a man
speak like this man!
That sound, the driving sound, always makes me see a black cat, face brilliant and sweating in the sunlight which pours down on his face, pacing, prancing, up a long, high hill. When he stumbles, he does not lean forward; he arches back, using the misstep to pick up the beat. He is surrounded by people urging him up the hill, they are all around him and behind him, but you do not see them. You know, simply, as he does, that they are present. If this sound always makes me think of a black cat, it is because the sound is black. It is black because the people who have betrayed themselves into being white dare not believe that a sound so rude and horrible, so majestic and universal, can possibly issue from them—though it has, and it does; that is how they recognize it, and why they flee from it: and they will hear it in themselves again, when the present delusion is shattered from the earth.
Beneath this sound: Paul’s chuckle, Florence’s laugh, Peanut and Arthur’s deadpan conspiracies, my face—I pick up my presents, and walk into the living room.
“Well, well, well,” Peanut said mildly. “Don’t look like you going to have any trouble adjusting to civilian life.”
“Now, you all leave me alone. You don’t know how bad I wanted to get out of that uniform.”
“You right. That uniform didn’t do nothing for you—didn’t bring out the color of your eyes. You see what I mean? But now, with this outfit!”
“Peanut, what makes you so jealous?” Florence asked. “And when you know the Lord don’t like that? My children—and especially my oldest one, today—they just naturally sharp, you might just as well go right on ahead and accept it.”
“I accept it, Mama Montana, I was just a little dazzled—”
“Ain’t no sense in being dazzled, you just go right on ahead and accept it.” She laughed. She was a little tipsy, not so much with wine as with happiness—with relief: as though she had been holding her breath all the time I had been gone and could only let it out now.
Paul was another matter. He would probably never again take a really deep breath, but he was a happy man today.
“I brought you all some presents,” I said. “But if you keep teasing me, you going to make me so nervous I won’t know what I’m doing.”
“You want to do that now?” Florence asked. “Or you want to wait till after we eat? I want to get some food in your belly.”
“Won’t take but a minute.” I was nervous, like a child. I concentrated on the packages. “Here,” I said to my mother. “This is for you,” and I gave her the package—that is, I reached the package to her and then went over to where she sat on the sofa, and kissed her, and “Here,” I said to Paul, “this is for you,” and I kissed him on the “forehead quickly, and “Here, Skeezix, this is for you,” and I dropped the big package into Arthur’s lap, and “Peanut,” I said, “I didn’t know I was going to see you today, but I hope you’ll like this. All I can say is I liked it, that’s why I bought it,” and I gave him the rolled-up poster and I sat down in the chair by the door.
“After all that,” said my father, “before we open the presents, I believe you need a drink.”
The table before the sofa was loaded with bottles and trays—peanuts, crackers, ham, cheese—I hadn’t even noticed it.
“Look like we having a party,” I said.
“You right,” Paul said. “We is sure enough having a party. We so glad to see you home, son, don’t none of us know how to act. Don’t even care if you get drunk—don’t care if I get a little drunk and you know I ain’t never said nothing like that to you before. How about a little Jack Daniel’s? Or Cutty Sark? Been saving it all for you. As you can see, your mama don’t drink”—Florence laughed—”and I don’t hardly drink and we lock up the bottles when your brother’s in the house.”
“I’ll have a little Cutty,” I said. “With some ice.”
My father poured it, and handed it to me. We looked each other in the eye for a second—-but a very long second: our past, our present, and our future happened in that twinkling of an eye—and we all raised our glasses to each other, and drank.
I do not know why I felt so keenly that this first homecoming was also my first farewell.
A silence fell. The noises from the street came in. The record player had stopped. Paul took out his pipe, examined it with great respect for a moment, put it between his teeth, and waved one hand at me. In my memory, all this occurred in silence. Arthur took out his Oriental robe and put it on, walking up and down the room, like Yul Brynner, and looking into the mirror. But the only full-length mirror was in the dining room, and so he disappeared for a moment. Mama put on her earrings, and Peanut unwrapped his martial scroll.
“Let me put the food on the table,” Mama said, and touched her earrings and smiled at me and sashayed into the kitchen.
“That’s true enough,” Paul said—he was speaking to Peanut—” I can spend the rest of my life and never sit down at a table with white folks—but that ain’t really the point.”
“Anyway,” Peanut asked, “how many niggers in Washington got enough money to go downtown and be desegregated?”
“Oh, some,” Paul said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t quite a number—but you wouldn’t like them, either.”
“Liking or disliking,” Florence said, “has nothing to do with nothing. I remember when you had to change trains in Washington and go to the Jim Crow car—
“I just don’t find it easy to swallow,” Peanut said. “These people got the gall to claim to be giving us something they didn’t never have the right to take away.” He took a swallow of his drink—we were at the table, getting some food into our bellies—and said, “It ain’t going to make me hold them in no higher esteem, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“That’s not the point, son,” Paul said. “It ain’t worth talking about. You can’t love nobody you can’t respect.”
I thought of some of the Oriental faces I had seen, and the dry, bitter contempt in their eyes. Some were whores, and some were grandfathers or grandmothers, and some were children. In the case of the old, the contempt might be leavened with pity or, in the case of the children, camouflaged by bewilderment and pain: but the contempt was a constant, at bottom, and bottomless. Not a single white buddy of mine had seen this—but then, they had not seen me.
“Well, anyway,” Arthur said, “it ought to make things better in the school.”
Peanut grunted. Paul said, “Listen. You all are young. Like it or not, we here now and we can’t go nowhere else. I was a kind of half-assed Garveyite when I was young—you would have been, too, had you been young when I was. But you all hardly know who he was, and ain’t no white person going to tell you. All I’m saying is, you going to have to do what we’ve always done, ain’t nothing new—take what you have, and make what you want.”