Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
“The dreamer awoke,” I said.
“Yes,” she said soberly, after a moment, “the dreamer awoke.”
I watched her. I really did not know what I felt, and I decided that I would not try to find out now. I would sort it out later. I had the feeling that something, something very clear, had yet eluded me.
“Is Sidney going to stay on at the bar,” I asked, “after you’re married?”
“No.” Her face changed again, with a warm, wondering, private smile. She touched her drink. “I may never have another drink.” She put her cigarette into the ashtray. “I may never smoke another cigarette or”—she looked around the bar—“sit in another place like this again.”
I laughed, although I knew I shouldn’t have; I laughed because I was frightened. “Are you going to become a Seventh-Day Adventist, or something, or”—I stopped laughing—“or what?”
She was quite untouched by my laughter. She was radiant. “Sidney’s studying for us to change our lives—to change the lives of all black people in this country. Especially black men, that’s the key.” She gave me a mocking, affectionate smile. “He might change you, too.”
Now I was perfectly sober, intent, watching her.
“I know Sidney never told you this, but I know it’s all right if I tell you now—he’s not hiding it anymore.” She paused. “Sidney has a younger brother in prison—did you know that?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.” Then, “My brother, Sidney, never told me he had another brother.”
“Well. He has. And for the past year or so, every time his brother writes, every time Sidney sees his brother, all he can talk about is the Messenger from Allah, about Islam, and how this truth, after all these centuries of lies, has helped him clean up his life. And Sidney says it’s true—his brother, who went to jail for murder, is a changed man. But Sidney will tell you, he’s been dying to tell you. And I’ve read some of his brother’s letters and they started me thinking in an entirely new direction.” She watched my face, and laughed, then sobered. “No, I’m not crazy, but I’ll let Sidney explain it to you—he’s studying, he spends every spare minute with his Muslim brothers, and it’s made him a changed man, too.” She paused, and then said proudly, “And if I’m going to be his wife, his helpmeet—well then, I must begin my studies, too.”
I simply looked at her. I couldn’t take it all in. “This is all new to me. I never heard anything about this.”
“But it’s not new. It’s old. It’s thousands of years old. It’s just been hidden from us.” No doubt, I still looked numb. “Look, the truth about black people has always been hidden from us, that’s how we got so messed up. But the Messenger of Allah knows the truth.”
“And this is a man—a living man?”
“A living black man—right here in the United States.”
“I think I better have another drink,” I said, “quick, and you better have one, too. Sounds like your drinking days are almost done.”
She laughed. “Why are you so frightened? You look absolutely terrified.”
“I am terrified. The truth is supposed to terrify.”
I asked the waitress for one more round, and I asked her to make mine a double. Martha watched me from her unassailable distance, with her unswerving love. Then she looked at her watch again.
“I’d better call Sidney. What are we going to do?”
“I’ll take you back to the bar, and Sidney and I will make arrangements to discuss this Muslim shit more thoroughly.”
“Very well,” she said, and took a dime from her purse and went to telephone Sidney.
I walked her up to Jordan’s Cat in silence. I didn’t want to be silent, but I didn’t know what to say: and I didn’t want her to talk. I kept thinking about what she had said, and more, the way she had said it; it kept turning and turning in my mind the way a heavy object in the water is pushed and pulled about. It would not sink, it would not stop moving.
So, when I got to the bar, I said to Sidney, “I hear you got something to lay on me, brother.”
Sidney gave me the most beautiful smile I had ever seen on the face of any man and said, “I believe I do.”
“You want to talk later?”
“You go get some sleep. I’ll pick you up at your house around six, okay?”
“Okay.”
And so I left them and started for my house. I didn’t get there right away, I got drunk but I didn’t get laid—I couldn’t have, I was watching everything and everyone from too great a distance, I kept hearing Martha’s voice and seeing her face—and that was the end of my first day home.
Sidney called me to say he’d meet me at a joint on 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, next to the subway station.
I was alone in my house. Florence, Paul, and Arthur were out. I had the feeling that they were leaving me alone until I got my bearings.
It was a bright fall day, the kind of day, along with some days in winter, that New York is best at, and so I decided to walk—to walk my familiar, and yet unfamiliar streets.
I did not want to think about last night, and Martha, because I knew I didn’t understand it yet: and I really didn’t know, any longer, how I felt about Sidney. I didn’t want to be unfair, and so I kept my mind a blank.
Sidney was standing by the subway station, wearing an old red sweater and old black pants and a cap: and the conk was leaving his hair.
We smiled at each other warily. We knew, after all, where we’d been. We didn’t know where we were.
He affected a West Indian accent: “Buy you a cup of coffee, mate?”
I laughed. “I’d rather have a beer.”
“You show signs, very definite, of being incorrigible—but, as it’s you—come on.”
We turned our back on the subway and the park, and walked about a block to a loud, raucous bar I had hardly ever entered. It was a bar mainly for whores and their men, and I didn’t mind that so much—though this meant that I really had no business there—but I didn’t like the cops or the other white men who came in there.
Now, in the late afternoon, it was half empty—perhaps half a dozen young men, some scarcely more than boys, sitting or standing at the bar. A couple of older men were at the tables, discussing the numbers.
Sidney and I sat at the bar. The barman, who was white, greeted Sidney as though he knew him. I didn’t like his face. He was young, probably the son of the owner, one of those hip white boys who know that they know niggers, know them so well that they can imitate the nigger’s language, and this gives them the right to treat niggers like scum.
He served Sidney a Coke, he served me a beer.
I lit a cigarette and offered Sidney a cigarette, perhaps mainly out of curiosity. Sidney refused.
“You don’t smoke anymore?”
“Not for the moment. Time will tell.”
I took a swallow of my beer, and jumped in.
“Congratulations about you and Martha,” I said, and I offered him my hand.
He grinned, and we shook hands, and I felt better. “I—we—owe it all to you,” he said.
“That’s a nice thing for you to say, and I appreciate it. But I didn’t really have anything to do with it. After all”—I laughed, hoping I wasn’t saying the wrong thing—”I wasn’t here.”
“How was it over there?”
“Man, you know how it was over there. It was bullshit piled high, pressed down, and running over.” I sipped my beer. “And lots of spattering blood and guts and brains and whores we treated like shit and V.D. and dysentery and dope.” I laughed. “America, the beautiful.”
“Well. Look around you, now that you back, and tell me how different is it over here.”
I was silent. I looked around me. Past the profile of the boy at the far end of the bar, I looked through the open door, into the street. The sun was traveling westward, that is to say the earth was turning; the sun struck the tops of buildings with a melancholy, departing glare and seemed to shake the topmost windows. I could see, fr
I looked back at Sidney, but found nothing to say.
“They have us trapped here,” said Sidney, “like rats, because the land belongs to them. Everything belongs to them.” He gestured toward the bartender, and said, in a low voice, out of the side of his mouth—something I had never known him to do before—“That devil, and his papa, they own I don’t know how many blocks, how much real estate around here, and, between them and the cops, man, and be you a whore or be you a chump looking for a license, you don’t turn no tricks, you hear me, if you don’t bend over and spread them cheeks. And you better be smiling, and holler thank you!” He finished his Coke. “They got our nuts in a vise, man, and all we can do is holler.”
I could say nothing. I listened to his voice, and I watched his face—or, really, I could almost say that I listened to his face and watched his voice. I was beginning, to hear, or see—to perceive—in another, new, very troubling way. It was as though one of my senses, or possibilities—sight, for example, or motion—had just been denied me, had just been stricken from me, and what remained to me had to do double or triple duty.
“You want another Coke?” I asked.
“No, get me a beer. It’s all the same poison.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said the friendly barman, the hip white motherfucker, one of those barmen always in earshot. You hope somebody will strangle him one day, and you hope it won’t be you.
I watched Sidney’s voice because there was a river rolling in it, a deep river, long dammed, about to overthrow everything in the path of the river, including the barman who, now, with a brotherly, conspiratorial wink, placed our beers before us. I heard Sidney’s eyes as they thundered behind the barman the entire length of the bar, from a long ways off.
Then Sidney laughed, thank heaven, and my normal senses were returned to me, not quite, however, as they had been.
Then, “Martha told you,” Sidney asked, “about my brother?”
I nodded yes.
“He killed a man. I don’t blame him. I would have, too.”
He sipped his beer, and said nothing more, and I said nothing.
“I wondered, for a long time, how what happened to my brother could have happened. And now I think I know.”
He looked beyond me, into the street.
“I used to think he was in prison, and I had to get him out. Now I know we all in prison, and we got to get us out.”
I watched him, and I listened.
“They told us God was white, and cut our nuts off, raped our women, slaughtered our children, and got us penned up here, like hogs. And they tell us it’s God’s will. It is God’s will—their God.”
He took a deep swallow of his beer, very calm now.
“It’s God’s will because they own everything—and they stole everything they own. Their whole history is a lie—ain’t a white devil walking who can tell the truth, not one. They even stole God.”
I thought to myself, Good. They can have Him. But I said nothing. Something was going on, deep inside me, something moving—too deep, too slow, too fast for me to grasp. Something was tormenting me, like the beginning of music, like the void into which one drops to find the word.
Sidney was trying to give me something, or to share something. Whatever it was, I could not possibly give it to Arthur. That may sound strange—and, even now, it sounds strange to me—but that’s what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all. Gods who could be stolen and then stolen back did not interest me at all. I wasn’t raised to deal in stolen goods. As far as I was concerned, it was all a lie, from top to bottom: and, since we had built it, only we could dare it down. That energy called divine is really human need, translated, and if that God we have created needs patience with us, how much more than patience do we need with God!
Sidney and I walked our streets together until he had to go to work, and I left him at the door of Jordan’s Cat. And I knew that I would never see him again, not as I had.
The only person in my life, then, really, was my brother, Arthur—and I accepted this with no complaint, even without astonishment—and time was flying and I had to start working on the building. I did not want to find Arthur standing, one day, in profile to me, at the far end of the bar.
Yes. I started working on the building, Arthur went on the road, and time began to do its number.
I woke up one morning in San Francisco, and I knew that there was something strange about the day, but I couldn’t place what it was.
Then I said to myself, with a reluctant wonder, I’m thirty. I’m thirty years old today.
I was alone in my hotel room. I had been on the coast for a couple of months, working with the California branch of the advertising agency I worked for in New York. It was a white firm, as need scarcely be said, but, in the sixties, as my countrymen were proud to point out, we blacks were making great strides in fields previously blocked to us.
Thirty. Well. I still had to get out of bed and confront and wash this aging frame. Which didn’t feel too decrepit, just the same. In fact, I felt pretty good, and I was even rather pleased that the day found me alone. And I didn’t feel anything momentous, the need to take stock of my life, or any shit like that. No, I was simply pleased and a little astonished to find myself still among the living, to have lasted this long.
And it was a nice day, and I like San Francisco. I wondered if I could find anyone to have lunch with me. It was a Saturday, so there’d be no one at the office, but I had a couple of numbers in my book.
I got in and out of the shower, got dressed, called room service for coffee. I looked out of my window, seeing, mainly, the tops of tall buildings, but I knew that beneath, below these, were my steeply vertiginous, beloved streets.
The girl came with the coffee and, at the very same moment, the phone rang.
The girl was Oriental, and she left. The phone call, as it turned out, was Faulkner.
Faulkner was blood-related to my boss, precisely to what legal degree I never knew: blood relative of a pirate, a cunning, hard-nosed blond. I loathed him, but I must confess that he frightened me, too—he was only about twenty, and had the moral sense of a crocodile.
“Hall?” That voice, clipped and rushed, remnant of Hollywood films with a British setting, and various private schools.
“Yes? Speaking.”
“Something came up, we need you back here.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“What do you mean, why am I calling you? Listen, I’m Faulkner Grey, I’m part of this firm—”
“I know who you are, and I know you’re part of the firm, but you’re not my boss. I don’t take orders from you.”
“Listen, this was just a friendly call to let you know that you’re going to be needed on deck back here, why are you jumping down my throat?”
“Because you might be high on something. Because you and I don’t have
“And because you hate my guts, right?”
“I don’t think about you one way or the other, Faulkner. I just don’t know how to move on your word.”
But I rather regretted, just the same, the tone I’d taken. It wasn’t smart.
“Do you think I’m calling you because I love your big brown eyes? Do you think I miss you, for Christ’s sake?”
Could be, I thought, could be. The thought had crossed my mind more than once. The kid damn sure stayed on my case.
And I knew I wasn’t being smart, but I couldn’t help it: “I certainly miss you, darling. What’s up?”
“You know, for an intelligent black cat and all, you can be pretty sickening.”
“Hush, child. Jealous tantrums will get you nowhere. Is my presence urgently required?”
“If you were smart, you’d get on a plane today, so you could be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early Monday morning.”
“On the level? You’re not shitting me?”
“No, I’m not shitting you, you bastard,” and he hung up.
Junior. You are God’s masterpiece, the matchless creep of creeps, and I will never know what I could possibly have done, in any of my previous lives, to deserve you.
Still, he wasn’t certifiably insane; if I was a little afraid of him, he was, also, a little afraid of me, and this meant that my presence was required back in New York. Having Faulkner call me was just one more of the little ways they had of letting me know that I might be an intelligent black cat and all, and my people might be making great strides in the kingdom, but I was still a nigger.
And, fuck it, yes, I am, and I wasn’t going to let these people spoil my birthday, or hurt me or hinder me in any way at all. White people can steal a lot of your time, can steal your whole life, if you let them.
So I figured I would spend the day in San Francisco, and take a flight out in the evening. Time works for you as you head east, and so I thought I might see my parents before my birthday was completely over.