Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
I pour Jimmy and I a drink. Jimmy sits down, and takes off his boots, puts his head on one cushion, and his feet on the other, takes his drink from my hand, and sits up.
I sit down next to him, and he raises his glass.
“I’m mighty glad to see you, brother.”
“I am, too.”
We touch glasses, and drink. Odessa comes in, and wipes down the table. There is a silence between Jimmy and I—not uncomfortable, but tense. With our first words, whatever they may be, we will have begun a journey. But we smile. Odessa swings out of the room.
“Well—what were you doing in Rome?”
“Man—what was I doing anywhere? I hardly know. Well, I do know.” He finds his cigarettes, and I light his cigarette, and mine.
Maybe what I mean when I say Jimmy’s quiet, is that Jimmy can go out on you in a second, and still be there, as motionless, and as private, as a cat. He smiles. “I went on a kind of pilgrimage. I was in Istanbul. I was in London, and Berlin, and Geneva. I was in Venice. I was in Paris—places where Arthur and I had hung out together, or just places where I knew he’d been. I was in Barcelona—we’d been very happy in Barcelona.” He grins, and sips his drink. “The Stations of the Cross.” Then, “Don’t misunderstand me. I discovered how much I’d loved him—love him still. And then—I began to be able to swallow without hurting. It—began to be all right. Hell, maybe nothing’s ever all right, but you know what I mean. I stopped hating God—or whatever. Whatever had hurt us so. Whatever smashed him.” He leans back on one cushion. “You know. I’ll tell you all about it, soon.”
Tony comes in. “You guys mind if I come in here? I mean, you know, I’m in the way in the kitchen, but I can always go upstairs and read a book.” He smiles, but he’s worried just the same.
Jimmy pats a cushion. “Sit down, Tony. I ain’t dumb enough to think I got any secrets from you. Hell, I ain’t got no secrets, period,” and the three of us laugh, and Tony sits down; or rather, he rearranges his sharp angles into what can roughly be called a sitting position; he isn’t standing up.
“What were you doing in Rome?” Tony asks.
“Some lardheads had some wild idea of doing a movie about your uncle’s life. I told them”—turning to me—”that you were the man to talk to, but, after one session with them, I wouldn’t even give them your address. I’ll tell you about it. Bloody Pentecost Sunday, in blackfare, or Porgy and Crown.” He makes a retching sound. “The end, baby. Otherwise,” he says to Tony, “I was playing piano. I played piano everywhere I went. That’s how I kept myself alive. It was a rough gig.” He sips his drink. “Don’t believe I’m going to do it no more. It wasn’t the same, it didn’t mean the same thing to me. I began to understand, better than I had—” Jimmy stops, and finishes his drink, and hands his glass to Tony. “Do the old man a favor? Put some more Scotch in there with a couple more rocks?”
“Right,” says Tony, and looks at me, but I signify, No. I’m terrified of drinking when I’m driving, and, also, on the drive home tonight, Tony and I will be alone, and Tony will be full of questions.
“What did you begin to understand?” I ask.
“How Arthur had to feel, after a while. It wasn’t him singing, anymore.” Jimmy sighed. “That’s what he felt, I know. You do, too. But he couldn’t go back, either.” He sits up, puts out his cigarette, immediately lights another. “I think I’ve started my book,” he says.
Tony brings Jimmy his drink, and sits down again.
“Yes,” says Jimmy, “I believe I’ve started my book.”
The women enter with the food and the wine.
I haven’t known Jimmy all of my life, but I’ve known him all of his—a curious difference, as time goes on. I hardly ever noticed him, until I started going with Julia. Until then, he’d just been Julia’s snot-nosed, noisy little brother, an absolute drag, and, every once in a while, I’d, have to step over him, politely, or push him aside, politely, or indicate, politely, that he go fuck himself. I had nothing against him. I just didn’t need him.
While I was going with Julia, I remember him, mainly, coming in the door, or going out of it: he no longer lived at home. But then, just the same, he became more real to me: I knew how much he meant to Julia.
Julia and I were going together in 1957, the year that Arthur went solo. Julia and I, for reasons that I will have to go into later, didn’t last too long; but Arthur, solo, did. So in 1960 or thereabouts, Arthur was doing a Civil Rights benefit in a church in the backwoods of Florida; and his regular pianist was in jail, in Alabama. I went with Arthur on this trip because I had become a little frightened for him—perhaps also because, without quite admitting it, I was becoming more involved myself. I had a whole lot of reservations about nonviolent protest, and praying for your enemies, and freedom songs, and all that. But those white crackers were far from nonviolent. You could hear the blows and the screams and the prayers from Mississippi to Harlem. You could catch it on your TV set when you came home. There was no way—for some people—to act like you didn’t know. I say, “some people,” and I say it with great bitterness, and even hatred in my heart for, God knows, “some people” were not most people. Most Americans did not give a shit about those black boys and girls and men and women—and some white boys and girls and white men and women—being beaten and murdered, in their name. Most Americans proved themselves to be absolute cowards—that’s the truth, and the record bears me out. But I’m running ahead of myself. Some of the kids drove us to the church, because Arthur was determined, and we found Jimmy there. Jimmy had been working in the South for about two years.
Now Julia had told me this, and I also knew that Jimmy played piano: but none of this registered until that moment Arthur and I walked into the church, and found Jimmy sitting there. He was sitting in the kitchen, which was in the church basement. This basement had already been bombed twice. There were sandbags in one corner, and in the hole where one of the windows had been.
Jimmy was sitting on the kitchen table, chewing on a bacon sandwich, wearing a torn green sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers. He was very thin. I didn’t recognize him right away, but Arthur did.
Jimmy grinned, and said, “Welcome to the slaughter, children. And don’t go nowhere without your comb, your washrag, and your toothbrush—some of these jails have running water.” Then he said to Arthur, “I hear your main man’s been detained, in the cradle of the Confederacy. I’ll play for you, if you want”
“Beautiful,” Arthur said. “You want to run through a couple with me, right quick? Just so we’ll get a sense of each other.”
Jimmy stood up, and finished his sandwich. “At your service,” he said, and we walked upstairs, into the church. Jimmy sat down at the piano. A couple of kids gathered around. Two black men stood at the doors, watching the street. It was about two hours before the church service—which was really a protest rally—would begin. Arthur’s name hung in banners outside the church. The air was heavy with a tension I was eventually to come to know as well as I know my name.
Jimmy began to play. Arthur waited a little, then he began to sing; he and Jimmy grinned at each other, briefly, as each began to enter the other’s beat. A few more kids gathered around the altar. A couple of women, arms folded, stood in the aisle. A telephone rang in the church office; someone immediately picked it up, closing the office door. I joined the two men as the music began to come alive, and stood at the door with them, staring out at the pastoral, apocalyptic streets.
More than a year later, one rainy night in Harlem, we let the rain sort of float us from one bar to another, and we walked and talked, alone on the black-and-silver streets, surrounded by the rain, water dropping from our hair and our eyelashes, from the tips of our noses, and down our backs. Arthur had just come in from London.
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imaginat
Ruth was in the hospital with Tony then, and Arthur and I had had dinner alone. It was raining as we walked out of the restaurant, which was near the Renaissance Theatre, on Seventh Avenue. My apartment, in one of those damn, disastrous housing projects, was behind us, slightly to the east.
Arthur had been very silent during dinner. I watched his face. It was a face I knew and didn’t know. He had something on his mind.
We walked out, silently, and found the rain, but we did not start back toward my apartment. We started slowly down the long, loud avenue, long with silence, loud with rain. Cars rocked, proudly amphibious, throwing up buckets of water. People stood in vestibules, in little circles of light, hugged the walls of buildings, splashed furiously through puddles: we walked very slowly. I was wearing a cap, but Arthur was bareheaded, holding a folded newspaper on top of his head. Arthur stopped before Dickie Wells. We looked briefly at each other, and walked in, and sat down at the bar. It was early, that is, it was not yet midnight, and the place was quiet.
The bartender served us, and Arthur looked down into his glass, and then he looked up at me, and he said, “So. We’re finally going to work together.”
We had decided that, just before he’d gone to London. It was Arthur who insisted. I worked in the advertising department of a black magazine—at least, it said it was black; and the job wasn’t bad, but Arthur said that it was turning me into a schizo: and I could see that that might be true.
Arthur was around twenty-six, which means that we had edged into the sixties. Without having yet, as the proverb goes, “made it,” Arthur was a tremendous drawing card, absolutely individual, and had reached that curious point through which all memorable careers seem to pass: when you must either go up and over, or down and out.
We were due to sign for his first record album in a matter of days, and this, too, was very much on his mind.
“Are you having second thoughts about us working together?”
He grinned. “You can’t get out of it that way, baby.”
Then again he was silent, and I watched his face.
“When you sing,” he said, suddenly, “you can’t sing outside the song. You’ve got to be the song you sing. You’ve got to make a confession.”
He turned his drink around, and said, in another tone, “Every time I pass that corner, next to the Renaissance, I remember this man who was standing on the corner one day when I came by, and he asked me to go to the store for him. I was about thirteen. He was about thirty or forty, a very rough-looking dude, tall and thin, he wore a hat. He said we had to go to his house to get the money.”
Arthur looked at me sideways, with a little grin, a shrug. “He looked like he might give me a nickel, or a dime.”
I watched Arthur, and held my breath.
“The house he said he lived in was very close to the corner, and we walked in the hall and started up the stairs. It was funny, I’ll never forget it, but the minute we started up those stairs, I knew that man did not live in this house. I knew it. I got scared like I’d never been scared before, but I didn’t turn and run, it was like I was hypnotized. I just followed him up those stairs, till we got to the third landing.”
I try to see the scene as a minor, adolescent misadventure, as common as dirt. But this is not what Arthur’s eyes are saying, nor his voice.
“He said I was a cute boy—something like that—and he touched me on the face, and I just stood there, looking at him. And, while I was looking at him, his eyes got darker, like the sky, you know? and he didn’t seem to be looking at the, just like the sky. And it was silent on those stairs, like you could hear silence just growing, like it was going to explode!”
Arthur looked at me and looked away, and took another swallow of his drink.
“He took out his cock, and I just stared at that thing pointing at me, and man, you know how we were raised, I did not know who to scream for, and then he put his hand on my cock and my cock jumped and then I couldn’t move at all. I just stood there, waiting, paralyzed, and he opened my pants and took it out, and it got big and I had never seen it that way, it was the first time and so it meant that I must be just like this man, and then he knelt down and took it in his mouth. I thought he was going to bite it off. But, all the time, it kept getting bigger, and I started to cry.
“A door slammed somewhere over our heads, and he stood up, and he put some money in my hand, and he hurried down the steps. I got my pants closed best as I could and I ran home. I mean, I ran all the way. I locked myself in the bathroom, and I looked at the money; it was a quarter and two dimes. I threw them out the window.”
He finished his drink. “And I had just started singing.”
A shyness I might not have felt with a friend, or a stranger, refused to release my tongue. Nothing so terrible had happened, after all; much worse might have happened. This thought made me ashamed of myself: how do I know that? It was not my initiation. I am ashamed of myself for another reason; that Arthur never thought to tell his older brother of this violation: he could certainly have told no one else.
But I had been twenty when Arthur was thirteen, far above the childlike concerns of my little brother. It would probably never have occurred to him to look for me, to talk to me. He would have been too frightened, and too ashamed.
“I never forgot that man,” Arthur said, slowly, “not so much because of the physical thing—but—”
Arthur stopped, and looked at me, and it was as though I had never before looked into his eyes, or had never before realized how enormous they were, and how deep.
“—it was the way he made, me feel about myself. That man made it impossible for me to touch anybody, man or woman, for a long time, and still, he filled me with a terrible curiosity. And, all that time, I was singing, man, I was singing up a storm.” Then he stopped laughing. “I’ve got to live the life I sing about in my song,” he said.
He put some money on the bar, and picked up his wet newspaper. “Come on,” he said, “let’s pub crawl. I don’t mind getting wet,” and he grinned, and propelled me to the door.
We walked out into the rain again, and started down the avenue. We walked slowly, in silence, head down, the only people on the street. Had there been anyone to see us, we would have been a strange sight.
Arthur put his newspaper on his head again, where it began its final disintegration. “If you knew me better, I’m sure you’d say I was a fool, and, if I wasn’t your brother, you might laugh at me—but I’ve had very little experience, and I’ve always been afraid. And I’ve stayed busy. And, if you notice, I’ve kind of stayed away from you. Because I’ve always looked up to you, and I love you, and I wouldn’t be able to live, man, if I thought you were ashamed of me.”
I made a sound like a laugh, a thin, demented sound against the torrent. “Why should I be ashamed of you?”
“Look. You’re going to be hanging out with me more and more.” We were now beginning to be soaked, we started walking faster, staying close to the walls of buildings; Arthur dropped the sodden newspaper, and we headed for the next bar. “You’re going to see my life. I don’t want to hide anything from you, brother.”
“Why should you hide anything from me?” But my voice sounded hollow, and, yes, I was afraid.
We walked into the bar. This was a bar we no longer knew very well, a poor bar. It can be said that all bars in Harlem are poor, but there are degrees, degrees of visibility; and this bar was poor.
We were very visible, too, as we walked through the bar, and sat down in a booth in the back. The jukebox was going very loud, and so were the people.
Arthur went into the bathroom, to wipe his streaming face, and hair. The barmaid, an elderly woman with a pleasant face, came over to me.
“That the one who sings?”
“Yes.” Then, “That’s my brother.”
“What’s his name?”
“Arthur Montana.”
“I knew it.
“Why would I say I was, if I wasn’t?”
“I don’t know why people say a lot of things. You tell him he got a beautiful voice. I heard him at Reverend Larrabee’s, me and my sister.”
She took the order, and went away. Presently, I heard “—a gospel singer? He ain’t going save no souls in here.” Laughter. “He can get wet, just like everybody else,” someone said. “And thirsty, too,” said another. “Man, didn’t nobody say he was no preacher.” “Let’s get him to sing ‘Didn’t It Rain.’.” “You no-good sinners,” said the barmaid, calmly, “you don’t know He’s everywhere.” More laughter. “Preach it, Minnie!” Dinah and Brook Benton were singing “A Rocking Good Way.” “Dinah started out in gospel,” somebody said.
Arthur came back, not very much drier—our hair holds the rain—and took off his jacket, and sat down. The bar-maid set her tray down on the table. “Give me them wet things,” she said, and she took my cap, and coat, and Arthur’s jacket, and placed them on a nearby table. “That’s better,” she said, and poured us our drinks.
“Thank you,” Arthur said.
“Don’t you let the whiskey ruin that pretty voice,” she said, and went back behind the bar.
Arthur stared in her direction, and then stared at me. “You been talking about me?”
“Baby, she heard you sing at Reverend Larrabee’s, and she’s already told everybody here. She told me.”
Arthur looked astounded, then—unwillingly—delighted, then thoughtful. He lit a cigarette.
“Don’t let them cigarettes wreck that pretty voice,” I said.
Arthur grinned, suddenly looking about ten years old, and he said, “Now, don’t you do me like that, brother.” I remembered teaching him to tie his shoes—his sneakers—years ago, they were brown and white, and I have no idea why I remember that.
“I’m not doing it,” I said. “It’s fame.”