James Baldwin Just Above my Head
Not one of us saw our futures coming: we lived ourselves into our present, unimaginable states, until, abruptly, without ever having achieved a future, we were trying to decipher our past. Which is all right,
too, I guess, on condition that one does not consider the past a
matter for tears, recriminations, regrets. I am what I am, and what
I have become. I wouldn’t do it over if I could, and, if I could, if I
had to do it over, I wouldn’t know how. The very idea causes the
spirit within me to grow faint with fatigue. No. Thank you: I do
not forget that fire burns, that water overwhelms, rolls, and drags
you under, that madness awaits in the valley, the mirror, and on
the mountaintop. I have no regrets, I have no complaints:
furthermore, I know very well that there is no complaint
department. I will carry on from here, thank you. My hand is on
the Gospel plow, and I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey
now.
***
Jimmy sets his beer down on the coffee table, and walks to the
piano. He stares at it for a while, then sits down. He lifts up the
cover, and touches the keys. He looks over at me. “I found it hard
to touch a piano for a while.” He plays a chord. “But playing all
over, like I did—that helped me.”
***
We went south, as scheduled, into a punishing climate. I do not
mean, now, merely the seasonal climate, or the climate of my
heart, or Arthur’s. I mean something harder than that, harder to
define. It was the climate created by something riding on the
wind. It was as though the landscape awaited the scalding
purification of the latter rain—the ruthless and liberating
definition. This was in the faces, the voices, the accents, in the
horror of what could not be said.
***
Said: it could not be whispered. Whispered: it could not be
dreamed. Dreamed: it could not be confessed. Not all of the
sheriffs children are white, this knowledge was in every eye. Not
all of my mother’s children are black. This knowledge, which is
the same knowledge, was also in every eye, but with a difference.
This difference is the difference between flight and
confrontation. Or, if I may stoop to borrow from a lexicon
stupefying in its absolute and desperately sincere dishonesty, it is
the difference between being black, or white. The words seem
infantile and weightless in such a context, words absurdly trivial
to account for so lethal a storm: but I have had to stoop, as I told
you, and borrow from a book I did not, thank heaven, write. For,
these were the only two words uttered, all that could be said, all
that could be heard riding on the southern wind. If I could
scarcely believe my ears, if it diminished me to see that we could
be so basely craven, yet, I had to hear it, for I was traveling with
my brother, and we trembled for our lives. For them, we were
black, and that was all there was to it. Oh, I might like to laugh,
and perhaps my life was dear to me, perhaps my fingers were
capable of field-stripping a rifle, or playing a violin, perhaps I
loved my wife, my son, or my daughter, or my brother, perhaps I,
too, like all men, knew that I was born to die. None of this
mattered, none If this contributed the faintest hair’s-breadth to the
balance, for I was black. If I could not conveniently die, or
decently smile, gratefully labor, then I should be carried to a place
of execution, the dogs to feast on my sex; fire, air, wind, water,
and, at last, the earth, my bones: it came to that, for me and mine,
and in my own country, which I loved so much, and which I
helped to build.
***
What do I care, if you are white? Be white: I do not have to prove my color. I wouldn’t be compelled to see your color, if you were not so
anxious to prove it. Why? And to me, of all people.—But I know
why. You are afraid that you have been here with me too long,
and are not really white anymore. That’s probably true, but you
were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has,
even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being
black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that
before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you.
***
“A black girl in Africa, who wasn’t born in Africa, and who
has never seen Africa, is a very strange creature for herself, and
for everyone who meets her. I don’t know which comes first, or
which is worse. They don’t know who they are meeting. You
don’t know who they are meeting, either—you may have thought
you did, but now, you know you don’t—and you don’t know who
they are either. You may have thought you did, but you don’t.
You don’t know a damn thing about any single day they’ve spent
on earth. You go through the village, or the villages, but you don’t
really see them—Hollywood threw acid in both your eyes before
you were seven years old. You’re blind, that’s the first thing you
realize is that you’re blind. Later you begin to see—something.
And, then, you begin to see why you couldn’t see. But, at first—
damn, you know more about the Mississippi cracker, even though
you hate him and you know he hates you. And then”—looking up
at me, with those eyes—”you see how people try to hold on to
what they know, no matter how ugly it is. It’s better,” and she
laughed, “than nothing!”
***
“But maybe what’s been happening to you all your life will
keep happening to you in Africa, too—why not? Everything has
happened there already, you just weren’t present. Like, you don’t
know what tribe produced you, and you don’t even know what
that means, but the people watching you, in Africa, they know.
They don’t even have to think about it—they know. And are they
remembering what they last did to you, or what you last did to
them?
***
I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The
burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it
useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the
imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more
dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will
distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible—indeed, it is
common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same
time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event
totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s
life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from
experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence:
memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that
we justify it.
***
Then Jimmy comes out of the kitchen, with Arthur’s drink, and
hands it to him, and there is something very moving in the way he
does this. It is probably impossible to describe it. Every gesture
any human being makes is loaded, is a confession, is a revelation:
nothing can be hidden, but there is so much that we do not want to
see, do not dare to see. The boy had poured the stiff drink Arthur
ordered into what I knew he considered to be a special glass, in
fact, Arthur’s glass: a square, heavy glass, with a wide silver
band. He did not kneel as he handed Arthur his drink, as, for
example, a Greek or an Elizabethan page might have done, but he
was compelled to lean forward, and, unconsciously, he bowed. I
was aware of this, perhaps, only because I was watching Jimmy’s
face, and I saw how his eyes searched Arthur’s: his devotion was
in his eyes, and that was why he seemed to bow. It was mocking,
wry, niggerish, salty, but it was love, and Arthur, as he took the
glass, looked into Jimmy’s eyes, and seemed to kiss him, on the
lips, and on the brow. And both were very happy. Arthur raised
his glass to Jimmy, then to his lips, and Jimmy moved away, back
into the kitchen. We heard his voice, and Ruth’s, and their
laughter.
***
Arthur and Jimmy were like that. I have rarely heard, or seen, a
freedom like that, when they played and sang together. It had
something to do with their youth, of course, it had something to
do with the way they looked, it had something to do with their
vows, with their relation to each other: but it was more, much
more than that. It was a wonder, a marvel—a mystery: I call it
holy. It caused me to see, in any case, that we are all limited, and,
mostly, misshapen instruments, and yet, if we can,
simultaneously, confront and surrender, extraordinary fingers can
string from us the response to our mortality.
***
Jimmy continues his investigations, very peacefully, with
Arthur’s tempo ringing in his head. Arthur’s tempo is the meaning
of the song, Arthur’s tempo, and the key he and Jimmy strike
together. Or the song is revealed as it is delivered, and by the
manner in which it is delivered. Sometimes Jimmy responds to
Arthur’s line—his call—by repeating it precisely, sometimes he
questions or laments, sometimes he responds from close by, and,
sometimes, from far away. Sometimes they both feel imprisoned
by the song, leaping to go further than the song, or Arthur’s
tempo, allow: then they sweat hardest, learn most. There is always
a beat beneath the beat, another music beneath the music, and
beyond.
***
The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by
the song. Ain’t no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song—that is
not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the bottom
of my balls, baby, that something hears him, something says,
come here! and jumps on him just exactly like you jump on a
piano or a sax or a violin or a drum and you make it sing the song
you hear: and you love it, and you take care of it, better than you
take care of yourself, can you dig it? but you don’t have no mercy
on it. You can’t have mercy! That sound you hear, that sound you
try to pitch with the utmost precision—and did you hear me?
Wow!—is the sound of millions and millions and, who knows,
now, listening, where life is, where is death?
***
Then I do remember, in my dream, the beginning of a song I
used to love to hear Arthur sing, Oh, my loving brother, when the
world’s on fire, don’t you want God’s bosom to be your pillow?
and I say to him, in my dream, No, they’ll find out what’s up the
road, ain’t nothing up the road but us, man, and then I wake up,
and my pillow is wet with tears.
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