Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (55 page)
“Yes. I believe you.”
“Then don't let this other shit get you down. That's just the way it is, and that's the way it's going to be for awhile.” He looked at his watch. “Hey. I know a place I'll take you.”
He stopped the car on a very crowded street, a street crowded with young people, black and white. They seemed to me to be very, very young; no doubt I seemed to them to be very, very old. There was something oddly attractive about them. Perhaps they reminded me, distantly, of myself, long ago. Perhaps they reminded me, dimly, of something we had lost. I had never worn such costumes, surely, beads, robes, sandals, and earrings, or walked quite so slowly, or dared to embrace another in the sight of all the world, or been so oblivious to the presence of the cops, who patrolled the streets in twos, or stood in doorways, holding their clubs motionless, with their eyes fixed on something straight ahead, and their lips recollecting a sour taste. It was late, but store windows were lighted, with very strange things in the windows, and the stores seemed to be openâbut I was not allowed to investigate, for Christopher was walking fast, one hand under my elbow. A couple stopped, looking at me, and Christopher turned me into the entrance of what had once been a movie theater. Unavoidably, he
had to stop to get tickets, and I could feel a crowd gathering behind us. I felt terribly uneasy. I turned, once, to look behind me, and I smiled. A colored cat called my name, and laughed, and said, “Be careful, man. You're under surveillance!”
“I know,” I said, and Christopher and I walked into the theater. I wondered if the boy had meant to tell me that I was under surveillance by the cops, or under surveillance by the people.
Whatever he had meant, I was under surveillance by both.
We entered a dark and noisy barn. All of the seats had been removed from the orchestra of this theater, and hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls filled this space. Some were standing, some were lounging against the walls, some were sitting on the floor, some were embracing, some were dancing. The stage held four or five of the loudest musicians in the world's history. It was impossible to tell whether they were any good or not, their sound was too high. But it did not really matter whether their sound was any good or not, this sound was, literally, not meant for my ears, and it existed entirely outside my capacity for judgment. It was a rite that I was witnessingâwitnessing, not sharing. It made me think of rites I had seen in Caleb's church, in many churches; of black feet stomping in the mud of the levee; of rites older than that, in forests irrecoverable. The music drove and drove, into the pastâinto the future. It sounded like an attempt to make a great hole in the world, and bring up what was buried. And the dancers seemed, nearly, in the flickering, violent light, with their beads flashing, their long hair flying, their robes whirlingâor their tight skirts, tight pants signifyingâand with the music assaulting them
like the last, last trumpet, to be dancing in their grave-clothes, raised from the dead. On the wall were four screens, and, on these screens, ectoplasmic figures and faces endlessly writhed, moving in and out of each other, in a tremendous sexual rhythm which made me think of nameless creatures blindly coupling in all the slime of the world, and at the bottom of the sea, and in the air we breathed, and in one's very body. From time to time, on this screen, one recognized a face. I saw Yul Brynner's face, for example, and, for a moment, I thought I saw my own. Christopher touched me on the shoulder.
“I came here a couple of times with Pete. It's a gas and there are some real people here and they're making some very nice things happen. I just wanted you to see it. But we have to flee in a minute. The people are starting to recognize you, and, anyway, it's almost curtain time.”
“Okay.”
But I stood there a few moments longer, and tried to understand what was happening.
“Guns,” said Christopher. “We need guns.”
It was the next day, we were driving down from Hunter's Point.
I said nothing.
We drove across the Golden Gate. We had no particular destination in mind. It was a bright, windy day, and I liked watching Christopher handle the car. Christopher liked carsâI don't; possibly because of the Workshop days. The bridge rushed at us, and the sky seemed to descend, and the water was at our feet. Christopher laughed, and looked at me, then looked around him. “This could be so beautiful,” he said, “for all of us.”
“Yes,” I said. Then, “But all I want is for you to live.”
“Alone?” he asked.
I did not know what he meant.
“Alone?” he repeated. “Walking over the bodies of the dead? Is that what you want for me, Leo? Is that what you mean when you say you want me to live?” He looked out over the bay again. “Look. I'm a young cat. I've already been under the feet of horses, and I've already been beaten by chains. Well. You want me to keep on going under the feet of horses?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me. We swung off the bridge, and ended up in some fishing town, the name of which I don't remember. We entered the town, very slowly: “If you don't want me to keep going under the feet of horses,” Christopher said, now with his dreadful distinctness, his muffled urgency, “and
I
know that you love me and you don't want no blood on my handsâdigâbut if you don't want me to keep on going under the feet of horses, then I think you got to agree that we need us some guns. Right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I see that.” He parked the car. I looked out over the water. There was a terrible weight on my heartâfor a moment I was afraid that I was about to collapse again. I watched his black, proud profile. “But we're outnumbered, you know.”
He laughed, and turned off the motor. “Shit. So were the early Christians.”
That evening, Barbara and Pete put us on the plane to New York. Caleb met us at the plane, with Louise, and one of the children, growing up now, a perfectly respectable,
black familyâand respectable, mainly, because their name was mine. As we say in America, nothing succeeds like successâso much for the black or white, the related respectability. Christopher and my father and I spent a day together, walking through Harlem. They looked very much like each other, both big, both black, both laughing. Then, I went away to Europe, alone. Then, I came back. I first did the movie,
Big Deal,
not a very good movie, really, and then I did a new play, and so found myself, presently, standing in the wings again, waiting for my cue.
NEW YORK, ISTANBUL, SAN FRANCISCO,
1965â1967
JAMES BALDWIN
James Baldwin was born in 1924. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a
Partisan Review
Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Giovanni's Room (1956)
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Another Country (1962)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Nothing Personal
(with Richard Avedon)
(1964)
Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)
Going to Meet the Man (1965)
The Amen Corner (1968)
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)
One Day When I Was Lost (1972)
No Name in the Street (1972)
If Beale Street Could Talk (1973)
The Devil Finds Work (1976)
Little Man, Little Man
(with Yoran Cazac)
(1976)
Just Above My Head (1979)
The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)
Jimmy's Blues (1985)
The Price of the Ticket (1985)
J
AMES
B
ALDWIN
THE AMEN CORNER
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when her estranged husband, Luke, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.
The Amen Corner
is an uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.
Drama
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales,
Another Country
is a novel of passionsâsexual, racial, political, artisticâthat is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at their most elemental and sublime.
Fiction/Literature
BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a “boy” like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. In
Blues for Mister Charlie
, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicatedâand in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
Fiction/Literature
THE DEVIL FINDS WORK
Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as
In the Heat of the Night
,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, and
The Exorcist.
Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.
African American Studies
THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION
The Cross of Redemption
is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. In
The Cross of Redemption
we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing,
The Cross of Redemption
is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity.
Essays/African American Studies
THE FIRE NEXT TIME
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963,
The Fire Next Time
galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.
Social Science/African American Studies
GIOVANNI
'
S ROOM
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Fiction/Literature
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN
Go Tell It On The Mountain
, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.
Fiction/Literature
GOING TO MEET THE MAN
“There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
Fiction/Literature
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotionsâaffection, despair, and hope.
Fiction/Literature
NO NAME IN THE STREET
A searing memoir and an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies,
No Name in the Street
is James Baldwin's powerful commentary on the political and social agonies of America's contemporary history. The prophecies of
The Fire Next Time
have been tragically realizedâthrough assassinations, urban riots, and increased racial polarizationâand the hope for justice seems more elusive than ever. Through it all, Baldwin's uncompromising vision and his fierce disavowal of despair are ever present in this eloquent and personal testament to his times.
Nonfiction
NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME
Nobody Knows My Name
is a collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United Statesâincluding a passionate attack on William Faulkner for his ambivalent views about the segregated Southâto the role of the writer in society, with personal accounts of such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.
Literature/African American Studies
TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN
'
S BEEN GONE
In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters, a man struggling to become himself even as he juggles multiple identitiesâas black man, bisexual, and artistâon the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life. At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.
Fiction/Literature
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