James Baldwin/The Atlantic
Author and activist James Baldwin. (photo: Guy Le Querrec/Getty)
04 february 24 (RSN.org)
EDITOR’S NOTE: A short story (From 1960)
You are full of nightmares,” Harriet tells me. She is in her dressing gown and has cream all over her face. She and my older sister, Louisa, are going out to be girls together. I suppose they have many things to talk about — they have me to talk about, certainly — and they do not want my presence. I have been given a bachelor’s evening. The director of the film which has brought us such incredible and troubling riches will be along later to take me out to dinner.
I watch her face. I know that it is quite impossible for her to be as untroubled as she seems. Her self-control is mainly for my benefit — my benefit, and Paul’s. Harriet comes from orderly and progressive Sweden and has reacted against all the advanced doctrines to which she has been exposed by becoming steadily and beautifully oldfashioned. We never fought in front of Paul, not even when he was a baby. Harriet does not so much believe in protecting children as she does in helping them to build a foundation on which they can build and build again, each time life’s high-flying steel ball knocks down everything they have built.
Whenever I become upset, Harriet becomes very cheerful and composed. I think she began to learn how to do this over eight years ago, when I returned from my only visit to America. Now, perhaps, it has become something she could not control if she wished to. This morning, at breakfast, when I yelled at Paul, she averted Paul’s tears and my own guilt by looking up and saying, “My God, your father is cranky this morning, isn’t he?”
Paul’s attention was immediately distracted from his wounds, and the unjust inflicter of those wounds, to his mother’s laughter. He watched her.
“It is because he is afraid they will not like his songs in New York. Your father is an artiste, mon chou, and they are very mysterious people, les artistes. Millions of people are waiting for him in New York, they are begging him to come, and they will give him a lot of money, but he is afraid they will not like him. Tell him he is wrong.”
She succeeded in rekindling Paul’s excitement about places he has never seen. I was also, at once, reinvested with all my glamour. I think it is sometimes extremely difficult for Paul to realize that the face he sees on record sleeves and in the newspapers and on the screen is nothing more or less than the face of his father — who sometimes yells at him. Of course, since he is only seven — going on eight, he will be eight years old this winter — he cannot know that I am baffled, too.
“Of course, you are wrong, you are silly,” he said with passion —and caused me to smile. His English is strongly accented and is not, in fact, as good as his French, for he speaks French all day at school. French is really his first language, the first he ever heard. “You are the greatest singer in France” —sounding exactly as he must sound when he makes this pronouncement to his schoolmates—“the greatest American singer”—this concession was so gracefully made that it was not a concession at all, it added inches to my stature, America being only a glamorous word for Paul. It is the place from which his father came, and to which he now is going, a place which very few people have ever seen. But his aunt is one of them and he looked over at her. “Mme. Dumont says so, and she says he is a great actor, too.” Louisa nodded, smiling. “And she has seen Les Fauves Nous Attendent — five times!” This clinched it, of course. Mme. Dumont is our concierge and she has known Paul all his life. I suppose he will not begin to doubt anything she says until he begins to doubt everything.
He looked over at me again. “So you are wrong to be afraid.”
“I was wrong to yell at you, too. I won’t yell at you any more today.”
“All right.” He was very grave.
Louisa poured more coffee. “He’s going to knock them dead in New York. You’ll see.”
I wondered what he would think of his Uncle Norman, older and much blacker than I, who lives near the Alabama town in which we were born. Norman will meet us at the boat.
Harriet repeats, “Nightmares, nightmares. Nothing ever turns out as badly as you think it will — in fact,” she adds laughing, “I am happy to say that that would scarcely he possible.”
Her eyes seek mine in the mirror — dark-blue eyes, pale skin, black hair. I had always thought of Sweden as being populated entirely by blondes, and I thought that Harriet was abnormally dark for a Swedish girl. But when we visited Sweden, I found out differently. “It is all a great racial salad, Europe, that is why I am sure that I will never understand your country,” Harriet said. That was in the days when we never imagined that we would be going to it.
I wonder what she is really thinking. Still, she is right, in two days we will be on a boat, and there is simply no point in carrying around my load of apprehension. I sit down on the bed, watching her fix her face. I realize that I am going to miss this old-fashioned bedroom. For years, we’ve talked about throwing out the old junk which came with the apartment and replacing it with less massive, modern furniture. But we never have.
“Oh, everything will probably work out,” I say. “I’ve been in a bad mood all day long. I just can’t sing any more.” We both laugh. She reaches for a wad of tissues and begins wiping off the cream. “I wonder how Paul will like it, if he’ll make friends — that’s all.”
“Paul will like any place where you are, where we are. Don’t worry about Paul.”
Paul has never been called any names, so far. Only, once he asked us what the word métis meant and Harriet explained to him that it meant mixed blood, adding that the blood of just about everybody in the world was mixed by now. Mme. Dumont contributed bawdy and detailed corroboration from her own family tree, the roots of which were somewhere in Corsica; the moral of the story, as she told it, was that women were weak, men incorrigible, and le bon Dieu appallingly clever. Mme. Dumont’s version is the version I prefer, but it may not be, for Paul, the most utilitarian.
Harriet rises from the dressing table and comes over to sit in my lap. I fall back with her on the bed, and she smiles down into my face.
“Now, don’t worry,” she tells me, “please try not to worry. Whatever is coming, we will manage it all very well, you will see. We have each other and we have our son and we know what we want. So, we are luckier than most people.”
I kiss her on the chin. “I’m luckier than most men.”
“I’m a very lucky woman, too.”
And for a moment we are silent, alone in our room, which we have shared so long. The slight rise and fall of Harriet’s breathing creates an intermittent pressure against my chest, and I think how, if I had never left America, I would never have met her and would never have established a life of my own, would never have entered my own life. For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken, many lives. If Harriet had been born in America, it would have taken her a long time, perhaps forever, to look on me as a man like other men; if I had met her in America, I would never have been able to look on her as a woman like all other women. The habits of public rage and power would also have been our private compulsions, and would have blinded our eyes. We would never have been able to love each other. And Paul would never have been born.
Perhaps, if I had stayed in America, I would have found another woman and had another son. But that other woman, that other son are in the limbo of vanished possibilities. I might also have become something else, instead of an actor-singer, perhaps a lawyer, like my brother, or a teacher, like my sister. But no, I am what I have become and this woman beside me is my wife, and I love her. All the sons I might have had mean nothing, since I have a son, I named him, Paul, for my father, and I love him.
I think of all the things I have seen destroyed in America, all the things that I have lost there, all the threats it holds for me and mine.
I grin up at Harriet. “Do you love me?”
“Of course not. I simply have been madly plotting to get to America all these years.”
“What a patient wench you are.”
“The Swedes are very patient.”
She kisses me again and stands up. Louisa comes in, also in a dressing gown.
“I hope you two aren’t sitting in here yakking about the subject.” She looks at me. “My, you are the sorriest-looking celebrity I’ve ever seen. I’ve always wondered why people like you hired press agents. Now I know.” She goes to Harriet’s dressing table. “Honey, do you mind if I borrow some of that mad nail polish?”
Harriet goes over to the dressing table. “I’m not sure I know which mad nail polish you mean.”
Harriet and Louisa, somewhat to my surprise, get on very well. Each seems to find the other full of the weirdest and most delightful surprises. Harriet has been teaching Louisa French and Swedish expressions, and Louisa has been teaching Harriet some of the saltier expressions of the black South. Whenever one of them is not playing straight man to the other’s accent, they become involved in long speculations as to how a language reveals the history and the attitudes of a people. They discovered that all the European languages contain a phrase equivalent to “to work like a nigger.” (“Of course,” says Louisa, “they’ve had black men working for them for a long time.”) “Language is experience and language is power,” says Louisa, after regretting that she does not know any of the African dialects. “That’s what I keep trying to tell those dicty bastards down South. They get their own experience into the language, we’ll have a great language. But, no, they all want to talk like white folks.” Then she leans forward, grasping Harriet by the knee. “I tell them, honey, white folks ain’t saying nothing. Not a thing are they saying —and some of them know it, they need what you got, the whole world needs it.” Then she leans back, in disgust. “You think they listen to me? Indeed they do not. They just go right on, trying to talk like white folks.”She leans forward again, in tremendous indignation. “You know some of them folks are ashamed of Mahalia Jackson? Ashamed of her, one of the greatest singers alive! They think she’s common.” Then she looks about the room as though she held a bottle in her hand and were looking for a skull to crack.
I think it is because Louisa has never been able to talk like this to any white person before. All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror. But Harriet’s necessity is precisely the opposite: it is of the utmost importance that she learn everything that Louisa can tell her, and then learn more, much more. Harriet is really trying to learn from Louisa how best to protect her husband and her son. This is why they arc going out alone tonight. They will have, tonight, as it were, a final council of war. I may be moody, but they, thank God, are practical.
Now Louisa turns to me while Harriet rummages about on the dressing table. “What time is Vidal coming for you?”
“Oh, around seven thirty, eight o’clock. He says he’s reserved tables for us in some very chic place, but he won’t say where.” Louisa wriggles her shoulders, raises her eyebrows, and does a tiny bump and grind. I laugh. “That’s right. And then I guess we’ll go out and get drunk.”
“I hope to God you do. You’ve been about as cheerful as a cemetery these last few days. And, that way, your hangover will keep you from bugging us tomorrow.”
“What about your hangovers? I know the way you girls drink.”
“Well, we’ll be paying for our own drinks,” says Harriet, “so I don’t think we’ll have that problem. But you’re going to be feted, like an international movie star.”
“You sure you don’t want to change your mind and come out with Vidal and me?”
“We’re sure,” Louisa says. She looks down at me and gives a small, amused grunt. “An international movie star. And I used to change your diapers. I’ll be damned.” She is grave for a moment. “Mama’d be proud of you. you know that?” We look at each other and the air between us is charged with secrets which not even Harriet will ever know. “Now, get the hell out of here, so we can get dressed.”
“I’ll take Paul on down to Mme. Dumont’s.”
Paul is to have supper with her children and spend the night there.
“For the last time,” says Mme. Dumont and she rubs her hand over Paul’s violently curly black hair. “Tu vas nous manquer, tu sais?” Then she looks up at me and laughs. “He doesn’t care. He is only interested in seeing the big ship and all the wonders of New York. Children are never sad to make journeys.”
“I would be very sad to go,”says Paul, politely, “but my father must go to New York to work and he wants me to come with him.”
Over his head, Mme. Dumont and I smile at each other. “Il est malin, ton gosse!” She looks down at him again. “And do you think, my little diplomat, that you will like New York?”
“We aren’t only going to New York,” Paul answers, “we are going to California, too.”
“Well, do you think you will like California?”
Paul looks at me. “I don’t know. If we don’t like it, we’ll come back.”
“So simple. Just like that,” says Mme. Dumont. She looks at me. “It is the best way to look at life. Do come back. You know, we feel that you belong to us, too, here in France.”
“I hope you do,” I say. “I hope you do. I have always felt — always felt at home here.” I bend down and Paul and I kiss each other on the cheek. We have always done so — but will we be able to do so in America? American fathers never kiss American sons. I straighten, my hand on Paul’s shoulder. “You be good. I’ll pick you up for breakfast, or, if you get up first you come and pick me up and we can hang out together tomorrow, while your maman and your Aunt Louisa finish packing. They won’t want two men hanging around the house.”
“D’accord. Where shall we hang out?” On the last two words he stumbles a little and imitates me.
“Maybe we can go to the zoo, I don’t know. And I’ll lake you to lunch at the Eiffel Tower, would you like that?”
“Oh, yes,” he says, “I’d love that.” When he is pleased, he seems to glow. All the energy of his small, tough, concentrated being charges an unseen battery and adds an incredible luster to his eyes, which are large and dark brown — like mine — and to his skin, which always reminds me of the colors of honey and the fires of the sun.
“Okay, then.” I shake hands with Mme. Dumont. “Bonsoir, Madame.” I ring for the elevator, staring at Paul. “Ciao, Pauli.”
“Bonsoir, Papa.”
And Mme. Dumont takes him inside.
Upstairs, Harriet and Louisa are finally powdered. perfumed, and jeweled, and ready to go: dry Martinis at the Ritz, supper, “in some very expensive little place,” says Harriet, and perhaps the Folies Bergère afterwards. “A real cornball, tourist evening,” says Louisa. “I’m working on the theory that if I can get Harriet to act like an American now, she won’t have so much trouble later.”
“I very much doubt,” Harriet says, “that I will be able to endure the Folies Bergère for three solid hours.”
“Oh, then we’ll duck across town to Harry’s New York bar and drink mint juleps,” says Louisa.
I realize that, quite apart from everything else, Louisa is having as much fun as she has ever had in her life before. Perhaps she, too, will be sad to leave Paris, even though she has only known it for such a short time.
“Do people drink those in New York?” Harriet asks. I think she is making a list of the things people do or do not do in New York.
“Some people do.” Louisa winks at me. “Do you realize that this Swedish chick’s picked up an Alabama drawl?”
We laugh together. The elevator chugs to a landing.
“We’ll stop and say good night to Paul,” Harriet says. She kisses me. “Give our best to Vidal.”
“Right. Have a good time. Don’t let any Frenchmen run off with Louisa.”
“I did not come to Paris to be protected, and if I had, this wild chick you married couldn’t do it. I just might upset everybody and come home with a French count.” She presses the elevator button and the cage goes down.
I WALK back into our dismantled apartment. It stinks of departure. There are bags and crates in the hall, which will be taken away tomorrow, there are no books in the bookcases, the kitchen looks as though we never cooked a meal there, never dawdled there, in the early morning or late at night, over coffee. Presently, I must shower and shave but now I pour myself a drink and light a cigarette and step out on our balcony. It is dusk, the brilliant light of Paris is beginning to fade, and the green of the trees is darkening,
I have lived in this city for twelve years. This apartment is on the top floor of a corner building. We look out over the trees and the roof tops to the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower stands. Beyond this field is the river, which I have crossed so often, in so many states of mind. I have crossed every bridge in Paris, I have walked along every quai. I know the river as one finally knows a friend, know it when it is black, guarding all the lights of Paris in its depths, and seeming, in its vast silence, to be communing with the dead who lie beneath it; when it is yellow, evil, and roaring, giving a rough time to tugboats and barges, and causing people to remember that it has been known to rise, it has been known to kill; when it is peaceful, a slick, dark, dirty green, playing host to rowboats and les bateaux mouches and throwing up from time to time an extremely unhealthy fish. The men who stand along the quais all summer with their fishing lines gratefully accept the slimy object and throw it in a rusty can. I have always wondered who eats those fish.
And I walk up and down, up and down, glad to be alone.
It is August, the month when all Parisians desert Paris and one has to walk miles to find a barbershop or a laundry open in some treeshadowed, silent side street. There is a single person on the avenue, a paratrooper walking toward École Militaire. He is also walking, almost certainly, and rather sooner than later, toward Algeria. I have a friend, a good-natured boy who was always hanging around the clubs in which I worked in the old days, who has just returned from Algeria, with a recurring, debilitating fever, and minus one eye. The government has set his pension at the sum, arbitrary if not occult, of fifty-three thousand francs every three months. Of course, it is quite impossible to live on this amount of money without working — but who will hire a half-blind invalid? This boy has been spoiled forever, long before his thirtieth birthday, and there are thousands like him all over France.
And there are fewer Algerians to be found on the streets of Paris now. The rug sellers, the peanut vendors, the post-card peddlers and moneychangers have vanished. The boys I used to know during my first years in Paris are scattered — or corralled — the Lord knows where.
Most of them had no money. They lived three and four together in rooms with a single skylight, a single hard cot, or in buildings that seemed abandoned, with cardboard in the windows, with erratic plumbing in a wet, cobblestoned yard, in dark, dead-end alleys, or on the outer, chilling heights of Paris.
The Arab cafés are closed — those dark, acrid cafes in which I used to meet with them to drink tea, to get high on hashish, to listen to the obsessive, stringed music which has no relation to any beat, any time, that I have ever known. I once thought of the North Africans as my brothers and that is why I went to their cafes. They were very friendly to me, perhaps one or two of them remained really fond of me even after I could no longer afford to smoke Lucky Strikes and after my collection of American sport shirts had vanished — mostly into their wardrobes. They seemed to feel that they had every right to them, since I could only have wrested these things from the world by cunning — it meant nothing to say that I had had no choice in the matter; perhaps I had wrested these things from the world by treason, by refusing to be identified with the misery of my people. Perhaps, indeed, I identified myself with those who were responsible for this misery.
And this was true. Their rage, the only note in all their music which I could not fail to recognize, to which I responded, yet had the effect of setting us more than ever at a division. They were perfectly prepared to drive all Frenchmen into the sea, and to level the city of Paris. But I could not hate the French, because they left me alone. And I love Paris, I will always love it, it is the city which saved my life. It saved my life by allowing me to find out who I am.
IT WAS on a bridge, one tremendous, April morning, that I knew 1 had fallen in love. Harriet and I were walking hand in hand. The bridge was the Pont Royal, just before us was the great horloge, high and lifted up, saying ten to ten; beyond this, the golden statue of Joan of Arc, with her sword uplifted. Harriet and I were silent, for we had been quarreling about something. Now, when I look back, I think we had reached that state when an affair must either end or become something more than an affair.
I looked sideways at Harriet’s face, which was still. Her dark-blue eyes were narrowed against the sun, and her full, pink lips were still slightly sulky, like a child’s. In those days, she hardly ever wore make-up. I was in my shirt sleeves. Her face made me want to laugh and run my hand over her short dark hair. I wanted to pull her to me and say, Baby, don’t be mad at me, and at that moment something tugged at my heart and made me catch my breath. There were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet. She was alone with me. Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world had always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible. During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world — that world which I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name, that world on which I knew one could never turn one’s back, the white man’s world. And for the first time in my life I was free of it; it had not existed for me; I had been quarreling with my girl. It was our quarrel, it was entirely between us, it had nothing to do with anyone else in the world. For the first time in my life I had not been afraid of the patriotism of the mindless, in uniform or out, who would beat me up and treat the woman who was with me as though she were the lowest of untouchables. For the first time in my fife I felt that no force jeopardized my right, my power, to possess and to protect a woman; for the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.
The sun fell over everything, like a blessing, people were moving all about us, I will never forget the feeling of Harriet’s small hand in mine, dry and trusting, and I turned to her, slowing our pace. She looked up at me with her enormous, blue eyes, and she seemed to wait. I said, “Harriet. Harriet. Tu sais, il y a quelque chose de très grave qui m’est arrivé. Je t’aime. Je t’aime. Tu me comprends, or shall I say it in English?”
This was eight years ago, shortly before my first and only visit home.
That was when my mother died. I stayed in America for three months. When I came back, Harriet thought that the change in me was due to my grief— I was very silent, very thin. But it had not been my mother’s death which accounted for the change. I had known that my mother was going to die. I had not known what America would be like for me after nearly four years away.
I remember standing at the rail and watching the distance between myself and Le Havre increase. Hands fell, ceasing to wave, handkerchiefs ceased to flutter, people turned away, they mounted their bicycles or got into their cars and rode off. Soon, Le Havre was nothing but a blur. I thought of Harriet, already miles from me in Paris, and I pressed my lips tightly together in order not to cry.
Then, as Europe dropped below the water, as the days passed and passed, as we left behind us the skies of Europe and the eyes of everyone on the ship began, so to speak, to refocus, waiting for the first glimpse of America, my apprehension began to give way to a secret joy, a checked anticipation. I thought of such details as showers, which are rare in Paris, and I thought of such things as rich, cold, American milk and heavy, chocolate cake. I wondered about my friends, wondered if I had any left, and wondered if they would be glad to see me.
The Americans on the boat did not seem to be so bad, but I was fascinated, after such a long absence from it, by the nature of their friendliness, It was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any possibility of friendship. Unlike Europeans, they dropped titles and used first names almost at once, leaving themselves, unlike the Europeans, with nowhere thereafter to go. Once one had become “Pete” or “Jane” or “Bill” all that could decently be known was known and any suggestion that there might be further depths, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation ol that privacy which did not, paradoxically, since they trusted it so little, seem to exist among Americans. They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which they related only to the analyst, and then read about in the pages of best sellers. There was an eerie and unnerving irreality about everything they said and did, as though they were all members of the same team and were acting on orders from some invincibly cheerful and tirelessly inventive coach. I was fascinated by it. I found it oddly moving, but I cannot say that 1 was displeased. It had not occurred to me before that Americans, who had never treated me with any respect, had no respect for each other.
On the last night but one, there was a. gala in the big ballroom and I sang. It had been a long time since I had sung before so many Americans. My audience had mainly been penniless French students, in the weird, Left Bank bistros I worked in those days. Still, I was a great hit with them and by this time I had become enough of a drawing card, in the Latin Quarter and in St. Germain des Pres, to have attracted a couple of critics, to have had my picture in France-soir, and to have acquired a legal work permit which allowed me to make a little more money. Just the same, no matter how industrious and brilliant some ol the musicians had been, or how devoted my audience, they did not know, they could not know, what my songs came out of. They did not know what was funny about it. It was impossible to translate: It damn well better be funny, or Laughing to keep from crying, or What did I do to be so black and blue?
The moment I stepped out on the floor, they began to smile, something opened in them, they were ready to be pleased. I found in their faces, as they watched me, smiling, waiting, an artless relief, a profound reassurance. Nothing was more familiar to them than the sight of a dark boy, singing, and there were few things on earth more necessary. It was under cover of darkness, my own darkness, that I could sing for them of the joys, passions, and terrors they smuggled about with them like steadily depreciating contraband. Under cover of the midnight fiction that I was unlike them because I was black, they could stealthily gaze at those treasures which they had been mysteriously forbidden to possess and were never permitted to declare.
I sang I’m Coming, Virginia, and Take This Hammer, and Precious Lord. They wouldn’t let me go and I came back and sang a couple of the oldest blues I knew. Then someone asked me to sing Swanee River, and I did, astonished that I could, astonished that this song, which I had put down long ago, should have the power to move me. Then, if only, perhaps, to make the record complete, I wanted to sing Strange Fruit, but, on this number, no one can surpass the great, tormented Billie Holiday. So I finished with Great GettingUp Morning and I guess I can say that if I didn’t stop the show I certainly ended it. I got a big hand and I drank at a few tables and I danced with a few girls.
AFTER one more day and one more night, the boat landed in New York. I woke up, I was bright awake at once, and I thought, We’re here.
I turned on all the lights in my small cabin and I stared into the mirror as though I were committing my face to memory. I took a shower and I took a long time shaving and I dressed myself very carefully. I walked the long ship corridors to the dining room, looking at the luggage piled high before the elevators and beside the steps. The dining room was nearly half empty and full of a quick and joyous excitement which depressed me even more. People ate quickly, chattering to each other, anxious to get upstairs and go on deck. Was it my imagination or was it true that they seemed to avoid my eyes? A few people waved and smiled, but let me pass; perhaps it would have made them uncomfortable, this morning, to try to share their excitement with me; perhaps they did not want to know whether or not it was possible for me to share it. I walked to my table and sat down. I munched toast as dry as paper and drank a pot of coffee. Then I lipped my waiter, who bowed and smiled and called me “sir” and said that he hoped to see me on the boat again. “I hope so, too,” I said.
And was it true, or was it my imagination, that a flash of wondering comprehension, a flicker of wry sympathy, then appeared in the waiter’s eyes? I walked upstairs to the deck.
There was a breeze from the water but the sun was hot and made me remember how ugly New York summers could be. All of the deck chairs had been taken away and people milled about in the space where the deck chairs had been, moved from one side of the ship to the other, clambered up and down the steps, crowded the rails, and they were busy taking photographs — of the harbor, of each other, of the sea, of the gulls. I walked slowly along the deck, and an impulse stronger than myself drove me to the rail. There it was, the great, unfinished city, with all its towers blazing in the sun. It came toward us slowly and patiently, like some enormous, cunning, and murderous beast, ready to devour, impossible to escape. I watched it come closer and I listened to the people around me, to their excitement and their pleasure. There was no doubt that it was real. I watched their shining faces and wondered if I were mad. For a moment I longed, with all my heart, to be able to feel whatever they were feeling, if only to know what such a feeling was like. As the boat moved slowly into the harbor, they were being moved into safety. It was only I who was being floated into danger. I turned my head, looking for Europe, but all that stretched behind me was the sky, thick with gulls. I moved away from the rail. A big, sandy-haired man held his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty. I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me. And the American flag was flying from the top of the ship, above my head. I had seen the French flag drive the French into the most unspeakable frenzies, I had seen the flag which was nominally mine used to dignify the vilest purposes: now I would never, as long as I lived, know what others saw when they saw a flag. “There’s no place like home,” said a voice close by, and I thought, There damn sure isn’t. I decided to go back to my cabin and have a drink.
There was a cablegram from Flarriet in my cabin. It said: Be good. Be quick. I’m waiting.
I folded it carefully and put it in my breast pocket. Then I wondered if I would ever get back to her. How long would it take me to earn the money to get out of this land? Sweat broke out on my forehead and I poured myself some whisky from my nearly empty bottle. I paced the tiny cabin. It was silent. There was no one down in the cabins now.
I WAS not sober when I faced the uniforms in the first-class lounge. There were two of them; they were not unfriendly. They looked at my passport, they looked at me. “You’ve been away a long time,” said one of them.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s been a while.”
“What did you do over there all that time?” —
with a grin meant to hide more than it revealed, which hideously revealed more than it could hide.
I said, “I’m a singer,” and the room seemed to rock around me. I held on to what I hoped was a calm, open smile. I had not had to deal with these faces in so long that I had forgotten how to do it. I had once known how to pitch my voice precisely between curtness and servility, and known what razor’s edge of a pickaninny’s smile would turn away wrath. But I had forgotten all the tricks on which my life had once depended. Once I had been an expert at baffling these people, at setting their teeth on edge, and dancing just outside the trap laid for me. But I was not an expert now. These faces were no longer merely the faces of two white men, who were my enemies. They were the faces of two white people whom I did not understand, and I could no longer plan my moves in accordance with what I knew of their cowardice and their needs and their strategy.
That moment on the bridge had undone me forever.
“That’s right,” said one of them, “that’s what it says, right here on the passport. Never heard of you, though.” They looked up at me. “Did you do a lot of singing over there?”
“Some.”
“What kind — concerts?”
“No.” I wondered what I looked like, sounded like. I could tell nothing from their eyes. “I worked a few night clubs.”
“Night clubs, eh? I guess they liked you over there.”
“Yes,” I said, “they seemed to like me all right.”
“Well”— and my passport was stamped and handed back to me — “let’s hope they like you over here.”
“Thanks.” They laughed—was it at me, or was it my imagination? — and I picked up the one bag I was carrying and threw my trench coat over one shoulder and walked out of the firstclass lounge. I stood in the slow-moving, murmuring line which led to the gangplank. I looked straight ahead and watched heads, smiling faces, step up to the shadow of the gangplank awning and then swiftly descend out of sight. I put my passport back in my breast pocket — Be quick. I’m waiting — and I held my landing card in my hand. Then, suddenly, there I was, standing on the edge of the boat, staring down the long ramp to the ground. At the end of the plank, on the ground, stood a heavy man in a uniform. His cap was pushed back from his gray hair and his face was red and wet. He looked up at me. This was the face I remembered, the face of my nightmares; perhaps hatred had caused me to know this face better than I would ever know the face of any lover. “Come on, boy,” he cried, “come on, come on!”
And I almost smiled. I was home. I touched my breast pocket. I thought of a song I sometimes sang, When will I ever get to be a man? I came down the gangplank, stumbling a little, and gave the man my landing card.
Much later in the day, a customs inspector checked my baggage and waved me away. I picked up my bags and started walking down the long stretch which led to the gate, to the city.
And I heard someone call my name.
I looked up and saw Louisa running toward me. I dropped my bags and grabbed her in my arms and tears came to my eyes and rolled down my face. I did not know whether the tears were for joy at seeing her, or from rage, or both.
“How are you? How are you? You look wonderful, but, oh, haven’t you lost weight? It’s wonderful to see you again.”
I wiped my eyes. “It’s wonderful to see you, too, I bet you thought 1 was never coming back.”
Louisa laughed. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t. These people are just as corny as ever, I swear I don’t believe there’s any hope for them. How’s your French? Lord, when I think that it was I who studied French and now I can’t speak a word. And you never went near it and you probably speak it like a native.”
I grinned. “Pas mat. Je me defends pas mal.” We started down the wide steps into the street. “My God,” I said. “New York.” I was not aware of its towers now. We were in the shadow of the elevated highway but the thing which most struck me was neither light nor shade, but noise. It came from a million things at once, from trucks and tires and clutches and brakes and doors; from machines shuttling and stamping and rolling and cutting and pressing; from the building of tunnels, the checking of gas mains, the laying of wires, the digging of foundations; from the chattering of rivets, the scream of the pile driver, the clanging of great shovels; from the battering down and the raising up of walls; from millions ol radios and television sets and jukeboxes. The human voices distinguished themselves from the roar only by their note of strain and hostility. Another fleshy man, uniformed and red-faced, hailed a cab for us and touched his cap politely but could only manage a peremptory growl: “Right this way, miss. Step up, sir.”’ He slammed the cab door behind us. Louisa directed the driver to the New Yorker Hotel.
“Do they take us there?”
She looked at me. “They got laws in New York, honey, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to spend all your time in court. But over at the New Yorker, I believe they’ve already got the message.” She took my arm. “You see? In spite of all this chopping and booming, this place hasn’t really changed very much. You still can’t hear yourself talk.”
And I thought to myself, Maybe that’s the point.
Early the next morning we checked out of the hotel and took the plane for Alabama.
I AM just stepping out of the shower when I hear the bell ring. I dry myself hurriedly and put on a bathrobe. It is Vidal, of course, and very elegant he is, too, with his bushy gray hair quite lustrous, his swarthy, cynical, gypsylike face shaved and lotioned. Usually he looks just any old way. But tonight his brief bulk is contained in a dark-blue suit and he has an ironical pearl stickpin in his blue tie.
“Come in, make yourself a drink. I’ll be with you in a second.”
“I am, hélas!, on time. I trust you will forgive me for my thoughtlessness.”
But I am already back in the bathroom. Vidal puts on a record: Mahalia Jackson, singing I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About lit My Song.
When I am dressed, I find him sitting in a chair before the open window. The daylight is gone, but it is not exactly dark. The trees are black now against the darkening sky. The lights in windows and the lights of motorcars are yellow and ringed. The street lights have not yet been turned on. It is as though, out of deference to the departed day, Paris waited a decent interval before assigning her role to a more theatrical but inferior performer.
Vidal is drinking a whisky and soda. I pour myself a drink. He watches me.
“Well. How are you, my friend? You are nearly gone. Are you happy to be leaving us?”
“No.” I say this with more force than I had intended. Vidal raises his eyebrows, looking amused and distant. “I never really intended to go back there. I certainly never intended to raise my kid there —”
“Mais, man cher,” Vidal says, calmly, “you are an intelligent man, you must have known that you would probably be returning one day.” He pauses. “And, as for Pauli — did it never occur to you that he might wish one day to see the country in which his father and his father’s fathers were born?”
“To do that, really, he’d have to go to Africa.”
“America will always mean more to him than Africa, you know that.”
“I don’t know.” I throw my drink down and pour myself another. “Why should he want to cross all that water just, to be called a nigger? America never gave him anything.”
“It gave him his father.”
I look at him. “You mean, his father escaped.”
Vidal throws back his head and laughs. If Vidal likes you, he is certain to laugh at you and his laughter can be very unnerving. But the look, the silence which follow this laughter can be very unnerving, too. And, now, in the silence, he asks me, “Do you really think that you have escaped anything? Come. I know you for a better man than that.” He walks to the table which holds the liquor. “In that movie of ours which has made you so famous, and, as I now see, so troubled, what are you playing, after all? What is the tragedy of this half-breed troubadour if not, precisely, that he has taken all the possible roads to escape and that all these roads have failed him?” He pauses, with the bottle in one hand, and looks at me. “Do you remember the trouble I had to get a performance out of you? How you hated me, you sometimes looked as though you wanted to shoot me! And do you remember when the role of Chico began to come alive?” He pours his drink. “Think back, remember. I am a very great director, mats pardon! I could not have got such a performance out: of anyone but you. And what were you thinking of, what was in your mind, what nightmare were you living with when you began, at last, to play the role — truthfully?” He walks back to his seat.
Chico, in the film, is the son of a Martinique woman and a French colon who hates both his mother and his father. He flees from the island to the capital, carrying his hatred with him. This hatred has now grown, naturally, to include all dark women and all white men, in a word, everyone. He descends into the underworld of Paris, where he dies. Les fauves — the wild beasts — refers to the life he has fled and to the life which engulfs him. When I agreed to do the role, I felt that I could probably achieve it by bearing in mind the North Africans I had watched in Paris for so long. But this did not please Vidal. The blowup came while we were rehearsing a fairly simple, straightforward scene. Chico goes into a sleazy Pigalle dance hall to beg the French owner lor a particularly humiliating job. And this Frenchman reminds him of his father.
“You are playing this boy as though you thought of him as the noble savage,” Vidal said, icily. ”Ça verit d’où — all these ghastly mannerisms you are using all the time?”
Everyone fell silent, for Vidal rarely spoke this way. This silence told me that everyone, the actor with whom I was playing the scene and all the people in the “dance hall,” shared Vidal’s opinion of my performance and was relieved that he was going to do something about it. I was humiliated and too angry to speak; but perhaps 1 also felt, at the very bottom of my heart, a certain relief, an unwilling respeet.
“You are doing it all wrong,” he said, more gently. Then, “Come, let us have a drink together.”
WE WALKED into his office. He took a bottle and two glasses out of his desk. “Forgive me, but you put me in mind of some of those English lady actresses who love to play putain as long as it is always absolutely clear to the audience that they are really ladies. So perhaps they read a book, not usually, hélas!, Fanny Hill, and they have their chauffeurs drive them through Soho once or twice — and (hey come to the stage with a pertormance so absolutely loaded with detail, every bit of it meaningless, that there can be no doubt that they are acting. It is what the British call a triumph.” He poured two cognacs. “That is what you are doing. Why? Who do you think this boy is, what do you think he is feeling, when he asks for this job?” He watched me carefully and I bitterly resented his look. “You come from America. The situation is not so pretty there for boys like you. I know you may not have been as poor as — as some — but is it really impossible for you to understand what a boy like Chico feels? Have you never, yourself, been in a similar position?”
I hated him for asking the question because I knew he knew the answer to it. “I would have had to be a very lucky black man not to have been in such a position.”
“You would have had to be a very lucky man.”
“Oh, God.” I said, “please don’t give me any of this equality-in-anguish business.”
“It is perfectly possible,” he said, sharply, “that there is not another kind ”
Then he was silent. He sat down behind his desk. He cut a cigar and lit it. puffing up clouds of smoke, as though to prevent us from seeing each other too clearly. “Consider this,” he said. “I am a French director who has never seen your country. I have never done you any harm, except, perhaps, historically — I mean, because I am white — but I cannot be blamed for that —”
“But I can be,” I said, “and I am! I’ve never understood why, if I have to pay for the history written in the color of my skin, you should get off scot-free!” But I was surprised at my vehemence, I had not known I was going to say these things, and by the fact that I was trembling and from the way he looked at me I knew that, from a professional point of view anyway, I was playing into his hands.
Continue reading This Morning, This Evening, So Soon →
When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that… if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing. To be able to put yourself in tune or rhythm with the forces beyond, which are the truly operative ones, that is the task — and the solution, if we can speak of “solutions.”
