JUST ABOVE MY HEAD

She opened the door very quietly, and switched on the light. The wide, long loft was utterly still; but Julia listened for a moment before she threw her handbag on the sofa.

I sat down. I wondered, then I didn’t wonder, how she knew Jimmy was home. The first bedroom door was closed: perhaps it would have been open if he were not at home. But it wasn’t, on the other hand, a matter of signals, not a code to be deciphered, broken—she knew, simply, that he was home because she would certainly have known if he wasn’t. She was behind me, at the bar. I felt, in her curious tranquillity, menaced, as I feared, or confirmed, as I hoped, by my presence, that she knew Jimmy was home because, otherwise, she would not be home, would not peacefully be preparing two drinks. It is true that I then heard a faint snore from beyond the closed door of the first bedroom: but I could not possibly have heard this if she had not already known that I might.

It was now a quarter to two in the morning. She came back and handed me my drink, took hers, and sat down on the sofa opposite me.

“Welcome home,” she said, and we touched glasses, looking each other in the eye.

And I was suddenly in torment. With no warning, my prick suddenly stretched, thundering upward against my shorts, my trousers, reaching for my navel: reaching for her. This was not at all like the familiar swelling created by the anticipation of a more or less calculated conquest, not at all. I could not remember ever having been so violently shaken before—perhaps I never had been. The past drowned in that moment, it was as though I had no past. It was terror that I felt, a terror both warm and icy. It was not merely that I felt at the mercy of my cock, but that my cock, all of me, was at the mercy of a force unnameable, and why do I say mercy? This force had no mercy. I shifted on the sofa, more unhappy than a boy trying not to wet his pants, and, before I knew it, I had said, “Julia. Julia. Please welcome me home. Please.”

It is rare that a cry is heard, and I think we l’ve forever those who hear the cry. Julia looked at me. Even today, until the day I die, in a way that has nothing to do with Ruth, whom I had not yet met (and yet, this moment prepared me for her!) and my children, not yet dreamed of, and Birmingham, and Peanut, and all those other corpses, and Arthur, my God, my God, my God, my God, I remember how Julia looked at me, and set her glass down on the table and stood up.

“Write down your phone number—I know you got a phone number, Mr. Young Executive! Is it listed?—so Jimmy will know where to find me and, while you doing that, I’ll find a toothbrush.” She laughed, then she sat back down and took my hand in hers. “I’m difficult,” she said, “but I’m not evil. You and me can stay here together any night but tonight you understand—I don’t want Jimmy to find out.”

She put her hands on my shoulders. Lord. Lord. Lord. I didn’t move, but I trembled. Lord. She trusted me.

She started to rise. I didn’t know that I was going to do it, but I put one hand on her wrist and pulled her to me. I was then invaded by her odor. She entered me: love is a two-way street. I put my arms around her, she put her arms around me. I had never, never, been held that way, never. I kissed her, or, rather, I sighed myself into her. She held me, then I looked into her eyes.

“I thought,” she said, “you’d have a fountain pen by now,” and we laughed, I let her go, and she stood up.

I did have a fountain pen. She brought me a piece of paper, and I scribbled my name and address on it. She scribbled above it, Am with Hall. Love, Julia, and put the piece of paper in the center of the table, weighing it down with the clock.

She looked at me again, disappeared, and came back with a small overnight bag. I took it from her. She opened the door and turned out the lights and locked the door behind her and we went on down the stairs.

For a wonder, we got a taxi right away, and we went to my place on West End Avenue, in the Seventies.

And, now—now, I find myself before many things I do not want to face. I feel a dread reluctance deep inside me and I would end my story here, if I could. But—what is coming is always, already on the road and cannot be avoided.

Some days after Julia and I had begun, as we now say, to “make it”—and several years before we could face what we meant to each other—Arthur came in from Canada with his nappy-headed self. He had been very successful in Canada, and very happy—one of the reasons that he was so nappy-headed: he hadn’t had time to do more than wash and comb his hair. He was now, decidedly, tall, and not only from the paranoid view of the older brother. He was tall and rangy and would remain, for the rest of his days, too thin.

Anyway, he had a pad way downtown on Dey Street, where his practicing didn’t bother the neighbors because he didn’t have any. When he dropped his bags at his pad and ran a comb through his hair, he called our father and mother, who told him I was back in the city and would probably like to see him. And so he put down the comb with which he had still been combing his hair, and called me.

“If this is a collect call from Canada, operator, would you please reverse the charges?”

“You want to look at your calendar while I look at my calendar? I don’t know about you, brother, but I’m booked.”

“About time. What you doing, oh, in the next five minutes? I believe I can steal five minutes because I have been booked. I’ll steal five minutes for you, you understand, but you going to have to shake your ass.”

I hung up, and looked around my pad. I never quite knew what I was doing on West End Avenue, but that’s another story. This was a Saturday. Julia and I were not yet living together—that was to come, so much was to come—but we spent a lot of time together. Jimmy had keys to both our doors, and pranced in and out—mainly, as it seemed to me then, in and out of our Frigidaires. All I really remember of Jimmy, then, is sneakers, beer, sandwiches, and ice cream. He was always eating; his legs seemed to grow by the hour. I did not, then, recognize this riot as his happiness. The keys to our houses, which he sometimes threw in the air and caught with one hand were, for him, the keys to the kingdom. He saw his sister as happy and himself as mightily protected. He had her and he had me, and, as to that, I will tell you now, he was absolutely right. But I did not know if Julia and I really had each other. Jimmy could believe that I made his sister happy, and again, as to that, he may have been closer to the truth than I: I couldn’t have known that, then. We both had too much to do.

And I loved her. She made me happy: but I was beginning to be too old to trust the ease sleeping behind that word: happiness. I was being forced to see that real love involves real perception and that perception can bring joy, or terror, or death, but it will never abandon you to the dream of happiness. Love is perceiving and perception is anguish.

So I learned, for mighty example, and long before Julia told me, how she had made the money to bring her brother and herself out of New Orleans. I was looking at ceilings, she told me, much later—while men pounded themselves into her, less brutally, after all, than her father had, and she picked up the money and took it home and put it aside. She had taken it all on: she had taken on too much. So I had said, and so I was to say again, until my heart was broken: but, in the meantime, there was Jimmy, lying on the sofa, with his sneakers on.

There was, also, Arthur, now, leaning on the doorbell. I buzzed him in. I lived on the fifth floor. I walked to my door, and opened it and stood in the doorway, waiting to see Arthur erupt from the elevator, which was a long way down the hall.

Here he came, presently, loping like a heathen, bright and sharp in a beige gabardine suit. Nappy-headed, grinning, with those eyes, and all those teeth. Seeing him was always new: I always wondered if he still liked me. A childish wonder, true, but not uncommon. His elegance was scarcely at all compromised by his adolescent lope and the fact that he was carrying a large shopping bag.

“Contraband from Canada,” he said. “Blazing hot. Close the door, I think I’m being followed.”

I put the shopping bag on the sofa. He walked around the living room, then stopped and looked at me.

“Nothing new. Well. A couple of things I’ll tell you about. How was Canada? You want a drink?”

“Yeah, I’ll have a little taste—here,” and he picked up the shopping bag, and we walked into the kitchen. He started unloading the bag. He had brought down cigars, a carton of cigarettes, a tin of ham, and bottles of whiskey and vodka and gin. He put all this on my kitchen table and he was, really, a little like a child who had managed to steal this contraband and bring it all on home.

“Canada was beautiful,” he said. He looked at me, with that smile. “Pour us a drink,” and he handed me the vodka, “while I go to the bathroom. I’ll tell you about it. And then, you got to tell me something. You know—we ain’t seen each other in a while.”

He went to the bathroom. I made drinks for both of us. I heard him singing to himself in the bathroom.

He came back, and we sat down in the two easy chairs near the window. This big window was the nicest thing in the apartment I lived in then. Not much could be seen from this window except the houses across the street, and the street itself, if you sort of leaned up and looked down. Still, one sensed the nearby river and one was aware of the sky and the light changed all the time.

“I had the feeling that they hadn’t heard anybody like me up there. Of course that’s not true, they must have heard just about everybody. But, look like, they hadn’t seen anybody like me. They damn sure didn’t want to let me go.” He smiled. “It was nice.”

He grinned. “I might be wrong, brother, but I had the feeling that niggers didn’t put down roots in Canada the way it happened here.” He sipped his vodka, which was straight, over ice. “I might be wrong. You got to remember, there was a whole lot of shit I didn’t see, because I was on the road. But—it was different. It was nice, like I say, but it was different.” He took another sip of his drink, frowning. “I just didn’t see as many of us. I didn’t see as many churches—their churches are different. I sang in civic centers, you know, and some white churches, and”—he laughed—”a football stadium, and, you know?”—his proud, astonished eyes now searching mine—”it was full, that stadium was damn near full, there was ump-teen thousand people there, baby, and it was beautiful, I left them rocking to the gospel as I went off, they might have stayed there all night, for all I know.” He laughed. “I had to get to my hotel and get some sleep because I was off again in the morning.”

He paused again, narrowing his eyes, looking through my window at the buildings across the street. “Maybe that’s what I mean when I say I had the feeling that they hadn’t seen nobody like me before. They seemed so—surprised—you know what I mean? Anyway,” and he put his drink down on the table before us, “I hadn’t seen anybody like them, either, and it was something, I think it was good for me, to sing before such a strange audience. They react”—clasping his hands together, looking at me—“in such strange places, it throws you, you don’t know where you are. Then—well, you go with it—you have to go with it—and you find out things.” He nodded his head, looking down, like an old man talking to himself. “It was nice. I didn’t see a lot of niggers. But I saw some Indians.”

“We got on fine. I had the feeling—you know?—that we were learning something from each other. And some of those cats, man, they know more about what’s happening in the States, with Martin Luther King, and Malcolm—man, they knew more than I know. I just listened to them, and I’m real glad I was up there.”

He looked at me as though he were afraid that I was making fun of him, but then he saw that I wasn’t. “Well, yes,” he said finally. “Maybe. But, to tell you the truth, I never thought of it that way before.” He frowned and grinned. “I never had to listen to other people listening to it before. So, I began to hear something because I was listening to them listen—does that make sense?” And again, he grinned and frowned, looking into my yes.

“It makes perfect sense to me,” I said. “But, really, you’ve been doing that—listening, I mean—ever since you started singing. You’re just beginning to realize it.”

He was leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. He said, “Daddy always told me that.” Then, “And I played piano for myself—accompanied myself—much more than I ever had before, just like Daddy said I would. I had to,” and he looked at me with a wonder at once personal and remote, “because, you know, it’s another beat they got up yonder. And I can’t really find the words for what I’m trying to say—it’s like another—pulse—the beat inside the beat.”

He rose and seemed to prowl, like a hunter, as though whatever was eluding him was certainly quivering somewhere in this room.

“I’d be up there, you know, singing, and the cats behind me would be keeping time—but—they couldn’t-anticipate—you know, when you leap from one place to another—they couldn’t be with me, I was alone—oh, brother, you’ve heard it all your life, like me, but I don’t know how to say it—the changes some of the old church choirs could ring on ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ make you hold your breath and you’d hold your breath until they let you know you could let it out—” he turned to me, and grinned, his hands spread wide—“you know, like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith can just leave a note hanging somewhere while they go across town and take care of business and come back just in time and grab that note and swing out with it to someplace you had no idea they were going—and carry you with them, that’s when you say Amen! and Mahalia can do that, too, and Cleveland, and some of those people I heard down South, and”—he grimaced, and walked to the window, hands on hips—“quiet as it’s kept, Miles and Dizzy and Yardbird, and”—pointing a triumphant finger at me—“Miss Marian Anderson, baby, people say she can’t sing spirituals but she can damn sure make Brahms sound like that’s all he wrote.” He turned from the window. “I better have another drink,” and he grinned. “You must think I’m going crazy.”

I picked up his glass. I couldn’t help laughing, because of his intensity and because of my love, but then I said, very soberly, “No, brother. I do not think that at all. You sound like you’ve been working. You sound like you are working.”

I stood up and I would have started for the kitchen, with both our glasses in my hands, but I was checked, held, by something in his face.

“It’s strange to feel,” he said, “that you come out of something, and something you can’t name, you don’t know what it is—something that has never happened anywhere, ever, in the world, before.” He grinned, and clapped his hands. “I don’t know no other people learned to play honky-tonk, whorehouse piano in church!” He collapsed, laughing, on the sofa, and I almost dropped the glasses. “And keep both of them going, too, baby, and all the time grinning in Mister Charlie’s face.” He wiped his eyes. “Wow. And sing a sorrow song so tough, baby, that it leaves sorrow where sorrow is, and gets you where you going.” He subsided, looking toward my window. “And that’s the beat.”

I walked into the kitchen with the glasses and poured vodka on the rocks for him and a Scotch on the rocks for me. At the front door, I heard the key turn in the lock.

Jimmy had leapt up on Arthur by the time I came out of the kitchen, as friendly and unwieldy as a Great Dane puppy.

Arthur was both astounded and delighted—and somewhat relieved when he finally managed to disentangle himself from Jimmy’s arms and legs. He held him by the shoulders and stared into his face.

I said to Jimmy, “I haven’t had time to tell him everything, son. He just got here, too. Why don’t you get whatever you want out of the kitchen and join us?”

Jimmy looked as though he thought he’d done wrong. I handed Arthur his vodka, and laughed, and grabbed Jimmy by one shoulder.

“Don’t worry—why you looking like that? Julia’s going to be here in a few minutes and, if you put on some decent clothes, I’ll take you all out to dinner someplace on one of my credit cards.”

“He ain’t never said that to me,” said Arthur. “I did’t even know about his credit cards.” Jimmy laughed. “Come on in the house, man. I just got in from Canada, and I been doing all the talking. But I think I already got everything pretty well figured out.” He winked. “I’m delighted you part of the family. I mean that.”

“I’ll bring you up-to-date presently,” I said—but I felt a strange discomfort.

Arthur lifted his chin and sucked his teeth. “Baby. Don’t you worry about it. Wow.” Then he laughed. “Life is the toughest motherfucker going.”

Jimmy came in with a vodka on the rocks. He suddenly looked very vulnerable, and I watched Arthur watching him.

“Well. Wait till Julia gets here,” I said, “and I’ll figure out where we’re going to eat and you’ll meet us there.”

I realized that Arthur also felt a powerful discomfort, and I watched Jimmy watching him.

In my experience—and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don’t really know what the word experience means—the strangest people in one’s life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn’t but because you didn’t have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one’s senses, by one’s soul—the people utterly indispensable for one’s journey.

So now, sitting before my big West End Avenue apartment window, feeling the discomfort which had entered the room with Jimmy and which, had immobilized Arthur, though I did not know what was going to happen, I did know that something had happened. I will not say that I looked ahead; clearly, anyway, during all this time, I have been painfully looking backward. But I was glad that Jimmy and Arthur had met at my house, and I was glad that Julia would soon be turning her key in the lock. I was, perhaps defensively, more amused than astonished. Our two little brothers would be compelled to deal with each other and leave the two weary old folks alone.

Jimmy had guts. He said, “Maybe we can work together up yonder, one of these days—I play piano—”

“I play piano, too,” said Arthur, more coldly than I had ever heard him sound. “And I ain’t going back up yonder for a while. I’m thinking of going south.”

“I just came back,” said Jimmy promptly. “I’d love to go there with you.”

Arthur gave Jimmy a look, which, though it was genuinely exasperated, was also genuinely amazed. He was seeing Jimmy for the first time. He was seeing a stranger who might become a part of his life in quite another way than he had been until now. His nostrils and his upper lip quivered slightly. He could not quite believe that Jimmy was saying so blatantly what he was saying. Arthur was made uncomfortable, too, I could see, by my presence in the room; my presence did not disturb Jimmy at all. Arthur stared at Jimmy helplessly, but he was no longer looking at Julia’s kid brother. His eyes darkened—or rather, a light went on, deep behind his eyes, and a most unwilling smile touched his lips.

Jimmy was tranquil, smug, triumphant: he had made Arthur look at him—at him: tranquil, triumphant, and smug as he appeared to be, he was also a little frightened, now, of the scrutiny he had so recklessly demanded.

“Well,” said Arthur, after a moment. “We’ll talk about it.” Then, “You sure you want to hang out with an old man like me?”

“You don’t look so old to me,” Jimmy said, and now he had Arthur’s full attention. Though, as I say, I knew nothing, officially, about Arthur’s life at that moment, I knew more than he thought I knew; or, more accurately, far more than he had told me. I could see how it all made perfect, idyllic sense to Jimmy, who would have a family again, or who would, perhaps, have a family for the first time. He would have Julia and me and Arthur, all of us belonging to each other. I could see, too, as Arthur couldn’t, that Jimmy had probably had a crush on Arthur all his life.

Then the bell rang, sharply, three times, Julia’s sometime signal, and she came on in the house.

Julia sometimes rang the bell, according to Julia, because she didn’t want to seem to be spying on me, or risk catching me in my sins: and I accepted this nonsense, as I accepted almost everything from Julia, in those days, with a wry delight.

She was carrying packages, she was dressed in something brown and yellow, she was bareheaded and radiant from the wind outside, and she hadn’t gained any weight. I watched her figure very closely in those days because I was hoping to get her pregnant, and so persuade her to marry me.

“My Lord,” she said, and put her packages on the table, “we got the whole family here today!” She kissed me briefly, pulled her brother’s hair, and ran to Arthur. They held each other a moment, in silence: it was nice to see. “When did you get back here?”

“Just today. It’s wonderful to see you. How are you?—you look wonderful.”

“I’m fine—you know your brother’s turned me into a fallen woman?” and she left Arthur and came to stand next to me.

Arthur grinned. “He hasn’t had a chance to tell me much of anything, I been doing all the talking—but I figured it out—it agrees with both of you.”

“He didn’t figure it out,” said Jimmy proudly, “until he saw me come bouncing in here.”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “Your brother done got loud since I last saw him—what you figure on doing with him?”

“We’ve been running ads in the papers for days,” said Julia, “but we can’t find nobody to give him to—”

“I understand that,” said Arthur. “I’d sure think twice about it. Wouldn’t never get no sleep.” He scowled at Jimmy, who grinned, and, in a kind of insolent, delighted panic, lit a cigarette.

“Not with you around, they don’t,” said Arthur. He said to Julia, “It would save you a lot of money if you’d let me strangle him right now.”

“He always asks me that,” said Julia. “And he knows I drink gin—have we got any gin?”

I went into the kitchen. I knew what Arthur was worried about, and I wished I could talk to him about it. I wanted to say, Dig it, man, whatever your life is, it’s perfectly all right with me. I just want you to be happy. Can you dig that? But that’s a little hard to say, if your brother hasn’t given you an opening. I thought that I would try to make an opening; then I thought that little Jimmy was perfectly capable of spilling all the beans in sight. He didn’t care who knew what—he trusted his sister more than Arthur trusted me; but then, an older sister is a very different weight, in a man’s life, than an older brother. Arthur was worried about another man’s judgment; in this case, mine. He was worried about Jimmy’s youth. He was frightened, already, though I don’t think he knew this, and could certainly not have said it, by Jimmy’s speed and single-mindedness: for Jimmy had lit his insolent cigarette on Arthur’s wouldn’t never get no sleep as though he were saying let’s try me, and see. I laughed a little to myself in the kitchen, as I fixed Julia’s drink: unless I missed my guess, Jimmy had Arthur in his sights and wasn’t thinking about changing his mind. And, if the weather got rough, Jimmy would turn to me—I could see that coming, too: after all, he had both me and Julia. I would have to tell him the truth, which was that I really felt that it would be a damn good thing for both of them, and a great load off my mind. It would be a great load off Julia’s mind, too, and then, maybe, the two weary old folks could be left alone. For the fate and the state of her baby brother was in the center of Julia’s mind, and there was no way for me not to respect that, for the fate and the state of my baby brother was in the center of my mind, too.

Well. I took Julia her drink, and, eventually, we decided where we were going to eat—at Harlem’s Red Rooster, though I wasn’t sure they took credit cards—and Jimmy bounced out of the house to go downtown and change his clothes, and meet us there.

That left the three of us to have a quiet drink alone, in front of the West End Avenue window. “Lord,” said Arthur. “Time is flying so fast, I know, now, we’ll never catch up.”

“Yes,” said Julia, “I was looking at you and thinking of the last time we saw each other—and that room on Fourteenth Street, remember?” And she laughed and then they both laughed. Then, “When was the last time you saw Crunch?”

“I haven’t seen Crunch—oh, for a long time now—not since before Christmas.”

They looked at each other. A strange, deep, unconscious sorrow flooded both their faces.

“I don’t really know,” said Arthur. “He’d been doing a little bit of everything—”

“He was working in a settlement house for a while,” I said. “And then I think he was in Philadelphia for a while, and then, I don’t know.”

“I had the feeling,” Julia said, “that something had happened to him in Korea, that something got broken—somehow—”

“Well,” said Arthur, “I know he was worried about you—and the baby” He sipped his drink, and looked down. “I couldn’t reach him.”

“Yes. But it wasn’t just that. Crunch was always worried about something. I had the feeling, I keep coming back to it, it’s the only way I can put it—that something got broken.”

Arthur stared out of the window. “Well. He damn sure wouldn’t let nobody touch it—whatever it was.” He dared to say, “I tried.”

He was holding everything very carefully in, but I knew that he was not very far from tears—he was not very far, after all, from his time with Crunch. But neither Julia, nor I, were supposed to know anything about that. “He was bitter,” Arthur said. “I had never known him to be bitter before.”

“A lot of us came back from over there bitter,” I said. “It was a bitter thing to be part of.” I looked at Arthur, who turned to look at me. “It was bitter to see that you were part of a country that didn’t give a fuck about you, or anybody else.”

“That’s true,” Arthur said. “I see that.” Then, “But you’re not bitter.”

Julia looked at me with a wry, pained pursing of the lips. “You’re a little like a loaded gun,” she said. “Sometimes—you know,” she said to Arthur, “you’re afraid to touch it, it might go off.” Arthur nodded, watching her. “Like Jimmy, every time he comes back from one of his trips south.”

“Yes,” said Julia. “I don’t know how to stop him—but—I guess I wouldn’t even if I could.”

Then we were silent, watching the evening gather outside my window. I thought of Jimmy, in the subway now, rushing home to get into his glad rags to come rushing back uptown. I knew how Julia trembled for him every time he went south, how she feared the newspapers, the radio, the television set; flinched each time the telephone rang, and trembled even more when it didn’t. And, even now, with Jimmy merely riding the subway in New York, not totally at ease; he was surrounded, after all, by a lonely and vindictive and unpredictable people. We were, none of us, ever, totally at ease. Our countrymen gave our children a rough way to go, and it was hard not to hate them for the brutality of their innocence.

“I’ve got to get there soon,” said Arthur slowly. “I’ve been wanting to get there for a while, but my manager always has other plans.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like keeping you alive, for example, so he can keep on paying his rent.”

We laughed, and Arthur said, “That’s the most bitter thing I ever heard you say, brother.”

“I just never wanted to meddle in your business. But I know about managers.”

Arthur said this with that throwaway, wide-eyed cunning which had sometimes made me want to strangle him as a child. He sipped his vodka, looked out of the window, looked at me. I had a cigarette between my lips, and he lit it for me. He said, looking into my eyes, “Not right now—but—later. Soon. I know you got other things to do—can I have another drink? Before you take us out to eat? Big brother?”

“That’s right,” said Julia, returning, and handing Arthur his drink. She kissed me on the cheek. “Lord. You don’t know how blessed we are—just to be together in this room.”

I put my arm around her, and looked at my brother. “That’s true. But you’re ganging up on me.”

“That’s right. You being persecuted. You need another drink, just before you really go round the bend.” I laughed, too, watching them: I didn’t mind their ganging up on me. Julia said to Arthur, “Watch over your brother while I go and fix my face—he’s taking us out, we got to look correct.” She went back to the kitchen, throwing over her shoulder, “He’s not bitter, Arthur, he’s just damn near paranoiac—he’ll be hearing voices pretty soon.”

I sat down opposite Arthur. It was dark now, the only light came from the kitchen. But, in a moment, Julia returned and put my glass in my hand, and switched on a lamp. She kissed me on the forehead: how sweet it is: to be loved by you, Arthur watching this with a smile, then vanished into the corridor which led to the bathroom and the bedroom. “I won’t be a minute!”

I really wanted to follow her. Arthur saw this in my face. We laughed softly together, touched glasses, and drank. Arthur said, “I’m happy to see you happy, brother. And she’s happy. I think that’s a miracle.” He grinned. “It strengthens my faith.”

He thrust out his lips in a self-deprecating smile and looked down at his glass, which he held between both hands. Then, looking up at me, “You two going to get married?”

He nodded his head slowly, not looking at me, looking within. “Well. I can see that, too. She’s been through some shit.” Then he looked up at me, and smiled. “Well. Patience, brother!”

“Patience, yourself,” I said, and I wanted to persist, but I didn’t, something told me that this was not the moment.

We finally hauled it on uptown, and I think it was the Red Rooster, a joint I dug a lot in those days, and I associate it with Julia. On the other hand, the Rooster is not too far from where Jordan’s Cat used to be, and not too far from where Martha used to live, and I know I avoided that neighborhood for a long time—everything around there hurt me too much. So maybe my memory is playing tricks on me and I associate the Rooster with Julia because we were so happy for a while. Our love was the beginning of my reconciliation with my pain, and, after Julia, I was never afraid to go anywhere again. Maybe I associate Julia with this turf because I had once been happy there and then had been locked out and felt myself lost and Julia gave me back my keys. Who knows? And it doesn’t matter. We went to a very groovy Harlem restaurant and had ourselves a ball. I still remember Julia’s face, and Arthur’s face, and Jimmy’s.

One thing I will say, though, now that I think I can, now that I don’t get around much anymore: when I realized that Julia and I were not meant to make it together, for reasons inexorably hidden in the cosmos, I entered a void, and, in that void, I discovered that Julia had given me something. She had given me herself, yes, or had given me what was hers to give: but she had given me more than that. Through her, I learned that anguish was necessary, and, however crushing, could be used—that it was there to be used. I sometimes thought that Julia was as wrong as two left shoes, and, in some ways, I still do: but what she saw, she saw, and she never pretended not to have seen it—whatever, indeed, it is that she sees, this ancient child from Egypt! Sometimes I wanted to kill her, and I was very often frightened for her. But, when the chips are down, it is better to be furious with someone you love, or be frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

That night, anyway, Jimmy was almost completely unrecognizable, mainly because he had not dressed for his sister, or for me, or for the restaurant, and had not given a thought to my credit cards. I had never seen him, as it were, “dressed,” and I very much doubt that Julia had: neither of us could have seen, anyway, what Jimmy wanted Arthur to see. God knows what Arthur saw, but even he must have suspected that Jimmy had dressed for him. There he was, then, in a dark gray suit, a beige shirt, a scarlet tie, gleaming brown pumps. His scalp must have been stinging still from the scouring, combing, brushing and greasing of his hair, and his fingernails were very nearly blinding. And, in fact, I realized, as Jimmy hoped Arthur would, realized for the first time (as Jimmy hoped Arthur would) that he was a very beautiful, tremendously moving boy, who might become, with love, with luck, a rare and valuable man. My heart turned over—he, too, after all, had been through some shit—and I hoped, with all my heart, that he would find the love he so needed to give.

He was one of those people who leap on terror as though terror were a dangerous horse, and ride; not quite knowing where they are going, but determined not to be thrown.

Arthur had asked him a question about the South, and Jimmy, riding, was instructing Arthur, and all of us, in the interesting folkways of the region:

“First of all, I thought, Shit, me and my sister been living down here. And then I had to realize that I had not been living down here. I had been living in Grandma’s house because there wasn’t no other place to send me. And the second thing I had to realize was that I had not been born in Grandma’s house, like those kids my age, hitting the waiting rooms and the lunch counters. I had not grown up with that. I didn’t see signs, saying WHITE and COLORED—and they so fucking hypocritical and cowardly, those assholes, why can’t they say white and black?—till I was past twelve years old—”

He was talking so fast, and becoming, as he talked, so indignant that he had to catch his breath. Julia said mildly, “Take it easy, baby. Eat.”

Arthur grinned and touched Jimmy on the cheek. “Don’t try to tell it all at once. You got to make sure I understand what you telling me.”

Arthur’s smile, and his fleeting touch, caused Jimmy, after a moment, to subside and drop his eyes and turn his attention back to his pork chops. Arthur watched him a moment, then turned back to his spare ribs. Julia and I, very much together, looked at each other for a second, and then, for a little while, we ate—except for the jukebox—in silence.

Older brothers, younger brother—this thought had crossed my mind as I watched Arthur watching Jimmy. It is taken for granted that the younger brother needs the older brother: this need defines the older brother’s role, and older brothers remain older brothers all their lives—the proof being that they are always, helplessly, creating younger brothers. They are quite incapable of creating, for themselves, an older brother no matter how desperately they may long for one. An older brother is not among their possibilities. But younger brothers also remain younger brothers all their lives, and either seek out older brothers, or flee from them. Loneliness being what it is—and wickedness being what it is—the role of the older brother is the easier role to play: it is easier to seem to correct than to bear being corrected. The older brother’s need, whatever it is, can always be justified by what he is able to dictate as being the need of the younger brother.

But what, I had abruptly wondered, watching Arthur watching Jimmy, happens to the younger brother who needs a younger brother to love, and who considers that this need is forbidden?

“What it is, you know,” he said to Arthur, “is that you don’t believe what you’re seeing. That fucks you up, right there. You don’t believe these people can be real.” He laughed. “It’s true. You think they must be part of a fucking circus, or they just escaped from a madhouse—somebody going to come and call for them in a minute, or, you know, they going to turn up the houselights, or something.”

“Then”—he gestured with those big hands—“you wonder what am I doing here? And I made it a point to be here. I walked miles and days to be here. And I don’t want their slimy coffee and I don’t want their fucking greasy hamburger—they can’t even cook, I guess they hate food just like they hate everything else, they got no more taste than pigs, man—and then one of them say something like What you want in here? You know we don’t serve you all in here, and”—he threw back his head, and laughed—“had one motherfucker say to me, This is a free country! You don’t like it, you can go on back to Africa!”

“Then”—sobering—“you start to get scared. It don’t come over you all at once. It’s slow. It come over you, look like, from your ankle, from your big toe, it creep up the back of your thigh till it reach your behind and your balls get wet. And it’s funny, because you were already scared on the way here, but when you walk in, five or six or seven of you, you not scared then. Then—you don’t get scared, exactly. Just, all of a sudden, you are scared. This ain’t no vaudeville show, this ain’t no circus, ain’t nobody coming to take these people nowhere. These people coming to take you somewhere. And”—leaning forward to Arthur—“two things, man. You don’t want to die, but you waiting. These people really want to kill you. That’s hard to believe. You know it, or somebody once told you, or you thought you knew it—but now, here they are, and now, they the only people in the world! Ain’t nobody to call on.”

He leaned back, lips pursed, forehead wrinkled. He tapped on the table with his fork.

“But the other thing is worse.” He looked up, now, at all of us. “Maybe somebody told you once that these people wanted to kill you. Maybe you got some sense of how many of us they already killed. And that’s why you there, after all—and you try to hold this in the center of your mind—to force some kind of showdown, to bring an end to the slaughter.” He shook himself, a little like a puppy, and sighed. “But couldn’t nobody ever have told you—or you didn’t hear it—that you would want to kill. Oh”—looking at Julia—”many a time I wanted to kill our father. I even thought, one time, that I wanted to kill my sister,” and he grinned. “But—that wasn’t really true, you know. That was just—pain. But, down yonder—you look into that white face and you look around at them white faces and you want to kill somebody. You want to start killing, and never stop, until you swimming in blood. And then you get scared in another way, all over again. You scared of yourself. You scared of what will happen to your buddies, them sitting beside you, if you don’t catch hold of yourself. And then, you see that this ain’t no circus, these people are real, just like you, because, now, you damn near just like them. And that makes you feel real cold. If you ever prayed, or never prayed, you pray then. Hell is a staining place.”

Arthur looked at him for a moment, unreadably. He did not, at that moment, know what to say, nor did Julia, nor did I. Arthur and Jimmy sat facing each other, Julia and I sat facing each other: Arthur could not avoid looking into Jimmy’s incredibly trusting eyes. I saw this from an angle. Julia looked down at her plate.

“I might,” said Arthur carefully, “consider taking you along as my guide. If you wasn’t so fucking undernourished.” He tapped Jimmy’s plate. “Eat.”

“But there’s a whole lot more than what I just said—there’s something very beautiful, too—some beautiful people, man, the most beautiful people I ever saw—!”

Arthur continued to watch him; then he grumbled to Julia, “This child ain’t got no respect for his elders. Think my brother got money to throw away on children who pick at their food.” Then, to Jimmy, “Eat, baby. We got time to talk.”

“We going to have a drink,” said Arthur, “and when you finished eating, raise your hand.”

Jimmy smiled as best he could, with his mouth full of pork chop and his eyes full of Arthur, and nodded. Arthur grinned, and tapped him on the cheek again, and winked at Julia. Julia winked back, and I could see, from that split-second exchange, that she was very grateful to Arthur, for Jimmy had told Arthur more, in an evening, than he had ever told her—or anyone: younger brothers, younger brothers.

The younger brothers put us in a cab, having elected, themselves, to ride the subway. Since they were together, it was almost the first time that Julia and I had said Good night! to the younger brother without a small, private, repudiated tremor of anxiety. Habit, we called it, silently: but habit is produced by experience.

Our cab rushed past them as they walked slowly down the crowded avenue, Arthur a little taller than Jimmy. They waved, and we waved, and Julia put her head on my shoulder. I pulled her into my arms, held her head against my chest for a moment, and, then, in the speeding, flashing light and darkness, we kissed and kissed each other until I said, “Thank God, Julia, we ain’t got to climb no stairs tonight. I’d never make it.”

She put her hand on me, and grinned. She said, “Well, if you can manage to get out of the cab, you can lean on me in the elevator. I like it when you lean on me.”

Well. But she always seemed surprised, surprised that she filled me so, that there was nothing she had to do, to please me. I knew that she would never, consciously or deliberately, do anything to hurt me—or anyone: her dread of inflicting pain was so deep that it could nearly be called an affliction. Nearly, but not quite. I never knew her to hurt anyone but herself, and that is how she broke my heart. But she faced it, and surmounted it, and she gave me the strength to do that, too: and one really cannot ask love to do more than that.

Ah. It is a story I will tell another day. I know I cannot tell it now. Even today, with Ruth, with my children, with time, like thunder, gathering behind us, dark before us, Julia will make a gesture, or throw back her head, and giggle, or lean forward, with a moaning laugh, and I feel a tingling in my thigh, as though some ineffable wound were there, and I see Julia, as we were, so long ago: Julia, stepping naked out of the shower, or Julia’s head foaming with shampoo; Julia, not quite certain that she approved of the fact that she shaved her armpits, “But,” dryly, “it is a competitive business”; wrapping Julia in my bathrobe which immediately became, on her, a tent; creeping under this tent to be with her, like The Sheik of Araby! and we would laugh. She would hold my head against her while I nibbled on her breasts, tasted her nipples (someone said that all love is incest), licked her throat, drank at her lips, found her mouth, a swimmer, deep inside me, holding his breath, letting it out, going under, coming up, aware of her astonished, astonishing surrender, aware that I had known her when she had no breasts, trying to lick the secrets out of her pussy, my tongue between her thighs, down those long legs, up again, up, until I covered her entirely, her long fingers on my back, stroking me from the nape of my neck to my ass, my mouth in hers, my mouth in hers, her breath becoming mine, mine hers, her hands on me, her hands on me, her mouth against my chest, my nipples, all the hairs of my body itching, tingling, one by one, her mouth against my navel, against the hairs of my groin, on the tip of my prick, on my balls, her mouth on my prick again, my prick in her mouth, my tongue in her pussy, then, up, up, until I covered her again, my mouth in hers, her mouth in mine, moaning, moaning, those long legs spreading, those thighs holding, that belly rising to meet mine, those fingers on my back, the slow, slow, slow discovery of the wet and seeking warmth inside her, that entry which took so long, there was always more of her, always more of me, I stretched and stretched and stretched and thickened, I was always astounded that there could be so much, and she opened, then closed around me, opened and closed, opened and closed, never had anyone held me so, I had never been welcomed with such rejoicing, never, nearly strangling, heard such a laugh come up from me, throbbing and pounding, throbbing and pounding, hearing her cry, hearing her cry my name until that cry was the only sound in the universe, feeling her give and give and give, gasping and grasping, and then, from the soles of my feet, along my thighs, as though dark bells had begun rejoicing, through the crack of my ass and up my spine, electrifying my shoulder blades and the nape of my neck and the top of my head, threatening to close my throat, my breath in hers, my breath in hers, down my chest, tormenting my nipples, my belly, swelling my balls, everything, now, all of me, thundering into that great organ, and, at this moment, not wanting it to end, I always paused, and she would say, please oh please but she would also lie still, knowing we couldn’t be still long, and we would kiss as though we never expected to kiss again, and, then, without even knowing it, we would be moving, moving, moving, and, always, at the moment I began to come, it always seemed that there was, suddenly, more of Julia and more of me, and more, hard hard hard, and sometimes I was almost frightened, it seemed that the outpouring would never ever end.

Then we would simply lie in each other’s arms, in each other’s element, each other’s time and space, for a long time: and I had never, in my life before, felt such a tremendous safety, or such power to protect. Never before had I felt about another you are my life my heart my soul. We sometimes made love on the living room floor, and woke up, in our tent, with the light shining down on us through my big West End Avenue window.

But that night at the Rooster was the last time the four of us were to be together for a while. Arthur did not go south then, his manager had already booked him west—to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, keeping Arthur, as he thought, out of harm’s way. This led to Arthur’s break with that manager, and, eventually, I assumed that role—again, another story.

Jimmy went to Birmingham. This was shortly before our countrymen began hearing of Birmingham, and about eighteen months before Peanut and Arthur and I went down: and all of this, for what it’s worth, is before the March on Washington.

Shortly before that trip south, Julia had left me to go to Africa—finding herself, for a long time, in, of all weird places, Abidjan—and I wasn’t functioning well. The agency had put me, in effect, on sick leave without pay: but I had asked them to do this. And, worried as I was about Arthur, I might not have gone south with him, at least not then, if Julia had not left me. Perhaps he saw me, bumping into walls, cursing out mirrors, drowning in alcohol, picking myself up off my floor in the midnight, crying myself to sleep, yes, crying like a baby, and I don’t know if you can call it sleep. I don’t know what you can call it. There was nothing I wanted, nor nobody, and nothing I wanted to do. I was aware, the way you hear voices from a long ways off, that my mother, my father, my brother, were worried about me: it was cold to be forced to realize that I knew a lot of people, but I didn’t really have any friends, not one, and I was only thirty-two! And, if I didn’t have any friends, it was because of something I had chosen, it was something I had done, there was no one to blame: and there you go, round and round in the prison of yourself, day in, day out, nightfall, sunrise, day again. Those voices I heard from a long ways off, my father, my mother, my brother—I couldn’t really speak, but I didn’t want them to be too ashamed of me: those voices forced me to stagger and sometimes damn near crawl across my floor and get to the bathroom and pee, and sit there and force myself to shit and get up and not quite face the mirror, but anyway, shave, and then brush my teeth, and, holding my breath, get into the shower—I always saw Julia there! And, sometimes, using all the strength I had, I would sometimes actually shampoo my hair and stand under all that water and cry and cry and cry.

Then, I would get dressed—dressed: she was everywhere, she used to help me dress. This tie, no, she didn’t like that tie, this shirt goes better with your skin, she said, my God, Hall, where did you get those socks? Oh, Lord, and wander around that house, those rooms, in and out of that fucking kitchen, Christ, the dishes, fuck the dishes, one shoe in my hand and one shoe on my foot, looking down to make sure they were the same color at least, taking out ice cubes and pouring myself a drink, running an ice cube over my face to stop the tears from flowing, forcing myself to sip the drink instead of smashing the glass against the wall, hearing myself laugh as I got the other shoe on, looking into the mirror, dressed, it’s all right, you look all right, where has Hall gone? Then pouring myself another drink and turning on the record player and sitting in front of my window.

All day, sometimes, all night. The phone would ring, it would be my mother, or my father, just calling to say hello, and we’d love to see you, soon as you get the time, or it would be Arthur, long distance, clowning about his life as a gospel singer—delicately suggesting that he could use me out there, if I could find the time.

And I would have to respond, somehow, if only for the exasperating split second, to the unspoken—their respect for my life, and for my pain. I knew that they were not listening, for an instant, to anything I said—which meant that I did not have to say much. They were listening to the tone of my voice, were checking, in effect, my temperature. I didn’t want them to start worrying about emergency wards and blood transfusions, after all, I loved them, too, and so I guess I sounded, all things considered, all right.

Yes, we save or damn or lose each other: of this, my soul is a witness. I was under, and nearly helpless, but I was not gone—so those faraway voices insisted, therefore, I was still among the living.

Anyway, Paul and Florence dropped by one evening. Paul had come to take me downtown, to hear a new piano player. Florence just wanted to lie down, she said, and she’d wait till we came back. Paul said that he had a taxi waiting, and so I’d have to hurry, and I did. I was glad to see them, and glad to get out of the house. Paul and I went down to the Village, and the piano player was not bad, in fact, he was very good. My father and I didn’t talk much, but we had a very nice time, and I laughed a lot, for the first time, it seemed to me, in the Lord knows when. It was a funny kind of laughter, because it hurt, hurt the way an unused muscle hurts. But Paul liked to see me laugh—why had I never noticed that before?—and I had always loved hanging out with him. I remembered again how proud I had been the first time I realized that he was proud of me. He got me a little drunk, and I knew he was doing it deliberately; he was a kind of honored guest of the house, and people kept coming over to our table, and he was kind of showing off, for me; the young piano player announced his presence, and played a number for him. Paul kept ordering doubles for me, and then, one for the road—which tune, the piano player obligingly played.

Maybe it’s not a great song. I’ll never know. I was leaning forward, laughing, talking some shit to Paul, when I heard:

We’re drinking, my friend,

to the end

of a brief episode,

and I looked at my father and I opened my mouth and I couldn’t catch my breath, I felt my father grab one of my hands in his, and that was all, all, I swear to you, that held me in this world, this life, the lights swung, like circus lights, inside and outside my head, I was on some maniacal merry-go-round, and I still couldn’t catch my breath or close my mouth, I held on to my father’s hand.

so,

make it one for my baby,

and one more,

for the road.

And I closed my mouth, or my mouth closed itself, it hurt my teeth, and when my mouth closed itself and my breath came back, it hurt my chest so, and the tears came pouring down. I just sat there, shaking from head to toe, and I know I didn’t make a sound, with water pouring down my face.

that long, long road!

My father didn’t stroke my hand, he just held it—held it hard. Then he pushed a handkerchief across the table, near my other hand. I don’t know if anybody noticed what was happening. I guess not, I don’t know. I hadn’t made a sound. Paul never looked around.

I took the handkerchief with my free hand, then took my other hand away from Paul’s, and put my face in the handkerchief and wiped my face and blew my nose.

I looked up. Paul was smiling—a strange, sad, proud smile, and his eyes were wet. He was very very cool about it, but his eyes were wet.

He said, “I can’t blow your nose for you no more, son.” Then, “But you seem to be getting the hang of it.”

Then we both laughed—laughed until we almost cried. I said that I wanted revenge—I would buy him one for the road. And so I did, and we got out of there sometime long after the joint was closed, and my father took me home, where my mother sat, watching The Late Late Late Late Late Show. Then they very calmly took their leave, and I crashed.

In the morning, I realized that my mother had gone over the house with a toothbrush and a fine-tooth comb, scouring, vacuuming, ventilating, exterminating, had hung up all my clothes, and washed all the dishes—meaning: that the rest was up to me.

In those days, Arthur had no musicians, simply sang behind whatever the local scene offered, or accompanied himself. Peanut was standby, and man Friday, to handle practical details and hold off the mob: for, curiously—though I did not see this then—Peanut was the first to recognize the dimensions, and the potential—to say nothing of the potential danger—of Arthur’s popularity. Only he knew, for example, how many churches, deacons, pastors, all over the South, had heard of Arthur, and wanted to see him; only he knew how passionately Arthur’s voice was claimed by the students. And this was almost entirely by word of mouth, for Arthur had made no records then. Well, he had appeared on a few, four or five, maybe, with various choirs; but, as these had all been recorded “live,” that is to say, had not been recorded in a studio, and as he had been singing with that choir that day or evening anyway; and, as he had not been paid for it, or had been paid something minimal; he had not thought of them as records, it had not occurred to him that his voice carried any further than the given space he happened to occupy at the given moment. Even this is not entirely true, for rumors reached our ears—but they were not real. They were real, however, for Paul, who heard a coming thunder—that is why he wanted me to manage Arthur—and it was certainly real enough for Peanut, who had promised Arthur’s presence, and who was de facto manager on this maiden voyage.

I always say Birmingham, because Birmingham, Alabama, was the most wicked and loathsome city I had ever seen in my life. I am not the only nigger, who, dreaming of Birmingham, wakes up in a cold sweat, stifling a scream. But, in fact, our first stop was Richmond, Virginia. Then we were going to Atlanta, Birmingham, and Tallahassee. These places are not exactly garden spots, either, they certainly weren’t then—nor are they now; but I was to discover, during this trip, and, later, during so many others, that one would do almost anything to avoid spending an extra night in Birmingham. It sounds insane, perhaps, but, in those years, if one couldn’t get as far as Washington, or New York, one breathed a great sigh of relief upon arriving in Atlanta. This is not because Atlanta had seen the light, but because the city simply could not afford public scandals any longer. To give up public lynchings—which had only lately, after all, begun to be looked on as public scandals—was a small price to pay for continued investments and galloping prosperity. And, in any case, life went on as usual—exactly as before—just outside Atlanta, in the Georgia pines.

We traveled by car—instructive: we never did it again. I think Arthur had to find out something, wanted to see for himself, exactly what had changed on these roads since he had traveled them last. Peanut was willing to teach him; Peanut was endlessly willing to see. And they both, for different reasons, in their different fashions, wanted to see what I saw, wanted to see it through my eyes. I think that they felt, obscurely—and I think I understand this—that what I saw, since I was seeing it for the first time, would cause all three of us to see what no single one of us would have been able to see alone.

And, as you travel that road, having crossed the bridge, or got through the tunnel, into and out of blighted New Jersey, getting out of Newark, bypassing Trenton, heading south, to Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and then, to the unimaginable regions below, you are traveling through history, and at almost exactly the same rate of speed at which that history was created. It is all “new.” It is all, already, older than dust. Nothing you pass took longer to throw up, nor will it take longer to pull down, than the moment of your eye’s brief and flinching encounter. On the other hand, there is the road, as endless as history, to be endured.

And, on this road, you must stop, from time to time: if history makes demands on flesh, flesh makes demands on history. The demands flesh makes on history are not always easily met: the further down you go, the more vivid this truth becomes.

But no one says anything—what is there to say? And, indeed, we are all very cheerful with each other, and the bright blue day. We stop for gas in, I think, Delaware.

Just the same, I have, without having thought about it, become very aware of colors, am sniffing for attitudes. It is a white station attendant who fills the tank, a pasty-faced blond boy, whose face holds no expression, who seems to have no attitudes of any kind. I get out of the car, I want to pee. Arthur gets out to stretch his legs.

Arthur points out the rest room to me. Peanut is still in the car. Arthur walks up and down. I go to the rest room, pee, and come back.

Peanut pays the attendant, winks at me, and moves the car into the parking area. He switches off the motor, gets out of the car, locks it. Arthur comes back.

“You want to get something to eat here, brother?” Arthur asks. “Or—you want to wait?” He grins. “Only—it might be quite a wait.”

I know that, in principle, and on the road, public accommodations have been desegregated. But I don’t say this.

“Well, if you hungry, it might be better to eat here, because, you know, otherwise, we might not be able to get nothing to eat until we get where we going—and that’s some hours away.”

“Man,” says Peanut, after a moment, “let’s just grab a cup of coffee, or a Coke, or something, and get on to where we going.” He looks sharply at the car, and we start walking toward the coffee counter. “This place serves dogshit, man, let’s go where we can eat.”

So we get our coffees, and walk back to the car with them. Standing beside the car, we drink our coffees, and smoke our cigarettes. We say very little. All of our attention is beginning to be focused on something else, something concerning which there is absolutely nothing to say. Peanut takes our coffee containers, and, very carefully, drops them into the trash bin.

He looks at Arthur, and grins. “That’s the way they do in Canada, right: Everything is clean!”

“You get a ticket if you leave anything dirty,” says Arthur, and they laugh. We get back into the car, and roll away.

“That don’t involve my voice. But I sure don’t want you wearing out your New York accent on this man’s road. You might never sing again.” They both laugh. Then, “No, I’m all right,” Peanut says.

It is near dusk, not quite dusk. Arthur is leaning back, humming. We are in Virginia now, approaching our destination—but we are still on the highway—and I say to Peanut, “Man, I’m sorry, but my back teeth are beginning to float. Can we stop for a minute, so I can take a piss?”

Peanut immediately looked into the rearview mirror. The road behind us was almost empty—almost, but not quite; the heavy traffic was on the other side, going north.

It was true. There was no margin on the highway, no shoulder, no cover. There were trees, but they were on the far side of a ditch.

I leaned back, and looked out of the window, angry at myself, because I knew that my pressing need had been partly produced by my panic. The panic I had been suppressing had transferred itself to my bladder, from which receptacle it could, in principle, oh happy day, be discharged. The sky, the trees, the landscape, flew past. The land was flat: no cover. Then I heard dogs yelping, yowling, barking through this landscape, looking for my ancestors, looking for my grandfather, my grandmother, looking for me. I heard the men breathing, heard their boots, heard the dick of the gun, the rifle: looking for me. And there was no cover. The trees were no cover. The ditch was a trap. The horizon was ten thousand miles away. One could never reach it, drop behind it, stride the hostile elements all the way—to Canada? Round and round the tree: no cover. Into the tall grass: no cover. That hill, over yonder: too high, not high enough, no cover. Circle back, no cover; pissing as you run, no cover; the breath and the hair and the odor and the teeth of the dogs, no cover; the eyes and the gun and the blow of the master, no, no cover; and the blood running down, the tears and the snot and the piss and the shit running out, dragged by dogs out of the jaws of dogs, forever and forever and forever, no mercy, and no cover!

We came to a rest area, a wide shoulder off the road, empty. Peanut pulled over, and I jumped out, ran to the farthest tree, and pissed against it. It seemed to take forever, boiling back up at me from the ground, from the tree, but, yes, in a funny way, part of my panic came out with my piss. I was going to have to find a way to deal with both.

I got back into the car, and Peanut, as though he knew exactly what had happened to me, laughed, and said, “You think you ready to hit it now, big brother?”

We got to the home of our hostess, in Richmond; a plain, wooden house, with a gate, on a tree-lined street. A Mrs. Isabel Reed, a dark, plump lady in her forties, a high school teacher who might not have her job much longer. She trusted her students, and they trusted her: this made her, as she said, “doubtful.” She laughed as she said this, there being, as she plaintively pointed out, “nothing else for me to do.” Her husband was a lawyer, a tall, balding, big-boned man, who said he couldn’t wait till they were driven out of town, so he could go back to Zurich and walk around the lake he remembered from his days as a G.I.

It was a nice dinner, though I don’t think Arthur ate much—he was never able to eat before a performance—and then, we headed for the church.

The climate of those years is almost forgotten now—well, that is not really true. Who was there, who bore witness, will remember that time forever; but no one wants to hear, now, what they did not dare to face then. Still, some of our children know; some of our children will always know. Out of the plain, wooden house on the tree-lined street, which is a marked house, and we all know it, we get into three cars, all marked, and we all know it, and drive to a marked destination, from which, and we all know it, we may not return.

It is the ordinary black church, Mount Olive or Ebenezer or Shiloh, a proud, stone edifice with a yard and steps, and it is packed. We are really part of a protest meeting, a fundraising rally, and are associated, then, with Montgomery and Tuskegee and boycotts and bankruptcy and all of the other plagues incomprehensibly being visited on the South. The church is ringed with policemen, in cars, and on motorcycles.

Peanut and the others in the car are old hands at this. Our passenger is one of the supports, one of the stars of the evening: his role, then, though not necessarily simple, is clear. Our roles, too, though not necessarily simple, are equally clear: we must get him in, and get him out. Peanut gets the car as close to the church steps as possible, and Arthur and I and Mrs. Isabel Reed get out. Peanut drives the car off, to park it, and Mr. Reed stays with Peanut.

Mrs. Reed leads us in, past the two black men standing on the church steps, introducing, hurriedly, my brother and me. They smile, and shake our hands—hurriedly—make some soft, neighborhood joke with Mrs. Reed, and we enter the church. It is only now that I become aware of the music, coming from the choir, but pounding from the walls. Arthur, sharply, catches his breath, and straightens. People are standing in the aisles. Mrs. Reed takes Arthur’s hand, Arthur takes mine, and, single file, we walk down the aisle on the left side of the church. She leads us to the first row, leans over, and says something to one of the men in the first row, who immediately rises, and gives me his seat. He goes to stand against the wall. Still holding Arthur by the hand, Mrs. Reed mounts the steps into the pulpit with him. She sits him down, sits down behind him.

If you pray right,

heaven

belongs to you,

if you love right,

heaven

belongs to you,

if you live right,

heaven

belongs to you,

oh,

heaven

belongs to you!

Organ, piano, tambourines, and a drum. I look around for Peanut, which is ridiculous. I would be able, maybe, to see him if I knew exactly where he was sitting, or if he were sitting beside me. I can see Arthur, but only because he’s sitting in the pulpit. In any case, Peanut is with Mr. Reed, and Mr. Reed knows where to find us.

Silence, like a tempest, fell when the choir sat down, and Mrs. Reed stood up and came forward. She was too short to stand behind the pulpit—she stood beside it, leaning on it with one hand.

“There’s no need,” she said with a smile, “to say why we’re here tonight. We know why we’re here, and so do all those motorists outside. They never before been so quiet when they come down here to find out how we doing.”

“We got microphones placed outside the church—and, I guess, they got some microphones placed inside the church—and so, I just want to let them all know”—and she raised her voice—“that they are welcome. They are welcome to hear the truth. The truth can set even the governor free. The truth heals everybody. Might even cause you to get up off”—she paused, and shook her shoulders, a delicate, loaded pause—“your motorcycles, and walk!”

She laughed again, and again, the church responded with that deep, good-natured growl.

“But I’m not here to keep you long. As I say, we know why we’re here. We’re here raising money to get our children off the chain gang, and out of prison. We’re here to let everybody know that every human being was born to be free!”

“I don’t want to get carried away here, tonight. I’m going to ask Reverend Williams to open the service for us, and then, we going to hear some witnesses.” She paused, and smiled. “For those of you who don’t know him, Reverend Williams is a freedom fighter from over yonder, in Tennessee.”

And she turned, extending her hand, and a young white man, with dark blue eyes, and rough, unruly black hair, and a face which appeared to have taken more than its share of punishment, stepped forward. I had not seen him. He had been sitting directly behind the pulpit, and the pulpit blocked my view. I was shocked, but the church wasn’t. They seemed to know him. He looked, to me, exactly like one of the cops outside.

But then, as he began to talk, I began to wonder if he was white. I remembered, suddenly, that thousands of black people cross the color line every year; become white Christians without even having to bob their noses, or change their names; they just change neighborhoods. No doubt, for this, they pay another price, a hidden price: but the price the country exacts from them for being white is exactly the price the country pays—for being white—and the price is incoherence.

Reverend Williams was not incoherent, which may be why I wondered if he was white. “I was born on a little farm in Tennessee,” he said, revealing that he still had nearly all of his teeth, “and all I remember of the beginning of my life is misery and drudgery. I know a lot of people in this country say that you can work yourself up by your bootstraps. That’s a little like Marie Antoinette telling the people to eat cake. That’s what she did, when there weren’t no bread in the palace. You can’t talk about bootstraps unless you got boots, and, Lord knows, we didn’t have no boots. I got bunions on the soles of my feet, but I ain’t got no corns on my toes. Me and boots were strangers—I still feel funny when I pull on my shoes.”

The church was silent, causing me to wonder if he were black or white. I realized that the question had never before occurred to me in quite this way.

“We’re here,” he said, “to get something so simple nobody believes it. To get respect for our labor, respect for each other’s lives, and a future for our children. That’s all. God bless us all. I’m going back to Tennessee, and see you all soon.”

I saw Mr. Reed lead Peanut to the side of the pulpit. Someone found a chair for him. Mr. Reed placed himself against the wall, with his arms folded. Something in his easy alertness made me realize that he, and the other casual men, had every exit and entrance to this church, and the pulpit, under surveillance. They were working.

I wondered about Reverend Williams. I was to wonder about him for many years: I do not mean this particular Reverend Williams, though it might turn out, through some hitherto unpublished FBI report, that I mean him, too.

In those years, one spoke to so many people, so many people spoke to you, one moved through crowds; and there was no way of knowing who you were talking to, who had stopped you, to shake your hand, or to ask your presence at yet another rally. And here, color did not matter at all. There were the people who could not live without causes, who appeared to live entirely by means of famines, floods, and earthquakes; these were mostly white, but by no means always. For me, they were the lame, the halt, the blind, the forbidden, the poor to whom nothing could be given because they had no way of receiving anything, creatures who didn’t even have a home in the rock. There were white chicks, like groupies, as we would now say, hitching Freedom Rides because they were mad at Daddy, or were jealous of Mama’s new lover, or had just had an abortion, or wanted a big, black dick shoved in them—and okay, why not? All motives are complex, but it’s dangerous not to know that. Or white boys with motives yet more impenetrable, trying to exorcise their terror of black men by, at once, instructing and imitating them, and, Lord, the ancient Marxists, whose historical parallels simply had no relevance, and the wealthy liberals who signed checks and appeared at rallies, but who ran for cover when the going got rough and became “bored” with the struggle when the struggle moved north, and, therefore, somewhat closer to their checkbooks.

But these people, on the whole, were part of the price, came with the territory, one understood them and couldn’t put them down, and they had, after all, a certain limited value. They were not wicked, or no more wicked than their weakness dictated, and some of them superbly, magnificently, transcended themselves and delivered on a promise they had scarcely been aware of making. They were not so very different, after all, when the chips were down, from myself—I, too, dreamed of safety: it was my luck, and not my desire, that cut the dream short. The really wicked, dangerous people were the informers, the FBI infiltrators, both black and white, who looked and sounded exactly like Reverend Williams. We didn’t know who these people were, and could not possibly have known, not until long, long after the damage had been done.

Well. After Reverend Williams, there came others, Mrs. Reed introducing them, as indefatigable as her husband, and far more visible. Nothing new was being said—in a sense; yet it was new for me, because the covered defiance is one force, and it is certainly better not to underestimate that force: but the open defiance is another force, and, while I had seen this force in some individuals, I had never witnessed it collectively. We were, after all, in a small town in the South, not far from John Brown’s body: and John Brown, because his views on slavery had been “immoderate,” had been hanged by the government of the United States. The “motorists” outside carried guns and clubs and had not been assigned to this place, this evening, for the purpose of protecting our lives. They were there to protect their stolen property, every inch of this land having been stolen: the government of the United States once passed laws protecting my “owners” against theft. Our lives had meant nothing then; our lives meant nothing now. The impulse and the assignment of the motorists was to find an opportunity to hang us—to hang John Brown. They couldn’t this evening, or they couldn’t yet: this intelligence had been conveyed to them by John Brown’s hangmen, the people for whom they worked. But the moment they could, they would; the moment they could, they did. I will tell you about that in a moment, for I watched it. John Brown’s body.

In the center of my mind, in a new way entirely, was the danger in which my brother stood—or, more precisely, at this moment, sat. It seemed incredible to me that the simple, smiling, nappy-headed mother could possibly follow John Brown. (Oh, John! Don’t you write no more!)

I watched Peanut being led to the piano. I had never before realized how tall and heavy he was—perhaps he had not, before, been so tall and heavy. I watched him shake hands with the church pianist. I had never before seen his courtesy, a real, a rooted courtesy—style: this is me. Who are you?

But I realized that this meant that Arthur was about to come on, and Mrs. Reed stood up.

“We have with us tonight,” she said, “a singer from New York. We been trying to get him down here for the longest while, and”—she caught her breath, and smiled—“I won’t tell you exactly how we did it, but we finally got him down here. It seemed to us, to us who heard him, that he was—singing about us. He is us. He’s being accompanied by”—she looked at a piece of paper she held—“Mr. Alexander T. Brown. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Arthur Montana.”

She sat, and Arthur rose, stepping down from the pulpit to join Peanut at the piano. There was a brief pause, a small rustling in the church, a cough. Peanut and Arthur looked at each other, Arthur nodded, and Peanut hit the keys.

It was an old song: it sounded, at this moment, and in this place, older than the oldest trees.

Through shady, green pastures,

So rich and so sweet

There was an indescribable hum of approbation and delight: for, at this moment and in this place, the song was new, was being made new.

God leads His dear children along.

I watched my brother with a new wonder, feeling the power of the people at my back, and all around me. It seemed to us, to us who heard him, that he was singing about us. And so it did, as though a design long hidden was being revealed. He is—us.

Where the flow of cool water

Bathes the weary one’s feet

Without a sound, I heard the church sing with him, anticipating, one line, one beat, ahead of him.

God leads His dear children along.

He looked straight out at the people, raising his voice, so that the motorists and the governor could hear:

Some,

through the water

I watched Mrs. Reed’s witnessing face, and the faces of the men on the wall. The organ now joined in, and the drum began to bear slow and solemn witness.

Some,

through the flood

The church had still not made a sound: it was as though all their passion were coming through that one voice. And now, it was not only this time and this place. The enormity of the miles behind us began to be as real as the stones of the road on which we had presently set our feet.

Some,

through the fire,

but all

through His blood.

Some,

through great sorrow!

And she raised her head, looking out. The church had still not made a sound, yet it was filled with thunder.

When God gave a song

If I had been among the motorists, or if I had been the governor, I think I would have been afraid. I might even have fallen on my knees. I was rocked, from the very center of my soul, I was rocked: and still, the people had not made a sound.

In the night season,

and all

the day long.

I felt a vast heaving, a collective exhaling, as though no one had been able to breathe until Arthur had reached the end of the beginning of the song. And now, indeed, I heard the voice of an old woman, saying, as out of the immense, the fiery cloud of the past, yes, child, sing it, and Arthur stepped forward, stretching out his arms, inviting the church to bear witness to his testimony:

Have you been through the water?

Have you been through the flood?

Have you been through the fire?

The organ and the drum and the people responded, and the choir now joined Arthur:

Are you washed in His blood?

And that mighty silence fell again, as Arthur paused, threw back his head, throwing his voice out, out, beyond the motorists and the governor, and the blood-stained trees, trees blood-stained forever:

Have you been through

great sorrow?

The organ and the drum, the choir, and the people, Mrs. Reed’s face, the faces of the men on the wall, a tremendous exhaling as the song dropped to its close,

when God gave a song,

in the night season,

and all

the day long.

Church-raised people don’t applaud as a rule, were raised not to—spectators applaud, but there are no spectators in the church: they let you know by the sound of their voices, with Hallelujah! and Amen! and Bless the Lord! and by the light on their faces. Peanut and Arthur went into their next number,

I woke up this morning

with my mind

stayed

on freedom!

joined by the tambourines, the organ, and the drum, and I looked around me. But I hardly needed to look around me, as the song says, it was all over me, it was deep inside me, a tremendous, pulsing joy and strength.

Hallelu,

Hallelujah!

And yet, the motorists were still outside, we would have to get past them to get home. One of us, or some of us, might not live through the night: some of us, certainly, would not live through the year. And this was not a matter of one’s inevitable mortality, of a man going round taking names: it is one thing to know that you are going to die and something else to know that you may be murdered. We knew that we could hope for neither help nor mercy from the people in whose hands we found ourselves, our co-citizens, some, literally, our blood-kin, flesh of our flesh. Yet the joy and power I felt in myself and all around me, was no less real than our danger, had brought us- through many hard trials: would be forced to bring us through many more, for many more were coming. And it was something like this I had felt, upon arriving at Mrs. Reed’s neat house, on her tree-lined street: I was glad, I was relieved, to be where I belonged. This sounds insane, of course, for I did not know the South, had never been here, did not know Mrs. Reed, or anything about her, had been frightened all the way here, for my brother, for myself, for Peanut—and yet, once I had arrived, I was glad. It was as though something had been waiting here for me, something that I needed. And it was this that Mrs. Reed had meant when she said that Arthur sounded as though he were “singing for us.” Arthur had been determined to get here, and, I don’t know, I was certain that now, just like me, without being able—or needing—to articulate it, he knew why.

Anyway, here we were, the meeting was breaking up, and we had to get through the motorists and go home. Peanut and Arthur were surrounded, people trying to get them to appear here, or there. Peanut had his notebook out, a green leather notebook, with a clasp; he was taking care of business, synchronizing watches. Arthur was being charming, but I knew he was exhausted, and I wanted to get him home, to Mrs. Reed’s. I thought of taking over Peanut’s role, but Peanut seemed to be doing all right. Anyway, it was not my role yet, and, let’s tell the truth, I was terrified of standing in that relation to Arthur, I was frightened of what he might see in me. And I had just been offered a better job—well, a job that paid more—in the advertising department of a black magazine, and I thought that I might take it. At least, it would get me away from Faulkner, who wasn’t going to give me any rest until I beat the living shit out of him. Well. I put all that at the back of my mind. At the moment, I had to get Arthur inside someplace, near a bed.

Most of the cars and motorists had gone when we stepped out of the church. Those who were left gave us a contemptuous once-over, and then elaborately ignored us.

Peanut and Arthur and Mr. Reed walked together, a little ahead of Mrs. Reed and me.

“I don’t,” Mrs. Reed whispered, “know which is worse—when you see them, or when you don’t.”

Across the street, one of the motorists, a youngster, leaned, with his arms folded, against his motorcycle. As we passed, he turned his face and spat on the ground at his feet.

I knew enough, already, not to look in his direction. We got in the car, and drove away.

But that puts it too simply. We had all geared ourselves to leave the church and walk into the street. In the street, we did not dawdle. People said their last good-byes quickly, and dispersed. The air was palpable with humiliation, with frustration, with hatred, with fear. The nerves of the men on the motorcycles and those of the men in the cars had been stretched to the breaking point. After all, they had been put through an utterly grueling ordeal, standing outside while the niggers inside sang and speechified and plotted against them—openly—and, sometimes, taunted them. It was best to remove oneself from their sight as quickly as possible—they, literally, could not bear looking at you. Anything could be used as an excuse for violence, if not murder, or one of them might, simply, go mad, and release his pent-up orgasm—for their balls were aching. You could damn near smell it. One walked, therefore, neither slow nor fast, and kept one’s eyes focused on some invisible object beyond them. Then, one reached the car, unlocked it, opened it, piled in, locked the doors. No one looked back. One prayed that the motor would start with no trouble, and, when it had, maneuvered very carefully past them, and away. Only then did one let out one’s breath, and, even then, no one looked back. If we were being followed, we’d know it soon enough.

There was something in it so ironic, so wasteful. A beautiful night, a beautiful land: I had watched it as we drove here, watched it now, as we drove through it. All the years that we spent in and out of the South, I always wanted to say to those poor white people, so busy turning themselves and their children into monsters: Look. It’s not we who can’t forget. You can’t forget. We don’t spend all our waking and sleeping hours tormented by your presence. We have other things to do: don’t you have anything else to do? But maybe you don’t. Maybe you really don’t. Maybe the difference between us is that I never raped your mother, or your sister, or if and when I did, it was out of rage, it was not my way of life. Sometimes I even loved your mother, or your sister, and sometimes they loved me: but I can say that to you. You can’t say that to me, you don’t know how. You can’t remember it, and you can’t forget it. You can’t forget the black breasts that gave you milk: but you don’t dare remember, either. Maybe the difference between us is that it might have been my mother’s or my grandmother’s breasts you sucked at, and she never taught me to hate you: who can hate a baby? But you can: that’s why you call me Tar Baby. Maybe the difference between us is that I’ve never been afraid of the prick you, like all men, carry between their legs and I never arranged picnics so that I could cut it off of you before large, cheering crowds. By the way, what did you do with my prick once you’d cut the black thing off and held it in your hands? You couldn’t have bleached it—could you? You couldn’t have cut yours off and sewn mine on? Is it standing on your mantelpiece now, in a glass jar, or did you nail it to the wall? Or did you eat it? How did it taste? Was it nourishing? Ah. The cat seems to have your tongue, sir. Tell you one thing: that God you found is a very sick dude. I’d check him out again, if I was you. I think He’s laughing at you—I tell you like a friend. He’s made it so that you can’t see the grass or the trees or the sky or your woman or your brother or your child or me. Because you don’t see me. Your God has dropped me like a black cloud before your eyes. You make a mistake when you think I want to do anything to harm you. I don’t. I really don’t. But, even if I did, I don’t have to: you, and your God are doing a much better job of harming you than I could begin to dream of. And that means that everything you think you have, and are holding on to, does not belong to you. I always think of the patient Indian. His land was stolen from him, but that does not mean that it belongs to you: he knows that, and you know that. And the Indian has never escaped the land which belongs to him: you can’t escape anything that belongs to you—but your God has no sense of time. And I know that those who find their lives intolerable are impelled to attempt to destroy everything that lives. But, no matter how hard you try, you will not succeed in drying up the sea and destroying life on earth. Already, here in the North American wilderness, other gods have checked you; now other gods will stop you. Rub your eyes, my brother, and start again. Peace be with you.

Yes, it was something like that I always wanted to say: for after all, human suffering is human suffering. I’ll say this: I saw some—not many, but some—white boys and girls and men and women come to freedom on that road, and it was as though they couldn’t believe it, that they could actually be, just be, that they could step out of the lie and the trap of their history. What I had always wanted to say to them is almost exactly what they said to me, and their being recalled to life was a beautiful thing to behold.

Look at a map, and scare yourself half to death. On the northern edge of Virginia, on the Washington border, cattycorner to Maryland, is Richmond, Virginia. Two-thirds across the map is Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by Mississippi, Tennessee, and. Georgia. Peanut calculated that we could drive from Richmond to Durham in about three hours, and from Durham to Charlotte in another three hours. If we left at six in the morning, as we planned, we would be in Charlotte around noon, and we could have lunch there. Then, we would drive from Charlotte to Atlanta, arriving in Atlanta after the sun went down. We would sleep in Atlanta, and the next day we would drive to Birmingham, in time for Arthur’s engagement. Arthur’s final engagement was in Atlanta, the following night. We were going to be forced to spend one night in Birmingham: there was no way around that. From Atlanta, we would drive back to New York, maybe stopping for a day in Washington.

For one thing, Mrs. Reed says firmly, “Don’t you try to do no desegregating in Charlotte. Don’t you try it. Lord, them white folks in Charlotte just knew they had the best niggers in the South. They just knew it. And now, they so ashamed, they can’t hardly hold their heads up—reckon they might have had to close what few hincty restaurants they did have.”

“Or, if they do let you in,” said Mr. Reed, “and let one of them aristocratic colored folk serve you, it might be your last supper.”

We laughed. We had made it home safely from the church, and were sitting around the Reeds’ living room, too wound up to sleep, or even to eat yet, having a few drinks.

Peanut said, “But I got family in Charlotte, and they expecting us for lunch.”

Arthur choked on his drink. Peanut looked at him, half grinning, half frowning. “Don’t be like that, man. They done greatly improved since we was last there.”

“I can’t say I see them often.” Peanut was blushing. “Only from time to time. They’ll be glad to have us for lunch. Besides—they know you a celebrity now.”

“Why,” said Mr. Reed, “I wouldn’t let that upset me. I sure wouldn’t let it cut my appetite—eat like a funky nigger, that’s the way you handle them people.” We laughed. “Well,” he continued, “let’s say the cousins feed you. By the time you hit the Georgia state line, the sun will be long gone. You know anyone in Atlanta?”

“Just the people who invited us. But they not expecting us until the next night—not tonight.”

Mr. Reed sighed, and looked at his wife. “We have friends in Atlanta,” Mrs. Reed said.

“It’s late,” she said, “but I just think I’ll take a chance on calling them. I’m sure they won’t mind.” She stood up. “Excuse me a minute,” she said, and left the room.

“Listen,” said Mr. Reed, “it is still a very bad idea to arrive anywhere in the South after the sun goes down. They had to take down some of them signs—didn’t look good, we being the leaders of the Free World, and all”—he made a puking sound with his lips—“but they got them in the back room, just waiting.” He looked steadily at the three of us. He had our entire attention. “But if you do have to arrive after the sun goes down, make sure you got a destination. Three northern niggers, with New York license plates on their car, going from door to door, looking for a place to sleep”—he shook his head, and gave a low whistle—”down here, now? They got all kinds of things they can pick you up on. And, when they pick you up, they don’t hand you a phone, and say, ‘Call your lawyer.’ Hell, they don’t do that up North, neither, but, at least up North, they’ve heard of lawyers and they know a nigger might have a lawyer. They don’t know nothing like that down here. They ain’t got no lawyers, how you going to have one? You just a symptom of Northern interference, come down here to stir up the good darkies—in truth, you much more than that, but that’s what they put it on.” He smiled. “You boys look tired. Ruby’s going to fix you all a bedtime snack and send you off to bed.”

“I thought it was bad down here,” said Arthur, “when we was here before.”

“And how,” he asked, “about stopping on the road—but I guess it just gets worse as you go down—you know—to get gas, and go to the bathroom? I ain’t really had no trouble to speak of before, but”—he laughed—“I wasn’t going to Alabama.”

Mr. Reed sighed. “Well, they got their tricks. They sell you the gas, but the bathroom might be out of order—they got more tricks than I can name, man.” He sighed again. “If you alone, it’s easier. Sometimes they just sort of grin and bear it and sometimes they real nice, talk to you about the baseball scores, shit like that. Besides, people, most people, ain’t really so low that they got to crack one lone nigger’s skull—except in times of stress, that is,” and he grinned. “But, if you more than one—I don’t know, they seem to feel that you come to do something to them—like you the advance patrol of an army.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. The best thing is not to expect goodwill and don’t expect bad will. But that wears you out.”

I watched him as he stood up and walked to the bar. I suddenly had great respect for him.

“I poured you gentlemen the first drink,” he said, “but now, you on your own. Just help yourself.” He poured himself a bourbon and ginger ale.

“I’ll take you up on that,” Arthur said, and joined Mr. Reed at the bar. “Hall, you want anything? Peanut?”

“Not too far from where you going. Town called Tuscaloosa.” He sipped his drink, and smiled. There was something fearful in that smile. “Whatever you do, don’t go there, neither after the sun goes down, nor at high noon, neither.” He lit Arthur’s cigarette. “You say it was bad when you was down here before. When was you down here?”

Mr. Reed laughed. “Oh, when this shit was just getting started.” He paused. “Well, it is worse now. You see, then, they didn’t like those desegregation laws, in schools and such, but they figured they could fuck over that in the courts until the year two thousand. Hell, they knew they could, they had friends in Washington showing them how to do it.”

Mrs. Reed came back into the room. Mr. Reed paused, and looked at her. His deep-set eyes were larger than, at first glance, they seemed; and, when one realized this, his whole face changed, becoming, at once, more vulnerable and more determined.

Mrs. Reed smiled at Arthur, and then, at all of us. “Well, I explained the situation to them—to our friends—and I explained that this was a celebrity, traveling with his accompanist, and his brother”—the celebrity laughed, and so did his entourage—“and they said they would be delighted.” She moved to the side table, next to the easy chair where she had been sitting, and picked up her drink. “I’m real pleased. Oh—there’s just one problem. They’ve just painted one bedroom, and if the paint’s not dry by tomorrow evening, one of the boys may have to sleep on the sofa—the smallest one,” and she laughed again.

“Well,” said Peanut, “I guess that’s where the celebrity is going to have to sleep.”

“He is the smallest,” said Mr. Reed. “Don’t hardly seem fair, does it, son?”

“It’s a comfortable sofa,” said Mrs. Reed. “I slept on it myself, once.”

“What trouble? I’m just glad it worked out. Makes me feel a little easier in my mind.” She finished her drink, and set the glass down. “You all excuse me again, I’m going to fix you all a snack and make up your beds—you all ain’t going to get much sleep.”

“Well, if we know exactly where we going tomorrow night,” said Peanut, “it makes the time thing a little bit easier.” He rose. “I believe I will have a refill.” He walked to the bar. “Mr. Reed, you had me so scared, I couldn’t hardly swallow. I was kind of scared when we was here before, but we was young boys then, traveling with”—he and Arthur looked at each other, laughed, and slapped palms—“a guardian!”

“I think Crunch threatened to kill him,” Arthur said, grinning, “and old Webster kind of crawled back into the woodwork.”

“That must be where he is right now,” said Peanut. “I know ain’t nobody seen him.”

“I’ll give you boys the name and address and phone number of our friends,” said Mr. Reed. “And a map—I’ll draw a map, so you can find them. And you call here, the minute you set out from Charlotte—I won’t be here, but Ruby’ll be here—and she’ll call them and give them a description of your car, and your license plate numbers, and give them an idea of when they should expect you.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Reed. “The crackers is hot. They got fucked. They fucked themselves. While they was working out their all deliberate speed bullshit, the people hit the streets. And now, they got the kids in their faces every time they turn around. And they got nobody to negotiate with. And their friends up North can’t help them; they scared, too. They know the storm is heading their way. Can’t these crackers do nothing else but kick ass.”

“Or hope it goes away,” I said. I poured myself a drink—vodka, because there wasn’t any Scotch.

Mr. Reed looked at me. “Yeah. When was the last time you hoped something would go away?”

He looked at me. He was not that much older than I, though his manner, and his high forehead made him seem so, at least at first sight. But now, I realized that he was a little younger than his wife, about thirty-eight, or -nine, pushing forty.

I liked him. I would have liked to have got to know him better. He had a long tale to tell. Tuscaloosa. And that was another thing about those years: one was always running into people with tremendous life and dignity and charm with real humor, people you would almost certainly not have met under any other circumstances, and you hoped to get to know them better. But it was very nearly impossible. What had bought you together also kept you apart: everyone was too savagely overworked. You met before, during, or after an event, or in the planning stages of an event, you met in strategy meetings, in lawyer’s offices, senator’s chambers, the homes of friendly Congressmen, the homes of movie stars, in prisons, in remote backwaters you scarcely knew existed (and which you could not believe existed, even though you were there), between trains, buses, planes, in and out of cars, at airports, the one on the way to raise money in Cleveland, the other on the way to a remote church in Savannah. Every once in a while, you might meet at a party, fighting against passing out, and going home early. You might share an hour or two in an airplane together. But neither could really concentrate on the other. One’s concentration was on the fact that the plane was going to land, and one had another gauntlet to run.

And when the dream was slaughtered, and all that love and labor seemed to have come to nothing, we scattered: it was not a time to compare notes. We had no notes to compare. We knew where we had been, what we had tried to do, who had cracked, gone mad, died, or been murdered around us. We scattered, each into his or her own silence. It was in the astounded eyes of the children that we realized, had to face, how immensely we had been feared, despised, and betrayed. Each had, with speed, to put himself together again as best he could, and begin again. Everything was gone, but the children: children allow no time for tears. Many of us who were on that road then, may now be lost forever, that is true, but not everything is lost: responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again. The dream was repudiated: so be it.

My father said to me, a long time ago, “Son, whatever really gets started never gets stopped. The trouble is,” he added thoughtfully, after a moment, “so little ever gets started.”

I was far more the pragmatic American then than I am now. Now, watching my children grow, old enough to have some sense of where I’ve been, having suffered enough to be no longer terrified of suffering, and knowing something of joy, too, I know that we must attempt to be responsible for what we know. Only this action moves us, without fear, into what we do not know, and what we do not know is limitless.

But we had no trouble at all on the road the next day, and it was a very beautiful, bright day. The leaves on the trees were turning, like the changing colors in the sky, and, as the miles increased behind us, our apprehensions dropped, and we were very comfortable with each other. We were comfortable with each other, among other reasons, because, whatever was coming now, we were in it together, and we could not turn back: this sense of having crossed a river brings one a certain peace.

He had been talking about Red, and how he had first discovered Red was a junkie. It was clear, from his voice, and from Arthur’s face, that he had never spoken of this before: there was scarcely anyone else to whom he could have spoken.

From Arthur’s face, too, I realized that he was thinking of Crunch—Lord, so long ago!—and wishing that he had been able to speak of Crunch the way Peanut spoke of Red.

“You know how close we were. He was my heart, my whole heart. It was like we had always known each other, but we didn’t meet, really, until I was about ten, when Grandma brought me to the city. What it was, I didn’t have no mama, nor no daddy. I just grew up with my grandma, and I know she did the best she could, but she was just too old to be raising a young kid. All she knew how to do was slap me and scold me and she didn’t want me to play with the other kids because they wasn’t good enough for us, and I’d get my clothes all dirty, and, oh, man”—with a low chuckle, as I kept my eyes on the road, and the trees flew by—”it was awful.

“So what happened, when we moved to the city, I had a friend for the first time in my life. And we were distant cousins, or something, and so Grandma didn’t disapprove like she usually did. I think she was relieved, really, that here was some other folks to help her look out for me, and, you know, she wasn’t a cruel woman, she was just strict because she was scared, and I think she was happy that I was happy. Anyway, she’d let me stay over at Red’s house and his mama got to be like that with my grandma, she couldn’t do no wrong far as my grandma was concerned, and Red’s mama got to be like my mama. And they all treated me like that, like I was one of them, and Red was a little older than me, he could teach me things. Like we used to ride the subway in the summertime, maybe go to Coney Island and lie on the sand and talk about what we was going to do when we got big, and Red taught me to swim. I hadn’t ever seen the water. I was scared, but I couldn’t be scared in front of him, you know, and so I got to be a pretty good swimmer. And we spent a lot of time running around in Central Park, around the reservoir and the lake and we used to love to watch the horseback riders. They looked so neat, especially the girls, you know, in their little hats and boots and shit, and with that whip, and that horse so proud, just stepping. But the men, they were fine, too, and I wanted to grow up and be one of them men on a horse like that. We didn’t never see no black riders, but Red said there were lots of them out West, and, when we got old enough, we’d go out West and buy a ranch and raise horses. Then we’d be rich, and we could send for my grandma, and his mania, and they wouldn’t have to work no more.”

I couldn’t see his face in the rearview mirror because he was leaning too far back, on one side. I glanced at Arthur’s face, which wore a cryptic smile.

“Then, maybe as a step in the right direction, we made a couple of shoeshine boxes and started shining shoes, after school, and in the summertime. A whole lot of time we didn’t go to school and I got my butt whipped a whole lot more often than Red did. You see, he could forge his mother’s name on the note to the teacher, but he couldn’t do nothing with my grandma’s signature, my grandma could hardly write. So I’d get the whipping and Red would look all sympathetic and virtuous, like he didn’t know why I couldn’t be more like him. Man, sometimes I wanted to kill him.”

He was silent for a while. I watched the road, and the road signs, pass: we were going in the right direction, anyway. The Peanut we were hearing was not exactly new, yet we—or, at least, I—had never heard him like this before. He had always been very private—not distant, but not close, either. Now he spoke as though he were looking at something for the very first, and, also, for the very last time: as though he were saying good-bye to Red.

Now he leaned up, and I saw his face for a moment, as he lit a cigarette. Then he leaned back.

“And everything we discovered, we shared. But, I guess it might be truer to say that he was the one who made most of the discoveries, and everything he discovered he used to kind of tyrannize me. I didn’t think of it that way though, then, though, and I guess I didn’t mind it. Like, for example, one time Red was going to be a boxer, and I was his sparring partner. Then he was going to be a tap dancer, and he got me to go out and steal records for him to dance to. I can still see him dancing around the room, just grinning, those teeth shining, waving his hands like they do in the movies, and he was always smiling in those days, couldn’t nothing get him down. Well, you remember, Arthur, he was always like that.”

“I remember,” Arthur said. But neither of us turned back to look at Peanut. That may or may not be strange. We sensed that, though he was, in a sense, uncovering himself, he did not wish to be seen. He was in that car with us, but he was also somewhere else.

He sat up, and lit another cigarette. This time, he remained seated, his hands between his legs, looking down at the floor. Both Arthur and I now dared to glance at him from time to time, in the rearview mirror. Neither of us ever forgot his face that day. I can only say that it was noble with grief. He was in that car with us, but he was far away, wrestling with an anguish he was articulating for the first time.

“Red was skinny when he got back here, but so was everybody. And he was a little strange, but so was everybody else.”

“It seemed to me that Red wasn’t altogether as happy to see me as I was to see him. But I figured there could be all kinds of reasons for that—maybe he’d left a girl, or a baby, over there, I mean I could see that there could be a whole lot of things he might not want to talk about right away, it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me. And I noticed, anyway, that he was like that with everybody—-with his mama, and my grandma, with Arthur—with all of us—edgy, like he was trying to get away, like he had something to hide. And that wasn’t like Red, he’d never tried to hide anything.

“And he didn’t seem to want to do anything, and I got the feeling, more and more, that he didn’t really want to see me. I’d go over to see him, and he’d be lying on the couch, looking at TV, not saying anything—acting bored, man, like you was intruding on him—or he suddenly had someplace to go, and he was already late, and he’d see me later. And I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to make him behave like that with me. But then, too, I had the feeling, deep inside, that he didn’t really want to behave like that—it was in his eyes, sometimes, a terrible pain, it cut me to pieces to see it—but—I didn’t know how to reach him. And so I tried to say, Well, fuck it, but I couldn’t: I got more and more worried. Something was wrong, somewhere, that was what I felt, and he didn’t want nobody to know what it was. Also, I couldn’t figure out where the hell he went when he went because none of us ever saw him, none of our friends, none of the people we used to hang out with, I could see his mama getting more and more worried, but she didn’t say anything, she didn’t know what to say, any more than me. And that was another reason I couldn’t just say, Fuck it, because she had been like a mama to me, I couldn’t just turn my back.

“And Red said that he was looking for work, but you can kind of tell when somebody’s looking for work. They look worried, they look eager, they look drugged, but they don’t come on like Red was coming on. Red would come in the house, his mama told me, around five or six in the morning and fall in bed till evening, sometimes I’d come in the evening to see him and find him fast asleep, just farting and drooling, and that wasn’t like Red, at six o’clock in the evening? Shit.

“And he began to look worse and worse. You know, like most of the guys seemed to be shaping up, more or less, rough as it was, but Red just seemed to go down and down. And he didn’t laugh no more, he was mean. He didn’t have nothing good to say about nobody.

“I was there one night, when his mother asked him how his job prospects looked—perfectly simple, ordinary question, I mean she wasn’t nagging him, or anything. And he jumped up, scared the shit out of me, and he yelled, ‘You want me to peddle my ass to them Jew crackers? That’s why black people is where they is today! Always sucking around the fucking Jew! Them bastards had my ass in a vise one time and they can’t have it no more! You hear me? I’m going to make me some money!’ and he slammed out the door. And his mama, she sat there and she cried, and if I could have got my hands on Red that night, I’d have cracked his skull.

“I didn’t go back there for a few days, because there didn’t seem to be anything I could do. There was a heavy weight on my heart. We all know how it is out here, but Red hadn’t never talked that way—all that black people-Jew bullshit. Red knew better than that. Shit, I wish it was that simple. And, you know, I was living pretty much as I am now, between Washington and New York, and I was doing all right, I had a nice apartment, and a real nice little girl, we was even thinking that maybe we’d tie that knot, but now, all this shit was really beginning to fuck with my mind.

“But, like I said, there was that look in Red’s eyes that hurt me, hurt me more and more. It was like a scared, wounded dog. Oh, it hurt me. That’s why I was so blind. If it hadn’t been Red, had it been some other dude carrying on like that, I’d have realized right away what was going down. But it was Red. He lived in a special place, in my mind, in my heart, and what I saw happening to other people all around us wasn’t supposed to happen to Red. Later on, people would ask me, ‘Didn’t you know?’ And I had to say, ‘No, I didn’t know.’ And then they would say, ‘Well, you just didn’t want to know, then.’ Well, of course, I didn’t want to know. But I’m not lying when I say, I didn’t know.

“But then, his mama told me that she was afraid that Red had stolen the rent money. And then she asked me if I thought he might have a habit. Then, I knew. The moment she asked me that, I knew. A light went on in my brain, so hard it gave me a headache, and I sat down.

“So, I asked Red—just like that. When I asked him, he looked at me as though he was going to kill me, and he turned his back to me. That made me mad, and I went over and turned him around to face me. And then—I’ll never forget it—he fell into my arms, crying like a baby, and he showed me his arms. His tracks. I held him tight, like I had sometimes—before—and I said, ‘Baby, let me help you. I will do anything, anything, anything, to help you.’ I held him and held him, I sat him down and held him till he stopped crying.

“He told me he got hooked in Korea, and I told him I understood that. I thought I understood that. He told me how much he hated white people and Jews and all, and I told him I understood that, but that was beside the point. It didn’t give him the right to steal. It didn’t give him the right to hurt the people who loved him. It didn’t give him the right to destroy himself. And we talked until morning came. I told him I’d take him somewhere and lock myself in with him till he was straight. He said he didn’t want to put me through that, he’d turn himself in for treatment. And he asked me to trust him, and I said I did, I would, and he was as good as his word, he went away and when he came back, he was all right, for a while.”

He was silent for a long time, as the trees flew past. Nothing broke the silence. There was only the sound of the tires on the road, the sound of the wind. Arthur’s face was very solemn, his eyes very bright: he was in the car with us, but he, too, was someplace else.

“But. Then. His mama’s TV set disappeared. An old watch of my grandma’s disappeared. He came to see me once, in Washington, and my stereo, and all my clothes disappeared.”

His voice was thick with tears, but he was not crying. He lit a cigarette, and leaned back, out of sight.

“That night I spent talking to him, when he asked me to trust him, made my mind go back to a night a long time ago, when he was still being a tap dancer and a boxer and all that, when he was still making all those discoveries, and coming to me with them.”

“I was sitting on the roof one night, because that was like our meeting place. If one couldn’t find the other no place, we’d look up on the roof, and he came up and found me. I was just lying on my back, with my hands behind my head, looking up at the sky. And he came up and he poked me in the belly button, like we always used to do to each other. I remember it was a summer night, and I was feeling strange and lonely—sad, like you can be at that age, without knowing exactly why. So I poked him back. Usually, then, we started wrestling, but I didn’t want us to wrestle on the roof, I was afraid we’d roll off. But he didn’t move. He was kneeling next to me, I remember he was wearing a black sweat shirt and dirty white pants. He was grinning, I still see his teeth. He said, ‘Hey, I’m nervous. You want to help me relax? I know a great way to relax.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it first.’ He was still grinning. ‘I’ll do it for you first, okay? And then you do it for me.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I always said okay to Red.

“He lay down on his side next to me, and took my dick out. At first, I was scared, because I had just started doing this by myself, and he grinned again, and said, ‘Relax, just let it feel good to you, you know I ain’t going to hurt you. And then you going to do it for me, I need it, I need it bad.’ Then—I thought about doing it for him, and, all of a sudden, I realized that I wanted to. I had never thought about it. So all the time he was working on me, I was thinking about working on him, and it made what he was doing to me more exciting than it had ever been when I did it by myself. He asked me how it felt, and I told him, and I guess I sort of moaned because he picked up speed, I was watching the sky and then I closed my eyes. It was strange to feel so helpless, like there was nothing in the world but his hand on me, and then I shot heavier than I ever had before, it was like straight up in the sky and over my shirt and his hand.

“I put one arm around his shoulder and held him tight, and I took his dick out with the other hand, and I started to work on him. He asked me to do it real slow, because he was so hot already. I loved him so much that night, because, in a way, he’d just taught me something new that I could do for him, that we could do for each other. I started working on him very slow, like he asked me to, watching his dick swell, but what I most remember is his breath next to my ear and his shoulder against mine, and his breathing. And his smell, and the smell of that shirt. He was as trusting as a baby, and I watched the way his legs moved, like all of him was new that night, and that thing got thicker and thicker in my hand until I was almost afraid I couldn’t hold it, I had never before realized how it leaps, like an animal, and then I could tell by his breathing that it was time to pump faster and harder, as hard as I could, and so I did, and held him tighter around the shoulder. He started making drowning sounds and he started shaking from top to toe, he turned his whole face into my shoulder, and I held him tighter, as tight as I could, and I watched as his dick shot and shot, against the darkness, against the sky, and I was very happy.”

He sat up, and I could see his face in the rearview mirror. His face was wet: again, he lit a cigarette from the coal of the old one.

“You can buy some more clothes, by and by, and another stereo and all that. That’s all right. That’s not the worst. The worst thing is that you slowly begin to hate, to despise this person, this person that you loved. You hate him because he hates himself. And that’s horrible, I swear, to feel your love drip out of you, drop by drop, until you empty of it and there’s just a big, hurting hole where that love used to be. And I don’t know if anything can ever really fill that hole. It’s terrible, but you wish your friend had died. That way, you could have wept for him and put him away and by and by it would be all right, everything would be clean. You wouldn’t have that filthy taste of contempt and hatred on your tongue, and you wouldn’t have that hurting, empty hole. That hole I got in me right now, that hole which sends burning water and ice-cold water all up and down my spine, every time I think of Red.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “My heart.”

He leaned back on the seat again, dropping out of sight again, and we drove in silence for a long while.

The lunch in Charlotte was somewhat elaborate, Peanut’s cousins having taken Arthur’s “celebrity” status more seriously than Peanut had imagined that they would have. They had even invited another couple to be present, to eat with us, and gawk at Arthur. This took some of the weight off Peanut, at least, who was somewhat subdued, and Arthur played the role of the young, boyish, rising celebrity to a smashing fare-thee-well. As for me, I remained steadfastly in the background, the somewhat dull, but watchful and devoted older brother. “No, ma’am,” I said to one of the matrons. “I only sing at Christmastime, and in large crowds. That way, my brother doesn’t feel threatened.”

The matron laughed, rating me, perhaps, as not so dull, after all. And, actually, they were all very nice, they meant to be nice: they were so nice, in fact, that we started out for Atlanta a little later than we should have, Peanut at the wheel.

We filled the tank in Charlotte, and we prayed as we hit the road. Now we were heading for the Deep South: everything, until now, had been a rehearsal.

“Thanks, you guys, for listening to me this morning,” Peanut said. “Sometimes, you have to find a way to let it out; don’t, you’ll explode.”

Arthur sat next to Peanut. I was in the backseat. I leaned forward and touched Peanut on the cheek, leaned back.

“We don’t really know. He sees his mama from time to time, but—that’s it.”

He switched on the radio. This was the time when the country was all upset about Cuba, which, they had discovered, was only ninety miles from Florida, and which was, probably, underhandedly, plotting to inch closer. This was either before or after the missile crisis, I don’t remember, but I remember feeling that going to Cuba was a far more attractive idea than descending into the Deep South. One doesn’t always prefer the murderous monotony of the devil one knows. However, we were now on our way to Atlanta, traveling, oddly enough, under Mr. Reed’s protection: we knew we were expected, and our description had been phoned ahead to certain people in Atlanta. If anything went wrong, and we could not call out, we knew that someone would be calling in. This had a strange effect: it reassured us, and this reassurance, at the same time, made the danger real.

We got to Atlanta late, long after the sun went down, but Mr. Reed’s map was clear, and we had no trouble finding his friends—who immediately telephoned the Reeds. We laughed a lot and ate and drank and slept. No one had to sleep on the sofa, because the fresh paint in the freshly painted bedroom had dried.

And we got through Birmingham without a bit of trouble, and, weary and lighthearted, arrived in Atlanta in the late afternoon, with a few hours to spare before Arthur’s last engagement on this tour.

The city did not want “incidents”: this was absolutely true. It was also true that the citizens bitterly resented that some of the more vivid results of their folkways had come to be regarded as “incidents.” They felt that they were being unfairly singled out, were no worse than others, no worse than the interfering North, or the condescending world: and, as to this, if one cannot say they were right, one certainly cannot say that they were wrong. They had missed the point, which was, simply, that they were being made to feel uncomfortable concerning what they took to be reality. This discomfort could, in principle, have afforded them the immense opportunity to reexamine what they took to be reality, and begun to liberate them from their strangling and castrating fears. But, in this, they were thwarted, not only by that lethargy which is produced by panic, but by the obvious truth that neither the spirit nor the perception of the Republic had changed. It was brute circumstance, merely, which had placed them in the foreground of this latest version of the national travesty. The rules of the game had been established during Reconstruction: the blacks would make, or would appear to make, certain gains: then the South and the North would unite to drive them back from the territory gained, or to render the territory worthless. The whites would make, or would appear to make, major concessions—school desegregation, for example, could be considered a major concession. But then, it would prove impossible to implement this concession—the Word would not become flesh, to dwell among us—or the concession would be bypassed, and thus, revealed as worthless. All deliberate speed, for example, can, now, twenty-four years later, be taken as referring to the time needed to outwit, contain—and demoralize—the niggers.

Peanut and Arthur walked me around, through some of the streets they had walked, years before, sometimes laughing, sometimes abruptly silent, far away from me, and from each other. They showed me the hotel where they had stayed, and the barbecue joint next to it, and the pool hall on the corner—everything was there as before, seeming, they said, not to have changed at all. But the way they said this betrayed their astonished, and, even, somewhat frightened apprehension that they had changed; and perhaps this change, the change in themselves, was the only change of which they could ever be certain. We walked, three abreast, through streets livid with white people, past stores we would not have known how to enter, past restaurants not yet open for us, walked in the limbo of our countrymen.

We stopped in a bar near our lodgings, a friendly black bar, warm as a stove, a haven from the livid streets. We still had a little over an hour before we had to get dressed, and go to the church. Our hosts had invited a few people in, to have drinks with us before the rally, and, while this would be very pleasant, and, hopefully, informative, it would also demand of us something of a performance. So we decided to sneak a carefree drink or two before facing what was coming.

The place wasn’t very crowded. We sat at the bar. Peanut wandered off, to play the jukebox.

“I’m not bored, I’ll tell you that. Yeah. I’m glad I came. What about you?”

He looked at the bartender, who was busy at the other end of the bar, looked at Peanut at the jukebox. “Yeah. It’s strenuous, and it’s even—mysterious—but I’m glad we came.” Then, “It’s been good for Peanut—a kind of—catharsis.” The bartender came over to us, and we ordered. “I’m glad we came, because—if I hadn’t come back here, I might never have realized—you know, deep down—how important that first trip was.” He was silent for a moment. The bartender served us, I paid him. “I thought I was coming for one reason, and that’s true, but—I had almost forgot that I had been here before. Now that I’m here again, I think I know why—why I thought I almost forgot.” He raised his glass. “Cheers.”

A chunky, dark kid, wearing a red woolen hat, had cornered Peanut at the jukebox. I couldn’t hear him, of course, but Peanut’s immobility and the carefully closed blankness of his face made me feel that he was dying to get away.

Presently, he escaped and came back to us, with a strange half-smile on his face. He sat down on a bar stool and picked up his drink, raised his glass briefly, and drank.

Then he said, “Don’t look now, but that guy who was talking to me at the jukebox, he was telling me that the Klan had a monster meeting just outside of town last night and has fired up all the people to do something about the niggers before it’s too late.”

“Ain’t nothing new about that,” Arthur said. “What he tell you that for?”

“Well. I did get the feeling that he maybe sees the Klan under his bed at night, but”—he laughed—“he said that they supposed to start getting it on tonight, in the streets of Atlanta.” He looked toward the street. “Might be turning the corner any minute now.”

‘Some niggers who heard them, and saw them, I guess Like he told me, niggers know everything that’s going on, man.”

“Well,” said Arthur, “if it’s true, they’ll probably meet us at the church.” We all laughed. “So we really ain’t got nothing to worry about.”

But it was suddenly chilling to think about how many Klan meetings there had been in this neighborhood, chilling to think of the willed results. I had never wondered about this before, but I wondered now: how had white people endured it? How did they endure it? For, whether or not there had actually been a Klan meeting on the edge of town last night, the Klan was meeting again all over the South, with the intention of striking terror into the hearts of the niggers, and murdering those who refused to be terrified. Not only the Klan: the White Citizens Councils, and the John Birch Society, and representatives of the people so powerful that they were untouchable, like Senator Eastland, for example. White people had embraced and endured this slaughter for generations, and appeared more than willing to perpetuate it for generations to come. It was, when you thought about it, as weird and dreadful as those pictures of penitentes howling through the streets, or the wilderness, beating themselves with whips, scouring themselves with thorns—how deeply, how relentlessly, they despised themselves!

Peanut’s new friend looked in our direction from time to time, but didn’t come over to us. It is true that Peanut offered him no encouragement, but perhaps he also felt that he had done his duty.

I remember that the jukebox was playing that afternoon, over and over, “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” and the voice of Ray Charles rang all along the street, from other jukeboxes, as we walked back to our lodgings. As we neared the house, we saw three white men, two on one side of the street, one on our side of the street, walking toward us. They were casually dressed, did not look official, were not old—men in their forties, perhaps. The one on our side of the street was a dirty blond, with heavy lips, and narrow blue eyes, he wore a brown leather jacket, and khaki pants and scuffed brown pumps. I did not register the other two as clearly, since I did not look directly at them. I had the strangest feeling that we had surprised them, had thwarted something, that they had not expected to see us at this hour. Our car was on the other side of the street, and the two men were walking away from this car. One was large and heavy, not fat but solid, like a bull, with black hair beginning to turn gray. He wore a pinstripe navy blue suit, a little too tight for him, had a wide mouth and thin lips and eyes like a rodent’s eyes. The man next to him was thinner, somewhat younger, with curly black hair and brown eyes, wearing a heavy gray sweater and black corduroy pants. He looked quickly up and down the street before he started toward us, a little behind the heavy man.

We had no choice but to continue walking toward them. I dared not look behind me, but Brown Eyes and I appeared to agree that the street, indeed, was empty.

The one on our side of the street stopped, and, when we reached him, he said, in a low, gravelly, musical voice, “You boys was visiting us a couple of nights ago, wasn’t you?”

I said nothing; we said nothing. I did not know quite what to do with the word boy. Neither did Arthur; neither did Peanut. It was ridiculous on my part, certainly, but I suddenly realized that I was the oldest. I was the oldest, and also, I had no function at the rally that night. Arthur and Peanut did, and so, it was more than ever crucial that nothing happen to them. God knows that I didn’t want anything to happen to me, either, but, as is the way at such moments, I really did not have an awful lot of room left in which to worry about myself.

I had struck the wrong tone—not that there would have been any way to strike the right one. My New York accent had enraged him, and his friends were crossing the street.

“Yeah. Why don’t you?” This was the heavy-set man, who now stood next to me. His friend stood next to Peanut.

So, there we were. The street remained empty. Then a woman stepped out on her porch and screamed, You stop molesting them! You stop molesting them! Come here, peoples! Help! Help! and, at the same moment, I saw Peanut move, and saw the man next to Peanut go down. I ducked the fist of the man next to me, I realized that Arthur was on the ground, the man’s next blow caught me on the side of the head, causing everything to tilt and turn scarlet. I hit him in the gut, I might as well have hit a barrel, but then, because I had to get Arthur up off the ground! I jumped up, joining my fists into a hammer, and came down as hard as I could on the top of his skull. We went down together, he and I, but now, I realized that the street was filled with feet, and voices, and I saw a flicker of fear in the rodent’s eyes, and blood came pouring out of his nose. Then, I wanted, more than anything else in this world, to finish the job, to kill him, and my hands, of their own volition, went around his neck, and both my thumbs dug into his Adam’s apple. I loved the expression on his darkening face. Somebody pulled me away and up. I saw Arthur, on his feet, leaning on Peanut, blood coming from his lip. And the street was full of black people. The blond had been attacked by a girl carrying a bag full of canned goods, the cans lay scattered all over the ground, and his face was covered with blood. Six or seven black men watched the three white men—who looked, above all, humiliated. One of the black men pulled Rodent Eyes to his feet, and another black man leveled a gun at him.

“What you doing around here?” he asked, in a friendly, concerned voice. “Somebody send for you? Did you lose something around here?”

Rodent Eyes simply stared at him. With a shock, I realized that the man holding the gun was our host.

“Let them go,” said one of the men, “before this spreads all over the city.”

“Yeah,” said our host, and he tapped Rodent Eyes, not too lightly, on the forehead, with the butt of his gun. “If I see you around here again, you will lose something—your life. Go on, get out of here,” and he pushed all three of them. Rodent Eyes’s friend could not take his eyes from Peanut, Peanut stared at him. Then—and the only warning was the sudden flash of fear in the brown eyes, I will never forget that instant—Peanut, suddenly, uncontrollably, slammed the man across the face with his open palm, four, five, six times, before he was pulled away. The man staggered, but did not fall, and I watched his eyes as he slowly opened them, staring at all of us, and then, at Peanut. The sweat on my back slowly grew ice-cold. This was not a man staring at us, then at Peanut, neither was it an animal. No animal could have been so depthlessly humiliated, and I had never, never seen such hatred. He staggered off, between his friends, and we all watched as they crossed the street and got into an old blue Buick, and drove off. The crowd was silent, knowing that this was not the end.

“Let’s get inside,” said our host, “before the cops get here. They’ll be here in a minute, it’s a wonder they ain’t here yet.” He looked at me, at Arthur, at Peanut. “Come on,” and now, he sounded very weary, almost close to tears. We started for the house. “I reckon I really should have held them, and sworn out a complaint. But that would really have been more trouble than it’s worth.”

He was, at bottom, and this is hard to swallow, absolutely right; just the same, later on, we wished that we had, at least, taken their names. Even though, if one wishes to look the truth in the face, that would not have made any difference, either.

We got to the house, looking rather weird, just as the guests were arriving. Peanut was all right, except that his clothes were a mess—one sleeve had been almost ripped off his jacket, and his shirt was torn. I was all right, except that my clothes were also a mess. Arthur’s lip was bleeding, and would probably swell; he would not, I thought, be able to sing tonight. His pants were ripped down the back by his fall, and his jacket would have to be thrown away.

The house had two bathrooms. Peanut went to one, and I went with Arthur to the other.

He turned on the cold water, and put his head under the faucet and washed and washed his face. I had the feeling that he was also weeping, but I could not be certain, and I said nothing. Then, he dried his face and head, and I sat him down on the toilet seat, to examine his lip.

The blow had split his upper lip. It was not serious, but it was certainly painful.

“I damn sure am going to sing tonight, brother. Now you can make up your mind to that.” He tried to grin; the lip was swelling fast. “Go and get me some ice. I’ll lie down for about half an hour and keep ice on it, it’ll be all right.”

He went into the bedroom which we shared, and I went into the kitchen, where my hostess stood with some of her friends, looking helpless and angry.

“May I have some ice, please? For my brother’s lip? He claims he’s going to sing tonight.”

She looked at me as though she scarcely saw me, but moved, automatically, to the refrigerator. “I don’t know if he’s going to sing tonight. We might not leave this house tonight.”

She took out the ice, and shook her head, as though to bring everything back into focus. Then she looked at me. She tried to smile.

“Son, you got to forgive me, behaving like this. But we been going through some trying times, down here.” She put the ice in a bowl, and picked up a clean dish towel. “Let me have a look at your brother.”

I followed her down the hall, into the bedroom. Arthur lay across the bed, his hands over his eyes.

“It’s not serious,” Arthur said. “If I just lie still, and keep ice on it, it’ll be all right.”

Mrs. Elkins looked at the lip carefully, touched it lightly. “Well. Lie still, and keep ice on it, anyway, and we’ll see.” She packed a dish towel with ice, and wrapped it tight, and handed it to Arthur, who held it against his mouth.

Mrs. Elkins stood up. “It’s going to drip,” she said. “Let me get you a bath towel so you won’t have ice water running down your belly and your back,” and she left the room.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to sing tonight,” I said. “Mrs. Elkins says she doesn’t think we can leave the house tonight.”

“Well. I don’t know. But they live down here—they should know. And they don’t seem—like very excitable people.”

Mrs. Elkins came back, with an enormous towel which she wrapped around Arthur’s neck and shoulders. “Now. You just lie still. If you want anything, just call. We’ll hear you.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Elkins. Just let me know when it’s time, I’ll be all right.”

“Pour yourself a drink,” said Mr. Elkins. “I know you need one.” He turned back to Peanut, who was leaning on the mantelpiece, still gray and shaken, his eyes very dark. “What did he ask you?”

Peanut looked at me. “I was just telling Mr. Elkins what that guy asked us—if we had been in Atlanta two nights ago.”

“Well—yes,” said Peanut. “That was why the question seemed so strange.”

I said, “I thought they might just have happened to see us—you know, northern black people seem to be pretty visible down here, they look at you like they think you’re carrying a bomb—and the car has New York license plates, and all—”

“But we weren’t nowhere near here,” said Peanut, “and we didn’t walk around town, or visit, or anything, we came in late at night, and we left the next day.”

We told him, and Mrs. Elkins shook her head, and she and her husband looked, briefly, at each other.

“Well,” said one of the guests, a gray-haired man with a pipe, “them vigilantes, they get around.”

The room crackled with a kind of perfunctory laughter, intended mainly, I felt, to reassure Peanut and me. And this was a little frightening.

“Well”—Peanut and I looked at each other—I said, “Well, the way it happened was that the people in Richmond had friends here—in Atlanta—and they were worried about where we were going to stay when we got here, because we would be arriving after dark, and so they called their friends in Atlanta and arranged for us to stay with them!”