JUST ABOVE MY HEAD

It’s me, it’s me,

It’s me, oh, Lord,

Standing in the need of prayer.

TRADITIONAL

I know my robe’s going to fit me well

I tried it on at the gates of hell.

TRADITIONAL

YOU have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story. It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished. I have wondered, more than once, why I started it, but—I know why. It is a love song to my brother. It is an attempt to face both love and death.

I have been very frightened, for: I have had to try to strip myself naked. One does not like what one sees then, and one is afraid of what others will see: and do. To challenge one’s deepest, most nameless fears, is, also, to challenge the heavens. It is to drag yourself, and everyone and everything and everyone you love, to the attention of the fiercest of the gods: who may not forgive your impertinence, who may not spare you. All that I can offer in extenuation of my boldness is my love.

Today is Sunday, and I am alone in the house. Winter is in the air. It was raining earlier, but now, the sun is out. A couple of hours ago, I watched Ruth and Tony and Odessa pile into the car, to drive to the city. Ruth is taking them to a matinee of The Wiz.

I was supposed to go, but, at the last moment, I asked Odessa to invite one of her girl friends. (I could not make the same suggestion to Tony, not out of even vaguely Puritanical motives, but, simply, to keep peace in the family. Odessa is persuaded that her brother is a sexist, and, considering my age, has her doubts about me. So. I’ll make it up to Tony.)

I decided not to go, because, early this morning, Jimmy called, and said he’d like to see me, if I was free today. He’s been busy, and I’ve been busy, and we haven’t seen a lot of each other, and I know he’s been working on his book. And he said that Julia had suggested that we come by for a drink.

The day proposed to me, in short, though somewhat more grueling than the matinee, was, equally, more urgent. Still, I feel a little guilty about not being with Ruth, and the children. But I have something, yet, to work out. I am not reconciled.

You would think that, at my age, I would be. But an age means absolutely nothing until it is your age, and then, you don’t know what your age means. It doesn’t mean any of the things you imagined it might mean. It doesn’t mean that you are any wiser or any better or any different and it doesn’t mean that you can easily become reconciled or that you can become reconciled at all.

Still, children are the beacon on this dark plain. They intimate what you must do, and dare: else, they never will be reconciled. I am their only key to their uncle, the vessel which contains, for them, his legacy. Only I can read this document for them. No more than I have dared to cheat in all that I have tried to say so far, do I dare cheat them.

Tony and Odessa: God knows what they are making of all this. I can see myself in them, for I know what we, the elders, made of all this. I can see what we were, and what we have become, and it really all happened in the twinkling of an eye. Not one of us saw our futures coming: we lived ourselves into our present, unimaginable states, until, abruptly, without ever having achieved a future, we were trying to decipher our past. Which is all right, too, I guess, on condition that one does not consider the past a matter for tears, recriminations, regrets. I am what I am, and what I have become. I wouldn’t do it over if I could, and, if I could, if I had to do it over, I wouldn’t know how. The very idea causes the spirit within me to grow faint with fatigue. No. Thank you: I do not forget that fire burns, that water overwhelms, rolls, and drags you under, that madness awaits in the valley, the mirror, and on the mountaintop. I have no regrets, I have no complaints: furthermore, I know very well that there is no complaint department. I will carry on from here, thank you. My hand is on the Gospel plow, and I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.

But the children do not yet, of course, see themselves in us, are as imprisoned in their futures as we are in our pasts.

Jimmy’s low-slung Triumph enters the driveway, and Jimmy steps out into the chilling, sunny, Sunday air. I watch him from the window. He is bare-headed, wearing a green military jacket and brown corduroy slacks, a black sweater. He takes a large paper bag out of the car.

Jimmy gives me his quick, surprised grin. “Howdy, brother of mine. How you making it?”

“That’s better,” he concedes, “than hanging up. I’m trying to hang in there, too.” He puts the paper bag on the kitchen table. “I brought some beer, and stuff. So—the family’s gone with The Wiz?”

He gives me a consoling pat on the shoulder. “Don’t despair. It’s a big hit, you’ll get a chance to see it.”

“Thanks.” Jimmy takes off his jacket, and goes into the living room. “What time is it?”

I go into the living room with two cans of beer. Jimmy is standing near the piano.

“Some days, I don’t know if I’m trying to write a book, or trying to write a symphony.” He takes the beer, and sits down on the sofa.

I smile, and watch his face. He looks very, as we say these days, together; lean, single-minded, calm. Calm may not be quite the word: his stillness is the stillness of someone paying absolute attention, of someone quietly paying his dues. “I wanted to see you, but now, I can hardly say why. Well. You know what I mean. But maybe I just wanted to be able to check out my sense of reality. Because, memory, man, when you start fucking around with memory, that can be a bitch.”

He takes a swallow of his beer, and smiles at me. “It’s true. I was trying to remember the very first time I saw Arthur. Of course, that’s bullshit, what difference does it make? But it was like a game I was playing with myself. It seemed to me, when we were running together, that he’d always been there, like I’d known him all my life.” He looks at me. “But that doesn’t jibe with the fact that I always felt that he’d made a great difference in my life.” He rises, and goes to his jacket, and takes out his cigarettes, lights one, sits down again, handing me the pack. He lights my cigarette for me. “It’s almost like—everything that happened to me before Arthur—didn’t happen,” and he pauses, frowns. “I think I understand that—but—they did happen, that’s why he made such a difference.” He laughs. “You see what I mean.”

“I know—like I know the first time I ever saw you was at church. But those churches all run together. I’ve blurred them all together. For me, church was mainly Julia—well, Julia, and my mother—I hated when Sunday came. It just meant that everybody was going to be all up on top of Julia, and pissing on me, and I think I must just have slept through all that. I hardly remember Arthur in the church. I remember”—this with a surprising shyness, and sipping his beer—”when you took us to the ice cream parlor. I thought we almost got to be friends that day, Arthur and me. Damn, I sure wanted a friend. But, no. He kept me waiting for a while.”

“Oh, come on. Who knows?” Then, he laughs. “Well. It wasn’t like I had so many other things to do.”

“He leans back on the sofa. “I think I knew something, somewhere. Like, you know, I hated Julia, but, at the same time, I knew something else.”

“Man, I always felt that nobody wanted to hang out with me because I had this freak of a holy sister!”

We both laugh. Then Jimmy says abruptly, “But Julia felt that, too, though—all that shit, back there, has a lot to do with Julia, until today. And—tell you something else—if it hadn’t been for Julia, I might never have seen Arthur again.” He looks up at me, looking very much as he had, years ago, when everything was beginning. “I’m not making any sense, am I?—just going around in circles.”

Arthur had come back into his life after everything else had gone out of it—his mother and his father, and, for a very long time, his sister. I thought I could see why Jimmy’s memory drew a blank. Furthermore, there was the church before Arthur, and the church after Arthur. And the church after Arthur—the church in which Jimmy functioned, at first without Arthur, and, then, briefly, with him—was in the apocalyptic South, on a battlefield. There was more than enough reason for the memory to stammer.

Jimmy sets his beer down on the coffee table, and walks to the piano. He stares at it for a while, then sits down. He lifts up the cover, and touches the keys. He looks over at me. “I found it hard to touch a piano for a while.” He plays a chord. “But playing all over, like I did—that helped me.”

Then he shakes his head, leaves the piano, and comes and stands in the middle of the room. “Look. I’ve been keeping to myself, you know, just working, making it on home, watching TV, if I don’t get home too late, not seeing nobody. And I woke up this morning, all of a sudden, around four or five o’clock, and I thought to myself, Damn, baby, you’re only thirty-seven, you’re supposed to be living, you are supposed to have a life. And you’re still fucking around here, in sackcloth and ashes. What is wrong with you?” He puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out, looks at his hands. I didn’t know it took so long, because I know he’s”—but he has to catch his breath before he can say the word—”dead. And I know he loved me, and doesn’t want me to suffer, he wants me to live. I know. But I just don’t seem to have any interest in—anything, really—and I just cannot imagine having an interest in anybody. It’s like my life stopped, too, in London. I still wish I’d gone with him.” He stops. “That’s what I can’t get out of my mind, it’s like that’s almost all I remember, and that’s so fucking stupid, and it’s wrong!” He stops, smiles, looks at me, tears standing in his eyes. “I didn’t come here to have a tantrum all over your nice clean carpet.”

“Have a tantrum. I don’t mind. I don’t mind for me, that is. But you’re still feeling guilty, and that is stupid—you don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

Arthur had been singing on the Paris music-hall stage. He and Jimmy had had a fight in Paris, and that was why Arthur had left for London without him. But Jimmy had planned to pick him up in London, and travel with him back to the United States.

Arthur had been very difficult those last months. I remembered very well. He had been difficult with me. He frightened me. I had begun to realize that he hated what he was doing. He did not know how to stop, and I did not know how to stop him. Jimmy had tried to stop him by threatening to leave, to cease being his accompanist. And, in fact, he had not played for Arthur that last night in Paris, and this is what torments him still.

But Arthur, who had always been able to drink, had begun to drink with a difference, and he had discovered drugs—nothing more than hashish, Jimmy hoped, but he didn’t know: cocaine, and heroin, were also floating around, and there were some very creepy people in the world which had begun to encircle Arthur. And Jimmy had had to deal with all that. He lived with my brother. I didn’t. And, if love and fear sometimes caused Jimmy to blow his stack, who can blame him? Arthur often made me blow my stack, too, but then, I repeat, I wasn’t living with him.

“That’s true,” Jimmy says. “I know that. But how long will it be before I believe it?” He blows his nose, and goes back to the piano.

“Would you,” I ask carefully, “like a real drink now? Or do you want to wait until we get to Julia’s?”

“I’ll have it now,” he says cheerfully, “if you’ll join me. Light on the usual, heavy on the rocks.”

I go into the kitchen to do this. Jimmy begins improvising on the piano, around “Here Comes the Sun,” blending it with “Oh Happy Day,” and threatening, generally, to work himself up into a fine camp-meeting frenzy. It sounds very clear and beautiful, in my empty house, on this chilly, sunlit Sunday.

I find the glasses and ice cubes, run water over the ice, and the music, somehow, blends with the feel of the cold, running water, the feel of the ice cubes, and the many lights the light strikes from them, and the light on my hands. I pour the dark, honey-colored whiskey into glasses like kaleidoscopes, as chords crash in the living room, and I realize that Jimmy is praying, is praying as hard as he knows how.

I stand for a moment, then, at the kitchen window, watching the trees, and the yard, and the quiet street beyond, listening to a sound which remains, in essence, strange and menacing for this place.

I come back into the room, and Jimmy finishes, elaborately, resoundingly, and stands up, and takes his glass.

“Cheers,” we both say, and sit down. We talk of other things, work, money, politics, color—music, finally, for Jimmy says suddenly, “It might really turn into a symphony. It might not be a book.”

I decide not to go, after all, to Julia’s with him, for, now, the sun is going down, and my tribe will be leaving the city, heading home, and I feel that I should be with them.

When Arthur arrived from Paris, on that far-off Sunday, he had taken a taxi across the Williamsburg Bridge straight to his loft on Dey Street, and then, he had called me from there. I had not been in when he first called; he got me later, and we saw each other that night, and, more or less, figured out our next trip south.

Arthur had started to call Jimmy, then decided to put it off. He had been afraid. Yet, he knew, somehow, that he was certain, now, to see him.

Julia had, finally, come through Customs at about the time Arthur arrived at his loft, and had gone straight to the flat on 18th Street.

New York seemed very strange, after the landscape to which she had chained herself for so long. She felt dizzy with space, awkward with freedom: she wondered if she could ever live here again. Jimmy’s note, which was several weeks old, did not surprise her. She thought of calling me, then decided to get her bearings first: and she was not sure that she had the right to call me. There were many things she wanted, indeed, needed, to talk about with someone; but, apart from us, the Montanas, that is, and her brother, she really had no friends here.

She had made two friends in Abidjan, both women, one very old, and they had not wanted her to leave, to return to her mysteriously barbaric country. But she had felt herself beginning to shrivel in the French West African outpost. If she had wanted to find another definition of what it meant to be a woman, and especially a black woman, well, then, she had found it: but it did not appear to be a role that she could play.

She had set down her bags, read Jimmy’s note, then gone into the bathroom, and run a bath as hot as she could bear it. Then she had undressed swiftly, as though discarding all evidence of her voyage. She had looked into the mirror. The African sun had darkened her skin and coarsened her hair: and she liked that. But she did not know—yet—what she had gained, or lost. She felt that she had gained—something—something for which she had, as yet, no words. Perhaps she had come home in order to make an assessment which could be made nowhere else.

She had filled the tub with bath salts, and stepped into the tub, sinking into the heat, gratefully, scrubbing herself with a rough sponge, scrubbing her hair as though she meant to tear something from her skull, her brain, scrubbing her body as though to wash it of sin. And she had actually thought that, her movements made her think that; perhaps, indeed, that was what she had always thought. She had lain still for a while, resting in the water, as still as leaves on ponds she had seen in the airless noon. She had touched her body, her loins: not even Africa had been able to make her fertile.

Then she had rubbed her body with her oils and perfumes, some of her fatigue subsiding into a kind of luxurious, lonely languor. But her loneliness was very particular, and it seemed that it would never end. And her beauty accused her.

She had put on her long, gray robe, and gone into the living room, and poured herself a drink. She had lit a cigarette, sitting in vigil over her life.

Arthur had come back to America with the intention of going south, and he began preparing for his journey at once. I hadn’t, yet, done everything necessary to free myself to go with him. One reason was that I was weary of compromise, and was considering burning my bridges. And the other reason was that I had just met Ruth. These reasons—with hindsight, one may say, of course—were to prove to be the very same reason: but, at the time I am speaking of, I was feeling my way.

But we managed to get it all together. It wasn’t easy for me, and it wasn’t easy for Arthur: and it turned out to be my first rehearsal as Arthur’s manager.

Arthur was not a star then, had no money except the money he made on the road. Also, a crucial matter which Ruth was the first to point out to me, he had virtually no clothes. Arthur thought of himself as dressed, when, in fact, he was merely covered, and, if asked, would have said that he loved to “dress.” But, in fact, as distinguished from his moving delusion, he lived, mainly, in old shirts, slacks, sweaters, and shit-kickers, went shopping only when he could no longer possibly avoid it, or when he saw something in a window, went in, bought it, and walked out: this always made him feel so tremendously virtuous that whatever he had bought would have worn out long before Arthur realized that it was time to go “shopping” again. As he was the very last person in the world to have been forced to live his life in a goldfish bowl, he was, of all voyagers, the least capable of packing a suitcase. His idea of packing was to throw everything he saw into a suitcase and close it, and rush to the next plane—he never thought of opening the closets, or the drawers. Thus, throughout what we call the “civilized” world, and even beyond its borders, there is an appalling chain of Arthur’s watches, charm bracelets, rings, lockets, combs, brushes, socks, shorts, shirts, ties, tiepins, cufflinks, jackets, trousers, shoes, wallets, address books, records, photographs, books, awards, appeals, fan mail, invitations, oil paintings, watercolors, notes, and scrolls, letters unanswered and letters unfinished.

To reproach him for this was utterly useless: one had to learn to take these aspects of Arthur into account when dealing with him.

Of course, our first problem was money—the walking-up-and-down and shopping money, sometimes known as “front” money: the money which pays for the “front.” We called it cash; we had, of course, no credit. There had been no record offers worth considering. All this was about to change, but we didn’t know that, then.

There was no money in the South, and managers are in business to make money. A minority of performers in any area become “stars,” but those who are not stars work enough, nevertheless, to keep various functionaries in bread-and-butter money. Arthur couldn’t be booked into the Copacabana or Vegas, but he was valuable on the college circuit; his reputation was growing in rather unexpected places. San Francisco-Oakland, for example, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, of course, sections of New Jersey, Boston—and, for some reason, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and London. These were the places his agency wanted to book him, naturally. Anyway, they couldn’t book him—they couldn’t—into places like Savannah, Tallahassee, New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, and so forth. They wouldn’t have known how to get him out of the hands of the sheriff, or off the chain gang, or out of prison. They didn’t want him to get hurt, and this concern came, very often, out of genuine affection. But they also didn’t want him, certainly not at the very beginning of his “promising” career, to be too closely associated with what was, after all, an exceedingly controversial, and, finally, unpopular causem Furthermore, as J. Edgar’s demise has permitted my-innocent countrymen to discover, exceedingly brutal pressures could be brought to bear on all kinds of persons, and corporations, and in all kinds of ways. Arthur, himself, was not yet that visible, but some of his handlers were.

Anyway, the money in the South, then, was needed for bail-bond money, fees, and food. One was not, according to Arthur, supposed to carry anything out of the South, except one’s person, if possible: and I agreed with him.

This meant that Arthur had to pay for the southern road by—going on the road. While his managers were busy booking him into places where he could pick up some change, I was busy booking him into places where he couldn’t: Arthur’s booking in Vancouver, for example, would pay for our journey to Jackson, Mississippi.

It was marvelous for me. I loved it. It was something I wanted to do: and I discovered that I could do it. Anyway, I had to, I was the synchronizer of the watches.

Let us say that Arthur, working his way down from Vancouver, has dates in Seattle, and Boston. From, Boston, he is to pick me up in New York, and fly to various points south.

And Montreal, let us say, having heard that Arthur has been a sensation in Vancouver, wants Arthur on a day when I know he must be in Tuskegee.

“I’m sorry, it’s not possible,” I say, into the breathing phone. “Mr. Montana is booked for that day—in fact, for that entire week—”

I learned one thing at once. They always felt that the bottom difficulty was money, and they always raised the price. So, naturally, later, I began at the highest price last quoted, and, then, sometimes, doubled it, feeling my way.

I found out. But that’s another story. Arthur found out, in a way, but never in the way that I did, and that’s because he had another assignment. I began to understand our connecting conditions. This was partly through Ruth, who worked with me during this first rehearsal, and who should have won several Oscars for her performances on the phone.

One of the black organizations—still called Negro, in those years—was throwing a party, either in victory or lamentation, I don’t remember, somewhere in midtown Manhattan. I had to be there, because of my job. Arthur had said that he’d try to be there, but he never showed. When I think about it, I can say only that the pulse of the party was neither victory nor lamentation, neither moaning nor tambourines. The real pulse, at many speeds, was, simply, resolution.

There was much fire-baptized and shining hair. The Afro was, then, just around the corner—the far corner, that is; having, as of now, very lately, disappeared around the nearest one. There were many hats, some designed, apparently, by architects: neither the bu-bu nor the dashiki had yet appeared, demanding to be addressed in Swahili. Oh, the brothers and the sister were “heavy,” but, mainly, they were wearily resolute. If they flaunted such a vast amount of surface, it was to make certain that anyone misled by the surface would crash through the ice, and drown. Their note of resolution was countered by their knowledge that they, themselves, were tiptoeing, slipping, or striding, inches over an icy grave. But they had been, after all, through the fire.

The brothers were, by far, less dazzling, mute, one might almost say, covered by the decent, self-effacing, missionary cloth. Whereas the ladies wore hair, they had eyes.

There I was, anyway, one of the brothers, his life wedged tightly up his ass, utilizing, like a shield, the obligatory glass, and smiling the obligatory smile. The party was in a townhouse, a house on the East Side, a house like the houses in Henry James. The host was a descendant, bore the name, of one of the country’s most terrifying, lethal financiers, one of the century’s most renowned plunderers, hailed from sea to shining sea. Well. He hoped to purchase something out of all our desperate, surface splendor. He was a nice man, a very sincere man. I talked to him as long as I could, insofar as I could, but that wasn’t long. My sphincter muscle was tiring: I had to escape with my life. He couldn’t help but look, poor man, as though he’d been trapped in some resounding slave-auction, on the auctioneer’s day off.

I walked down a flight of stairs, intending to ease my way out of here—Arthur wasn’t coming. I was at the head of a second flight of stairs when someone stopped me, someone I knew vaguely, someone, let us say, fom a rival firm, another kind of pirate, an adventurer in the antipoverty bullshit hype.

He was black, though not, I hope, like me—in fact, he was gingerbread-colored—and I grinned at him as he grinned at me. His name, which I always thought was unfortunate, was Roy Furlong. Some of us described him as, for me, but not for long!

“Beautiful.” He whispered, I can’t imagine why, the FBI knew everything already. “Getting some bucks for my theater, man.”

“Ain’t no big thing, you understand—just my loft down on the East Side—off the Bowery. Got the kids making sets out of old bedsheets, and mops, and raggedy blankets. We spray them with paint, you know—even got somebody’s mama’s old washing board!” He laughed, his fox-face leaning in toward me.

“I been looking for your brother—somebody said he was going to be here tonight. Is he here?”

“If you ain’t seen him, he ain’t here. Tell you what I’d like him to do—come on down, and give them kids a kick in the ass—sing them a little gospel, let them know where they come from.”

I thought, Wow. “Those kids come from all kinds of places,” I said. “Like Catholic parishes and Russian synagogues and Chinese temples—”

“That’s just the point, man—one song from Arthur, and they’ll shake all that shit together.” He lowered his voice. “And it’d be great publicity for the school—you know, we let a couple of the black brothers in the media in on it, you dig, and they’ll cover it, and it would be great publicity for your brother, too.” He smiled, very pleased with himself. “Everybody gets a little taste.”

I might now have made the really ridiculous error of pointing out that it didn’t seem to me that the children were going to be given very much of a “taste”—had opened my mouth to frame the words, when a heavy-set girl, wearing a tan cape, and a hat which looked like a demented Chinese pagoda, appeared out of the confusion around us, and tapped Roy on the shoulder.

“You told me it had a money-back guarantee,” she said, “and it didn’t.” She pursed her lips. “Now I don’t have to tell you what I could do to your ass.”

“Ruth, honey!” Roy cried, throwing his arms around her, and kissing her—partly, I felt, to shut her up, in case she was not really joking. “You been here all night? I didn’t see you!”

“I’ve been skulking corners, listening to you peddle your wares. I am wired for sound, all the way to my teeth—you just wait, Mr. Furlong, until I turn in my report!”

Roy said, “You wouldn’t do nothing to hurt me, sugar, I know that.” He turned to me, with some relief. “Have you two met? This is Ruth Granger, we used to work together awhile back. Ruth, this is Hall Montana.”

We shook hands. I liked the feel of her hand in mine. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Montana. Have you known this medicine man long?”

Roy laughed, and raised his hands, helplessly. “I don’t know why you so down on me, mama. I declare. What can I do to please you?” and he looked at me in what he thought was mock-despair. “I see you’re not drinking. Can I get you a drink?”

I said, “I will get the lady a drink. We will leave you here, to plot and scheme some other way of getting back into the lady’s good graces.” I grinned at Ruth. “May I?”

She was also carrying a rather menacing shoulder bag, which she now shifted to the opposite shoulder, so that she could take my arm: she was accoutered, definitely, for any improbability. “I think you have found the perfect solution,” she said, and smiled sweetly at Roy. “Good night, Mr. Furlong!” and we moved back into the crowd.

I hadn’t meant to do this, had really meant to go. But, once I had seen Ruth’s face, under that absurd and winning hat, and been exposed to all her preposterous paraphernalia—well, my mood changed, I was no longer that anxious to be alone. I liked her. She was funny. She was direct. I did not dream of attempting to imagine her history. When she laughed, she looked exactly like a calculating, ten-year-old shoeshine boy. She was heavy-set, but she wasn’t fat—a big-boned chick—and, ordering all that solidity, at the center, was a hurt and courageous little girl. I sensed all this, in the way one senses things. I liked her.

It’s strange, but when a man likes a woman from the git-go, he tends not to think of her as a woman: this comes later, if it comes at all. In the beginning, he is simply relieved that he is not being forced into attempting a conquest. He is relieved to be released from his role. Much later, he may realize that he has been released from a delusion which menaced both the woman and himself. And a woman then becomes a much more various and beautiful creation than she has been before.

If Ruth’s exterior was elaborate, not to say strong-willed, her tastes were simple. She was not longing for a Brandy Alexander, for example, or a sticky sweet Manhattan, or something preciously French, or Russian, but took what we were, finally, able to get, two Dewars on the rocks. Then, we made our way back to the staircase where we had met. Ruth put her shoulder bag on the floor, and sat down on the top step.

I don’t know why we hadn’t, already, simply decided to leave the place, but I think we both felt, in our different fashions, that this might have been, disastrously, to risk moving too fast: curious to observe how we act on what we don’t yet know that we know.

I sat down on the step below her, my back leaning against the iron grille of the balustrade.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I said, “but I really can’t resist asking you—how, and where—did you get that hat?”

She laughed, and touched the remarkable thing. “You remember Hattie McDaniel, she played Mammy in Gone With the Wind?”

“Well, you remember, somebody finally gives her something—scarlet petticoats, no less—”

“I think it was actually Clark Gable who gave them to her—I really don’t dare think—but anyway, she shows them to Clark Gable—stop laughing—”

She touched her hat again. “We all have our different ways of seeking approval. With Gable, I admit, I blew it, but there’ll be others. I just want them to see how well it becomes me—what they gave me.”

I am sure that I had begun to look somewhat alarmed, for she laughed, and said, “No. It’s just a fun, insane hat. It’s got something to do with what these people call serendipity. I bought it on an especially rainy afternoon, and I wear it when I’m in a certain mood.”

“That means that you are abnormal, and, possibly, dangerous—you suspect the possibility of cause and effect.”

“Is there any way not to know him?” She grinned, and sipped her drink. “I used to be private secretary to”—she named a black actress-singer, who had died about a year before—”and she got roped into one of his ‘benefits,’ and I had to curse him out a couple of times.”

She reached behind her, and rummaged in her shoulder bag, and found a pack of cigarettes. She offered me a cigarette, lit mine, lit hers. She put the cigarettes back in the bag. “We aren’t what you would call intimate friends.”

She laughed. “Thank God. Now, I won’t have to wear it for at least a month.”

We had both finished our drinks. I said, “Why don’t we get out of here? If you’re not in a hurry, I’d like to buy you a nightcap someplace. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and rose, stealing a glance at her watch as she did so. I took both our empty glasses, and left them on one of the tables near the head of the stairs. She shouldered her bag, and we went down the stairs, smiling and nodding at various points and people, hoping not to be intercepted either by Furlong, or our host: who were almost certainly, however, by now, busily exchanging fantasies, reveling in each other. We got into the wind. Ruth had her car, and so we drove to Smalls’ Paradise, and sat there, drinking and talking until about two or three in the morning, comparing the Indian-stained Africas in which each of us had first seen the light of day. Ruth had then lived on Riverside Drive in the nineties, which meant that we were practically neighbors, and she drove me home, dropping me at my door. We were going to see each other for lunch, in the next couple of days. I remember watching her drive away before I turned into my building, and wondering why I felt so wearily peaceful, so tremendously at ease.

We went south, as scheduled, into a punishing climate. I do not mean, now, merely the seasonal climate, or the climate of my heart, or Arthur’s. I mean something harder than that, harder to define. It was the climate created by something riding on the wind. It was as though the landscape awaited the scalding purification of the latter rain—the ruthless and liberating definition. This was in the faces, the voices, the accents, in the horror of what could not be said.

We flew from city to city, but drove from town to town, walked many a dusty road, crossed endless railroad tracks, walked under many an underpass, saw endless depots, warehouses, scrap heaps, houses abandoned on the edge of town, tough weeds threatening wood and stone, passed many a quiet evening veranda, entered many a church and hovel, saw many and many a child. We both realized, at once, wordlessly, that we were still searching for vanished Peanut, for light, reddish-colored Alexander Theophilus Brown. He was absent from every room we entered, threatened to appear at every corner, whispered in the rising and the setting sun. We didn’t speak of him—we couldn’t; we couldn’t say to each other that we had entered a state like madness. We lived in pain and terror, unrelenting, walked in the shadow of death, and the shadow of death was in every eye. It was in the eyes of the men and women willing and anxious to accomplish our destruction, and in the eyes of the black people who were watching us, and watching the eyes which watched us. No one ever spoke of this, any more than my brother and I ever spoke of Peanut. Yet everything referred to—all that could not be said.

It could not be said that kinsman was facing kinsman, but it was nothing less than that: father slaughtering son, brother castrating brother, mother betraying lover, sister denying sister—kissing cousins chaining kissing cousins, tracking them down with dogs, gutting them like cattle, as they had sold them like cattle. Said: it could not be whispered. Whispered: it could not be dreamed. Dreamed: it could not be confessed. Not all of the sheriffs children are white, this knowledge was in every eye. Not all of my mother’s children are black. This knowledge, which is the same knowledge, was also in every eye, but with a difference.

This difference is the difference between flight and confrontation. Or, if I may stoop to borrow from a lexicon stupefying in its absolute and desperately sincere dishonesty, it is the difference between being black, or white. The words seem infantile and weightless in such a context, words absurdly trivial to account for so lethal a storm: but I have had to stoop, as I told you, and borrow from a book I did not, thank heaven, write. For, these were the only two words uttered, all that could be said, all that could be heard riding on the southern wind. If I could scarcely believe my ears, if it diminished me to see that we could be so basely craven, yet, I had to hear it, for I was traveling with my brother, and we trembled for our lives. For them, we were black, and that was all there was to it. Oh, I might like to laugh, and perhaps my life was dear to me, perhaps my fingers were capable of field-stripping a rifle, or playing a violin, perhaps I loved my wife, my son, or my daughter, or my brother, perhaps I, too, like all men, knew that I was born to die. None of this mattered, none If this contributed the faintest hair’s-breadth to the balance, for I was black. If I could not conveniently die, or decently smile, gratefully labor, then I should be carried to a place of execution, the dogs to feast on my sex; fire, air, wind, water, and, at last, the earth, my bones: it came to that, for me and mine, and in my own country, which I loved so much, and which I helped to build.

I watched the eyes of the black men and women, watching the eyes watching us. The eyes held pity and scorn, and a distant amusement—and calculation, for, after all, surrender was not a possibility. You may be blind, the eyes seemed to say, but I can see, and I see you. It is hardly possibile that I have been here with you, for so long, and have endured so much at your hands, and yet, have loved you so much, and washed your naked body so often, spanked your children into what they were able to grasp of maturity (for you were not a model!) watched you when you thought you were safe (and, therefore, had no use for me) opened my door to you when the web of safety broke and sent you crashing down (and what other door would have opened? Your friends are all like you) walked to the graveyard with you, and to the christening, Lord, on the mountain, in the valley, trumpets, trombones, and melancholy, leading you to rock your soul in that one more river, do you now suppose that this density of passionate connection has turned me into nothing more than a peculiar mirror, reflecting only what you want to see? What do I care, if you are white? Be white: I do not have to prove my color. I wouldn’t be compelled to see your color, if you were not so anxious to prove it. Why? And to me, of all people.—But I know why. You are afraid that you have been here with me too long, and are not really white anymore. That’s probably true, but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you.

Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice. Certainly, the punishing climate through which Arthur and I were walking resembled nothing so much as a terrified fantasy, and was the result, incontestably, of a moral choice.

By the time we got to Florida, we had lost weight, were running low on money, and had lost the pianist, a Harlem boy named Scott, to the chain gang. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, an angular town so white that it seems dead, like a bone bleaching in the desert. There are towns like that, towns with colors that stay in the mind: Jerusalem, for example, really is golden, as the sun drops behind those weary, sacred hills. As the sun leaves Montgomery, one is reminded of nothing so much as the smokeless, fiery, alabaster gates of hell.

Scott was a loudmouthed Harlem boy of about twenty-two, ill-equipped for nonviolence, but willing to try it, kidnapped, in Montgomery—I refuse to use the legal word, “arrested”—for spitting on the sidewalk, and, as it turned out, having no money in his pockets. The charge was vagrancy, and, for good measure, due to his loudmouthed, disorderly conduct, and he was sentenced to ninety days. This was at dusk, while we were sitting in the hotel room, waiting for him. We went on to the church, the ministers began calling the police, we got through a quite indescribable night and didn’t find out what had happened to Scott until late the next afternoon. By that time, he was on the chain gang.

A great deal can happen to a man in ninety days, and this is why Scott was not escorted back to the hotel, where he was registered, and where we had the cash to prove that he was not a vagrant. As for the disorderly conduct charge, running off at the mouth a little when accosted by strangers, in or out of uniform, is one of the American’s most sacred attributes. When kidnapped for spitting in the gutter of the alabaster city, Scott said nothing that America has not been applauding for generations, whenever it was said by, for example, John Wayne, or, for that matter, J. Edgar Hoover. Nothing succeeds like success.

We had to raise the bail-bond money, an arbitrary, but far from trifling sum. Arthur wired his agency, and their lawyer—it was the first time I realized that we didn’t have a lawyer—and I wired the magazine, and their lawyer. We hoped that we had intimidated the authorities enough to prevent Scott from following Peanut. But we couldn’t depend on that, either in or out of Dixie, down South, or up South. We had to raise the money, and come back with it in our pockets and hand it to the judge and pick up Scott and limp back north, somehow. For the first time, Arthur would have to pocket his southern honorarium: we couldn’t miss, or cancel, a single date, and so we got to Florida.

We were not unaware, although it could not be said, that kidnapping Scott was a way of menacing Arthur. They were brandishing the popular sign, still waiting, patiently, in various closets, to be brought back into daylight: Nigger, read this and run. If you can’t read, run anyhow!

And so we arrived at the basement of that church, in the backwoods of Florida, where a Jimmy so thin I hardly recognized him was sitting on a table, wearing an old torn sweater, and eating a sandwich.

I didn’t recognize him, because, for the first time, he reminded me of Julia: and I had just met Ruth. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it was something like that, as though, when I saw him, I blinked my eyes against a sudden, too strong light.

And we followed him upstairs, into the main body of the church. He sat down at the piano, and Arthur began to sing, and so they began, at last, their time together.

“I—just hoped you’d be glad to see me. I couldn’t think any further than that.”

And Jimmy turns toward Arthur, who pulls him into his arms. They are in Jimmy’s bed, at the back of the house where Jimmy stays. It is about two o’clock in the morning.

The house is very quiet, as are the streets outside. Jimmy and Arthur are very quiet, too, very peaceful; it is as though each has, finally, come home.

They had been intensely, incredibly aware of each other in the church, but had spoken very little. They had been surrounded, they were busy, Arthur was tense, worried, and exhausted. Behind him was the image of Scott on the chain gang, and, before him, the question of his performance at the rally. There would not be time to eat, or to change. He had known, sensed, that, somehow, he would soon see Jimmy, and had been longing to see him. But he had also been afraid to see him, and it seemed vindictive on the part of fate to have arranged for them to meet under such grueling circumstances, at this moment, and in this place.

Nevertheless, imperceptibly, the atmosphere between them began to ease as they dealt with the music. Each sensed the other, swiftly and precisely: it was, suddenly, quite amazing to realize that they had never before worked together. Without having had an instant to mention the past, they found themselves becoming comrades in the present, and the music, indeed, had already begun to move them into the future: if they could play this way together, they would certainly be fools to lose each other now!

So their anticipation, however reluctantly, increased. Perhaps they were richer than they had thought.

We liberated, without, on the whole, recuperating, Scott, and limped back into New York, and Julia called me. She had just seen Jimmy, who; both weary and exultant, had arrived to put his bags down; and Arthur arrived very shortly afterward, to pick Jimmy up. So there were the four of us reunited, though I was not present: and the moment the two younger brothers left her loft, Julia got me on the phone.

It was a Saturday, late afternoon, early evening. I was alone, playing records, and kind of half reading, and thinking of tomorrow, when I would be seeing Ruth. (I had called her. She was going to try to get out of a previous dinner date, and have dinner with me.)

She was to call me back. In the long meanwhile, I was free. I knew that I would not be seeing Arthur or Jimmy tonight. I had no duties of any kind, except to Hall. I had decided that I would not go out. I would telephone for a Chinese dinner, take a shower, and watch television. And I had taken off my shoes and socks and trousers, preparing to go into the shower, when the phone rang.

I was sure it was Ruth. I pad-padded happily over to the phone, and picked up the receiver, looking out at still, cold West End Avenue, absently scratching my belly button, and my balls.

One should never, never do that: never anticipate the voice at the other end, never assume you know to whom you are speaking. The voice I heard sliced me as cleanly as a razor. The sweat suddenly dripping from my armpits slid down my body as smoothly, as crucially, as my blood would have run down, had I been slit from armpit to thigh.

I knew her name, and I wanted to call her name, but I couldn’t. For some reason, I grabbed my dick. The houses across the street seemed, with a hostile attention, to tilt toward me.

“That wasn’t meant for you,” I said, now feeling very awkward indeed, and wishing that I had said something else, at the very same moment that she laughed, and said, “Oh, I know it wasn’t for me. How are you, Hall?”

My dick began to stiffen under my hand. This frightened me, and made me angry at Julia. Then, insanely, it made me angry at Ruth.

“Well, I just saw your long-lost brother, along with my little long-lost brother, and so I know you must be tired—”

“Oh, around the time that Arthur got back, I guess. But I didn’t know where any of you were.”

Stop calling her child. It’s none of your business where she’s been, or was.

I began to be frightened. I ached more and more. I had come to the phone anticipating Ruth. My prick was heavy, getting hard, and I did not know if this ache was hope, or memory, nor could I, any longer, tell the difference.

“Girl, even Timbuktu has got to have post offices, and telegraph and telephone wires.”

“Well”—and she laughed—“that’s one of the strange things about Timbuktu. Sometimes, it looks like they do. Then when you look again, they don’t.”

I wanted her to say yes. I wanted her to say no. I wanted to get in, or get out.

“Okay. Why don’t we meet—oh, on the steps of Carnegie Hall, at one thirty? Then well decide where to go from there.”

She seemed to catch her breath. Then, “I think I may have begun to learn something—in Timbuktu. But you’re the only person I can tell. You’re the only person who might know.”

My ache began to subside, and, yet, began to rise, into another, sweeter, more inexorable sorrow.

“I’ll always love you, you know. I mean”—I held my breath, I dropped my dick—”no matter what.”

“I think I’ve always known that. Anyway, I know it now. I’ll always love you, too.” She laughed, and it was a laugh low in her throat, but, astoundingly free of bitterness. “No matter what. Until tomorrow, then.”

And she hung up, then I hung up. I stripped naked, and took my shower, free, until tomorrow.

Tomorrow was a bright, cold Sunday, with a coldness and brightness peculiar to New York. The sky remains metallic, but raises itself up to where the sky should be: the buildings concede your right to be here, and give you elbowroom. And I walked down West End Avenue, wearing a black Russian fur hat, I remember, and the serious, distinguished, winter garb which Russian fur hats demand, feeling perhaps, within my difficult ease, a leashed panic, but trying to be ready for whatever this tomorrow—as the song says—would bring.

And turned east on 59th Street, walking those long blocks to Columbus Circle, which was filled with the New York Sunday innocence—that is to say, with people who scarcely knew where they were, or why: and crossed the Circle, and continued down to 57th Street, turning east again toward Carnegie Hall, with my heart beginning to hammer, and the brow beneath—within—the band of my Russian hat beginning to be hot and cold and wet.

And waited for the light at Seventh Avenue, a long light, watching the people milling about in front of Carnegie Hall, watching the people on the steps, looking at the unchanging red light, watching the cars speed by, the taxis, and a horse-drawn carriage turned onto the avenue from the Plaza Hotel, a man and a woman and a little girl sat in it, and this carriage clumped down Seventh Avenue, and passed me, crossing 57th Street, and the light changed.

I crossed the avenue. But I was still on the wrong side of the street. It had not occurred to me that I could have crossed the street while I was waiting to cross the avenue. I watched the posters outside Carnegie Hall; apparently, there was a concert there, this afternoon. There were many people on the steps. I looked at my watch. It was twenty-five minutes to two. It could not really be said that I was late. The light changed, and I crossed the street.

She was standing on the top step, near the series of doors farthest from the avenue. She was wearing a gray, belted, cloth coat, with a high collar. She was wearing black, high-heeled boots. She was wearing a stylish black turban, which covered her ears. She had her hands in her pockets.

She did not seem to be waiting for anyone, was not anxiously watching the streets. She stood at a kind of three-quarter angle to me, watching the people coming in and out of the doors, or watching nothing—it was impossible to tell what she was watching—and standing perfectly still, as though she were certain of being found.

I stood at the bottom of the steps for a second, watching her. Then I started up the steps. She turned her head, and saw me.

Welcome is indescribable—rare: it cannot be imitated. When Julia turned her head, and saw me, I knew—I knew—that, though I did not mean to her what I had hoped to mean, I meant more to her than I would ever be able to imagine. I surrendered myself to her welcome. Whatever anguish she had caused me I felt being blown away from me by the faint wind around my head and shoulders as I climbed the steps.

Then, I stood next to her, holding both her small, cold, ungloved hands. Drink to me only with thine eyes—that ridiculous song suddenly made sense to me. And I will pledge with mine. Then I took her in my arms, and we kissed each other, like brother and sister.

“Well, I broke into Jimmy’s piggy bank. Let’s go next door. They used to know me there.”

“Part of the glory of being a model. But I never wanted to bug you with that side of it. Come on. It’s cold, to be fighting these streets.”

And so we walked down the steps, and entered the Russian Tea Room. We hadn’t chosen a bad hour, in spite of the fact that it was Sunday. The people heading for a matinee were paying their checks and leaving, and the evening people would not be arriving for a while.

And it was true that they knew her here. It was “Miss Miller” this, and “Miss Miller” that, all the way from the checkroom to our table. But I had the feeling that they really liked her, that she had given them some reason to respect her, that they respected each other.

“Others might not put it so nicely, but, yes”—she grinned—“I’ve had my day.”

For that was the way she looked. There is a moment in a man’s life, a woman’s life, when all, all that is the person seems to come together for the first time, when all of the warring, disparate elements—the chin, the nose, the eye-brow, the set of the head, the look in the eye—form, for the first time, a coherent composition. Julia was beginning to look like Julia.

It is true that, as a child preacher, she had been quite unforgettable; but she had looked like no one then, she had simply been the disquieting illustration of a mystery. She had been unforgettable precisely because, at that moment, as a child and as a preacher, she had not belonged to herself, nor had the remotest idea who she was. She had then been at the mercy of a force she had had no way of understanding. That was why I, for example, had wished to be able to turn my eyes away from the inevitable spectacle of her dreadful fall from grace, had hoped not to be present, still less summoned, at the hour her trumpet sounded.

Now something had happened to her, that was unmistakable, and, out of what had been fragmented, out of what had been left her, she had begun to create herself. I am sure that Julia did not put it that way to Julia: but I was welcome because she trusted what she saw in my eyes.

“Oh. I don’t know. I’ve just come back. I don’t know where I am. I’m not sure I know where I’ve been.”

“Maybe. Ill tell you one thing: the people running around saying they discovered Africa are all completely mad.” She laughed, that holy-roller urchin’s laugh. “I think Africa might have discovered them—to drive them mad—but—ain’t nobody ever discovered Africa.”

The waitress came, and took our drink orders, inquiring as to Miss Miller’s health, and treating me with the deference due Miss Miller’s escort.

“Oh. Since I last saw you. About two years. But—putting it that way doesn’t really make any sense—you know what I mean? It was some other kind of time.”

“Well—look. I was in a city called Abidjan. They call it a city. And it’s on the west coast of Africa. But it’s not really in Africa—Africa is in it, and driving it crazy.” Watching my face, she laughed again, and said, “Yes. I think it drove me a little crazy, too.”

“I never really understood,” I said carefully, “what you were doing there—why you went—”

She looked down. Then she picked up my pack of cigarettes, and lit one. “Well. Let’s say I thought it might be more cool—and more fair—to lay some questions on Africa that I didn’t want to lay on you.” She looked down again. “You’re not history.”

“I concede that. But—you’ve lost me.” She gave me a look.” As concerns the particular detail, I mean. You’ll never lose me.”

“It’s hard,” she said, “to tell the truth. Partly because you don’t know it. Partly because you’re afraid—”

I don’t know why her face made me put it to her that way. Perhaps I was reading my mind.

“Do you know why,” she asked, “a Bloody Mary is called a Bloody Mary? Instead of, for example”—we both laughed—”a Bloody Virginia, for example? Or a Bloody Julia?”

Luckily, the Russian Tea Room was fairly sparsely populated at that moment, or we might have been asked to leave. As it was, heads turned, wondering what had so cracked us up.

“Well,” she said, “that means that you do know why.” She sipped her Bloody Mary. “That’s part of what I began to learn—in Timbuktu.” She put out her cigarette. “That’s why no one has ever discovered Africa. They don’t dare.”

She picked up another cigarette, looking at once very young and very weary. I picked up my lighter, and lit her cigarette: a reflex, created, partly, by the surroundings. I knew that she didn’t really want another cigarette. But she inhaled, and blew the smoke carefully, above my head.

It is astounding to behold—endure—a beauty to which you are forever and inexorably connected, and which will never, never, never belong, submit, to you. It shakes one mightily to confront the vulnerability before which stone and steel give way.

For the girl before me longed to belong to someone. It was the depth of her longing which altered the nature of the transaction, which demolished the expected, the habitual terms. She had been frightened too deeply to be easily frightened again, had endured possession long before dreaming of love. This gave her, cruelly, an intimidating freedom: who would dare attempt to possess her?

This, too, she had begun to learn during her curious pilgrimage. “He was a very nice man. I never learned enough, you know, about his world. Maybe I never will. But, you know, he came up through the church schools, and was sent to France, and Switzerland, to study. I niet him at some U.N. function. I was there, you know, with all my glamor on. He seemed to look through all that, straight on down to me. I had the feeling that he could never be fooled.

“And he was so black. Not just physically black—he was that, too, but really black, black in a way I’d never encountered. He was old enough to be my father—and—I guess—that made him beautiful in my eyes.”

She broke a hard roll, carefully, as she said this, and swallowed a mouthful of her beef Stroganoff. I watched her, not knowing what to say: she was not, for example, confessing to an act of infidelity.

“He was married, of course, and had children my age, in school. A girl, and a boy—there were younger children I met later, over there. But the boy and the girl were very nice to me. I don’t know what I expected, but I hadn’t expected that. They seemed amused, too, as though I were one of the packages their father loved to bring home from his travels. I had the feeling that they were telling me not to worry about them—they were used to it.”

She laughed and sipped her wine, looking around the restaurant. I was beginning to be more and more fascinated by a story which included me, and which, yet, held me outside.

“He wanted me to come with him, to Africa. I said, I couldn’t—he told me I was lying, I was dreaming. There was nothing holding me here.”

Again she paused, and looked at me—not exactly as though she feared she might be hurting me: she acknowledged this likelihood with a wry pursing of the lips. She looked at me as though she wondered if I understood, or could help her understand. Her story locked me out at the same time that it locked me in—with her. She was talking to me about something which was happening to us.

This was the strangest and most grueling sign of respect anyone had given me, in all my life.

“I would have liked to be able to have said—to myself—that it was you. But I would have been lying—to myself, and to you, and I love you too much for that.”

She dropped my hand, and nibbled at her rice. The restaurant was full, but not yet inundated, we had, for the moment, a haven.

“I said before—you’re not history. You couldn’t undo it. I couldn’t lay it on you. Sometimes, you walk out of one trap, into another. I think I thought that he was history. Because he reminded me of my father. And because he was black, black in a way my father never was.” And she smiled. “Perhaps I thought that he could undo it.”

She took off her turban, abruptly, and dropped it on her seat, beside her. I saw her coarse, beautiful, half-Spanish, half-kinky hair. She had piled it all up, under the turban, knotted in a bun at the top of her head. So one saw the fine lines in her high forehead, and around her eyes. She was beginning to look like Julia: the price she would pay was beginning to show.

“There were lots of things I wanted to say to you then, but I couldn’t. I wanted to ask you to take care of everything over here—while I tried to find out what I had to find out—over there.” Then she smiled. It was a smile that made me know that she was a part of me, forever; and, precisely because she was a part of me, she was part of a mystery I would never unlock.

“I couldn’t say anything to you, really, because we were hurting too much. But I knew that you would do it, anyway. I knew”—and she sipped her wine—”that you had your brother, and you knew that I had mine. So I wasn’t afraid.”

“I said I wouldn’t go unless I had a way of making a living over there. I said I wasn’t cut out to be nobody’s concubine.” She laughed, it was the most unexpected sound, it rang through the place, and people turned, and smiled. “Of course, there are any number of ways of being a concubine—as he knew, and as I was about to find out.”

She looked down at the table as though she were looking into a well, looking for something which she had, mistakenly, dropped into the bottom of a well. “He knew the one thing I didn’t really know—he knew how much I trusted him.”

I looked around the restaurant, wishing, really, to flee, and not from Julia—with her; and this made me wonder about all my relationships, until this moment, and to come. I chewed on whatever it was, a chicken Kiev, I think, and looked around me at a setting which was, abruptly, hideously, brutally foreign.

But no more foreign, really, than any setting becomes the moment one is compelled to examine, decipher, and make demands of it: no more foreign, certainly, than the European outposts jutting, like rotting teeth, out of the jaws of West Africa. If teeth rot, it is because their host, the body, gives them nearly no nourishment. The explicit or exotic European outposts of North America do not, for the moment, appear to lack vitamins, and yet, they do bring uneasily to mind the notion of a mystery imposed on a dilemma: details ripped from their context manifest a sinister and relentless incoherence. All of the details of the room in which we sat once were part of a life elsewhere; a communal, a tribal life, still going on, no doubt, elsewhere, but certainly not, as far as the senses are able to report, here.

“I had a position working for one of the airlines. I have to call it a position, because it damn sure wasn’t a job, I was sort of in charge of the VIPs who didn’t speak French.” She laughed. “They didn’t speak much English, either, but I got by on guesswork, and flattery. And I actually learned some Dutch, French, and German, and, who knows, it may all come in handy one day.

“But my friend, there, once I was there, began to be more and more important to me. He understood something. He was the only person who did—well, the only male. But, in the beginning, I didn’t know any women at all.

“A black girl in Africa, who wasn’t born in Africa, and who has never seen Africa, is a very strange creature for herself, and for everyone who meets her. I don’t know which comes first, or which is worse. They don’t know who they are meeting. You don’t know who they are meeting, either—you may have thought you did, but now, you know you don’t—and you don’t know who they are either. You may have thought you did, but you don’t. You don’t know a damn thing about any single day they’ve spent on earth. You go through the village, or the villages, but you don’t really see them—Hollywood threw acid in both your eyes before you were seven years old. You’re blind, that’s the first thing you realize is that you’re blind. Later you begin to see—something. And, then, you begin to see why you couldn’t see. But, at first—damn, you know more about the Mississippi cracker, even though you hate him and you know he hates you. And then”—looking up at me, with those eyes—”you see how people try to hold on to what they know, no matter how ugly it is. It’s better,” and she laughed, “than nothing!”

She finished her Stroganoff, wiped her lips carefully with her napkin, and picked up her wine.

“But maybe what’s been happening to you all your life will keep happening to you in Africa, too—why not? Everything has happened there already, you just weren’t present. Like, you don’t know what tribe produced you, and you don’t even know what that means, but the people watching you, in Africa, they know. They don’t even have to think about it—they know. And are they remembering what they last did to you, or what you last did to them?

“The old man, my friend, didn’t think that any of that would matter very much, in Africa, in what he called the ‘long’ future. But he expects me to live to about a hundred, and that’s in what I guess he would call the ‘short’ future. So—I began to see that I would not be able to understand anything that anyone was saying to me unless I began to hear—to trust—another language.” She frowned and smiled, her forehead as tense as music. “But you cannot hear another language, unless you’ve heard it already. And you certainly didn’t want to hear it, the first time!”

I looked around the place again. The evening people were beginning to arrive. They had dressed to be seen, they were dressed to be “out.” I don’t know why, but, almost for the first time, or for the first time so sharply, I found their procession moving. They all seemed, vaguely, like refugees. Many of them were refugees, or had so begun their lives in America. In one way, they were certainly more at home in America than Julia or I could claim to be; and yet, in another way, in a way that Julia and I were not, they were homeless. I wondered how much this had to do with what one remembered of home, with how much one could carry out, or with how much had to be left behind. And left behind, after all, how, and in what hands, or even, come to think of it, where? Does anyone dare remember? Is it possible? If she had not been stricken still and dumb by her last sight of the flaming city, perhaps Lot’s wife could tell us—perhaps, indeed, she does. But memory cannot be a pillar of salt, standing watch over a dead sea: we need a new vocabulary.

Julia, too, looked over at the people, couples, families, being led to their tables. It was a Sunday, and it seemed to me, therefore, that family was more in evidence than usual. Grandmothers, plump, with brooches on the ample bosoms, hair rinsed silver or blue, made up with a discretion which, yet, owed something to television, and their daughters, or daughters-in-law, smooth, polished to a high gloss, hair artfully free, and tumbling. The winter air had stung the skin, quite beautifully, to life, and their eyes glowed with the pleasures of safety. The men were proprietary, with a muted Sunday cheerfulness, but seemed to be very proud of their families, very solicitous of their children. I had once envied these people, or so I had thought. I didn’t anymore, but it was nice to watch them in a setting in which we did not seem to menace each other. They, also, glanced casually at Julia and me, seeming to feel a similar ease and relief.

I watched a grandmother, a delicately boned lady, with auburn-and-silver hair, cut short. She was wearing a copper-colored two-piece suit, very smart, an emerald brooch, and matching earrings. She had to have been extremely beautiful when young, with that kind of fragile, breathless, wide-eyed beauty one associates, for some reason, with Vienna. On one hand, she wore a wedding ring; the other hand was bare. There was no one at the table who could have been her husband; she was with her daughter, or her son, and her grandchildren.

Well, suddenly I saw her, as she might have been, years ago, in, let us say, Vienna; saw the nervous, bony hands, the wide mouth, the big, dark eyes, the simple, tasteful outfit she would have been wearing then—somewhere in Vienna, in an office, in a room, in a restaurant. I could not hear what she was saying, but her eyes conveyed her inability to believe that she had been marked for death, and was now about to be carried away, to die. I could not hear what she was saying because no one could hear what she was saying. Her jewelry was taken from her, and thrown into a box. Someone who did not look unkind stripped her of her simple, tasteful outfit, and took her shoes. Then someone signaled, pushed, or pulled her, and she took her place in line, and followed everybody—the way one follows the airport guide, not too unlike the way one follows the waitress to the table. With the whole world refusing to listen, or to watch, she arrived, naked, at Golgotha.

She did not remember it. Perhaps the wedding band remembered, flashing briefly now, as she reached across the table to ruffle one of her grandchildren’s hair. Perhaps dreams were her testimony, perhaps terrors were her proof, perhaps one eyelid twitched violently at certain subway stops, and she took long baths because she was unable to step under a shower: this proves the deep and endless effect of the event, but may or may not be due to what we call memory.

I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible—indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.

This cannot be done by memory, but by looking toward tomorrow, and so, to undo the horror, we repeat it.

This is, perhaps, why I so often thought of safety when I watched these so lately baptized Americans, and why I thought of them as homeless. They had to believe in safety, who on earth could blame them? But I knew that they were not safe: if I was not safe in my country, if no viable social contract had been made, or honored, with me, then no one could be safe here. I may not believe that safety exists anywhere, but it certainly cannot exist among such dishonorable people. They did not want to hear this—now that they were the Americans, I was the stranger—I couldn’t blame them, and I held my peace. Still, I had to wonder what their memory made of their ordeal: which could never have so mercilessly overtaken them, had they not believed themselves to be safe. So it was true, after all, however odd and brutal: I knew there was no hiding place down here; they were homeless, I was home.

She pursed her lips, looking very somber. “I’m glad to be back. But—that’s the same question they asked me over there. And they weren’t wrong.”

“I mean, it wasn’t a bullshit, my-African-sister kind of thing. The ones who came on like that just despised you, and wanted to find a way to use you. No. The question was serious. There was something true in it, though I still don’t know how to put it into words. It comes out of a place, anyway, without words, somewhere where the question is the answer.”

She looked up at me, as though she were wondering if she made any sense. I didn’t know, yet; she did, and she didn’t. She did, that is, if she did: I was all attuned to her.

Something she saw in my face made her smile. “Well, I’m trying to get it together, brother. The diaspora didn’t happen in a day.” We both laughed. “But I mean—we’ve been raised to think that a question is one thing, and the answer is another—and we always say, the answer. But it may not be like that.” She smiled. “Just think of all the people you watch going through their whole lives looking for the answer, waiting for the answer—and never dealing with the question. So—I really just had to accept the question as saying something tremendous about—me.”

She stopped, still smiling, and toyed with the cigarettes on the table. Our waitress came, and we ordered dessert—chocolate mousse for Julia, Russian cream for me—and coffee. It was past four o’clock. My date with Ruth was at seven thirty.

And I suddenly wondered what I would tell Ruth about this afternoon; wondered, for the first time, what I would tell her about Julia. Julia, for the first time, was someone I would have to try to clarify to another.

And I looked at her as though I were already trying to form the words in my mind, or as though I were about to say good-bye. But I had already said good-bye to Julia, and I realized, abruptly, and absolutely, that I was never going to say good-bye to her again, nor she to me. We had done that, and it hadn’t been any fun at all, and we’d never, thank heaven, have to go through that again. We had accepted our terms, or perhaps, we had dictated them; it made no difference now. Too much joined us for us ever to be pulled apart: our love was here to stay.

And I hummed a bar or two of that song, in fact, while Julia looked at me, ironically, her chin resting on one fist.

“There,” she said, “that’s a very good example—of the question being the answer, I mean.”

Our dessert came, and we ate, for a while, in silence. Then Julia said, looking down, “He told me that I was not barren, that childbirth takes many forms, that regret is a kind of abortion, that sorrow is the only key to joy.” She looked up. “I don’t know. But he gave me something to think about— maybe he gave me a way to think about it. He made me begin to look forward, instead of looking back.”

She looked down again. “And—I wanted to see you—because—somehow—I feel differently. I’m not happy, but—I’m not tormented, as I was. I wanted you to know. You deserve to know. And there’s no one else I could tell. Oh,” and she looked up at me again, “one day, I’ll tell you other things. It was a nightmare for me, I didn’t know who I was. But that was very important—to know I didn’t know. It was strange to be looked on, not merely as yourself, but as part of something other, older, vaster. I hated it. But now that I’m back here, among all these people, who think that everything begins, and ends, with them, it all begins to make: sense.” She shook her head, laughed, looked up. “I don’t know what that word sense means anymore, but I’m learning to trust what I don’t know.” She leaned over, surprising me, and took my hand. “Maybe that’s all I wanted to tell you. So you’d be at ease in your mind about me, and be free.”

I took her hand in both of mine. I know that we looked like lovers, and it was beautiful to realize that, in truth, at last, we were.

“Thank you for that,” I said. “But what I’m mainly going to do with my freedom is watch over those I love.”

“That’s a two-way street,” she said. She watched me for a moment. “You’ve been somewhere, too.”

We left the place around six. I managed to find a taxi, and I put her in it, and I walked home, scarcely believing that I could be so happy, or so free. Nothing, after all, had been lost. We were going to live.

That is a somewhat curious statement, and relates to what was to become a part of Jimmy’s agony: but I must let the statement stand.

I do not at all agree with Jimmy’s assessment of his responsibility, and Jimmy will be forced to agree with me as his agony subsides. I watched it happen, after all, without quite knowing what I was watching, but one thing was very clear to me: Jimmy made Arthur happy. There is no other way to put it. I saw my brother happy, for the first time in our lives.

When someone you love is happy, you have been given a great gift; you are the honored guest at a rare celebration. If you are burdened, the joy of your brother lightens your burden, if you are crawling on your belly, his joy brings you to your feet. It’s true: my soul is a witness. After days, or weeks, of despair, and inertia, you are given the force to go out and contend for the rent money, and to get your watch out of the pawnshop. The happiness of someone you love proves that life is possible. Your own horrors, whatever they may be, must simply await your return from the celebration—there can be no question of your taking them with you. And there they sit, indeed, in your room, when you return, looking baleful and neglected, and you realize that some horrors need you far more that you need them, and, mercilessly, you begin to clean house.

But in truth, I, too, then, was very happy, not only because I had found Ruth, but because I had not lost Julia. These two truths were related: I might not have been free, for Ruth, or anyone, if Julia had been lost. And I might never have known why I wasn’t free, might never, consciously, have made the connection: it was only when the cloud lifted, when I saw Julia again, that I realized how dense the cloud had been, how long I had been wandering. Oh, I had responsibilities, commitments, a privacy of pride (or a pride of privacy) and a relatively strong will. These are not trivial attributes, but I know what they can, and cannot do. They can help you to put on your armor, and teach you how to wear it, but they cannot help you to take it off. Something itches, something burns, something, finally, fatally, begins to stink. And when you begin to be engulfed by your own odor, you dare not let anyone near you, and your life becomes a matter of ritual and evasion. It is true that I had Arthur, but Arthur was a grown-ass man—my brother, not my ward—and if I could not, so to speak, buy my own ticket to the concert, he would soon have no choice but to have me locked out of the hall: I was not his ward, either.

So my West End Avenue apartment was a kind of joyful tabernacle that winter, as my thirty-second year began to end, as my thirty-third year, incredibly, beautifully, blew trumpets in the distance.

Julia was seldom there. She was working all the time. Her absence, somewhat to her surprise, had had the effect of increasing her value; she was in at the very beginning of a kind of high-fashion African craze. Her journey had also given her another, more haunting quality, and, according to Jimmy, Broadway, Hollywood, and television producers were on the phone, and Julia had actually read a few scripts: after which, again according to Jimmy, “Julia thinks modeling is about as low as she wants to sink.” To some extent—indeed, to a very important extent—I could guess Julia’s state from Jimmy’s, for his eye was always on that sparrow, and, more than that, Jimmy always trusted me. Just as he knew that I knew he loved my brother, he knew I loved his sister.

And I could gauge, yet more vividly, Arthur’s state from Jimmy’s. When I was thirty-two, Arthur was twenty-five, and Jimmy was twenty-one. Twenty-one is a cunning, carnivorous, but far from devious age. Neither Arthur nor Jimmy could ever really hide anything, nor did they ever, it must be said, when the chips were down, try: but Arthur was far more veiled, especially, of course, in his relation to Jimmy, around me. I thought Arthur was very funny—downright, as the old folks would say, “cute.” Here came Jimmy, bouncing in, in the canvas shit-kickers which had replaced the sneakers, wearing Arthur’s duffel coat, blue jeans, and a sweater, glowing like a planet, kissing Ruth, whom he called “Mother Mattie,” throwing his arms around me, and heading, of course, for the kitchen, rubbing his hands, and complaining about the cold, and yelling behind him, “Hey, old gospel warrior, you ain’t had nothing to eat all day! What you want me to fix you?”

This to Arthur, who, very soberly, has more or less limped in behind him, doing his best to look exasperated, and dissembling the pleasure he cannot hide by throwing his smile at Ruth, or me—we always caught it—and then, frowning, under the necessity of answering Jimmy’s yell, in the utterly doomed hope of shutting him up before he reveals all the secrets of the chateau, “I didn’t hear you ask Hall for permission to go into his icebox, man!”

Jimmy (at the door of the kitchen, bottle of Scotch in one hand, loaf of bread in the other): Would you like a ham or fried chicken or spare rib sandwich? You got to eat something, baby. Your brother don’t want you to starve. (To me) Do you?

Me: Certainly not.

Jimmy: I’ll fix you a drink first. You want Scotch or vodka? (To me) Where’s your vodka?

Me: In the cabinet, under the sink—you know.

Jimmy: Oh. Yeah. (To Arthur) Which is it?

Ruth: You fix the drinks, Jimmy. I’ll fix the food.

Jimmy: Okay, Mother Mattie. (To Arthur) Which is it?

Arthur (ceasing to struggle): Scotch. Double. Rocks. (Under his breath): Motherfucker.

Ruth goes into the kitchen, and Arthur looks at me—a very moving look, a mocking scowl, a question, an irrepressible joy. And I laugh.

And he looks at me again, more than ever my baby brother, and I dare to say, “I love you. Don’t forget it. And, whatever makes you happy, that’s what you supposed to do, and whoever makes you happy, that’s where you supposed to be.”

He looks at me again, and something seems to fall from him. Then, “Okay. I love you, too.”

Then Jimmy comes out of the kitchen, with Arthur’s drink, and hands it to him, and there is something very moving in the way he does this. It is probably impossible to describe it. Every gesture any human being makes is loaded, is a confession, is a revelation: nothing can be hidden, but there is so much that we do not want to see, do not dare to see. The boy had poured the stiff drink Arthur ordered into what I knew he considered to be a special glass, in fact, Arthur’s glass: a square, heavy glass, with a wide silver band. He did not kneel as he handed Arthur his drink, as, for example, a Greek or an Elizabethan page might have done, but he was compelled to lean forward, and, unconsciously, he bowed. I was aware of this, perhaps, only because I was watching Jimmy’s face, and I saw how his eyes searched Arthur’s: his devotion was in his eyes, and that was why he seemed to bow. It was mocking, wry, niggerish, salty, but it was love, and Arthur, as he took the glass, looked into Jimmy’s eyes, and seemed to kiss him, on the lips, and on the brow. And both were very happy. Arthur raised his glass to Jimmy, then to his lips, and Jimmy moved away, back into the kitchen. We heard his voice, and Ruth’s, and their laughter.

Jimmy and Arthur spent all their time together, really, either at 18th Street—“Man, we finally made it up all them stairs!” Jimmy once irrepressibly crowed to Ruth and me while Arthur scowled, and blushed—or at the Dey Street loft, where they also worked, practiced, rehearsed, around the clock. It was beautiful to watch them; freedom is an extraordinary spectacle. It was a tremendous moment in all our lives, I remember it, until this hour, as the turning point: and Tony was conceived then. And when I say that it was largely because of Jimmy that Arthur became: a star: I do not mean that this possibility had entered either of their minds. Each learned, working, enormous things from the other, but they were far from calculating a public conquest: at that moment, indeed, it was not only the farthest thing from their minds, but would have been, had they thought of it, a trap to be avoided. People who think that they wish to become famous have no idea how the process works fame cannot be summoned; it strikes, like a hammer, and the trick, thereafter, is to stand up under what has seemed to be a mortal blow. No, they were happy, they were working, they were learning to trust the unanswerable truth that each was indispensable to the other—should they lose each other, each would have to learn to live all over again—and, if I say that it was largely due to Jimmy that Arthur became The Soul Emperor! Mr. Arthur Montana! I mean that Jimmy’s presence in Arthur’s life, Jimmy’s love, altered Arthur’s estimate of himself, gave him a joy and a freedom he had never known before, invested him with a kind of incandescent wonder, and he carried this light on stage with him, he moved his body differently since he knew that he was loved, loved, and, therefore, knew himself to be both bound and free, and this miracle, the unending wonder of this unending new day, filled his voice with multitudes, summoned, from catacombs unnameable, whosoever will.

Arthur’s first hit record, for example, was more than a year in the future, but here is, partly, how it came about: In the Florida church, on that far-off afternoon, when Jimmy had first played for Arthur, Arthur, after two, or three, improvisations, had thought that they would stop and that we would all go back down to the church basement, where we would wash our faces and change our shirts, if we had shirts to change into. We might have just enough time to drive somewhere, for a quick drink.

So he stopped, and turned toward Jimmy to indicate a break; but Jimmy, very deliberately, with great impertinence, and looking Arthur straight in the eye, banged out the opening of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

Arthur caught his breath, and nearly cracked up, but had no choice but to follow Jimmy’s lead:

Grant it, Jesus,
if You please.
Daily, walking, close to Thee,
let it be,
dear Lord,
let it be.

I had no idea, then, of course, how direct, and, as it were, sacrilegious, Jimmy was being—considering the uses to which we put the temple of the Holy Ghost, sacrilegious is a very strange word—but, however that may be, his call was very direct and moving, and brought from Arthur a response which seemed to ring out over those apocalyptic streets, and caused me, and the two men standing at the church door with me, to look back and see where that sound was coming from.

This song became for them, then, theirs, a sacrament, a stone marking a moment on their road: the point of no return, when they confessed to each other, astounded, terrified, but having no choice, in the hearing of men, and in the sight of God.

Arthur was never to have another accompanist like Jimmy, and Jimmy was never to have another singer like Arthur. This is a mystery to which one must, simply, say Amen: it will never be deciphered. One has seen dancers, for example, quite extraordinary alone, or with whatever partner—and then one sees the two dancers together, who seem to have been created to be together, from the moment the earth was formed. Together, they accomplish mysteries which neither could dream of confronting alone, and their defiance of space and death lifts us, also, shivering and shining, up into the middle of the air.

Arthur and Jimmy were like that. I have rarely heard, or seen, a freedom like that, when they played and sang together. It had something to do with their youth, of course, it had something to do with the way they looked, it had something to do with their vows, with their relation to each other: but it was more, much more than that. It was a wonder, a marvel—a mystery: I call it holy. It caused me to see, in any case, that we are all limited, and, mostly, misshapen instruments, and yet, if we can, simultaneously, confront and surrender, extraordinary fingers can string from us the response to our mortality.

They worked their behinds off, for example, on this old number, but, by the time they hit the last note, it was true for everyone who could hear, and, even, I swear, for those who could only feel vibrations:

I can tell the world,
about this!
I can tell the nations,
I’m blessed!
Tell them what Jesus,
He has done!
Tell them
the Comforter has come,
and He brought
joy, joy, joy,
unto my soul!

So there we were after all, the four of us, reunited, Julia, Jimmy, Arthur, me, bound together, as it now turned out, for life, and with the addition of Ruth, who arrived, simply, and transformed the space which had been waiting for her.

Arthur and Jimmy are in the Dey Street loft, working on “Lift Him Up,” which is one of the numbers they are doing for Christmas, at one of the great Harlem tabernacles.

I rarely visited Arthur’s Dey Street pad, not because I didn’t like it, or didn’t feel welcome there, but because it was so much more his workshop than it was his home. That’s, suddenly, a chilling way to put it; I don’t think I put it to myself that way, then. If I say, I hardly remember what it looked like, that’s because of all the time I had to spend down there, putting things in crates and boxes, closing Arthur’s eyes.

It was on the top floor of a three- or four-story building. The inferior stories were occupied by various small businesses, visibly and swiftly entering bankruptcy, if one were to judge from the faces one sometimes saw. All day long, throughout the building, motors whined and rumbled, so that the building always seemed to be purring, like some great cat. After five or six o’clock, the purring ceased, the building, and the entire neighborhood, became silent and empty. Virtually no one lived down here. This was perfect for Arthur, who could experiment as loudly as he wished all night, and indeed, for that matter, all day. His music scarcely troubled the steady industrial roar.

It was marvelously retired and peaceful on Saturday after-noons; and this is a Saturday.

Oh,
the world is hungry
for the living bread.

Arthur sings this in a low voice, standing at the window, watching the shuttered windows of the luncheonette across the street. In front of it lean two winos, white, sharing a bottle, seeming not to care about the cold, though the frayed jacket of the one and the torn, black raincoat of the other afford them absolutely no protection. Wretchedness does not, so far as Arthur has been able to tell, appear to have the power to transcend race, or, more accurately, habit: white winos travel, in the main, with whites, and blacks with blacks. They appear to be utterly oblivious to everything and everyone outside their world, are aware of others only as a means to another bottle. They are a great mystery for Arthur, he wonders what hit them so hard, so soon—for many of them are young, their youth seems tentative and frozen beneath the shining sweat and grime.

The loft stretches the entire length of the top floor, halfheartedly divided by a clothesline with a sheet draped over it. Behind this sheet is the bed: a king-size mattress on a wooden frame, close to the floor, covered, in the daytime, with a heavy dark blue blanket, and many loud pillows. There is the bathroom, and the rudiments of a kitchen lean against the far, blank wall.

Lift the Savior up,

for men to see.

In the front of the loft are Arthur’s piano, records, tape recording apparatus, sheet music, books; all more or less contained, or controlled, by a system of wooden cabinets. There is a sofa, chairs, a big table. On the walls, photographs: Paul, Florence, Arthur, me; Arthur, with some of his friends, or co-workers; Julia; and, now, of course, Jimmy; an indifferent painting or two; and posters, like theatrical posters, announcing Arthur, announcing others.

Jimmy, wearing an old green jump suit, is sitting at the piano, fooling around, but also, listening to Arthur. Arthur is in blue jeans, a sweater, and sandals, and is walking up and down, combing his hair.

Trust Him,
and do not doubt
the words that He said:
I’ll draw all men
unto Me!

And Arthur goes behind the sheet, to the bathroom, to check on his hair, and to get rid of the comb.

Jimmy continues his investigations, very peacefully, with Arthur’s tempo ringing in his head. Arthur’s tempo is the meaning of the song, Arthur’s tempo, and the key he and Jimmy strike together. Or the song is revealed as it is delivered, and by the manner in which it is delivered. Sometimes Jimmy responds to Arthur’s line—his call—by repeating it precisely, sometimes he questions or laments, sometimes he responds from close by, and, sometimes, from far away. Sometimes they both feel imprisoned by the song, leaping to go further than the song, or Arthur’s tempo, allow: then they sweat hardest, learn most. There is always a beat beneath the beat, another music beneath the music, and beyond.

Arthur comes back, his hair looking, as it should, extremely combed, and they go to work: not only on “Lift Him Up,” but on the other two numbers they are scheduled to sing for Christmas, which is, now, a little more than a week away. For a wonder, the phone does not ring, all the afternoon long, as they rehearse, call and respond, call and respond. This sound rings through the canyon of the darkening, deserted street, as night comes down.

And, if I,
be lifted,
up, from the earth,
I will draw all men
unto Me!

Around seven thirty, eight o’clock, Jimmy throws up his hands, yawns, and disappears behind the sheet, to go to the bathroom. Arthur also yawns, somewhat astonished by the hour—he has been on his feet all afternoon—walks to the window, peers through the pane into the empty street, then lights a cigarette, and throws himself on his back, on the sofa.

Jimmy returns with a beer and a Scotch. He hands the whiskey to Arthur, then sits down on the floor, the back of his head against Arthur’s knee.

He reaches for Arthur’s cigarette, uses it to light his own, then hands Arthur’s cigarette back to him.

“I feel like we moving. But sometimes, I don’t know—I’m not sure—I know where.”

Arthur pulls himself up, putting his feet on the floor, and leans forward, holding his drink between both hands.

“But I don’t mind feeling that,” says Arthur. “In fact, I dig that. It’s a little scary. But maybe, that’s what I’ve been looking for.”

“You ever think,” asks Jimmy, “of branching out from gospel?—you know, blues, ballads, all the other music you got in you.”

Arthur says, after a moment, “I’ve thought about it. People ask me that all the time.”

Arthur says this haltingly, with wonder, as though he is translating the words as he speaks.

“Oh, come on, baby, you left home a long time ago, you ain’t nothing but a gypsy—you made me leave my happy home.” Then, he turns his head, laughing, to look into Arthur’s face—he has caught himself by surprise. “Hey, dig. For example. We could do something great with that.”

“You. Are. Sick. Two cats, two black cats, and we supposed to be the noble motherfucking phallic savage, doing that number? Why don’t we do “What Did You See in Her?” ’

“Man, I am not suggesting that we turn ourselves into a freak show, and try to conquer the freak market. I’ve had my day in that market, that zoo, you didn’t get back here; believe me, a moment too soon.”

He rubs his cheek against Arthur’s knee for a second, then straightens, and sips his beer.

“But we could get away with ‘Since I Fell for You.’ You won’t be singing it to me—it’s not a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald toothpaste ad”—they both crack up again—”it’s a recollection, a barroom confession, you’ll be singing to all the other people out there, and I’ll just be bearing witness. Hey—listen—”

He rises, and goes to the piano. The chord he strikes echoes his introduction to “Just a Closer Walk”: for a moment, Arthur, sitting still on the sofa, is not certain he knows where Jimmy is heading. Then, the melody resolves itself, comes to the fore. Arthur moans it, sitting on the sofa—he sings the last lines:

I guess I’ll never see the light
I get the blues most every night,
since I fell for you.

Arthur’s last note is Jimmy’s last note, something like the last note struck on a drum: the piano makes no comment. But the last note continues to gather in the strangely summoned silence.

“Only,” says Arthur, after a moment, “I don’t get the blues—since I fell for you.”

“Oh, shit,” says Jimmy, “I never thought of that,” and walks back to the sofa and takes Arthur in his arms.

After a moment, Arthur puts his hands on Jimmy’s shoulders, pushing him up, in order to look into his eyes.

“When you talk about the song, man, what you really mean—is—you don’t want to be consoled—you don’t want”—he laughs, but it is a very dry laugh—“no consolation.”

“That’s never true,” says Jimmy, and looks at Arthur, and takes him in his arms again.

And this time, Arthur holds Jimmy as though one of them is about to die. He holds on, holds on, he does not want to hurt the boy, does not really want Jimmy to feel, to bear, his weight, to endure his odors, to drown in his tears. Yet for no reason that he knows, as he holds on to Jimmy, he begins to weep great, scalding, salty tears, tears deeper than tears produced by pride, humiliation, tears deeper than any vocabulary. He does not know why he is weeping. He is astounded by the force of his tears, astounded that he cannot stop, amazed that he can weep at all, and in the arms of a boy: for Arthur, too, is the elder brother.

Jimmy curls his green, jump-suited body around Arthur’s arms and legs, puts his face against Arthur’s salty face, his fingers uncomb Arthur’s hair, he says nothing, just holds on.

Slowly, Arthur’s body ceases to shake, but he does not relax his hold on Jimmy. For a very long moment, they do not move at all. The canyon is absolutely still: proving that there can be peace in the valley.

“Well—last time I looked”—and they laugh, laugh, now, as hard as Arthur cried, and in the tremendous luxury of their private space, free, on each other, to stretch out.

Yes. But what is Arthur doing, lying on his back, on the floor of the basement of that London pub?

I have tried, every which-a-way, not to go there, and yet, I haven’t tried as hard as Arthur tried, Arthur, who simply, finally, saw it coming, saw that he couldn’t avoid it, had been running toward it too long, had been alone too long, didn’t trust, really, any other condition. Jimmy came too late.

But if I say that, I’ve got, equally, to consider the possibility that Jimmy came too soon, was a part of his landscape, if not a part of his life, from the very beginning of that life. According to Arthur, he never noticed Jimmy when they were children; but he noticed him enough to be nice to him, on that far-off Sunday afternoon, when his mother slapped him. He noticed him enough for Jimmy to know that he was noticed; and who knows how that helped Jimmy through his valley? Which, furthermore, certainly, called him down too soon. Or too early, or too late. I don’t know. I’m left with what I don’t know.

It would simplify matters, perhaps, if I could say that we don’t know what we don’t want to know: but I, we, are not that simple. We know. Almost everything we do is designed to protect us from what we know: consider the uses to which we put the troublesome past tense of the verb.

So if I say, I’m left with what I don’t know, I could, equally, be saying, with tears in my eyes, I knew! But, Lord, how I hoped I didn’t know—how I hoped my hand could hold up the sky!

Well. Let us go back to the loft. There they are, on the sofa still, they are not laughing now. They are very quiet, in each other’s arms, and Dey Street is absolutely silent. Arthur or Jimmy has drawn the black monk’s-cloth blinds. The only light in the room is the light around the piano, and the very faint light, filtering through the bedsheet, from the kitchen.

Looking down into Arthur’s face, relentlessly uncombing his hair, allowing all of his weight to rest on Arthur.

Jimmy shifts his weight, pushing both of them deeper into the sofa, rubs his cheek against Arthur’s, murmuring, “I asked you first.”

Jimmy laughs, one hand tangled in the hair at the nape of Arthur’s neck. “No. We got eggs and pork chops, some leftover red beans and rice, and a chicken wing.” He leans up. “Bread, a little stale, but I can heat it up, you know. Some beer, a little whiskey. I mean—we don’t have to go out, not unless you just want to go out.” He grins. “I can get it together, now.”

“I’ll nibble on the chicken wing, that’s all the help I’ll need. Ill let you set the table.”

Then they both look over at the table, which is piled high with the debris of the afternoon’s work.

“Maybe,” says Arthur, “I’ll let you set the table, while I get into the pots.”

“Or,” says Jimmy, “we can eat in the kitchen, and leave all that where it is, until tomorrow—it’s all going to end up there tomorrow, anyway.”

“Just lie easy till I call you, baby.” He picks up Arthur’s glass. “I’ll freshen your drink.”

Arthur remains, in the dim light, on his back, on the sofa, in the loft in which, in fact, he has always lived alone. He had hoped, for a long time, that Crunch would come to visit him, even, perhaps, come to stay. Then he had begun to see that Crunch would never do this, that he could not: neither come to visit, nor come to stay. This was not because Crunch did not love him, but for a more terrible reason.

It cannot be said that he is listening, but he hears Jimmy, humming in the kitchen: somewhere, that is, behind the halfhearted partition. The melody eludes him, comes and goes, like a headache, but he knows that he has always known it.

Jimmy comes back with a fresh drink. Arthur sits up, putting his feet on the floor, and Jimmy puts his drink in his hands. Wordless, humming, he disappears again.

Arthur sits staring at the black monk’s-cloth-covered windows. There is a sound in the street, someone shouting, or singing, from far away. A car door slams, this brief, brutal blow ringing through the canyon.

Arthur rises, walks to the window, and looks through the blinds. The street is as empty as it has always been, and as silent. Well, some brutally isolated figure seems to shuffle, slowly, around the near corner, out of view; not so very far away, tourists are beginning to clamor, at the Fulton Fish Market. Chinatown is within walking distance. He knows: he has walked the distance often enough.

He scratches his chest, he sips his drink, and wonders if he knows enough to know that he is happy.

For he is happy, even though he feels, obscurely, that happiness is not his right, that he has no right to be happy. He does not know why he has no right to be happy, and this is why he thinks of Crunch. He was happy, once, with Crunch, as Jimmy is happy, now, with him—the tune Jimmy is humming, in his fashion, is “Didn’t It Rain,” and he has, apparently, cut up some onions to go with the pork chops on the fire.

Arthur knows, too, furthermore, that he is not Crunch, any more than he is Jimmy, or that Jimmy is the other, younger, Arthur, and that Julia cannot be a threat to their love: perhaps: insofar as he knows now, or can know now. Love takes many forms and faces, and Julia, so far as Arthur can see, loves Jimmy, and no one else.

I could have told him that the truth was rougher than that, but time, distance, speech, and ourselves, are as real, as unanswerable, as love.

Arthur, nevertheless, is astounded by his happiness. It is as though someone, by mistake, gave him a wallet containing a fortune, thinking to do him a service, persuaded that they had seen him drop it. The wallet does not belong to him: but it is in his hands now, and the friendly stranger has vanished around the wintry corner. There is no one on the street to whom he can explain his dilemma, no one, certainly, to whom he can give the wallet: indeed, he cannot stand here very much longer, like a fool, holding the wallet in his hands. He will become an occasion of sin, in others. Whether he deserves it or not, he is happy, and what can he do with the money but spend it?

He thinks of Crunch, perhaps, because—this is not the way he puts it to himself, but it is something like this wonder which holds him at the window—he has never thought of joy as being a potential of the air one breathes, or of happiness as being as simple, for example, as the light in Jimmy’s eyes when Jimmy looks at him, or Jimmy’s utterly irreplaceable walk, or the two indentations just above Jimmy’s buttocks, placed there, obviously, for Arthur’s thumbs, and for no other reason—what other reason could there possibly be? Jimmy’s teeth, and Jimmy’s grin, his many odors—which are so many signals—his stormy and sometimes weather: clouds lifting, clouds gathering, stars, planets, milky ways, moons like craters, craters like moons, the sun, daybreak, nightfall, the rising and dropping of the sea, the dialogue of planets—all, within the narrow frame of a twenty-one-year-old boy, who, furthermore, wants the world to know that he belongs to Arthur. As, indeed, he does: Arthur has enough sense to know that he cannot drop the wallet in the gutter, cannot, as others might put it, drop the money and run.

And yet—the wallet will, one day, be empty, the money spent, God knows where. Happiness goes.

Ah, thinks Arthur, standing at the window, listening to the pork chops, the onions, and Jimmy, but to have it!—if only for just one time! And he smiles—scratches his chest, sips his drink, and smiles. And anyway, something in him knows that something, nevertheless, something, however the deal goes down, something, as the disaster of your happiness strikes the sewers, like the last note of a song, or the look in your mama’s or your daddy’s eyes, something, something, remains forever, and changes the air we breathe.

Happiness is humiliating, terrifying: what is one to do later? It has to become later before one sees that the question is vain, before one ceases to ask this question, but one is always afraid that later will be too late. Too late: so Arthur, now, stands at the window, knowing perfectly well that, in a moment, he will go behind the halfhearted partition, grab Jimmy by those two dimples just above his ass, growl, and bite, into the nape of his neck, sniffing the hair there, just like a cat, cup both his hands under Jimmy’s prick, and grind Jimmy’s behind against his own prick, playfully, while Jimmy protests—playfully—and lets the onions burn while he turns and takes Arthur in his arms: too late. The pork chops, too, may burn, unless Jimmy, as he often does, exhibits great presence of mind, and turns down the one flame, while both calming, and surrendering to the other Motherfucker. Ain’t you heard about food? You skinnier than that mule Abraham Lincoln promised us. Your brother see you now, he’d have my ass. Sit down and eat. I ain’t going nowhere. Without you. And you damn sure ain’t going no place without me, unless you going on stumps. Or crutches. And I ain’t going to buy you no crutches.

Jimmy laughs, and Arthur laughs: bewildered by his happiness, and, quiet as he hopes to keep it, terrified. He cannot believe that Jimmy loves him, cannot imagine what there is in him to love.

Ah. What is he doing on the floor in a basement of that historical city? That city built on the principle that he would have the grace to live, and, certainly, to die, somewhere outside the gates?

Perhaps I must now do what I have most feared to do: surrender my brother to Jimmy, give Jimmy’s piano the ultimate solo: which must also now, be taken as the bridge.

So: Arthur walks through the halfhearted partition, and, man, he bites me on the neck. He starts fooling around with me. I don’t mind that, in fact, I dig that, but my hands are all slippery with grease and onions, and I can’t move for a minute.

He turns me around and he kisses me, long enough for the chops to start burning. So I push him away, and I try to laugh, and I turn the pork chops over. I can feel him watching me. I’m happy, but I’m scared, too. I don’t know why. Well. I do know why, in a way. Those eyes, your brother’s eyes, are asking something of me which no one has ever asked before, something, maybe, which no one will ever ask again. You hope you can answer the question you see. You hope you can give what is asked of you. It’s the most important thing in the world, the only thing in the world, to be able to do that. What you can do hardly matters, if you can’t do that.

Now, sometimes, when I try to talk about Arthur, I feel like a freak. And, for whatever it’s worth, I guess I am a freak. But, dig it, baby, when I held your brother in my arms, when he had his arms around me, I didn’t feel like a freak then. Even when people started talking about us, the way they did, you remember, I really did not give a shit. I was only hurt because Arthur was hurt. But I will tell Great God Almighty, baby: I was in love with your brother.

It’s only since he left us, and I’ve been so alone and so unhappy, that all the other moral shit, what the world calls moral, started fucking with my mind. Like, why are you like this instead of like that? Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know? I know this: the question wouldn’t even come up if I wasn’t so alone, and so scared, wouldn’t come up, I mean, in my own mind. I’m scared, and I’d like to be safe, and nobody likes being despised. And, quiet as it’s kept, you can’t bear for anyone you love to be despised. I can’t break faith with Arthur, I can’t ride and hide away somewhere, and treat my love, and let the world treat my lover, like shit. I really cannot do that. And the world doesn’t have any morality. Look at the world. What the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That’s how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger—otherwise you can’t be sure you’re safe.

Look. I’ve been walking up and down my room, up and down my room, walking these streets, and driving these roads. And I miss my buddy, my lover, your brother, like there ain’t no language for it. So then you listen to the world, and you hear that consolation—ah! everybody knows I’m Jimmy Miller, and everybody knows I was tight with the late, great, Arthur Montana. Don’t none of these mothers know shit, man. They don’t know. They cannot afford to know. In the Book of Job, Job calls these cats “miserable comforters,” and Job was right. They want you to believe that it’s “psychological”—that we are psychological. What a crock of shit. If that was true, how could we sing, how could we know that the music comes from us, we build our bridge into eternity, we are the song we sing?

The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by the song. Ain’t no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song—that is not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the bottom of my balls, baby, that something hears him, something says, come here! and jumps on him just exactly like you jump on a piano or a sax or a violin or a drum and you make it sing the song you hear: and you love it, and you take care of it, better than you take care of yourself, can you dig it? but you don’t have no mercy on it. You can’t have mercy! That sound you hear, that sound you try to pitch with the utmost precision—and did you hear me? Wow!—is the sound of millions and millions and, who knows, now, listening, where life is, where is death?

I know. Maybe I sound this way because I can’t tease your brother no more, or look him in the eye, can’t watch him walk on stage, or into a room, will never, never, never again, grease his ashy elbows, and his spiky knees, never, again, have to find a way to tell him you really don’t hardly have no buns, man, and, so, you can’t buy these pants, because they make you look like you don’t have no ass. He was such a tired, black Puritan, your brother. He’d turn, and look at me, you know, like he was Ezekiel, or Saint Paul, or Isaiah—those desert cats didn’t have no ass, either, and they didn’t have no Jimmy to go down on them.

Sometimes I thought he hated me for the way—the ways, all the ways, I loved him. I couldn’t hide it, where was I to hide it? Every inch of Arthur was sacred to me.

I will testify that, to all the gods of the desert, and, when they have choked my throat with sand, the song that I have heard and learned to trust, my friend, at your brother’s knee, will still be ringing.

And will bring water back to the desert, that’s what the song is supposed to do, and that’s what my soul is a witness is about.

Think about where you would have had to go, to put those five unrelated words together, and make of the connection, a song.

Well. The sermon does not belong to the preacher. He, too, is a kind of talking drum. The man who tells the story isn’t making up a story. He’s listening to us, and can only give back, to us, what he hears: from us.

Like, it’s absolute bullshit, you know, when they are defending how they make their money—which is, also, exactly how they betray their children, and how their children are lost: when people are defending how they fuck, and get fucked, without kisses, and even without Vaseline: they are compelled to tell the people only what the people wish to hear.

Dig it: that means that they are better than the people to whom they tell nothing but lies.

So, now, you have become a liar, and everybody returns the favor you did them—sends back the elevator, as the French would put it—and tells you only what you want to hear.

Arthur got hurt, trapped, lost, somewhere in there. I had to deal with some of his old friends, lovers, leeches, from Paris to London to Amsterdam, to Copenhagen: all Arthur wanted was for the people he respected to respect him—the people who had made the music, from God knows who, to Satchmo, Mr. Jelly-Lord, Bessie, Mahalia, Miles, Ray, Trane, his daddy, and you, too, motherfucker, you! It was only when he got scared about what they might think of what he’d done to their song—our song—that he really started to be uptight about our love.

That wasn’t no easy scene, our love, but we did hang in there, baby, for almost fourteen years.

Arthur: is leaning on the bar of the London pub, alone. The pub is fairly crowded.

He is the only black person there, but gives off a reassuring accent: and everyone is distantly polite to their baffling, unpredicted, but indisputably American cousin.

Facing him, in the wall facing him, on the other side of the bar, is a small, brown, wooden service door, a door which swings, lightly, but remarkably, each time one of the staff enters, or exits, to accomplish this or that. He has been fascinated by the door, or has been thoughtlessly mesmerized by the door, for more than an hour: and, during this time—he does not realize this—he has moved only to lift his glass, or to order another whisky, or to light his cigarette. He does not realize how his long, black, silent immobility immobilizes the patrons of the London pub: who, whether or not they know it, are not accustomed to being ignored. To be ignored involves waiting to be recognized, or, as they might, once, have wistfully put it, discovered.

Jimmy is now thirty-five years old, Arthur is thirty-nine: and Jimmy and Arthur have, indeed, spent fourteen years together. I agree that this does not seem possible: but with or without our agreement, time passes, just like that.

Boy,
you sure took
me
for
one big ride.

He had sung that, as an encore, on the Paris music hall stage, for Jimmy, who had not been there. He had played his own piano, he had not, after all, been bad, not as far, in any case, as his audience had been able to hear. He had been drunk, stoned, in a state of fury and anguish and panic, and had certainly not, as far as he had heard himself, been good.

He had been certain that Jimmy was ashamed of him, and should have been ashamed of. him, and that that was the reason that Jimmy had not been there.

Yet the people—that void beyond him—roared. He was imprisoned, blinded, by the light, and had completely lost the sense of humor which had been his key to

boy,
don’t get too lost
in all I say.

He had always handled it as a funky, light, blues-ballad; now, last night, he couldn’t handle it at all, managing to get through it without entirely losing the beat—that is to say, the meaning—standing up, and bowing, and getting the fuck off that stage, pouring out saltwater, a flood of saltwater, from his eyes and his prick, in the toilet.

but, at the time,
I, really,
felt that way.

Now, he does not know what he feels, and a tremendous weight seems to gather, in his chest, and between his shoulder blades.

He wonders what I, his brother, Hall: what I think of him, really. He wonders if Paul, his father, is dead, in the grave, because he was ashamed of his son. And, at the very same moment that he knows that he knows better, he also knows that he does not know, will never be released from the judgment, or the terror, in his own eyes. For he knows that it is he, and only he, who so relentlessly demands the judgment, assembles the paraphernalia of the Judgment Day, selects the judges, demands that the trumpet sound. He wants to state his case, and be released from the judgment: but he can be released from the judgment only by dropping the case.

Lord knows,
I’ve got to stop believing
in all your lies,

but anguish is real, and has massive consequences. It is true that our judgment flatters the world’s indifference, and makes of us accomplices to our doom: but to apprehend this, and change it, demands a larger apprehension of our song.

For, in fact, at this moment in Arthur’s life, Jimmy has packed his bags, in the Paris hotel, has wearily, sternly, dried his weeping eyes, has called the desk to wake him in the morning and to have a cab ready to take him to the airport, where he will take the plane for London. He regrets the lover’s quarrel of the night before, but now, intends merely to get back to his lover and travel with him to New York: and the book he opens, after he has poured himself a drink and stretched out on the bed, is not Lamentations. He is a little worried, true, but one is always worried by the conundrums of the space to be conquered in order to be joined with the conundrum of one’s lover. He has not the remotest thought of judgment, judges, or trumpets. In fact, to tell the truth, Jimmy simply misses Arthur, and wants Arthur in his arms; gets a mild hard-on, and shifts his weight in bed, still reading. He is reading, as one always does at such moments, something by Agatha Christie, and will have got to the end of it before realizing that he has read it before: Jimmy claims that he has read, in his life, exactly one Agatha Christie novel, but that he has read it about eighty-seven times.

And Ruth and I are waiting for them in New York, Ruth deciding what to feed them, Julia, who will do the actual shopping, writing down these decisions as Ruth delivers them over the phone. I just want to get some sleep before the two voyaging monsters come in, because I certainly won’t get much sleep once they have come in, and the kids—more accurately, Tony: Odessa is too young—wondering what their uncles will have brought them.

Arthur leans on the bar. He has begun to be aware that others in the pub are aware of him. He is aware, that is, suddenly, of his notoriety, of himself as a famous singer, standing, drinking alone, in some obscure London pub. In fact, it may or may not be obscure, he doesn’t know. He simply wandered in, sometime ago.

He walked from Piccadilly, and now, he knows where he is. He is not far from his hotel.

He is aware of his notoriety in another way: a pair of Irish eyes—he is certain that they are Irish—are staring at him, have been staring at him, from a table in a far corner of the room.

It cannot be said—tonight—that Arthur is tempted by, or is able to respond to, the astoundingly open confession, or the hope, or the plea, in those eyes. On another night, yes, in this city, or in other cities, yes: but promises can be made with the body as sacred as those made in speech, and Arthur has, according to Arthur, defaulted too often on these promises. So he straightens his shoulders, seeing himself, or, rather, his attire. We do not change very much, really, and so Arthur is wearing black boots, old black corduroy trousers, a gray turtleneck sweater, and a pea jacket. And his thinning hair is just beginning to be sprinkled with salt.

He has a moment of panic as he straightens, for he has one of the bad habits of a star, or at least, of a star so beleaguered and improbable, which is to wander about with no identification and no cash.

Both delicately and courageously, he plunges into his pea jacket, relieved to discover his wallet, passport, traveler’s checks, and, the Lord alone knows how, some English pounds.

The fact of the English pounds is due, entirely, he realizes, to Jimmy, and he smiles as he takes a five-pound note out of his wallet.

He is aware of the unsmiling Irish eyes at the far corner of the room, is aware of the other eyes on him, and he wants to get away from here, suddenly, away from these people, these eyes, this death. For, it is death, the human need to which one can find no way of responding, the need incapable of recognizing itself.

And then, again, something hits him, lightly, in the chest, and between the shoulder blades. He leans, lightly, on the bar, holding onto his five-pound note. He thinks that it must be gas, indigestion, he will go to the toilet, as soon as he pays his bill.

He pays his bill, but his hands are shaking, he puts his change in his pockets just any old way, and crosses the room. The toilet is at the far end of the room, through a narrow door, and down a flight of steps.

The journey across the room is the longest journey he has ever forced himself to make. He starts down the steps, and the steps rise up, striking him in the chest again, pounding between his shoulder blades, throwing him down on his back, staring down at him from the ceiling, just above his head.

I had a dream the other night. Jimmy and Julia and Arthur and me were standing on a country porch. It was raining, but we were sheltered from the rain. It fell before us, like a curtain. We could see outside this curtain, but nobody could see us.

It was as though we had all been sitting in the house, talking, or playing cards, or playing music, and someone had said, Oh, children! Come, look here! Look, over yonder!

And so, in my dream, Julia, who has been sitting in the house, writing a poem, puts the poem in the belt at her waist—a heavy belt, I remember it from somewhere, but I don’t have time to ask her anything—and Jimmy, who has been cutting Arthur’s hair with some big, cruel, golden scissors, and Arthur, who has been sort of weaving the hair as it falls to the floor into something he wants to give Jimmy, and me, I, Hall, who seems to have been chopping wood, so that we can have a fire tonight, all go running to the porch. I have the feeling that it might have been Paul’s voice, but it might have been Ruth’s voice: she is somewhere in this dream, either holding my elbow, a little bit behind me, or talking to Florence.

But Florence is in the rain pouring down on the road, just beyond this country porch. She is, at first, the only person I see, and I see her because of the mother-of-pearl comb in her hair which calls the rain, flashing on the comb, like lightning flashes, or the pillar of cloud, by day. Amy is helping her to hold up Martha, and, just behind her, Sidney and Joel are trying to help each other up the blinding road.

I hold Tony on my shoulders; his hands cling to my hair. Odessa clings to my knee.

From the torrent of the road, Florence gives a warning, exasperated look: Oho, oho.

Paul flashes the magic silver locket my brother gave to me, and is covered by the rain. Oho—oho.

Then, everyone is laughing. I have made a fire. We have fed the children, and the children are in bed. We are all drenched from the rain, even though I don’t remember that we ever left the porch. The fire begins to dry us, at the same time that it makes us know how wet we are. And Arthur repeats his question.

The question torments me, like a song I once heard Arthur sing, and can’t now, in my dream, for the life of me, remember.

“I wish,” says Jimmy, busy with the brilliant scissors at Arthur’s rain forest of Senegalese hair, while Arthur’s fingers are busy with whatever garment it is that he is weaving for Jimmy, “that you’d just let the rain do whatever the rain is doing.”

Hurry down,
sunshine,
see what tomorrow brings.

The sun went down,
Tomorrow brought us
rain.

Then I do remember, in my dream, the beginning of a song I used to love to hear Arthur sing, Oh, my loving brother, when the world’s on fire, don’t you want God’s bosom to be your pillow? and I say to him, in my dream, No, they’ll find out what’s up the road, ain’t nothing up the road but us, man, and then I wake up, and my pillow is wet with tears.

The Gates of Hell