THE HEART ATTACK was strange—fear is strange. I knew I had been working too hard. I had been warned. But I have always worked too hard. I came offstage at the end of the second act. I felt hot and I was having trouble catching my breath. But I knew that I was tired. I went to my dressing room and poured myself a drink and put my feet up. Then I felt better. I knew I had about twenty-five minutes before I was due onstage. I felt very bitterly nauseous and I went to the bathroom but nothing happened. Then I began to be afraid, rather, to sit or lie down again and I poured myself another drink and left my dressing room to stand in the wings. I had begun to sweat and I was freezing cold. The nausea came back, making me feel that my belly was about to rise to the roof of my head. The stage manager looked at me just as I heard my cue. I carried his face onstage with me. It had looked white and horrified and disembodied in the eerie backstage light. I wondered what had frightened him. Then I realized that I was having trouble finding my positions and having trouble hearing lines. Barbara delivered her lines. I knew the lines, I knew what she was saying, but I did not know how to relate to it, and it took an eternity before I could reply. Then I began to be frightened and this, of course, created and compounded the nightmare, made me realize that I was in the middle of a nightmare. I moved about that stage, I don’t know how, dragging my lines up from the crypt of memory, praying that my moves were right—for I had lost any sense of depth or distance—feeling that I was sinking deeper and deeper into some icy void. “Shall we ring down the curtain?” Barbara whispered, and “No!” I shouted or whispered back. At one point in the scene I was called upon to laugh and when I laughed I began to cough. I was afraid the cough would never stop, some horrible-tasting stuff came up, which I was forced to swallow, and then, suddenly, everything passed, everything became as clear and still and luminous as day. I got through a few more lines, and I thought, Hell, it’s over, I’m all right, and then something hit me in the chest, tore through my chest to my backbone and almost knocked me down. I couldn’t catch my breath to deliver my lines. They covered for me. I knew we were approaching the end of the act. I prayed that I could stand up that long. I made a few more moves, I delivered a few more lines. I heard the penultimate line, Barbara’s, “So you’ve come home to stay?” and I answered, “I think, dear lady—but I do not wish to grieve you—that I may have come home to die.” The line seemed terribly funny to me at that moment. The curtain came down. I heard the crash of applause, like the roar of a cataract far away, and for the first time I heard the sound of my own breathing, it was louder than the cataract. I took a step and fell to my knees, then I was on the floor, then I was being carried, then I was in my dressing room. I was trying to speak, but I couldn’t speak. It was Barbara’s face above me that told me how ill I was. Her brown hair fell over her face, half hiding it, and her storm-colored eyes stared into mine with the intention of communicating something which I had to know, but did not know. “Be still,” she said, “don’t move. Don’t speak.”

But I wanted to ask her to forgive me for so many errors, so many fears. She took my hand. “Be still,” she said, “be still.” And this hand held on to me. All my weight, the weight which scales measure, and the weight no scale can measure, seemed pulling downward against that hand. I seemed to be hanging in the midde of the hostile air, ready for the mortal fall, with only the frail white hand of a frail white woman holding me up. It seemed very funny. I wanted to laugh. Perhaps I did laugh, I don’t know, everything hurt so much. Barbara’s face did not change, her grip never relaxed. My eyes did not leave her face, which now seemed suspended in the middle of the light which filled my dressing room, which fell down on me from everywhere. Behind her face were other faces, shapes, sounds, movements, but they had nothing to do with me. I saw the face of Pete, my dresser, dark, vaguely Oriental, staring at me with the same concentration I have known him to exhibit when watching a light cue being changed or a move being modified. It was a look which asked, If they go about solving the problem this way, how many more problems will they have created? I like Pete very much, he’s a very good man, we’ve worked together for years and I wanted to tell him not to worry. But, still, his face seemed very funny. Oddly enough—or maybe it isn’t odd at all, I don’t know—I wasn’t frightened; or perhaps I simply didn’t know that I was frightened. I thought, My God, this is no way to play a death scene, the audience would never be able to see me. Then I decided that it was a death scene being played not onstage but on camera and pretended that the camera was placed in the ceiling, just above my head—a huge, long close-up, with lights, and, eventually, music, to heighten my ineffable, dying speech. But I could think of nothing to say, though I turned to Barbara with my mouth wide open. The pressure of her hand increased very slightly. I felt tears roll out of my eyes and into my ears and onto my neck. I heard my breathing again, scratchy and loud, as though each attempt at breathing were creating a sandstorm. There was a movement far from me, a movement all around me, all the faces except Barbara’s disappeared, and a strange face, utterly isolated in the light, stood above me. It was a broad face, with brown hair and blue eyes, a big, aggressive nose, and fleshy lips. I recognized him immediately as the doctor. He reminded me—or, rather, his nose reminded me—of a Harlem barber who had sometimes cut my hair when I was a kid; this barber had had the biggest hands, the biggest fingers I had ever seen. One of his fingers, or each one of them, seemed bigger to me than my penis. I was only beginning to be terrified of this imperious bit of flesh, which was only at the beginning of its long career of blackmail.

The doctor said that I could not be moved; he instructed them to put my feet up on pillows; he wanted the room emptied. All this I heard, or, rather, divined—from far away. Everyone left but Barbara. She stood just behind the doctor. She had let go my hand and now the doctor took it, loosened my belt, looked at me as though to say, It’s pretty bad, but don’t worry. I couldn’t speak, but the ham in me wanted to prove that I was no crybaby, that I was not afraid, and so I smiled. I watched him prepare the needle; then I sought Barbara’s face. She was standing very straight and still, far from me; I realized that she had neither removed her makeup, nor changed into street clothes; I wanted to reprimand her for that. My eye returned to the needle. I knew that there was no point in asking what was in it. I thought of Harlem and all the needles I had seen there. “Make a fist,” said the doctor, as who should say, Come on, now, be a man. I thought of all the boys I had seen making fists. I made a fist. He swabbed my arm and plunged the needle in. The needle remained in my arm for a long time. Abruptly, he pulled it out, put cotton on the vein, and forced my fist up against my chest. “There, now,” he said, “don’t move.” He said to Barbara, “He must not move for at least half an hour. Then we will see.” He had a foreign accent. “I will call my hospital. Can you stay with him?” Barbara nodded. “Remember,” said the doctor, “don’t let him move. He must not move at all.” Barbara nodded again. She sat down and took my hand, the hand against my chest, again. The doctor went out.

Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me. My heart—if it was my heart—seemed to be rising and sinking within me; seemed like a swimmer betrayed by an element in which, by an unanswerable tide, it was being carried far out, by an unanswerable pull, being carried far down; and yet struggled, struggled upward, yet one more time. But the sea is stronger than the swimmer. How many more times could I hope to hear it labor up again?—that labor which caused such a roaring in my breath. And how many more times could it fall far from me, far beneath me, so that I breathed harder than ever, and in an awful panic, to coax it up again? The sound of my breathing was the only sound there was. My own panic, at once stifling like a cloak, and distant like the wind, made me realize how frightened Barbara was, and how gallant. I would not have liked to change places with her. We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand. I wondered what she was thinking. But I think she was not thinking, not at all. She was concentrated. She was determined not to let me die.

“Barbara—”

“Be quiet, Leo. There’ll be time for talking later. Don’t try to talk now.”

“I have something to say.”

“Later, my dear. Later.”

I went down again. My heart and I went down again. I was aware of her hand. I was aware of my breathing. I could no longer see it, but I was aware of her face.

“Barbara. My dear Barbara.”

“My dearest Leo. Please be still.”

And she’s right, I thought. There is nothing more to be said. All we can do now is just hold on. That was why she held my hand. I recognized this as love—recognized it very quietly and, for the first time, without fear. My life, that desperately treacherous labyrinth, seemed for a moment to be opening out behind me; a light seemed to fall where there had been no light before. I began to see myself in others. I began for a moment to apprehend how Christopher must sometimes have felt. Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. However great the private disasters to which love may lead, love itself is strikingly and mysteriously impersonal; it is a reality which is not altered by anything one does. Therefore, one does many things, turns the key in the lock over and over again, hoping to be locked out. Once locked out, one will never again be forced to encounter in the eyes of a stranger who loves him the impenetrable truth concerning the stranger, oneself, who is loved. And yet—one would prefer, after all, not to be locked out. One would prefer, merely, that the key unlocked a less stunningly unusual door.

The door to my maturity. This phrase floated to the top of my mind. The light that fell backward on that life of mine revealed a very frightened man—a very frightened boy. The light did not fall on me, on me where I lay now. I was left in darkness, my face could not be seen. In that darkness I encountered a scene from another nightmare, a nightmare I had had as a child. In this nightmare there is a book—a great, heavy book with an illustrated cover. The cover shows a dark, squalid alley, all garbage cans and dying cats, and windows like empty eyesockets. The beam of a flashlight shines down the alley, at the end of which I am fleeing, clutching something. The title of the book in my nightmare is, We Must Not Find Him, For He Is Lost.

When Caleb, my older brother, was taken from me and sent to prison, I watched, from the fire escape of our East Harlem tenement, the walls of an old and massive building, far, far away and set on a hill, and with green vines running up and down the walls, and with windows flashing like signals in the sunlight, I watched that building, I say, with a child’s helpless and stricken attention, waiting for my brother to come out of there. I did not know how to get to the building. If I had I would have slept in the shadow of those walls, and I told no one of my vigil or of my certain knowledge that my brother was imprisoned in that place. I watched that building for many years. Sometimes, when the sunlight flashed on the windows, I was certain that my brother was signaling to me and I waved back. When we moved from that particular tenement (into another one) I screamed and cried because I was certain that now my brother would no longer be able to find me. Alas, he was not there; the building turned out to be City College; my brother was on a prison farm in the Deep South, working in the fields.

I felt my hand being released. The doctor was back. He tapped, pushed, prodded, a complex hunk of meat. He flashed a light into my eyeballs, a light into my throat, a light into my nostrils. I hoped that they were clean. I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.

I must have blacked out for a moment. When the light came on again the doctor had one hand under my back, holding me up, and held a small glass of brandy to my lips.

“Drink it,” he said. “Slowly.”

He held the glass for me and I tried to get it down. Two men in white were in the room, looking like executioners, and beyond them, Pete, and next to Pete, Barbara. The men in white frightened me terribly. The doctor realized this.

“Slowly,” he repeated. “Slowly.” Then, “We are taking you to the hospital, where you can rest. You need rest very badly.”

In panic I looked around the dressing room, my only home. I was still in costume, my street clothes were hanging against the wall. I had not showered, I had not removed my makeup, I had not got my own face back. The face I was wearing itched and burned, I wanted to take it off. My hair was still full of the cream I used to make it gray. I wanted to cry and I looked for help to Pete and Barbara, but they were dumb. What ruin, what relic, were these men in white ripping from its base, and how could Pete and Barbara bear to see me so heartlessly demolished? I looked at the lights above the long mirror, the tubes, the jars, the sticks, the Kleenex, the empty glasses, the whiskey bottle, the ashtray, the half-empty package of cigarettes. No one would recognize me where I was going! I would be lost. “Oh, Pete,” I muttered, I moaned, and I could not keep the tears from falling. “Please wash my face.”

Without a word, Pete moved to the long dressing table and picked up the Kleenex and cold cream and came to where I lay. He covered my face with cream, he carefully wiped away the lines and distortions which I had so carefully painted in three or four hours before. “Hold still, now,” he said. He threw the dirty Kleenex into the wastebasket, he carefully replaced the box of Kleenex and the jar of cold cream on the long table, he went into the bathroom and returned with a wet face-towel and a dry towel. He ran the wet face-towel and then the dry towel over my face and hair. He said, “That’s the best I can do right now, old buddy.” He took both my hands and stared into my eyes. “You ready now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “Anytime. I’ll be proud to wash your face any old time.” He held my shoulder a moment. “Don’t panic. You’ll be all right. But we’ve got to get you out of here, so the man can lock up his theater.”

He stood up. The two men in white brought the stretcher next to the bed. Pete, probably in order to remain where I could see him, held me from the waist down, the doctor from the waist up, and they moved me to the stretcher. I was covered with a blanket. The pain in my chest increased. I almost cried out. We began to move. I kept sinking down and rising up, blacking out and coming back. I felt the cold air. For a moment, I saw the stars. Then I felt myself being lifted into a dark place. Then I saw nothing but Barbara’s face and the doctor’s face. I heard the siren and felt lights flashing, felt the wheels beneath me begin to turn, realized that we were descending a steep hill at a dangerous speed, felt the ambulance braking, felt the turn—and Barbara caught my hand and held it—and knew that we were rushing through the streets of San Francisco because no one could be certain that the life of Leo Proudhammer, actor, might not now be measured by the second-hand on the clock.

And something strange happened to me, deep in me. I thought of Africa. I remembered that Africans believed that death was a return to one’s ancestors, a reunion with those one loved. They had hurled themselves off slave ships, grateful to the enveloping water and even grateful to the teeth of sharks for making the journey home so swift. And I thought of a very great and very beautiful man whom I had known and loved, a black man shot down within hearing of his wife and children in the streets of a miserable Deep South town. There are deaths and deaths: there are deaths for which it is impossible and even ignoble to forgive the world, there are deaths to which one never becomes reconciled. But, now, for a moment, I was reconciled, for I thought, Well, I’ll see him. And we’ll sit around and bullshit about everything and get drunk, like we planned. And this thought made me fantastically, inexpressibly happy. I saw my friend’s face and felt his smile and heard his voice. Then I thought, But I won’t see Caleb, and all my pain came back, my chest felt as though all the weight of the pyramids lay on it, and the sound of my breathing roared and resounded through the narrow car.

Caleb was seventeen when I was ten. In that year he went to prison. We were very good friends. In fact, he was my best friend and for a very long time, my only friend.

I do not mean to say that he was always nice to me. I got on his nerves a lot and he resented having to carry me around with him and being responsible for me when there were so many other things he wanted to be doing. Therefore, his hand was often up against the side of my head, and my tears caused him to be punished many times. But I knew, somehow, anyway, that when he was being punished for my tears he was not being punished for anything he had done to me; he was being punished because that was the way we lived; and his punishment, oddly, helped to unite us. More oddly still, even as his great hand caused my head to stammer and dropped a flame-colored curtain before my eyes, I understood that he was not striking me. His hand leaped out because he could not help it and I received the blow because I was there. And it happened, sometimes, before I could even catch my breath to howl, that the hand which had struck me grabbed me and held me, and it was difficult indeed to know which of us was weeping. He was striking, striking out, striking out, striking out; the hand asked me to forgive him. I felt his bewilderment through the membrane of my own. I also felt that he was trying to teach me something. And I had, God knows, no other teachers.

For our father—how shall I describe our father?—was a ruined Barbados peasant, exiled in a Harlem which he loathed, where he never saw the sun or the sky he remembered, where life took place neither indoors nor without, and where there was no joy. By which I mean, no joy that he remembered. Had it been otherwise, had he been able to bring with him into the prison where he perished any of the joy he had felt on that far-off island, then the air of the sea and the impulse to dancing would sometimes have transfigured our dreadful rooms. Our lives might have been very different. But, no, he brought with him from Barbados only black rum and a blacker pride, and magic incantations which neither healed nor saved. He did not understand the people among whom he found himself, for him they had no coherence, no stature and no pride. He came from a race which had been flourishing at the very dawn of the world—a race greater and nobler than Rome or Judea, mightier than Egypt—he came from a race of kings, kings who had never been taken in battle, kings who had never been slaves. He spoke to us of tribes and empires, battles, victories, and monarchs of whom we had never heard—they were not mentioned in our schoolbooks—and invested us with glories in which we felt more awkward than in the secondhand shoes we wore. In the stifling room of his pretensions and expectations, we stumbled wretchedly about, stubbing our toes, as it were, on rubies, scraping our shins on golden caskets, bringing down, with a childish cry, the splendid purple tapestry on which, in pounding gold and scarlet, our destinies and our inheritance were figured. It could scarcely have been otherwise, since a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless. If our father was of royal blood and we were royal children, our father was certainly the only person in the world who knew it. The landlord did not know it and we observed that our father never mentioned royal blood to him. Not at all. When we were late with our rent, which was often, the landlord threatened, in terms no commoner had ever used before a king, to put us in the streets. He complained that our shiftlessness, which he did not hesitate to consider an attribute of the race, had forced him, himself, an old man with a weak heart, to climb all these stairs to plead with us to give him the money that we owed him. And this was the last time—he wanted to make sure that we understood that this was the last time. The next time our ass would be on the sidewalk. Our father was younger than Mr. Rabinowitz, leaner, stronger, and bigger. With one blow into that monstrous gut, he could have turned Rabinowitz purple, brought him to his knees, he could have hurled him down the stairs. And we knew how much he hated Rabinowitz. For days on end, in the wintertime, we huddled around the gas stove in the kitchen because Rabinowitz gave us no heat; and when the gas was turned off, we sat around the kerosene stove. When windows were broken, Rabinowitz took his time about fixing them; the wind made the cardboard we stuffed in the window rattle all night long, and when snow came the weight of the snow forced the cardboard inward and onto the floor. Neither Rabinowitz nor the city was alert about collecting garbage or shoveling away snow; whenever the apartment received a fresh coat of paint, we bought the paint and painted the apartment ourselves; we caught and killed the rats; a great chunk of the kitchen ceiling fell one winter, narrowly missing our mother. We all hated Rabinowitz with a perfectly exquisite hatred; great, gross, abject liar of a Jew—and this word in our father’s mouth was terrible, as dripping with venom as a mango is with juice—and we would have been happy to see our proud father kill him. We would have been glad to help. But our father did nothing of the sort. He stood before Rabinowitz, scarcely looking at him, swaying before the spittle and the tirade, sweating—looking unutterably weary. He made excuses. He apologized. He swore that it would never happen again. (We knew that it would happen again.) He begged for time. Rabinowitz would finally go down the steps, letting us, and all the neighbors, know how good-hearted he was being, and our father would walk into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of rum. But we knew that our father would never have allowed any black man to speak to him as Rabinowitz did, as policemen did, as storekeepers and pawnbrokers and welfare workers did. No, not for a moment—he would have thrown them out of the house; he would certainly have made a black man know that he was not the descendant of slaves! He had made them know it so often that he had almost no friends among them, and if we had followed his impossible lead, we would have had no friends, either. It was scarcely worth-while being the descendant of kings if the kings were black and no one had ever heard of them, and especially, furthermore, if royal status could not fill the empty stomach and could not prevent Rabinowitz from putting, as he eventually did, our collective ass, and all our belongings, on the city streets. It was then, and I don’t remember how, that we moved into the tenement from which Caleb was arrested.

And it was because of our father, perhaps, that Caleb and I clung to each other, in spite of the great difference in our ages; or, in another way, it may have been precisely the difference in our ages which made the clinging possible. I don’t know. It is really not the kind of thing which anyone can ever know. I think it may be easier to love the really helpless younger brother because he cannot enter into competition with one on one’s own ground, or on any ground at all, and can never question one’s role, or jeopardize one’s authority. In my own case, certainly, it did not occur to me—or did not occur to me until much later—to compete with Caleb and I could not have questioned his role or his authority because I needed both. He was my touchstone, my model, and my only guide. But there is always, on the other hand, something in the younger brother which eventually comes to resent this. The day comes when he is willing to destroy his older brother simply because he has depended on him so long. The day comes when he recognizes what a combination of helplessness and hard-hearted calculation go into the creation of a role, and to what extent authority is a delicate, difficult, deadly game of chance.

Anyway, our father, dreaming bitterly of Barbados, betrayed by Garvey, who did not succeed in getting us back to Africa, despised and mocked by his neighbors and all but ignored by his sons, held down his unspeakable factory job, spread his black gospel in bars on the weekends, and drank his rum. I do not know if he loved our mother. I think he did. They had had five children—only Caleb and I, the first and the last, were left. We were both dark, like our father, but two of the three dead girls had been fair, like our mother. She came from New Orleans. Her hair was not like ours. It was black, but softer and finer and very long. The color of her skin reminded me of the color of bananas. Her skin was as bright as that, and contained that kind of promise and she had tiny freckles around her nose and a small black mole just above her upper lip. It was the mole, I don’t know why, which made her beautiful. Without it, her face might have been merely sweet, merely pretty. But the mole was funny. It had the effect of making one realize that our mother liked funny things, liked to laugh. The mole made one look at her eyes—large, extraordinary, dark eyes, eyes which seemed always to be amused by something, eyes which looked straight out, seeming to see everything, seeming to be afraid of nothing. She was a soft, round, plump woman. She liked nice clothes and dangling jewelry, which she mostly didn’t have, and she liked to cook for large numbers of people, and she loved our father. She knew him—knew him through and through. I am not being coy or colloquial, but bluntly and sadly matter of fact when I say that I will now never know what she saw in him. What she saw was certainly not for many eyes; what she saw got him through his working week and his Sunday rest; what she saw saved him. She saw that he was a man. For her, perhaps, he was a great man. I think, though, that, for our mother, any man was great who aspired to become a man: this meant that our father was very rare and precious. I used to wonder how she took it, how she bore it—his rages, his tears, his cowardice. On Saturday nights he was almost always evil, drunk, and maudlin. He would have come home from work in the early afternoon and given our mother some money. It was never enough—of course; but he always kept enough to go out and get drunk; she never protested, at least not as far as I know. Then she would go out shopping. I would usually go with her, for Caleb would almost always be out somewhere and our mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me alone in the house. She was afraid the house would burn down while she was out—fires were common enough in our neighborhood, God knows. So, while our father stood sternly and gloomily in a bar not far away, getting drunk on rum, and Caleb and his friends were in somebody’s cellar, getting drunk off cheap wine, we took on the Harlem streets. And this was probably, after all, the best possible arrangement. People who disliked our father were sure (for that very reason) to like our mother; and people who felt that Caleb was growing to be too much like his father could feel that I, after all, might turn out like my mother. Besides, it is not, as a general rule, easy to hate a small child. One runs the risk of looking ridiculous, especially if the child is with his mother.

And especially if that mother is Mrs. Proudhammer. Mrs. Proudhammer knew very well what people thought of Mr. Proudhammer. She knew, too, exactly how much she owed in each store she entered, how much she was going to be able to pay, and what she had to buy. She entered with a smile, ready—she attacked:

“Evening, Mr. Shapiro. Let me have some of them red beans there.”

“Evening. You know, you folks been running up quite a little bill here.”

“I’m going to give you something on it right now. I need some cornmeal and flour and some rice.”

“You know, I got my bills to meet, too, Mrs. Proudhammer.”

“Didn’t I just tell you I was going to pay? I don’t know why you don’t listen, you must be getting old. I want some cornflakes, too, and some milk.”

Such merchandise as she could reach she had already placed on the counter. Sad Mr. Shapiro looked at me and sighed.

“When do you think you’re going to be able to pay this bill? All of it, I mean.”

“Mr. Shapiro, you been knowing me for years. You know I’m going to pay it just as soon as I can. It won’t be long. I ain’t going to move.”

Sometimes, when she said this, she had the dispossess notice in her pocketbook. Mr. Shapiro looked into my face from time to time as though my face would reveal my mother’s secrets. (But it never did.) Sometimes he looked at my mother as though he were wondering how such a handsome, almost white woman had got herself trapped in such a place.

“How much does it all come to? Give me that end you got there of that chocolate cake.”

The chocolate cake was for Caleb and me.

“Well, now you put this against the bill.” Imperiously, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she put two or three dollars on the counter.

“You’re lucky I’m soft-hearted, Mrs. Proudhammer.”

“Things sure don’t cost this much downtown—you think I don’t know it? Here.” And she paid him for what she had bought. “Thank you, Mr. Shapiro. You been mighty kind.”

And we left the store. I often felt that in order to help her, I should have filled my pockets with merchandise while she was talking to the storekeeper. But I never did, not only because the store was often crowded or because I was afraid of being caught by the storekeeper but because I was afraid of humiliating her. When I began to steal, not very much later, I stole in stores which were not in our neighborhood, where we were not known.

Not all the storekeepers were as easy to get around as sad Mr. Shapiro. The butcher, for example, was a very different man, not sad at all, and he appeared to detest all children; still, our mother managed him most of the time, though with an effort considerably more acrid and explicit. But there were times when she did not feel up to it and then we would not even pass his store. We would cut off the avenue at 133rd Street and walk the long blocks west to Eighth Avenue and then walk down to the big butcher shop on 125th Street. Because this shop was so much bigger it could sometimes be a little bit cheaper and yet we did not break our necks to go there because most of the people who served you were so unpleasant. There was something intolerable about being robbed and insulted at the same time, and yet, I suppose, our mother reconciled herself, while stonily and silently making her purchases, by remembering that it was only, after all, a matter of degree.

When we had to do “heavy” shopping, we went shopping under the bridge at Park Avenue, Caleb, our mother, and I; and sometimes, but rarely, our father came with us. The most usual reason for heavy shopping was that some relatives of our mother’s, or old friends of both our mother and our father were coming to visit. We were certainly not going to let them go away hungry—not even if it meant, as it often did mean, spending more than we had. Caleb and I loved to hear that visitors were coming, for it meant that there was going to be a banquet at our house. There were always visitors, of course, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, visitors bringing their hams and chickens and pies to add to ours; but people also showed up for birthdays and anniversaries or for no reason at all, simply because the spirit had so moved them. In spite of what I have been suggesting about our father’s temperament, and no matter how difficult he may sometimes have been with us, he was much too proud to have any desire to offend any guest of his. On the contrary, his impulse was to make them feel that his home was theirs; and besides, he was lonely, lonely for his past, lonely for those faces which had borne witness to that past. Therefore, he would sometimes pretend that our mother did not know how to shop and he would come with us, under the bridge, in order to teach her. There he would be, then, uncharacteristically, in shirt-sleeves, which made him look rather boyish; and, as our mother showed no desire to take shopping lessons from him, he turned his attention to Caleb and me. “Look at that woman,” he would say, pointing out a woman who was having something weighed, “can’t, she see that that Jew’s hand is all over that scale? You see that?” We agreed that we had seen it, whether we had or not. He said bleakly, “You got to watch them all the time. But our people ain’t never going to learn. I don’t know what’s wrong with our people. We need a prophet to straighten out our minds and lead us out of this hell.” He would pick up a fish, opening the gills and holding it close to his nose. “You see that? That fish looks fresh, don’t it? Well, that fish ain’t as fresh as I am, and I been out of the water. They done doctored that fish. Come on.” And we would walk away, leaving the fish-stand owner staring; a little embarrassed, but, on the whole, rather pleased that our father was so smart. Meantime, our mother was getting the marketing done. She was very happy on days like this because our father was happy. He was happy, odd as his expression of it may sound, to be out with his wife and his two sons. If we had been on the island which had been witness to his birth instead of the unspeakable island of Manhattan, he felt, and I also eventually began to feel, that it would not have been so hard for us all to trust and love each other. He sensed, and I think he was right, that on that other, never to be recovered island, his sons would have looked on him very differently and he would have looked very differently on his sons. Life would have been hard there, too—he knew that—which was why he had left and also why he felt so betrayed, so self-betrayed; we would have fought there, too, and more or less blindly suffered and more or less blindly died. But we would not have been (or so it was to seem to all of us forever) so wickedly menaced by the mere fact of our relationship, would not have been so frightened of entering into the central, most beautiful and valuable facts of our lives. We would have been laughing and cursing and tussling in the water instead of stammering under the bridge: we would have known less about vanished African kingdoms and more about each other. Or, not at all impossibly, more about both.

If it was summer, then, we bought a watermelon, which either Caleb or our father carried, fighting with each other for this privilege. And it was marvelous to see them fighting this way, the one accusing the other of being too old, and the ancient of days insisting that if his son carried a watermelon for another block that way all the girls in the neighborhood would live to regret it. “For the sake of the family name, man,” he said, “so the family name won’t die out, let me carry that melon, Caleb. You going to bust your string.” “Little Leo’ll see to it that we carry on,” Caleb said, sometimes; sometimes he hinted broadly that he was carrying on the blood even if he wasn’t yet in a position to carry on the name. This sometimes led to a short footrace between them to the steps of our tenement. Our father usually won it, since Caleb was usually handicapped by the weight and the shape of the melon. They both looked very much like each other on those days—both big, both black, both laughing. Caleb always looked absolutely helpless when he laughed. He laughed with all his body, perhaps touching his shoulder against yours, or putting his head on your chest for a moment, and then careening off you, halfway across the room, or down the block. I will always hear his laughter. He was always happy on such days, too. If our father needed his son, Caleb certainly needed his father. Such days, however, were rare—one of the reasons, probably, that I remember them now. And our father’s laugh was like Caleb’s laugh, except that he stood still, and watched. Eventually, we all climbed the stairs into that hovel which, at such moments, was our castle. One very nearly felt the drawbridge rising behind us as our father locked the door.

The bathtub could not yet be filled with cold water and the melon placed in the tub because this was Saturday, and, come evening, we all had to bathe. The melon was covered with a blanket and placed on the fire escape. Then we unloaded what we had bought, rather impressed by our opulence, though our father was always, by this time, appalled by the money we had spent and the quality of what we had bought. I was always sadly aware that there would be nothing left of all this once tomorrow had come and gone and that most of it, after all, was not for us, but for others. How come we could do all this for others and not for ourselves? But I knew better than to give tongue to this question. Our mother was calculating the pennies she would need all week—carfare for our father and for Caleb, who went to a high school out of our neighborhood, downtown; money for the life insurance, money for milk for me at school, money for cod-liver oil, money for light and gas, money put away—if possible—toward the rent. She knew just about what our father had left in his pockets and was counting on him to give me the money I would shortly be demanding to go to the movies. Caleb had a part-time job after school and already had his movie money. Anyway, unless he was in a very good mood, or needed me for something, he would not be anxious to go to the movies with me.

Our mother never insisted that Caleb tell her where he was going, nor did she question him as to how he spent what money he made. She was afraid of hearing him lie and she did not want to risk forcing him to lie. She was operating on the assumption that he was sensible and had been raised to be honorable and that he, now more than ever, needed his privacy. But she was very firm with him, nevertheless.

“I do not want to see you rolling in here at three in the morning, Caleb. I want you here in time to eat and you know you got to take your bath.”

“Yes, indeed, ma’am. Why can’t I take my bath in the morning?”

“Don’t you start being funny. You know you ain’t going to get up in time to take no bath in the morning.”

“Don’t nobody want you messing around in that bathroom all morning long, man,” said our father. “You just get your butt back in the house like your mama’s telling you.”

“Besides,” I said, “you never wash out the tub.”

Caleb looked at me in mock surprise and from a great height, allowing his chin and his lids simultaneously to drop and swiveling his head away from me. “I see,” he said, “that everyone in this family is ganging up on me. All right, Leo. I was planning to take you to the show with me, but now I’ve changed my mind.”

This suggestion always had exactly the effect he desired. Our parents were relieved, not only because, as they supposed, I would now operate as a check on Caleb and not only because Caleb would be protection for me—this dulling the uneasy, incipient guilt they felt about my being in the streets at all; they were above all relieved that they might now, without worrying, be truly alone for a little while, friendly and vertical, in the broad daylight. I was repentant and overjoyed.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, “I take it back.”

“You take what back?”

“What I said—about you not washing out the tub.”

“Ain’t no need to take it back,” our father said stubbornly, “it’s true. A man don’t take back nothing that’s true.”

“So you say,” said Caleb lightly, quickly, with a hint of a sneer. But before anyone could possibly react to this, he picked me up, scowling into my face, which he held just above his own. “You take it back?”

“Leo ain’t going to take it back,” our father said.

Now I was in trouble. Caleb watched me, a small grin on his face. “You take it back?”

“Stop teasing that child and put him down,” said our mother. “The trouble ain’t that Caleb don’t wash out the tub—he just don’t wash it out very clean.”

“I never knew him to wash it out,” said our father, “unless I was standing behind him.”

“Well, ain’t neither one of you much good around the house,” said our mother with finality, “and that’s the truth.”

Caleb laughed and set me down. “You didn’t take it back,” he said.

I said nothing.

“I guess I’m just going to have to go on without you.”

Still, I said nothing.

“You going to have that child to crying in a minute,” our mother said. “If you going to take him, go on and take him. Don’t do him like that.”

Caleb laughed again. “I’m going to take him. The way he got them eyes all ready to water, I’d better take him somewhere.” We walked toward the door. “But you got to make up your mind,” he said to me, “to say what you think is right.”

“What movie,” asked our father, “you fixing to take him to see?”

“I don’t know,” said Caleb. “We’ll see what’s playing at the Lincoln.”

“I don’t want his mind all messed up—you know that.”

“He ain’t going to get his mind messed up—not by going to the movies.”

“You don’t know the Jew like I know him.”

“Let them go on,” said our mother, “so they can get back here in time for supper.”

“It’s the Jew makes them movies, man, in order to mess up our minds. That’s why I don’t never go to see them.”

“You don’t never go to see them,” said our mother, “because you too lazy and too old. And can’t nobody tear you away from that rum. Let these children go on—”

“You’ll see,” he said, grimly, “you’re going to see one of these days just what I’m talking about. And you ain’t going to like what you see at all.”

“Hush,” she said, “I ain’t afraid of what I’m going to see. I know what I’ve seen already.”

I grabbed Caleb’s hand, the signal for the descent of the drawbridge. She watched us cheerfully as we walked out, he watched us balefully. Yet, there was a certain humor in his face, too, and a kind of pride. “Dig you later,” Caleb said, and the door closed behind us.

The hall was dark, smelling of cooking, of boiling diapers, of men and boys pissing there late at night, of stale wine, of rotting garbage. The walls were full of an information which I could scarcely read and did not know how to use. We dropped down the stairs, Caleb going two at a time, pausing at each landing, briefly, to glance back up at me. I dropped down behind him as fast as I could. Sometimes Caleb was in a bad mood and then everything I did was wrong. But when Caleb was in a good mood, it didn’t matter that everything I did was wrong. When I reached the street level, Caleb was already on the stoop, joking with some of his friends, who were standing in the doorway—who seemed always to be in the doorway, no matter what hour one passed through. I didn’t like Caleb’s friends because I was afraid of them. I knew the only reason they didn’t try to make life hell for me the way they made life hell for a lot of the other kids was because they were afraid of Caleb. I came through the door, passing between my brother and his friends, down to the sidewalk, feeling, as they looked briefly at me and then continued joking with Caleb, what they felt: that here was Caleb’s round-eyed, frail and useless sissy of a little brother. They pitied Caleb for having to take me out. On the other hand, they also wanted to go to the show, but didn’t have the money. Therefore, in silence, I could crow over them even as they despised me. But this was always a terribly risky, touch-and-go business, for Caleb might always, at any moment, and with no warning, change his mind and drive me away, and, effectively, take their side against me. I always stood, those Saturday afternoons, in fear and trembling, holding on to the small shield of my bravado, while waiting for Caleb to come down the steps of the stoop, to come down the steps, away from his friends, to me. I prepared myself, always, for the moment when he would turn to me, saying, “Okay, kid. You run along. I’ll see you later.”

This meant that I would have to go to the movies by myself and hang around in front of the box office, waiting for some grown-up to take me in. I could not go back upstairs, for this would be informing my mother and father that Caleb had gone off somewhere—after promising to take me to the movies. Neither could I simply hang around the block, playing with the kids on the block. For one thing, my demeanor, as I came out of the house, those Saturdays, very clearly indicated that I had better things to do than play with them; for another, they were not terribly anxious to play with me; and, finally, my remaining on the block would have had exactly the same effect as my going upstairs. Someone would surely inform my father and mother, or they might simply look out of the window, or one of them would come downstairs to buy something they had forgotten while shopping, or my father would pass down the block on his way to the bar. In short, to remain on the block after Caleb’s dismissal was to put myself at the mercy of the block and to put Caleb at the mercy of our parents.

So I prepared myself, those Saturdays, to respond with a cool, “Okay. See you later,” and prepared myself then to turn indifferently away, and walk. This was surely the most terrible moment. The moment I turned away I was committed, I was trapped, and I then had miles to walk, so it seemed to me, before I would be out of sight, before the block ended and I could turn onto the avenue. I wanted to run out of that block, but I never did. I never looked back. I forced myself to walk very slowly, looking neither right nor left, trying to look neither up nor down—striving to seem at once distracted and offhand; concentrating on the cracks in the sidewalk, and stumbling over them, trying to whistle, feeling every muscle in my body, from my pigeon toes to my jiggling behind, to my burning neck; feeling that all the block was watching me, and feeling—which was odd—that I deserved it. And then I reached the avenue, and turned, still not looking back, and was released from those eyes at least, but now faced other eyes, eyes coming toward me. These eyes were the eyes of children stronger than me, who would steal my movie money; these eyes were the eyes of white cops, whom I feared, whom I hated with a literally murderous hatred; these eyes were the eyes of old folks who also thought I was a sissy and who might wonder what I was doing on this avenue by myself. And these eyes were the eyes of men and women going in and out of bars, or standing on the corners, who certainly had no eyes for me, but who occupied the center of my bewildered attention because they seemed, at once, so abject and so free.

And then I got to the show. Sometimes, someone would take me in right away and sometimes I would have to wait. I looked at the posters which seemed magical indeed to me in those days. I was very struck, not altogether agreeably, by the colors. The faces of the movie stars were in red, in green, in blue, in purple, not at all like the colors of real faces and yet they looked more real than real. Or, rather, they looked like faces far from me, faces which I would never be able to decipher, faces which could be seen but never changed or touched, faces which existed only behind these doors. I don’t know what I thought. Some great assault, certainly, was being made on my imagination, on my sense of reality. Caleb could draw, he was teaching me to draw, and I wondered if he could teach me to draw faces like these. I looked at the stills from the show, seeing people in attitudes of danger, in attitudes of love, in attitudes of sorrow and loss. They were not like any people I had ever seen and this made them, irrevocably, better. With one part of my mind, of course, I knew that here was James Cagney—holding his gun like a prize; and here was Clark Gable, all dimples, teeth, and eyes, the eyes filled with a smoky, taunting recollection of his invincible virility; here was Joan Crawford, gleaming with astonishment, and here was proud, quivering Katharine Hepburn, who could never be astonished, and here was poor, downtrodden Sylvia Sidney, weeping in the clutches of yet another gangster. But only the faces and the attitudes were real, more real than the lives we led, more real than our days and nights, and the names were merely brand-names, like Campbell’s Baked Beans or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. We went to see James Cagney because we had grown accustomed to that taste, we knew that we would like it.

But, then, I would have to turn my attention from the faces and the stills and watch the faces coming to the box office. And this was not easy, since I didn’t, after all, want everyone in the neighborhood to know that I was loitering outside the moviehouse waiting for someone to take me in, exactly like an orphan. If it came to our father’s attention, he would kill both Caleb and me. Eventually, I would see a face which looked susceptible and which I did not know. I would rush up beside him or her—but it was usually a man, for they were less likely to be disapproving—and whisper, “Take me in,” and give him my dime. Sometimes the man simply took the dime and disappeared into the movies, sometimes he gave my dime back to me and took me in, anyway. Sometimes I ended up wandering around the streets—but I couldn’t wander into a strange neighborhood because I would be beaten up if I did—until I figured the show was out. It was dangerous to get home too early and, of course, it was practically lethal to arrive too late. If all went well, I could cover for Caleb, saying that I had left him with some boys on the stoop. Then, if he came in too late and got a dressing down for it, it could not be considered my fault.

But if wandering around this way was not without its dangers, neither was it without its discoveries and delights. I discovered subways—I discovered, that is, that I could ride on subways by myself, and, furthermore, that I could usually ride for nothing. Sometimes, when I ducked under the turnstile, I was caught and cuffed and turned back, and sometimes great black ladies seized on me as a pretext for long, very loud, ineffably moral lectures about wayward children breaking their parents’ hearts; as to this, however, the ladies very often and very loudly disagreed among themselves, insisting that wayward children were produced by wayward parents, and calling down on the heads of my parents the most vivid penalties that heaven could devise. And heaven would have had to go some to have surpassed their imaginations. Sometimes, doing everything in my power not to attract their attention, I endeavored to look as though I were the charge of a respectable-looking man or woman, entering the subway in their shadow, and sitting very still beside them. It was best to try to sit between two such people, for, then, each would automatically assume that I was with the other. There I would sit, then, in a precarious anonymity, watching the people, listening to the roar, watching the lights and the cables and the lights of other stations flash by. It seemed to me that nothing was faster than a subway train and I loved the speed because the speed was dangerous. For a time, during these expeditions, I simply sat and watched the people. Lots of people would be dressed up, for this was Saturday night. The women’s hair would be all straightened and curled and the lipstick on their full lips looked purple and make-believe against the dark skins of their faces. They wore very fancy capes or coats, in wonderful colors, and long dresses, and sometimes they had jewels in their hair and sometimes they wore flowers on their dresses. They were almost as beautiful as movie stars. And so the men with them seemed to think. The hair of the men was slick and wavy, brushed up into pompadours; or they wore very sharp hats, brim flicked down dangerously over one eye, with perhaps one flower in the lapel of their many-colored suits and a tie-pin shining in the center of their bright ties. Their hands were large and very clean, with rings on their heavy fingers, and their nails glowed. They laughed and talked with their girls, but quietly, for there were white people in the car. The white people would scarcely ever be dressed up, and never as brilliantly as the colored people. They wore just ordinary suits and hats and coats and did not speak to each other at all—only read their papers and stared at the advertisements. But they fascinated me more than the colored people did because I knew nothing at all about them and could not imagine what they were like. Their faces were as strange to me as the faces on the movie posters and the stills, but far less attractive, because, mysteriously, menacing, and, under the ruthless subway light, they were revealed literally, in their true colors, which were not green, red, blue, or purple, but a mere, steady, unnerving, pinkish reddish yellow. I wondered why people called them white—they certainly were not white. Black people were not black either—my father was wrong. Underground, I received my first apprehension of New York neighborhoods, and, underground, first felt what may be called a civic terror. I very soon realized that after the train had passed a certain point, going uptown or downtown, all the colored people disappeared. The first time I realized this, I panicked and got lost. I rushed off the train, terrified of what these white people might do to me with no colored person around to protect me—even to scold me, even to beat me, at least their touch was familiar, and I knew that they did not, after all, intend to kill me; and got on another train only because I saw a black man on it. But almost everyone else was white. The train did not stop at any of the stops I remembered. I became more and more frightened, frightened of getting off the train and frightened of staying on it, frightened of saying anything to the man and frightened that he would get off the train before I could say anything to him. He was my salvation and he stood there in the unapproachable and frightening form that salvation so often takes. At each stop, I watched him with despair. To make matters worse, I suddenly realized that I had to pee. Once I realized it, this need became a torment; the horror of wetting my pants in front of all these people made the torment greater. Finally, I tugged at the man’s sleeve. He looked down at me with a gruff, amused concern—he had been staring out of the dark window, far away with his own thoughts; then, reacting, no doubt, to the desperation in my face, he bent closer. I asked him if there was a bathroom on the train. He laughed.

“No,” he said, “but there’s a bathroom in the station.” He looked at me again. “Where’re you going?”

I told him that I was going home. But the pressure on my bladder made it hard for me to speak. The train looked like it was never going to stop.

“And where’s home?”

I told him. This time he did not laugh.

“Do you know where you are?”

I shook my head. At that moment the train came into the station and after several hours it rolled to a stop. After a slightly longer time than that, the jammed doors opened and the man led me to the bathroom. I ran in, and I hurried because I was afraid he would disappear. But I was glad he had not come in with me.

When I came out, he stood waiting for me. “Now,” he said, “you in Brooklyn—you ever hear of Brooklyn? What you doing out here by yourself?”

“I got lost,” I said.

“I know you got lost. What I want to know is how come you got lost? Where’s your mama? Where’s your daddy?”

I almost said that I didn’t have any because I liked his face and his voice and was half hoping to hear him say that he didn’t have any little boy and would just as soon take a chance on me. But I told him that my mama and daddy were at home.

“And do they know where you are?”

I said No. There was a pause.

“Well, I know they going to make your tail hot when they see you.” He took my hand. “Come on.”

And he led me along the platform and then down some steps and along a narrow passage and then up some steps onto the opposite platform. I was very impressed by this maneuver, for, in order to accomplish the same purpose, I had always left the subway station and gone up into the streets. Now that the emergency was over (and I knew that I would not be late getting home) I was in no great hurry to leave my savior; but I didn’t know how to say this, the more particularly as he seemed to be alternating between amusement and irritation. I asked him if he had a little boy.

“Yes,” he said, “and if you was my little boy, I’d paddle your behind so you couldn’t sit down for a week.”

I asked him how old was his little boy and what was his name and if his little boy was at home?

“He better be at home!” He looked at me and laughed. “His name is Jonathan. He ain’t but five years old.” His gaze refocused, sharpened. “How old are you?”

I told him that I was ten, going on eleven.

“You a pretty bad little fellow,” he said, then.

I tried to look repentant, but I would not have dreamed of denying it.

“Now, look here,” he said, “this here’s the uptown side—can you read or don’t you never go to school?” I assured him that I could read. “Now, to get where you going, you got to change trains.” He told me where. “Here, I’ll write it down for you.” He found some paper in his pockets, but no pencil. We heard the train coming. He looked about him in helpless annoyance, looked at his watch, looked at me. “It’s all right. I’ll tell the conductor.”

But the conductor, standing between the two cars, had rather a mean pink face and my savior looked at him dubiously. “He might be all right. But we better not take no chances.” He pushed me ahead of him into the train. “You know you right lucky that I got a little boy? If I didn’t, I swear I’d just let you go on and be lost. You don’t know the kind of trouble you going to get me in at home. My wife ain’t never going to believe this story.”

I told him to give me his name and address and that I would write a letter to his wife and to his little boy, too. This caused him to laugh harder than ever. “You only say that because you know I ain’t got no pencil. You are one hell of a shrewd little boy.”

I told him that then maybe we should get off the train and that I would go back home with him. This made him grave.

“What does your father do?” This question made me uneasy. I stared at him for a long time before I answered. “He works in a”—I could not pronounce the word—“he has a job.”

He nodded. “I see. Is he home now?”

I really did not know and I said I did not know.

“And what does your mother do?”

“She stays home. But she goes out to work—sometimes.”

Again he nodded. “You got any brothers or sisters?”

I told him No.

“I see. What’s your name?”

“Leo.”

“Leo what?”

“Leo Proudhammer.”

He saw something in my face.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Leo?”

“I want to be”—and I had never said this before—“I want to be a—a movie actor. I want to be a—actor.”

“You pretty skinny for that,” he said.

But I certainly had, now, all of his attention.

“That’s all right,” I told him. “Caleb’s going to teach me to swim. That’s how you get big.”

“Who’s Caleb?”

I opened my mouth, I stared at him, I started to speak, I checked myself—as the train roared into a station. He glanced out of the window, but did not move. “He swims,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, after a very long pause, during which the doors slammed and the train began to move. “Is he a good swimmer?”

I said that Caleb was the best swimmer in the world.

“Okay,” my savior said, “okay,” and put his hand on my head again, and smiled at me. I asked him what his name was. “Charles,” he said, “Charles Williams. But you better call me Uncle Charles, you little devil, because you have certainly ruined my Saturday night.”

I told him (for I knew it) that it was still early.

“It ain’t going to be early,” he said, “by the time I get back home.” The train came into the station. “Here’s where we change,” he said.

We got out of the train and crossed the platform and waited.

“Now,” he said, “this train stops exactly where you going. Tell me where you going.”

I stared at him.

“I want you,” he said, “to tell me exactly where you going. I can’t be fooling with you all night.”

I told him.

“You sure that’s right?”

I told him I was sure.

“I got a very good memory,” he said. “Give me your address. Just say it, I’ll remember it.”

So I said it, staring into his face as the train came roaring in.

“If you don’t go straight home,” he said, “I’m going to come and see your daddy and when we find you, you’ll be mighty sorry.” He pushed me into the train and put one shoulder against the door. “Go on, now,” he said, loud enough for all the car to hear, “your mama’ll meet you at the station where I told you to get off.” He repeated my subway stop, pushed the angry door with his shoulder, and then said gently, “Sit down, Leo.” And he remained in the door until I sat down. “So long, Leo,” he said, then, and stepped backward, out. The doors closed. He grinned at me and waved and the train began to move. I waved back. Then he was gone, the station was gone, and I was on my way back home.

I never saw that man again but I made up stories in my head about him, I dreamed about him, I even wrote a letter to him and his wife and his little boy, but I never mailed it. I had a feeling that he would not like my father and that my father would not like him. And since Caleb never liked anyone I liked, I never mentioned him to Caleb.

But I never told Caleb anything about my solitary expeditions. I don’t know why. I think that he might have liked to know about them; or perhaps I am only reacting to his own, later, guilty feeling that he should have known about them; but, I suppose, finally, at bottom, I said nothing because my expeditions belonged to me. It scarcely seems possible that I could have been as silent and solitary and dangerously self-contained as the melancholy evidence indicates me to have been. For certainly I cried and howled and stormed. Certainly I must have chattered, as children do. Such playmates as I had, in spite of my size and strangeness, my helpless ambiguity, I eventually dominated—without quite knowing how this had come about; I was able to do it, that was all, and, therefore, condemned to do it. I know that, as I grew older, I became tyrannical. I had no choice, my life was in the balance. Whoever went under, it was not going to be me—and I seem to have been very clear about this from the very beginning of my life. To run meant to turn my back—on lions; to run meant the flying tackle which would bring me down; and, anyway, run where? Certainly not to my father and mother, certainly not to Caleb. Therefore, I had to stand. To stand meant that I had to be insane. People who imagine themselves to be, as they put it, in their “right” minds, have no desire to tangle with the insane. They stay far from them, or they ingratiate them. It took me almost no time to realize this. I used what I knew. I knew that what was sport for others was life or death for me. Therefore, I had to make it a matter of life or death for them. Not many are prepared to go so far, at least not without the sanction of a uniform. But this absolutely single-minded and terrified ruthlessness was masked by my obvious vulnerability, my paradoxical and very real helplessness, and it covered my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be born again. What a dream: is it a dream? I don’t know. I know only what happened—if, indeed, I can claim to know that. My pride became my affliction. I found myself imprisoned in the stronghold I had built. The day came when I wished to break my silence and found that I could not speak: the actor could no longer be distinguished from his role.

Another time, it was raining and it was still too early for me to go home. I felt very, very low that day. It was one of the times that my tongue and my body refused to obey me—this happened often; when I was prey to my fantasies, or overwhelmed by my real condition; and I had not been able to work up the courage to ask anyone to take me into the show. I stood there, watching people go in, watching people come out. Every once in a while, when the doors opened, I caught a glimpse of the screen —huge, black and silver, moving all the time. The ticket-taker was watching me, or so I thought, with a hostile suspicion, as though he were thinking, You just try to get somebody to take you in, I dare you! It’ll be your ass. Actually, it’s very unlikely he was thinking at all, and certainly not of me. But I walked away from the show because I could no longer bear his eyes, or anybody’s eyes.

I walked the long block east from the moviehouse. The street was empty, black, and glittering. The globes of the streetlamps, with the water slanting both behind them and before, told me how hard the rain was falling. The water soaked through my coat at the shoulders and water dripped down my neck from my cap. I began to be afraid. I could not stay out here in the rain because then my father and mother would know I had been wandering the streets. I would get a beating, and, though Caleb was too old to get a beating, he and my father would have a terrible fight and Caleb would blame it all on me and would not speak to me for days. I began to hate Caleb. I wondered where he was. If I had known where to find him, I would have gone to where he was and forced him, by screaming and crying even, to take me home or to take me wherever he was going. And I wouldn’t have cared if he hit me, or even if he called me a sissy. Then it occurred to me that he might be in the same trouble as myself, since if I couldn’t go home without him, he, even more surely, couldn’t go home without me. Perhaps he was also wandering around in the rain. If he was, then, I thought, it served him right; it would serve him right if he caught pneumonia and died; and I dwelt pleasantly on this possibility for the length of the block. But at the end of the block I realized that he was probably not wandering around in the rain—I was; and I, too, might catch pneumonia and die. I started in the direction of our house only because I did not know what else to do. Perhaps Caleb would be waiting for me on the stoop.

The avenue, too, was very long and silent. Somehow, it seemed old, like a picture in a book. It stretched straight before me, endless, and the streetlights did not so much illuminate it as prove how dark it was. The familiar buildings were now merely dark, silent shapes, great masses of wet rock; men stood against the walls or on the stoops, made faceless by the light in the hallway behind them. The rain was falling harder. Cars sloshed by, sending up sheets of water and bobbing like boats; from the bars I heard music faintly, and many voices. Straight ahead of me a woman walked, very fast, head down, carrying a shopping bag. I reached my corner and crossed the wide avenue. There was no one on my stoop.

Now, I was not even certain what time it was; and everything was so abnormally, wretchedly still that there was no way of guessing. But I knew it wasn’t time yet for the show to be over. I walked into my hallway and wrung out my cap. I was sorry that I had not made someone take me into the show because now I did not know what to do. I could go upstairs and say that we had not liked the movie and had left early and that Caleb was with some boys on the stoop. But this would sound strange—I had never been known to dislike a movie; and if our father was home, he might come downstairs to look for Caleb; who would not know what story I had told and who would, therefore, in any case, be greatly handicapped when he arrived. As far as Caleb knew, I was safely in the movies. That was our bargain, from which not even the rain released me. My nerve had failed me, but Caleb had no way of knowing that. I could not stay in my hallway because my father might not be at home and might come in. I could not go into the hallway of another building because if any of the kids who lived in the building found me they would have the right to beat me up. I could not go back out into the rain. I stood next to the big, cold radiator and I began to cry. But crying wasn’t going to do me any good, either, especially as there was no one to hear me.

So I stepped out on my stoop again and looked carefully up and down the block. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the Holy Roller church across the street was silent. The rain fell as hard as ever, with a whispering sound—like monstrous old gossips whispering together. The sky could not be seen. It was black. I stood there for a long time, wondering what to do. Then I thought of a condemned house, around the corner from us. We played there sometimes, though we were not supposed to, and it was very dangerous. The front door had been boarded up but the boards had been pried loose; and the basement windows had been broken and boys congregated in the basement and wandered through the rotting house. What possessed me to go there now I don’t know, except that I could not think of another dry place in the whole world. I thought that I would just sit there, out of the rain, until I figured it was safe to come home. And I started running east, down our block. I turned two corners and I came to the house, with its black window sockets and garbage piled high around it and the rain moaning and whistling, clanging against the metal and drumming on the glass. The house stood by itself, for the house next to it had already been torn down. The house was completely dark. I had forgotten how afraid I was of the dark, but the rain was drenching me. I ran down the cellar steps and clambered into the house. I squatted there in a still, dry dread, in misery, not daring to look into the house but staring outward at the bright black area railing and the tempest beyond. I was holding my breath. I heard an endless scurrying in the darkness, a perpetual busy-ness, and I thought of rats, of their teeth and ferocity and fearful size and I began to cry again. If someone had come up then to murder me, I don’t believe I could have moved or made any other sound.

I don’t know how long I squatted there this way, or what was in my mind—I think there was nothing in my mind, I was as blank as a toothache. I listened to the rain and the rats. Then I was aware of another sound, I had been hearing it for awhile without realizing it. This was a moaning sound, a sighing sound, a sound of strangling, which mingled with the sound of the rain and with a muttering, cursing, human voice. The sounds came from the door which led to the backyard. I wanted to stand, but I crouched lower; wanted to run, but could not move. Sometimes the sounds seemed to come closer and I knew that this meant my death; sometimes diminished or ceased altogether and then I knew that my assailant was looking for me. Oh, how I hated Caleb for bringing my life to an end so soon! How I wished I knew where to find him! I looked toward the backyard door and I seemed to see, silhouetted against the driving rain, a figure, half bent, moaning, leaning against the wall, in indescribable torment; then there seemed to be two figures, sighing and grappling, moving so quickly that it was impossible to tell which was which—if this had been a movie, and I had been holding a gun, I would have been afraid to shoot, for fear of shooting the wrong person; two creatures, each in a dreadful, absolute, silent single-mindedness, attempting to strangle the other! I watched, crouching low. A very powerful and curious excitement mingled itself with my terror and made the terror greater. I could not move. I did not dare to move. The figures were quieter now. It seemed to me that one of them was a woman and she seemed to be crying—pleading for her life. But her sobbing was answered only by a growling sound. The muttered, joyous curses began again, the murderous ferocity began again, more bitterly than ever, and I trembled with fear and joy. The sobbing began to rise in pitch, like a song. The movement sounded like so many dull blows. Then everything was still, all movements ceased—my ears trembled. Then the blows began again and the cursing became a growling, moaning, stretched-out sigh. Then I heard only the rain and the scurrying of the rats. It was over—one of them, or both of them, lay stretched out, dead or dying, in this filthy place. It happened in Harlem every Saturday night. I could not catch my breath to scream. Then I heard a laugh, a low, happy, wicked laugh, and the figure turned in my direction and seemed to start toward me. Then I screamed and stood straight up, bumping my head on the window frame and losing my cap, and scrambled up the cellar steps, into the rain. I ran head down, like a bull, away from that house and out of that block and it was my great good luck that no person and no vehicle were in my path. I ran up the steps of my stoop and bumped into Caleb.

“Where the hell have you been? Hey! what’s the matter with you?”

For I had jumped up on him, almost knocking him down, trembling and sobbing.

“You’re soaked. Leo, what’s the matter with you? Where’s your cap?”

But I could not say anything. I held him around the neck with all my might, and I could not stop shaking.

“Come on, Leo,” Caleb said, in a different tone, “tell me what’s the matter. Don’t carry on like this.” He pried my arms loose and held me away from him so that he could look into my face. “Oh, little Leo. Little Leo. What’s the matter, baby?” He looked as though he were about to cry himself and this made me cry harder than ever. He took out his handkerchief and wiped my face and made me blow my nose. My sobs began to lessen, but I could not stop trembling. He thought that I was trembling from cold and he rubbed his hands roughly up and down my back and rubbed my hands between his. “What’s the matter?”

I did not know how to tell him.

“Somebody try to beat you up?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“What movie did you see?”

“I didn’t go. I couldn’t find nobody to take me in.”

“And you just been wandering around in the rain all night?”

I shook my head. “Yes.”

He looked at me and sat down on the hallway steps. “Oh, Leo.” Then, “You mad at me?”

I said, “No. I was scared.”

He nodded. “I reckon you were, man,” he said. “I reckon you were.” He wiped my face again. “You ready to go upstairs? It’s getting late.”

“Okay.”

“How’d you lose your cap?”

“I went in a hallway to wring it out—and—I put it on the radiator and I heard some people coming—and—I ran away and I forgot it.”

“We’ll say you forgot it in the movies.”

“Okay.”

We started up the stairs.

“Leo,” he said, “I’m sorry about tonight. I’m really sorry. I won’t let it happen again. You believe me?”

“Sure. I believe you.”

“Give us a smile, then.”

I smiled up at him. He squatted down.

“Give us a kiss.”

I kissed him.

“Okay. Climb up. I’ll give you a ride—hold on, now.”

He carried me piggyback up the stairs.

Thereafter, we evolved a system which did not, in fact, work too badly. When things went wrong and he could not be found, I was to leave a message for him at a certain store on the avenue. This store had a bad reputation—more than candy and hot dogs and soda pop were sold there; Caleb himself had told me this and told me not to hang out there. But he said that he would see to it that they treated me all right. I did not know exactly what this meant then, but I was to find out. I had to wait for him in that store many nights; and for years I was to wish that I had never seen it, never heard of it; and for years I was to avoid the store’s alumni, who also had their reasons for not wishing to face me.

But this store was not the only place I sometimes waited for, or met, Caleb. I went in the store one Saturday night, and one of the boys who was always there, a boy about Caleb’s age, looked up and smiled and said, “You looking for your brother? Come on, I’ll take you to him.”

This was not the agreed-on formula. I was to be taken to Caleb only in cases of real emergency, which was not the case this night. I was there because the show had turned loose a little earlier than usual; and so Caleb was not really late yet, and since it was only about a quarter past eleven, I figured I had about half an hour to wait. But I also knew that the boss, a very dour, silent, black man—he spoke only to curse—was made very nervous by my presence in the store, especially at the hours I would be there, and he sometimes sat me alone in the back room. Otherwise, I must say, they were, in their elegantly philosophical fashion (I was simply another element to be dealt with) very nice to me. They didn’t say much to me, since they didn’t consider that there could be very much in the way of common ground between us—or, insofar as a common ground existed, it was far safer not to attempt to describe it—but they bought me Hershey bars, sometimes, and malted milks, and soda pop. They themselves drank wine and gin and beer, and, very rarely, whiskey.

This particular Saturday night, when the boy made his invitation, I assumed it was because of some prearrangement with the boss—who looked at me from behind his counter, munching on a toothpick, and said nothing. There were only a couple of boys in the store, silently playing cards.

I said, “Okay,” and the boy, whose name was Arthur, said, “Come on, sonny. I’m going to take you to a party.” He grinned down in my face as he said this, and then waved, more or less at random, to the store: “Be seeing you!” We walked out. He took my hand and led me across the avenue and into a long, dark block. We walked the length of the block in silence, crossed another avenue, Arthur holding tightly to my hand, and passed two white cops, who looked at us sharply. Arthur muttered under his breath, “You white cock-suckers. I wish all of you were dead.” We slowed our pace a little; I had the feeling, I don’t know why, that this was because of the cops; then Arthur said, “Come on, sonny,” and we walked into a big house in the middle of the block. We were in a big vestibule with four locked apartment doors staring away from each other. It was not really clean, but it was fairly clean. We climbed three flights of stairs. Arthur knocked on the door, a very funny knock, not loud. After a moment, I heard a scraping sound, then the sound of a chain rattling and a bolt being pulled back. The door opened. A lady, very black and rather fat, wearing a blue dress which was very open around the breasts, held the door for us. She said, “Come on in—now, what you doing here with this child?”

“Had to do it. It’s all right. It’s Caleb’s brother.”

We started down a long, dark hall, with closed rooms on either side, toward the living room. One of the rooms was the kitchen. A smell of barbecue came out and made me realize that I was hungry. The living room was really two living rooms, one following the other. The farthest one looked out on the street. There were about six or seven people in the room, women and men. They looked exactly like the men and women who frightened me when I saw them standing on the corners, laughing and joking in front of the bars. But they did not seem frightening here. A record player was going, not very loud. They had drinks in their hands and there were empty plates and half-empty plates of food around the room. Caleb was sitting on the sofa with his arm around a girl in a yellow dress. “Here’s your little brother,” said the fat black lady in blue.

Caleb looked at me and then, immediately, to Arthur. Arthur said, “It was just better for him not to have to wait there tonight. You know.” To the lady in blue, he said, “The train is in the station, everything’s okay. I’m going to get myself a taste.”

Caleb smiled at me. I was tremendously relieved that he was not angry. I was delighted by this party, even though it made me shy. I wished I had come sooner.

“How you doing?” Caleb said. “Come on over here.” I went to the sofa. “This is my kid brother,” Caleb said. “His name is Leo. Leo, this is Dolores. Say hello to Dolores.”

Dolores smiled at me—I thought she was very pretty; she had a big mouth and blue gums and a lot of shining hair—and shook my hand and said, “I’m very happy to meet you, Leo. How’ve you been?”

“Just fine,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know how she’s been?” Caleb grinned.

“No,” said the fat black lady, and laughed, “I’m sure he don’t want to know that.” She had a very loud, good-natured laugh and Caleb and Dolores laughed with her. “They’re not being very nice to me, are they, Leo?” Dolores asked. “I don’t think you ought to let them laugh at me this way.”

I did not know what to say. I just stared at her red lips and her shining eyes and her shining hair. She had a bright, round, red pin at the center of her dress, where her breasts met. I could not keep my eyes away from it; and Arthur and Caleb laughed. Dolores said to Caleb, “I guess you come by it naturally, honey. I guess it runs in the family,” and Caleb said, “Lord. Let me get him out of here before he steals my girl.”

The lady in blue came to my rescue. “Don’t just go rushing him off like that. I bet he’s hungry. You been stuffing yourself all night, Caleb, let me give him a little bit of my barbecue and a glass of ginger ale.”

She already had one hand on my back and was beginning to propel me out of the room. I looked at Caleb. Caleb said, “Just remember we ain’t got all night. Leo, this is Miss Mildred. She cooked everything, and she’s a mighty good friend of mine. What do you say to Miss Mildred, Leo?”

“Dig Caleb being the big brother,” Arthur muttered, and laughed.

“Thank you, Miss Mildred,” I said.

“Come on in the kitchen,” she said, “and let me try to put some flesh on them bones. Caleb, you ought to be ashamed with your great, big, fat self, and letting your brother be so puny.” She walked me into the kitchen. “Now, you sit right over there,” she said. “Won’t take me but a minute to warm this up.” She sat me at the kitchen table and gave me a napkin and poured the ginger ale. “What grade you in at school, Leo?” I told her. “You must be a right smart boy, then,” she said with a pleased smile. “Do you like school, Leo?”

I told her what I liked best was Spanish and History and English Composition. This caused her to look more pleased than ever. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Somehow, I could not tell her what I had told the man—my friend—on the train. I said I wasn’t sure, that maybe I would be a schoolteacher.

“That’s just what I wanted to be,” she said proudly, “and I studied right hard for it, too, and I believe I would have made it, but then I had to go and get myself mixed up with some no-count nigger. I didn’t have no sense. I didn’t have no better sense but to marry him. Can you beat that?” and she laughed and set my plate in front of me. “Go on, now, eat. Foolish me. You know I had a little boy like you? And I don’t know where he’s gone to. He had the same big eyes like you and a dimple right here”—she touched the corner of her lip—“when he smiled. But I give him to my sister, she lives in Philadelphia, because I couldn’t raise him by myself, and my sister she was married to a undertaker and they was right well off—of course my sister and I never did get along too well, she was too dicty for me, you know how some folks are—and they said they’d raise him just like their own. And I reckon they tried. But he walked off from them one day—I reckon he was about sixteen—and don’t nobody know where he went. I keep expecting him to come through this door. Now, your brother,” she said suddenly, “he’s a right fine boy. He wants to make something of himself. He’s got ambition. That’s what I like—ambition. Don’t you let him be foolish. Like me. You like my barbecue?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “It’s good.”

“But I bet you like your mama’s better,” she said.

I said, “My mama’s barbecue is different. But I like yours, too.”

“Let me give you some more ginger ale,” she said, and poured it. I was beginning to be full. But I didn’t want to go, although. I knew that, now, it was really beginning to be late. While Miss Mildred talked and moved about the kitchen, I listened to the voices coming from the other rooms, the voices and the music. They were playing a kind of purple lazy dance music, a music which was already in my bones, along with the wilder music from which the purple music sprang. The voices were not like the music, though they corroborated it. I listened to a girl’s voice, gravelly and low, indignant, and full of laughter. The room was full of laughter. It exploded, at intervals, and rolled through the living room and hammered at the walls of the kitchen. But it traveled no further. No doubt, lying in bed, in one of the rooms off the hall, one would have heard it, but heard it dimly, from very far away, and with a certain anger—anger that the laughter could not travel down the hall and could not enter one’s dark, solitary room. Every once in a while, I heard Caleb, booming like a trumpet, drowning out the music, and I could almost see him, bouncing his head off Dolores’ shoulder, rising like a spring from the sofa and jack-knifing himself across the room. Now, someone was telling a story: it concerned some fool he worked with in the post office. Only this voice and the music were heard. The voice began to be hoarse with anticipation and liquid with exuberance. Then his laugh rang out, and all the others laughed, rocking. “He said—he said—I don’t know what’s the matter with you niggers. You ain’t got good sense. I’m working for my pension. And Shorty say, he say, Yeah, baby, and that pension’s going to buy you enough beans for you to fart your life away! Ho-ho! Ho-ho! Ha-ha!” Then, by and by, the voices sputtered out, the voices dropped, and the music took over again. I wondered how often Caleb came here and how he had met these people who were so different, at least as it seemed to me, from any of the people who ever came to our house.

Then Caleb’s hand was on my neck. Dolores stood in the doorway, smiling. “You stuffed yourself enough, little brother? Because we got to get out of here now.” I stood up. “Wipe your mouth,” said Caleb, “you ain’t civilized at all.”

“Don’t you pay him no mind,” said Miss Mildred. “He’s just evil because Dolores thinks you got prettier eyes than him.”

“That’s the truth,” said Dolores. “I was just thinking what a pity I didn’t see your little brother first.”

I knew that she was teasing me, but I fell in love with her anyway.

“Keep on talking,” said Caleb, “and I’ll give him to you. Ain’t neither one of you noticed how much he can eat. Come on, Leo, put on your coat. One of these mad chicks is liable to kidnap you and then I don’t know what I’ll say to your mama.”

We walked slowly down the hall, Miss Mildred, Dolores, and Caleb and me. I wanted to say good-night to all the others but I knew I couldn’t suggest this. We reached the door, which had a metal pole built into it in such a way as to prevent its being opened from the outside, and a heavy piece of chain around the top of the three locks. Miss Mildred began, patiently, to open the door. “Leo,” she said, “don’t you be no stranger. You make your brother bring you back to see me, you hear?” She got the pole out of the way, then she undid the chain. She had not turned on the hall light; I wondered how she could see. To Caleb she said, “Bring him by some afternoon. I ain’t got nothing to do. I’ll be glad to look after him—let your mama and daddy have a day off, go to the movies or something.” I thought this was a splendid suggestion and wondered how I could persuade Caleb of this. There was no question of ever being able to persuade our parents. The last lock yielded and Miss Mildred opened the door. We were facing the bright hall lights; no, the building was not very clean. “Good-night, Leo,” Miss Mildred said, and then she said good-night to Dolores and Caleb. She closed the door. I heard the scraping sound again, and we walked down the stairs. “She’s nice,” I said, and Caleb said, yawning, “Yeah, she’s a very nice lady.” Then he said, “Now, I don’t want you telling nobody at home about this, you hear?” I swore I wouldn’t tell. “It’s our secret,” Caleb said.

It was colder in the streets than it had been before and there were not many people.

Caleb took Dolores’ arm. “Let’s get you to your subway,” he said. We started walking up the wide, dark avenue. We reached the brightly lit kiosk which came up out of the sidewalk like some unbelievably malevolent awning or the suction apparatus of a monstrous vacuum cleaner. “Bye-bye,” said Caleb, and kissed Dolores on the nose, “I got to run. See you Monday, after school.”

“Bye-bye,” said Dolores. She bent down and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Bye-bye, Leo. Be good.” She hurried down the steps.

Caleb and I began walking very fast, down the avenue, toward our block. The subway station was near the moviehouse and the moviehouse was dark. But we knew we were late—we did not think that we were very late.

“It was a very long show,” Caleb said, “wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What did we see?”

I told him.

“What were they about? Tell me about both pictures. Just in case.”

I told him as well and as fully as I could as we hurried down the avenue. He held me by the hand and he was walking much too fast for me and so my breath was short. But Caleb had great powers of concentration and could figure out enough from what I said to know what to say if the necessity arose. But our troubles, that night, came from a very different source than our parents. I had just reached the point in my breathless narration where the good girl is murdered by the Indians and the hero vows revenge, we were hurrying down the long block which led east to our house, when we heard the brakes of a car and were blinded by bright lights and were pushed up against a wall.

“Turn around,” said a voice. “And keep your hands in the air.”

It may seem funny, I don’t know, but I felt, at once, as though Caleb and I had conjured up a movie; that if I had not been describing a movie to him, we would not have suddenly found ourselves in the middle of one. Or was it the end? For I had never been so frightened in my life before.

We did as we were told. I felt the grainy brick beneath my fingers. A hand patted me all over my body, front and back, every touch humiliating, every touch obscene. Beside me, I heard Caleb catch his breath.

“Turn around,” the voices said.

The great lights of the police car had gone out; I could see the car at the curb, the doors open. I thought I could see, across the street, a colored man, in the shadows, staring, but I could not be sure. I did not dare to look at Caleb, for I felt that this would, somehow, be used against us. I stared at the two policemen, young, white, tight-lipped, and self-important. They turned a flashlight first on Caleb, then on me.

“Where you boys going?”

“Home,” Caleb said. I could hear his breathing. “We live in the next block,” and he gave the address.

The flashlight had gone out and I could see their faces. I memorized their faces.

“Where’ve you been?”

I trembled. I did not know of whom the question had been asked. I did not know what to answer.

Now I heard the effort Caleb was making not to surrender either to rage or panic. “We just took my girl to the subway station. We were at the movies.” And then, forced out of him, weary, dry, and bitter, “This here’s my brother. I got to get him home. He ain’t but ten years old.”

“What movie did you see?”

And Caleb told them. I marveled at his memory. But I also knew that the show had let out about an hour or so before. I feared that the policemen might also know this. But they didn’t, of course, know: such knowledge is beneath them.

“You got any identification?”

“My brother doesn’t. I do.”

“Let’s see it.”

Caleb took out his wallet and handed it over. I could see that his hands were trembling. I watched the white faces. I memorized each mole, scar, pimple, nostril hair; I memorized the eyes, the contemptuous eyes. I wished that I were God. And then I hated God.

They looked at his wallet, looked at us, handed it back. “Get on home,” one of them said, the one with the mole. They got into their car and drove off.

“Thanks,” Caleb said. “Thanks, you white cock-sucking dog-shit miserable white mother-fuckers. Thanks, all you scum-bag Christians.” His accent was now as irredeemably of the islands as was the accent of our father. I had never heard this sound in his voice before. He raised his face to the sky. “Thanks, good Jesus Christ. Thanks for letting us go home. I mean, I know you didn’t have to do it. You could have let us just get our brains beat out. Remind me, O lord, to put a extra large nickel in the plate next Sunday.” And then, suddenly, he looked down at me and laughed and hugged me. “Come on, let’s get home before the bastard changes his mind. Little Leo. Were you scared?”

“Yes,” I said. “Were you?”

“Damn right, I was scared. But—goddamn!—they must have seen that you weren’t but ten years old.”

“You didn’t act scared,” I said.

And this was the truth. But I also felt, I don’t know how, nor do I really know why, that I couldn’t let him feel, even for a moment, that I did not adore him, that I did not respect him, love him and admire him.

We were in our own block, approaching our stoop. “Well. We certainly have a good excuse for being late,” he said. He grinned. Then he said, “Leo, I’ll tell you something. I’m glad this happened. It had to happen one day and I’m glad it happened now. I’m glad it happened while I was with you—of course, I’m glad you were with me, too, dig, because if it hadn’t been for you, they’d have pulled my ass in and given me a licking just as sure as shit—”

“What for?”

“Because I’m black,” Caleb said. “That’s what for. Because I’m black and they paid to beat on black asses. But, with a kid your size, they just might get into trouble. So they let us go. They knew you weren’t nothing but a kid. They knew it. But they didn’t care. All black people are shit to them. You remember that. You black like me and they going to hate you as long as you live just because you’re black. There’s something wrong with them. They got some kind of disease. I hope to God it kills them soon.” We started up the steps to our house. “But it’s liable to kill us before it kills them.”

I said nothing. I said nothing because what he said was true, and I knew it. It seemed, now, that I had always known it, though I had never been able to say it. But I did not understand it. I was filled with an awful wonder, it hurt my chest and paralyzed my tongue. Because you’re black. I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I only saw the policemen, those murderous eyes again, those hands, with a touch like the touch of vermin. Were they people?

“Caleb,” I asked, “are white people people?”

“What are you talking about, Leo?”

“I mean—are white people—people? People like us?”

He looked down at me. His face was very strange and sad. It was a face I had never seen before. We climbed a few more stairs, very slowly. Then, “All I can tell you, Leo, is—well, they don’t think they are.”

I thought of Mr. Rabinowitz and Mr. Shapiro. Then I thought of my schoolteacher, a lady named Mrs. Nelson. I liked her very much. I thought she was very pretty. She had long, yellow hair, like someone I had seen in the movies, and a nice laugh, and we all liked her, all the kids I knew. The kids who were not in her class wished they were. I liked to write compositions for her because she seemed really interested and always asked questions. But she was white. Would she hate me all my life because I was black? It didn’t seem possible. She didn’t hate me now; I was pretty sure of that. And yet, what Caleb had said was true.

“Caleb,” I asked, “are all white people the same?”

“What do you mean, the same?”

“I mean—you know—are they all the same?”

And Caleb said, “I never met a good one.”

I asked, “Not even when you were little? in school?”

Caleb said, “Maybe. I don’t remember.” He smiled at me. “I never met a good one, Leo. But that’s not saying that you won’t. Don’t look so frightened.”

We were in front of our door. Caleb raised his hand to knock. I held his hand.

“Caleb,” I whispered, “what about Mama?”

“What do you mean, what about Mama?”

“Well, Mama”—I stared at him; he watched me very gravely. “Mama—Mama’s almost white—”

“Almost don’t get it,” Caleb said.

I stared at him.

“Our mama is almost white,” Caleb said, “but that don’t make her white. You got to be all white to be white.” He laughed; inside, we heard our father cough. “Poor Leo. Don’t feel bad. I know you don’t understand it now. I’ll try to explain it to you, little by little.” He paused. “But our mama is a colored woman. You can tell she’s a colored woman because she’s married to a colored man, and she’s got two colored children. Now, you know ain’t no white lady going to do a thing like that.” He watched me, smiling. “You understand that?” I nodded. “Well, you going to keep me here all night with your questions or can we go on in the house now?”

I told him to knock, and he did, and our mother opened the door.

“About time,” she said dryly—she was chewing on a porkchop bone, and had her hair piled in a knot on the top of her head. I liked her hair that way. “You must have sat through that movie four or five times. You’re going to ruin your eyes and that’ll just be too bad for you because you know we ain’t got no money to be buying you no glasses. Leo, you go on inside and get ready to take your bath.”

“Let him come over here a minute,” said our father. He was sitting in the one easy chair, near the window. He was drunk, but not as drunk as I had seen him, and this was a good mood drunk. In this mood, he would not talk about his job, or the white workers on the job, or his foreman, or about white people, or about African kings. In this mood, he talked about the islands, his mother and father and kinfolk and friends, the feast days, the singing, the dancing, and the sea.

I approached him, and he pulled me to him, smiling, and held me between his thighs. “How’s my big man?” he asked, smiling, and rubbing his hand gently, and with wonder, over my hair. “Did you have a good time tonight?”

Caleb sat on a straight chair near him, leaning forward. “Let Leo tell you why we so late. Tell them what happened, Leo.”

“We were coming down the block,” I began—and I watched my father’s face. Suddenly, I did not want to tell him. Something in Caleb’s tone had alerted him, and he watched me with a stern and frightened apprehension. My mother came and stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. I looked at Caleb. “Maybe you could tell it better,” I said.

“Go on, start. I’ll fill in.”

“We were coming down the block,” I said—and I told him which block—“coming from the movies”—I looked at Caleb.

“It’s not the way we usually come,” said Caleb.

My father and I stared at each other. There was, suddenly, between us an overwhelming sorrow. It had come from nowhere. “We got stopped by the cops,” I said. Then I could not continue. I looked helplessly at Caleb and Caleb told the story. As Caleb spoke, I watched my father’s face. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I felt the one arm he had around me tighten, tighten; his lips became bitter and his eyes grew dull. It was as though, after indescribable, nearly mortal effort, after grim years of fasting and prayer, after the loss of all he had, and after having been promised by the Almighty that he had paid the price and no more would be demanded of his soul, which was harbored now; it was as though in the midst of his joyful feasting and dancing, crowned and robed, a messenger arrived to tell him that a great error had been made, and that it was all to be done again. Before his eyes, then, the banquet and the banquet wines and the banquet guests departed, the robe and crown were lifted, and he was alone then, frozen out of his dream, with all that before him which he had thought was behind him. My father looked as stunned and still and as close to madness as that, and his encircling arm began to hurt me, but I did not complain. I put my hand on his face, and he turned to me, his face changed, he smiled—he was very beautiful then!—and he put his great hand on top of mine. He turned to Caleb.

“That’s all that happened? You didn’t say nothing?”

“What could I say? It might have been different, had I been by myself. But I had Leo with me, and I was afraid of what they might do to Leo. You know those bastards. You can’t get no lower than those bastards until they lower you six feet under.”

“No, you did right, man, I got no fault to find. You didn’t take their badge number?”

Caleb snickered. “What for? You know a friendly judge? We got money for a lawyer? Somebody they going to listen to? You know as well as me they beating on black ass all the time, all the time, man, they get us in that precinct house and make us confess to all kinds of things and sometimes even kill us and don’t nobody give a damn. Don’t nobody care what happens to a black man. If they didn’t need us for work, they’d have killed us all off a long time ago. They did it to the Indians.”

“That’s the truth,” said our mother. “I wish I could say different, but it’s the truth.” She stroked our father’s shoulder. “We just thank the Lord it wasn’t no worse.”

“You can thank the Lord,” said our father. “I ain’t got nothing to thank him for. I wish he was a man like me!”

“Well, you right,” said our mother. “It was just an expression. But let’s don’t sit here brooding about it. We just got to say: well, the boys got home safe tonight. Because that’s the way it is.”

I asked, “Daddy, how come they do us like they do?”

My father looked at me for a long time. Finally, he said, “Leo, if I could tell you that, maybe I’d be able to make them stop. But don’t let them make you afraid. You hear?”

I said, “Yes sir.” But I knew that I was already afraid.

“Let’s not talk about it no more,” our mother said. “No more tonight. If you two is hungry, I got some pork-chops back there.”

Caleb grinned at me. “Little Leo might be hungry. He stuffs himself like a pig. But I ain’t hungry. Hey, old man”—he nudged my father’s shoulder; nothing would be refused us tonight—“why don’t we have a taste of your rum? All right?”

Our mother laughed. “I’ll go get it,” she said. She started out of the room.

“Reckon we can give Leo a little bit, too?” our father asked. He pulled me onto his lap.

“In a big glass of water,” said our mother, laughing. She took one last look at us before she went into the kitchen. “My!” she said, “I sure am surrounded by some pretty men! My, my, my!”

I awoke suddenly, rising up abruptly from darkness, and flowers faced me on a table far away, great, blatant, triumphal blooms, reminding me of Barbara’s dressing room on opening nights. The table was placed before a large, high window, hung with yellow drapes. The drapes were slightly parted, and I could see the sun outside. The rest of the room was white—white walls, a white closed door. My blue dressing gown hung against the wall nearest my bed. I tried to raise myself up to see the rest of the room and then discovered that I had no strength at all. I felt as light and as hollow and as dry as a bleached bone in the sand. My skin seemed flaking. The hair on my head felt like an affliction. A woolly trap, it felt so heavy that I might have been in the grave for days. Then I wondered what day it was, and how long I had been here. All was silent—silent and white. I tried to guess from the sun what time it would be, and I decided it would probably be about eleven. But nothing mattered—except my heavy load of hair; I didn’t care if the silence never ended; I didn’t care if the room remained empty of people forever. I stretched my legs. They did not feel like mine, they had no weight at all. I felt a great peacefulness—such as I had never felt before. I turned my shell of a body into the white sheets and closed my eyes.

In no time, it seemed, I opened them, but now the sun was in another place and I supposed it must be about four. The nurse was in the room. “Hi, there, sleepy-head!” she cried cheerfully—with that really unnerving cheerfulness of nurses; one dare not speculate on what awful knowledge the cheerfulness hides—“You certainly got a good rest. How do you feel?”

She was young, very pretty, with a clean, scrubbed face, and with short red hair under her starched cap.

“I feel pretty exhausted,” I said. I did. And I suddenly felt very depressed.

“That’s only natural,” she said. “Please—may I?” And she extended the thermometer toward me.

“How long have I been here?”

“Just a day and a night—well, a night and a day and a night. Does it feel longer?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It feels like my hair’s been growing for a month.”

She laughed. “Well, I think we can fix that,” she said, “in a couple of days.” She extended the thermometer again, purposefully, and stuck it under my tongue. She looked at my chart, she pulled the curtains, she watered the flowers. She worked in silence, with short, childish movements. I watched her pleasing rump and her round arms and her aggressive, and at the same time helpless, breasts. I had the feeling that she hadn’t long since lost her baby fat. She opened the door and came back with an enormous basket of fruit, which she placed on the table next to the bed. “Some of your friends wanted to send over a case of champagne,” she said, “but we didn’t think we could allow that. Much as I wanted to. Oh! and aren’t some of the girls just sick with jealousy! Of me! Because I’m nursing Leo Proudhammer! They can hardly eat their lunch for asking me questions. I just tell them, Well, he’s sleeping. There’s not much difference between one man and another when they’re asleep.”

“Well,” I said, as she took the thermometer from my mouth and stared at it gravely, “now you can tell them that I’m awake. And I’m still not different.”

“Oh, but you are,” she said. “Yes, you are.” She carefully noted my temperature on my chart, and replaced the thermometer in its glass jar. “The doctor will be in to see you later,” she said. “We’re going to be running some tests on you. But right now,” she said firmly, “I will require a urine specimen, please.” She handed me the medieval jar, which was covered with a towel, and placed the screen in front of my bed. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and I heard the door close behind her.

I laughed as I prepared to obey her. How had she ever learned to say it that way? So impeccably firm and impersonal. But there obviously wasn’t any other way to say it, except, perhaps, between lovers, or parents and children. We will require a mucus specimen, please. But we said, Blow your nose. Harder. That’s better. The troubling, tyrannical, inconvenient flesh. The sacred flesh. I filled up the jar. The color seemed all right; there wasn’t any odor. But I was suddenly trembling, and cold with sweat. I might have been running for an hour. My body suddenly began to reassert its claims over me, plaintively proclaiming itself as exhausted, petulantly demanding that I do something. I had barely strength enough to wrap the towel around the bottle and place it on the lower shelf of the table. I just lay there. The basket of fruit was at my head, I wanted to know who had sent it, but it was too much trouble to lift my hand and look at the card. I began to realize that I was helpless—a big, grown, stinking man, and as helpless as a child. Perhaps, even more than most people, it is a state I cannot endure. It is terrible to depend on others, on another, for the execution of the simplest functions, terrible to see the book one wants at the other end of the room and be unable to get there. It causes one to begin to hate oneself. And, indeed, this vile, creepy, slimy, self-loathing came back as I lay there and realized that I had to go to the bathroom. I would have to use the bedpan; but I would never be able to sit up, unsupported. And I wanted to die—to drop my black carcass someplace and never be humiliated by it any more. I thought I had left this feeling far behind me, but here it was, now, as strong as ever—stronger; as I pictured the clean, apple-faced nurse supporting my back while I strained and sweated and my heavy stink filled the room. I put my hands to my woolly hair, that vile plantation, as though I would tear it from my skull. And I knew that I had felt this, in some way, all my life. But I had buried it; and made a point, certainly, of never being helpless. But if I had always felt this, then, certainly, I must have shown it, and shown it most, perhaps, when I was least aware of it. My body, after all—I told myself—was no more vile than others; my stink was not original, it had no greater resonance; the rats and the worms would find me as tasty as another. “Ah, Leo,” I said, “what a child you are.” This reflection did not mitigate my distress. The nurse came back. She picked up the bottle. There was no help for it. I said, “Nurse, I have to go to the bathroom.”

She said, “I can’t let you move. Wait just a moment.” Then she smiled a real smile. “I know it’s awful. But please don’t let it worry you. Please don’t.” She disappeared, then returned with the grim utensil. Her words hardly helped and yet I guess they helped a little. Anyway, we were still friends when it was over. I lay back. I wondered why humiliation seemed, after all, at bottom, to be my natural condition.

The doctor came in, the little nurse beside him. He was very cheerful, too, seeming to bring into the room with him the stinging air of the bay. His face was ruddy and he was immaculate, from his smooth, gleaming brown hair to his gleaming brown shoes. “You have decided,” he said, “to return to us. I thought you would, just as soon as you got a little rest. You know, I have never seen a man so tired as you. And that is very unwise.” He sat down and took my pulse. The nurse showed him my chart. He looked at it for awhile, looked at me. “Ah, yes,” he said. “How do you feel today? Any pain?” He watched me very carefully.

“No. I just feel as weak as a newborn kitten.”

“Naturally. You had quite a battle to fight. But we will get you on your legs again.” He took out his stethoscope and forced me to breathe this way and that way, he prodded me and tapped me and flipped me over once or twice, like a baby or a flapjack. He took my blood pressure. “We will be running some tests on you,” he said, “for a few days—blood, the liver—oh, a million sordid elements but I will not bore you with the details. At least not yet. This,” he said, preparing a needle, “may be a little unpleasant.”

When he was through, the nurse gathered up the needles and trays and towels and went out. The doctor pulled his chair closer to the bed. “Now,” he said, “listen. I do not know exactly all that I should know—I expect to discover more in a few days—perhaps everything.” He laughed. “Who knows? You have had a fairly serious heart attack. Not very serious—but fairly serious. It has been brought about by nervous exhaustion and overwork. Now, there is nothing wrong with your heart—yet—as, oddly enough, as far as I can tell now, there is nothing wrong with your liver. But you are thirty-nine years old, Proudhammer—you are not a boy. And you will not, from this time onward in your life, recover like a boy. If you make, as I think you say in show business, a change of pace, you will live a long time and I will be able to go and see you play many, many times more. I think you are a marvelous artist, by the way, and my wife and my daughter become speechless when your name is mentioned—so there is some selfishness in what I say. It would be a great pity to lose you. I mean that, that is true. But, you see, if you do not make a change of pace—drink less, smoke much less, and arrange your working schedule so that you have time to rest—and by rest I do not mean five minutes in the dressing room—then you will have another attack, and then another, and by then you will be seriously damaged, and then”—he grimaced—“it will be too late and one of your attacks will carry you away. And that would be too bad, a terrible waste, it is not necessary. You understand me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand you.”

“You do not need to push yourself so hard,” he said. “You have enough money. Oh! I know we never have enough money.” He laughed. Then he said, in a different tone, “But it is not really money with you, anyway. It is an impertinent question—but what is it? I simply would like to know. You have been extraordinarily successful for more than a decade—you see, I know, I did not hear of you yesterday. I should guess that the odds against you were fantastic. So—indulge me, if you please? I should like to know.”

I did not know how to answer. I had never put the question to myself—at least not in that way. I said, “I don’t know if I know. I’m an actor—I think I’m a pretty good actor”—I was listening to myself and I sounded very lame and defensive—“I’ve always tried not to repeat myself. I mean—I’ve always tried to do things I wasn’t sure I could do. If I knew I could do it, then there didn’t seem much point in doing it. And then you just do the same thing over and over again and pretty soon you’re not an actor, you’re just a kind of highly paid—mannequin.” I coughed. “Manipulated.” And then I said, surprised, rather, at the vehemence with which, in spite of myself, it came out, “And in my own case, after all, it’s been both easier and harder. When I say easier I guess I mean that I’m not at all—likely—so when I get on a stage, people notice me. But I’m what’s known as a hard type to cast—and a hard type to cast has got to be better, about thirty-seven thousand times better, than anybody else around—just to get on a stage. And then, when you start getting jobs—when they start casting you”—I subsided—“well, you’ve got a certain kind of advantage. But you can’t afford to lose it.”

“I see.” He smiled. “You are what a friend of mine would call—an obsessional type.” His face suggested, and I also felt, weakly, that there was more to it than anything I had said. But I did not know how to say more; I felt, inexplicably, on the brink of tears; and I decided that this was due to my weariness.

But I forced myself to smile, I forced myself to be together. “Is there anything wrong, doctor—with being an obsessional type?”

“Most artists,” he said discreetly, “are obsessional types. There is nothing to be done about that. I will leave you now and I will see you in the morning. But you must think about what I have said.”

“I promise that I will. Thank you. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Proudhammer.”

He went out. But he returned almost at once. “Your friend and coworker, Miss King, has been here every day and has called every night. She will be here this evening. But I have told her that she cannot stay with you very long.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Now, the room was beginning to fill with twilight. I discovered a lamp near my bed, and I turned it on. I looked at the basket of fruit and picked up the card. It was not really a card, but a telegram. It read, Stop jiving the people and get yourself back here. You know you can’t get sick. And it was signed, Love, Christopher. It was very moving, though in an oddly remote way—but everything seemed remote—for Christopher and his friends had no money. It must have demanded some ingenuity, from New York, to make certain that a basket of fruit would be in my hospital room in California. Not very long ago, such ingenuity on Christopher’s part would have filled me with joy—not now; I put the telegram, folded, on the table and wondered if I would ever feel anything again, for anyone. Black Christopher: because he was black in so many ways—black in color, black in pride, black in rage. No wonder I had a heart attack, I thought. And then I thought of what the doctor had said. Leo, Barbara had sometimes said, you also have the right to live. You have the right. You haven’t got to prove it.

I thought of the years I had first met Barbara, in the Village—the grimy, frightening, untidy years. I had not imagined that I could ever feel nostalgia for those years, or that I would ever, abruptly, bleakly, see in them, and in myself, a vanished, a blasphemed beauty, a beauty which I had never recognized and which I had, myself, destroyed. None of it had seemed beautiful then, myself least of all. There we were, filthier than gypsies, more abject than beggars, our mouths open obscenely for the worm, the morsel, the crumb, which the world never dropped—but the world dropped other things, we gagged and vomited, we feared that we were poisoned!—with our stolen books, our “borrowed” records, our frail pretensions, our ignorance, our stolen food. For a time, four or five of us—or, indeed, to tell the truth, whoever would—shared two floors in a falling-down tenement on the East Side. It was hidden, for decency’s sake, from the street; one entered it through a gate, finding oneself in a courtyard where two buildings leaned crazily toward each other; a third building, at the end of the courtyard, seemed leaning upon these two—three drunken, lunatic friends, all about to go down together. We called this place Paradise Alley—odd it is, to reflect now that in some way we loved it. Nothing locked, we soon gave up any such attempt, and formed the habit of climbing in and out of each other’s windows, walking through each other’s doors. Nothing belonged to anybody, so that whatever there was (or whoever there was) could be found, and possibly collected, anywhere in the building. It was here that Barbara had become pregnant for the first time—by a hometown, childhood sweetheart, who had joined the Marines and come to visit her, emphatically to let her know what he thought of girls who ran away from respectable homes and lost their morals. She had had to have an abortion, I helped her raise the money—by waiting on tables, by hustling—and after that she became very sick and we became much closer. We went “shopping” at dawn, following a long and circuitous route. Bananas had been delivered outside the A&P. We put these in our shopping bag. (We took turns “shopping”: we couldn’t all get arrested at once.) We picked up the bread and milk and vegetables which had been delivered to the stores along Bleecker Street—sometimes we even got eggs. We were home before six, and ready for breakfast. Meat was our only problem, but we had a friend who worked in a big hot dog stand on 14th Street; to this day, I have no affection for hot dogs. We drank beer in the bars in the Village, shamelessly flattering the uptown strangers, who drank whiskey, who ordered whiskey for us, who might buy us a meal, who might, indeed—why not? it happened from time to time—buy us several; who might, in return for being allowed to lean at the candle of our ardor and our youth, in return for holding us (who desperately wanted to be held) between darkness and dawn on Saturday nights, see to it that we ate meat. What in the world had I been like in those years? But I remembered Barbara. For a time, we had both been artists’ models at the Art Students’ League on 57th Street. Barbara lasted much longer than I. She was rather more round-faced then, with very high color, and with very long, brown, curly hair, which she wore in bangs and pigtails. She had a marvelous laugh—she looked very much like what she was, a refugee schoolgirl from Kentucky. She had a very boyish figure, small breasts and not much of a behind—she was still in her teens—and wonderful long legs. She almost always wore pants, which got her in some trouble in some quarters, sometimes, but every once in a while she would put up her hair and put on lipstick and wear a dress. And it was astonishing what a difference this made. She became extraordinarily pretty, vulnerable, glowing. Then she looked like the rather proud daughter of proud Kentucky landowners. I was always delighted and secretly intimidated when she dressed, for I could not meet her on that ground at all. It made me wonder what she, really, in her secret heart, thought of me, what she thought of us all. The world in which we lived threatened, every hour, to close on the rest of us forever. We had no equipment with which to break out—and I, least of all. But she could walk out of it at any instant that she chose.

I remember going with Barbara to an uptown party one summer night. It turned out, in fact, to be my first theatrical party. I was not supposed to go. A friend of ours, Jerry, who also lived in Paradise Alley, was supposed to take her. But when the time came, he was nowhere to be found. I had been sitting in my—quarters, I suppose I must call them—for the last hour, reading, and listening to Barbara, in the room across the hall, humming, and slamming drawers. I heard her call up the steps:

“Jerry!”

She had a big voice for such a little girl, too. There was no answer. She called again. This time the voice of the old Russian lady sculptress who lived on the top floor answered:

“Barbara, he is not up here. There is no one up here but me.”

“Thanks, Sonia.” Then, “Damn!” She knocked on my door, simultaneously opening it, and leaned there, glowering at me. “Have you seen Jerry?” She was wearing a light blue dress, and high heels.

“I haven’t seen him all day. Where’re you going?”

“To a party. To an uptown party. Jerry was supposed to come with me.”

“Well—maybe he’s with Charlie.”

Loosely speaking, we operated in pairs. One became a pair by sharing the same quarters—in my case, a mattress on the floor, and a victrola—and the half that was out was technically supposed to remember that the half at home was certainly hungry. Which I was. But Charlie hadn’t been seen since the day before.

“I don’t think so. Jerry’s probably gone to see his mother. He can’t seem to stay away from her, although he keeps me up all night, every night, telling me how much he hates her.”

“We both seem to have been abandoned. But you’re in luck. You’re going to a party. Will they feed you?”

“There’ll be lots of food. Come with me.”

“I can’t come with you!”

“Why not? I’ve got enough money for a taxi, Leo, honest. And I can borrow some money up there. Really. Come on. You’re not doing anything down here. And you’d be doing me a favor.”

She mentioned the taxi because we had had terrible trouble, many times, trying to get through the streets of my hometown together, black and white. Nothing would ever induce us to take a subway again together, for example. But I admired Barbara for her unsentimental clarity. Lots of other girls I had known before her had been very sentimental indeed, and had almost got me killed.

“Just put on a clean shirt, and tie. And your dark jacket.”

“What about these pants?”

“They’re all right. They’re not torn, or anything. They just need to be pressed. Keep smiling, because you’ve got a wonderful smile, you know, and don’t stand too long in one place and nobody will notice anything. Now, hurry up, we’re supposed to be there right now.”

She sat down on my mattress, not that there was anyplace else she could have sat, and leafed through my book.

“Leo, why are you suddenly reading Swinburne?”

I said defensively, “Because I never read him before, that’s why.” I was very ashamed of my lack of education, and, in those days, I was reading everything I could get my hands on.

“Well. I think he’s pretty silly. Eliot’s the only great poet. Leo, your hair looks perfectly all right. Leave it alone and put on your shirt.”

“I was only brushing it. And I need a haircut.”

“Why, oh why,” crooned Barbara philosophically, “do we never like ourselves as we are? I love your hair, it goes with your face. But you probably wish you had silly stringy hair like mine.”

“Shut up.” I put on my shirt. “Who’s giving this party?”

“Well, one of the instructors at the League used to do set designs years ago, for the people who’re giving the party. Nothing big—summer theater, little things, you know—and, well, he knows I want to be an actress and he thought that they might give me some ideas about how to get started—especially where to study, that’s my problem. Oh. You see, his friends went on to become part of The Actors’ Means Workshop. So—it might be interesting.”

“For you. He doesn’t know I’m coming.”

“He knows a friend is coming. If they’re shocked, well, you can take it, and the hell with them. They’re so goddamn liberal, anyway, they make me want to puke. God, give me back my old Kentucky home, where a spade”—she began to laugh, and I laughed with her—“is called a spade!”

We walked down the stairs and crossed the quiet yard and walked out through our gate, into the streets. I always had to force myself to walk through the gate, especially if I was with Barbara. But, today, there were not many people in the streets—mainly the elderly, in windows, or on stoops. They seemed not to notice us. Avenue A was completely deserted, and we walked up to 14th Street before we found a cab. It was about seven in the evening, a marvelous summer evening. Barbara gave the driver the address. I leaned back, with my hand in hers.

“I think I should break up with Jerry,” she said.

I took my hand away, and watched the streets go by. “I wasn’t sure you were really with Jerry,” I said.

“Well, why do you think you’ve been seeing him all the time, coming in and out of my door, for the last six weeks?”

“I wasn’t in your room, sweetheart. And he’s been coming in and out of my door, too.”

“That sounds like Jerry. I’m beginning to think he’s not very particular about his doors.”

“But you are,” I said. “Or you certainly should be.” I looked at her. I looked out of the window again. “Hell. I don’t know.”

She bit her lip. We were approaching the park at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. “D’you know anybody who lives on Gramercy Park?” she asked. “Because I do. Gramercy Park South.”

“Good for you, princess. Do you want to stop and pay them a visit?”

“God, no. They’re just friends of my family, they’re here for a couple of weeks. My mother wrote me about them, and asked me to go and see them.”

“Suppose they come to see you?” I sat straight up.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think they can. I think they still think I’m at the Y. I always write them on Y stationery.”

“What about when they write you?”

“Yes. That’s happened. But, then, I explain that I’m at another branch. And now I’ve told them to write me at the Art Students’ League.”

“I think it might be simpler, after all,” I said, “just to give them your address.”

“But, then,” she said, “they’d just keep sending these people up to see me all the time. And that would be awful.”

“They’d have a fit.”

“Yes. And I’m just so tired of fighting with them.”

“And they wouldn’t like Jerry. Or Charlie. Or me.”

“That’s true. But they don’t like me.”

The taxi kept rolling. I said nothing.

“Do you get along with your family?” she asked.

I said, “No.” Then, “But I don’t really have any family. Not like you do.”

She sighed. “Poor Leo. Poor Barbara. What’s the matter with us all?” She looked out of her side of the cab and suddenly started laughing. The cab driver chuckled, too. “Oh, Leo. You didn’t see it. This old, old lady in the middle of the street—and the bus was practically on top of her—she had no business out there—and she just put up her hand like this”—and she raised her hand in a gesture that looked like the Hitler salute—“and the bus just stopped. What brakes, boy. Or what a hand. You should have seen it. Sunday in New York. Wow. Kentucky was never like this.”

We got to the party, which, as I remember, was somewhere in the Eighties, west of the Park. I remember an enormous foyer, artificial brown brick, lights flush with the ceiling, mirrors, and fake Greek columns. Levels, so that you had to watch where you were going, or you’d break your neck. A doorman stared at us, or, rather, at me; and we stood next to him while he called upstairs. Even then, he wasn’t satisfied but left his post and came upstairs with us. The door was open and there were many people in the room. But the doorman rang the bell and stood there. Barbara had been amused. Now she was getting angry, and this, as always, made me cool. He kept looking from Barbara to me, and looking over the heads of the people, waiting for the host to appear. I kept staring at him; but—cowards all!—he refused to meet my eye. Barbara said, “The Führer is proud of you. You have done your duty like a good little soldier, and tomorrow you will be promoted to the latrine detail. Come on, Leo.” She took my arm; the doorman danced as though he had to pee; the host, thank God, appeared. “But why are you standing out here?” he cried. “Come on in!”

“Your man didn’t seem to want to let us in,” I said.

“I just wanted to make sure it was all right, Mr. Frank,” said the doorman. “You understand.”

“What? Sure it’s all right. What are you talking about? Kids!” He opened his arms wide. “Come on in.”

Mr. Frank was smiling, but Barbara was dry. “This is Mr. Frank,” she said. “Mr. Frank, this is my friend, Mr. Proudhammer.”

“Pleased to meet you,” we said, and our handshakes and our smiles meshed perfectly together. We went on in.

I look back on that party now—I see it through the veil of years—in an indefensibly romantic way. In the light of all that came after, it has the weight of the portentous, the dreadful value of the crucial turning. There we were, Barbara bright in blue, I dull in dark. Young, young, terribly young, and with scarcely any weapons save our youth and what time was to reveal as our character—by which I mean our real preoccupations. Time was to tell us what we really cared about. Then, we really did not know. I see us moving into the room, piloted by the rather desperately smiling Mr. Frank—who had a mustache, an open, boyish face, much graying hair, perhaps too deliberately unkempt, and long eyes, placed very close together. He was the Art League instructor, and Barbara’s friend; I do not know what it was in his smile which made me feel how often—three times a week, at least—he had seen Barbara naked. And this was revealed in Barbara, too, in an attitude at once shrinking and haughty. Barbara had been imprecise—she was forever to remain so. It was not Mr. Frank’s friends who were giving the party, but Mr. Frank himself. His friends were the guests of honor. But it took a while before we met these friends, who were to have such an effect on our lives. There were, I am sure, hundreds of people there, and both Barbara and I, in our bright blue, dull dark fashions, were intimidated by them all. They glittered, they flashed, they resounded; they had that air, inimitable absolutely, of those who have succeeded. We recognized many of them, for many of them were famous. I think Sylvia Sidney was there, she was doing a play in New York then; and Franchot Tone; and Bette Davis. And many playwrights and many directors. I was amazed that I recognized so many. Yes, we were dazzled, dazzled indeed. In the long, high room, this elegant room—elegant if one bears in mind that elegance is scarcely permissible in America—they seemed different, both younger and older—for one saw the faces, off-guard, in life—and certainly smaller than they appeared on stage or screen. One saw that so-and-so’s teeth, for example, were a little crooked; and this one had bowlegs; this one was very drunk and was clearly intending to become drunker. One very famous actress struck me as having very narrowly missed being a dwarf: but she had seemed very tall, in her regal robes, when I had seen her on the stage as the queen of all the Russias. It may have been that night that I really decided to attempt to become an actor—really became committed to this impossibility; it is certain that this night brought into my mind, in an astounding way, the great question of where the boundaries of reality were truly to be found. If a dwarf could be a queen and make me believe that she was six feet tall, then why was it not possible that I, brief, wiry, dull dark me, could become an emperor—The Emperor Jones, say, why not? And I then watched everybody with this cruel intention in my mind.

Barbara, meanwhile, was being very much the heiress of all Kentucky. She was armed with her beauty, and she knew it, and her intentions were no less cruel than mine. If the other guests flashed, glittered, resounded, she more than confronted this display with her own unanswerable radiance, an innocence more presumed on their part than assumed on hers—but she was certainly no more above using their presumptions against them than I was—and a trick she had, which was to make her fortune later, of dropping her voice. She sometimes sounded as though she suffered from laryngitis, and one had to listen very carefully to hear what she said. She knew, however, that she had the power to make one listen very carefully, she knew very well that she was not at all what she seemed to be, and, furthermore, she knew how to make the company know that, though they had fame, she had youth, and time was on her side. The trick with her voice was something she had picked up from Margaret Sullavan, an actress she admired very much. But it always astonished me that no one ever recognized this. Perhaps it was because she had mastered the trick and made it her own. It was no longer a trick, but a fact.

The room had a fireplace and a mantelpiece. Rather unpleasant objects were placed on the mantelpiece, curios meant to remind one of Africa and of Rome. The room contained the necessary elements of Picasso and Matisse and Rouault, and, hanging from the center of the ceiling, was an extremely depressing and sibilant mobile. Just as the room was grim with splendor, it was also very heavily freighted with liquor and with food on two immense tables, near the open windows. Barbara saw that I had found my feet, knew what to do—that girl always trusted me—and, as we were operating, in any case, in tandem, she went on to her job in the perfect assurance that I would do mine. Her job was mainly to be charming, thus divesting the company of their spiritual valuables. My job was to be surly—my surliness being, precisely, my charm. At this point in our lives, Barbara and I had never slept together, but we had also, by now, been forced to discover how extremely unattractive and indeed offensive most people considered the truth to be. We no longer dreamed of telling the truth. Thus, Barbara knew herself to be branded, merely by the fact of my presence, with a letter far more dreadful than the scarlet one—and far more attractive, therefore she dropped her voice, forcing everyone to lean in to listen, and used her teeth and eyes to such moving effect that everyone wished they were me—and I was invested, by her presence, with an aura of dangerous recklessness and power. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but we were, as Pirandello puts it, in the process of living our play and playing our lives.

Preparing myself for my role—I was to live with this inane concept for many years—I went to the tables and heaped food on a plate. Then I poured a very genteel glass of red wine. Since Barbara was now being so very delicate and Southern—she was pretending to be Scarlett O’Hara, was being extremely girlish and completely untruthful concerning the family “domains—but I reckon y’all say real estate, don’t you?”—I carried the immense plate of food and the genteel glass of wine to her. I even remembered to drape a napkin over my arm.

“Why, my darling Leo,” she said, in her highest voice and with her richest accent, “How sweet of you! But how in the world”—she turned, glowing indeed, to the couple she had been so brutally seducing—“am I to manage it?”

“I’ll hold the glass,” I said.

“Not at all. He’s completely impossible,” she now informed the fascinated couple—“really! I will find a seat and sit down. And you will find yourself something to eat, and a drink—he drinks far too much,” she said to the couple, “but I’ve given up fighting him about it, it’s simply a waste of time. Do come with me,” she said to the couple, who were now regarding me with a very definite awe, “and, Leo,” she said imperiously, “do come immediately back and I will introduce you to the guests of honor. I don’t dare do it now because you’re not in the least amenable until you’ve got something in your stomach.” She smiled at the couple. “He’s really a very sweet boy.”

I said, “Thank you, princess. Them’s the kindest words I’ve heard from you all week.” Then, precisely on cue, I gave the couple my most irresistible grin. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I went to the tables and got down a lot of chicken livers in a hurry and loaded up a plate and poured myself an enormous Scotch.

They were sitting on a sofa near the fireplace. Barbara had a very definite eye on all the other actresses in the room and was selecting and discarding various details of their dress and manner. She was also attempting, with a success far from complete, some of the worldliness of Tallulah Bankhead. Her audience, though, which was probably amused, was also very firmly held. Barbara was talking about Miss Julie. “Leo and I love that play,” she said. “We’re convinced that poor, mad Strindberg wrote it with us in mind.”

“But, my dear,” said the female of the couple, “the preoccupations of Miss Julie—we wouldn’t go far wrong, I think, in saying the obsessions of that remarkable play—and I believe my husband feels as I do—are so very Northern. Surely. You are not like that at all. You are—tropical. Truly. You give off heat.” She smiled, and batted her enormous blue eyes. “I feel it. All the way over here.” Her husband was sitting between them, and I was sitting on the other side of Barbara, practically in her lap. I ate with a silent, surly ferocity and, from time to time, I smacked my lips. I took great swallows of the Scotch. But I was also concentrating, for I had never read Miss Julie, and I now had to figure out, from what they—or, more particularly, Barbara—said, just what the devil our favorite play was about. The blue-eyed lady, however, had sunk the subject of Miss Julie without a trace. She said, “My dear Miss King, you haven’t introduced us to your silent, hungry, and very attractive friend.” Whereas, before, she had looked very steadily at Barbara in order to avoid looking at me, she now looked very steadily at me in order to avoid looking at Barbara. “So I will introduce myself. Lola San-Marquand is my name and this is my husband, Saul.” She extended her hand and I carefully wiped mine on my napkin before taking it. We shook hands. I liked her at once. I liked her enormously. I do not know what it was in her which made me feel, immediately, and with great force, that she was a sad woman, a lost and ruined woman, and, even, a gallant one. Her details were preposterous, but I read these details as the very signal of her bewilderment and sorrow. She was enormous, not fat in a hard way, fat in a soft way: one felt that she had become fat out of despair. Yet, she covered this despair with a stylish, loose, black sack. Her hair, which was very beautiful, very blond, and very long, was severely, impeccably even, perhaps masochistically, pulled back from a rather stunning brow and ferociously knotted at the back of her head. And over this glory she wore a black chiffon scarf, knotted beneath her—chins, perhaps accuracy compels me to say, but the original chin was a firm one. This was the uniform of Lola San-Marquand. I never knew her to dress in any other way. She must have had hundreds of black dresses and scarves—though, in fact, a black and impetuous toque sometimes did duty for the scarf. This, however, was mainly on opening nights. She impressed me—she impresses me still—as one of the most curious, most loving, devious, ruthless, and single-minded people I have met in all my life. She was brilliantly and brutally manufactured: she had not grown into her present shape, but had been hammered into it, or perhaps, as in some unspeakable vat, been lowered. Her hands were white and pudgy and soft. Yet, they were not without power, and the fingers were elegant. One felt that the pudginess of the hands was no more inevitable than the rings they bore—rather awful rings; that, trapped within Lola San-Marquand, was a beautiful, dying girl. But, alas, fatally, overwhelmingly at last, one became aware of the odor of that corruption.

Barbara said, “You’re very right, Mrs. San-Marquand, and I’m terribly sorry”—but I felt that she did not, now, quite know how to carry on. My reaction to Lola—for Barbara was swift—had disarmed her; had caused the top she had been maliciously spinning to fall, with a perceptible thunder, uselessly and tamely down. She looked at me briefly, wondering if I thought she should be ashamed of herself, then concentrated on her plate, having made it very clear that she now waited to take her cue from me.

Saul San-Marquand had also shaken my hand. His hand was wet and white, I felt nothing when I took his hand except a deep aversion. I disliked him at once, and as profoundly as one man can dislike another—from the very bottom of my balls. His lips were thin, his eyes were vague, his nearly snow-white head seemed far too heavy for his neck. He impressed me as a Jeremiah who had never had any convictions. Perhaps I disliked him because I liked Lola—he seemed, certainly, the most preposterous and deadly of all her preposterous details—or perhaps it was because I knew that Barbara admired him very much. Women liked Saul. No doubt it is due to some fatal lack in me that I never understood this at all.

But perhaps I disliked him because he was one of the very few men I’ve ever met, if not the only one, who seemed really to dislike men. I am probably being unjust here, and, if I’m to be honest, I must confess to a certain bewilderment and to a very definite awareness that my attitude cannot be defended by logic. For I get along with women who dislike women very well. Perhaps the male ego finds the female antipathy flattering and perhaps it also flatters itself that it is able to understand this antipathy. Barbara, God knows, can’t bear women and has only had, in all the time we’ve known each other, a single close female friend—who can’t bear women, either, and who can’t even, in fact, bear the theater, and who has lately taken a post in a hospital in Hong Kong. But my own instinct, as to the male relation, is that men, who are far more helpless than women—because far less single-minded—need each other as comrades, need each other for correction, need each other for tears and ribaldry, need each other as models, need each other indeed, in sum, in order to be able to love women. Women liked Saul, but I never felt that Saul liked women. I felt that he used them, collected them, huddled like an infant between their breasts, and used their furnace to diminish his chill. If his chill could be—barely—diminished, it could certainly not be conquered. It eventually began to seem to me that the women clung to Saul in the hope of being able to get back some of the heat he had stolen. Perhaps some of them managed to do so, but his wife was not to be numbered among that improbable few. For warmth she had substituted a deft imitation, a most definite style, which was bizarre and bewildering precisely to the degree that one sensed beneath it a genuine impulse, perpetually, and not without bitterness, held in check.

“We know that Miss King is from Kentucky,” said Lola San-Marquand, “but she has not told us where you are from. And, while I’m aware that the most unlikely things happen every day—that’s the very lesson, the charm, the discipline of the theater—yet, I must say, that the script which would have the two of you meeting in Kentucky would”—and she laughed elaborately, a high, clear, rather girlish sound—“impress me as lacking verisimilitude. Now, I’m sure that you’ll shatter all my preconceptions and tell me that you both grew up in Kentucky in the same house.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s happened more than once, though—friendship—wasn’t the usual result. But I’ve never even seen Kentucky. I rather hope that I never do. I was born in New York. In Harlem.”

For reasons securely hidden from me, the mention of Harlem created in Lola’s husband a comparative vigor, a stunning hint of life. “We lived there long ago,” he said. He looked at nothing and no one as he said this, and I concluded that he was seeing the streets of Harlem. “Oh,” I said, quickly, “where?”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. He then lapsed, as it were, out of our sight, and then again was shaken with a brief convulsion. This one reached his lips and caused the corners—nearly—to turn up. “Did you know Ethel Waters?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but, of course, I know who she is.” I didn’t like Saul, but he had the power—how the years were to prove it!—of bewildering me, of throwing me off-guard, of distracting my attention to him when it should have been on the terrain. “She’s a wonderful singer,” I said inanely, and felt, at once, with a sharp and furious resentment, that this nerveless, wormy little man had somehow carried me beyond my depth. I stared at him. I felt Barbara concentrating on her plate in order the more deliberately and totally to concentrate on me. And I also felt—and this, too, I resented, feared—that my immediate affection for Lola and my unshakable love for Barbara—for it was love—had created, with the speed of flame, a deep, speechless communication between them. And this communication had to do with Saul and me—they were exchanging signals over our heads, quite as though my quality, far from nerveless, and my value, were to be equated with that of this unspeakable refugee from the garment center. I had worked in the garment center, pushing trucks, and indeed I was to work there many times again, and Saul San-Marquand was the very distillation of my foremen and my bosses. I choked on my food, which now seemed, as, in a way it was, stolen, and my Scotch burned me. But of course I was going to be cool, and, in any case, I needed time to calculate, and so I used my sputter and my cough to make my statement impeccably ingenuous and juvenile: “I hear she’s a marvelous actress, too, but I’ve never seen her.”

“But, my dear boy,” cried Lola, leaning forward, and with something very genuine in her face now—perhaps it was a genuine affection—“how could you possibly have seen her? You’re far too young. I am old enough to be your mother, and I have seen her very seldom—Saul, my dear”—leaning forward again, beautifully interrupting herself, and moving a compassionately nerveless hand toward her magnificent brow—“she never acted, did she, at the Lafayette Theater—which is before your time, my dear youth,” turning now to me, “though it’s in your territory. I don’t,” she said portentously, leaning back, “think that she did. But your memory is so much better than my own.”

Saul’s obsessive perusal of the streets of Harlem elicited, “No. We saw Rose McClendon there. Before we met.”

“Of course! Wasn’t she superb. What was the play? Oh. My memory. I do not know what I would do without Saul. And he does me the honor of pretending not to know what he would do without me. Do you remember the name of the play, my dear?”

“Ethel Waters,” Barbara interrupted, “couldn’t possibly have acted in the Lafayette Theater. I don’t think. She wasn’t considered an actress then, she was only, as Leo says, known as a singer. Isn’t the first thing she did as an actress”—she leaned into Lola San-Marquand’s quite incredible breasts—“the play called Mamba’s Daughters? Which I didn’t see. I was still doing penance in Kentucky then.”

Lola threw back her head and laughed—that oddly genuine, girlish sound. “My dear. If you had seen it, I assure you that your penance in Kentucky would have been perhaps more painful, but certainly more brief. I assure you—”

“The play in which we saw Rose McClendon,” said Saul, with what I was now beginning to recognize as the unanswerable firmness of the totally infirm, “was a play by Paul Green—you remember Paul Green—it was called In Abraham’s Bosom.”

“Of course!” said Lola. “About the schoolteacher. Neither of you, of course, could possibly have seen—”

“But I read it,” I said. I was beginning to find my feet again. “I’m not sure I really liked it.”

“If you were older,” said Lola San-Marquand, with assurance, “it would be a very good role for you. Miss King has confided in us that she wished—aspired—to become an actress. Are you also tempted toward the sacred flame? I must tell you—and Saul will tell you that I am never wrong about these things—these elements—he likes to pretend that I was really born to be a medium”—and now she laughed again, not as long as it seemed, not as loud as it sounded, with her marvelous head thrown back—“and, truly, I never am wrong. In these matters.” She looked at her husband roguishly; he had not yet looked at her. “And I must tell you—my beamish boy—that, whether or not you are tempted toward the sacred flame, the flame”—she raised her hand, she spread her fingers wide; the lights flashed, like flame, like flame, on her abjectly jeweled fingers: it was as though, with the same gesture, she were warding off and abjectly awaiting the mortal blow—“the flame has very definite intentions toward you. The flame demands you. The flame will have you. You are not handsome. You are not, really, even, very good-looking. But you are—haunting. If you are capable of discipline—and I know that you are, it shows in the way you carry yourself, it shows in ways that you do not see—which you will never see—my dear, you will go far. Much further than you imagine. I know. I am gifted in these matters. In fact,” and now she leaned toward Barbara; they had been continually exchanging signals—over our heads; now Lola hurled her deadliest, most crucial flare, which was also her vow, to Barbara, of fidelity. “Miss King will also go very far—very far indeed. Her fame will be greater than yours, and it will certainly come sooner. But she will not have had to cross your deserts. And she will have to pay for that. And so will you.” And then she leaned back, mighty, exhausted.

Barbara said, much to my surprise, “I hear you. I hear you. I think you’re right. I’m very glad you’ve said it. I’ve never known how.”

I was amazed. I was flattered. I was frightened. I looked at the two women, who looked neither at each other nor at either of us. Barbara leaned back and put her empty plate behind the sofa, on the floor. “I still don’t like,” I said, with a certain, very deliberate obstinacy—deliberate, but far from calculated—“In Abrahams’ Bosom. I’d like—if you think I can act—to try The Emperor Jones—”

“You’re much too thin for that,” said Lola, with finality, “and, frankly—I hope you aren’t inordinately sensitive—much too young—”

“Leo,” said Barbara—she looked at Lola—“I think the play we should try to do is All God’s Chillun Got Wings.”

Lola clapped her hands. “Of course,” she said. She smiled at Saul. “And Rags could direct it. Rags would love to do it.”

“We are,” said Saul, sounding far more definite than he had sounded all night, “the artistic directors of The Actors’ Means Workshop.”

“Rags—Rags Roland—was once, I believe, a good friend of the actress who did that play in London. With great success.” Lola spoke now with a bright, matronly vagueness which impressed me as being a way of stalling for time. “You’ve heard of Rags Roland? You know who she is?”

“Oh, of course,” said Barbara, “she’s a very successful producer.”

Lola leaned back, raising one finger, closing both eyes. “She is not only that, my dear. She is also a most interesting director. Most interesting. The world does not yet know it, but we do—and many of the actors she has worked with are very aware of who really directed them in some of their greatest performances—oh, there is far more to Rags Roland than her mere function as producer. She is part of our staff at the Workshop. She is one of our oldest friends. And invaluable.”

“Is there really any hope of our being allowed to study at the Workshop?” Barbara now asked. She asked this of Saul. Lola, continuing to smile, now looked very steadily at Barbara in order, I felt, not to look too directly at her husband, on whom Barbara’s effect was now, critically, practically, to be tested. “I’ve heard marvelous things about it, but, of course, we both also know that it’s virtually impossible to be accepted there.”

Barbara had decided that she wished to be accepted, had decided, indeed, that she was going to be accepted, on terms, whatever these might prove to be, which she would simply have to prepare herself to meet. I was undecided. Events seemed to be moving rather faster than I liked. But I struggled to be ready with my answer when the moment for my answer would be ripe.

“Well, of course,” said Saul, and he looked very briefly at me—he liked me no more than I liked him—“we would be derelict in our duty, in our responsibility to the theatrical community at large and to the American theater in particular, if we didn’t insist that those who wish to work with us meet the very highest standards. Many people feel that our standards are ridiculously high, I have even heard us accused, in some quarters, of cruelty. This has never dismayed us for a second, we have steadfastly gone on with our work, and we have achieved what we consider, and not only we, if we may say so, some exceedingly fine results. Our harvest has not been negligible, we are very much encouraged, and we intend to continue in the great light which our long experience has permitted us to achieve.” He paused. I watched him; I think my mouth was open. “Now, you,” he said, “and your friend, Mister—?”

“Proudhammer,” I said.

“Yes. You are both very interesting young people. You impress us very much. Your own quality,” and he favored Barbara with a meek, shy smile, “is something like a—stormy petrel, so to say. We don’t yet have, honestly, as clear an impression of your—uh—friend. Proudhammer. As we do of you. But this is not to say that we find him less interesting,” and he attempted a smile in my direction which failed, quite, to reach me. “But our methods at the Workshop are extremely severe and not everyone can bring to the Workshop the necessary background, the background which will enable them to achieve the necessary discipline. We have a responsibility, as we have said, not only to the theatrical community at large, but to all those who work with us and who try to learn from us.” I was silent, for Barbara’s sake. I finished my drink and, only for Barbara’s sake, did not immediately leave the sofa to pour myself another. But I leaned forward, with my empty glass in my hand, deliberately in the attitude of imminent departure. “You are an exceedingly attractive young lady, but what makes you feel that you are qualified to become an actress?”

“You have asked me that question,” Barbara said, very coolly and distinctly, “only to set a trap for me. Or to give me a kind of test. I refuse to fall into your trap and so you’ll have to give me good marks for passing my first test. I am an actress because I know it, and I intend to prove it, and I shall prove it. I’ll prove it, yet, to you. To you, I may prove it late or early, but, actually, that’s your option—that’s for you to decide.”

“That’s my girl,” I said. Saul looked slightly stunned, but not displeased. Lola now watched Barbara with something in her enormous, her brilliantly blue and candid eyes, which made them seem hooded, which darkened the blue with what I could only read as patience. I rose. Saul looked up at me.

“And what,” he asked me, “do you consider your qualifications to be?”

I said, “I think you’re looking at them.” Then I smiled. “I need another drink. But I’m sure you realize already that I can’t be as definite as Miss King because of the great difference in our backgrounds.”

“My,” said Lola, mildly, “you are young. But spirit you have.”

“That’s how darkies were born,” I said, and walked back to the whiskey bottle.

I was bitter, I was twisted out of shape with rage; and I raged at myself for being enraged. I dropped ice recklessly into my glass, recklessly poured Scotch over the rocks, took too large and swift a swallow, and, trying to bring myself to some reasonable, fixed place, to turn off the motor which was running away with me, I lit a cigarette and turned my back on the company to stare out of the window. I knew that I was being childish, and, in the eyes of the company, perhaps definitely and inexcusably rude; but I could not trust myself, for that moment, to encounter a human eye or respond to a human voice. It did not help, and it could not have, to recognize that I really did not know—assuming that I aspired to walk in the light of clarity and honor—what had triggered this rage. I refused to believe that it could truly have been Saul San-Marquand: how could it have been if it was really true that I held him in such low esteem? But the measure of my esteem had, fatally, to reveal itself in the quantity of my indifference—which quantity was small and shameful indeed. Here I stood at the Manhattan window, seething—to no purpose whatever, which was bad enough: but it was worse to be forced to ask myself, abjectly, now, for my reasons and find that I did not have any. Or, which, really, I think, caused the cup of my humiliation to overflow, to find that I had no reasons which my reason—by which, of course, I also mean that esteem in which I hoped to earn the right to hold myself—did not immediately and contemptuously reject. I was not—was I?—stupidly and servilely to do the world’s dirty work for it and permit its tangled, blind, and merciless reaction to the fact of my color also to become my own. How could I hope for, how could I deserve, my liberation, if I became my own jailer and myself turned the key which locked the mighty doors? But my rage was there, it was there, it pretended to sleep but it never slept, the merest touch of a feather was enough to bring it howling, roaring out. It had no sight, no measure, no precision, and no justice: and it was my master still. I drank my Scotch, I stared at the stars, I watched the park, which, in the darkness, was made shapeless and grandiose, which spoke of peace and space and cooling, healing water—which seemed to speak of possibilities for the bruised, despairing spirit which might remain forever, for me, far away, a dark dream veiled in darkness. A faint breeze struck, but did not cool my Ethiopian brow. Ethiopia’s hands: to what god indeed, out of this despairing place, was I to stretch these hands? But I also felt, incorrigible, hoping to be reconciled, and yet unable to accept the terms of any conceivable reconciliation, that any god daring to presume that I would stretch out my hands to him would be struck by these hands with all my puny, despairing power; would be forced to confront, in these, my hands, the monstrous blood-guiltiness of God. No. I had had quite enough of God—more than enough, more than enough, the horror filled my nostrils, I gagged on the blood-drenched name; and yet was forced to see that this horror, precisely, accomplished His reality and undid my unbelief.

I was beginning to apprehend the unutterable dimensions of the universal trap. I was human, too. And my race was revealed as my pain—my pain—and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed; until my pain became invested with a coherence and an authority which only I, alone, could provide. And this possibility, the possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of life and the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the very tip of my tongue. My pain was the horse that I must learn to ride. I flicked my cigarette out of the window and watched it drop and die. I thought of throwing myself after it. I was no rider and pain was no horse.

I was standing near a piano. A strange girl, with real eyes in a real face, was watching me with a smile. “You’ve been very far away,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. Somehow, she cheered me; my heart lifted up; we smiled at each other. “Yes. But I’m back now.”

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome!”

I felt like a boy. I wanted to please her. I touched the piano keyboard lightly. “Would you like me to try to play something for you? Would you like that?”

“I’d love that,” she said.

I sat down. She took my glass and set it on top of the piano for me. She leaned there, smiling on me like the sun. I felt free. “I don’t play very well,” I said, “and I don’t sing very well any more—my voice changed, you know, when I got to be a big boy”—and she threw back her head, like a very young horse in a sun-filled meadow, and laughed, and I laughed—“but I like to try it from time to time. It—helps—to—keep me in touch with myself.” I stared at her. She nodded. I struck the keys. “I’ll try to sing a blues for you,” I said, “and, after that, even if I’m asked to leave, if you’ve liked it, I won’t mind my exile at all.”

“You won’t,” she said, “be exiled. And I’m sure you know it.”

“All right,” I said. “Well, all right, then,” and I jumped into a song which I remembered Caleb singing, which Caleb had loved, and when I reached the lines, Blues, you’re driving me crazy, what am I to do? Blues, you’re driving me crazy, what am I to do? I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to,” I looked up and found that the entire room had gathered around the piano. I looked into Barbara’s face—she was smiling. She was proud of me. I looked at the nice girl, the girl who had said, “Welcome!” She was smiling, too. Then I looked at Saul and I struck the keys again. “What,” I asked Barbara, “do you think of my qualifications now, princess?”

“We are still,” said Lola, “looking at them. And you can’t stop now.”

“If I were you,” said Barbara, “I’d just keep on keeping on.”

“Well, then, all right,” I said, and I sang some more. We all got drunk. Barbara borrowed some money from Mr. Frank, and also extorted from him an unopened bottle of Scotch. He was too drunk to care—or, rather, too drunk to help himself, for he certainly cared about his money and his liquor. Saul and Lola, and Barbara and I, were the last to leave the party; and Barbara and I had sufficient genuine elegance and enough borrowed money to drop the San-Marquands, in style, at their stylish Park Avenue apartment. It had been decided that we would work at the Workshop, that summer, in New Jersey, in effect, as student handymen. Barbara and I were to prepare, for Saul’s inspection, one or two improvisations, the nature of which he would dictate, and one or two scenes, which we were to choose ourselves. And, depending on what the summer revealed of our qualifications, we would be accepted into the Workshop. We were very confident and we were very happy. The sky was purple and the sun stood ready, behind this curtain, waiting for her cue, as we reached falling-down Paradise Alley. I had held Barbara in my arms all the way home, and I think that we would surely have slept together that night—or that morning—but Jerry was asleep in Barbara’s quarters, and Charlie was snoring in mine. So we woke them up, and opened the whiskey, and told them of our triumphs. And that summer, in fact, for one night, Barbara and I both appeared in Of Mice and Men. Barbara played Curley’s wife, and I played Crooks.

And now, Barbara, as though conjured up by the twilight, as silently as a reverie, entered my hospital room. “Hi, my love,” she said, and came to the bed and kissed me. “How nice to have you back.”

“It was worth the journey,” I said, “just to have you say that.”

She looked at me. “I trust,” she said, “that one day soon you’ll find less drastic ways of being reassured.” Then she smiled. “But I haven’t come to lecture you. Dr. Evin has promised to take over that department from me. He’s a very nice man, don’t you think?”

“Very nice. Have you told him a lot about me?”

“No more than I had to. And much less than I know.” I laughed. She walked to the window and touched my flowers. “I hope the nurse knows that these must be taken out of here at night. She doesn’t seem to know much, I must say. Would you like me to read some of your telegrams to you? These silent messengers seem to be merely piling up dust over here. I must speak to that nurse.”

“Leave her alone. She’s a nice kid.”

“She is far too easily dazzled by fame. She looks on me as a combination of Queen Victoria and Madame X. And the good Lord knows what delicious nightmares you are evoking in those covered-wagon breasts. So naturally she can’t do her work properly.” She picked up the telegrams and came back to the bed.

Time had not done much for Barbara’s figure, though she no longer, as one of her directors had put it, promised only a bony ride. Time had thinned her face and dimmed its color; the theater had put her hair through so many changes that the color which it had now adopted—due to the demands of her present role—was probably as close to the original as she would ever again be able to get; and, though there were no silver locks in it yet, there were, perceptibly, silver strands. Her elegance was swinging and it was also archaic; perhaps elegance is always archaic. She was rather splendidly dressed, in something dark, with a dull, heavy brooch at the neck; her hair was piled very tightly up, in the fashion in which she wore it in the play. She caused one to think, I don’t know why, of sorrow and fragility: she caused one to think of time. Her splendor seemed extorted, ruthlessly, from time, and she wore her splendor in that knowledge, and with that respect, and also with that scarcely perceptible trembling. One wondered how such a fragility bore such a ruthless weight. This wonder contributed to her force as an actress. Barbara had become a very good actress—one of the best on a scene which she knew, however, to be barren. Since she knew the scene to be barren, she was not much impressed by her eminence. She tried to work with as little show, and, she hoped, to as decent an effect, as any honorable cook or carpenter—though she knew very well that there were not many of these left, either. This lonely effort had stripped her of her affectations. Of course, on the other hand, the authority with which this effort had invested her caused many to insist that her affectations had all been disastrously confirmed, and constituted, furthermore, her entire dramatic arsenal. Barbara went on her swinging way. She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss. If life had endlessly cheated her, she had resolved not only never to complain, but to take life’s performance as an object lesson and never to cheat on life.

“How’s the show going?”

“Oh, the show’s okay. Your understudy is still going through his all-white-men-to-the-sword-and-all-white-women-to-my-bed bullshit—but—oh, well, you can hear him across the Hudson River and he doesn’t bump into the furniture. Anymore. He’s the only person who doesn’t miss you. Naturally.” She opened one telegram. “Do you know anybody named Joan Nelson?”

“No.”

“Well, she knows you and she wants you to get well.” She opened another telegram. “So does someone named Bradley Timkins. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“You impress me as being a somewhat solitary type. Not that it’s any wonder, as heartless as you are.” She opened another. “Oh. This is from Marlon—you do know him?”

“Oh, yes. The friend of my youth.”

“I think that he really does want you to get well. He wants everyone to get well.”

“So do I.”

“Yes. Well, we haven’t got a prayer, sweetheart.”

“How goes the nation?”

“The nation goes abominably. And it’s no subject for a sick man to discuss—or a well one, either.” She smiled. “Oh. Here’s one from Lola. Show business!”

“Christopher sent the basket of fruit,” I said.

She looked up. The light in the room seemed to change; or, a more tremendous light than the twilight entered it. Perhaps it was Barbara’s face at that moment which finally reconciled me to life. “Did he? Oh, let me see.” And I handed her Christopher’s telegram. She read it and she laughed. “Oh. That black mother. He’ll never change. Christopher.” And then she was far from me. I watched her face. Although I knew her face so well, I did not know it now at all. It was incredibly trusting and triumphant; it existed in another realm, which spoke another language; there is truly something frightening in a woman’s face. And yet—how can I say it?—the mystery that I saw there contained a help for me, and promised me my health. “Dear Christopher.” Then she looked down at me. “Leo, I think we have done something very rare.” She smiled. But I cannot describe that smile. It was neither sorrowful nor joyful, neither was it both: it spoke of journeys. I cannot describe it because I could not read it. Then she spoke, very carefully, testing, as it were, each word. “I think we have managed to redeem something. I think it’s our love that we redeemed. Who could have guessed such a thing? Black Christopher!” She walked back to my flowers. “And I was afraid it was too late—that it had all been for nothing—that we’d betrayed and discarded all the best of us—for—what anyone with five dollars can buy at the box office.” She laughed and turned and looked at me again. “Well. Thank you, Leo. We made it one time.”

“What,” I asked, a little frightened, and at the same time amused and moved, “are you talking about, Barbara?”

“I’m talking about our journey through hell. I’m talking about Christopher. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you’re making too much of it.”

“That’s possible. But you’re making too little. You always do.” She laughed softly again, looking, against the yellow blinds and in the dimming, changing light, exactly like the Barbara of Paradise Alley—and yet not, that laugh had cost her everything—and then became grave again. “We have come a long way together, you and I,” she said. “Des kilomètres.” She looked out of the window for a second, then closed the blinds. She looked briefly at her watch. The room was dark. She switched on the light. “Well. I must get to the theater. The show must go on.”

“Those days with Christopher must have been very hard on you,” I said.

She looked at me. “Oh. They were brutal. But why do anything easy? Those days were very hard on you, too.”

“But I always felt,” I said, smiling, “that you’d done nothing to deserve it.”

“But you had. Of course!” She laughed again. “Dear Leo!”

“I have the feeling that you’re making fun of me. But I don’t know why.”

“Because you’re funny,” she said.

“Bon. Bravo pour le clown.”

“Well. It’s true. When you were at your funniest, I didn’t laugh. I’m sorry for all the things I didn’t see. And for all the things you didn’t see. What you didn’t see, I saw, it seemed to me, very clearly. Leo, you always want people to forgive you. But we, we others, we need forgiveness, too. We sometimes need it, my dear”—she smiled—“even from so wretched a man as you.” And she watched me very steadily, with that steady smile.

I said, after a moment, with difficulty, “True enough, dear lady. True enough. But I wonder why I feel so depressed.”

“I should think,” she said, dryly, “that the state of your health might have something to do with that. And I’ve stayed longer than I promised Dr. Evin I would.” She leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “Bye-bye. Is there anything you want me to bring you tomorrow?”

“Only the heads,” I said, “on pikes, of many politicians.”

“Now you sound like Christopher.”

“He’d be proud of me.”

“He was always proud of you. He couldn’t understand why you couldn’t understand that. Christopher had a rough time, too.”

“How have you,” I asked suddenly, “managed to put up with me for all these years?”

“I love you,” she said, “and so I can’t really claim to have had much choice in the matter.” She looked at her watch again. “Leo, now I really must run. If the heads of politicians prove to be scarce tomorrow, is there anything else you want?”

“Surprise me.”

“I’m honored. I’m one of the few people left in the world who can still do that. To you. Throw everything out of your mind, Leo, eat your supper, read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

She left, closing the door carefully and softly behind her.

But she had left me, as our much loved Bessie Smith would have been prompt to inform her, with everything on my mind. Christopher had always wished to see Africa; we became friends partly because I had. I told him once that he was certainly black enough to be an African, and even told him that the structure of his face reminded me of faces I had seen in Dakar. This enchanted him: which meant, fatally, that he then invested me with the power of enchantment. I did not want this power. It frightened me. But my fright frightened him, and it made him cruel: for to whom was he to turn, in all this world, if not to an elder brother who was black like him? And I began to see, though I did not want to see it, the validity of Christopher’s claim. If it is true, as I suspect, that people turn to each other in the hope of being created by each other then it is absolutely true that the uncreated young turn, to be created, toward their elders. Thus, whoever has been invested with the power of enchantment is guilty of something more base than treachery whenever he fails to exercise the power on which the yet-to-be-created, as helplessly as newborn birds, depend. Well, yes, I saw at last what was demanded of me. I would have to build a nest out of materials I would simply have to find, and be prepared to guard it with my life; and feed this creature and keep it clean, and keep the nest clean; and watch for the moment when the creature could fly and force those frightened wings to take the air.

On the other hand, any threat to their enchanter, which is simply a threat to life itself, is answered by the young with the implacable intention to kill.

I first realized this—through Christopher—at a monster rally in downtown New York. Thousands of people were gathered in a park near City Hall. We were there to protest the outrages taking place in the city (and also in the nation) against those who, already poor and defenseless, were rendered even more so by the apathy and corruption of the municipality, and by the facts of their ancestry, or color. The rally was guarded by the police, whom we were, in fact, attacking. They were there to make certain that none of the damage which we asserted was being done to the city’s morals would so far transform itself as to become damage to the city’s property.

I was one of the speakers at this rally. I would have been there anyway, but not as a speaker, as one of the oppressed: but I was seated on the wooden platform because my name can draw crowds. Having never been quite able to consider my name my own, this fact meant something else for Christopher, and also for the crowds, than it could have meant to me: but opportunity and duty are sometimes born together. There I sat on the platform, then, uneasy and indignant, and not altogether at my ease with the other luminaries, who were certainly not at their ease with me. Our common situation, the fact of my color, had brought us together here; and here we were to speak as one. But our intensities, our apprehensions, were very different. In many ways, perhaps in nearly all ways, they disapproved of me, and I knew it; and they knew that in many ways I disapproved of them. But we were responsible, commonly, for something greater than our differences. These differences, anyway, could be blamed on no one and could never have risen to the pressure of a private quarrel had it not been for the nature of our public roles. Our differences were reducible to one: I was an artist. This is a very curious condition, and only people who never can become artists have ever imagined themselves as desiring it. It cannot be desired, it can only—with difficulty—be supported, and one of the elements to be supported (along with one’s own unspeakable terrors) is the envy, rage, and wonder of the world. Yes, we on the platform were united in our social indignation, united in our affliction, united in our responsibility, united in our necessity to change—well, if not the world, at least the condition of some people in the world: but how different were our visions of the world! I had never been at home in the world and had become incapable of imagining that I ever would be. I did not want others to endure my estrangement, that was why I was on the platform; yet was it not, at the least, paradoxical that it was only my estrangement which had placed me there? And I could not flatten out this paradox, I could not hammer it into any usable shape. Everyone else desired to be at home in the world, and so did I—or so had I; and they were right in this desire, and so had I been; it was our privilege, to say nothing of our hope, to attempt to make the world a human dwellingplace for us all; and yet—yet—was it not possible that the mighty gentlemen, my honorable and invaluable confreres, by being unable to imagine such a journey as my own, were leaving something of the utmost importance out of their aspirations? I could not know. I watched Christopher’s face. He trusted none of the people with whom I was sitting. Most of them were from five to ten years older than I, and from twenty to thirty years older than Christopher. And nothing we had done, or left undone, had been able to save him.

There was a little black girl on the platform, she was part of a junior choir from a Brooklyn church. They were singing. I knew that when the choir finished singing, I would be on, and this is usually a very difficult moment for me, but the little girl’s voice pushed my stage fright far to the side of my mind. They were singing a song about deliverance; she had a heavy, black, huge voice. She was the leader of the song, and her voice, in all that open air, rang against the sky and the trees and the stone walls of office buildings and the faces of the open-mouthed people and the closed faces of the cops, as though she were singing in a cave. Deliverance will come, she sang, I know it will come, He said it would come. And, again, Deliverance will come. He said it would come. I know it will come. I watched her face as she sang, a plain, black, stocky girl, who was, nevertheless, very beautiful. Deliverance will come. I wondered how old she was, and what songs she would be singing, and in what company, a few years from now. Deliverance will come. Would it? We on the platform certainly had no patent on deliverance—it was only because deliverance had not come that we sat there in all our uneasy rage and splendor. Deliverance will come: it had not come for my mother and father, it had not come for Caleb, it had not come for me, it had not come for Christopher, it had not come for this nameless little girl, and it had not come for all these thousands who were listening to her song. I watched the little girl’s face, but I saw my father’s face, and Caleb’s, and Christopher’s. Christopher did not believe that deliverance would ever come—he was going to drag it down from heaven or raise it up from hell—for Christopher, the party, that banquet at which we had been being poisoned for so long, was over. Yet, he watched the little girl, and listened to her, with delight. And all my speculations began to paralyze me again, and again I wondered what I could say when I rose. I wanted deliverance—for others even more than for myself: my party, my banquet, in ways which Christopher could not possibly imagine, was over, too. But I wondered if it was possible, and not only for me, to live without the song. No song could possibly be worth the trap in which so many thousands, undelivered, perished every day. No song could be worth what this singing little girl had already paid for it, and was paying, and would continue to pay. And yet—without a song? Was Christopher’s manner of deliverance worth the voices it would silence? Or would new songs come? How could I tell? for the question engaged my life and my responsibilities and perhaps even my love, but it no longer engaged my possibilities. I was defined. I was relieved to recognize that I was not cast down by this quite sufficiently weighty fact, only troubled by the question of how not to fail this little girl, and Christopher. Whatever had happened to me could have no meaning unless it could help to deliver them. But the price for this deliverance, this most ambitious of transactions, could only be found in a wallet which I had always claimed was not mine. I began to sweat. The little girl’s voice rang out. Caleb’s face hung steadily in the center of my mind. Deliverance will come. Well, if she believed it, then it had to be made possible; though only she, after all, plain, stocky, beautiful, black girl, could really make it true.

I watched Christopher’s face as the song ended, watched his big white teeth in his big black face and watched him clap his big black hands. Then, as silence descended, and his face changed, and the master of ceremonies rose, I suddenly realized, with a violent nausea, that it was my turn now. Every single orifice in my body first threatened, shamefully, to open, then closed, despairingly, forever, and I began to drip with sweat. Christopher’s face was very calm and proud—I was his big brother, his boy, or my man! as we say in Harlem; and my little girl looked very tranquil, too, as though she had just been seated at a fried chicken dinner. But I knew, as I stood up and walked to the dangerous promontory, that she hadn’t tasted it yet. Deliverance will come.

There is a truth in the theater and there is a truth in life—they meet, but they are not the same, for life, God help us, is the truth. And those disguises which an artist wears are his means, not of fleeing from the truth, but of attempting to approach it. Who, after all, could believe a word spoken by Prince Hamlet or Ophelia should one encounter this unhappy couple at a cocktail party? Yet, the reason that one would certainly never make the error of inviting them back again is that their story is true—and not only for the Prince and his mad lady; is true, is true, unbearable, unanswerable: and one’s disguises are designed to make the truth a quantity with which one can live—or from which one can hope, by the effort of living, to be delivered. But on that afternoon I was facing the people with no recognizable disguise—though perhaps by this time my disguises were indistinguishable from myself—and I was very frightened. I don’t know what I said. I tried to be truthful. I tried to talk to the little girl, and to Christopher, and from time to time, I peeked, so to speak, from the promontory of my despair at their faces. Their faces were very bright. The little girl seemed to be enjoying her fried chicken dinner. Then I wondered if I was right to give her a fried chicken dinner which she could enjoy. Maybe I should have given her a dinner which would cause her to overthrow the table and burn down the house. But I did not want her to vomit or to burn: I wanted her to live. Deliverance, however, was not in my hands. Christopher looked like a black sun when I finished and opened his big black face and clapped his big black hands. The little girl ran over to me with her green autograph book held out. She reminded me of everything I hoped never to forget. I took the autograph book and signed it and I wrote above my name, Deliverance will come. It was folly, for I was immediately surrounded and trapped on the platform which the policemen wanted me to leave. I wanted to come down, but I did not know how. I did not see the friends who had driven me to the rally. I could no longer see Christopher. I did not know how to get to the car. Then I saw Christopher’s furious and terrified face, struggling to break through the crowd to get to me and in a flash, an awful one, I saw what he saw: the Leo who certainly did not belong to himself and who belonged to the people only on condition that the people were kept away from him, surrounded by the uncontrollable public madness, and in the very heart of danger. For it was the time of assassins. Christopher could not know, nor, abruptly, could I, who, in the crowd pressing around me, desired my death nor who was willing to execute it. I felt myself being pushed off the platform by the police: it was like being pushed off a cliff. Then Christopher leaped—but it really seemed rather more like flying—onto the platform, placing his body in front of mine, his arms stretched wide on either side; and evidently he had already given a signal to five others of his age and history, who joined him and joined hands, forming a human barricade, and led me to the car—which, however, was also, now, surrounded. Christopher used his shoulders and his elbows ruthlessly, and his voice, and got the car door open, got in first and pulled me in after him. Then two of his friends piled in and slammed the door—so that I was protected on all sides. The driver of this car, and his companion, were both white, and so Christopher had to take out his wrath on me instead of on all the white devils. But he managed to suggest, in that language he had mastered, that not even the white people in the front seat were above wishing that I were dead. What was most vivid to me was how deeply he desired that I should live. I was not flattered by this, but frightened; for this was a passion impersonal indeed, and it proved how little I belonged to myself. Not a soul in that crowd mattered for Christopher, nor would a soul have been safe from him as long as that crowd menaced—as he later put it: “my only hope.”

The nurse now entered with a tray, on which she bore my supper and a threatening black object which turned out to be a transistor radio. “Miss King brought the radio,” she said, “but since you only woke up today, we forgot about it.” I understood, from her chastened and bewildered air, that Barbara had been rather hard on her. She was bewildered because this had revealed—or, rather, had failed to reveal—a Barbara King and a Leo Proudhammer whose names were not in lights. She did not know her idols, therefore she did not know herself, and she was full of a resentment which she masked by her attention to details. In a chill silence, in which, nevertheless, she kept smiling, she raised the head-rest, arranged the pillows, imprisoned me with the tray. She said, with her firm, girlish impeccability, “You must try to eat it all.” Then she picked up some of the flowers. “These must all be taken out at night,” she said. “I’ll be back when you’ve finished your supper. Then the night nurse takes over. The bell is next to your bed.” She left the room, a poor little girl with her feelings hurt. I resolved to make Barbara do something on the morrow to cheer up my little nurse.

I looked at my supper, which did not interest me, but I forced down my soup and a little salad. Then I lay back, wide awake—it wasn’t even show time yet—and wondered what I would do with the night. But either my keepers or my body had foreseen this, for, while I was wondering, I fell asleep:

Barbara and I were painting signs in a wooden shed, the toolshed in New Jersey. Barbara was very clumsy and kept laughing at her clumsiness. Every time I got my sign nearly painted, she came over with her bucket and her brush and spoiled it. Every time she came near me, she seemed to envelop me; she seemed deeper than water, as inescapable as air; I felt myself suffocating in the foul, sticky web she was spinning with her laughter. I began to be angry. I said, Stop that, now, you stop it! She kept on laughing. She spilled red paint all over my sign. I said, Barbara, you do that again, and I’ll—You’ll what? she asked, and danced very close to me. What will you do, Leo? And she sounded pleading. I was overcome with fear. I’ll kill you, I said. Honest. But I also sounded pleading. We lay down together in the scarlet paint. Then something happened, and we were running. Caleb was chasing us. His voice came over the mountains: What are you doing with that white girl? What are you doing? Caleb grabbed me, and with the great wooden Bible in his hand, he struck me. Nothing. Caleb. Nothing. Caleb struck me again. I began to cry, and I fell to my knees. Caleb struck me on the back of my head. I cried out and I started trying to crawl away from him. I crawled through dirty water which became deeper and deeper, and suddenly I was staring at the bottom of the sea. The filthy water filled my nostrils, filled my mouth. I kicked to keep from drowning. I turned to look for Caleb. I could see him through the veil of water, he stood watching me, and now he was stark naked, black and naked. I reached out my hand, but he would not take it. I screamed and started going down. I woke up.

The nurse stood with the tray, watching me. “I was about to wake you up,” she said. “You seemed to be having a bad dream.”

It took a second before I could bring her into focus. “I guess I was.”

“Do you have them often?”

“Not very often. Only when I’ve done something bad—like in those plays by Shakespeare.”

She smiled. “I’ll bring you a sleeping pill,” she said, and left again.

I turned on my radio. I listened to the news for awhile, but Barbara had been right—it was not for a sick man, or a well man, either. I turned the dial and found Ray Charles. And he was playing my story for me.

The winter came, and we were evicted, and ended up in two rooms on the top floor of a defeated building on the edge of the Harlem River. The music Ray was playing reminded me of this house. I have lived long enough to see my language stolen—I was about to say betrayed; but it has certainly been pressed into a most peculiar service. “Beat,” in those days, meant something very different from what it has since come to mean: for example, our poor father was “beat to his socks,” which meant that his hope was gone. And no one, in those days, desired to be “funky”: funk was a bad smell, it was the invincible odor which filled our house, the very odor of battle, the battle waged by the living in the midst of death. In those two rooms we acted out our last days as a family. Our father had been laid off from his job, which is why we had been evicted; all he found were odd jobs for a day or two, helping to tear up the city’s streets, or shoveling away the snow downtown—I never saw any snow being shoveled away in Harlem! And Caleb quit school—to my father’s wrath and despair—but he scarcely fared any better than our father. Our mother began working as a maid in the Bronx, and brought home odds and ends from Miss Anne’s kitchen. Our father would not eat the food that she brought home—he said it would have choked him, and I believe it would have. It was hard enough for him to accept the fact that without the money she made, we would probably all have starved to death. I became a shoeshine boy, downtown, after school, and on the weekends I sold shopping bags in front of the department stores and the five and dimes on 14th Street. And we went on relief—not for the first time; for the last time. Our father no longer drank rum, but a pale, sticky, sweet white wine.

We were cold and frightened, and we were hungry, but, except for our father, we were not in despair. Our mother was holding on—grim, silent, watchful, but not cheerless; she was determined to bring us to the daylight. But she had a lot to watch, a lot to carry. She was watching our father, praying that the daylight would come before his spirit should be forever broken; she was watching Caleb, praying that the daylight would come before his hope, which was his youth, should be forever destroyed; and she was watching me, wondering what I was learning, and what I would be like when the daylight came. The daylight may always come, but it does not come for everybody and it does not come on time.

My shoeshine box, my shopping bags, were the emblems of my maturity; and I now began to learn less from my elders than from my peers; and from the mysterious downtown strangers whose touch on my head made me recoil, whose eyes were as remote as snowcapped mountain peaks. They had no rhythm which struck any chords in me. The wonder with which I watched them, and the distaste which I somehow sensed in their distance, needed but a touch to be transformed forever into enmity. I was trying to discover what principle united so peculiarly bloodless a people. I suspected that the principle was cruelty, but I was not sure. My white peers did not really baffle me, not even when they called me names—I could call names, too. We fought all the time and sometimes I won and sometimes I lost—usually, I guess, I lost; but I was lucky in that we usually fought fair, and so defeat did not bring about a poisonous rancor. In any case, at least from time to time, we had to band together against the cops—and I had long ago dismissed the cops from all human consideration. But the others, the men and women, young and old, sometimes smiling, sometimes harsh, always distant—if I fell into their hands, would they treat me like the cops? I was not certain: but I feared the worst. And my black peers thought that my wonder was foolish, that it proved me soft in the head. And I learned a new folklore, by which I did not dare to admit that I was frightened, manfully laughing with them at their pictures of Popeye with a hard-on, screwing Olive Oil, giving respectful attention to their accounts of their sexual discoveries, wondering what was wrong with me, for I had certainly never done any of those things. I could not really imagine them. But I never said so. I never said much, for I was afraid of revealing my ignorance. But, without quite knowing it, I began to look at everyone around me in another way. Did everybody do it? It was impossible to believe.

I had fallen into the habit of going to see Miss Mildred every once in a while. If it was raining or snowing and my shopping bags could not be sold, or my shoeshine box could not be used; when I was frightened, when I was sad, I would go to see Miss Mildred, for perhaps no one would be home at my house; and I very often met Caleb there. Sometimes, when I got there, it would be a long time before Caleb and Dolores came out of one of the rooms off the hall. And this made me wonder. But I loved Caleb too much to wonder long. One day I would ask him if what I was told was true: and I knew that he would tell me the truth. When I look back—now—it seems to me that the air knew that we were to be parted; and so the air informed us; for Caleb and I clung to each other as we never had before. He teased me, as before, of course, but this did not make me feel ashamed. On the contrary, it made me feel proud. I felt that he was beginning to treat me like a man, that he expected great things from me. And I did everything I could to live up to his expectations: not to be a crybaby, to fight back, no matter how big the adversary was (and then to give Caleb his name and address), to wash myself, even in the coldest weather, to be respectful to old folks (if they were colored), to do my schoolwork right so that our father and mother would be proud of me. And he said that he would try to send me to college—“because you’re smarter than I am, little brother”—and he was teaching me to box, and, when summer came, he was going to teach me to swim. Sometimes, he and Dolores took me to the movies with them. And, at night, when we lay in bed, Caleb would sometimes give me a stolen Milky Way, and talk to me for hours. I don’t remember what we talked about. I just remember the sound of his voice in the darkness, the breathing of our parents in the other room, the ferocious industry of the rats which we heard in the kitchen, in the walls, which sometimes took place beneath our bed, the music coming from another apartment, the frost on the windows, so thick sometimes that one could not see out, the blunt, black shape of the kerosene stove which had now been extinguished, for safety and for thrift, and Caleb’s arm around me, his smell, and the taste of chocolate, and the electrical sound of the paper. “You ain’t sleepy yet?” he might ask, and I would shake my head, No. “Well, little brother,” he would say, with a yawn, “I am, and you better be.” Then he would rub his hand over my head, a trick of our father’s, and say, “Goodnight, little Leo.” Then he would turn on his side, saying, “Snuggle up tight, now. You all right?” I put one arm around him and nodded my chin against his back, and we fell asleep.

One day—one day—I came down the avenue on my way downtown to buy and sell my shopping bags, and I noticed that the store where Caleb and I always met was closed, was padlocked. There was no one in the store and none of the people who were usually hanging around the store were in the streets. This seemed very odd, especially since this day was a Saturday. But I couldn’t wonder about it too much; I had to get downtown. And nothing that happened during all that long day, that cold, bright day, warned me of what was coming. The sun shone all day long—a cold sun; nobody bothered me, neither my peers, nor the police; people tipped me nicely, that day, and I sold all my shopping bags. I was tremendously proud of myself when I got on the subway to go home. I didn’t think of stopping by Miss Mildred’s because I had to give my mother the money I had made.

But when I started up the steps to our house something whispered to me, something whispered, trouble. It was in the darkness of the hall—the lights had gone out—it came out from the walls, it came out—I suddenly realized it—from the silence. These steps, these landings, had never been so silent before. I ran faster up the stairs. I pushed on our door, and it opened at once. But it was usually locked. I stared at my father and mother, who stood in the center of the room, staring at me.

“You seen your brother?” my mother asked.

“No,” I said. “I just come from downtown.” I took the money out of my pockets. “Here.” But she didn’t see the money, she didn’t take it. I just held it. It got heavier and heavier. My mother sat down, crying. I had never seen her cry before. I looked at my father. He stood above my mother, holding her tightly by the shoulder.

I asked, “What’s the matter, Mama?”

My father asked, “You know any of your brother’s friends?”

I said, No, because I wanted to hear what he would say.

“They done robbed a store, whoever they is, and stabbed a man half to death. They say Caleb was with them.”

“A boy named Arthur—Arthur something-or-other,” said my mother, “he the one say Caleb was there.”

“Do you know him?” my father asked.

I shook my head, No: for a different reason this time.

“They used to steal things—they used to steal things,” said my mother, “look like they was a regular gang, and the cops say—the cops say—they used that store for a hiding place.”

“The cops say!” said my father.

I had seen the cops in the store many times; they had always been perfectly friendly with the owner. “The store is closed,” I said. I went over to my mother. “Mama—Mama—what they going to do if they find Caleb?” My mind had stopped, stuck, screaming, on the faces of white cops.

“They going to take him away,” she said.

I looked at my father. “But Caleb don’t steal! Caleb never stole nothing in his whole life!” My father said nothing. We heard footsteps on the stairs. Not one of us moved. But the steps stopped just below our landing. Then I realized that I would have to find Caleb and tell him not to come home. I stuffed my money in my pockets—maybe he would need it. I said, “I’ll be right back,” and I ran out of the house and down the stairs. I ran down those stairs faster than Caleb ever had, and into the startling wind of the street. Everything was new, everything was evil, every house was dangerous. The people all were strangers. I do not think I saw them. And yet, something cautioned me not to run too fast; something cautioned me to dissemble my distress; something cautioned me to look, to look about me, before I moved. I stood on my stoop and I looked toward the dreadful river. Only small boys were playing there. Across the street, there were ladies in windows and men on stoops; and up the street, more men and boys and ladies, and no cops. I touched the money in my pockets—I don’t know why; perhaps I wanted everyone to believe that I had been sent to the store. And then I started walking, out of the block, toward Miss Mildred’s house. But I did not go down the avenue because I was afraid to pass the store. I went straight west until I came to Miss Mildred’s avenue. I passed cops on my way, but they did not stop me, or seem to look at me. I reached Miss Mildred’s building and I ran up the steps. I tried to give the funny knock I had heard Arthur give, but, then, I broke, I pounded on the door with all my might, and I screamed, “Miss Mildred! Miss Mildred! It’s Leo. It’s Leo! Let me in!” Then I heard the pole being moved out of the way, and the rattle of the chain, and the locks unlocking. She stood before me, and I knew she knew.

“Miss Mildred? Is my brother here?”

She pulled me inside, with one hand, saying nothing. In the hall stood Dolores. I was led down the long hall to the two big rooms. Caleb sat on the sofa, dressed in his black lumberjacket. He had his arms wrapped around himself, as though he were cold. He looked over at me. His face looked dry, as though he had never sweated. He said, “Hello, little Leo. Don’t look so frightened.” I started to cry, and I walked over to him. He pulled me onto his lap.

“Caleb didn’t do it, Leo,” Dolores said. “We know he didn’t do it, and we’ll go to court and say so.” Caleb continued rubbing his hand over my head. He sighed, a great sigh, my head moved with it, and he pulled my head back and looked into my face. “Don’t be afraid, Leo,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid. Will you do that? For me?” I nodded. Then he said, “I didn’t do it. I just want you to hear it from me. All right?”

I said, “All right.” Then I said, “But I don’t care if you did!”

He laughed. He cried, too. He said, “I know that, Leo.” He laughed again.

“Caleb—are you going to run away?” He stared at me. “The cops have been at the house,” I said.

“Did you see them?”

“No. Mama and Daddy told me.”

The three of them looked at each other. “That Arthur,” said Miss Mildred, “that Arthur.”

“If I run,” said Caleb, “I won’t get far. And then they’ll fix my ass for sure.”

“I got some money,” I said. But he didn’t hear me. He was listening to something in the street. Dolores walked to the window and looked out. She turned back into the room. “Here they come,” she said. I had never seen a face so bitter. And she did not seem to be able to move. Then she looked at Caleb, and she smiled. She tried to say something. Caleb suddenly rose and ran to her, and grabbed her.

“I hear you,” said Miss Mildred, for there was a pounding at the door. She started down the hall. “I hear you,” she cried again, “ain’t no need for all that.” I heard her opening the door. Dolores stood with Caleb; now it was I who could not move. “Do you people have to make such a racket?” I heard Miss Mildred ask. “Don’t you people have good sense? Don’t you push past me this way! This is my house! Ain’t you people able to ask for what you want?”

They came down the hall, three of them, white; one of them had his gun drawn. Still, I could not move.

“We’re looking for Caleb Proudhammer,” one of them said.

“What for?” asked Dolores.

“That’s none of your business,” one of them said.

“Yes, it is my business,” Dolores said, “to ask you what you’re arresting him for. And it’s your business to tell me.”

“Listen to the nigger bitch,” one of them said.

“I’m Caleb Proudhammer,” Caleb said. “You don’t need those guns. I’ve never shot nobody in my life.”

“Come on over here. We’re taking you down to the station.”

“What for?”

“You’re a very inquisitive bunch of niggers. Here’s what for,” and he suddenly grabbed Caleb and smashed the pistol butt against the side of his head. The blood ran down—my brother’s blood. I jumped up, howling, from the sofa, trying to get to Caleb, but they knocked me back. I couldn’t catch my breath; they were pulling him down the hall. I called his name. I tried to crawl down the hall. Miss Mildred was trying to hold me back. Dolores was screaming. I punched Miss Mildred, I bit her hand. They were carrying him down the steps. I screamed his name again. I butted one cop in the behind, with all my might I dragged on one of his legs. “Get that kid out of here,” one of them said, and somebody tried to grab me, but I kicked and bit again. I tumbled headlong down the steps and grabbed the policeman’s leg again. I held on, I held on, he dragged me down. I called Caleb’s name again. We were in the downstairs hall. They were carrying him into the streets. Now, the cop kicked me, and I tasted blood. I crawled down the hall, screaming my brother’s name. We were in the cold air; there were many people. I picked myself up, and I ran to the car, crying, Please. Please. That’s my brother. I tried to crawl into the car, but I was pushed out of it; then I tried to get in front of it, to push it back, but someone lifted me high in the air. I called his name again. I heard the car doors slam, and I cried, Please. Please. I heard the motor start, and I cried, Please. Please. I fought my way to the sidewalk, I punched and kicked myself free, I ran after the red lights of the car. Oh Caleb Caleb Caleb Caleb Caleb. Oh Caleb. Caleb. The lights of the car disappeared, I stumbled and fell on my face on the sidewalk, I cried, I cried. They picked me up, they took me upstairs, they washed me, they took me home. My father tried to stroke my head. I pushed his hand away. My mother offered me a bowl of soup. I knocked the bowl from her hand. I hate you, I said, I hate you, and I buried myself in the pillow which still held Caleb’s smell.