Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

I had never known Caleb to be cruel, and so I couldn’t believe that he was baiting me. I stared at him. “What do you mean, what does an artist do? He—he creates—”

He stared at me with a little smile, saying nothing.

“You know,” I said, “paintings, poems, books, plays. Music.”

“These are all creations,” he said, still with that smile.

“Well, yes. Not all of them are good.”

“But those that are good—what do they do? Why are they good, when they’re good?”

“They make you—feel more alive,” I said. But I did not really trust this answer.

“That’s what drunkards say about their whiskey,” he said, and he nodded in the direction of my wine.

“Well. I don’t mean that,” I said.

He watched me for a long while with his little smile, and he made me very uneasy.

“Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Because I want to know. I’m not teasing you. I don’t know anything about it. And you say you want to be an actor. That’s a kind of artist. Isn’t it? Well, I want to know.”

“I think it—art—can make you less lonely.” I didn’t trust this answer, either.

“Less lonely.” He smiled. “Little Leo.” Then, “I don’t know anything about it, but I’ve watched some people who claimed to be artists and they all seemed pretty lonely to me. The man I work for has a lot of friends like that. They’re lonely”—he watched me earnestly now—“and they’re half crazy and I’ve seen them do terrible things. Do you really think that people like that, who are really in hell themselves, Leo—do you really think that they can help anybody?”

“They do.” I said it stoutly, but felt, nevertheless, that my faith was not as strong as Caleb’s. And I realized that Caleb was far from stupid.

“They do? How do you know they do?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “you read something—or you listen to some music—I don’t know—and you find that this man, who may have been a very unhappy man—and—a man you’ve never seen—well, he tells you something about your life. And it doesn’t seem as awful as it did before.”

“As awful,” said Caleb, “as it did before.” And he watched me, his face in the candlelight yet more austere and distant than it had been, and, at the same time, somehow—it was as vivid and elusive as a half-heard, half-forgotten bit of music—more than ever the face of my brother. “Has it been as bad as all that, Leo?” But he didn’t wait for me to answer this. “What I thought,” he said, rising and walking up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, “was that a lot of these people didn’t think of anything but self. Maybe they had gifts, but they didn’t think the gift was for others, for the glory of God. They thought it was just for self. And that’s what made them like they were—that they just thought of self. And that offended God, and so they lost the gift.” He looked at me. “We were put on earth to love each other and to praise God, Leo.”

“All right. But can’t we”—hoping for daylight, hoping for reconciliation—“each praise God in our own way?”

“Oh, but that’s taken for granted,” he said, with a simple, monumental conviction, “of course we all praise God in our own way. No two people praise God alike. But not to praise Him is a sin.”

I sipped my wine, feeling beleaguered and lost. Yet—I loved him, this stranger returned from the dead. Something in his face, his voice, something in his attitude as he stood before the fireplace, made him seem, to me, almost helpless, vulnerable, sad, and it made me think of a most melancholy song. I have had my fun, if I don’t get well no more. Really, for a moment, I heard it: he might have been singing it. Don’t send me no doctor, doctor can’t do me no good.

But he had found his doctor, the Saviour, who was Christ the Lord.

“Yes, we have to find our way out of the prison of the self,” said Caleb, “we have to release ourselves from all our petty wants, our petty pride, and just see that the will of God is far beyond us—like King David said, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”—and just surrender our will to His will.” He smiled a ruined, radiant smile. “We know He’ll always guide us right. He’ll never let us be lost.” And then his face became both tender and austere, at once old and young. “Until that day, Leo, the soul is a wanderer and it has no hope and can find no peace. I know. I moaned and I moaned, I moaned all night long—you remember that song, Leo?”

I said, watching him, “I moaned and I moaned until I found the Lord.”

He smiled. “Yes. My soul could not rest contented. Until I found the Lord.” And he shook his head. “The old folks knew what they were talking about.”

“The old folks had a lot to bear,” I said.

“But they bore it,” said Caleb, “they bore it, and they gave us the keys to the kingdom. It comes to you, Leo, it comes to you when you’re all alone in the valley, deep in the valley, and it looks like the deep water is dragging down your soul, something whispers to you, He that overcometh shall receive the crown of life. He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. What a promise that is! And it’s for every man, Leo. For every man.”

I said nothing. Perhaps I was thinking of what he had had to bear. I watched his face. It was very beautiful. He moved up and down the room.

“I guess the light comes differently to every man,” he said, in a different tone. He stopped pacing. “Me, I had to almost kill a man. I really wanted to kill a man, Leo. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You must have killed a lot of men in the war,” I said. I wanted to go to the bar and pour myself a drink, but I didn’t.

“I don’t mean that. If I killed anybody, I didn’t know it, I didn’t see it.” He stopped. “I suppose I must have. My Lord, you know, men were dying all around you, dying in a second, dying worse than dogs. Lord, Leo, you’d be talking to a man one minute, and when you looked up again, his head would be over yonder and his body God knows where. I remember watching one guy ahead of me one time, running, and a mine caught him and he rose up in the air just as pretty as you please, like he was flying or dancing, and one leg went this way and the other leg went the other way and the rest of him come floating down and he landed on his back. I never saw his face, but I saw lots of other faces. They all looked surprised. They were young. A lot of them were no more than kids. I had hated some of them. But, you know, when you look down on this poor, helpless, stinking mess—death has an odor, Leo, nobody can describe it—well, you know, it all goes out of you. You realize that the poor creature just wanted to live, just like you, and you think about his mother or his wife or his kids or about whoever loved him. And it makes you wonder why you ever bothered to hate anybody. You know, the body just turns into garbage when the gift of life has left it. What a mystery. We have no right to kill. I know that. But I must have killed some people. I was in darkness then, I know my Lord’s forgiven me. I was shooting because I was a soldier, and people were shooting at me. All over this beautiful land where we were fighting, this beautiful land that God had given the people so they could rejoice and be fruitful and multiply, this land He had given them so they could praise His name, there was nothing but bodies and pieces of bodies piled up like tinder, nothing but the bombs going off and howling and screaming and moaning and the fear of death and the shadow of death and death all around you, on the right hand, on the left. Leo, the sea was red, it was like something out of the Bible. And it just went on, it just went on, every morning, every day, every night. I just wanted to stay alive. I was surprised every morning and every night that I was still alive. I thought I’d like to go back one day to some of those places where we were, when the war was over, and the people was more themselves, because it was beautiful, Leo, and some of the people were beautiful.” He was silent for a long time. “Our unit got all messed up, and I got sent to Sicily and then we had us a time, baby, all up and down Italy. I’ll never forget it.” He stopped again. He looked a little surprised. “I didn’t want to kill nobody during all that time. But I did want to kill this man.”

“I’ve wanted to kill, too,” I said. I said it quickly, not in sympathy, but to establish myself as unrepentant; for I felt his presence stifling me.

“Have you, Leo? Do you still want to? That’s too bad.”

“Well,” I said, after a moment, “I won’t ever do it. I’ve just felt that way sometimes, and I guess I will again.”

“I hope you won’t,” he said. “It’s the worst feeling that there is. It’s the most destructive feeling that there is. It fills you with darkness, Leo. It’s the soul turning away from God.”

How I longed to pour myself a drink! But I did not move. I dreaded hearing any more of his story: dreaded it. I felt myself retreating, moving backward before him. I felt him pursuing me, moving me, inexorably, into a place where I would have to cry out and fall on my knees. I watched him, and said nothing.

“This was a white man. You know how it is in this man’s army, Leo, they keep the black and the white separated—you know—and, naturally, all my buddies was colored, until I got overseas. I mean, you know, the only white cats we ever talked to was our officers and we didn’t like talking to them. But overseas it was a little different.”

Now, his face was almost the face that I remembered, surprised, and full of grief.

“But, like I say, our unit got wiped out, most of my buddies, and, well, you know, the man couldn’t afford to be so particular once we was over there in all this mess together. If you depending on a guy for your life, you don’t really much care what color he is. And we had to depend on each other. We had to.

“Anyway, by the time we got ourselves out of Cassino, Lord, I was buddies with this white guy from Boston, Hopkins. Frederick Hopkins. He seemed like a nice kid, blond, kind of skinny, real good-natured. He didn’t—he just didn’t—seem like most white guys. That’s what made it so hurtful later. He wasn’t a good soldier, but he wasn’t a bad soldier; but he was quick; something like me. And we’d been buddies all through that slaughter. And he was all right until we got to Rome. I’ll never understand what happened to that kid, when we got to Rome. Well—maybe I do understand it.” And he laughed.

I didn’t go to the bar, but I lit a cigarette.

“Did you like Rome?” I asked. I knew it was a foolish question, but I had never seen Rome, I rather envied him for having been there, and I was trying, although I knew I could not succeed, to deflect him.

“Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I liked Rome. I was in darkness in Rome, but I liked it. I don’t know if I’d like Rome now. I’m not the same now. In Rome, I lived my last days as a sinner.” And now his face was very sad, sad, and, at the same time, proud.

“Well, you know, we got to Rome. And it is a beautiful city, especially if you’ve never seen it before, and especially after all we’d been through. And the people were very glad to see us, and they were starving. I realized I had never seen starvation until I got to Rome.” He looked at me. “I didn’t know how much I had to praise God for. There wasn’t nothing you couldn’t buy in Rome, you could buy anything or anybody and it wouldn’t cost you no more than cigarettes, stuff like that. And you know soldiers. When you been cooped up with all these men for so many months, cooped up with the smell of all these men, well, then, you want a woman. And I was just like all the others. I wasn’t no better. We hit that town”—he laughed—“like locusts. And, it’s funny, you know, I might have thought at the very back of my mind that I might be kind of shy—because I knew I wasn’t going to meet no colored women in Rome—but I wasn’t shy a bit. Maybe I wasn’t shy because they weren’t shy. They not at all like the women here, Leo. Not a bit. They don’t look at you like women here, like they scared to be in the same street with you. No, they didn’t care, not as long as you had the currency, didn’t nobody care what color you were. And with a lot of them, it wasn’t just the currency. I have to give them that. I got to give them that. A lot of these women, they were really loyal, and it was, you know, it was nice.” He looked very young as he said this. “I had never really seen that before, not between black and white, and I hadn’t seen it too often between those of the same color. If a woman found herself a nice man, be he black, blue or yellow, well, she took care of him and there wasn’t nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Nothing.”

He sat down at the table again.

“I forgot,” I said, “to offer you a cup of coffee, Caleb. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“If it’s no trouble. Am I keeping you up?”

“I told you that sometimes I don’t leave this place until four o’clock in the morning.”

I went into the kitchen and put a light under the coffee and took out the cups, the sugar and cream; and had to face the fact that I simply did not have the courage, under Caleb’s eyes, to pour myself a drink. This exasperated me, and made me very angry with Caleb. But I was afraid that if I poured myself a drink, I would be doing it only to hurt him.

He sat very quietly at the table until I came back. I poured the coffee and sat down and lit another cigarette. He watched me with a bright, disapproving smile, but only said, shaking his head, “Little Leo.” Then, “We were in Rome for quite a long while, between you and me I don’t believe that this war was very well managed at all, and by and by I found me a real nice little girl, her name was Pia.”

Then he stopped—for quite a long while; and his face changed, unreadably; now, it was not merely a private face, but a personal face. He kept his eyes on the table. He sighed once, looked shamefacedly, just like Caleb, up at me, and smiled. He tirred his coffee and blew on it as he picked up the cup. “Ah,” he said, “I have to tell you—I was different in those days. Well, you remember how I was.” He paused again, and sipped his coffee. “And I have to tell you that most of the guys, well, they were still, you know, going from here to yonder. I mean, you know, maybe they had lots of girls, but me, I just had one. She was a pretty girl, she really was, and she was a nice girl. She really was a nice girl.” He blew on his coffee again. “She was a blonde and I didn’t know but that seems to mean something in Italy because there aren’t many, I guess. And she came from a nice family except they’d lost all their money. They expected us to get married. Married! Can you imagine that?” And he looked up at me, with his eyes very big. I said nothing. “And when I look back,” he said, “I guess I wasn’t, you know, very truthful. I wasn’t thinking. I was like a child. I was happy with Pia. I had never been so happy before. I thought maybe I would stay in Italy.”

Then he was silent again. I felt that he wanted to cry. I sensed tears somewhere in him, dammed up, drying fast. I wished I could have reached out and stroked the place where the tears were hidden; stroked the place and probed it and let the blood-red, salty tears come out. There is a fountain filled with blood. His face would have changed then, and he would have become Caleb again. But he did not want to be Caleb anymore.

“I was so happy, I didn’t see what was going on around me. Well, the colored guys and the white guys didn’t really get along, not most of us. Frederick and me still hung out together, and he had other colored buddies, mainly because of me, I think, and we had some nice times, but most of the guys, you know, they just stayed away from each other. Most of the white guys, we tried to stay away from them and they sure stayed away from us.” How careful his voice was now! “Well, we didn’t need them, we weren’t at home. They couldn’t, you know, like in the States, tell you where to sit and when to stand and all that; they couldn’t stop you from going out with a girl if you wanted to; if the girl didn’t care, there wasn’t much they could do. They couldn’t stop you from making friends with the people. If the people wanted to make friends, well, you know, that was it. But they didn’t like it. They gave a whole lot of guys a whole lot of trouble. And they told the people, oh, they told the people ridiculous things, Leo, like we had tails and back home we weren’t allowed on the streets after dark and wouldn’t nobody in the States never sell a black man no liquor because we got savage when we was drunk and started cutting up people just like savages, cannibals, and we was always raping white men’s daughters and wives and mothers and sisters and—and—our—member was so huge that it just tore white people to pieces, you know, ridiculous and childish stuff like that. And a lot of the people believed it, and guys had trouble sometimes, especially with the women, on account of stuff like that. And we was there supposed to be fighting for freedom. Well, it was, you know, it was just ridiculous.

“But, you see, since I was spending all my time with Pia, I didn’t go to the bars much, and I wasn’t running after women, so what was going on around me didn’t bother me. I just didn’t see it. My free time, I’d go on over to Pia’s house and talk to the folks for awhile. They were really nice old-fashioned people and they seemed to like me, we got on very well. I was really surprised. They treated me like a gentleman. Of course, they was too intelligent to believe any of that stuff the Americans was spreading around. We’d go out and eat dinner, Pia and me, or maybe we’d eat at the house, and we might go dancing someplace. But we wouldn’t go where most of the Americans went. We might go out in the country. We rode out in the country many a night. And sometimes we’d just sit there, under that beautiful Italian sky.”

His coffee cup was empty. He stared into it. “And she could make me moan. She really made me moan. Over and over and over. It was—it was mighty. I never shook like that. I wanted us to have a baby so bad. I knew it would be beautiful, it would have to be, it was so beautiful with us. And I really thought I could stay in Italy. I didn’t see how I could ever leave. But I knew it was going to be hard for us to get married as long as I was in the service. They didn’t like it, and they could make it mighty rough. So I hadn’t figured out exactly what I was going to do. I guess I thought I’d wait until I got discharged. I guess I thought I’d do that and then maybe open up a club or a restaurant, you know, then it could have been done, a lot of guys did it. Well, I was just happy for awhile, I guess, putting it off. But I certainly didn’t see how I could live without Pia. I used to wonder sometimes how come I had to come all the way to Italy. I used to pinch myself. It didn’t seem possible. And sometimes I’d catch myself laughing, Leo, just like a kid.”

He rose from the table and walked back to the fireplace. I heard his song again. Won’t somebody write my mother and tell her the shape I’m in.

“I didn’t—think—that Frederick Hopkins had any reason to be upset. We had been buddies, tight buddies. I never thought of him at all. I’d see him, naturally, and everything certainly seemed to be all right. If he seemed a little strange sometimes, well, that didn’t bother me, white people are always a little strange. He was always talking about his women. I never talked about mine. I never have talked about women, I don’t believe in that. But he knew I had this girl, because I’d told him. The other guys knew, too, naturally, that I had this girl somewhere, but they didn’t mess with me because I had, you know, a bad reputation. They thought I was crazy, and that was just fine with me.

“One night I come in this bar where we used to go sometimes, late, and I found Frederick there, all alone, crying. So I tried to find out what the matter was—you know. And he told me this sad story about how some girl he was going with had put him down, and what I realized, right quick, was that all his women put him down and I could see why, he wasn’t nothing but a baby, really, and all that talk of his was just talk. Well, you know, if you got to talk it all the time, you can’t be doing much. I didn’t say any of that, what I was thinking, to him, naturally, but I tried, diplomatically, I think, to show him where he might be going wrong and to make him look at it in another light. I tried to cheer him up, you know, even though I had just suddenly realized that I didn’t have no respect for this man. He was just a poor, sick, homesick baby, no wonder the women put him down. And he looked at me, I remember, with this funny look in his eyes, and he said, You don’t have no troubles, do you? And I said, Sure, I have troubles. Everybody has troubles. He said, You don’t have no troubles with women, and I don’t know what I said, I turned it off, somehow, it was just too silly, and I wasn’t about to start talking about me and my women and you know I wasn’t going to start talking about me and Pia. He might be a child, but I wasn’t. So we went on in, and I forgot all about it. The next day, when I was fixing to go, he asked me if he could come with me and like a chump I said Okay, because I was sorry for him, you know, and, bam, he met Pia, and, bam, baby, my troubles started. That boy, my buddy, a man I’d tried to help, and we’d looked on death together, he took one look at Pia and he decided to take her from me. To his mind, it was real simple. This poor, ignorant Italian girl—but she was much better educated than him, he didn’t know that—was running with me because she didn’t know any better. But she certainly wouldn’t want to be bothered with me, once she realized what he had to offer. And what he had to offer was his house and his cars and his money, back in Boston. What he had to offer was his family’s social position, and the fine future waiting for him, in Boston. And he hammered away at it. And it wasn’t, you know, that he cared about the girl, or had any intention of marrying her. He just wanted to get her away from me. He was determined to give her a taste of what life would be like if she stayed with me, and so he caused her to start being harassed in all kinds of ways, like one time they wanted to make her register as a whore, things like that. Oh. I can’t tell you. Or we’d go out someplace, we’d be walking down the street, and somebody would insult her and I’d get into a fight and my liberty would be canceled. And then he would go to see her. Stuff like that. And then she and I would fight about me getting into fights, and what was happening, though we didn’t realize it right away, was that all the pressure was getting to us, and we weren’t the same with each other. She didn’t believe Frederick, but, just the same, he had planted a seed, I could see the doubt begin, I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me, I could see the fear begin, I could see her wondering if she could really make it, if anybody could ever love anybody enough to take what she was going to have to take. And I lay on my bunk one night—I was different then, I’ve changed, I’ve changed—and I hadn’t seen her for two weeks because I hadn’t had no liberty, and I thought, This is really something. I’m five thousand miles from home, in this man’s uniform, protecting him, and he brings his poison all the way over here with him to spoil my girl and ruin my life. I lay on my bunk and I cried worse than Frederick had ever cried. But I cried because I was mad. I had whipped too many people, I was tired of whipping people, and it hadn’t done me no good, here I was, lying on this bunk, and I might as well have been in chains.

“The next time I saw Frederick it was in a bar, I was by myself, he come in, and he was whistling. He didn’t see me right away. He came along, slow, whistling, with his cap on the back of his head, and, I don’t know, I never decided to kill him, just as he came closer that was all that was in my mind, and I knew I was going to kill him. I knew it. I had never noticed before how, when a guy whistles, there’s a funny little trembling high up in his neck. I noticed it now. His neck wasn’t going to be trembling long, he was whistling one of his last songs. I noticed the space between his eyebrows, that kind of little no-man’s-land between the hairs, there’s bone there when you touch it and if a bullet goes in there, you’re dead. I watched his whole body as he moved toward me, and I saw him lying flat and still, on his back, forever. It takes less than a second to kill a man. I wanted him to look surprised, like I’d seen so many look.

“And I knew exactly how I was going to do it, and I would never be caught. I knew we were going to be moving out of Rome soon, going north. And I was just going to stay real close to him, like white on rice. I knew, we all knew, the fighting was going to be heavy, where we was going. And one night or one morning just as soon as I saw my opportunity, I was going to pull that trigger and blow his head off. I didn’t have any reason to be fighting the people I was fighting. But I had every reason in the world to kill him. And I knew I was going to do it.

“He looked surprised when he saw me. He stopped whistling. He started to say something, and then he didn’t. I just looked at him. I didn’t say a word. He sat down at the bar. Then, he just suddenly got up and left.

“Well, we moved on out. I only saw Pia once before we left Rome, and she was as beautiful as ever, but it wasn’t like before. It wasn’t like before in me. And then I stuck close to Frederick, I kept him in sight. It happened one morning, very early, not like I’d planned. He was all alone, he was near a tree. We was away from the others, nobody could see us, and the valley where we were was full of snipers. I started running up on him and I called his name because I wanted him to know it was me who killed him. And he turned around. He looked surprised, all right. He raised his hands in front of him, like a baby, and he was trying to say something, and while he had his mouth open, his mouth opened wider, all of a sudden, and another look came over his face, another surprise, an awful agony, Leo, I’ll never forget it, and he pitched forward on his face. I knew I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. I hadn’t heard a sound. I just stood there. Leo, I started to tremble. He lay there with his arms stretched out in front of him on the ground. I looked down at him and I looked around. I could hear shouting and running and all; but it all seemed like in a dream. I turned him over. He wasn’t dead, but he was dying, and he didn’t look surprised anymore. He looked at me, just for a minute, right in my eyes, and he said, I don’t blame you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. Then he died. In my arms. Like that, he sort of hiccuped and then he was still, with his eyes wide open. All of a sudden, he was mighty heavy. He’d gone into eternity believing I’d killed him. I just sat there. There was noise and flame all around me. Guys were running and crying and ducking. Some guy pulled on me and pulled and he was shouting something and just then the earth blew up right at my feet and Frederick rolled out of my arms. And I was on my face like he had been, and then I started crawling and then I started running. We was all running in the same direction, we must have been running to some kind of shelter, but I didn’t know what I was doing, my legs was just carrying me, carrying me with the others, wherever they were going. I kept thinking how I should go back and close his eyes. I fell, and I heard somebody right nearby scream. It sounded like Frederick, but I knew it couldn’t be him, he was back there where I’d left him, he was dead. When I fell, I didn’t get up, I just hugged the ground. I listened to the screaming and tried to figure out where it was coming from and I tried to inch my way in that direction but I couldn’t see ahead of me and the earth was shaking and turning over. I wanted to help whoever it was, because I thought that might make up for Frederick, but then, the screaming stopped, and I knew. No. No life can be given back. And that was the moment of my repentance, Leo. It was a pain I had never felt before, a heartbreak I had never felt before. I saw my whole life stretching ahead of me forever like this, in lust and hatred and darkness, and to end like this, face down, hugging the earth, and you feel your bowels moving for fear, Leo, and to be like that until the earth covers you. I struggled up to my knees. I knew, I knew for the first time that there was a God somewhere. I knew that only God could save me, save us, not from death but from that other death, that darkness and death of the spirit which had created this hell. Which had sent men here to die. I cried out, I cried out something, I remember I was thinking, Lord, send the angel down, and then I was struck. It didn’t hurt. It knocked me flat on my back, it knocked me out of my body, and I remember I thought of Frederick’s eyes and I thought, Well, now, I can tell him I didn’t pull the trigger. And it seemed to me God’s great mercy that I hadn’t, and I praised Him for His mercy, that He’d held me back from mortal sin, and was taking me home now, washed of my sins, forgiven. I thought I was dying, but I wasn’t afraid. I understood for the first time the power and beauty of the love of God.”

A silence fell when Caleb ceased speaking such as I had never known before, and have not known since. It was a silence loud enough to wake the dead. It was the silence that Jesus had in mind when he told the Pharisees that if his disciples held their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. It was a silence in which one seemed to hear the bloodstream move. One wondered at its cargo. In the awful light—the awful light—and in this silence, we now watched each other. How terrible it is to overhear a confession! He was more than ever my brother now, forever—and he was more than ever a stranger, forever and forever: because I had seen him for the first time. We listened to the sounds coming in from the streets. It was three o’clock in the morning.

I did not say anything. I rose and went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of rum. I came back with it, and sat down at the table again.

He walked over to me, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“When you’ve been down in that valley, Leo,” he said, “when you been wrestling with the angel, it changes you. It changes you. Everybody hits that valley, Leo, but don’t everyone come up. Love lifted me. And I’m free at last.”

Free at last, free at last, praise God Almighty, I’m free at last! These words rang in my mind. I sipped my rum. His hand was very heavy on my shoulder. I felt his weariness, and smelled his sweat—fleeting, like my memory of our past, and indescribable, inaccessible, like that. What did I feel? I cannot tell. I will never know. I felt, for the first time, and it must be rare, another human being occupying my flesh, walking up and down in me. And that is why I cannot tell, that is why I cannot remember. Oh. I remember the candle before me, burning low; I thought, I must put it out. I remember that I thought that the police would soon walk by, checking the lights. They might come in. I remember thinking, I promised Caleb that I would come home soon, to see my father and my mother. I remember the way the restaurant looked at that moment, the tables not cleared, coffee cups and dessert plates everywhere, and some tables needed new candles. I remember all that, and his hand on my shoulder, and the silence.

I was nineteen then, and Caleb was twenty-six. Years and years later, I grabbed Barbara back from her Sutton Place window ledge, eight stories up. Let us pretend that I was a man by that time. I remember that moment very well. I remember that Barbara and I had had what we both then considered to be our deadliest, irrevocable fight. I remember that I took my gray topcoat off her sofa, and put it on, and walked out of her living room, walked the long corridor to the door. I had left her on the floor, in her nightgown, crying. I walked out of the apartment, slamming the door, and buzzed for the elevator. I watched the indicator as the car moved up to eight. Eight. Somehow, that number began to scream in my mind. The indicator struck six, and, without knowing that I was going to do it, I turned away from the elevator, and took out my keys and opened Barbara’s door and walked back into the apartment. It was silent. I slammed the door behind me—or, rather, the door slammed behind me, and, far off, I heard another door slam, the door to Barbara’s bedroom. But both doors had been slammed by the wind. I ran to the bedroom, and opened the door—what guided me?—and saw Barbara, with her back to me, sitting on the window ledge, swinging her feet like a child, and about to drop. I pulled her back by the hair. I remember that moment, I remember it well, and I know that I have since used it in my work. But I have never consciously used that moment in the restaurant with Caleb. I remember it only in flashes, hot and cold. It may be that, by the time I dragged Barbara back from the ledge, I knew enough to know that she might be sitting there. But I did not know, when Caleb walked into The Island on that far-off night, how many ways there were to die, and how few to live.

“You’ll see it, too, one day,” he said—very carefully, very softly—“the light. I know you will. I know it. You don’t know how hard I pray for you.”

Well. I remember that he helped me wash the dishes. We talked of other things, and we laughed a lot. We were almost friends again. I remember that, at one point, he picked up my forgotten, unfinished glass of rum and poured it into the sink. “Soon, you won’t be needing that, little brother.” I remember the way the rum and the soapy water smelled. I remember how it looked—and we both laughed as it vanished down the drain, white soap and black sugar. We left the kitchen spotless. He helped me set up my tables. I turned out all the lights and locked up the joint and I walked him to his subway. I watched him run down the steps and he turned, one last time, at the bottom of the steps, to smile and wave. I realized again how glad I’d been to see him. Then, he disappeared. The morning light was rising now, as I walked home, walked toward the river, walked toward Barbara.

I kept my promise to go home on that Thursday, but of course that didn’t really help. I had made—I had made it without knowing that I had—some enormous and unshakable resolution. I had arrived at an awful cunning, which was to be protected by silence. I knew that Caleb would never see the case as I saw it—no one would ever see my case, and so I would not waste breath presenting it. But I knew what I was going to do. I was alone all right; for God had taken my brother away from me; and I was never going to forgive Him for that. As far as the salvation of my own soul was concerned, Caleb was God’s least promising missionary. God was not going to do to me what He had done to Caleb. Never. Not to me.

I walked home, that morning, as I say, and I stood over Barbara for a long time, and watched her sleeping in our bed. I remember the way she looked that morning, her hair curling over the pillow, one thin hand clutching the blanket, as though she sensed departure. She worked very hard, my poor little girl, at some bleakly piss-elegant establishment, like Longchamps. I sat at the window, and lit a cigarette. Our room faced what had once been a courtyard; directly facing me was the opposite wing of this decrepit complex. In some windows, the shades were down—those hideous kinds of paper shades, which leap out of your hand and curl round and round themselves and are as hard to reach, then, as a treed cat. In other windows, the shades were up. No one in Paradise Alley could really have anything to hide. The people slept. Everything was still. I can’t stay here, I thought. And I looked back at Barbara. I closed the window and I pulled down the shade and I got undressed.

The proud and desperate years began. That winter ended, and the summer came again. Barbara got a job in summer stock, but I didn’t. I didn’t go away with the Workshop, though they wanted me to come and play Crooks again and drive that goddamn car again. I stayed with The Island, and I found a voice teacher, and I studied that guitar. A few of the show business people who came in were nice to me, and they invited me here and there. I began to be seen around. It was accepted that I was talented—this came as something of a surprise, but it was a nice surprise. I sang at The Island almost every night, and more and more people came to hear me—so many that Hilda had to hire a helper for me; and we had trouble with the cops, which eventually ended those sessions. Hilda gave an Island ball at a big hall in Harlem, and she had got some very big show business names to perform, and I was on the bill, too. That was the very first time I ever saw my name on a poster and I carried it to my mother and father and they came to the ball—but Caleb didn’t; now, he was in the world, but not of it—and my mother and father were very proud of me, and we had a very nice time that night. And, like all kids, with their first taste of the deeply desired approbation, I saw myself on the heights already. But, in fact, I wasn’t being hired, and it was a very long time before I was.

Barbara and I split up, for the first of many times. We didn’t see each other for a long time, not until I took Sally to see her in her first Broadway show. She played a very small part, but she was noticed, and she got offers from Hollywood which she had the good sense to turn down. I plodded on, and Sally and I split up, and I left The Island and started singing in a short-lived Village supper club. I got hired, as I’ve said, for bit parts here and there, odd parts here and there, but nothing led to anything and I was beginning to be more and more frightened. Steve and I split up, insofar as we had ever really been together, and, at the same time, Caleb got married, and I was the best man at his wedding. He married a woman named Louise, heavy and black and respectable, who would certainly take excellent care of him. I remember the wedding because I hated being there. By now, I was twenty-five, and I was terribly ashamed of the life I lived. Everyone had found the life that suited them; but I hadn’t. Caleb looked safe and handsome that day, he had become a preacher and was now assistant pastor at The New Dispensation House of God. Now, he had a wife and a home and he’d have children, all according to God’s plan. But, my life! It made me, I know, very defensive and difficult. I was a short-order cook, I was a waiter, I was a busboy, I was an elevator boy, I was a messenger, I was a shipping clerk—and that’s when times were good. Otherwise, I was a bum, a funky, homeless bum, a grown man who slept in flop-houses and movies, who often walked the streets without the price of subway fare, and who really knew no one because I didn’t want to know the people in my condition—I didn’t like my condition, I was not going to make peace with it, I was not going to enter the marihuana-drenched, cheap-beer-and-whiskey-soaked camaraderie of the doomed. I was going to change my condition, somehow, somehow—how?—and I was too proud to approach the affluent. My recollection of those years is not that I pounded the pavement, but crawled on my face over every inch of it. Breaks came and went, but terror and trouble stayed. The worst of it was, perhaps, that I most thoroughly avoided the people who loved me most. Barbara, for example, once spent a week in New York looking for me. She couldn’t find me. I knew she was in town because I knew the show she was with was in town. But Barbara had a job, and I didn’t. I knew I couldn’t fool her the way I fooled others—I hoped—with my clean shirt and mattress-pressed pants and shiny shoes and clean fingernails. How I managed to keep clean the half dozen shirts which saw me through those years I’ll never know. I knew—or I felt—that people were beginning to give me up. They felt, I was sure, that I was destined, simply, to become a part of the wreckage which lines every steep road. And, since I felt this way, I began to act this way—the most dangerous moment of all. I began to smell of defeat: that odor which seals your doom. I was drinking far too much, for people will always buy you a drink. And it was in a bar, in fact, that something happened which turned out, as we survivors love to put it, to be my first real break, the solid break, the break which made the others possible. It certainly didn’t look like a break. It only looked like a job. I wasn’t absolutely on my ass at this point. I was working as a short-order cook in Harlem. But, of course, I didn’t want to spend my life as a short-order cook, and I was very low because I knew my mother wasn’t well.

This man came over to me, a white man, very friendly, and said his name was Ray Fisher. He asked me how I was, and what I was doing. I didn’t know the man, and I hated people to ask me questions like that, I was ashamed to tell people what I was doing. But I was also too proud to lie. This man had heard me sing, somewhere, and he had seen me on the stage; which caused me, I must say, enormously to respect his powers of observation. And he told me that a little theater group was going to do an experimental version of The Corn Is Green. This production would utilize Negroes, and they were looking for a Negro boy who could sing, to play the lead. He was a friend of the director’s, which was how he knew about it, and he knew that the director had also seen me, and had a hunch about me. He said that it was only scheduled for seven performances, and the pay wasn’t very much. But, on his own behalf, and on behalf of the director, his friend, he very much hoped that I’d think about it—it might, he said, with that innocent earnestness which characterizes so many Americans, be a kind of breakthrough. Anyway, it might be worth looking into, he thought, and he gave me the address of the theater. Which wasn’t in the Village, but way down on the East Side, precisely the neighborhood where nobody would ever dream of going, especially not to see an experimental production, with a Negro in the male lead, of The Corn Is Green.

I remember looking at him, and saying, “The corn is green?” I was sure he was joking, or mad. You meet all kinds of people in bars. But he didn’t seem to be joking, and he didn’t seem to be mad. I’d never read the play, but I’d seen Ethel Barrymore play it. I didn’t remember the boy’s part at all. It all sounded, really, almost completely mad: I kept staring at Ray, whom I didn’t yet recognize as the hand of God. But we had a few drinks; he was really very nice; I promised I’d go down, because he really seemed to mean it. But what decided me, really, was a telegram under my door, when I got home that night. I was living on 19th Street and Fourth Avenue. It was, you know, well—shit!—they really have been looking for me. So, in the morning, I called the barbecue joint, to say I’d be coming in late, and I went on down.

When things go wrong, the good Lord knows they go wrong; one can find oneself in trouble so deep and so bizarre that one knows one can never get out of it; and it doesn’t help at all, as the years swagger brutally by, to recognize that much of one’s trouble is produced by the really unreadable and unpredictable convolutions of one’s own character. I’ve sat, sometimes, really helpless and terrified before my own, watching it spread danger and wonder all over my landscape—and not only my own. It is a terrible feeling. One learns, at such moments, not merely how little we know, but how little whatever we know is able to help us. But sometimes things go right. And these moments, humiliatingly enough, don’t seem to have anything to do with one’s character at all. I got to this tiny little theater, and I met the director, Konstantine Rafaeleto, a nice man, a heavy-set Greek about forty-odd, and I liked him right away, liked his handshake, liked his eyes. The first thing he said, after “Good morning, Mr. Proudhammer. I’m glad we found you—you’re a hard man to find, do you know that?” was “Do you know the script?” I said, No, but I’d seen the play. He said, “Forget that,” and handed me a script. I thought he wanted me to read, but he poured two cups of coffee and we sat down and he began to tell me what he had in mind.

He had not been in my country long, he said, only about eight years; he was part of the multitude driven here by the latest European debacle; thus, one of the lucky ones—but he said this with a sad and winning irony. Then he said, with a smile, that he did not pretend to understand my country, or the place of black people in this strange place. I was wondering what all this was leading up to, naturally, and I was already half convinced that he was just a nice intellectual nut, who probably couldn’t direct me across the street. But I think he caught this in some expression on my face, for he smiled, and said, “I am not a lecturer. I am a director. I thought that I would try a little experiment.” He paused, and looked at me, now, very narrowly indeed. He said, “I don’t know if you agree with me, but I don’t think that any of these problem books and plays and pictures do anything”—we were in the era of Earth and High Heaven and Gentlemen’s Agreement and Focus and Kingsblood Royal and Pinky—“I don’t think that they’re even intended to do anything. They just keep the myths alive. They keep the vocabulary alive. Of course, we can all feel unhappy about the poor unhappy darkies—we can afford to, we’ve got so many happy ones. Why not feel sorry for the Jews, we’ve killed so many. But a gas oven is a gas oven, and isn’t a darky still a darky?”

I sipped my coffee, and watched him.

“Now,” he said, very attentive to the quality of my attention, “the experiment I have in mind is just an experiment. The principal element of this experiment, that is, the play, is far from ideal. I mean, I don’t want you to think that I think it’s a great play. But it’s a relatively truthful play, and sometimes very touching, and there are elements in it which I think we can make very exciting.”

I was watching him while he spoke—watching him more than I was listening to him, which is a habit of mine. I always think that you can tell a great deal from the way a man looks at you when he’s talking. Konstantine—Connie—was a kind of nut, as it turned out, and he was to pay very heavily for this later, for the voice of Senator McCarthy was loud in the land. But he was my kind of nut. He had real convictions, and he’d thought some of them through, and he tried to live by his convictions. Not even later, when his reputation and his means of making a livelihood were on the block, and nearly all of those who could have helped him had turned away from him, did I ever hear him complain. He only said, “Well, I guess it’s time to take a deep breath and hold your nose and go under. Thank God, I learned that long ago.”

That morning, while he was talking to me, he looked me directly in the eye, and he was much too involved in what he was trying to say to me to have energy left over to hand me any shit. He wasn’t trying to impress me, and he wasn’t blackmailed by my color. He talked to me as one artisan to another, concerning a project which he hoped we would be able to execute together. This was a profound shock, he couldn’t have known how profound, and it was a great relief. No one in the theater had ever talked to me like that. No, I had become accustomed to the smile which masked a guilty awareness. Americans are always lying to themselves about that kinsman they call the Negro, and they are always lying to him, and I had grown accustomed to the tone which sought your complicity in the unadmitted crime. The directors I had talked to had to suspect, though they couldn’t admit, that the roles I was expected to play were an insult to my manhood, as well as to my craft. I might have a judgment on the clown or porter I was playing. They could not risk hearing it. Of course, I couldn’t risk stating it, though there were also times when I couldn’t resist stating it. But this tension, created by the common knowledge of an unspeakable and unspoken lie, was not present in Konstantine’s office that morning. He was the first director I’d met with whom I really wanted to work. For that matter, he was the first director I’d met who talked to me as though I could.

He poured more coffee, and he said, “One of the things that’s most impressed me in this country is the struggle of black people to get an education. I always think it’s one of the great stories, and nobody knows anything about it. If there were a play on that subject, I’d probably do that. But I don’t know of any, and so I thought I’d try this experiment with this play. I think you’ll see what I mean when you read it. I certainly hope you do. Very few of the elements in the play are really alien to American life. You’ve got mining towns like that, for Christ’s sake, worse than that, and people just like that, right on down to the squire. People don’t really differ very much from one place to another, anyway.”

By now. I had caught his drift, and was dying to get home and read the play. I didn’t know yet whether he was crazy or not, but he was beginning to excite me.

“So I thought,” he said, “I’d take this play, this mining town situation, with no comment, so to say, only making the miners and the servants, people like that, black. It’s true that the play takes place in Wales, but I think we can make the audience forget that after the first few minutes, and hell, anyway, there are black people in Wales. And I figured we’d let the Negro kids improvise around the stretches of Welsh dialogue—dialect, really—and of course we’ve got tremendous musical opportunities with this play.” He looked at me and smiled. “How does it strike you, son? Oh. Of course, Ray Fisher must have told you that I want you to play the boy—to play Morgan Evans. That could be a Negro name, couldn’t it?”

“So could most white names,” I said, and after a moment he laughed and I laughed with him.

“Can you read the script right away?” he asked. “And get back to me right away?”

“I’ll read it today,” I said, “and I’ll call you as soon as I’ve read it.”

“Call me this evening at home,” he said, and scribbled his number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “I hope you’ll like it. That’d be the only reason for doing it. There’s not much money in it, and no glory.”

“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed now, “I’ll call you this evening.”

“Right.” He held out his hand. “People call me Connie. May I call you Leo?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Well, good-bye, Leo. I hope we can do something.”

“Good-bye, Connie. I hope so, too.”

And we shook hands, and I left.

I read the play, of course, on the subway, and had finished the first act by the time I got uptown. I didn’t want to go to work until I’d finished reading the play and so I went into a bar and ordered a beer and read to the end. It was a mad idea, all right, and I kept telling myself that, but I couldn’t help getting more and more excited. I could see what Connie had in mind; I could see that it might work. Perhaps I didn’t altogether like the faintly missionary aspect of the white schoolteacher, black-promise business, but it really couldn’t be helped and if we played it right, it wouldn’t be stressed. It was only going to play for seven performances, I reminded myself, but anybody in my business has to approach any project as though it has the possibilities of shaking the world. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the boy, Morgan, but I felt that I could understand him and felt that I could do it. And, obviously, Connie felt that I could do it or he wouldn’t have been looking for me. He was so sure that I could do it that he hadn’t even asked me to read. So, it looked all right. It looked very nice. And, no matter what happened now, my morale had once again been saved. And, after all, who knew what might come of it? Who could know? And I sailed out of the bar, with my script under my arm and sailed up the avenue to the barbecue joint in a beautiful gentle wind. I wasn’t helpless anymore. Maybe I was going to live.

I called Connie that night from the barbecue joint. “This is Leo Proudhammer. I just wanted to say, thank you. You’ve made me very happy.”

There was a pause. Then, “You’ve made me very happy, too, Leo. Can you make it at ten in the morning?”

“Right.”

“Till then.”

Well, this meant that I would be working nights in the barbecue joint, and rehearsing all day. But this was one of the greatest times in my life, and I’ll never forget it. It was the very first time in my life, and after so long, that I was handled as an actor. Perhaps only actors can know what this means, but what it meant for me was that the track was cleared at last for work, I could concentrate on learning and working and finding out what was in me. I wasn’t carrying that goddamn tray, and I wasn’t at war with myself or the play or the cast. I didn’t have the feeling, which I’d had so often, that I was simply hanging around, like part of the scenery, and was going to be used like that. It was the first time I was treated with that demanding respect which is due every artist, simply because of the nature of his effort, and without which he finds it almost impossible to function. I was being challenged and the very best was expected of me. And I was going to deliver my very best.

Connie worked me like a horse. Sometimes he’d say, “Now, you know you’re not telling me the truth. Don’t you? You’re cheating the boy.” So we’d do it again; I knew what he meant; I remembered everything he said. My first encounter with Miss Moffat I’m still not sure I ever really got right. It is a very tricky moment, deceptively cute—“Please, miss, can I have a kiss?” and she spanks me on the bottom, try being cute when you play it—and Morgan turned out to be the hardest role I’d ever been assigned. But it was also the best role, and I didn’t at all mind being worked like a horse. He worked all of us like horses. I had trouble the first week or so with the actress who was playing Miss. Moffat. She had been a fairly big star in the thirties, a sort of second-string Janet Gaynor or Sylvia Sidney, and she was saddled with one of those awful Wampus Baby star names. She was known professionally as Bunny Nash, and though she was now far on the far side of fifty, she couldn’t change it. She was having a little trouble adjusting to work in a settlement house theater. She was more than a little troubled, though she couldn’t have admitted this, by finding herself surrounded by so many Negroes. Outnumbered, really: for Connie had cast all the serving roles, Bessie, Mrs. Watty, all the mine boys, and Old Tom, as black people. This meant that of fifteen speaking roles, ten were black. This made it hard on Miss Moffat, for, in the play, Miss Moffat’s relationship to her peers is quite perfunctory. Her only real relationship is to Morgan. And, as Connie was directing the play, this is also true of all the “black” people in the play, who look on Morgan as their hope. For the first week, Connie concentrated on these subsidiary and unspoken relationships, leaving the center of the play virtually untouched. And this worried Bunny Nash, who had looked on The Corn Is Green as a starring vehicle for herself. But Connie knew Bunny Nash, and it suited him to have her a little worried. He wanted a kind of tug of war between Miss Moffat and Morgan, in order to make vivid in the production what is only implicit in the script; that, whereas, clearly, Miss Moffat is a mystery for Morgan Evans, he is, equally, a mystery for her. And he wanted Bunny to play it not merely as the imperious, knowing, and rather noble spinster schoolteacher, but also as a woman more than a little frightened by what she has undertaken.

And, in fact, Bunny and I were frightened of each other in different ways, and for different reasons. Connie used this. Cruelly and painstakingly, he walked us, in our own personalities, over the ground we had to cover in the play. He never spoke of the tension between Bunny and Leo, but used this tension—or, rather, forced us to use it—to illuminate the tension between Morgan and Miss Moffat. It worked. He got what he wanted. It made our fight scene in the second act a really painful, tearing fight—Morgan, hateful, bewildered, weeping, striking out, and Miss Moffat, equally bewildered, terribly frightened and hurt, struggling for control. Having hit that peak, as it now seemed with no effort, and resolved that tension, our confidence mounted and we went to work in earnest. We had found our feet, and were able to play the difficult and, at bottom, quite improbable third act as friends whose friendship has cost them more than a little.

Connie used a lot of music in the play, and I had a solo, unseen. Before the curtain rose, I was to sing, accompanied by my guitar, an old mining song, “Dark As a Dungeon.” On the lines,

There’s many a man I’ve known in my day,

Who lived just to labor his poor life away.

Like a fiend for his dope, a drunkard his wine,

A man will have lust for the low, rugged mine …

I always thought of my father, and I sang the song for him. But I hadn’t been home. And I hadn’t really told anyone very much about the play, for by now I knew a whole lot about the best-laid plans of mice and men and I didn’t want to risk having to explain that everything had fallen through. The guys at the barbecue joint knew, of course, and they’d all been very nice. If they hadn’t been, it would have been very hard on me, because I didn’t want to quit my job and then be on my ass again, after seven days. And they were all going to come down and see me, with their wives or their girl-friends or whatever, on different nights. But, though I worked in Harlem, so close to home, I hadn’t been home. I said to myself that it was because of my hours. We often rehearsed from ten to ten, and then I worked in the barbecue joint till dawn. Then, I grabbed a little sleep and went back to the theater. It was a schedule which I probably couldn’t hope to survive today, but then it was nothing unusual. And I’d done it before, by this time I’d done it many times. Just because it’s so impossible a schedule, one crams, without ever being able to recount how, a great many things into it. So, I could have gone to see my mother, whom I knew to be ailing. I had managed, on tighter schedules, to do less important things. My parents had no phone, but there was a phone at The New Dispensation House of God and I could have called Caleb. Or, I could simply have explained it to the guys at the barbecue joint, and they would have understood and would never have given me a hard time about it. They were very nice guys and they liked me very much and they did very much hope I’d make it, even if it meant that I’d change and never talk to them again. So, there was really no reason for my not going home. Any psychiatrist will be glad to give you the reasons, of course, but I have always very keenly felt, in the psychiatric account, the absence of the two most important people, one of them being the psychiatrist and the other being me. Anyway: I didn’t go home. Ten o’clock in the evening was too late, I said, and six in the morning was too early. And so, one night, after a particularly hard and rewarding day, I walked into the barbecue joint and found Caleb sitting at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for me.

Now, the cats in the barbecue joint, unlike the people downtown at The Island, so many years ago, knew all about Caleb and me. He was Reverend Proudhammer: they all knew that. They treated him with that species of respect which masks despair. He was in his bag, as we now say; had found his niche, as the English say; nothing more could be expected from him and they expected nothing. Really, he was for them exactly what I might be in a few years, or a few months, a few weeks, a few days: beyond them, and useless. He had made his way—all right. They had not made theirs—all right. The fact that he was a Reverend and I was trying to become an actor made no difference at all, no difference whatever. They knew, without knowing that they knew it, simply by having watched it, by having paid for it, what nearly no one can afford to remember: that the theater began in the church. We were both performers, that was how they saw us, brothers, and at war. They may have expected more from me than they did from him simply because my pulpit was so much harder to reach, and they hadn’t, after all, yet heard my sermon.

They knew it was going to be a bad night for me. I came in, breathless, carrying my book, bareheaded, and wiped the rain off my face and hair as I hurried through the restaurant. Red, my boss, signified something to me but I was full of the play and anxious about being late, and so I simply didn’t react. I hung up my coat and ran into the bathroom. Red came in behind me.

“Your brother’s out there,” he said. “He’s been here for more than an hour.”

I was peeing and it suddenly splashed all over my hand and all over the floor.

“My brother?”

“Reverend Proudhammer,” he said, “your brother.”

I washed my hands, and dried them. I said, “Oh, shit.”

“Well,” he said, “he’s here.” He watched me in the mirror. “It might be some kind of trouble in your family, I reckon, so”—he watched me; he was a pale Negro, with a reddish skin, freckles all over his face; I liked Red very much, and he liked me—“if it is, you just go on with him and don’t worry about nothing.” He started out the door. “How’s it going downtown?”

“It’s going pretty well,” I said. I turned and looked at him. He could see it in my face. He could hear it in my voice. He smiled—a smile I’ve seen only on the faces of black Americans. “Red. It’s going very well.” I couldn’t help it. I said, “Red, you know, I’m going to be very good! You’re going to be very proud of me.”

He smiled again—that smile. “Well, all right,” he said, and left me.

I combed my hair and stared at my face, my God, my so improbable face, where did you get those eyes? and walked out to meet Caleb. He was sitting at the counter, as I’ve said, and I sat down beside him.

He was stern, as always, beautiful, as always. I said, “Hello, Caleb.”

He was drinking coffee. I had the feeling that he’d drunk quite a lot of coffee. He was pretty well dressed, with a hat and everything—certainly someone, somewhere, someday, should do a study of the American male’s hat!—and I wasn’t. It was winter, and I was wearing a turtleneck sweater and some old corduroys. I hadn’t had a haircut and I hadn’t shaved. He looked at me and that was what he saw. I knew it. I can’t say I didn’t care. I cared. But I knew that there was no longer anything I could do about what Caleb saw. And I knew this because there was no longer anything I could do about what I saw.

“Your mother wants to see you,” he said, after he had completed his scrutiny. “She’s sick and she wants to see you and she thought I could find you and that’s why I’m here. Do you think you can take time off and come home and see your mother?”

We looked at each other. I didn’t say anything. I walked to the coat rack and picked up my coat. I looked briefly at Red, and Red nodded. I walked back to Caleb. “I’m ready,” I said.

Caleb stood up and put some money on the counter, but Red shoved it back at him. “You’re part of the family, Reverend Proudhammer,” he said, and Caleb smiled, a stiff, lordly smile, and we walked out. The other cats had not said anything. They knew that there was nothing to say.

The rain was falling pretty hard. I had my book under my arm and my shoulders hunched and we walked down the avenue. I realized that we were going to have to pass The New Dispensation House of God, and this made me want to laugh. Laugh may not be the most exact word. I asked, “How’s Louise? And the baby?”

“They’re fine,” he said. “I keep telling the kid that he’s got an uncle, but he doesn’t seem to believe me anymore.”

I didn’t like this. It smacked of a certain kind of blackmail. And I didn’t like Louise very much, I thought she was a dumb, pretentious, black bitch. But, on the other hand: “I’ve been busy, Caleb,” I said.

“How can a man get so busy,” cried Caleb, “that he don’t have time for his own flesh and blood!” I knew the tone. It fell on me like the rain fell on me. There was nothing I could do about it. We passed the church and heard the singing and I saw Caleb’s name on the black-white board. “Don’t tell me you’ve been busy. You ain’t been as busy as I’ve been and I’ve been to see Mama every day. Every day. And every day she asks me if I’ve seen you.”

Then, we walked in silence. Just before we turned off the avenue, we passed a bar and someone I knew was going in and he hailed me. Then he saw who I was with, and he just kept on, into the bar.

“You got some fine friends,” Caleb said.

“Yes,” I said deliberately, “I do.”

“Do you realize you’re going to be thirty pretty soon?” Caleb asked. “Now, what do you think is going to happen to you?”

“I know I’ll soon be thirty. And whatever’s going to happen to me is none of your goddamn business.”

He stopped and turned and looked at me. We stood stock still in the rain. “I’m a man now, Caleb,” I said, “you leave me the fuck alone, you hear?” and he slapped me, slapped me so hard that my book fell from beneath my arm, and I had to scramble like a child to rescue it from the torrent. All my notes were in it. I hoped they weren’t all ruined. We were opening in a week. I stared at Caleb. “You bastard,” I said. “You bastard. You no-good, black Holy Roller bastard.” And he slapped me again, and we stood there.

“Once, I wanted to be like you,” I said. “I would have given anything in the world to be like you.” I was crying. I hoped he couldn’t see it, because of the rain. “Now I’d rather die than be like you. I wouldn’t be like you and tell all these lies to all these ignorant people, all these unhappy people, for anything in the world, Caleb, anything in the world! That God you talk about, that miserable white cock-sucker—look at His handiwork, look!” And I looked around the avenue, but he didn’t. He looked at me. “I curse your God, Caleb, I curse Him, from the bottom of my heart I curse Him. And now let Him strike me down. Like you just tried to do.” And I walked away and left him.

I ran up the stairs to our house. I wiped my face and hair as best I could, and I knocked on the door. My father opened it.

Perhaps it was the play. Perhaps it was the fight. Perhaps it was his face. I’ll never know. I was not stunned to see that my father was old. I knew that he was old. I was not stunned by the fact that he was drunk. I knew that he was usually drunk—though Caleb still insisted that he would soon give up his sinful ways and come to the Lord. Bring your burdens to the Lord and leave them there! I thought, and I stared into the crater of my father’s face. What had fallen on that face, to sink it so? What had happened to the eyes? the eyes of an animal peering out from a cave. I heard Caleb’s footsteps, far below me, slow and certain, like the wrath of God. It took a second before my father recognized me. Then, he smiled, my God, how his face changed, what a light came into it, and he pulled me into the house with one hand and turned, crying, “Old lady, look who’s here! Now, I know you going to be all right.”

He pulled me into the living room, where my mother sat in the easy chair, covered with blankets. She was very still. Her hands were in her lap, and she had been looking into the streets. Now, at his voice, she turned. Her face was as yellow as a yolk, and her eyes were like two raisins. Her hair was piled on the top of her head, held with a comb, as dry as stone, and as dull. And she smiled and held out her arms. She said, “My gracious, boy, I just been sitting here, thinking about you. Now, where’ve you been?”

I heard Caleb’s footsteps in the outside hall, and I walked over to my mother and kissed her. She smelled old. She held me tight, and I was uneasy. I was able, at last, to look up into her face and I smiled into her face, just as Caleb came into the room. Whatever I had ever felt for my mother, my beautiful, almost white mother, came down on me, and I said, “Mama, sweetheart, why do you want to get everybody all worried and upset this way? Don’t you know we love you?” And Caleb sat down on the sofa. I didn’t look at him but I knew he’d leaned back and pushed his hat to the back of his head.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with me, Leo,” she said, “except age and weariness. But I sure have missed seeing you. Now, what have you been doing with yourself?”

I had to say it. I hoped she would understand me. My father stood behind me, and Caleb was watching. I said, “Mama, I’m doing a play.” I watched her. “A very good play, Mama, I think I’m going to be very good and make all of you very proud of me.” I said, “Mama, I’ve been rehearsing all day, every day, from ten in the morning until ten at night, and then I work all night in this barbecue joint where I cook, you know, and serve the people, and that’s why I haven’t been to see you.” I watched her. She didn’t say anything for awhile. She smiled at me. It was a very secret smile, it was not meant for the other two men in the room at all, and I knew it. She said, “Leo, how old are you now?”

I said, “Mama, I’m just about to be twenty-six. Now, you ought to know that,” and, after a moment, she laughed and I laughed and my father laughed.

“Twenty-six,” she said, and looked at my father a moment and then looked out of the window, “it seems like a dream.” I watched her face, which was bonier now, and very very handsome. Her eyes looked over the streets, as though she was waiting for someone. She looked at me again, and laughed like a girl. “When can I come and see this play, Leo?”

“We open—the play opens”—I picked up my book from the floor and took out my rain-soaked notes, looking for the handbill advertising the play, I was suddenly very proud of it, my name was on it—I found it, it wasn’t too ruined, and handed it to her—“you see, Mama? We open in a week.”

She looked at it and my father came to read it over her shoulder. She giggled again, and handed it to him. “Read it,” she said, “your eyes is better than mine. Read it out loud, so Caleb can hear it.”

And so my father read, The Clay House Players present Miss Bunny Nash—“why I’ve heard of her,” cried my mother, “you working with her?”—in The Corn Is Green, a play by Emlyn Williams, directed by Konstantine Rafaeleto, with so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and co-starring, all by itself at the bottom, in block print, Leo Proudhammer, as Morgan Evans. My father and my mother looked at me. “You see, Mama?” I said. “You see?”

My father folded the handbill. “You reckon we can make it down there, old lady?” He was smiling. I hadn’t considered how much he loved my mother.

She sucked her teeth. “Make it down there? You know we going to make it down there.” And she looked out of the window again.

“How about you, Caleb?” our father asked. “It is your brother. I don’t think God can find no fault with that.”

And I realized at that moment, though my father would never say it to me, and certainly never to Caleb, that he was very disappointed in my brother. And I knew my brother knew it. Caleb and I stared at each other. Caleb pushed his hat further back on his head, and he said, “Daddy, you know I don’t go to the theater, and that’s all there is to that. I’ve made my choice and Leo’s made his choice. Now, I’ve got to be getting on home.” And he stood up. My mother was watching him.

“But you haven’t got to go right yet,” she said.

He smiled. “Mama, I got to go to work in the morning and I got to preach tomorrow night. Now, you know I need a little rest. You need a little rest, too.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, and shifted under the blankets, away from him, “I’m just tired. Ain’t nothing wrong with me.”

He watched her. Then he grinned, looking like Caleb again—just for a moment. He put his hat on his head properly. “Well, all right. But I got to go. See you tomorrow.” He patted me on the head. “Good-night, little brother. I’ll always love you and I’ll always pray for you.”

I said, “Good-night, Caleb.”

And he left. I stayed and had a couple of drinks with my father and mother. We had a rather nice time, but I didn’t stay too long because I could see that my mother really needed rest, and my father had to get up to go to work in the morning. My mother held me very close, and kissed me. My father kissed me, too. I didn’t go back to the barbecue joint, but went straight home and fell into bed. The alarm clock rang and I ran to the theater.

Konstantine’s experiment, as it was known all over town, was causing something of a stir. People were very curious about it; curious about Bunny Nash, whom no one had seen for ages; curious about me, who had virtually never been seen—and my billing was Connie’s idea; and curious about the future of Konstantine Rafaeleto, who would certainly, any day now, be hauled before The House Un-American Activities Committee. Connie was very calm—as calm as anyone can possibly be as an opening night approaches. We worked. Bunny Nash was also worried, because she might also be called. No one knew what was going to happen, we might indeed be closed before we opened, and so all we could do was work.

The morning of the day which will end in the opening night is a very strange moment. One wakes in a tremendous silence, the judgment morning silence. Something has gone terribly wrong somewhere in the world; one racks one’s brains to remember what it is. And one doesn’t wish to get up, because that will, somehow, compound whatever the disaster has been. One lies in bed very straight and still, and listens with great attention to the morning. I listened to my neighbors. They were apparently playing cards. Someone was joking with someone at the street door. I had a terrible melancholy hard-on, and I wanted to pee or jerk myself off, but didn’t have the energy for either. I didn’t want to get up. It was in this bed I had slept with Sally, and then with Steve. And this room had witnessed both departures. I looked at the clock. It was just nine. What was I to do until this evening? This evening: and I immediately ran to the bathroom. I was cold and shaking and sweating. But I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever; and what was I to do until this evening? All my other days, my whole life, it now seemed, had been spent at the theater. But there was no rehearsal today. Tonight was it.

And what I did that day, I really don’t remember. It took me a long time to get dressed and get out of the house. Once out of the house, I had no idea what to do. I walked into a cafeteria and got breakfast. I remember carrying the tray to the table, looking at the breakfast, swallowing the milk, and walking away. The man sitting opposite me looked at me as though I were completely mad, and I certainly couldn’t blame him. Recklessly—I rather felt that this was the very last day of my life—I took a cab to Broadway; to the theatrical section of New York, that is, not having the courage to go downtown to my own theater. I wandered around these sordid and frightening and beautiful streets—Little Leo. On the great white way—and made the very great mistake of walking into a movie called My Son, John. I have no idea why I did it, having never had any respect for Leo McCarey’s work, and having always been totally impervious to the charms of Miss Helen Hayes. She’s always impressed me as an aging, not very bright drama student, perfectly suited for Christmas pageants, preferably someplace in Vancouver. She always makes me think of football rallies and there was indeed a great deal of football talk, as I remember, in this exceedingly shameful and depressing film. It was just about the worst thing I could possibly have done that day. That movie made me ashamed of human beings and ashamed of my profession and I thought, My God, if this is what is supposed to happen to me, I swear I’ll go back to the post office. It was more shameful than anything I’d ever had to do with my fucking menial tray. I walked out into the streets again, to find a cop beating up some poor man in the gutter. My Son, John. I walked into a bar, wondered if I dared have a drink, ordered a beer, sat there. It was only five in the afternoon. On any other day, it would have been seven. I sipped my beer and three or four hours later, it was only five-fifteen. I thought of going uptown to escort my father and mother to the theater, but I knew that such an effort was thoroughly beyond me. In fact, there was absolutely nothing I could do except stew on the back of the stove until showtime. Our curtain was at eight, and I was due at the theater at seven. I left the bar, and wandered around. I wished I’d had a friend to talk to, or some refuge where I could have hidden. It was awful to walk around these streets this way, all dressed up, and carrying my terrible secret, which was that I wasn’t really Leo Proudhammer any more and hadn’t yet become Morgan Evans.

At the stroke of seven, I arrived at the theater, over which was hanging the desperate chill of death. Konstantine had been called before the guardians of the American safety, and would be going to Washington in a few days. He told me this very quietly when he came into the dressing room. And it must be admitted that not even this dragged me any closer to the real world. I heard him, and I cared, but I heard him and cared from very far away.

Presently, we all stood on the tiny stage, the stage manager with his watch in his hand. There was an incredible silence. Bunny, holding on to Miss Moffat’s bicycle, looked at me and smiled, very faintly. The Negro girl, Geneva Smart, who was playing Bessie, and who was very good, swallowed hard, once, and then stood perfectly still. The stage manager said, “Places, please,” and we stood there. Then he gave me my cue for “Down in the Dungeon,” and I began to sing in this silence, feeling, from beyond the curtain, something sweeping up to me, life sweeping up to me, and carrying me and my song. I finished my song, and got into the wings, and the stage manager, after a moment, said, “Curtain,” and the curtain rose, and we were on. That is, they were. Morgan doesn’t appear until the second scene.

I watched, and it seemed to be going well. There seemed to be a lot of Negroes in the audience, you can always tell if you know the way Negroes react and the kind of things they react to. They laughed a lot at Miss Moffat, and they liked her, and they applauded when she said “this part of the world was a disgrace to a Christian country.” Bunny was very energetic and very good and the atmosphere was very alive and electric. They were carrying the play, the audience, I mean, and that’s what you always pray will happen. Then, the scene was over, and I and the four other “nigger boys” took our places and started to hum. The curtain rose.

I’ve done lots of plays since then, some of them far more successful, but I’ll never forget this one. There is nothing like the first cold plunge, and any survivor will tell you that. When the curtain came up, I knew I was going to vomit, right here, in front of all these people. The moment I delivered my first line, “No, miss,” I knew I was going to be all right. And you can tell, from the other actors and from the audience. Bunny and I were working very well together, and some very, very nice things happened in our scene at the end of the first act, when she has read Morgan’s composition and invests him with a sense of his potential which he has never had before. I played that scene for all that was in it, for all that was in me, and for all the colored kids in the audience—who held their breath, they really did, it was the unmistakable silence in which you and the audience re-create each other—and for the vanished Little Leo, and for my mother and father, and all the hope and pain that were in me. For the very first time, the very first time, I realized the fabulous extent of my luck: I could, I could, if I kept the faith, transform my sorrow into life and joy. I might live in pain and sorrow forever, but, if I kept the faith, I would never be useless. If I kept the faith, I could do for others what I felt had not been done for me, and if I could do that, if I could give, I could live. Our scene ends the first act, and the curtain came down, and they gave us a mighty hand. We rose with the tide generated in the hall by Konstantine’s experiment. Our last scene came, and I think we played it well. I know we played it well. The curtain fell, and we heard this tremendous roar from the people. Konstantine stood in the wings, with this smile on his face. He grabbed me and kissed me and pushed me away and the curtain rose for our curtain calls. We went out in the order which we’d been assigned, and I came out next to last. There is no baptism like the baptism in the theater, when you stand up there and bow your head and the roar of the people rolls over you. There is no moment like that, it is both beautiful and frightening—they might be screaming for your blood, and if they were, they would not sound very different. I bowed and bowed, while the colored kids in the audience stamped and cheered, and I turned to bring on Bunny. She came and we stood there together and bowed and the curtain fell and I went off, leaving Bunny there alone. The curtain rose and fell, and Bunny smiled and bowed. But Bunny was a pro, and a very nice woman, and she reached out her hand for me again and Connie put his knee in my behind and pushed me on. They were standing and cheering. Bunny and I bowed together and the curtain fell and Bunny went off and then the curtain rose again and I was out there by myself. And all the years of terror and trembling, all the nearly twenty-six years, were worth it at that moment. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t seen my mother and father in the audience. I had been playing for them, oh, how I wanted them to be proud of me! But I hadn’t thought about them at all. For awhile, it didn’t seem that the audience would ever let us go, the curtain rose and fell, and, I don’t know why, a certain fear began knocking in my heart. I tried to see if they were there. But they were not there. I would have known. Red was there, with his wife. I saw them standing and clapping.

The curtain fell at last, for the last time, and then we were in our dressing rooms, and the mob came pouring in. The colored kids came in, and I signed autographs for almost the first time in my life. Variety was there, and they said I’d been tremendous, and looked at me with wonder; that wonder with which one, eventually, must learn to live; it is the way the world will always look at you. Red came in, and his face was like a fountain. He kissed me, not saying anything, and his wife, laughing and crying, kissed me. It certainly looked like one more of our boys had made it. Life magazine was there, and they made an appointment to interview me. A star is born, they said—wow! The East Side Explosion, they called me. Hilda was there. I hadn’t seen her for years. Sally was there, with the man who was going to be her husband. I had a telegram from Steve—how in the world had he known? And a telegram from Barbara, who was on the West Coast, making her second movie, the movie which won for her, in the supporting actress category, her first Academy Award. Oh, yeah. We kids were going to make it, all right. But Caleb wasn’t there, and my mother and my father weren’t there.

By now, it was midnight, too late to go uptown and too late to call The New Dispensation House of God. So, I tried to throw everything out of my mind, and walked with Konstantine to the cast party, which was being held in Chinatown. I was exhausted, with the particular, peculiar, and exhilarating exhaustion only a performer feels. I knew I had been good. I had been very good. I could feel it in Konstantine’s very quiet pride. I had not betrayed him. I had not betrayed the play. I had not betrayed myself and all those people whom I would always love, and I had not betrayed all that history which held me like a lover and which would hold me forever like that.

I hardly remember the party, except that Connie was grave and triumphant, and I got a little drunk and tried to make love to Geneva Smart, who had the good sense to laugh at me, but very nicely. We got some of the reviews, and the reviews were extraordinary. They said very nice things about me, “incandescent,” “unforgettable,” “an actor not merely seasoned, but highly spiced”—shit like that. A lot of it came out of pure embarrassment that Konstantine was being called to testify. But we certainly looked like a hit, and it was clear that we were going to run for longer than seven performances. As it turned out, we ran for over eight months, and were the talk of the town and I was sometimes the toast of the town. I did some television. I was signed for a movie. I began doing night clubs and records. When The Corn Is Green closed, I did my first movie and then I did a play in England and came home to do a revival of Cabin in the Sky on Broadway, which was a tremendous personal triumph for me. I had made it. I looked back and I wondered how I got over.

But I got a telegram the morning after the opening of The Corn Is Green, telling me that my mother had been carried to the hospital. While she was dressing to come to my opening, she had a stroke and fell into a coma from which she never recovered consciousness, and she died two days later. Caleb spoke at her funeral, and the choir sang “Get Away, Jordan.” My father just sat there. It was the first time I had seen him in a church. And I must say for the old man, in spite of the fact that he was so lonely now, and in spite of the way Caleb went on at him about his soul, he never relented. No, he went his own way, and sometimes stood on the avenue, listening to black nationalist speeches, and he was a faithful client of the black nationalist bookstore. After I met Christopher, he and Christopher would spend hours together, reconstructing the black empires of the past, and plotting the demolition of the white empires of the present. It was good for my father, who adored Christopher, and was good for Christopher to find someone that old whom he could trust and admire. I sang, alone, for my mother, a song she had sometimes sung to me: “Mary, Mary, what you going to name that pretty little baby?”

Pete left very soon after dinner, and Barbara and I sat before the fire, as calm, I thought suddenly, almost, as two old people.

They had sent the telegram and the money order to Christopher while I had been soaking in the tub.

“How do you feel?” Barbara asked.

“Fine. Sleepy. Like a cat.”

“You look like one. Curled up there like that. A tired tomcat, finally come home.”

“But not a spayed tomcat?”

She laughed. “Oh, no. I know that’s been your fear, but it’s never been your problem.”

“But I’ve been a problem for you very often, Barbara, haven’t I?”

“I don’t doubt that you will be again, Leo,” she said, and smiled. “I’ve also been a problem for you. But we’ve come through so far, and we will again.” She paused. “It isn’t, our story isn’t—isn’t a story anyone would have chosen to live. But, I had to ask myself, Barbara, would you change it if you could? Would you? And I had to realize that I wouldn’t. So—that’s all there is to that.” She rose, and kissed me on the forehead. “And now, my dear invalid, I must put you to bed. You must sleep until you wake up—that is, no one’s to wake you. I have a date for lunch, but Pete will be here in the morning, and the maid will be here, too.”

“All right, princess,” and I rose. I had to say it: “I thought you might be a little afraid of seeing Christopher again.”

Barbara laughed. “Good Lord, no. How could I be afraid of anything, Leo, after all those years of storm and strife with you?” Her face changed. “What happened between Christopher and me happened because of you. We both know that. You haven’t got to know it. And we both love you. We both know that. Now, go to bed.”

We kissed each other—like brother and sister. “Good-night,” I said.

“Good-night, my dear.”

I turned into my bedroom and undressed and got into bed. Barbara was right; I was very tired. I was very peaceful, after our long storm. Barbara had done something very hard and rare. As though she had known I would need it, and would always need it, she had arranged her life so that my place in it could never be jeopardized. This room in which I lay had cost her more in the way of refusals than she would ever tell; perhaps it had given her more in the way of affirmation than anyone would ever know. The incestuous brother and sister would now never have any children. But perhaps we had given one child to the world, or helped to open the world to one child. Luckier lovers hadn’t managed so much. The sunlight filled the room. I heard voices, muted, laughing, in the big, wide room. My watch said ten to one. I went to my window and opened the blinds. It was a very bright day, and I suddenly wanted to be out in it. I went into my bathroom and stripped naked and stepped under the shower. For some reason, I thought of Paradise Alley. I laughed to myself, and I sang. I put on a sweater and slacks and walked out into the big room. Pete was sitting on the sofa, laughing, there was a suitcase near him, and Christopher, long and black, and dressed in a black suit, was talking on the phone.

“Look who’s here!” Pete said.

Christopher looked over at me. “He just this minute stepped out of his room,” said Christopher. “Yeah, just this minute. He looks all right, I can tell ain’t nothing wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with him before, you people are too much, I swear, got me all the way out here on a bullshit tip, you know how many affairs I had to cancel to make it out here? Shame on you! Shame, yeah, that’s what I said. What?” He laughed. “Well, you want me to spell all that to you when I see you? No, you don’t want me to do that, no, you don’t. Yeah. Pete’s got the address. We’ll be there. What? Of course, he’ll feel like coming, he ain’t got nothing else to do, don’t you know I’m here now? I’m his doctor, don’t know why you didn’t send for me before. Yeah, bye-bye, you have a nice lunch, you hear, and don’t you let them people jive you, you too sweet and pretty. Now, why you want to say a thing like that? You hurting my feelings, Barbara. Yeah. Old brother Christopher is on the scene now, baby, bye-bye, see you later.” He put down the receiver and smiled, and held out his arms. “Come here, Big Daddy. Look like you just can’t do right. I ain’t going to let you out of my sight no more. The minute you out of my sight, you got to go and fall flat on your face in front of umpteen million people. Shame on you!” He grabbed me and hugged me and kissed me. “I’m glad to see you, baby. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said. “How’ve you been?” And then, “You look all right.”

“I’ve been fine. The people is pretty sick, but I’m all right.”

“Black Christopher!” Pete said.

“Yeah, baby,” Christopher said, “black—just like Kenyatta, and all them folks.” He laughed again. “You better believe I’m black.”

“It’s hard to doubt it,” I said, “when you put it with such force.”

Christopher threw back his head, and laughed. “If anything was ever the matter with him, he’s all right now. I know your little digs. You mean, if I didn’t tell you I was black, you wouldn’t know I was black. I heard you. All right.”

It was good to see him, striding up and down this room, with his face so bright.

“What do you want, big man?” Pete asked me. “You want some coffee? You ready for lunch?”

“He shouldn’t be drinking coffee,” said Christopher, “that’s bad for his heart. Let him have some orange juice, or something.”

“I thought maybe he wanted something hot,” Pete said humbly.

“Well, let him drink some cocoa. Or some Ovaltine. He ain’t supposed to be drinking no coffee or tea.”

“I think,” said Pete to me, “that you may have a problem.”

“Couldn’t we compromise on coffee, with a lot of milk in it?” I asked.

“Now, it’s your heart,” said Christopher. Then he looked out of the window, and smiled and blushed. “Just make sure you put a lot of milk in it—hell, I’ll do it, you won’t do it right,” and he suddenly walked out of the room.

“When did he get here?” I asked.

“A couple of hours ago. He must have packed his bags the minute he got the telegram. I told you he’d have been here already, if he’d had any bread.”

“It’s nice of him to come,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Pete, “especially considering how many other places he has to go.”

“All right, Pete,” I said.

“I mean, just don’t go through your usual bullshit routine of thinking it was a great sacrifice or anything. It’s no sacrifice for a kid to come to San Francisco for the first time to see some people who love him. If you’d get such details as that through your mind, you wouldn’t be such a kid yourself, and Barbara and all of us would have a much easier time.”

“Do I give you all such a hard time?”

Pete laughed. “Now, if I say yes, what are you going to do? Leap out of this window, or go off and have another heart attack?” He laughed again. Then, he sobered. “You give us a hard time, man, when we watch you giving yourself a hard time. That’s all. You can’t hide nothing from us, and you damn sure don’t have anything to prove to us. We know you’re Leo Proudhammer. You don’t know it.”

I watched him. He wasn’t smiling now. I sat down on the sofa. Christopher came clattering in, carrying a bottle of milk in one hand, and balancing a cup and saucer in the other. He set them both down on the table before me, and said, standing over me, “Now, let’s see what you think is a whole lot of milk—I put in two sugars, but I didn’t stir.”

Since the coffee cup held a little less than half a cup of coffee, my only possible option was to fill the cup. I stirred it a little, and I tasted it. Christopher watched me. “Very good,” I said gravely, “thank you.”

He watched me with his deep and wry distrust. He sat down on the sofa, and put one hand on my knee. “What’s happening in this town?” he asked Pete.

“Oh,” said Pete, “a whole lot’s happening in this town, from broads to pot to civil rights to urban renewal. Which scene do you want to dig first?”

“How do you tell them apart?” I asked.

Christopher punched my knee. “The broads and the pot smokers tend to talk less,” he said, “now, you’d remember that if you hadn’t been so sick.” He turned back to Pete. “Well, we can’t have Big Daddy here making them scenes, so you can just kind of cool me and I’ll make it on my own.”

“This town’s not exactly as nice as it looks,” I said.

“You trying to scare me?” Christopher asked. “You tried that once before. Remember?” He smiled and forced me to smile. “I thought you’d learned your lesson. Ah. I might have to remind you again, bye and bye.”

I watched him as he talked to Pete, watched his big teeth, his big hands, listened to his laugh. He sounded so free; a way I’d never sounded: a way I’d never been.

A double-minded man is never much of a match for a single-minded boy. When Christopher first met me, he decided that he needed me: that was that. He needed human arms to hold him, he could see very well, no matter what I said, that mine were empty, and that was that. If I was afraid of society’s judgment, he was not: “Fuck these sick people. I do what I like.” Or, laughing: “You afraid that people will call you a dirty old man? Well, you are a dirty old man. You’re my dirty old man, right? I dig dirty old men.” And, in another tone: “I just do not want to be out here, all hungry and cold and alone. Let’s not sweat it, baby. Love me. Let’s just be nice.”

I first met Christopher at a party, briefly, when I had been in rehearsal, and didn’t see him anymore until after the play had opened. When we had settled into our run, his face leaped out at me again, the way a hungry dog in the cellar leaps when you open the door.

We saw each other at another party, very late at night, uptown, where I didn’t live anymore. I very nearly didn’t get there. I was dead, because I had had a class in the morning, then the matinée, then the evening show. Then I had drinks in my dressing room with my agent, who wanted to talk to me about a guest appearance on a pretty lousy TV serial—he said that it might be a breakthrough. I finally fell into a taxi and realized, once it began to move, that I had absolutely no money on me. I asked the driver to take me to a bar near my apartment, where I could cash a check. Then the idea, tired as I was, and so close to home, of traveling to the party, seemed intolerable. I went into the bar, cashed the check, paid the driver, went back into the bar for a drink. The bar was absolutely hideous with gray, lightless people. I went into the phone booth to call up my host and ask him not to expect me.

But this was a friend from the evil days. He had been nice to me, and he was a Negro, and his life wasn’t going too well. I sighed to myself as I heard the tone of his voice: “We’re all waiting for you. Of course, it’s not too late, are you kidding? There are people here who want to meet you, they’ve been waiting all night. Get in a cab and come on, you can pass out here.”

Christopher told me later that he had been about to leave when the phone rang; and it was me; and he waited. They all waited but from the moment I walked into the room I had eyes only for him. I was introduced to the people, who looked at me with the kind of wary respect with which I imagine they would greet a baboon or a lion who was free of his cage for the evening. Some people had seen me in the play, and they congratulated me on my performance. I was flattered, as always, chilled, as always. Someone remembered the small part I had done in that movie more than ten years before. I had been very young then, but this caused me to remember that I was not young anymore. And I was watching the boy, who was watching me.

People who achieve any eminence whatever are driven to do so; and there is always something terribly vulnerable about such people. They very soon discover that their eminence makes of them an incitement and a target—it does not cause them to be loved. They are trapped on their hill. They cannot come down. They cannot bear obscurity as some organisms cannot bear light—death is what awaits them when they come down from the hill.

“I met you before,” said Christopher, “do you remember?” The hand with which he grasped my own was very large and dry; something in the nervous alertness of his stance, and the wary hopefulness in his eyes made him seem poised to run. The candor of his panic made me smile. I envied him.

“Of course,” I said, “how’ve you been?”

“Oh,” he said, with great cheerfulness, “I’ve been all right.” He had a slight Southern accent. I had not noticed it before. “Oh! Congratulations. Your play’s a big hit. Everybody’s talking about it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It looks like we may run for awhile.” I wanted to ask him if he had seen the play, or if he wanted to, but for some reason I didn’t.

“So,” he said, after a moment, “I guess that’s all you’ve been doing? Making it to the theater, and making it on home?”

“And crashing an occasional party.”

He laughed, but looked at me quickly, speculatively. “You must be tired. Don’t you have anybody to fight off the world for you, to protect you from jokers like this”—he indicated the room—“and jokers like me—don’t you have anybody to make sure you come home nights?”

“No,” I said sorrowfully, “not a soul,” and we both laughed again.

“Shame on you. You shouldn’t be wandering around alone, you’re too valuable—I’m not joking, I mean it. This town is full of all kinds of sick people.”

“Well, I think I’ve met most of them by now. So I’m safe.”

“If you think that,” he said, with a peculiarly aggressive distinctness, “you really are crazy.” And then he added, almost as an afterthought, it seemed, and to himself, “You really do need somebody to take care of you—why don’t you hire me as your bodyguard, man? That way, the future of the American theater will be a whole lot brighter.” He said it with a smile, but also with a shrewd, calculating, coquettish look, as though he were saying, That’s right, mother. I’m bucking for the job.

I was still impressed by his candor, but he was beginning to frighten me. We moved to the window. It was a high window, it was a blue-black night, we looked out on the cruel half-moon and the patient stars and fires of Manhattan.

“Look at that,” he said, and put one great hand under my elbow, “look at that. Isn’t that a gas? From so high up, it almost looks like a place where a human being could live.” Then he looked down. He dropped my elbow. “But from down there, sweetheart, on that cold cement, you know you could howl and scream forever and not a living soul would hear you.” Then he smiled. “But you don’t know nothing about that, do you? You don’t walk these streets, you just ride through them. You only see cats like me through glass.”

“I come from the streets. It’s true I ride now, but I used to walk. Don’t pull rank on me. I might outrank you.”

“Okay. Don’t get mad. I was only putting you on. I can’t help it. I always do that if I like somebody.”

I knew what he was saying, I heard him; it was as though he had just smuggled a note to me; and he knew that I would not read it until I was alone. But he also knew that I would certainly read it. He did not look at me now, but stared out of the window. And, to bring us back from where we were, and also to carry us further, he now said (while I began to be aware that the rest of the party was watching us, and said to myself, I’ve got to circulate around this room once, and get out of here): “Someone once told me that if it wasn’t for the lights from the earth reflected in the sky, nobody would ever be able to look into the sky. It would be too frightening. I’ve often thought about that. I wonder if it’s true.”

“I guess we’ll never know,” I said. “When all the lights on earth go out, we’ll be gone, too.”

“Well,” he said, and laughed, “I certainly hope so. I sure don’t want to be left alone down here, in the dark.”

There was a note deliberately plaintive in that last statement, and I did not want to pursue it. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Well, actually, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up in New York—I grew up in Harlem.”

“Where in Harlem? That’s my hometown.”

But I knew that his Harlem was not my Harlem.

“We used to live on 134th Street.”

“We lived on 136th.”

“Well, shit, you’re one of the neighborhood boys, then—I wonder if I ever saw you—”

“No. You would have been a snot-nosed kid then.”

“Yeah,” he said, and looked at me quizzically, “I guess so. We wouldn’t have had an awful lot in common—I was always in trouble.” He gestured toward the room. “That’s how I met Frank.” Frank was our host, a social worker. “He knew my probation officer. He helped me out a lot.”

I did not want to ask him why he had been on probation, both because I did not want to know and because I was certain that one day he would tell me.

“If you were born in New Jersey,” I said, “and you were brought up in New York, how did you get that Southern accent?”

He grinned. “I haven’t got a real accent.” He looked at me. “I went to reform school in the South. And then, later on, I used to go with this broad from Miami and I sort of put it on, you know, for her—she went for it—and I guess it kind of stuck.” He seemed a little embarrassed. He tapped on the glass with one astonishingly manicured fingernail. “Kid stuff,” he said.

I laughed. “Maybe you should have been an actor.”

“Not me,” he said. “I don’t have the nerves. Or the patience.” He paused. “I’m fascinated,” he said, “by space.”

He was referring to those planets which were simply points of light to our eyes. They contained possibilities for him; and perhaps they really did, why not? The planet on which we stood was not extremely promising. But it had proved to be enough, and more than enough, for me.

“The only space which means anything to me,” I said, “is the space between myself and other people. May it never diminish.”

He looked as though I had hurt his feelings. “Ah,” he said, with a really disarming and disconcerting gentleness, “you don’t mean that.” And when he said this everything about him seemed to shine, as though a light had been turned on from within. “Don’t say things like that, it doesn’t become you—and, anyway, I’ll never believe you.”

I was shocked—bewildered—by his vehement sincerity, and discomfited because he had caught me in a lie. Of course I had not meant what I had said; I had only, and far more cunningly than he would have been able to do for himself, wrenched his full attention around to me again. I had been putting him on.

“I guess what I mean,” I said, then, guilty about having upstaged him and now, helplessly, feeding him his lines, “is the space between myself and most people.”

He was a quick study. “But not all of them?” And, after a moment, with a smile, “Not all of us?”

“No”—losing ground now every instant, and knowing it—“by no means all. I know some very nice people.”

“I’ll bet you do,” he said, with tranquillity, “you’re a very nice person yourself.”

I felt a terrible fatigue. I watched his profile. He was looking with wonder into the sky. I watched his hands, pressed flat against the windowpane, like the hands of the orphan in the fable, the orphan trapped outside of warmth and light and love, hoping to be received, to be rescued from the night. His mouth was a little open, like the mouths of waifs and orphans. Not so very long ago, I had stood as he now stood and had hoped as he now hoped. What had my hope come to? It had led me to this moment, here. I heard his cry because it was my own. He did not know this—did not know, that is, that his cry was my own—but he knew that his cry had been heard. Therefore, he hummed a little and tapped with his fingers on the glass. He sensed that he had found the path that led home. But I was afraid. What, after all, could I do with him? except, perhaps, set him on his path, the path that would lead him away from me. My honor, my intelligence, and my experience all informed me that freedom, not happiness, was the precious stone. One could not cling to happiness—happiness, simply, submitted to no clinging; and it is criminal to use the unspoken and unrealized needs of another as a means of escorting him, elaborately, into the prison of those needs, and sealing him there. But, on the other hand, the stone I hoped to offer was, nevertheless, a stone: its edges drew blood, and its weight was tremendous.

Still, there he was, before me. And my fatigue increased.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

“I know you do,” said Christopher. “I wish you didn’t. We’re all going to have to go soon. But I know you must be tired.”

“I guess I better circulate just a little bit, anyway,” I said, “then I’ll split.”

“I’ve kind of monopolized you, haven’t I? Well, crazy. I’m not going to say I’m sorry because I’m not. I’m a real selfish monster.”

“I outrank you again,” I said. “I’m the monster here.”

“You? You’ll have to prove it to me.”

“You’ll just have to take my word,” I said.

And I moved a little away from him. He followed me. We stood at the bar together, and he filled my drink. “I was born in the streets, baby, and I take nobody’s word for nothing.” He touched my glass. “You know I’m not going to take your word.”

“You’d better.”

“You trying to scare me?”

“Shit. I’m probably trying to make you.”

He threw back his head, and laughed. “Tremendous!” Then, “Do you like me? I like you, I think you’re crazy.”

Something rose in me, stronger than intelligence or experience. “Sure, I like you. I like you very much. You know that.”

He gave me a smile of pure pleasure, and it cannot be denied that such a smile is rare. He touched my glass again. “Tremendous,” he said. “We’re going to get on just fine.” He looked very grave. Then, irrepressibly, like a very small child, “You know something I was going to tell you before, but didn’t have the nerve? You got your name written all over me. That’s right. I got my name on you, too.”

I smiled. “Okay. We’ll see.”

We walked back to the window. Everyone was leaving us alone, and yet everyone was watching us, too, waiting for their opportunity. An English girl sat on the sofa, talking to our host, but her eyes were on Christopher and me. Two drama students, both male, were loudly disputing some point about the Stanislavski method, concerning which, as far as I could tell, neither of them knew anything. They hoped that I would overhear and genially interrupt and even, perhaps, find one of them attractive. Not that either of them was “gay”—to use the incomprehensible vernacular; anybody mad enough to make such a suggestion would have been beaten within an inch of his life. But they were on the make, and what else, after all, did they have to give? Also, they were lonely.

“When can I come to see your play?” Christopher now murmured. “I don’t think I’ve seen more than two plays in my whole life, and I didn’t like them much. But I’d like to see you—”

“Anytime,” I said. The English girl had screwed up her courage, and was approaching. One of the drama students had disappeared into the john. His friend, not knowing how to conquer the field, simply waited.

It was getting late.

“Well,” said Christopher, with a curious, muffled urgency in his voice that I was to come to know, “as soon as possible, don’t give me this anytime crap. Is it hard to get the tickets?—I mean, you know, I can scrape up the bread to pay.”

“Don’t be silly.” We agreed on a night. “You can pick me up in my dressing room after the show and we can have a few drinks, maybe something to eat. Do you want to bring anyone with you?”

“No,” he said.

During all these years, Barbara and I had seen each other with many people, always slightly envying and slightly pitying whoever was with the other. We had achieved our difficult equanimity, were reconciled to the way our cookie had crumbled, and very often, indeed, alone or together, made of these crumbs a rare and delicate feast. One can live a long time without living: and we were both to discover this now.

Pacing my dressing room some evenings before the curtain rose, glimpsing myself in the mirror, listening to the sounds, the voices, the life in the corridors, I found myself resisting, and wrestling with the fact that something had happened to me. I say something because I was reluctant indeed to use the word love—the word splashed over me like cold water, and made me catch my breath and shake myself. It certainly had not occurred to me that love would have had the effrontery to arrive in such a black, unwieldy, and dangerous package. Anyway, love was not exactly what it felt like. I don’t know what it felt like. When something does happen to a person, it is somewhat chilling to observe how the memory, so authoritative till then, cops out, retreats, stammers out only the most garbled and treacherous of messages. One couldn’t act on them, even if one was able to make any sense of them. What floated up to me, like the sounds of some infernal party on the dark ground floor of some dark house, were echoes, images, moments—memories? But they were too swift for memories. They came unreadably into the light, and vanished. Was it memory, or was it a dream? I could not know. My life was whispering something to me. Was it my life, or was it the whirring of the wings of madness? I could not know. I could not even take refuge in any fear of what the world might call me. The world had already called me too many names, and while I knew that my indifference was not as great or as deep as Christopher’s—was not the same quantity at all—the world would never be able to intimidate me in that way anymore. The world was not my problem. I was my problem. Something had happened to me. I was forced to suspect with what relentless cunning I had always protected myself against this. I was forced to suspect in myself some mighty prohibition, of which sex might be the symbol, but wasn’t the key.

Barbara knew something had happened to me, knew it at once, knew it before she met Christopher. I did not tell her, but I knew she knew. I did not tell her because I was ashamed—not of my liaison; but, in beginning to thaw, I had to see how I had frozen myself; and, in freezing myself, had frozen Barbara. If I had merely been having an affair, I might have told her, without even thinking about it; for there would really have been nothing to tell. But now—oh, yes, something had happened to me, and now, for the very first time, really, Barbara was threatened, and Barbara knew it.

Christopher sometimes picked me up after the show. Sometimes he met me at home, sometimes he arrived the next day, sometimes he’d merely telephone. I didn’t know much about his life then, except that most of it took place in the streets, or in lofts, or in basements, or on rooftops. I did not want to know. I gathered that I had an interesting reputation in the streets. Some people considered me a fagot, for some I was a hero, for some I was a whore, for some I was a devious cocks-man, for some I was an Uncle Tom. My eminence hurt me sometimes, but I tried not to think too much about it. I certainly couldn’t blame the people if they didn’t trust me—why should they? They had no way of knowing whether or not I gave a shit about them, and all I could do to make them feel it—maybe—was to do what I could, and do my work.

Every once in a while, some of Christopher’s friends came by the house. All of his friends were black. Sometimes, some of my friends might be there, and many of my friends were white. I knew that this made me suspect, but, then, everything about me was suspect, and always had been, and it was late in the day to start nursing an ulcer about it. I liked Christopher’s friends very much, young, bright, eager, raggedy-assed, taking no shit from anyone; I had the feeling, hard to explain, that they found me very strange indeed; I had the feeling that the very strangest thing about me, for them, was that they rather liked me, too, but hadn’t expected to and didn’t trust the feeling. They were younger than they thought they were, much: they might arrive in their Castro berets, their Castro beards, their parkas and hoods and sweaters and thin jeans or corduroys and heavy boots, and with their beautiful black kinky hair spinning around their heads like fire and prophecy—this hair putting me in mind, somehow, of the extravagant beauty of rain-forests—and with Camus or Fanon or Mao on their person, or with Muhammad Speaks under their arms, but they were goggle-eyed just the same, and so far from being incapable of trusting, they had perpetually to fight the impulse to trust, overwhelmed, like all kids, by meeting a Great Man, and awkward like all kids, and, however they tried to dissemble it, shy. They were proud of Christopher for knowing me, and delighted by me for knowing Christopher. Christopher lived partly with me, partly with a sister I had yet to meet. He had his own key, he had the run of the house. I admit that, at first, I was a little frightened, but I don’t really, anyway, have very much to steal, and I’ve just never managed to get very hung-up on possessions. I tend not to give a shit. This is a trait in me of which Christopher entirely disapproved, and I very shortly realized that with Christopher in the house, every tie, tie-clasp, cufflink, spoon, every plaque, trophy, ring, shoe, shirt, sock, watch, coat, was as safe as, if not indeed considerably safer than, the gold rumored to be in Fort Knox.

I usually left Christopher and his friends alone. I didn’t want to bug them. They had to be a part of my concern, for I was their elder; but there was no real reason for me to be a part of their concern. I’d go to my study, and read, or do nothing, look out of my window at the Manhattan streets, wonder what had happened to me, and begin—slowly, slowly—to be glad that it had happened. What I was going to do with it, or what it was going to do to me, I didn’t know. I was happy watching Christopher’s bright, black face, happy to know that I had helped to make it so bright. He felt safe, he had a friend, he was valued. He could say what he liked, he could be what he was. It was, I must say, very beautiful, and it made up for a lot: Christopher, lying flat on his belly, reading all the long afternoon, Christopher keeping me awake all night with his sweeping statements and halting questions, Christopher ruthlessly dominating his friends, instructing them in everything from terrorism to sex, or Christopher and his friends, boys and girls, dancing to the hi-fi set. They were teaching me a great deal; made me wonder where I’d been so long; made me wonder what it would have been like to have had children. I often eavesdropped on their funny, earnest, quite terrifying conversations. They knew that they were slated for slaughter, at the hands of their countrymen, willfully. Beneath everything they said lay the question of how to prevent or outwit or face that day. “We are not going to walk to the gas ovens,” Christopher said, “and we are not going to march to the concentration camps. We have to make the mothers know that.”

I suppose that if their nominal representatives in Washington, that virtuous band of men, could have heard them—those brave descendants of cowboys, robbers, rapists, pirates, and whores—everyone in the barbed-wire business would have made a tremendous killing. I liked them. If they had ever been represented, loved, by the people who had kidnapped and used them, they would not have had to spend so much of their youth evolving dubious strategies for self-defense. When the shit hit the fan, I wanted to be at the wire with them—not, being black like them, that I flattered myself about having any choice.

Barbara met Christopher one night in my dressing room. I was a little nervous about the encounter; but it was brief, because Barbara had a date. She looked quite marvelous that evening, and I could see that Christopher was very taken with her. Christopher was sitting in a corner. I had just finished dressing, and we were about to leave the theater. Christopher and I were merely going to grab a bite at Downey’s, and then go home. “Why don’t you grab a bite with us?”

“Thank you. I’d like to, but I can’t. I have a family night. My mother and father and brother and sister-in-law are in town and they’ve always wanted to see ‘21’ and so I’ve reserved a table there, like the dutiful daughter I am. They haven’t yet been to see the play, you’ll note, but they’re coming next week—they didn’t think that they could do it justice tonight, since they’ve only just got in. And you’ve never met my family and so I thought I’d corral you—they’re dying to meet you.” We both laughed. “That’s progress,” she said, “don’t knock it.” She looked at Christopher. “Hello. My name is Barbara King.”

“I know,” said Christopher. He rose, grinning, and held out his hand. “My name is Christopher Hall.”

They shook hands. “Wouldn’t you like to come to ‘21’?”

“I’d love it,” said Christopher, “but it’s up to Big Daddy here.”

He put his hand on my back, briefly, and something flickered between them for a second.

Barbara looked at me with great, mocking amusement. “Well, Big Daddy?”

“We’re not really dressed for it, Barbara. I think it would be too much of a hassle.”

We left the dressing room, and started for the steps. “How long are they going to be in town?”

“Oh, another four or five days, I expect. I don’t know.”

We said good-night to the doorman, and we were in the streets.

“Well—is tomorrow Sunday? We can have brunch at my house tomorrow.”

“Oh. That’s even better. It makes a great story to tell in Kentucky.” We laughed again. But, for the first time in my life, or, at least, the first time that I could remember it happening in this way, I wanted to get rid of her.

“Are you from Kentucky?” Christopher asked.

“Yes, Christopher,” she said, “I’m from Kentucky. But I left it just as soon as I could. All right?”

He smiled, embarrassed. “You’re certainly all right with me,” he said.

“Any friend of Big Daddy’s.” She turned to me. “Do you want me to drop you? Or are you kids going to walk?”

“I think we’ll walk. It’s just a couple of blocks.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow. Good-night, Christopher.”

“Good-night. I’m glad to have met you.”

“Likewise,” she said, and she got into her car, blowing us a kiss. She leaned back, and was whirled away. I felt a little awkward.

“She seems nice,” said Christopher. “Especially for a broad from Kentucky.”

“She is very nice. She’s probably my best friend.”

“You’ve known each other a long time?”

“About half my life, I guess. Since I was younger than you are now.”

He seemed to think about this as we walked, watching the people.

“How come you two never got married?”

“Our families objected,” I said, and I laughed. Then, “No, that’s not the reason. It would just have been a terrible marriage.”

“Because she’s white?”

“Partly. I don’t mean that it’s her fault.”

“Oh,” he said, slyly, “I know you would never mean that.”

“You think we should have got married?”

“No. You too much of a Puritan. That would have fucked up my scene altogether, and a whole lot of other folks, too.” He turned me into Downey’s. “Now, you just remember who you come with, you hear? I don’t want to have to start no shit.”

We stayed out very late that Saturday night, and I had completely forgotten about the brunch. But suddenly I heard Christopher turn and curse and jump out of bed.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Move your ass, Leo, them people going to be here in about a hour.”

Then I remembered. “Oh, Christ.”

“Go get in the shower, I’ll go to the store. Move your ass now, Leo, I swear I don’t know how the fuck you managed all these years without me.” He got into his dungarees, ran into the bathroom, peed, and splashed his face in the sink, hurled himself into an old shirt, got into his sneakers, pulled the covers off me, pulled me to my feet, pushed me into the bathroom, grabbed my wallet, and dashed out the door. Bam. I felt shaky and short of breath, but I was more or less together by the time he got back. He put the groceries away—we had had almost nothing in the house—and went to take his shower and I started straightening up the place. The telephone rang. It was Barbara.

“I thought I ought to warn you that we’re on our way. Are you up to it?”

“Oh, yeah, we’re ready. Thanks to Christopher. He woke me up. I think I have a hangover, but I’m not conscious enough yet to be sure. How many are you again?”

“Mama and Daddy and brother Ken and his wife, and a friend of theirs, and me. I’m afraid it’s not going to be the most exciting brunch you’ve ever had, but what the hell. You know. We pass this way but once, et cetera.”

“Et cetera. Okay. We’re ready. Maybe I can persuade Christopher to do his soft-shoe routine.”

“Please don’t—he’ll be there?”

“Oh, yes. He’ll be here.”

“Here we come then. Later.”

“Ciao.”

Christopher went to the door when the bell rang—he didn’t feel that I should answer my door; to please him, I stood in the living room, waiting. To be meeting Barbara’s family, after all these years, suddenly seemed hilarious. It also seemed sad. I wondered what Barbara was thinking. I wondered what Christopher was thinking. I heard a confused, nervous gaggle of voices, and I walked into the foyer.

I was on.

“Hello. I’m Leo Proudhammer. I guess you’ve met Christopher—Mr. Christopher Hall. Hi, Barbara.” We usually kissed each other, lightly, when we met, but we didn’t this time. “Come on in the house.” I led the way into the living room. Christopher, indescribably, impeccably sardonic, brought up the rear. We seemed, as we entered the living room, to be taking up battle positions. “You must be Mrs. King,” I said, and took her hand in mine, as boyish and open and charming as I knew I could be, and she smiled dazedly up at me from behind her flashing spectacles, dazzled and floundering. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for years,” I said. I turned to the father. “And you, too, sir,” I said, and held out my hand. He took it, briefly, staring at me with a face as blank and as helpless and as treacherous as water. I could not resist dropping into this pond a hard, sharp pebble. “Barbara’s told me so much about you,” I said. “It’s a pity we couldn’t meet sooner.”

“This is my brother. Ken,” said Barbara, and we shook hands. He was older than Barbara, with a friendly face, a softening body, and thinning hair. “And his wife, Elena.” Elena was dark, and rather pretty, very chunky. There was down on her upper lip. We shook hands. “And their friend,” said Barbara, “Tyrone Bennett,” and I turned to shake hands with a heavy-set, pale-eyed, albino-looking man, in his middle forties, perhaps, with loose, nervous lips. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, “please, let’s all sit down. Make yourselves comfortable.” Mrs. King sat down on the sofa, still smiling, her gaze seeming to be helplessly riveted on me, and Mr. King sat beside her. Elena and Ken sat down, and Bennett strolled to the window and lit a cigarette. Christopher leaned on the bar, and Barbara went over to him.

“My,” said Barbara’s mother, “it’s so nice of you to have us.” She laughed, like a girl. I was worried about the effect of her accent on Christopher’s nerves. I looked over at him. Barbara was talking, he was listening, with this same sardonic smile. “Why, I just can’t get over it. Sitting in the house of a real famous movie star.”

“Oh, stop it, Mrs. King. Your daughter’s a famous movie star. You should be used to it by now.”

“Oh, but that’s different. Barbie’s not a movie star for me. She’s my own flesh and blood. Of course, we’re proud of her, and all—but you—you’re real special. It just makes me feel so good that a boy like you could make so much of himself. It really does. Why, I could cry.” I kept smiling. Barbara and Christopher were still in conference at the bar. “Your mother must be real proud of you.”

“Well, I hope my father is,” I said, “but my mother’s been dead for awhile.”

“Oh! That is too bad. But your father? I hope he’s enjoying good health?”

“Oh, yes”—and I almost said, “ma’am.” I felt myself being strangled by her sincerity, and I felt abandoned by Christopher and Barbara, who were still leaning on the bar. “We see each other all the time. He’s tough, my father. He was built to last at least a hundred years.”

“Are you from New York?” Ken asked me. He had taken out his pipe, and was playing with it the way pipe smokers do.

“Yes. Born and bred.”

“You an only child?”

“Oh, no. I have an older brother.”

“He in show business too?”

“Oh, no.” I paused. “He’s a preacher.”

“That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?” said Bennett, turning and looking at me, “to have a preacher and an actor in the same family?” He chuckled. “Y’all get along?”

“Oh, I think it happens very often,” said Elena, “especially—well, it’s very common, anyway.” She turned to her husband. “Who was it we saw, last time we was up here—that singer? The one I was so crazy about? Oh, you know who I mean! A beautiful girl.”

“She has all kinds of enthusiasms,” Ken said to me, smiling. “I don’t know how she expects me to keep up with them.” He turned back to Elena. “Lena Horne?”

“Oh! She is beautiful. And she is such a lady, don’t care what she’s doing, it just stands out all over her. I just adore her, don’t you?”

“I do indeed,” I said. “I really do.”

“But she wasn’t the one. No, this was another one—a whole lot darker than Lena Horne.”

“You’re thinking of Pearl Bailey,” Barbara said.

“Yes. That is the one. With those hands, and all. She is a scream. Now, she’s got a brother who’s a preacher, at least that’s what we was told.”

“Yes, she does,” I said. “You’re right, it is common. Most of us come out of the church, one way or another.”

“Why is that?” asked Barbara’s father. A slight flush on his face told me that he had almost said “boy.”

“Well, that’s a very loaded question,” I said. “It could keep us here for several days—”

“Christopher and I are being bartenders,” Barbara said. “There are lots of Bloody Marys and there’s just about anything else you want. Now, who wants what?”

“The reason that so many of us come out of the church,” said Christopher, “is that the church is the only thing we had—the only thing the white man let us have.”

They all stared at him. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary,” said Barbara’s mother.

“Me, too,” said Ken.

“Hell, might as well make it Bloody Marys all around,” said Bennett. He watched Christopher. “Why do you say that?”

“I say it,” said Christopher, “because it’s true.” He looked up at Bennett, then continued dropping ice in glasses. Barbara was putting the glasses on a tray. Her hair was down, she was wearing slacks and low heels and she was as silent as the waitress which she once had been. Christopher began to pour.

Bennett looked at me, but I said nothing. Christopher winked broadly at me, and I suppose they all saw it, but they didn’t—nor did I—know how to react. Barbara began passing around the drinks. Ken looked at Barbara for a moment, shrewdly. Barbara brought a drink to me.

“Well, it just seems to me,” said Ken, finally, “that that’s maybe putting it too simply—like you’re blaming the white man for everything.”

“I’m not blaming you,” Christopher said. “You had a good thing going for you. You’d done already killed off most of the Indians and you’d robbed them of their land and now you had all these blacks working for you for nothing and you didn’t want no black cat from Walla Walla being able to talk to no black cat from Boola Boola. If they could have talked to each other, they might have figured out a way of chopping off your heads, and getting rid of you.” He smiled. “Dig it.” He took a swallow of his drink. “So you gave us Jesus. And told us it was the Lord’s will that we should be toting the barges and lifting the bales while you all sat on your big, fat, white behinds and got rich.” He took another sip of his drink, and squatted on his heels in the middle of the floor. “That’s what happened, and you all is still the same. You ain’t changed at all, except to get worse. You want to tell me different?”

“I don’t think I want to tell you anything,” said Bennett, and turned back to the window. “I don’t think you can listen.”

“Try me,” Christopher said, and he winked at me again.

“My,” said Barbara’s mother, and patted her husband’s knee, “you don’t have to talk to us this way. You don’t know how many colored friends we have down where we come from. If you ever get down that way, why we’d be happy to make you welcome. Why, Barbie can tell you. We don’t care about the color of a person’s skin—we never have done! My daddy would have skinned me alive had he ever heard of me mistreating a colored person, or calling them out of their name. And I never have. I loved my daddy too much. My daddy used to say, God made us all. We’re all here for some reason. Barbie can tell you. Tell him, Barbie.” She had been leaning forward, toward Christopher; now, she leaned back. “Why, Barbie grew up with colored folks. She’ll tell you that herself. She looked at me and smiled and sipped her drink. “He’ll learn,” she assured me. “He’s young.” She looked at her husband, looked at Ken, glanced at Barbara, who was now in the kitchen, on the other side of the bar. “Now, let’s just talk about something else. Mr. Proudhammer—where did you go to school?”

Christopher snorted, but delicately, and rose from the floor and joined Barbara in the kitchen. His laugh rang out across the room, then hers. Ken and Bennett and Barbara’s father looked toward the kitchen; but they did not move.

“I went to high school,” I said, “here in New York.”

“You didn’t go to college? My!”

“And you made it, all right, didn’t you?” Bennett asked. “Why, I bet you make more money than I do—I know you make more money than I do,” and he chuckled. “And I bet you didn’t do it sitting around, feeling sorry for yourself, did you?”

“Hell, no,” Ken said. “He just made his own way. And anybody can make his way in this country, no matter what color he is.”

I thought, Great God, I’m not going to be able to take this much longer, even if it is Barbara’s family. And, in a minute, Christopher’s going to throw everything in the kitchen out here on these defenseless heads, and we’re all going to end up in jail.

Barbara said, “That’s pure bullshit, Ken, and you know it. None of those boys who work for you are going to make their own way, you’ve seen to that—you’ve helped to see to that—they can’t even join a union. So, don’t you sit here and talk to Leo as though you had something to do with the fact that Leo’s still alive. You didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Leo’s tough. That’s all. And you’re a no-good bastard. I’ve told you that before.”

“And I’ve told you before,” he said, turning red and wet, “to hold your tongue—to mind your tongue in front of your mother.”

“The way,” said Barbara, “that you’ve always minded yours in front of me? Don’t give me any of your shit, Ken, I know you.”

“Hush, children,” said Mrs. King, “we didn’t come here to fight. Why, we’re embarrassing Mr. Proudhammer.” And she finished her drink, and set it down; the old girl could drink. I rose to give her a refill. I said, “You’re not embarrassing me. But there’s no point in pretending that Negroes are treated like white people in this country because they’re not, and we all know that.”

“But look at you,” said Ken. “I don’t know what you make a year, but I can make a pretty shrewd guess. What have you got to complain about? It seems to me that this country’s treated you pretty well. I know a whole lot of white people couldn’t afford to live in this apartment, for example—”

“Of course you do,” said Barbara dryly, “and they work for you, too.”

He threw an exasperated look toward the kitchen, but held his peace, and looked at me. I realized that I was beginning to be angry, but I also realized that it was a perfectly futile anger. I had not been surprised by Christopher, nor had I been in the least surprised by this family. But I was a little surprised by Barbara, who seemed to be paying off old scores. I didn’t care at all what these people felt, or thought. Talking to them was a total waste of time. I just wanted them to get loaded on their Bloody Marys and get out of my house. I was a little angry at Barbara for having brought them here at all. And yet, I was aware, with another part of my mind, that Barbara was showing me something—showing me, perhaps, part of the price she had had to pay for me?—and she was, at the same time, exhibiting her credentials to Christopher. This argued an uneasiness on Barbara’s part which, again, after all these years, surprised me.

The question had been addressed to me, and so I was compelled to answer it, praying that, then, we could let the matter drop. I said, “You can’t imagine my life, and I won’t discuss it. I don’t make as much money as you think I do, and I don’t work as often as I would if I were white. Those are just facts. The point is that the Negroes of this country are treated as none of you would dream of treating a dog or a cat. What Christopher’s trying to tell you is perfectly true. If you don’t want to believe it, well, that’s your problem. And I don’t feel like talking about it anymore, and I won’t.” I looked at Ken. “This is my house.”

They sat in silence, angry themselves now, uneasy, and trapped, and I put on a Billie Holiday record, “Strange Fruit.” Yes, I was being vindictive. I poured myself a refill, and sat down. Mrs. King gave me a reproachful look, but I avoided her eye and lit a cigarette. Christopher, holding a carton of eggs in his hand, leaned over the bar and smiled and said, “What the man just told you is that you’re stuck with your criminal record and he’s not going to be an accomplice to it, or let you feel good about it. How do you all like your eggs?”

And yet, surprisingly enough, it turned out not to be such an awful afternoon, after all. Christopher’s insolence had released him, and, in a curious way, it had released them. Bennett’s pale, vindictive eyes and his busy wet lips conveyed but too vividly what he would have done with Christopher, had he encountered Christopher in his own bailiwick; this not being the case, and since he was now, morally, at least, encircled, he relaxed and proceeded to enjoy the afternoon as though it were a species of vaudeville show and something he would not soon be doing again. Ken, no match for Barbara anyway, contributed anecdotes from their childhood, which Barbara took with wry good grace, and the old lady, knocking back Bloody Marys as though there were no tomorrow, told stories about presidents and governors who had visited her home when she was young. She confessed how upset she had been by Barbara’s choice of a career, and said that Barbara got her stubbornness from her father—which transparent fiction seemed to delight the faceless old man. I watched Christopher watching them from the heights of an unassailable contempt, as they became more and more themselves, more and more human, and less and less attractive. They could not know how much they revealed, how pathetic and tawdry they were—this master race. But they were dangerous, too, unutterably so. They knew nothing about themselves at all. I wondered—but idly—how they had got that way; wondered, but from a great distance, as the sun grew paler in my living room; as Ken grew blander, more shapeless, and by now he was clenching a pipe between his teeth with the energy of the dying; his wife grew more flirtatious, though not with him, exactly; the old lady grew drunker and madder, her husband appeared to be waiting for God knows what dreadful event; and Bennett, licking his nervous lips each time he looked at Christopher, could not have realized that he was a study in lust and bloodlust. But they were not my concern. Christopher was my concern. The problem was how to prevent these Christians from once again destroying this pagan. Barbara sat among her kin, dry and cold, looking very young, and putting me in mind of a living sacrifice. When, at last, they rose to go, and bags and hats and various appurtenances were collected, and the last male left the “little boys’ room,” and we stood chatting in the foyer, I had a splitting headache. Barbara now kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Thanks, Leo. I’ll talk to you later.” Then, very deliberately, she thanked Christopher, and kissed him, too. I kissed the old lady, because she wanted me to, and shook hands with Elena and the men, said I would be happy to be their guest when I came to Kentucky—“Give us a chance!” the old lady cried. “You’ll see we ain’t nearly so bad down there as people up North say we are!”—and allowed Christopher to walk them to the elevator. I closed the door behind them, and walked back into the living room and stretched out on the floor.

Soon, the door slammed behind Christopher, and he came padding in. He stretched out on the floor beside me, and rubbed his hand over the back of my neck. “Wow! Baby, are they for real?” He sat up, clasping his knees. “Damn. They really fucked up. That old lady should be in an asylum some place.” He laughed. “No wonder Barbara split—she took one look at them people and she started making it—she hauled ass, baby!” He laughed again, and stretched out on the floor again. “Wow!” Then, “Barbara’s tough. I didn’t know a white chick could be so tough.”

I said, “She’s tough, all right.”

He said, “She’s really for real. She’s something.” He looked over at me. “You must be tired, Big Daddy. You want to take a nap?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“If they hadn’t stayed so long, I was thinking about maybe going to a movie. There’s a couple of movies in town I wanted you to see. But, now, I don’t think I feel up to it, and I know you don’t.”

“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

He put his head on my chest. I held it there.

“Christopher—something I’ve been meaning to ask you—what do you want to do?—with your life, I mean.”

He laughed, his head bouncing up and down against my chest.

“I already told you. I want to be an astronaut.”

“Come on. Be serious.”

“I am serious. I think I might dig going to the moon—or Mars—you know—”

“Come on. You know that’s not about to happen soon. You’re going to be earth-bound for awhile. So, what do you want to do on earth while they’re figuring out whether or not they’re going to let you on the moon?”

“Well”—thoughtfully—“I guess I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in that shoe store.” He had a job in a shoe store in Spanish Harlem. “I don’t know. I’m a high school dropout, Leo—you’ve heard of cats like me, who drop out of school? And I’ve got a record, baby. It’s not so easy for me to tell you what I want to do.”

“Well, I think we can fix all the legal shit. But what do you think you want to do?”

He was silent. “I could learn a lot just working for you.”

“That’s cool. But that’s not enough.”

Silence again. His breath came and went against my chest. “Why not? You don’t want me to work for you?”

“Come on, now, don’t be coy—”

He leaned up, smiling. “What does that word mean—coy?”

“It means that you know damn well that I’ll be glad to have you with me all the time, and you just want to hear me say so. That’s being coy.”

He grinned. “Oh. Thanks.” He put his head on my chest again. “I don’t know, Leo. I want to learn—everything I can. That might sound funny, coming from me, but I really do. But”—he leaned up, looking at me very earnestly—“this is no cop-out, believe me, but—what I really want to learn—it doesn’t look like it’s being taught. I mean—I don’t want to learn all that shit they teach you here. That’s not where it’s at. I don’t want to be like these people. I know kids in the street who know a hell of a lot more than—all those people in school. I don’t know—I always feel like they trying to cut my balls off. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do.” I put my hand over my forehead.

“You got a headache?”

“A little. It’ll go away.”

“Should I get you some aspirin?”

“No. Finish what you were saying.”

“Well. That’s it. I like the people in the streets, there’s a whole lot of beauty in the streets, Leo, and I’d like to help, I’d like to teach, but somebody’s got to teach me.”

I watched his face. His face made me want to smile. “Well. First things first. We’ll try to make you ready.”

He looked down, then looked into my eyes again. “You know something?”

“What?”

“I got a birthday coming soon.”

I laughed. “And what do you want for your birthday?”

He laughed, too. “Would you get me a camera? Just a simple, ordinary camera. I thought I might fool around with that for awhile—you know, maybe I can at least make a kind of record of what’s happening. And I can go a whole lot of places where no camera’s ever been.”

I said, watching him, “I’m hip.”

“So it wouldn’t really be a waste of your money.”

I pulled his head onto my chest again. “Don’t sweat it, baby. Everything’s going to be nice.”

“I believe you,” he said, after a moment, and then we lay quietly on the floor, until the sun was long gone, and night filled the room. The street lights pressed against my window. It was very silent. Christopher had fallen fast asleep, snoring and whistling. I lay there, and stroked his kinky hair and thought of my father and mother, and my brother, and of Christopher, and a line suddenly came flying back at me, out of my past, from The Corn Is Green. It made me laugh, and hold my breath and it almost made me cry. It was Bunny’s curtain line: Moffat, my girl, you mustn’t be clumsy this time. You mustn’t be clumsy. Ah. So! I laughed to myself, and stroked Christopher’s hair, laughed perhaps a little sadly and ironically, but without grief. This little light of mine.

“I can explain it, in a way, and, in another way, I can’t,” Barbara said. She stood very straight, walking up and down my living room. It was about three o’clock in the morning. Christopher was God knew where. “If I could have explained it before it happened, then, obviously, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I said, “Barbara, I don’t need any explanations. I really don’t. I don’t feel—whatever you’re supposed to feel when something like this happens. I just don’t. I don’t feel—wronged.” I watched her. Her face hurt me. It was true that I did not feel wronged: what did I feel? An immense fatigue, a sense of going down beneath a burden; of barely holding on. “Don’t you see what I mean? Old Princess?”

She turned away from me, and walked back to my bar and poured herself another drink. I joined her at the bar. My living room was lit by one dim light, and my record player was playing Dinah Washington, very low.

I poured myself a drink, and touched her face. She smiled, and we touched glasses. She sat down on one of the barstools, and lit a cigarette.

“He reminded me of you,” she said, “when we were young. I was reaching backward for you—and for me—I think—reaching backward, over twenty years.” She sipped her drink, and smiled, threw back her head, and sighed. “He was you before our choices had been made. Before we’d become—what we’ve become.” She looked at me, seemed to try to look into me, her eyes were enormous. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I think I do.” Then, “Do you think what we’ve become is so awful, Barbara?”

“No. Oh, I don’t mean that. But it isn’t—is it?—exactly what we had in mind. I didn’t,” she said at last, “expect to become so lonely.”

“Neither did I,” I said. Then, for a moment, Dinah’s voice was the only sound in the room.

“I think he wanted”—she stopped—“I think he wanted to find out—if love was possible. If it was really possible. I think he had to find out what I thought of his body, by taking mine.” She paused. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, “with you and me.”

“No. It wasn’t like that with you and me.”

“I’m glad for one thing,” she said. “I was afraid that I’d—seduced Christopher, or allowed Christopher to seduce me, only in order to hurt you. I was terribly afraid that I was only acting out of bitterness. And that would have had to mean that I’d been bitter all this time. But it wasn’t that. It was just—you. That’s terrible, in its way, but it’s true. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to get back to you. And he realized that, oh, very quickly. Then, he realized that love was possible. I shouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t frighten him.”

“He’ll be back,” I said. “He’ll be back, or I’ll go into the streets to find him. He’s not lost, don’t sweat it. I won’t let him be lost.” She said nothing. “Look. That’s all that matters now, isn’t it—that the kid not be lost?”

“I hope I haven’t wrecked everything,” she said.

“I don’t think you have. But if you have, then we’ll have to face that, too. And if you have, well, I don’t know how I’ll feel then. But I don’t think you have. And now you ought to go home. We’ve both had it.”

“I suppose so,” she said, and rose. She was still very straight and steady. “When he left me—he said he was coming here.”

“It’s only been three days. He’s probably at his sister’s house. He’ll be along.”

“I must tell you,” she said, “it has not been easy for me. It has not been easy at all to have lived all these years the life I’ve lived and to know, no matter who I was with, no matter how much I loved them or hoped to love them and no matter what they offered me, it has not been easy to know that if you whistled, called, sang, belched, picked up the telephone, sent a wire, I’d be there. I’d have no choice, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’ve not been free—not all these years. And with time flying—and time’s worse for a woman than it is for a man. No, it’s not been easy. And sometimes I hated you and hated myself and hated my life and wanted to die, to die!”

Her words and her voice rang in my ears, they always will, and her face burns in my mind.

I said, from the depths of my terrible fatigue, “I couldn’t have done otherwise. I couldn’t have done otherwise—then! And once we’d made that turning—could we have done otherwise later, Barbara? Could we?”

“I know,” said Barbara. “I know.” She sat down on the barstool again. She picked up her glass and raised it in a sorrowful, gallant, mocking toast. “Let us drink to the new Jerusalem.”

She left, and I went to sleep, wearier than I’d ever been in all my life. Sometime that morning, Christopher came crawling into bed beside me. He was as cold as sweating metal, almost that dangerous to touch, as funky as a fishstall. God knows where he had been. I never asked him. He crawled into my arms, sighing like a mother, found a place for his head, and then lay still. And then we slept.

On our last night but one in San Francisco, I was allowed to go out. It was to be a very quiet evening; the idea was for me to be bothered as little as possible by people who might recognize my face. We were to pick up Pete and Barbara at the theater, after the show. Pete loaned Christopher his car, and we drove to a Chinese restaurant, crowded and fashionable, but very good. It was strange to be out. I felt, well, rested is perhaps the only word, and for the very first time in my whole life. I was not, so to speak, running, but was learning how to walk. At the door to the restaurant, my notoriety suddenly hit me, like a glove—a not unpleasant tap, but a definite one. I had been exulting in the glory of having had my sight returned to me, I was going to be able to see the world again, for awhile. I hadn’t thought about the world seeing me. Yet, here the world was, in the headwaiter’s face, in the faces turning toward us, in the hum, the buzz, the rustle, which marked our passage through the room. Christopher marched before me, stern, elegant, and tall like a chieftain or a prince, taking very seriously his role of lieutenant and bodyguard. We found our table, and sat down, and people smiled at us, and it was a rather nice feeling, that evening, to feel oneself recalled to life. We ordered two dry martinis, and our menus came, bigger than the most thorough map of the world, and Christopher grinned, and said, “This is certainly not the moment to start thinking of the starving Chinese. You know what some of my friends would say if they saw me in a place like this?”

“Well, then, order your usual bowl of rice, baby, and eat it in the kitchen. The starving peasants will rejoice, believe me, to have you swell their ranks.”

“Later for the kitchen. I know that I can always make it in the kitchen. But let me see what I can do out here with—let’s see now—some sweet and sour pork, how does that strike you? You know, we mustn’t forget our roots, they ain’t hardly got no grits, but how about some egg foo young?” And he went on like this, until mercifully, our waiter suggested that we put ourselves in his hands and allow him to order our meal. So we did that, and he didn’t let us down. Perhaps it was because I’d been away so long, but everything tasted wonderful, and the room, the people, the rise and fall, the steady turning, as of a wheel, of many voices, the laughter, the clink of glass and silver, the shining hair, the shining dresses, the rings and earrings and necklaces and spangles and bangles and bracelets of the women, the tie clasps and watches and rings of the men, all created an astounding illusion of safety and order and civilization. Evil did not seem to exist here, or sorrow, or intolerable pain, and here we were, a part of it. I was a celebrity, with a bank account, and a future, and I had it in my power to make Christopher’s life secure. We were the only colored people there. I had worked in the kitchen, not a hundred years ago; outside were the millions of starving—Chinese. I’m going to feast at the welcome table, my mother used to sing—was this the table? This groaning board was a heavy weight on the backs of many millions, whose groaning was not heard. Beneath this table, deep in the bowels of the earth, as far away as China, as close as the streets outside, an energy moved and gathered and it would, one day, overturn this table just as surely as the earth turned and the sun rose and set. And: where will you be, when that first trumpet sounds? I watched Christopher, making out with the chopsticks, smiling, calm, and proud. Well. I want to be with Jesus, when that first trumpet sounds. I want to be with Jesus, when it sounds so loud.

I signed the restaurant’s golden book, and I signed a couple of autographs—but the people were nice, they remembered I’d been sick—and we walked out to the car. It was a beautiful, dark-blue, chilly night. We were on a height, and San Francisco unfurled beneath us, at our feet, like a many-colored scroll. I was leaving soon. I wished it were possible to stay. I had worked hard, hard, it certainly should have been possible by now for me to have a safe, quiet, comfortable life, a life I could devote to my work and to those I loved, without being bugged to death. But I knew it wasn’t possible. There was a sense in which it certainly could be said that my endeavor had been for nothing. Indeed, I had conquered the city: but the city was stricken with the plague. Not in my lifetime would this plague end, and, now, all that I most treasured, wine, talk, laughter, love, the embrace of a friend, the light in the eyes of a lover, the touch of a lover, that smell, that contest, that beautiful torment, and the mighty joy of a good day’s work, would have to be stolen, each moment lived as though it were the last, for my own mortality was not more certain than the storm that was rising to engulf us all.

I put my hand on Christopher’s neck. We stood for a moment in silence. We got into the car.

We drove through the streets of San Francisco, though I wanted to walk. “You can’t,” said Christopher flatly, “you’ll be mobbed on every streetcorner. I promised Barbara and Pete to take real good care of you, so stop giving me a hard time, all right? Be nice.”

“I really would like,” I said, “to know more than I do about what’s going on in the streets.”

He looked at me. “You do know. You want to know if they still love you in the streets—you want to know what they think of you.” He sighed. He was driving very slowly. “Look. A whole lot of cats dig you, and some of them love you. But, Leo—you a fat cat now. That’s the way a whole lot of people see you, and you can’t blame them, how else can they see you? And we in a situation where we have to know which people we can trust, which people we can use—that’s the nitty-gritty. Well, these cats are out here getting their ass whipped all the time, Leo. You get your ass whipped, at least it gets into the papers. But don’t nobody care what happens to these kids—nobody! And all these laws and speeches don’t mean shit. They do not mean shit. It’s the spirit of the people, baby, the spirit of the people, they don’t want us and they don’t like us, and you see that spirit in the face of every cop. Them laws they keep passing, shit, they just like the treaties they signed with the Indians. Nothing but lies. they never even meant to keep those treaties, baby, they wanted the land and they got it and now they mean to keep it, even if they have to put every black mother-fucker in this country behind barbed wire, or shoot him down like a dog. It’s the truth I’m telling you. And you better believe it, unless you want to be like your brother and believe all that okey-doke about Jesus changing people’s hearts. Fuck Jesus, we ain’t about to wait on him, and him the first one they got rid of so they could get their shit together? They didn’t want him to change their hearts, they just used him to change the map.” Then he stopped. He said, in another tone, “I’m just trying to tell it to you like it is. We can’t afford to trust the white people in this country—we’d have to be crazy if we did. But, naturally, a whole lot of black cats think you might be one of them, and, in a way, you know, you stand to lose just as much as white people stand to lose.” He paused again, and he looked at me again. “You see what I mean?” he asked me very gently. I nodded. He put one hand on my knee. “You’re a beautiful cat, Leo, and I love you. You believe me?”

“Yes. I believe you.”

“Then don’t let this other shit get you down. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be for awhile.” He looked at his watch. “Hey. I know a place I’ll take you.”

He stopped the car on a very crowded street, a street crowded with young people, black and white. They seemed to me to be very, very young; no doubt I seemed to them to be very, very old. There was something oddly attractive about them. Perhaps they reminded me, distantly, of myself, long ago. Perhaps they reminded me, dimly, of something we had lost. I had never worn such costumes, surely, beads, robes, sandals, and earrings, or walked quite so slowly, or dared to embrace another in the sight of all the world, or been so oblivious to the presence of the cops, who patrolled the streets in twos, or stood in doorways, holding their clubs motionless, with their eyes fixed on something straight ahead, and their lips recollecting a sour taste. It was late, but store windows were lighted, with very strange things in the windows, and the stores seemed to be open—but I was not allowed to investigate, for Christopher was walking fast, one hand under my elbow. A couple stopped, looking at me, and Christopher turned me into the entrance of what had once been a movie theater. Unavoidably, he had to stop to get tickets, and I could feel a crowd gathering behind us. I felt terribly uneasy. I turned, once, to look behind me, and I smiled. A colored cat called my name, and laughed, and said, “Be careful, man. You’re under surveillance!”

“I know,” I said, and Christopher and I walked into the theater. I wondered if the boy had meant to tell me that I was under surveillance by the cops, or under surveillance by the people.

Whatever he had meant, I was under surveillance by both.

We entered a dark and noisy barn. All of the seats had been removed from the orchestra of this theater, and hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls filled this space. Some were standing, some were lounging against the walls, some were sitting on the floor, some were embracing, some were dancing. The stage held four or five of the loudest musicians in the world’s history. It was impossible to tell whether they were any good or not, their sound was too high. But it did not really matter whether their sound was any good or not, this sound was, literally, not meant for my ears, and it existed entirely outside my capacity for judgment. It was a rite that I was witnessing—witnessing, not sharing. It made me think of rites I had seen in Caleb’s church, in many churches; of black feet stomping in the mud of the levee; of rites older than that, in forests irrecoverable. The music drove and drove, into the past—into the future. It sounded like an attempt to make a great hole in the world, and bring up what was buried. And the dancers seemed, nearly, in the flickering, violent light, with their beads flashing, their long hair flying, their robes whirling—or their tight skirts, tight pants signifying—and with the music assaulting them like the last, last trumpet, to be dancing in their grave-clothes, raised from the dead. On the wall were four screens, and, on these screens, ectoplasmic figures and faces endlessly writhed, moving in and out of each other, in a tremendous sexual rhythm which made me think of nameless creatures blindly coupling in all the slime of the world, and at the bottom of the sea, and in the air we breathed, and in one’s very body. From time to time, on this screen, one recognized a face. I saw Yul Brynner’s face, for example, and, for a moment, I thought I saw my own. Christopher touched me on the shoulder.

“I came here a couple of times with Pete. It’s a gas and there are some real people here and they’re making some very nice things happen. I just wanted you to see it. But we have to flee in a minute. The people are starting to recognize you, and, anyway, it’s almost curtain time.”

“Okay.”

But I stood there a few moments longer, and tried to understand what was happening.

“Guns,” said Christopher. “We need guns.”

It was the next day, we were driving down from Hunter’s Point.

I said nothing.

We drove across the Golden Gate. We had no particular destination in mind. It was a bright, windy day, and I liked watching Christopher handle the car. Christopher liked cars—I don’t; possibly because of the Workshop days. The bridge rushed at us, and the sky seemed to descend, and the water was at our feet. Christopher laughed, and looked at me, then looked around him. “This could be so beautiful,” he said, “for all of us.”

“Yes,” I said. Then, “But all I want is for you to live.”

“Alone?” he asked.

I did not know what he meant.

“Alone?” he repeated. “Walking over the bodies of the dead? Is that what you want for me, Leo? Is that what you mean when you say you want me to live?” He looked out over the bay again. “Look. I’m a young cat. I’ve already been under the feet of horses, and I’ve already been beaten by chains. Well. You want me to keep on going under the feet of horses?”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me. We swung off the bridge, and ended up in some fishing town, the name of which I don’t remember. We entered the town, very slowly: “If you don’t want me to keep going under the feet of horses,” Christopher said, now with his dreadful distinctness, his muffled urgency, “and I know that you love me and you don’t want no blood on my hands—dig—but if you don’t want me to keep on going under the feet of horses, then I think you got to agree that we need us some guns. Right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see that.” He parked the car. I looked out over the water. There was a terrible weight on my heart—for a moment I was afraid that I was about to collapse again. I watched his black, proud profile. “But we’re outnumbered, you know.”

He laughed, and turned off the motor. “Shit. So were the early Christians.”

That evening, Barbara and Pete put us on the plane to New York. Caleb met us at the plane, with Louise, and one of the children, growing up now, a perfectly respectable, black family—and respectable, mainly, because their name was mine. As we say in America, nothing succeeds like success—so much for the black or white, the related respectability. Christopher and my father and I spent a day together, walking through Harlem. They looked very much like each other, both big, both black, both laughing. Then, I went away to Europe, alone. Then, I came back. I first did the movie, Big Deal, not a very good movie, really, and then I did a new play, and so found myself, presently, standing in the wings again, waiting for my cue.

NEW YORK, ISTANBUL, SAN FRANCISCO, 1965–1967