Just Above My Head Read online

  I decided to call them, to give them this news. I didn’t know where Arthur was, hadn’t seen him in three months. Neither of us lived at home anymore, and Arthur was working all the time. He had still to make, as we say, the “big one,” but he got better all the time; he had a faithful, growing audience, mostly black but not entirely; he wasn’t making a lot of money but he wasn’t starving, either, and he was only, after all, twenty-three. I was proud of him. And we got on well. We loved each other, yes, but that can be a torment. We liked each other, and that was nice.

  My mother answered the phone.

  “Honey, I was just thinking about you. How you faring out there, with all them cowboys and Indians? Don’t get scalped now,” and she laughed. “Oh, and happy birthday.”

  “I’m thirty years old today:”

  “I know you made thirty, child, I was there. Lord, it seems like a dream.”

  “You proud of me, Mama?” Have I been a good son? But I didn’t ask that.

  “I’ve always been proud of you. Hush. Your daddy wants to say something to you.”

  My father got on the phone.

  “Happy birthday, son—Hall, I was thinking, now that you beginning to grow up and all, that it’s my duty as a father to take you aside and give you a little instruction”—here, he coughed elaborately—”about the birds and the bees and such—I think that’s a father’s duty—”

  “The birds and the bees? Aw, shucks, Dad, birds fly and bees sting—is that what you want to tell me?”

  “Look like somebody got there ahead of me,” he said, and we laughed together. “Can’t say I didn’t try. When you think you coming this way?”

  “Well—that’s why I called, really. I’ll be coming in sometime tonight.” I coughed. “The Board of Directors requires my presence.”

  “On a Saturday? You must be a big man on the board.”

  “Daddy, I know I don’t know much about the birds and the bees and such, but how do you spell that? It must be we got a bad connection.”

  “You got a dirty mind. I’m going to have your mama wash it out with soap. I said board, Hall, now pull yourself together.”

  “I’m sorry—no, I’ve got to be there Monday morning, but I thought I’d come in tonight.”

  “That’d be mighty nice. Around what time?”

  “I don’t know yet: Nine, ten, along around that time. I’ll call you back, and let you know as soon as I get a flight.”

  “Well. We’ll be here. You know your mama, she going to bake you a cake. You got anybody special you want to see?”

  “No. You didn’t tell me about the birds and the bees soon enough.”

  “I knew you was fixing to blame me for something. I didn’t tell you to go out there, in all that Indian territory. You ain’t fit to see nobody.”

  “I’d like to see my brother, if he’s around.”

  “Man, Arthur is in Canada. Tell me he’s shaking them up, up there.”

  “In Canada? Where in Canada?”

  “All over Canada—what?” I heard my mother’s voice in the background. “Your mother say, he’s in Toronto now, but he’s been in Quebec, and everywhere.”

  “I guess I won’t see him, then.”

  “You’ll see him when he gets here. You going to be here for a while, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah. That’s true. Well—I’ll call you back later, Daddy. Let me go, and take care of business.”

  “Go with God. We love you.”

  “I love you, too. Good-bye.”

  “See you later, son.”

  And we hung up. I finished my coffee, and descended into the city.

  It was the end of spring, you could almost taste the smoke of the coming summer. The streets were crowded with people who seemed to be hurrying toward the summer—I thought of Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” Their bright summer dresses.

  I walked to the corner of my crowded street—I was on the heights of San Francisco—and looked both ways, up and down. There was a cable-car line on the street on which I was standing and a part of me wanted to ride it, just for fun, but another part of me wanted to walk. The street before me simply dropped, dropped as steep, it seemed to me, as a mountain slope, and it ended, I knew, at the wharf. I started down this street, as happy as a kid on a holiday. For a moment, I had nothing to do and nowhere to be.

  I also had no one to eat with but this didn’t really bother me, either: and I couldn’t do anything about it, because I had left my phone book in the hotel, and I wasn’t going back for it.

  Thirty.

  And I had a lobster, all by myself, looking out over the vast, gray crashing water, watching the sun on the water, watching the gulls.

  Thirty.

  And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it. You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you. This person is not for you, and you, really, are not for that person—and that’s it, son. But you try, you both try. The only result of all your trying is to make absolutely real the unconquerable distance between you: to dramatize, in a million ways, the absolutely unalterable truth of this distance. Side by side, and hand in hand, your sunsets, nevertheless, are not occurring in the same universe. It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder, and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other. Your elements will not mix, unless one agrees that the elements be pulverized—and the result of that is worse than being alone. The result of that is to become one of the living dead. The most dreadful people I have ever known are those who have been “saved,” as they claim, by Christ—they could not possibly be more deluded—those for whom the heavenly telephone is endlessly ringing, always with disastrous messages for everybody else. Or those people who have been cured by their psychiatrists, a cure which has rendered them a little less exciting than oatmeal. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach—or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.

  Then I walked to the airline office, through my favorite American streets, and bought a ticket.

  I was thirty. So I said: “Make that first class, if you please.”

  No one, as far as I know, has ever tried to describe airports and air travel.

  First of all, I am certainly not the only person in the world who, at the very center of his being, is simply numb with terror at the idea of flying at all. I am not grateful for the pilot’s announcement that we are now thirty-three thousand feet in the air. I do not want to know that; it is perfectly useless information. I already know that it’s a long way down, that this fall will be the mortal fall. I don’t think about it, and I don’t think I appear to be frightened, and I am not frightened, consciously. I can’t afford to be frightened consciously. And, of course, I know that automobiles are yet more lethal, that not everyone who steps off the curb manages to get across the street, that the bathtub or the shower can kill, and I know that I smoke and drink too much. Whatever is going to kill me is already moving, is on the road, and I do not know, no more than anyone does, how I will face that last intensity, when everything flames up for the last time and then the flame falters and goes out. I would like it to be swift: yet I know that this moment does not exist in time.

  Thousands and thousands of people at the airport, multitudes, multitudes, going where? Everywhere: and, furthermore, Everywhere is numbered. Flight 123 to Dayton, Flight 246 to Tucson, Flight 890 to Dallas, Flight 333 to Birmingham, Flight 679 to Denver, Flight 321 to Washington, three-four to Baltimore, five-six to Pick Up Sticks, three-four-five-six-seven, and all good niggers go to heaven.

  I was traveling befo
re the days of electronic surveillance, before the hijackers and the terrorists arrived. For the arrival of these people, the people in the seats of power have only themselves to blame. Who, indeed, has hijacked more than England has, for example, or who is more skilled in the uses of terror than my own unhappy country? Yes, I know: nevertheless, children, what goes around comes around, what you send out comes back to you. A terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of the State behind him—indeed, he has no State, which is why he is a terrorist. The State, at bottom, and when the chips are down, rules by means of a terror made legal—that is how Franco ruled so long, and is the undeniable truth concerning South Africa. No one called the late J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, though that is precisely what he was: and if anyone wishes, now, in this context, to speak of “civilized” values or “democracy” or “morality,” you will pardon this poor nigger if he puts his hand before his mouth, and snickers—if he laughs at you. I have endured your morality for a very long time, am still crawling up out of that dung-heap: all that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and that is not morality.

  Leaving that alone: I checked my one bag, picked up my attaché case—Great God, a nigger with an attaché case!—took back my validated ticket, and bought a magazine. I had a little time to kill, and so I sat down at the airport bar, a dark bar, and ordered myself a drink.

  I looked around me. A black man does not look around him in the same way a white man does: there is a difference. In a way not too unlike the way I have learned to live, more or less, with my fear of flying, I have learned to live in a white world. It may sound banal, or unfriendly, but it must be said: when a black man looks around him, he is looking, after all, at the people who control his social situation, if not his life, at the people his children will encounter, win, lose, or draw, at the people who menace everything and everyone he loves. And, though this fact controls every single aspect of their lives, the people he sees when he looks around him, either do not know it, or do not know they know it, or do not want to know it, or pretend not to know it. Yet they use, and are protected by this power every hour of every day. In the humiliating, dangerous, disastrous, or bloody event, it will make no difference what they know or don’t know. All that will matter is what they do, and he knows what they will do: they will kill him, or allow him to die. If one of their number protests this, and attempts to protect him, this white person then becomes not only worse than a nigger, he becomes a traitor—a reproach—and the two, the black and the white, are dispatched together.

  It is impossible for a black man, here, not to anticipate, endlessly, disaster at the hands of his countrymen. The result is that he is always looking around him at people who do not know, or dare not know, what he is thinking, people who have been rendered incapable of seeing him. I listen to what white people say and, still more, to what they don’t say. I must: my life may depend on what I hear: I cannot afford to be surprised.

  This means that, in the generality, everything a white man says to a black man is a confession, though the white man never knows it. Sometimes I sing because I’m happy, true, and sometimes I sing because I’m free: but sometimes I sing because it is so grinding down to spend one’s life listening to confessions.

  My call was announced, and I paid the man and started for the gate—which turned out to be several miles away. But I got there, and stood on line with the others. We were all, now, in limbo, having surrendered our autonomy with our luggage.

  The line was moving though, thank God, and I walked on the plane and took my seat at the window. I opened my magazine, closed it, fastened my seat belt, watched the people as they entered what might prove to be our last vehicle. One never thinks of that when getting into a car, or boarding a train, not even when getting on a boat—though the water is as terrible as the air. Still, one hopes, in the water, to be able to grab something, something floating, which will allow one to hold on to life a little longer—long enough, maybe, to be saved: but there is nothing at all in the air.

  I realized these, perhaps, were not the happiest thoughts to be holding while waiting for a takeoff. The people all were seated. There were consultations at the cabin door. Then the girl pulled the door down, and locked it. The plane moved slowly away from the gate.

  Slowly at first, then faster, then too fast for the earth. I am always fascinated by that point of no return, when the speed of the plane means fire or air. We rose into the air. The landing gear stowed itself away with a thump. San Francisco careened below us—buildings with flat roofs, buildings with towers, houses, freeways, poles and wires, bridges, and the water—looking as vulnerable as a child’s game. Then clouds whispered alongside the plane, then dropped beneath it. San Francisco vanished. Then we were above the clouds, in a blue and golden air, on the great white plains of heaven. We seemed alone up here.

  The NO SMOKING sign blinked off, I lit a cigarette. I did not feel like reading my magazine. I looked out of the window, imagining myself an explorer in this dread, silent, utterly limitless space. Then I thought of that incredible army of men and women who had built the cities and towns and houses beneath me, who had crossed this continent on foot, looking up at the clouds for rain, watching the sky for vultures. An incredible moment in the history of our race, but they had lied about the price, and had brought to the savage an unprecedented savagery. The red-skinned tribes were right: the land is not to be bought or sold. The blacks were right: a man is not to be used as a thing. The tom-tom and the smoke signal and the talking drums are true, and the gods are many.

  Black models had begun appearing just about everywhere then, and I leafed through my magazine, seeing a blade face here, a black face there, advertising the same shit that I was paid to advertise. (I didn’t think too much about the implications of my job. I didn’t dare. I treated it as a game that I was playing, a necessary game. To have treated it any other way might have precipitated a nervous breakdown.)

  Anyway, the kids were making a quarter, and that might hold off the holocaust for a time. They smiled, looking sultry, looking boyish, smoking this and drinking that—as though they had been doing this all their lives. (And they had been doing this all their lives.)

  I came to a full-page ad of a lady holding a wineglass. Her thick black hair was cut short, in bangs, she wore hoop earrings, great circles which gleamed like gold, and a very tight, low-cut black gown; her long, large, Egyptian eyes seemed to hold an urgent message: not the message of the ad, which read (the wineglass was extended) Try this. It will make you feel better.

  With a great shock, I realized that I was looking at a photograph of Julia. It had to be Julia, or her twin, and Julia didn’t have a twin. It had to be Julia, or I was going mad.

  I looked at the ad for a long time. I studied it. The girl was thin, almost to the point of being skinny, but she wasn’t flat-chested, and her legs were long—one leg was visible through a slit in the gown—and, yes, Julia would look like that now. The pose was sultry, seductive—she was advertising an aperitif—but there was the very faintest hint, around the lips, of Julia’s tomboy grin. And the eyes—they were excessively madeup, but there was a lot in those eyes: yes, Julia could look like that now.

  Where the devil was she? We hadn’t heard from them in a long time. Florence’s friend, down yonder, had become more and more laconic. We knew that Julia had recovered— with astonishing speed, in fact, but that was like her. We knew that Jimmy seemed to be all right, going to school and working. When Crunch returned, he had gone to visit her, but he had not stayed there long. Officially, even at this point in time, I knew nothing about Crunch and Arthur, but, perhaps inevitably, they had broken up: Arthur’s life was carrying him far beyond Crunch’s orbit. I think that the breakup was devastating for Arthur, but he never spoke about it, and so, neither could I speak.

  I think that Crunch did not know how to deal with Arthur, or how to deal with the implications in his life as a man of having a male lover. It would have been simp
ler if he had simply managed to stop loving him: but, though Billie is right about love being like a faucet and being off, sometimes, when you think it’s on, it is also true that, sometimes, the faucet won’t turn off.

  Crunch was still in New York, working in a school for delinquent boys, and had one girl friend after another. Red was on the needle. Peanut had hit the Civil Rights road.

  I had not yet been south. I told myself that I didn’t believe in nonviolence, but this objection had long ago become meaningless. Arthur had been, several times, often with Peanut. I didn’t want him to go, but I couldn’t stop him. I was beginning to realize that it would, finally, be simpler for me to go with him rather than sit in New York, chewing my nails and dreading each television announcement and each phone call. But it was hard for me to get away. So, though I avoided thinking about the implications of my job, I knew, at bottom, that I was about to be forced into painful confrontations, and I was going to have to make some changes.

  But my mind went back to Julia. She, who had wanted to get to New Orleans armed to protect and deliver her brother, had instead been carried there, helpless, victim of the father she had so adored—victim of their father: I wondered how much Jimmy knew.

  Joel had disappeared, for us, anyway. I wondered if he had any contact with his children.

  I closed the magazine, and put it in my case.

  I got her phone number from the agency—they were looking for her, too. She lived in a loft on East 18th Street, on the top floor. I think I remember three brownstone steps, up from the street, heavy banisters, of some gray, ornately worked metal, double doors leading into the vestibule, mailboxes and doorbells on either side, no intercom.

  I rang her bell—JULIA MILLER/JAMES MILLER—and the inside door buzzed open, and I began to climb the stairs.

  From way above me: “Hall?”

  “It’s me, child, just a-huffin’ and a-puffin.’ ”