Just Above My Head Read online

  Tony leans on the car, watching me.

  “Tony—didn’t me and your mother raise you right? didn’t I—we—tell you, a long time ago, not to believe in labels?”

  He looks away from me. Then, “Yes. You did.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What did you think of your uncle?”

  He looks down; unwillingly, he smiles.

  “I thought he was a crazy, beautiful cat.” He looks at me. “I loved him—that’s why—” Tears drip from his nose; he throws his head back. “I just wanted you to tell me,” he says.

  I do not dare to touch him, for fear that I will weep. Odessa calls, “Come in you all—food’s getting cold!” We hear the door slam. We stand there. Tony is nearly as tall as I.

  “Well,” I say, “thank you for asking me,” and we walk on back around the house.

  We enter the room, which is now very different. The hi-fi is silent. Julia has placed two tall white candles on the low table, but she has not lit them yet. The table is a darkly varnished, gleaming board, with dark placemats—seeds of some kind, dried and polished, and tightly woven together—copper mugs, heavy wooden pepper-and-salt containers, two great wooden bowls with wooden spoons and forks, one flat wooden platter. There is a salad of raw spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, and radishes in one bowl, a fiery pale potato salad in the other bowl. The mahogany ribs are on the mahogany platter. There is a small bowl of very hot African peppers, smoldering green and red, a wicker basket full of hot buttered rolls, and Coca-Cola, red wine, and beer.

  The table is in the center of the room, with bright cushions all around it. One wall is a bookcase. The facing wall is mainly a great picture window, overlooking the small space of shrubs and gravel which separates Julia’s house from her neighbors’. There is a wooden African deity standing in a corner near the door; on either side of the door are two small windows—which had once been too high for the children to see out of—overlooking the yard. The room leads, two steps down, to a long hall which leads to two bedrooms, and the bathroom, the kitchen, the den, the front door, the front porch (of the red brick steps) and the basement. The rooms which Arthur and Jimmy occupied are upstairs.

  Julia is seated at the bottom of the table, her back to the door, and to the small, upright piano in the corner opposite the African deity. On top of this piano are photographs of Arthur, Julia, and myself, and smaller photographs of Ruth, and of Tony and Odessa—when they were five and seven—and a photograph of Jimmy.

  I sit at the head of the table, Ruth on my left, the children on my right. The cushion next to Julia is empty.

  “Let us say grace,” says Julia, “silently, each in his own way,” and we bow our heads. “Amen,” she says, after a moment. “Now let’s get it on, kids!” and we all laugh.

  The room is different because Tony and I have talked, and the burden which has weighed on me so heavily and so long has begun, almost imperceptibly, to lift. I hardly know that this is what I feel; but this is what I feel. I almost want to sing, and the salads and the ribs and the peppers and the bread and the wine are delicious. The light coming through the window begins to be a kind of fiery mother-of-pearl. Except for the eating sounds and the sound of wood striking lightly against wood—a somehow breathless sound—the room is silent.

  Odessa has tied a yellow ribbon in her hair, and knotted it in the hair at the nape of her neck, allowing the ribbon to fall down her back. And she is wearing a pale blue jump suit. Tony is wearing brown corduroys and scuffed shit-kickers and an outsize gray sweater, and he could use a haircut—I think, I have no idea what his plans are for his hair. Anyway, I’m certainly not much of an example, in my old black turtleneck and old blue jeans.

  Tony looks at me for a moment, and smiles; a different smile than he has ever smiled before.

  “Guess who I ran into the other day,” says Julia. Then, “No. You’ll never guess—old Red! You remember Red!”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Red was part of the quartet years ago: Red, Peanut, Crunch, and Arthur.

  “Yes. I was just coming out of Bloomingdale’s. I had to go there to get something for one of my nephews—I was standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and here come this dude, wearing that same old stingy brim—I swear it’s the same one—and he stops in front of me. My mind was somewhere else, I knew somebody was standing in front of me, but I didn’t even notice him until he called my name. So low, like he was saying it to himself—’Sister Julia?’ Why, whoever says Sister, now, except the radicals? and he didn’t look like that. I don’t know what I started to say, but I looked into his eyes, and suddenly, there he was—old Red!”

  Arthur had been fifteen-sixteen, Red had been seventeen-eighteen, when they sang together. Their quartet—The Trumpets of Zion—didn’t get too for before the hammer of Korea smashed it; but it had been a good quartet, very heavy in the churches, and in battles of song; and they were, really, very nice boys, crazy though they were.

  Red was built close to the ground—square; with hair that turned sandy in the summertime; and with freckles, like the pricks of needles, dotting his copper skin. He had big square teeth, and a nice grin—and, if I remember correctly—since I am now approaching that head-on collision between not daring to remember and hoping to remember—unwillingly, remembering: he sang bass. That was, certainly, his quality, not low, but deep.

  The quartet broke up, the boys scattered. Arthur went solo, Arthur became a star! Crunch went mad, Peanut was murdered, and Red: became a junkie. To spell it out a little, he was thrown into prison for a crime he hadn’t committed, then was thrown into the army, and then his ass was hustled to Korea, and he got hooked, as one of the more esteemed of the American lyricists would put it, over there. I saw him just after he came back from over there. He had barely had time to learn to wipe himself, and was already on his way over yonder. His doom, and, still more, his pretense that it was nothing more than a heavy cold, made me despise him. It was many years ago; watching Red was like watching a one-armed man on the basketball court. I hope I’ve learned since then, and I hope I’ll be forgiven.

  “Who’s Red?” asks Odessa.

  “Your uncle Arthur used to sing with him,” says Julia. “They were part of a quartet—a long time ago, before you got here, baby.”

  “Before I met your father,” Ruth says.

  But Odessa has very little interest in whatever is rumored to have happened on the other side of the flood. She accepts Ruth’s before I met your father without flinching, armed with her knowledge of biology. Obviously, she is thinking, as I gather from an impatient movement of the yellow ribbon, her father and her mother must have met somewhere, or she—nor, of course, her brother, whom she now stares at rather disdainfully—would not be here.

  “How is Red?” I ask.

  “Oh.” The one earring moves briefly, like a tear thrown backward, out of the corner of the eye. “He is trying, honey, he is trying. He walked me to the Automat close by. I didn’t really have the time, except, sometimes, you better have the time, and he sat me down. We had a cup of coffee.”

  She chews on a rib, her dark eyes seeing something. “He’s just come out of jail—armed robbery, not the first time—and now he’s on that methadone program and he’s trying to work with children in the streets. But no matter what you do, they’re still in the streets. And methadone kills you, too, you’re still a junkie—just maybe a little more lobotomized, a good junkie, and they can do whatever the fuck they want with you—I mean, Red knows it’s a bullshit tip. But, it’s just like he said to me— what else you going to do?’ He’s trying,” She pauses again, and sips her wine. “His wife, Lorna, she’s gone, and she took the two boys. He says he knows she was right—but you can see how bad it hurt him. He says he don’t really have no reason to live—just keeping on because he’s afraid to die. Or because there are so many people he’d like to kill—slowly, so they suffer, and so they’ll have the time to know
why you killing them— looking in their eyes the whole time, while death comes closer and they find out why. Yes. Now, he says, he understands the songs he was singing, way back there—but he can’t sing no more, and he don’t want to, anyway.” She looks at Tony and Odessa. “He was a real good friend of your uncle’s,” she says, in quite another tone of voice, a tone of voice which makes it all real for them suddenly, “when we were all children, when I was a preacher.” She grins at me, that child’s grin. “Don’t believe I understood my sermons, either; might just be beginning to understand them now. Lord. Have mercy.”

  “How old were you when you were a preacher?” Odessa asks.

  “You knew she was a preacher,” says Tony impatiently.

  “Yes,” says Odessa—not to Tony—”but how old were you?”

  “Well,” says Julia, sounding very dry, “I was—called—when I was seven, and I stayed in the pulpit until I was almost fourteen.”

  “What made you leave?” asks Tony.

  “The passage of time,” says Julia, and laughs. “The natural passage of time.” Then, “No. I found out something about love. Or I might have turned into a junkie.” She looks at Ruth, and me. “But one of the reasons I didn’t—maybe the only one—was that I was so afraid that Jimmy would. He had a bad enough time, being the little brother of a child evangelist.” She grins at Tony and Odessa. “Oh. Honey, in my heyday, Billy Graham wouldn’t of come nowhere near the town I was going to preach in. Who?” Then she grins at me. “We had it locked up there for a while, now didn’t we? And it had us locked up, too.”

  “I didn’t want to say that.”

  “Oh, come on, Hall—you grinning now just like you used to grin back then.” She turns to Tony and Odessa again: Tony is delighted. “Only then, we didn’t call him Hall. We didn’t say it, because we didn’t dare—I don’t know why—but we thought of him as Ha! We used to say, ‘You see Mister Ha back there with his Ha? Just wait till the Lord, He puts a ha! on him’—because that’s the way he always looked at you—like he just couldn’t understand none of this foolishness at all!”

  “I was much older than all of you,” I say.

  “Ha!” says Julia, and Ruth and the children laugh. “I got pictures of that quartet,” Julia says. “I’ll get them after supper.”

  Julia’s den is her secret place—in the biblical sense; and no one enters it without being asked. I have been there a few times. Arthur was there more often. It is a meditation room, says Julia, and that’s not bullshit. You feel a concentration of human passion in the room; which holds, otherwise, two tape recorders, many books, all kinds of books, from Foxe’s Martyrs to Valley of the Dolls—”they’re connected,” says Julia—several Bibles, hymnbooks. On one wall above a baby grand piano: a tambourine, a desk, a typewriter, a chair, and a cot.

  But we do not go into the den tonight, perhaps out of consideration for the children. After we have had hot apple pie with ice cream, and after Julia and Ruth and I have had coffee—and Tony and Odessa abstractedly play a game of cards which they appear to be inventing—Julia goes into the den alone, and comes back with two large folders. I have seen many of these photographs already, but not for many years: perhaps I have half hoped, knowing the hope to be futile, never to see them again.

  We make ourselves comfortable on the cushions, on the floor. Julia sits with one knee up, a cigarette in one hand. She is at once present and very far away, and with a beauty I have seen only in those who have been forced to suffer into, and beyond, astonishment. This beauty is terrifying because it cannot be denied and it cannot be possessed; while utterly at the mercy of the human being, it is beyond all human help.

  Julia opens one folder. “Some of these are just me,” she says, “but your daddy will remember some of them. Some, I hardly remember myself. The people who take the pictures, sometimes they remember better than you do. But The Trumpets and me, we used to work a lot of churches together.” She looks up, and smiles. “Because we was all so young. Had we had us a decent manager, we might have got a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.” She laughs. “I’m glad we didn’t, though.”

  “But then, Red might not have turned into a junkie,” Tony says. Then, after a moment, looking briefly at me, as though willing himself to test everything, awaiting the reaction to what is, in fact, a question: “And my uncle might not have died.”

  Julia looks at him, and does not attempt to evade the unspoken accusation. “There are lots of ways to be a junkie. At least, Red knows he’s a junkie. And, since he knows it, he might recover.”

  Tony and Julia watch each other very carefully, and Odessa watches them both. Ruth leans against the wall, watching Julia, a faint smile on her face.

  “It’s like we used to say in the church, and it’s still true—the sinner can’t be saved unless he knows he’s a sinner. And you surrounded by junkies, child. This is a nation of sleepwalkers, and they can’t wake up.” She reaches out, and touches Tony’s face, lightly. “And death comes, baby, that’s all. It’s best, when death comes, that he wrap his arms around you, and take you with him. Death can strike you, and leave you grinning where you are—like a skeleton with clothes on. It’s happening around us every day. You just look around you, when you walk out tomorrow morning.”

  Tony and Odessa are still, hypnotized, not so much by what she is saying as they are by the passion in her tobacco voice. “Your uncle and death walked off together, arm in arm. Death didn’t despise your uncle, because your uncle never despised life. Don’t grieve.” She taps a page. “Look.”

  We look down at the child Julia in her long robe, her crocheted white cap on her head—how well I remember!—standing in the pulpit, before an enormous open Bible. Behind her is a window on which a crucifix is painted; on either side of the child tower vases holding lilies of the valley. The child’s eyes stare upward, her tiny hands flat on the Scriptures.

  “That was one Easter, in Reverend Kelsey’s church, in Brooklyn. I still remember my text, the fairest among ten thousand—and, do you know, that man’s still there? pimping just as bad as ever. But you hardly ever come that far with us.”

  “Oh, come on, Julia! I drove to Philadelphia, and to Washington, lots of times.”

  “Yes. But that was later.”

  “How old were you then?” asks Odessa.

  “Then? Oh, I was about nine years old. There I am, again, with my mother and daddy, and Jimmy—but these ain’t the pictures we want to be looking at—”

  “Wait a minute.” Tony asks, and holds the page, forcing us to look at a very pretty woman—and, yes, I remember, Julia’s mother looked like that—wearing a hat perched forward over one eye, in the fashion of the forties, wearing a bolero jacket over a white blouse, and a tight-fitting skirt. She is holding a proud, grinning Julia by the hand, and here, Julia is bareheaded, with her hair curled, and with a ribbon in her hair, wearing a white middy blouse and a black pleated skirt, and those flat patent-leather shoes which button on the side. She looks happy enough to burst, and her joy is so intense that it blazes up at us—and especially at me—from thirty years away, causing Tony to mutter “Wow,” and Odessa to look quickly from the photograph to Julia, and say nothing. Julia’s father and mother stand hand in hand, and I remember this very handsome dude, his wide grin, his sharp mustache, his modified zoot suit, and his dark, open-necked shirt. He is holding Jimmy by the hand. Jimmy is about three years old, on sturdy legs, in short pants. His father is holding him by the hand, but Jimmy seems to be leaning forward, willing them out of the frame; his eyes are huge, and he is smiling.

  “Jimmy and his father never really got along,” Julia says, and turns the page. “No more than me and my mother,” and she looks at Ruth, and both women smile.

  Julia keeps turning pages, ruthlessly, and yet with a certain tenderness, shuffling beyond the images of her family, her relatives, the hieroglyphics spelling out the root, and the beginning, of her sorrow. We come to a photograph of Red, Peanut, Crunch, and Arthur, singing somewh
ere, incredibly young, uplifted, Crunch grinning, and holding the guitar. Their hair is slicked and curly, their foreheads, noses, teeth, gleam. The fairest among ten thousand. “Look at them,” Julia murmurs. “I always think they’re singing ‘Sweet Hour of Prayer.’ ” I have no idea what song they’re singing, on their way to glory; nothing has yet hit them hard enough to flatten the nose, close the eye, turn the lips into hamburger and ketchup. Crunch had all his teeth then; but for years before he was carried away, the two front teeth were missing. A cop had kicked them out, a black cop; and because it was a black cop who had attempted to destroy him, Crunch never had his teeth replaced. He could have; he was into every hustle, he was smart, and he was ruthless. But, no: he wanted black people to see what black people did to black people: White man couldn’t touch us if we’d just learn to love each other!

  This didn’t help him to love either his women, or his woman.

  One morning, fucking, he realized that the devil had got inside his woman, and was pulling on his prick, and he tried to beat the devil out of her. He didn’t reach the devil, neighbors broke down the door and pulled him off and out of her, and carried him away. They had to carry her away, too, poor girl, nobody’s ever seen her since, not, anyway, to recognize. Crunch is still alive, somewhere upstate.

  Now, on facing pages, we come across two photographs of Arthur and Julia together. The first photograph is long ago. Julia is in her white robe and her white cap. Arthur is in a black suit and white shirt and black tie, and his hair is shining and curly.

  The second photograph is much later, of Arthur and Julia at a party somewhere. Arthur’s hair has gone back to natural, he is wearing a tight blue suit with a Chinese collar, and a heavy gold chain around his neck, and a heavy gold ring on the middle finger of his right hand. I know that Jimmy has the ring now, and that anyone who wants the ring will have to take the finger; I don’t know what happened to the chain. This photograph was taken when Arthur was riding high. I remember the suit and I recognize the gold, and, still more, Arthur’s proud and carefree grin, his head so high. He holds Julia around the waist; Julia, with her hair piled high, silver flashing at her ears and neck, wearing a low-cut, flaring evening gown, a cigarette in one hand and a champagne glass in the other, laughing, and very, very beautiful.