Just Above My Head Read online

  There was no answer. The place was empty. There was a kerosene lamp burning low on a shelf above the latrine, and I picked this up, uselessly, and looked around the place. Yes, it was empty. I even held the light above the deep, stinking hole.

  “Look,” said Arthur. His face was absolutely bloodless, his eyes were black, his lips seemed parched, his voice was as rough as sand.

  He was pointing to the floor. I leaned down, and picked up the green notebook with the yellow metal clasp. I knew at once that it was Peanut’s, but I opened it anyway, and looked at his name, in his somewhat florid handwriting, handwriting more elaborate and self-conscious than one would have imagined Peanut to be: Alexander Theophilus Brown, and his Washington address, and the address of Red’s mother in New York.

  I looked up at Arthur and Mr. Elkins.

  “He was here,” I said. I don’t know why I said that.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Elkins. “He was here.”

  His face was—indescribable: the way a man might look when pinned beneath a boulder.

  I remember, no one said anything. We heard human voices, far away.

  Mr. Elkins moved to the door of the outhouse, and leaned there for a moment. Arthur moved past him, into the darkness, screaming, Peanut! Peanut! at the top of his lungs. I came out of the outhouse, holding the kerosene lamp, looking in the direction Arthur had gone—I could no longer see him. After a moment, I yelled, “Arthur! Come back! Come back!”

  The sounds of our voices were beginning to change the sounds of the other voices: they began to respond to the note of alarm, of terror, and some people began moving toward us. I was suddenly certain that Arthur, too, had been swallowed up, and I screamed his name again, again, and again, until I saw him come loping toward me. He looked into my face, and put his hand on my arm—we were both trembling.

  From the outhouse door, Mr. Elkins asked, “How long had he been gone before you missed him?”

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “Not long—five minutes, maybe, not more than ten.”

  “He just said he was going to the bathroom?”

  “Yes, sir.” Then, after a moment, “Of course I didn’t know where the bathroom was.”

  Mr. Elkins sighed a mighty sigh, and moved from the door. “Well. Look like, some other folks did.” He paused. I sensed him fighting himself, his terror, surprise, and pain, fighting himself upward to a place where he could begin to act. “They couldn’t have been waiting for him—must just have seen him run in there.” He looked around, helplessly, at the dark wilderness which surrounded us. “We had just about raised the money for an indoor toilet.”

  I looked up. We were surrounded by people—by black people. They stared at us with a grave, frightened, solemn sympathy, loath to ask the question the answer to which would torment their sleep—the answer might make sleep impossible for many days and nights.

  Mrs. Elkins asked, “What’s happened, Herb? Where’s Mr. Brown?”

  “We don’t know,” said Mr. Elkins.

  I said, “We found his notebook in the latrine,” and I held it up, as though to prove something, I don’t know why.

  “Let’s look in the church again,” she said.

  I said, “I already did.”

  A man’s voice said, “There ain’t nobody in the church now, sister. The church is empty. I believe it’s already been locked up.”

  As though to prove this, the church lights now went out. A high, triumphant, rebel laugh came from the motorists and the cyclists. They were preparing to move out.

  Mrs. Elkins looked toward them with a face which might have been present when bitterness was first distilled.

  “Won’t do no good, but let’s ask them anyhow,” she said, and we started across the road, Mr. Elkins in the lead.

  We stopped at the first trooper we saw, the nearest one. He stood there with his arms folded, smiling, chewing gum.

  His buddies, at some distance, stopped whatever they were doing, and listened—every once in a while, there was a muffled laugh, and, intermittently, that high-pitched rebel squeal of a laugh.

  “Officer,” said Mr. Elkins, “we’re missing one of our party, and we wonder if you might have seen him”—and he described Peanut, very well, under the hideous circumstances, the trooper smiling, and chewing gum the while.

  “No. Can’t say I seen anybody answering that description.”

  Laughter, whispers, in the background, a sense of something lewd.

  The trooper facing us grinned, and licked his lips.

  “All I can tell you, he might have found some more attractive company—happens all the time with young black bucks. Go on home, he’ll show up in the morning, more dead than alive, probably won’t be able to move for a couple of days.”

  He laughed, and his buddies laughed with him.

  I was standing next to Mr. Elkins, and I felt his trembling as I felt my own. It was not fear, or, if it was fear, it was the fear of madness—of suddenly turning into something as total as an earthquake, as vicious as a plague. What would I not have given at that moment to have been able to pierce those bright blue eyes with red-hot needles, clogged the nostrils with boiling tar, poured cement in his asshole, cut his prick off at the tip, hacked off one, and one only, of his feet, and one, only one, of his hands, and then not killed him, no: set him free to wander this wide world until he learned what anguish was! Or, it was fear, yes, it was fear, fear that one word, one gesture, one whispered nuance of mine would set him free to kill my brother, and all the others standing there. I sweated, trembled, sweated, I could not bear that Mr. Elkins say another word to him, I held my peace but could not prevent myself from saying, with the most hideous grin I could manage, the vindictiveness of which must have nearly penetrated even that thick skull, “Well, we surely thanks you for your kindness, Cap’n, believe me, we won’t never forget it. Won’t never forget it, you can believe that. I sure hope I live long enough to see the Lord pour down His blessings on your head.” I took Mr. Elkins’s arm, and we moved away. “Good night, Cap’n. Good night, all.” At least, for a moment, with his mouth open, he hadn’t chewed his gum.

  We got into the car. “What we do now?” I asked Mr. Elkins.

  “We go to the police station,” he said. “Lord, why didn’t I take those crackers’ names?”

  “Hush,” said Mrs. Elkins. “Don’t start that, it ain’t going to do no good. Wouldn’t have mattered what names they give you. They got as many names as Satan.”

  And we went to the police station, we spent days at the police station. The captain was a little more urbane than his men, but that only made it worse, and it made him worse than his men. We put ads in papers, we ransacked Georgia: but we never saw Peanut again.

  That blow, the loss of Peanut, seemed to have the effect of fragmenting each of us where we stood, and, fragmented, we scattered everywhere. His grandmother took the news in silence, but never left her apartment again. Within three months, worn out with waiting for his return, she set out to find him. Red’s mother found her lying on the floor of her kitchen, fully dressed, her suitcase packed and standing beside her, her keys in her hand.

  Red was nowhere to be found. After the funeral, Red’s mother packed up, too, and went back to live among her remaining relatives, in Tennessee. She was not old, just a little past fifty, but, after Peanut’s disappearance, her graying hair turned white, her skin turned dry. “I’d like to laugh again, one day,” she told me the last time I saw her. “Peanut used to know how to make me laugh.” She didn’t mention Red, or leave any address for him.

  Arthur went west, and then, from Seattle, back to Canada, and then, for the first time, to London, and visited, for the first time, Paris, Geneva, and Rome. His postcards were laconic, and I sensed in him a new note—dry, wary, bitter. It’s lonely as a mother out here, he wrote, but maybe that’s the best way for it to be. Can’t nobody hurt you if they can’t get close to you. But this formula was not entirely satisfactory: Love must be the rarest, most precious t
hing on earth, brother, where is it hiding? I knew that he was already being pressured to “branch out” from Gospel, and that he was warily considering this.

  In those days, I had no particular feeling about the kind of music Arthur sang. It seemed to me that this was entirely Arthur’s affair, and I was not to make certain connections until I saw these connections menaced: perhaps nothing is more elusive than the obvious. Then I was worried about Arthur’s private tally sheet, what he made of what time had done to his friends. Red was out of it, he never saw Crunch anymore, Peanut was gone—was almost certainly dead: they had all sung the Lord’s song together. Julia was more mine, perhaps, than his, but she was, nevertheless, unanswerably, also his: I received cryptic communications from her, from time to time, from Abidjan, where, it seemed to me, she could not possibly be happy. But I did not dare think too much about her, I kept her outside. I never saw Jimmy. I supposed that he was still on 18th Street, and, every once in a while, I thought of calling him, but I never did.

  I left the agency and took the job in the advertising department of the black magazine: and, though my circumstances there were far more agreeable, and I no longer had to deal with that wretched creep Faulkner, it was, really, in essence, the same job, and I knew I was not happy. But I didn’t know if my unhappiness was due to the job, or the loss of Julia, or was just, simply, due to me. I felt—unused, therefore, useless, and I felt unwanted, I felt, as the song puts it, so unnecessary.

  But I, like a multitude of others, got up in the morning and took the subway to work, hacked myself through my working day, even finding small, utterly superficial satisfactions in that day, in the work, and in a kind of provisional camaraderie. I knew that the real reason I got on well with my co-workers was that I was able, but not ambitious; didn’t care enough to scheme for advancement, threatened nobody’s job. I was marking time, but, on the other hand, time wasn’t marking time; time was moving. And, in a few years, if I didn’t contrive to rise, I would inexorably descend, and the camaraderie of my co-workers—and my superiors—would be stained with contempt and pity. I knew that I could never bear that, and I would, then, furthermore, be over the hill.

  I could never, at bottom, take advertising seriously. I felt it as demeaning. It seemed to me to be really a shell game, based squarely on the sucker principle. One could scarcely respect the people who went for all this okeydoke, who were, indeed, addicted to it. The sense of life with which advertising imbued them—or vice versa—made reality, or the truth of life, unbearable, threatening, and, at last, above all, unreal: they preferred the gaudy image, which they imagined to be under their control. Thus, they entered the voting booth as blindly cheerful and incoherent as they were at the supermarket, reaching out for the “brand” name, the name, that is, which had been most ruthlessly and successfully sold to them. They did not know, and did not dare to know, what was in the package: it had been “guaranteed,” and everybody else was buying it. True, there were occasional scandals, moments which might cause one to suspect that the public confidence had been abused: but the noise of scandal was swiftly conquered by the sprightly music of the next commercial. The music of the commercial simply reiterates the incredible glories of this great land, and one learns, through advertising, that it is, therefore, absolutely forbidden to the American people to be gloomy, private, tense, possessed; to stink, even a little, at any time; to grow gray, to wrinkle, to be sexless; to have unsmiling children; to be lusterless of eye, hair, or teeth; to be flabby of breast, belly, or bottom; to be gloomy, to know despair, or to embark on any adventure whatever without the corroboration of the friendly mob. Love, here, demands no down payment, though it must have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and, though love may be driven from Eden, it is only so that it may “mature” among friendly neighbors. This stupefying ode to purity has pornographic undertones: consider the classic hair-ad which has the portrait of a lady in the foreground and a naked infant in the background. The legend reads, hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure! The legend is a dirty street-joke, and has reference to the lady’s pubic hair: but the presence of the baby washes the legend clean. The infant’s presence informs us that this is, indeed, a lady, a married one at that, and a mother, and her husband has nothing to fear from her hairdresser—who, probably, furthermore, like all hairdressers, is a faggot. Faggots, of course, never appear in this technicolored bazaar, except as clowns, or as the doomed victims of their hideous lusts, and it goes without saying that here, death shall have no dominion.

  Much later, I was to realize that my discomfort was due to the fact that I was operating far, too far, beneath my level; or, in other words, I had more to give than was being demanded and I was being weighed down by the residue. I was also realizing that, though people endlessly fool themselves, they cannot really be fooled: what you really feel shines through you. So, my co-workers, and my superiors, in spite of the camaraderie, sensed my real attitude toward advertising, and, therefore, toward them, and distrusted me—soon, inevitably, they would dislike me. I could not blame them, for, if my attitude toward advertising as concerned the great, white, faceless mass was, at best, ironic, my attitude toward advertising as concerned black people was very painfully ambivalent. I felt that black people had a sense of reality far more solid and arresting than the bubble-gum context in which we operated—though I had days, God knows, when I wondered about this, too.

  But who was I, anyway, after all, to have an attitude? I was doing the same thing, in the same office, and for the same reason: we had to eat. And we were expected to be aware, too, that the presence of blacks in advertising was a major sociological breakthrough. Was it? for our breakthroughs seemed to occur only on those levels where we were most speedily expendable and most easily manipulated. And a “breakthrough” to what? I was beginning to be wary of these breakthroughs, was not certain that I wanted a lifetime pass to Disneyland. On the other hand, here we were, and you can’t have your cake and eat it, too: we would simply have to find a way to use, and survive and transcend this present breakthrough the same way we had survived so many others.

  But this is not the best possible attitude for the salesman to take toward the people who buy the stuff he sells.

  Arthur called me from Paris, to say that he would be coming home in a few days, and he hoped that I would be able to take time off to go south with him. He had been haunted throughout his journey, everywhere he’d been—I could hear this in his voice, and I, too, was haunted.

  “It’s not just Peanut,” he said, “but all of it, the whole terrible scene. And I just have the feeling that if I don’t go back right away, I never will go back and—well, I just don’t think I want to let it go down like that.”

  I could see the truth in that, and I told him so. I wasn’t sure about getting time off, but I’d begin working on that question right away. I asked him if he wanted me to meet him at the airport.

  “No, don’t bother. I’ll get a cab, and go on home and drop my things. Then I’ll call you and we’ll take it from there.”

  I knew he had sung in a club in London, and sat in with some musicians in a club in Paris. “How did it go?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know, really. I think it went all right, but it was strange.” Then, “I dug it, though, I think I’m learning. And I think the people dug it, although”—and he laughed again—”I don’t know exactly what it was they dug. But they were nice.”

  “Good, then. See you in a minute.”

  “Right, brother. Love you.”

  “Love you, too. Right on.”

  “Ciao.”

  “Ciao, bambino.”

  Arthur hangs up the phone, after talking to me, and walks to the window of his hotel room. This is a long, French window, and it opens on a small stone balcony. He is in a small hotel on the quai St.-Michel, and his room faces the river. He had called me at work, at three P.M., my time: it is nine P.M. for him. He has not yet eaten supper and he has no one to eat with and he has been
alone all day but he is not, as he might be, depressed. He had liked walking around Paris alone. It is his first time in France, and he speaks no French, and, yet, strangely, he feels more at ease in Paris than he had felt in London.

  He watches the lights in the dark and gleaming water, the orderly procession of lights on the farther bank. It is a chilly night, yet the people walk at a more deliberate pace than is common in New York. In Paris, he feels free to be an outsider, to watch; nothing in Paris really reminds him of home, in spite of the disastrous French attempts to imitate the American scene. These imitations, though, are so blatant that they cannot possibly elicit anything resembling nostalgia, and anyway, he has not been away from home long enough for that. Here he feels free, more free than he has ever been, anywhere; and, though he has yet to realize this consciously, this freedom is very largely due to the fact that he moves in almost total silence. His vocabulary exists almost entirely in his fingers and in his eyes: he is forced to throw himself on the good nature of the French and he will never, luckily, live here long enough to be forced to put this good nature to any test.

  And if he cannot speak, neither can others speak to him, and he cannot even eavesdrop. He has no way of understanding what they are saying, therefore, it does not matter what they are saying: in the resulting silence, he drops his guard.

  He could never have done this in New York, where all his senses were always alert for danger, or in London, which was exasperating because it spoke a foreign language which sounded, superficially, like his own. But they were saying different things in London, or they were saying the same things in a different way. His efforts to break the code exhausted him.

  But nothing is demanded of him in Paris. In Paris, he is practically invisible—practically, free.

  He soaps and washes his face, combs his hair, puts a jacket on over his black turtleneck sweater, puts on his overcoat, locks his door behind him, and walks down the two flights of stairs to the tiny, narrow lobby. The concierge, or the night watchman or the owner sits in a cubbyhole not much larger than a closet, all day and all night long. This cubbyhole is next to a short, L-shaped counter; on the wall behind this counter, the room keys hang on a board. The mail is piled high on a desk in the cubbyhole, and, Arthur has noted (he is not expecting any mail) that being given one’s mail demands some patience, the concierge or the watchman or whatever he is, being nearly blind, and unaccustomed to foreign names; indeed, he seems to resent the clear impossibility of pronouncing these barbaric names only slightly less than he resents the fact that his clients get any mail at all. Arthur, not having been guilty of this lapse, or oversight, seems still to be in the guardian’s good graces. At any rate, he nods his head as Arthur places his key on the counter, and says, “Bonsoir, m’sieu,” as Arthur passes the cubbyhole.