Here are a few links I checked out before reading the book
Let's copy and paste our highlights and notes below in the sections. We can tag ourselves as we go, like [Spencer 26/03/20] or something?
Oddly enough—or maybe it isn’t odd at all, I don’t know—I wasn’t frightened; or perhaps I simply didn’t know that I was frightened. I thought, My God, this is no way to play a death scene, the audience would never be able to see me. Then I decided that it was a death scene being played not onstage but on camera and pretended that the camera was placed in the ceiling, just above my head—a huge, long close-up, with lights, and, eventually, music, to heighten my ineffable, dying speech. But I could think of nothing to say, though I turned to Barbara with my mouth wide open.
Looking back on this, it's clear from the beginning that Baldwin's focus on the profession of acting highlights the relationship between a life and its living. We say an actor makes "choices". Leo's life is both a series of choices made by a "natural" actor, and reactions to events that occur without his involvement (beginning with his race).
The sound of my breathing was the only sound there was. My own panic, at once stifling like a cloak, and distant like the wind, made me realize how frightened Barbara was, and how gallant. I would not have liked to change places with her. We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand. I wondered what she was thinking. But I think she was not thinking, not at all. She was concentrated. She was determined not to let me die.
I like the idea of thinking as a choice, and of life not made up of thoughts, but a kind of unconscious determination, concentration.
In panic I looked around the dressing room, my only home. I was still in costume, my street clothes were hanging against the wall. I had not showered, I had not removed my makeup, I had not got my own face back. The face I was wearing itched and burned, I wanted to take it off. My hair was still full of the cream I used to make it gray. I wanted to cry and I looked for help to Pete and Barbara, but they were dumb. What ruin, what relic, were these men in white ripping from its base, and how could Pete and Barbara bear to see me so heartlessly demolished?
I feel very cognizant of the use of colors here. The hair is grey, the men are white. His face is black, but this is implicit in his possessive, "my own face". The idea of the mask as a metaphor for the actor comes to mind. Leo is a master of the mask, of donning new faces when it's necessary to become something that he isn't. The idea of "losing one's self", or purely being, might be akin to an actor getting lost in character, forgetting the mask you're wearing, or perhaps taking off that mask completely.
More oddly still, even as his great hand caused my head to stammer and dropped a flame-colored curtain before my eyes, I understood that he was not striking me. His hand leaped out because he could not help it and I received the blow because I was there. And it happened, sometimes, before I could even catch my breath to howl, that the hand which had struck me grabbed me and held me, and it was difficult indeed to know which of us was weeping. He was striking, striking out, striking out, striking out; the hand asked me to forgive him. I felt his bewilderment through the membrane of my own. I also felt that he was trying to teach me something. And I had, God knows, no other teachers.
It feels important that the hand is anthropomorphized. The hand, not Caleb, hits his face. Again, the sense of control is obscured. The person being hit and the one doing the hitting is merged. This idea of characters and people blending is interesting, and speaks to this overall idea of changing how we think about actions and responsibility. Later in the story Caleb "didn't do it" but he is still jailed. Leo is taught in this moment that people are not naturally free. People play characters that embrace freedom. Things happen.
He came from a race which had been flourishing at the very dawn of the world—a race greater and nobler than Rome or Judea, mightier than Egypt—he came from a race of kings, kings who had never been taken in battle, kings who had never been slaves. He spoke to us of tribes and empires, battles, victories, and monarchs of whom we had never heard—they were not mentioned in our schoolbooks—and invested us with glories in which we felt more awkward than in the secondhand shoes we wore. In the stifling room of his pretensions and expectations, we stumbled wretchedly about, stubbing our toes, as it were, on rubies, scraping our shins on golden caskets, bringing down, with a childish cry, the splendid purple tapestry on which, in pounding gold and scarlet, our destinies and our inheritance were figured. It could scarcely have been otherwise, since a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless. If our father was of royal blood and we were royal children, our father was certainly the only person in the world who knew it.
Stumbled wretchedly, the jewels. I just really love this characterization. It feels ancient, like his father is of a different era.
He made excuses. He apologized. He swore that it would never happen again. (We knew that it would happen again.) He begged for time. Rabinowitz would finally go down the steps, letting us, and all the neighbors, know how good-hearted he was being, and our father would walk into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of rum. But we knew that our father would never have allowed any black man to speak to him as Rabinowitz did, as policemen did, as storekeepers and pawnbrokers and welfare workers did. No, not for a moment—he would have thrown them out of the house; he would certainly have made a black man know that he was not the descendant of slaves! He had made them know it so often that he had almost no friends among them, and if we had followed his impossible lead, we would have had no friends, either. It was scarcely worth-while being the descendant of kings if the kings were black and no one had ever heard of them, and especially, furthermore, if royal status could not fill the empty stomach and could not prevent Rabinowitz from putting, as he eventually did, our collective ass, and all our belongings, on the city streets.
The relationship between black characters and Jewish characters is interesting. I'm not sure what to make of it. Do they consider Rabinowitz to be white?
She was a soft, round, plump woman. She liked nice clothes and dangling jewelry, which she mostly didn’t have, and she liked to cook for large numbers of people, and she loved our father. She knew him—knew him through and through. I am not being coy or colloquial, but bluntly and sadly matter of fact when I say that I will now never know what she saw in him. What she saw was certainly not for many eyes; what she saw got him through his working week and his Sunday rest; what she saw saved him. She saw that he was a man. For her, perhaps, he was a great man. I think, though, that, for our mother, any man was great who aspired to become a man: this meant that our father was very rare and precious.
I like that she "knew him through and through". I'm curious if we will found out what this definition of man is, since we know that his father devolves into alcoholism.
He was happy, odd as his expression of it may sound, to be out with his wife and his two sons. If we had been on the island which had been witness to his birth instead of the unspeakable island of Manhattan, he felt, and I also eventually began to feel, that it would not have been so hard for us all to trust and love each other. He sensed, and I think he was right, that on that other, never to be recovered island, his sons would have looked on him very differently and he would have looked very differently on his sons. Life would have been hard there, too—he knew that—which was why he had left and also why he felt so betrayed, so self-betrayed; we would have fought there, too, and more or less blindly suffered and more or less blindly died. But we would not have been (or so it was to seem to all of us forever) so wickedly menaced by the mere fact of our relationship, would not have been so frightened of entering into the central, most beautiful and valuable facts of our lives.
This is a subtle passage, but it's an interesting way, if I've understood it, to explain Leo's belief that the existence of the family in this place fraught with racism was doomed to begin with. This moves the blame from his father (and mother, where the old women in the subway station might point their fingers) to the system surrounding the family, the structure of society.
The white people would scarcely ever be dressed up, and never as brilliantly as the colored people. They wore just ordinary suits and hats and coats and did not speak to each other at all—only read their papers and stared at the advertisements. But they fascinated me more than the colored people did because I knew nothing at all about them and could not imagine what they were like. Their faces were as strange to me as the faces on the movie posters and the stills, but far less attractive, because, mysteriously, menacing, and, under the ruthless subway light, they were revealed literally, in their true colors, which were not green, red, blue, or purple, but a mere, steady, unnerving, pinkish reddish yellow. I wondered why people called them white—they certainly were not white. Black people were not black either—my father was wrong. Underground, I received my first apprehension of New York neighborhoods, and, underground, first felt what may be called a civic terror. I very soon realized that after the train had passed a certain point, going uptown or downtown, all the colored people disappeared. The first time I realized this, I panicked and got lost. I rushed off the train, terrified of what these white people might do to me with no colored person around to protect me—even to scold me, even to beat me, at least their touch was familiar, and I knew that they did not, after all, intend to kill me; and got on another train only because I saw a black man on it. But almost everyone else was white. The train did not stop at any of the stops I remembered. I became more and more frightened, frightened of getting off the train and frightened of staying on it, frightened of saying anything to the man and frightened that he would get off the train before I could say anything to him. He was my salvation and he stood there in the unapproachable and frightening form that salvation so often takes. At each stop, I watched him with despair.
The use of colors here is striking when placed aside the geography. The passage is especially moving when told from Little Leo's perspective.
I know that, as I grew older, I became tyrannical. I had no choice, my life was in the balance. Whoever went under, it was not going to be me—and I seem to have been very clear about this from the very beginning of my life. To run meant to turn my back—on lions; to run meant the flying tackle which would bring me down; and, anyway, run where? Certainly not to my father and mother, certainly not to Caleb. Therefore, I had to stand. To stand meant that I had to be insane. People who imagine themselves to be, as they put it, in their “right” minds, have no desire to tangle with the insane. They stay far from them, or they ingratiate them. It took me almost no time to realize this. I used what I knew. I knew that what was sport for others was life or death for me. Therefore, I had to make it a matter of life or death for them. Not many are prepared to go so far, at least not without the sanction of a uniform. But this absolutely single-minded and terrified ruthlessness was masked by my obvious vulnerability, my paradoxical and very real helplessness, and it covered my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be born again. What a dream: is it a dream? I don’t know. I know only what happened—if, indeed, I can claim to know that. My pride became my affliction. I found myself imprisoned in the stronghold I had built. The day came when I wished to break my silence and found that I could not speak: the actor could no longer be distinguished from his role.
In my understanding, the "stronghold" he builds is his character. The way Leo explains his evolution to himself is the choice to build a character that stands, one that is insane. This is how he rationalizes choices that don't follow any prescribed pattern. In one sense, his freedom presides in a manic lack of self-control. In another, he is actively working against what he sees as his "helplessness", his lack of control to "stand" that he begins with. Eventually, these characters harmonize. The mask becomes the face.
I stood there, watching people go in, watching people come out. Every once in a while, when the doors opened, I caught a glimpse of the screen —huge, black and silver, moving all the time.
I love this little image of his wonder of the movie screen, burgeoning lust for the magic of film. I want him to go after this metaphor more fully, to push the concept further and make it work for the story.
I stepped out on my stoop again and looked carefully up and down the block. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the Holy Roller church across the street was silent. The rain fell as hard as ever, with a whispering sound—like monstrous old gossips whispering together. The sky could not be seen. It was black.
I think I'm just hypersensitive to the use of these color words at this point, but equating black with being unseen is notable.
Little Leo. Were you scared?” “Yes,” I said. “Were you?” “Damn right, I was scared. But—goddamn!—they must have seen that you weren’t but ten years old.” “You didn’t act scared,” I said. And this was the truth. But I also felt, I don’t know how, nor do I really know why, that I couldn’t let him feel, even for a moment, that I did not adore him, that I did not respect him, love him and admire him. We were in our own block, approaching our stoop. “Well. We certainly have a good excuse for being late,” he said. He grinned. Then he said, “Leo, I’ll tell you something. I’m glad this happened. It had to happen one day and I’m glad it happened now. I’m glad it happened while I was with you—of course, I’m glad you were with me, too, dig, because if it hadn’t been for you, they’d have pulled my ass in and given me a licking just as sure as shit—” “What for?” “Because I’m black,” Caleb said. “That’s what for. Because I’m black and they paid to beat on black asses. But, with a kid your size, they just might get into trouble. So they let us go. They knew you weren’t nothing but a kid. They knew it. But they didn’t care. All black people are shit to them. You remember that. You black like me and they going to hate you as long as you live just because you’re black. There’s something wrong with them. They got some kind of disease. I hope to God it kills them soon.” We started up the steps to our house. “But it’s liable to kill us before it kills them.”
I found this scene of the police stopping Leo and Caleb moving. It feels very real, so much that I assume it's autobiographical. The rest of the book feels less real, and I wish it had this intensity, movement, heartbreak.
Because you’re black. I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I only saw the policemen, those murderous eyes again, those hands, with a touch like the touch of vermin. Were they people? “Caleb,” I asked, “are white people people?” “What are you talking about, Leo?” “I mean—are white people—people? People like us?” He looked down at me. His face was very strange and sad. It was a face I had never seen before. We climbed a few more stairs, very slowly. Then, “All I can tell you, Leo, is—well, they don’t think they are.”
This is a powerful passage, I think, because we're watching Leo's attempt to contemplate this nearly unfathomable (Leo is actually, he says, unable to think) hypocrisy.
“Caleb,” I whispered, “what about Mama?” “What do you mean, what about Mama?” “Well, Mama”—I stared at him; he watched me very gravely. “Mama—Mama’s almost white—” “Almost don’t get it,” Caleb said. I stared at him. “Our mama is almost white,” Caleb said, “but that don’t make her white. You got to be all white to be white.”
Leo learns a kind of racial calculus.
You didn’t take their badge number?” Caleb snickered. “What for? You know a friendly judge? We got money for a lawyer? Somebody they going to listen to? You know as well as me they beating on black ass all the time, all the time, man, they get us in that precinct house and make us confess to all kinds of things and sometimes even kill us and don’t nobody give a damn. Don’t nobody care what happens to a black man. If they didn’t need us for work, they’d have killed us all off a long time ago. They did it to the Indians.”
An offhand comment making a massive point about colonialist force over centuries.
“There’ll be lots of food. Come with me.” “I can’t come with you!” “Why not? I’ve got enough money for a taxi, Leo, honest. And I can borrow some money up there. Really. Come on. You’re not doing anything down here. And you’d be doing me a favor.” She mentioned the taxi because we had had terrible trouble, many times, trying to get through the streets of my hometown together, black and white. Nothing would ever induce us to take a subway again together, for example. But I admired Barbara for her unsentimental clarity. Lots of other girls I had known before her had been very sentimental indeed, and had almost got me killed.
I found the language here interesting, the "unsentimental clarity" of the ruthless facts of racism found plainly in something as common as public transport, something "other girls", assumedly white, simply don't think about.
There were, I am sure, hundreds of people there, and both Barbara and I, in our bright blue, dull dark fashions, were intimidated by them all. They glittered, they flashed, they resounded; they had that air, inimitable absolutely, of those who have succeeded. We recognized many of them, for many of them were famous. I think Sylvia Sidney was there, she was doing a play in New York then; and Franchot Tone; and Bette Davis. And many playwrights and many directors. I was amazed that I recognized so many. Yes, we were dazzled, dazzled indeed. In the long, high room, this elegant room—elegant if one bears in mind that elegance is scarcely permissible in America—they seemed different, both younger and older—for one saw the faces, off-guard, in life—and certainly smaller than they appeared on stage or screen. One saw that so-and-so’s teeth, for example, were a little crooked; and this one had bowlegs; this one was very drunk and was clearly intending to become drunker. One very famous actress struck me as having very narrowly missed being a dwarf: but she had seemed very tall, in her regal robes, when I had seen her on the stage as the queen of all the Russias. It may have been that night that I really decided to attempt to become an actor—really became committed to this impossibility; it is certain that this night brought into my mind, in an astounding way, the great question of where the boundaries of reality were truly to be found. If a dwarf could be a queen and make me believe that she was six feet tall, then why was it not possible that I, brief, wiry, dull dark me, could become an emperor—The Emperor Jones, say, why not? And I then watched everybody with this cruel intention in my mind.
I liked this passage because it touches the idea of characters held against their "real" selves. The idea of others, and even ourselves, is simply a model for the person. Becoming an actor is more than a mask, Leo realizes, it's a freedom to become something else entirely. Leo sees acting as a means to transcending his race.
Saul San-Marquand had also shaken my hand. His hand was wet and white, I felt nothing when I took his hand except a deep aversion. I disliked him at once, and as profoundly as one man can dislike another—from the very bottom of my balls. His lips were thin, his eyes were vague, his nearly snow-white head seemed far too heavy for his neck. He impressed me as a Jeremiah who had never had any convictions.
I identify with this feeling of aversion when meeting someone for the first time.
But my own instinct, as to the male relation, is that men, who are far more helpless than women—because far less single-minded—need each other as comrades, need each other for correction, need each other for tears and ribaldry, need each other as models, need each other indeed, in sum, in order to be able to love women.
I love this understanding of masculinity. It's an understanding of masculine weakness that drives fraternity. I don't understand the "singlemindedness" comment, however...
She looked at her husband roguishly; he had not yet looked at her. “And I must tell you—my beamish boy—that, whether or not you are tempted toward the sacred flame, the flame”—she raised her hand, she spread her fingers wide; the lights flashed, like flame, like flame, on her abjectly jeweled fingers: it was as though, with the same gesture, she were warding off and abjectly awaiting the mortal blow—“the flame has very definite intentions toward you. The flame demands you. The flame will have you. You are not handsome. You are not, really, even, very good-looking. But you are—haunting. If you are capable of discipline—and I know that you are, it shows in the way you carry yourself, it shows in ways that you do not see—which you will never see—my dear, you will go far. Much further than you imagine. I know. I am gifted in these matters.
What a wonderful moment of character arc! This is the command to the hero, kicking off his journey. Leo has met the oracle and is shown his destiny.
I was beginning to apprehend the unutterable dimensions of the universal trap. I was human, too. And my race was revealed as my pain—my pain—and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed; until my pain became invested with a coherence and an authority which only I, alone, could provide. And this possibility, the possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of life and the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the very tip of my tongue. My pain was the horse that I must learn to ride. I flicked my cigarette out of the window and watched it drop and die. I thought of throwing myself after it. I was no rider and pain was no horse.
Leo's character shows some depth here as he vacillates between acknowledging, even embracing, a freedom to overcome his blackness and disregarding this possibility. Leo's struggle is one of confidence in the face of overwhelming negative pressure from a room full of wealthy white people.
There is a truth in the theater and there is a truth in life—they meet, but they are not the same, for life, God help us, is the truth. And those disguises which an artist wears are his means, not of fleeing from the truth, but of attempting to approach it. Who, after all, could believe a word spoken by Prince Hamlet or Ophelia should one encounter this unhappy couple at a cocktail party? Yet, the reason that one would certainly never make the error of inviting them back again is that their story is true—and not only for the Prince and his mad lady; is true, is true, unbearable, unanswerable: and one’s disguises are designed to make the truth a quantity with which one can live—or from which one can hope, by the effort of living, to be delivered.
This epistemology of the theatre is interesting. Leo seems to be building an epistemology based on narrative. The stories we create, are the closest thing to truth that we have. Shakespeare's works are so important to us because they approach the truth so closely. Leo's journey, then, becomes that of a truthseeker. Acting, the theatre, as a transcendence towards universal truths.
All my weight, the weight which scales measure, and the weight no scale can measure, seemed pulling downward against that hand.
So mystic
One of his fingers, or each one of them, seemed bigger to me than my penis. I was only beginning to be terrified of this imperious bit of flesh, which was only at the beginning of its long career of blackmail.
Preach
I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.
Same mom story. What a way set up the ennd of this paragraph tho
The day comes when he recognizes what a combination of helplessness and hard-hearted calculation go into the creation of a role, and to what extent authority is a delicate, difficult, deadly game of chance.
Great case for self determination
He laughed with all his body, perhaps touching his shoulder against yours, or putting his head on your chest for a moment, and then careening off you, halfway across the room, or down the block.
So black
At that moment the train came into the station and after several hours it rolled to a stop.
Gold
I know that, as I grew older, I became tyrannical. I had no choice, my life was in the balance. Whoever went under, it was not going to be me—and I seem to have been very clear about this from the very beginning of my life. To run meant to turn my back—on lions; to run meant the flying tackle which would bring me down; and, anyway, run where? Certainly not to my father and mother, certainly not to Caleb. Therefore, I had to stand. To stand meant that I had to be insane. People who imagine themselves to be, as they put it, in their “right” minds, have no desire to tangle with the insane. They stay far from them, or they ingratiate them. It took me almost no time to realize this. I used what I knew. I knew that what was sport for others was life or death for me. Therefore, I had to make it a matter of life or death for them. Not many are prepared to go so far, at least not without the sanction of a uniform. But this absolutely single-minded and terrified ruthlessness was masked by my obvious vulnerability, my paradoxical and very real helplessness, and it covered my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be born again.
Toxic Masculinity Defined
Then it occurred to me that he might be in the same trouble as myself, since if I couldn’t go home without him, he, even more surely, couldn’t go home without me. Perhaps he was also wandering around in the rain. If he was, then, I thought, it served him right; it would serve him right if he caught pneumonia and died; and I dwelt pleasantly on this possibility for the length of the block. But at the end of the block I realized that he was probably not wandering around in the rain—I was; and I, too, might catch pneumonia and die.
What a mystic
Then I was aware of another sound, I had been hearing it for awhile without realizing it. This was a moaning sound, a sighing sound, a sound of strangling, which mingled with the sound of the rain and with a muttering, cursing, human voice. The sounds came from the door which led to the backyard. I wanted to stand, but I crouched lower; wanted to run, but could not move. Sometimes the sounds seemed to come closer and I knew that this meant my death; sometimes diminished or ceased altogether and then I knew that my assailant was looking for me. Oh, how I hated Caleb for bringing my life to an end so soon! How I wished I knew where to find him! I looked toward the backyard door and I seemed to see, silhouetted against the driving rain, a figure, half bent, moaning, leaning against the wall, in indescribable torment; then there seemed to be two figures, sighing and grappling, moving so quickly that it was impossible to tell which was which—if this had been a movie, and I had been holding a gun, I would have been afraid to shoot, for fear of shooting the wrong person; two creatures, each in a dreadful, absolute, silent single-mindedness, attempting to strangle the other! I watched, crouching low. A very powerful and curious excitement mingled itself with my terror and made the terror greater. I could not move. I did not dare to move. The figures were quieter now. It seemed to me that one of them was a woman and she seemed to be crying—pleading for her life. But her sobbing was answered only by a growling sound. The muttered, joyous curses began again, the murderous ferocity began again, more bitterly than ever, and I trembled with fear and joy. The sobbing began to rise in pitch, like a song. The movement sounded like so many dull blows. Then everything was still, all movements ceased—my ears trembled. Then the blows began again and the cursing became a growling, moaning, stretched-out sigh. Then I heard only the rain and the scurrying of the rats. It was over—one of them, or both of them, lay stretched out, dead or dying, in this filthy place. It happened in Harlem every Saturday night. I could not catch my breath to scream. Then I heard a laugh, a low, happy, wicked laugh, and the figure turned in my direction and seemed to start toward me.
What a wild sex scene
We reached the door, which had a metal pole built into it in such a way as to prevent its being opened from the outside, and a heavy piece of chain around the top of the three locks.
Such security. much wow.
no, the building was not very clean.
2nd note. Point taken. But why?
I wished that I were God. And then I hated God.
!
“Caleb,” I asked, “are white people people?” “What are you talking about, Leo?” “I mean—are white people—people? People like us?” He looked down at me. His face was very strange and sad. It was a face I had never seen before. We climbed a few more stairs, very slowly. Then, “All I can tell you, Leo, is—well, they don’t think they are.”
WOowow
“We got stopped by the cops,” I said. Then I could not continue. I looked helplessly at Caleb and Caleb told the story. As Caleb spoke, I watched my father’s face. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I felt the one arm he had around me tighten, tighten; his lips became bitter and his eyes grew dull. It was as though, after indescribable, nearly mortal effort, after grim years of fasting and prayer, after the loss of all he had, and after having been promised by the Almighty that he had paid the price and no more would be demanded of his soul, which was harbored now; it was as though in the midst of his joyful feasting and dancing, crowned and robed, a messenger arrived to tell him that a great error had been made, and that it was all to be done again. Before his eyes, then, the banquet and the banquet wines and the banquet guests departed, the robe and crown were lifted, and he was alone then, frozen out of his dream, with all that before him which he had thought was behind him. My father looked as stunned and still and as close to madness as that, and his encircling arm began to hurt me, but I did not complain. I put my hand on his face, and he turned to me, his face changed, he smiled—he was very beautiful then!—and he put his great hand on top of mine.
A truer scene has never been written. Every black dad ever
I didn’t care if the silence never ended; I didn’t care if the room remained empty of people forever. I stretched my legs. They did not feel like mine, they had no weight at all. I felt a great peacefulness—such as I had never felt before. I turned my shell of a body into the white sheets and closed my eyes.
Dude just got free
And I knew that I had felt this, in some way, all my life. But I had buried it; and made a point, certainly, of never being helpless. But if I had always felt this, then, certainly, I must have shown it, and shown it most, perhaps, when I was least aware of it. My body, after all—I told myself—was no more vile than others; my stink was not original, it had no greater resonance; the rats and the worms would find me as tasty as another. “Ah, Leo,” I said, “what a child you are.” This reflection did not mitigate my distress. The nurse came back. She picked up the bottle. There was no help for it. I said, “Nurse, I have to go to the bathroom.” She said, “I can’t let you move. Wait just a moment.” Then she smiled a real smile. “I know it’s awful. But please don’t let it worry you. Please don’t.” She disappeared, then returned with the grim utensil. Her words hardly helped and yet I guess they helped a little. Anyway, we were still friends when it was over. I lay back. I wondered why humiliation seemed, after all, at bottom, to be my natural condition.
The mysticism just keeps on coming
we were, as Pirandello puts it, in the process of living our play and playing our lives.
!
She said, “My dear Miss King, you haven’t introduced us to your silent, hungry, and very attractive friend.” Whereas, before, she had looked very steadily at Barbara in order to avoid looking at me, she now looked very steadily at me in order to avoid looking at Barbara. “So I will introduce myself. Lola San-Marquand is my name and this is my husband, Saul.” She extended her hand and I carefully wiped mine on my napkin before taking it. We shook hands. I liked her at once. I liked her enormously. I do not know what it was in her which made me feel, immediately, and with great force, that she was a sad woman, a lost and ruined woman, and, even, a gallant one. Her details were preposterous, but I read these details as the very signal of her bewilderment and sorrow. She was enormous, not fat in a hard way, fat in a soft way: one felt that she had become fat out of despair. Yet, she covered this despair with a stylish, loose, black sack. Her hair, which was very beautiful, very blond, and very long, was severely, impeccably even, perhaps masochistically, pulled back from a rather stunning brow and ferociously knotted at the back of her head. And over this glory she wore a black chiffon scarf, knotted beneath her—chins, perhaps accuracy compels me to say, but the original chin was a firm one. This was the uniform of Lola San-Marquand. I never knew her to dress in any other way. She must have had hundreds of black dresses and scarves—though, in fact, a black and impetuous toque sometimes did duty for the scarf. This, however, was mainly on opening nights. She impressed me—she impresses me still—as one of the most curious, most loving, devious, ruthless, and single-minded people I have met in all my life. She was brilliantly and brutally manufactured: she had not grown into her present shape, but had been hammered into it, or perhaps, as in some unspeakable vat, been lowered. Her hands were white and pudgy and soft. Yet, they were not without power, and the fingers were elegant. One felt that the pudginess of the hands was no more inevitable than the rings they bore—rather awful rings; that, trapped within Lola San-Marquand, was a beautiful, dying girl. But, alas, fatally, overwhelmingly at last, one became aware of the odor of that corruption.
What an incredile character intro
“And what,” he asked me, “do you consider your qualifications to be?” I said, “I think you’re looking at them.” Then I smiled. “I need another drink. But I’m sure you realize already that I can’t be as definite as Miss King because of the great difference in our backgrounds.” “My,” said Lola, mildly, “you are young. But spirit you have.” “That’s how darkies were born,” I said, and walked back to the whiskey bottle. I was bitter, I was twisted out of shape with rage; and I raged at myself for being enraged. I dropped ice recklessly into my glass, recklessly poured Scotch over the rocks, took too large and swift a swallow, and, trying to bring myself to some reasonable, fixed place, to turn off the motor which was running away with me,
Microaggression triggered
I lit a cigarette and turned my back on the company to stare out of the window. I knew that I was being childish, and, in the eyes of the company, perhaps definitely and inexcusably rude; but I could not trust myself, for that moment, to encounter a human eye or respond to a human voice. It did not help, and it could not have, to recognize that I really did not know—assuming that I aspired to walk in the light of clarity and honor—what had triggered this rage. I refused to believe that it could truly have been Saul San-Marquand: how could it have been if it was really true that I held him in such low esteem? But the measure of my esteem had, fatally, to reveal itself in the quantity of my indifference—which quantity was small and shameful indeed. Here I stood at the Manhattan window, seething—to no purpose whatever, which was bad enough: but it was worse to be forced to ask myself, abjectly, now, for my reasons and find that I did not have any. Or, which, really, I think, caused the cup of my humiliation to overflow, to find that I had no reasons which my reason—by which, of course, I also mean that esteem in which I hoped to earn the right to hold myself—did not immediately and contemptuously reject. I was not—was I?—stupidly and servilely to do the world’s dirty work for it and permit its tangled, blind, and merciless reaction to the fact of my color also to become my own. How could I hope for, how could I deserve, my liberation, if I became my own jailer and myself turned the key which locked the mighty doors? But my rage was there, it was there, it pretended to sleep but it never slept, the merest touch of a feather was enough to bring it howling, roaring out. It had no sight, no measure, no precision, and no justice: and it was my master still. I drank my Scotch, I stared at the stars, I watched the park, which, in the darkness, was made shapeless and grandiose, which spoke of peace and space and cooling, healing water—which seemed to speak of possibilities for the bruised, despairing spirit which might remain forever, for me, far away, a dark dream veiled in darkness. A faint breeze struck, but did not cool my Ethiopian brow. Ethiopia’s hands: to what god indeed, out of this despairing place, was I to stretch these hands? But I also felt, incorrigible, hoping to be reconciled, and yet unable to accept the terms of any conceivable reconciliation, that any god daring to presume that I would stretch out my hands to him would be struck by these hands with all my puny, despairing power; would be forced to confront, in these, my hands, the monstrous blood-guiltiness of God. No. I had had quite enough of God—more than enough, more than enough, the horror filled my nostrils, I gagged on the blood-drenched name; and yet was forced to see that this horror, precisely, accomplished His reality and undid my unbelief. I was beginning to apprehend the unutterable dimensions of the universal trap. I was human, too. And my race was revealed as my pain—my pain—and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed; until my pain became invested with a coherence and an authority which only I, alone, could provide. And this possibility, the possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of life and the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the very tip of my tongue. My pain was the horse that I must learn to ride. I flicked my cigarette out of the window and watched it drop and die. I thought of throwing myself after it. I was no rider and pain was no horse.
I love these tirades. such flow and tumbling power; rapids even.
Her elegance was swinging and it was also archaic; perhaps elegance is always archaic.
<3
Your understudy is still going through his all-white-men-to-the-sword-and-all-white-women-to-my-bed bullshit—
What a phrase
people turn to each other in the hope of being created by each other then it is absolutely true that the uncreated young turn, to be created, toward their elders.
Yes! We create each other !
There is a truth in the theater and there is a truth in life—they meet, but they are not the same, for life, God help us, is the truth. And those disguises which an artist wears are his means, not of fleeing from the truth, but of attempting to approach it.
Facts
shoveling away the snow downtown—I never saw any snow being shoveled away in Harlem!
Never Thought about that disparity
You ain’t sleepy yet?” he might ask, and I would shake my head, No. “Well, little brother,” he would say, with a yawn, “I am, and you better be.” Then he would rub his hand over my head, a trick of our father’s, and say, “Goodnight, little Leo.” Then he would turn on his side, saying, “Snuggle up tight, now. You all right?” I put one arm around him and nodded my chin against his back, and we fell asleep.
Ugh. Something baaaaad is happening in oz...
dipsomaniacal
For, by this time, I had become impatient with all my hard labor and wanted to be tested. Though I tried to be gallant, I was nevertheless watchful, and I knew that there was something ambiguous, at best, about the uses, the errand boy uses, to which I was permitting myself to be put. I realized how unlikely it was that I would ever work on a stage, and I also realized that my future did not really matter to the San-Marquands at all. My future mattered, really, only to me. That was why I had bought my guitar. I didn’t expect much of the summer, it was a stop-gap: but I had to be ready for the winter.
It was inevitable that some of the town Negroes would also appear, inevitable that the Sicilians would not have the sense to turn them away—it was against the law to turn them away, though this was not their reason—and inevitable, immediately thereafter, that the guardians of the law should descend to deepen the Sicilian confusion. They began to stare at the Negro laborers, who, after all, were often there with white laborers, eating and drinking and laughing and cursing, exactly like the laborers they still remembered, with the definite and desperate intention of discovering what was wrong with them. It began to occur to the women that there might be something wrong with being a laborer, since it meant, apparently—they were indeed confused—that one had to be friends with Negroes. They had seen where the Negroes lived by now, and how they lived. But they had yet to ascend high enough in the American scale to become reconciled to the American confusion; they had not yet learned to despise Negroes, because they were still bemused by life.
These ladies gave me my first glimpse of a species of psychology which I eventually summed up—or dismissed—as the fig leaf complex; they were all working members of the fig leaf division. It did indeed, as Jerry said, cause my skin to “crinkle” when I stood before them naked. At first, I was most intimidated by my color—all of me naked seemed a vast quantity of color to bear; but it was not long before I began to be intimidated, far more grievously, by the fact of my sex.
When I watched Salvatore and Jerry together, I was happy for Jerry but I was sad for me. For the old, sturdy man recognized Jerry, he had seen him before. He found the key to Jerry in the life he himself had lived. But he had no key for me: my life, in effect, had not yet happened in anybody’s consciousness. And I did not know why. Sometimes, alone, I fled to the Negro part of town. Sometimes I got drunk there, and a couple of times I got laid there. But my connections all were broken.
“It seems to me that they work everybody like slaves,” Barbara said.
The French landscape is cerebral, this being the form that the French passion deludes itself into taking. The Swiss landscape is ordered, nothing could be more remote from passion—people who cannot make love make money—and it is designed to advertise one of the most flagrantly fraudulent Edens in our unhappy history. The Italian landscape is ragged, wild, unpredictable, like the landscape of Spain, the landscape of Africa. And something in me answers to such a landscape. Something in me is caught and held and solaced. I am profoundly repelled by the smug angularities of northern Europe, the cold sky and the spiteful lips of New England. A day may come, but not for me, when the American South will be habitable. Till then—well, I am wandering. But I was about to say that, however dramatic the frontiers I have mentioned, the most dramatic, the most appalling, remains that invisible frontier which divides American towns, white from black.
hot damn
The car rushed forward, and we heard music. People, black, walking and talking, began to populate the landscape. The streets narrowed, the houses clustered, the music became louder. Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers. They were on porches, playing jacks, a light behind their heads, two boys were rolling around in their yard, a couple of boys and girls were singing. I felt myself in the middle of a turning wheel. It felt like that, as one might feel at a circus, with all its shifting, multicolored, terrifying lights, and with all that sound; or as one might feel walking on the tightrope, with all the lights and sounds and people, mortally, hideously, unbelievably beneath; everything depending on what one was able to achieve of balance.
Some of the women looked at me with a terrible contempt. Some of the men looked at me as though I were a fool, but, just possibly—looking at Madeleine with a cool, speculative, lewd contempt—a lucky fool. Their eyes said they wouldn’t mind, maybe, taking my place in Madeleine’s bed, oh, maybe, four or five times. I knew that some of them wouldn’t scruple to suggest this. If a white woman would sleep with one black man, then, obviously, she had no self-respect, and would sleep with an entire black regiment. I had not yet learned, though time was to teach me, how hideous it is to be always in a false position. I was hurt for Madeleine, and bewildered—and I was glad that I had not come in holding Barbara’s hand—but I was hurt for them, too. It seemed to me that their swift estimate of Madeleine revealed their estimate of themselves, and this revealed estimate frightened me as being, perhaps, after all, at bottom, my own.
Some of the women looked at me with a terrible contempt. Some of the men looked at me as though I were a fool, but, just possibly—looking at Madeleine with a cool, speculative, lewd contempt—a lucky fool. Their eyes said they wouldn’t mind, maybe, taking my place in Madeleine’s bed, oh, maybe, four or five times. I knew that some of them wouldn’t scruple to suggest this. If a white woman would sleep with one black man, then, obviously, she had no self-respect, and would sleep with an entire black regiment. I had not yet learned, though time was to teach me, how hideous it is to be always in a false position. I was hurt for Madeleine, and bewildered—and I was glad that I had not come in holding Barbara’s hand—but I was hurt for them, too. It seemed to me that their swift estimate of Madeleine revealed their estimate of themselves, and this revealed estimate frightened me as being, perhaps, after all, at bottom, my own. But—they saw what they saw. They saw themselves as others had seen them. They had been formed by the images made of them by those who had had the deepest necessity to despise them. The bitterly contemptuous uses to which they had been put by others was the beginning of their history, the key to their lives, and the very cornerstone of their identities: exactly like those who had first maligned them, they saw what their history had taught them to see. I did not know then, and I do not know now if one ever sees more than that. If one ever does, it can only be because one has learned to read one’s history and resolved to step out of the book.
For a second, I listened to Madeleine’s breathing, which was faint, but not very steady. I didn’t know what role she wanted me to play with her, and for the moment I was just stalling, being a kind of bebop kid. “Put something on the record player,” she said, “and I’ll make that drink.” “Right.” I walked back into the living room. “What do you want to hear?” “Anything you want to hear. But keep it very low.” “That’s right. We certainly don’t want the neighbors barging in here tonight.” She laughed. “No. I don’t want to be sent back to the convent.”
kith and kin.
“Little Leo sure ain’t grown much,” Caleb said. “What you been feeding him?” “Exactly what we fed you,” said our mother. “Red beans and rice and cornbread and pork chops and ham hocks and ribs and greens.”
“What you figure on doing now?” our father asked carefully, “now that you out?” “Do?” asked Caleb, gently. “Do? What do I figure on doing? Is that what you asked me? Why—I might find me a rich white lady and take a trip to Palm Beach with her—as her chauffeur, you understand, a lot of them white ladies suffer from black fever—or I might get a job in a bank—or I might take over a life insurance company—or, let me see now, there’s a lot of money in real estate, there’s a whole lot of money in that, I might take over a few blocks of houses—or, then, again, I might become an aviator, I’ve always liked to fly. That’s what I’ll do,” he said decisively, “I’ll fly.” “You’ve got to walk,” said our mother, “before you can fly. What do you intend to do while you’re walking?” He looked at her. “Walk,” he said. “Just walk.” “You’ve got to eat,” she said, “while you’re walking.” “I can steal,” he said. “I can steal. And I’ll be stealing a long time before I get back half of what they stole from me.” “Well, if you can’t,” she said, “steal it back, it don’t look like to me there’s much point in stealing.” He was silent. And our father was silent.
I knew, I knew, what my brother wanted, what my brother needed, and I was not at all afraid—more than I could say for God, who took all and gave nothing: and who paid for nothing, though all His creatures paid. I held my brother very close, I kissed him and caressed him and I felt a pain and wonder I had never felt before. My brother’s heart was broken; I knew it from his touch. In all the great, vast, dirty world, he trusted the love of one person only, his brother, his brother, who was in his arms. And I thought, Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll love you, Caleb, I’ll love you forever, and in the sight of the Father and the Son and the fucking Holy Ghost and all their filthy hosts, and in the sight of all the world, and I’ll sing hallelujahs to my love for you in hell. I stripped both of us naked. He held me and he kissed me and he murmured my name. I was full of attention, I was full of wonder. My brother had never, for me, had a body before. And, in truth, I had never had a body before, either, though I carried it about with me and occasionally experimented with it. We were doing nothing very adventurous, really, we were only using our hands and, of course, I had already done this by myself and I had done it with other boys: but it had not been like this because there had been no agony in it, I had not been trying to give, I had not even been trying to take, and I had not felt myself, as I did now, to be present in the body of the other person, had not felt his breath as mine, his sighs and moans, his quivering and shaking as mine, his journey as mine. More than anything on earth, that night, I wanted Caleb’s joy. His joy was mine. When his breathing changed and his tremors began, I trembled, too, with joy, with joy, with joy and pride, and we came together. Caleb held me for a long time. Then he whispered, against my ear, “You all right?” “Yes,” I said. “I’m all right. Are you?” “Yes. Yes.” Then, “You still love me? You not mad at me?” “Why should I be mad at you?” Then I said, “Yes, I love you, Caleb, more than anybody in the whole wide world. You believe me?” After a moment, he said, “Yes. I believe you.” “Give us a kiss,” I said. He kissed me. “Now, go to sleep.” He kissed me again. “Good-night, little Leo. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I kept my hands in my pockets (and so did Caleb) so I could not be accused of molesting any of the women who jostled past, and kept my eyes carefully expressionless so I could not be accused of lusting after the women, or desiring the death of the men. When my countrymen were on holiday, their exuberance took strange forms. And I was aware—for the first time, though not for the last—that I was with Caleb, whose danger, since he was so much more visible, was greater than mine. It was not here and not now and not among these people, that he could protect me by his size. On the contrary, our roles were reversed, and here, now, among these people, it was my size and my presumed innocence which might operate as protection for him. He was not, walking beside me, a burly black man prowling the streets but an attentive older brother taking his little brother sightseeing through the great, cultured and so enormously to be envied metropolis of New York. My presence, potentially, at least, proved his innocence and goodwill and also bore witness to the charity and splendor of the people to whom I owed so much and from whom I had so much to learn. We came to Broadway, and the great marquees.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” Caleb said, and vanished behind the door marked MEN. I waited. I looked at the photographs of the movie stars on the walls. They were white and cheerful and dramatic. I was already arrogant enough to feel that they couldn’t, mainly, act their way out of a sieve, but lights and makeup and an innocence as brutal as it was despairing did marvelous things for these sons and daughters of the one and only God, and very nearly reconciled me to Ronald Reagan’s teeth. Caleb came back. We left the cathedral and entered the cave. Dark, dark indeed, sloping, hushed. We were in the balcony, so that Caleb could smoke, and from other worshipers here and there a taper glowed.
Madeleine’s door faced the steps, and an elderly man and his wife were mounting these steps as I jubilantly bounced out of Madeleine’s door, and locked it behind me. They stared at me as though I were a ghost, and they really seemed, for a moment, unable to move. Perhaps their terror, for an instant, terrified me, I don’t know; anyway, for less than a second, snake to rabbit, we stood immobilized by each other. Then, I said gently, “You can keep coming up the stairs, you know. I don’t bite.” This broke the charm, and they came briskly to the landing. He had now found his voice, and he asked me sternly, “What are you doing in this building, boy?” “I was looking for a file, so I could sharpen my teeth. Suh. But I couldn’t find none.” I grinned. “See?” I shrugged. “Some days are like that.” Then I crooned, “Oh, dat old man ribber, he sure do keep rolling along! Ain’t it de truf! Laws-a-massy, hush my mouf, he he he and yuk yuk yuk!” and I tapdanced down the stairs. At least they now knew that I wasn’t a ghost, but it didn’t seem to reassure them.
I had not yet guessed why they had come for me, and I did not know what was going to happen. But I was going to scheme as long as I had breath, and outwit them if I could. So I did not whimper, What for? I ain’t done nothing, but asked, as deliberately as I could, and as mockingly as I could, “What is it that you imagine me to have done?” I was gambling on their reflexes. They were accustomed to black boys whimpering, or, on the other hand, defiant, and it was easy, in either case, for them to know exactly what to do—to amuse themselves with the whimper or the defiance, and beat the shit out of the boy, and sometimes to beat the boy to death. I had to walk a tightrope between groveling and shouting, and had to hope that a faintly mocking amusement would be sufficiently unexpected to confound their reflexes and immobilize their impulses, at least until I got to the station, where I would have to begin to calculate again. Central to my calculations was the terror of finding myself begging for mercy: I hoped I would be able to see that moment coming, and nullify that moment by causing it to come too late.
I said nothing, only looked at him. Again, he darkened and swelled. He did not know how frightened I was. He was, Allah be praised, far too dense for that: but he knew that I hated him, and would have been happy to see him dead. And this baffled him and angered him—which increased my danger—for he, after all, did not hate me. I was not real enough for that. I was not as real for him as he, unspeakably, was for me. But I could not drop my eyes. I told myself that there was nothing I could do, now, to minimize the danger. All that I could do was control my fear.
There was no way to tell what would happen, who would enter, when the door opened again. And, not altogether consciously, I began to evolve a trick which was to help me, later, in the theater: Leo, I said, you can’t know what’s going to happen, and, until it happens, you can’t know what to do. You’re going to be surprised—so be surprised. That’s the only way you’ll be ready.
“The blue grass of Kentucky,” she said, “is great for finding out the facts of life. Especially if neither you nor anyone around you has anything else to do. When I went to parties, I used to pretend I was Jane Austen.” She laughed again, and grabbed me and kissed me. “In fact, I thought of being a writer before I thought of being an actress.” Then she looked at me very soberly. “Well. I hope you like having a sister—a white, incestuous sister. Doesn’t that sound like part of the American dream?” “Well—like Adam said to the Lord, when all this shit was starting—I guess I’ll get the hang of it, all right.”
“Why did you feel it necessary, or advisable, to make Othello’s pain physical? In some theatrical circles, that might seem—a little strange?” “Well, Othello’s a great play, I guess, but a lot of it seems a little silly—all that handkerchief stuff, and everything. I mean”—he was floundering—“if you think about what Othello’s doing, well maybe, you’ll just think he’s dumb. But if you feel it—like a stomach ache—well, then, maybe you’ll understand him.” And he looked hopefully, expectantly, at Saul. “Well,” said Saul, after a long pause, “you certainly seem to have thought about your problems. We do not feel that you have resolved them, but, as we said before, we are not here to make you lower your aim, but to help you hit the target—on the bull’s eye, so to say. We admire the directness of your approach to your problem—the idea of Othello with, so to say, a bellyache, we do not reject, as others might, no, we find it a very interesting idea. We feel that if your perceptions lead you into these areas, well and good. We wish to help you to explore; we are not afraid of any discovery; we are dedicated to discovery. We only insist that these discoveries be subjected to the proper theatrical discipline so that these discoveries can take their proper place in the vocabulary of the living theater. We are like, oh, Henry Ford, so to say—the theater is like that—we want the use of your inventions so that we can stay in business.” The class laughed. “Thank you, Mr. Parker. Your progress is most gratifying.”
I drank my coffee, and I listened to the chatter. When the coffee hit my stomach, I realized I was sick, and I put the coffee down, and barely made it to the bathroom. My whole body was covered with a cold, light sweat, and I was nauseous—perhaps Othello with a bellyache was not such a bad idea. I had never felt this way before. I was sexually excited, too, but in an eerie way; it was a tension which contained no possibility of release. I came back to the coffee table to find that people were sitting down. Barbara was already in the alcove, and was talking to the assistant. She seemed quite calm. What the hell, I told myself, it’s going to be over in less than ten minutes. And it doesn’t matter what these people think. But I wished we had decided to do some other scene, any other scene. I no longer believed in this one. Barbara had my book with her, in the alcove. It was on the sofa. I rushed up, and opened it, because I suddenly couldn’t remember my first lines.
Miss King”—he straightened, and Barbara straightened—“why did you elect to do this scene?” “We liked it,” Barbara said. She paused. “We felt that it made a connection—between a private love story—and—a—well, between a private sorrow and a public, a revolutionary situation.” She paused again. Saul watched her. She watched Saul. “The boy and girl are trapped. For reasons that they can’t do much about, anything about—and it’s not their fault—not their fault, I mean, that they’re trapped.” “Then, your motives in doing this particular scene,” said Saul, “were personal?” He looked briefly at me. “One’s motives,” said Barbara, sitting very still and straight, “are always personal.” Then, after a second, “I hope.” And she lifted her eyes to Saul again. “One’s motives,” he said, “may always be personal. But one’s execution, as I believe you have heard us attempt to tell Mr. Parker, can never be personal. One’s motives, ah, that is one thing—but one’s execution of these motives, if one is attempting to work in the theater—these must be quite something else again.” “I don’t,” she said flatly, with a certain calculated rudeness, “know what you’re talking about.” And she watched him. The silence, like water, rose.
Everyone was now watching Barbara and Saul, as though we were watching a horse race. But Saul, whatever he wasn’t, was shrewd; and his pride had never been a burden. “We like your spirit,” he said briefly, “but your spirit is perhaps more interesting offstage than it is on—what do you know about the girl in this scene?” “I know that she has probably just finished washing the dishes, and her hands are probably still a little damp. I know she can’t stand the house she lives in—it makes her feel as though she’s in jail.” She paused. “She’s scared—scared that she’ll never get out of jail. She’s in love with Sid, but sometimes she almost hates him, too, and—well, she’s a virgin. That scares her, too. Maybe that scares her more than anything else.” “Pardon me, Miss King. Have you ever lived—as this girl lives?” “No. But I’ve never lived the life of Lady Macbeth, either. And no actress has.” Perhaps Saul could live without being burdened by pride; but he could not live without his control over that world he had made. And Barbara was beginning to jeopardize it. The interest in the scene was shifting from him to her. He cleared his throat. We waited.
“The actor’s instrument, Mr. Proudhammer, is unlike any instrument used in art. A writer’s instrument is his pen, a violinist has a violin, a sculptor has stone and a chisel, an architect has a slide rule, and so forth. But an actor’s instrument is his body, is himself. Paul Robeson, for example, is an actor who was made to play Othello. The instrument suggests it, the instrument, so to say, demands it. Other actors could never play Othello. The instrument will not carry the illusion.” He coughed, and looked around the room. “We do not wish to say that anything is impossible. We know of a great French actor who is—ah—a hunchback. Art, like life, is full of exceptions. But these exceptions—prove the rule.” He looked at me again. “You are certainly an exception. Frankly, we find it difficult to know exactly how to proceed with you. There is nothing to indicate—ah—in our opinion—that you have any very striking theatrical ability. Except, perhaps, for that little dance at the very end of the scene. Then you seemed free, and, so to say, joyous and boyish. We found it your very best moment. And if we decide to continue with you—or if you decide to continue with us—it will be in the hope that we can make such moments come more easily to you.” I said nothing with my voice; I hoped I said nothing with my face.
signs and mowed lawns and posed naked. They disliked Jerry because he was Italian, they disliked Barbara because she was not, and, therefore, had no excuse, and they disliked me because I did not appear to realize that both Barbara and Jerry were white. I did not, in fact, appear to know that I was colored and this filled them with such a baleful exasperation, such an exasperated wonder, that the waitress’ hand, when I stopped in the diner, actually trembled as she poured my coffee, and people moved away from me, staring as though I were possessed by evil spirits. Naturally, I despised them. They didn’t even have the courage of their sick convictions, for, if they had, they would have tarred me and feathered me and ridden me out of town. But they didn’t dare do this because of my connection with the Workshop. Naturally, they brought out the worst in all three of us. Their minds were like dirty windowpanes; and so we obligingly acted out their fantasies for them.
Their minds were like dirty windowpanes; and so we obligingly acted out their fantasies for them.
Wow. Sharp
It was early July, and the sun was a busy and persistent sun. I had turned darker, with a lot of red in my skin and hair; while Barbara had turned mulatto and her hair had turned blond on her forehead and on the curly sides and edges. Jerry was browner than Arabs, and we called ourselves, when we journeyed through town, “the Negro color problem.” We were just outside a small town on a bluff above a river. The Indian Magua, in The Last of the Mohicans, had forced the British maiden, for whom honor was more important than life, over this bluff, into this river—so, at least, Fenimore Cooper and his Hollywood descendants had informed me; it was not hard to imagine Indian braves catapulting down this river, and one heard the fury of their arrows through the leaves of trees. In the hope of catching some whisper of the past, we sometimes wandered through the graveyard in town—a dreadful town, built and ruined by financiers, but saved by a war. Though the graveyard failed to give us any sense of our past, the town gave us all too vivid a sense of our actual condition. The town had been moribund a long time, but factories and government contracts and army installations and eventually soldiers with their pay came to the town and saved it. The people in the town were, therefore, happily making money and the nature and the degree of their happiness made them haltingly friendly and quickly cruel. Although it was recognized that our presence in the town conferred on the town a peculiar prestige and was even good for business, we certainly were not liked. The San-Marquands had rented a big, white wooden house in town, and it was a tremendous sign of status to be invited to one of their parties. It was suspected that the San-Marquands were Jewish, and people said terrible things about them behind their backs; but, on the other hand, they were friends with the stars of stage and screen, and some of these stars would, in fact, be appearing under the Workshop banner. The gentry came to the San-Marquand parties, dazzled, supercilious, and drunk; and we, the Workshop kids, who were often there, serving canapés and drinks, sometimes picked up an odd job or two—or vice versa; but, whatever the use they might occasionally make of us, the combination of our youth and our aims was distressingly and sharply distasteful to them. Everyone was certain that the San-Marquands were exotically, unimaginably, erotically corrupt, and so were the movie stars, their friends. They had gotten away with it, and, thus, were obviously a bad example for us; obviously, kids in such fast company were bound to be depraved. They did not want to know why, when we could have been doing other things, we painted signs and mowed lawns and posed naked. They disliked Jerry because he was Italian, they disliked Barbara because she was not, and, therefore, had no excuse, and they disliked me because I did not appear to realize that both Barbara and Jerry were white. I did not, in fact, appear to know that I was colored and this filled them with such a baleful exasperation, such an exasperated wonder, that the waitress’ hand, when I stopped in the diner, actually trembled as she poured my coffee, and people moved away from me, staring as though I were possessed by evil spirits. Naturally, I despised them. They didn’t even have the courage of their sick convictions, for, if they had, they would have tarred me and feathered me and ridden me out of town. But they didn’t dare do this because of my connection with the Workshop. Naturally, they brought out the worst in all three of us. Their minds were like dirty windowpanes; and so we obligingly acted out their fantasies for them. When Jerry and I walked through town together, for example, everyone assumed we were queer—there couldn’t be any other reason for our walking together; and so we sometimes walked with our arms around each other. If Jerry had not been so big and I had not been so bold, we would have paid—more often than we did—a bloody price for this. But Jerry’s size intimidated and bewildered them—he certainly didn’t act queer—and so did my boldness, which seemed to contradict my color; on the whole, we were rather too queer to be easily molested. Of course, when Barbara and Jerry walked through town, Barbara had only to put her head on Jerry’s shoulder for them both to become, at once, a pair of lewd and abandoned lovers; while for the three of us, walking together and holding hands, they had no words at all. Nevertheless, they endured us because the San-Marquands gave parties at which they might meet movie stars.
This whole section is fucking delicious
The bathroom was very old and primitive, with a metal tub which took hours to fill and hours to empty; Jerry
The bathroom was very old and primitive, with a metal
The bathroom was very old and primitive, with a metal tub which took hours to fill and hours to empty;
Ohhhh i am noticing i appreciate lots his play with time!
We examined every costume, no matter how old, faded, or torn, and salvaged as many as possible. The costumes gave me a strange, sad thrill: these uniforms of Czarist generals, of Civil War soldiers, the shawls and dresses of Lorca heroines, the patched jackets of Steinbeck peasants, of Odets insurgents, these buckles, shoes, boots, pumps, bonnets, rugged shirts and ruffled shirts, tight breeches and baggy pants, cowls, capes, helmets, swords, shields, spears, drums, harps, horns, so deeply drenched in human salt that sometimes they shredded at a touch, so icily trapped in time’s indifference that they chilled the hand, spoke of the reality, operating relentlessly every hour, which would one day overtake me and all my styles and poses and all my uniforms. These garments had been worn—by real people; real music had been played for them, and they had moved in a genuine light; they had put their hands on their hearts and delivered their vows, and the curtain had come down. These costumes were like their dispersed, indifferent bones, and the attic always reminded me of Ezekiel’s valley, and Ezekiel’s question: Oh, Lord, can these bones live?
Stunning
I had never been on a real stage before, and the first time I stepped on the stage of The Green Barn, one stormy summer afternoon when the sky was wailing as though heaven had gone mad, sending down water in merciless, blinding sheets, and drumming on the roof like all of Africa, I looked up before I looked out, and was astonished to realize how high a stage could be. I looked up and up, into dust and darkness, scaffolds and ropes. It would be terrible to fall from there. I was all alone that afternoon. I had been sent on some kind of errand—I was always being sent on errands. But I had to wait for the summer storm to end, and, in the meantime, no one was very likely to be able to get to me. I looked out at the dark, spooky theater—very spooky now, with the rain roaring—and wondered if my destiny could be involved in such a place. But destinies, as I was beginning to discover, are strange—and must be, being so mysteriously hung up with desire. For I desired, I realized one day—if these bones could live—to stand here before those living with whom I would fill this dusty void, and hear them bearing witness as I now heard the sound of the rain. I had never before thought of my desire as a reality involving others; neither had I thought of others as needing my desire; but I, now, for the first time, in that dusty barn, suspected that this coupling defined one’s destiny, and that on this coupling depended the mysterious life of the world. I was young. Perhaps it is hard, now, to credit, still less to sound, the depth of my bewilderment. I merely suspected in the chilling height, the dusty, roaring darkness, the presence of others, each of whom was myself. But these others could not know it, and neither could I, unless I was able, being filled by them, to fill this theater with our lives. This was, perhaps, my highest possibility of the act of love. But I did not say it that way to myself that afternoon. I merely walked up and down the stage. I measured its length, breadth, and depth, and threw my voice to the topmost balcony. In that empty space, I thought, in spite of the rain, that I heard it echo back; and I wished that I had brought my guitar with me.
Lovely. Foreshadowing. Powerful construction of an epiphany
about make-believe. At one point in the scene, after remembering their furtive lovemaking in parks and hallways, the girl offers to go with Sid to a room somewhere. But he refuses; he says there is no future for them. There is great tension in the scene, which connected with an unspoken tension in us, and we began to be appalled. For it is also the most crucial of love scenes, the moment of loss and failure: perhaps a great deal of superstition was mixed with our recoil. I don’t, in detail, remember the scene very well anymore, but perhaps I’ll never forget how it choked me, made me stammer, how it caused me, sometimes, almost to hate Barbara. This I saw in her bewildered and slowly divining eyes: which both helped the scene and hurt it. Anyway, this scene was very much on my mind the first time, that rainy afternoon, when I paced the stage of The Green Barn and threw my voice to the balcony. For, by this time, I had become impatient with all my hard labor and wanted to be tested. Though I tried to be gallant, I was nevertheless watchful, and I knew that there was something ambiguous, at best, about the uses, the errand boy uses, to which I was permitting myself to be put. I realized how unlikely it was that I would ever work on a stage, and I also realized that my future did not really matter to the San-Marquands at all. My future mattered, really, only to me. That was why I had bought my guitar. I didn’t expect much of the summer, it was a stop-gap: but I had to be ready for the winter.
We couldn’t make it and we couldn’t let it go—I had not known make-believe could be so painful, and, indeed, I now began to learn something about make-believe. At one point in the scene, after remembering their furtive lovemaking in parks and hallways, the girl offers to go with Sid to a room somewhere. But he refuses; he says there is no future for them. There is great tension in the scene, which connected with an unspoken tension in us, and we began to be appalled. For it is also the most crucial of love scenes, the moment of loss and failure: perhaps a great deal of superstition was mixed with our recoil. I don’t, in detail, remember the scene very well anymore, but perhaps I’ll never forget how it choked me, made me stammer, how it caused me, sometimes, almost to hate Barbara. This I saw in her bewildered and slowly divining eyes: which both helped the scene and hurt it.
Deft
I finished, nearly gagging, my tasteless beer—but pride can control one’s reflexes, though I also suspect that one’s reflexes are, sometimes, what one takes to be one’s pride—and set my glass down.
Oof
Their house was always full of people, and Rags Roland was spending the summer with them. Rags was very impressive; big, and so ugly that she was positively splendid. In fact, a woman who looked like Rags had scarcely any choice but to become splendid if she were to achieve any bearable human quality at all. She was bigger than most men, with a face as square and as expressive as a block of granite—a block of granite veined with fine red lines. She had been given, in belated and incongruous compensation, a great deal of very bright, curling hair which was red by the time I met her. She wore it as though it were a helmet, not, I must say, that she could have worn it in any other way. Her clothes all seemed, on her, to be made of metal—relentless two-piece tweed suits, sometimes somber but sometimes startlingly plaid, which gave way, come summer, to equally relentless, sacklike prints. They boomed like trumpets, they hurt the eye. She was incredibly energetic, one of the people whose relentless good-nature at length becomes rather frightening. She was always smoking and joking; one wondered if she could ever be still. She had told me once, sitting on the San-Marquand porch, in a large, ornate double swing made of South American straw, that she could not get through a single day without listening to music. I wondered when. I wondered how she could ever turn off all the noise she lived with long enough to hear anything: I should have thought that her spiritual eardrums had long ago been broken. But photographs of herself and the San-Marquands, taken years before when they had just begun the Workshop, showed another Rags, a Rags unreconciled. These photographs were on the walls of The Green Barn office, and in Saul’s study at home. The photographs showed them sitting around under trees, reading scripts, or in rehearsal. Saul looked very different, his hair had not been white then; in one of the photographs he was without his glasses and he looked like a startled boy. Lola had been round but not shapeless, her hair had been long, and her face very earnest and girlish. And Rags—Rags had worn her hair very long then, and braided into a crown. The big face, the big mouth, the great square mass of her, seemed, somehow, vulnerable. And she was wearing something which looked gray in the photographs, long and soft and full. She had been trying to be an actress in those days, and she wrote poetry. “Wretched poetry,” she said, “but I’ve never had the heart to burn it. It’ll turn up in my private papers after I’m dead. Don’t let the world laugh at me too much.” This was when she was drunk, at one of the San-Marquand parties.
Love this. The metallic stuff is brill. There are some extraneous bits tho.
We drove into town at exactly six o’clock—so the courthouse clock informed us—and by seven we had placed our last sign in the window of the pizza joint which we had virtually taken over. The people who ran this joint weren’t natives of the town—thank God; in fact, they weren’t natives of the country. They came from Sicily, I think, they hadn’t been in America long, and they were beginning to be gravely confused. They—the old mother and father, the sons and daughters and in-laws—still considered, in their barbaric, possessive, and affectionate fashion, that they were responsible for each other, that what happened to one affected all. This showed in their manner with each other and this manner marked them as foreign. This meant, of course, that they were disreputable and so we naturally gravitated there—it was our oasis. Neither had this Sicilian family yet arrived at anything resembling a perfect comprehension of what color meant in America, and so it was the only place in town where Negroes sometimes ate and drank, or, rather, it was the only place in town where Negroes and whites sometimes ate and drank together. Only the younger members of the family, and of these mainly the women, were beginning to suspect what this meant for their status and might mean for the material future of their children. One sensed this in their worried frowns, in their occasional hesitations, above all in their steadily developing realization that the respectable people never ate their pizzas at the brightly colored tables, but always took them out. They were not yet materially menaced, for soldiers came, and sailors, and frequent travelers, and laborers; and these all had money to spend. But the soldiers and the sailors often brought their girls—rather dubious, rather dangerous girls—and so did the travelers, and the laborers were loud. It was inevitable that some of the town Negroes would also appear, inevitable that the Sicilians would not have the sense to turn them away—it was against the law to turn them away, though this was not their reason—and inevitable, immediately thereafter, that the guardians of the law should descend to deepen the Sicilian confusion. They began to stare at the Negro laborers, who, after all, were often there with white laborers, eating and drinking and laughing and cursing, exactly like the laborers they still remembered, with the definite and desperate intention of discovering what was wrong with them. It began to occur to the women that there might be something wrong with being a laborer, since it meant, apparently—they were indeed confused—that one had to be friends with Negroes. They had seen where the Negroes lived by now, and how they lived. But they had yet to ascend high enough in the American scale to become reconciled to the American confusion; they had not yet learned to despise Negroes, because they were still bemused by life. They liked Barbara and Jerry and me. They didn’t know how to hide it. They didn’t yet know that there was any reason to hide it. Of course, they particularly liked Jerry because they could speak Italian with him, and they gave each other tremendous joy because Jerry could put them down for being Sicilian and they could put Jerry down because his family came from Naples. I didn’t speak a word of Italian in those days, but I used to love to watch them and to listen. For Jerry’s relationship with these Sicilians was very unlike my relationship with the Negroes in the town. I envied Jerry. Perhaps I hated him a little bit, too. Also, in the pizza joint, since we were in the theater, we were special, we were gentry. It didn’t seem at all odd to them that I should be in the theater—it was not only logical, it was, so to speak, my inheritance, my destiny. The only Negroes they had ever heard of had been in the theater, or in the ring. They were in awe of Paul Robeson—I must say that they really were. They loved Joe Louis. They loved Marian Anderson. They loved Josephine Baker. They made me tell them everything I knew about Father Divine. He had helped to feed the hungry, I told them, and they agreed with me that this meant that he was a good man; even though, as I later realized, their nods and thoughtful frowns referred not to Father Divine, but to Mussolini; who had also, perhaps, helped to feed the hungry, but who had turned out, after all, not to be a good man.
International shades of oppression
The Life class was pretty depressing. It was made up mainly of aging, idle women, and not one of them, as far as I could judge, had the remotest hint of talent. They usually placed me somewhere in Africa and I was often invested with a spear. But their concept of the African savage was fatally indebted to, and entangled with, their concept of the American Indian; the results on paper were stunning indeed. I found it disquieting that anyone could look at me and see what they saw; it was not less disquieting to realize that their bland, dumpling exteriors concealed so much of fantasy, helpless, lonely, and vindictive. These ladies gave me my first glimpse of a species of psychology which I eventually summed up—or dismissed—as the fig leaf complex; they were all working members of the fig leaf division. It did indeed, as Jerry said, cause my skin to “crinkle” when I stood before them naked. At first, I was most intimidated by my color—all of me naked seemed a vast quantity of color to bear; but it was not long before I began to be intimidated, far more grievously, by the fact of my sex. I wore the regulation jockstrap, though this seemed silly to me. Female models wore nothing at all. But then I began to feel that the jockstrap actually functioned—and perhaps was meant to function—as a kind of incitement, both for them and for me. I began to resent the jockstrap, for it seemed a kind of insult to my body. I couldn’t help but become terribly conscious of what the jockstrap concealed and this made my penis nervous. I was always frightened of having an erection: all of me could be seen except that most private and definitive part of me, which was on no account to announce its presence. Well, it was agony. With all of my anxiety centered below my waist, I always, inexorably, felt the vengeful organ begin to stretch and swell—with anxiety, I suppose, certainly not with lust—pulling the jockstrap down. But I kept my eyes straight ahead of me, and held my pose, expecting at any moment to hear the women scream and faint, while sweat poured from my armpits and over my pubic hair and down my legs. Holding a five-minute pose before my ladies was harder than working in the mines. But the ladies worked steadily with their pads and pencils and brushes, sometimes holding a pencil up before them to dissect me, while I felt my rebellious black prick pounding against the walls of its dungeon, and threatening, as it seemed to my unhappy imagination, to destroy it. When it was over and I stepped down, they had achieved a noble savage who was carrying a spear and adorned with a loincloth as bland and as shapeless as their faces—a harmless savage, suitable for a pet, and one who could certainly never have any children.
Love it life class is pretty depressing
Salvatore treated Jerry like a son; and this brought forward the man in Jerry. It brought forward in him elements of delicacy and courtesy which Jerry, in most of his daily life, disguised by rough speech and rough play. The lost and loving boy Jerry was attempting—helplessly—to divorce and deny was the only creature Salvatore saw, and it did not even occur to him to doubt the value of this creature. Salvatore could not know it, but he thus reached directly into the heart of Jerry’s loneliness, and also foreshadowed his hard and lonely life.
All most of us want is to be seen. To have our inner child validated
When I watched Salvatore and Jerry together, I was happy for Jerry but I was sad for me. For the old, sturdy man recognized Jerry, he had seen him before. He found the key to Jerry in the life he himself had lived. But he had no key for me: my life, in effect, had not yet happened in anybody’s consciousness. And I did not know why. Sometimes, alone, I fled to the Negro part of town. Sometimes I got drunk there, and a couple of times I got laid there. But my connections all were broken.
What a beautiful terrible way to illuminate racism
“You take what you can get,” Barbara said, “but, then, when you’ve taken it, you can make it do what you want.” “Can you?” asked Madeleine.
But, mainly, you take what you can get.” “You take what you can get,” Barbara said, “but, then, when you’ve taken it, you can make it do what you want.” “Can you?” asked Madeleine.
But, mainly, you take what you can get.” “You take what you can get,” Barbara said, “but, then, when you’ve taken it, you can make it do what you want.” “Can you?” asked Madeleine. There was a pause. Barbara finished her drink. “I can,” said Barbara.
Burn!
Giuliano began cutting up the pizza, and, while he was doing this, two young Negro laborers came into the place. I say they were young—they were both somewhat older than I; than I was then. One was perhaps about thirty, chunky, dark, and cheerful. And I say laborers, but, actually, the younger, not far into his twenties, impressed me as being a soldier, for I remember that he was dressed in khaki. He was lean, light brown, long, and shy, with a narrow face. I had seen the chunky one before, on the Negro side of town, in a bar, but he had not spoken to me and I had not known how to speak to him. But I had not seen the younger one before, and something in his manner—the particular manner of his diffidence—made me decide that he was a stranger here. I suppose I mean that the older one, the chunky, cheerful one, was accustomed to being uneasy, and sailed into it, smiling, as into the wind of his life, whereas the younger, stiff and silent, was only beginning to be aware of the chill. Here they were, here they came, and the elder, with that ready smile, and with all those lighthouse teeth, piloted the young one to a table—a table three tables from us. Jerry and Barbara were facing Madeleine and me; we certainly looked like a unit. Besides, I was already notorious, because, in complete innocence, like a foreigner outrageously overtipping in a desperate nation, I had disrupted the town’s emotional economy. I had not known, after all, and could not have, what it would be like to deal with such a town, and there was absolutely no possibility that I could accept, much less survive, on such terms. But if it was vivid to me that they had, it was equally vivid to them that I hadn’t—either because I knew more or because I knew less; either because I wouldn’t or because I couldn’t; either because I despised my color or because I didn’t. We desperately wished to get to the root of the matter, but we did not know how to begin. Here I was, sitting with three white people—or, rather, with two white women. I could not leave my table and go to theirs. They could not leave their table and come to ours—or, rather, in this context, mine. We could not do what we wished to do, which was simply to be easy with each other. No: there we sat, under the eyes of the observant and bewildered Sicilians, studiously ignoring each other, the chunky, black, cheerful cat giving the order, the lanky, lean, brown cat looking down, with his hands between his knees. For a moment, I hated all of my companions, for whom, as I supposed, nothing had happened. We were all concentrating on our pizza and our wine.
Too real
Barbara was silent. I watched the laborers. They were drinking rye and water. The darker one was laughing and talking—easily and slowly, even intimately, but absolutely onstage. The light had hit him early—that unspeakable light; he would be onstage until the day he died. And the proof of his authority was that the young one, uneasily, chuckled, with his head down. “Now,” the black one was saying, “you can’t find a better black broad than my old lady—you see what I mean? She is a champ, baby. I mean, she is a champ. But even she is started to go for the jive. You see what I mean? She want me to keep working my ass off so she can get to look like Rita Hayworth.” And he looked wisely at the young one, who was watching him carefully, his drink held in both hands before his face, and then turned carelessly, laughing, away, showing us all his teeth.
Really appreciating the theatre motif
Matthew asked me, with a shy smile.
“Then what are you doing here?” Matthew asked me, with a shy smile.
Queer?
He reminded me of Caleb.
Oof
But the old dyke got my goat.” Jerry said, “You shouldn’t call her names like that. You don’t know if she’s a dyke or not. Anyway, it’s nobody’s business what a person does—” “That’s right,” said Matthew, staring at Jerry: he looked rather as though he had stumbled into a seminar. “What a grown person does with his life is that person’s business.” And he looked at Fowler. “Especially,” I said, “since it’s the person who pays for it. For what he does, I mean.”
Def queer
I suspected that Fowler and I might prove to have very little to say to each other. Matthew and I might have been another matter, but Matthew was leaving within the week.
Fam... What a twist.
I have crossed many a frontier since then, have had my passport stamped, say, at the French-Swiss border, at the Swiss-Italian border; and I am beginning to believe that a landscape is not a landscape at all, merely a reflection of the sensibility of the people who live in it—certainly this is what one is watching as one crosses their forests and plains, vineyards and mountains, cities, tunnels, towns. French towns are mostly hideous, all French trees are mercilessly cropped, with a view, presumably, to the landscape, the larger vision—in the way French poodles operate as accessories to the wardrobes of their owners. There is absolutely no nonsense about it, whatever does not fit in is out, down to the merest flickering flower, the puniest, struggling branch. I suppose the French impose such a violent topographical order in order to compensate for an extreme untidiness, indeed, disorder, which the nature of their history—their passion—does not allow them to attack in any other way. The man at the frontier has cigarette ashes all up and down his uniform, and a cigarette is established between his lips. He has not the remotest interest in the voyager, or his passport: he forces himself to squint at both. Sometimes he looks at the baggage, sometimes not. Sometimes he stamps the passport; sometimes one has to ask him to stamp it. His office, were it not in France, would remind one of nothing so much as a cell in purgatory; and he and confreres seem to feel that they are serving a sentence which they probably, after all, deserve. Within seconds, the time it takes to cross a small backyard, one has left this outpost, the last witness to this indisputably dour and extraordinarily interesting people, and one is facing the apple-faced Swiss. Their quarters are impeccable, as are their uniforms. The Swiss do not smoke their cigarettes, but leave them quietly burning in one of their millions of ashtrays. Their uniforms are ironed every morning and laundered every night; and the man within the uniform would find himself in something much worse than purgatory if he were not laundered and ironed, too. He examines everything very carefully, passport, luggage, voyager; causes one to think of the dirty socks and shorts in one’s baggage, one’s filthy armpits, and abruptly active intestines; is unspeakably polite, as patient as a ferret, as distrustful as a thief; and when one has escaped the Swiss correctness, one feels that one is being pursued—they are hoping to delude you into leading them to your accomplice. And then, abruptly, one is at the Italian frontier. They seem extremely surprised, but, on the whole, delighted, that you decided to drop by. Between extravagant offers of extravagant dinners, and impassioned questions as to what drove you from your part of the world, they are perfectly willing to glance at your passport and stamp it on any random page. They swear eternal brotherhood, and so you pass out of their offices and out of their lives. The French landscape is cerebral, this being the form that the French passion deludes itself into taking. The Swiss landscape is ordered, nothing could be more remote from passion—people who cannot make love make money—and it is designed to advertise one of the most flagrantly fraudulent Edens in our unhappy history. The Italian landscape is ragged, wild, unpredictable, like the landscape of Spain, the landscape of Africa. And something in me answers to such a landscape. Something in me is caught and held and solaced. I am profoundly repelled by the smug angularities of northern Europe, the cold sky and the spiteful lips of New England. A day may come, but not for me, when the American South will be habitable. Till then—well, I am wandering. But I was about to say that, however dramatic the frontiers I have mentioned, the most dramatic, the most appalling, remains that invisible frontier which divides American towns, white from black.
Just brilliant. Random and brilliant
Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers.
!
but prancing scarcely fairly described their uses of their vigor. Only someone who no longer had any sense of what constituted happiness could ever have confounded happiness with this rage.
The mask!
And yet—how can I explain this?—this profound discomfort did not really disturb my peace.
Who is he talking to? Broke the fourth wall
Then I was horrified to remember that I was wearing no underwear, and my member, with no warning, with uncontrollable speed, raged and thickened against the cloth of my jeans. Barbara had to feel it, but her face gave no sign; and I—poor me!—had no choice but to keep the rude witness hidden against her body. It was horrible. I thought of all the people watching. Involuntarily, without realizing I was doing so, I pressed Barbara closer. Sweat broke out on my forehead, at the hairline. I wanted the dance never to end. I wanted the dance to end at once. How would I ever be able to get across the dance floor? I tried to move as little as possible, but this made matters worse. I cursed myself. Then I maneuvered us closer to our table, and thanked God that the lights were dim. Yet, beneath it all, I felt a curious peace. At last the record ended. In a grave and decorous silence we walked back to our table and I slipped quickly into my seat. We were silent. Something of the greatest importance had happened to us.
Power of the erotic... Eros
“Good-night.” And they drove off down the dark street, leaving everything empty. Now, I was really frightened, though, now it was too late.
Ha i know that fear
Some instinct made me do exactly what she wanted me to do. I looked at her, I changed my position, and I put my head in her lap. She looked down at me, smiling. Her breasts seemed very big. I put my hand on one of them, really rather like a kid playing doctor, but also aware that a strange and mighty storm was rising in me. I was aware that the storm had really nothing to do with Madeleine, except that she was in the path.
The queer storm of erotic energy. So true
I fell into bed and lay on my back, frightened and evil, patiently waiting, immense and heavy and curdled with love.
Stunning
Here I was, in this white cunt’s bed; here I was, ready for the slaughter; here I was, I, Judas, with a stiffening prick and a windy heart, lost, doomed, terrified, alone.
Here I was, in this white cunt’s bed; here I was, ready for the slaughter; here I was, I, Judas, with a stiffening prick and a windy heart, lost, doomed, terrified, alone. The air whispered, or I whispered, my brother’s name. But nothing, now, forever, could rescue my brother, or me.
Ugh. Stomach turning
Leo. You are more than nineteen years old. What the fuck do you think you’re doing, with your life?
Omg i love this line
But, sometimes, on Saturday nights, she accompanied my father to a bar in the neighborhood and they laughed and gossiped with the people there. This was to prevent my father from becoming melancholy mad: he drowned in his sorrow when he drank alone.
True of so many
the determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
Facts
Other moments are irrecoverable, and I know it, and I have lately begun to know why.
Trauma?
Other moments are irrecoverable, and I know it, and I have lately begun to know why. I do not subscribe to the superstition that one’s understanding of an event alters the event. No, it is the event which does the altering, and the question one faces is how to live with time’s brutal alterations.
a boy with an unspeakable past was a man with an unendurable future.
!
Now, the news was on, and our father restlessly clicked the dials: the air was full of a false urgency, such news as there might be entirely muffled by the habits and exigencies of salesmen. “Now, don’t you want to know,” asked Caleb, “what’s happening in the world?” “No,” said our father imperturbably, still clicking dials, “ain’t no white boy living can tell me what’s happening in the world. Not before they find out what’s happening on my job.”
Still feels true today
We stood on the avenue and waited for the bus. We were very shy with each other, suddenly; we were very happy with each other, too. Because we were shy, I watched the people passing, listened to the music coming from a bar behind us, watched the church members going home from church. We, as a family, had never gone to church, for our father could not bear the sight of people on their knees. But I thought, suddenly, for the first time and for no reason, that he must surely have gone to church in the islands, when he was young. I turned to ask Caleb about this, but I was stunned and silenced by his face. The sun was yellow, it was in his eyes, causing him to squint; it fell over his forehead and curled in his hair; his lips stretched upward in a scowl. He was looking at me. He looked worried and thoughtful and happy: no one had ever before looked at me with such a concentrated love. It stunned me, as I say, for he made no effort to hide it. It made me very proud, and it frightened me.
Damn. So beautiful and terrible
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “you know the odds, little brother? I mean, you know the odds are against you?” “Hell, yes,” I said
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “you know the odds, little brother?
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “you know the odds, little brother? I mean, you know the odds are against you?”
So good to know now that he was successful
But we going to have to fox them, little brother.” He put his hand on my neck; he looked out of the window, with tightened lips and darkened eyes. “Yeah. We going to have to fox them.”
Gotta fox em
I wondered how we were ever going to fox them if we couldn’t even bear to look at them.
Part 1
How could we fox them if we could neither bear to look at them, nor bear it when they looked at us?
Part 2
My presence, potentially, at least, proved his innocence and goodwill and also bore witness to the charity and splendor of the people to whom I owed so much and from whom I had so much to learn.
Vile
His voice stopped: his silence created a great wound in the universe. There was nothing for me to say: nothing. I held him, held what there was to hold. I held him. Because I could love, I realized I could hate. And I realized that I would feed my hatred, feed it every day and every hour. I would keep it healthy, I would make it strong, and I would find a use for it one day.
Hatred can be so usefujl
and I was not afraid to walk through the city, though I had always been afraid before. I did not feel, either, even remotely defiant. I don’t think I even saw the cops: I simply walked.
Disembodied traumatization
But my memory, for reasons which are not at all mysterious, blurs everything here, resists going over the ground again. This was the night that I discovered chaos, or perhaps it was the night that chaos discovered me; but it certainly began the most dreadful time of my life, a time I am astounded to have survived. It was the first of my nights in hell.
Damn . Trauma ejected him into the streets
Or, it may have been this night, or a night very soon thereafter, that I was picked up by a Harlem racketeer named Johnnie, big, Spanish-looking, very sharp, and very good-natured—good-natured with me, anyway—who took me home and gave me my first drink of brandy, and took me to bed. He frightened me, or his vehemence, once the lights were out, frightened me, and I didn’t like it, but I liked him. I had to keep him from buying things for me which I couldn’t take home; he was an even greater protection than Francis, and it took me a long time to break with him, simply because he was fond of me—he was often the only person to whom I could turn. Eventually, Johnnie and another pimp tangled, and Johnnie was killed.
Fam. Wasnt ready for this turn
Then I remembered the elderly man and his wife. Solid citizens, they had done their duty and called the police.
Then I remembered the elderly man and his wife. Solid citizens, they had done their duty and called the police. It was unbelievably funny. If I had not been handcuffed, I think I might have laughed.
Damn. Arrested for a joke
We stared at each other—if I had allowed myself to drop my eyes, I would have fallen to the floor.
This knife edge is so real
Someone now entered whom I had not seen before, bluff, hearty, red-faced, who called me by my name and slapped me on the back. “So, you’re an actor! Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place, Leo? You can’t blame us for a little misunderstanding. Mistakes will happen, won’t they?”
Good cop bad cop?
You have to realize that this is a small town and the people here are not very sophisticated—they’re not bad people. You just have to—understand their limits. That’s how you manage to play a character on the stage, by understanding the character’s limits.
Oof. Thats so good
The words bounced around the page, and I followed them around in the hope that they would eventually do something which could capture my attention.
I def have had this experience today
Wow. I wish it had been me. The police chief of this town would be looking for a job.” She looked around at us, and gave a little laugh. “I mean it. After all, I’m an heiress. I don’t always like being an heiress, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not prepared to use it.”
Yes! leverage that privilege
We were alone, she in that robe, and I in my skin, under the morning light, and with the spilt coffee all over the whitewashed floor.
A sentence
We really had no choice. I had to warm my girl, my freezing girl. I covered her with my body, and I took off her robe. I covered her, I covered her, she held me, and I entered her. And we rejoiced. Sorrow,
We really had no choice. I had to warm my girl, my freezing girl. I covered her with my body, and I took off her robe. I covered her, I covered her, she held me, and I entered her. And we rejoiced.
Wow. Betrayed by his dick indeed
“A person can’t just decide to be great, Barbara.” “Some persons can. Some persons must.” “You think I’m one of those persons?” “I know you are. I’ve always known it.” She paused. “That’s how I know, you see—that you don’t belong to me.” She smiled. “But let’s be to each other what we can.”
Tattoo this on my face
“A person can’t just decide to be great, Barbara.” “Some persons can. Some persons must.” “You think I’m one of those persons?” “I know you are. I’ve always known it.” She paused. “That’s how I know, you see—that you don’t belong to me.” She smiled. “But let’s be to each other what we can.” “While we can,” I said, watching her. “Yes. While we can.” Then, “But if we do it right, you see, we can stretch out our while a very long while and we can make each other better.
Frankly, we find it difficult to know exactly how to proceed with you. There is nothing to indicate—ah—in our opinion—that you have any very striking theatrical ability. Except, perhaps, for that little dance at the very end of the scene. Then you seemed free, and, so to say, joyous and boyish. We found it your very best moment.
the racism is stunning
Then I thought, Fuck it, and I turned the car around again, and drove out of town and hit the highway for New York.
WHAT?!
It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be facing a gang of reporters, to have the camera’s lights flashing around your head and in your eyes. It occasions a peculiarly subtle and difficult war within oneself. In a bitter way, the fact that one is half blinded by the staccato lights is a help, for it means that one can’t see anything very clearly, especially not the faces of the reporters. If one really looked into those faces, one would certainly blow one’s cool. But the war I mentioned is subtle and difficult—and, at bottom, base—because everyone loves attention, loves to be thought important. Here are all these people, the innocent ego proudly contends, here to talk to you, here because of you. You are, literally, then, one among countless millions. You are news. Whatever you do is news. But it does not take long to realize, at least assuming that one wishes to live, that to be news is really to be nothing; that the attention paid to one’s vicissitudes is merely the most cunning way yet devised of making the adventure of one’s life a farce. He woke up this morning, or he didn’t—either way, it’s a story—and he brushed his teeth or he didn’t, and then he peed, or didn’t, and then he shit, or he couldn’t, and then he fucked his wife or his broad, or he fucked his boy or his boy fucked him, or they blew each other, or they didn’t—it’s a story, either way, any way: it is all, all, there in the eager faces of the reporters.
I leaned back in the cushions—what is it about a fire which makes one feel so safe?
I had to agree because it is always possible that if one man can be saved, a multitude can be saved. But, in fact, it seemed to me that Christopher’s options and possibilities could change only when the actual framework changed: and the metamorphosis of the framework into which we had been born would almost certainly be so violent as to blow Christopher, and me, and all of us, away. And then—how does the Bible put it? Caleb would know—perhaps God would raise up a people who could understand. But, God’s batting average failing to inspire confidence, I committed myself to Christopher’s possibilities. Perhaps God would join us later, when He was convinced that we were on the winning side. Then, heaven would pass a civil-rights bill and all of the angels would be equal and all God’s children have shoes.
And what did the fire say? Now that I knew that I was going to live, at least for awhile, the fire seemed warmer than it ever had before. I sipped my drink, watching that crumbling, shaking, brilliant universe. The fire towered high, rising straight up, like a tree or tower—a tower made of air, lifting itself ever higher, vain even in its fall, and glorious. Not for two seconds together did the fire remain the same. It could not be content until everything had come under its dominion, had served its lust, and become a part of itself. I thought of martyrs, saints, and witches perishing in the fire, while multitudes looked on and felt that they were, thus, purified by flame. The man who stole the fire had bequeathed us the instrument of our salvation; and we, like the fire, were never the same for two seconds together, and, like the fire, we had never changed. How had they felt, those who had been destined to make our purity inviolate, when brought chained to the place and tied to the stake or the ladder, watching the faces of their brothers as they piled the fire higher, watching those faces until the smoke and the fire and the anguish intervened, until the sinful flesh had paid its penalty and the multitude were once again redeemed? What a tremendous decision had been made, what a mighty law had been passed, so long ago, and with the roar of universal relief and approval: that only the destruction of another could bring peace to the soul and guarantee the order of the universe!
Oh, yes, yes, yes, forgive them, let them rot, let them live or die; but how can you stand in the company of our murderers, how can you kiss that monstrous cross, how can you kiss them with the kiss of love? How can you? I asked of Caleb, who moaned and thundered at me from the fire.
What a pity. What a waste. I knew, when my mother went on like that, when my mother hurt me, that she was not trying to hurt me. I knew that. And yet—I was hurt. I was frightened—perhaps because I then considered that I was too old to be hurt, especially by my mother. I did not know—then—what nerve was unbearably struck in my mother by the conjunction of Barbara and myself. I wish I had known. But one of the reasons I was so vulnerable—in those days, in those ways—was my unspoken and unspeakable shame and fury concerning my career. I had, indeed, appeared on the professional stage, oh, four or five times, and worked with little theaters all up and down the goddamn country. I still choke on the dust of those halls, will never really recover from the stink and chill of those rooms. And, my God, the roles I played! Roles—roles is much to say. I made my first professional stage appearance, inevitably, carrying a tray.
By and by, in little experimental theaters here and there, I played some roles written for white men. And this was a curious kind of revelation, too, and it was very unnerving. I knew, in the first place, after all, that no matter how well I played, say, Tom in The Glass Menagerie, or Mio in Winterset, I was never going to be hired to play these parts. To do them at all was very forcefully to be made to realize the nature of the vacuum in which, helplessly, one was spinning. It was very hard to persist in learning what would almost certainly prove to be a useless language.
To drive to town, to walk about, to get through a single day, demanded at least as much energy as would have been demanded for a fifteen-round fight. More: for a fifteen-round fight supposed a winner and a loser, supposed a resolution, and, hence, a release. But there was no release for me, and especially not where it should most certainly have been found, in Barbara’s arms, in bed. Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together. And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty. It’s hard, after all, for a boy to find out who he is, or what he wants, if he is always afraid and always acting, and especially when this fear invades his most private life. Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough—alone, we were doomed.
Because I was certain that Barbara could not stay with me, I dared not be committed to Barbara. This fear obscured a great many fears, but it obscured, above all, the question of whether or not I wished to be committed to Barbara, or to anyone else, and it hid the question of whether or not I was capable of commitment. But these questions were hidden from me then, much as the shape of the valley was hidden. I knew that I had to make my way—somehow. No one could help me and I could not call for help. There was no way for me to know if the fear I sometimes felt when with Barbara, a fear which sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, which sometimes made me catch my breath when walking the streets at noon, was a personal fear, produced merely by the convolutions of my own personality, or a public fear, produced by the rage of others. I could not read my symptoms, for I loved her, I knew that, and loved her more than I loved anyone else. We were not always happy, but when I was happy with Barbara I was happier than I had ever been with anyone else. We were at ease with each other, as we were with no one else. And yet, I saw no future for us.
“Look,” she said again, “look!” With one hand, she pounded the newspaper into the grass. “The war is over. The war is over.” Then I saw that she had been crying. Some of the other ladies were standing on the porch. We looked down at the newspaper. Well, we understood that the war was over; for a long time, that was all that we understood. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities we had never heard of, had been leveled with single, unprecedented bombs. At first, I only wished that I had paid more attention to mathematics and physics when I had been in high school; what did it mean to split the atom? The old lady kept making sounds between tears and jubilation. I kept thinking, They didn’t drop it on the Germans. The Germans are white. They dropped it on the Japanese. They dropped it on the yellow-bellied Japs. I stared at the old lady. She was still sitting on the grass. She stared up at me, but I knew she wasn’t seeing me. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried. “Isn’t it wonderful? This terrible war is over. Over!”
I got a job at the West Indian restaurant as a waiter, a waiter who sang. Late some nights, after we had finished serving, I would take down my guitar and sing a few songs. Barbara had been right. They liked it, and it was good for me. That job held Barbara and me together, that winter, longer than we might have stayed together. And the job had an effect, obliquely, on my career. A singing black waiter in the Village in those days was bound to be noticed, and so, without realizing it, I became what I was later able to sell: a personality.
they came, my God, the wretched, the beautiful, lost and lonely, trying to live, though death’s icy mark was on them, trying to speak, though they had learned no language, trying to love although the flesh was vile, hoping to find in all the cups they tasted that taste which was joy, their joy, without which no life is worth living. Yes, I learned a lot. They frightened me, but I learned a lot.
“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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.
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.
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 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?”
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally,
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
So mystic
I looked for Barbara’s face, and Pete’s face. Their faces reassured me. They knew their boy. It had cost them something: and they would never let me see the bill.
!
Then, I sat on the bed and I looked at my records, the records they had bought for me: Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles and Miles Davis and Nina Simone and Joe Williams and Joe Tex and Lena Horne; and I thought what a comfort they would be to me, what a ball I would have with them in the south of France, where I would now be going, to sit in a borrowed villa and think over my life and recover my health and eventually read the script and sign the contract which would bring me back to work again. I realized that I was frightened. This would be the first time in more than twenty years that I had not, in one way or another, been working. When a worker is not working, what does a worker do? I knew that I was chilled by the fear of what I might find in myself with all my harness off, my obligations canceled, no lawyers, no agents, no producers, no television appearances, no civil-rights speeches, no reason to be here or there, no lunches at the Plaza, no dinners at Sardi’s, no opening nights, no gossip columnists, no predatory reporters, no Life and Loves of Leo Proudhammer (in six installments, beginning in this issue!), no need to smile when I did not want to smile, no need, indeed, to do anything but be myself. But who was this self? Had he left forever the house of my endeavor and my fame? Or was he merely having a hard time breathing beneath the rags and the rubble of the closets I had not opened in so long?
Yes! Picking up the theatre metaphor and deepening it into that deep human paradoox: loneliness
no hips at all, or, rather, the kind of hips that don’t exist until you hold them.
Such an apt description
My body had been functioning all those weeks I’d been in bed, and, abruptly, seriously, I was terribly horny. I shifted a little bit away from her, more astonished than embarrassed. This particular aspect of Lazarus’ return had not before occurred to me: but it certainly made sense. To come up from the place where one thought one was dead means that one becomes greedy for life, and life is many things, but it is, above all, the touch of another. The touch of another: no matter how transient, at no matter what price.
Wow new magical clarity about lazarus resurrection
I stopped to kiss my dazzled little nurse on the forehead. “Be good,” I said. “And come to see me soon—soon, I hope.” “You know I will,” she said. “You know I will.” She looked dazed and radiant and cheerful—this poor little girl who had had to empty my shit and wash my ass and my cock and balls. She would touch, for many days, the spot on her forehead where I had kissed her. Her face taught me, on the instant, something of the male power and the female hope, something of the male and female loneliness, and it deepened, on the instant, my already sufficiently bitter awareness of the bottomless
Oof
Then he allowed the elevator doors to close, and we started down. “There’ll be some reporters waiting downstairs,” Pete said. “I thought it was better not to have them come up.” He grinned. “Reporters and champagne don’t mix.” “We’re going to be very tyrannical,” Barbara said, “and get rid of them in a hurry. Reporters. The most loathsome parasites on earth. If they had any self-respect, they’d find a rock and crawl under it.” The elevator landed, the doors opened. She took my arm. Pete preceded us. There they were, about ten or twelve of them, with notebooks and cameras. There was a television crew in the streets. It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be facing a gang of reporters, to have the camera’s lights flashing around your head and in your eyes. It occasions a peculiarly subtle and difficult war within oneself. In a bitter way, the fact that one is half blinded by the staccato lights is a help, for it means that one can’t see anything very clearly, especially not the faces of the reporters. If one really looked into those faces, one would certainly blow one’s cool. But the war I mentioned is subtle and difficult—and, at bottom, base—because everyone loves attention, loves to be thought important. Here are all these people, the innocent ego proudly contends, here to talk to you, here because of you. You are, literally, then, one among countless millions. You are news. Whatever you do is news. But it does not take long to realize, at least assuming that one wishes to live, that to be news is really to be nothing; that the attention paid to one’s vicissitudes is merely the most cunning way yet devised of making the adventure of one’s life a farce. He woke up this morning, or he didn’t—either way, it’s a story—and he brushed his teeth or he didn’t, and then he peed, or didn’t, and then he shit, or he couldn’t, and then he fucked his wife or his broad, or he fucked his boy or his boy fucked him, or they blew each other, or they didn’t—it’s a story, either way, any way: it is all, all, there in the eager faces of the reporters.
So many layers. Leo acting as a reporter, stumbling into mystic truth by being confronted with them. Also powerful moment of clarity about news as mostly useless
They were glad—they were proud, even—that I could stare into the fire, that I was free to stare into the fire. And what did the fire say? Now that I knew that I was going to live, at least for awhile, the fire seemed warmer than it ever had before. I sipped my drink, watching that crumbling, shaking, brilliant universe. The fire towered high, rising straight up, like a tree or tower—a tower made of air, lifting itself ever higher, vain even in its fall, and glorious. Not for two seconds together did the fire remain the same. It could not be content until everything had come under its dominion, had served its lust, and become a part of itself. I thought of martyrs, saints, and witches perishing in the fire, while multitudes looked on and felt that they were, thus, purified by flame. The man who stole the fire had bequeathed us the instrument of our salvation; and we, like the fire, were never the same for two seconds together, and, like the fire, we had never changed. How had they felt, those who had been destined to make our purity inviolate, when brought chained to the place and tied to the stake or the ladder, watching the faces of their brothers as they piled the fire higher, watching those faces until the smoke and the fire and the anguish intervened, until the sinful flesh had paid its penalty and the multitude were once again redeemed? What a tremendous decision had been made, what a mighty law had been passed, so long ago, and with the roar of universal relief and approval: that only the destruction of another could bring peace to the soul and guarantee the order of the universe! The fire said, in Caleb’s voice, Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? I wondered why it was a virtue, often presented as the highest, to despise oneself and everybody else. What a slimy gang of creeps and cowards those old church fathers must have been; and remained; and what was my brother doing in that company? Where else should a man’s breath be, Caleb, I asked, but in his nostrils? Have you forgotten, have you forgotten, the flesh of our fathers which burned in that fire, the bones of our men broken by that wrath, the privacy of our women made foul by that conquest, and our children turned into orphans, into less than dogs, by that universal righteousness? Oh, yes, yes, yes, forgive them, let them rot, let them live or die; but how can you stand in the company of our murderers, how can you kiss that monstrous cross, how can you kiss them with the kiss of love? How can you? I asked of Caleb, who moaned and thundered at me from the fire. I had not talked to Caleb for years, for many years had cultivated an inability to think of him. But, soon I would be seeing him and his wife and his children. Me, but lately ensnared by death, I returned to my brother, I longed for him. I needed him: but the fire raged between
They were glad—they were proud, even—that I could stare into the fire, that I was free to stare into the fire. And what did the fire say? Now that I knew that I was going to live, at least for awhile, the fire seemed warmer than it ever had before. I sipped my drink, watching that crumbling, shaking, brilliant universe. The fire towered high, rising straight up, like a tree or tower—a tower made of air, lifting itself ever higher, vain even in its fall, and glorious. Not for two seconds together did the fire remain the same. It could not be content until everything had come under its dominion, had served its lust, and become a part of itself. I thought of martyrs, saints, and witches perishing in the fire, while multitudes looked on and felt that they were, thus, purified by flame. The man who stole the fire had bequeathed us the instrument of our salvation; and we, like the fire, were never the same for two seconds together, and, like the fire, we had never changed. How had they felt, those who had been destined to make our purity inviolate, when brought chained to the place and tied to the stake or the ladder, watching the faces of their brothers as they piled the fire higher, watching those faces until the smoke and the fire and the anguish intervened, until the sinful flesh had paid its penalty and the multitude were once again redeemed? What a tremendous decision had been made, what a mighty law had been passed, so long ago, and with the roar of universal relief and approval: that only the destruction of another could bring peace to the soul and guarantee the order of the universe! The fire said, in Caleb’s voice, Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? I wondered why it was a virtue, often presented as the highest, to despise oneself and everybody else. What a slimy gang of creeps and cowards those old church fathers must have been; and remained; and what was my brother doing in that company? Where else should a man’s breath be, Caleb, I asked, but in his nostrils? Have you forgotten, have you forgotten, the flesh of our fathers which burned in that fire, the bones of our men broken by that wrath, the privacy of our women made foul by that conquest, and our children turned into orphans, into less than dogs, by that universal righteousness? Oh, yes, yes, yes, forgive them, let them rot, let them live or die; but how can you stand in the company of our murderers, how can you kiss that monstrous cross, how can you kiss them with the kiss of love? How can you? I asked of Caleb, who moaned and thundered at me from the fire. I had not talked to Caleb for years, for many years had cultivated an inability to think of him. But, soon I would be seeing him and his wife and his children. Me, but lately ensnared by death, I returned to my brother, I longed for him. I needed him: but the fire raged between us.
Fire
The silence in the room was a little loud.
my mother hated Barbara, hated her helplessly, depthlessly, felt for Barbara a revulsion so deep that she could scarcely bear to look at her. And she attempted to cover this with a New Orleans gentility which we, her family, had never known her to use before, and which was far more devastating than cursing or spittle or a blow. What made it unbearable was that it revealed a fear I had never noticed in my mother before. “Now, you know,” she said to me darkly, once, “that is not what I raised you for. That was no part of my calculations, young man, and you might as well know it front as back.” “What are you talking about, Mama?” I knew what she was talking about. She could almost never bring herself to mention Barbara by name, but the tone was unmistakable.
But, whereas my father, without particularly liking or disliking Barbara, worried about the griefs and dangers she could bring me to, and Caleb kept her carefully quarantined in the limbo of unregenerate harlots—unregenerate because she was white, harlot because she was a woman, in limbo because she was both—my mother hated Barbara, hated her helplessly, depthlessly, felt for Barbara a revulsion so deep that she could scarcely bear to look at her. And she attempted to cover this with a New Orleans gentility which we, her family, had never known her to use before, and which was far more devastating than cursing or spittle or a blow. What made it unbearable was that it revealed a fear I had never noticed in my mother before. “Now, you know,” she said to me darkly, once, “that is not what I raised you for. That was no part of my calculations, young man, and you might as well know it front as back.” “What are you talking about, Mama?” I knew what she was talking about. She could almost never bring herself to mention Barbara by name, but the tone was unmistakable.
Family story Of the first white partner. My brother is leo
But, whereas my father, without particularly liking or disliking Barbara, worried about the griefs and dangers she could bring me to, and Caleb kept her carefully quarantined in the limbo of unregenerate harlots—unregenerate because she was white, harlot because she was a woman, in limbo because she was both—my mother hated Barbara, hated her helplessly, depthlessly, felt for Barbara a revulsion so deep that she could scarcely bear to look at her. And she attempted to cover this with a New Orleans gentility which we, her family, had never known her to use before, and which was far more devastating than cursing or spittle or a blow. What made it unbearable was that it revealed a fear I had never noticed in my mother before. “Now, you know,” she said to me darkly, once, “that is not what I raised you for. That was no part of my calculations, young man, and you might as well know it front as back.” “What are you talking about, Mama?” I knew what she was talking about. She could almost never bring herself to mention Barbara by name, but the tone was unmistakable. “I mean, I am not going to have no fair-haired, blue-eyed baby crawling around here and calling me Grandmama. That’s what I mean. You know damn well what I mean.”
people won’t see what they can’t afford to see.
Quote of the chapter
had to serve this zombie his breakfast about five hundred fucking times, and every single time I went upstage to uncover his eggs and pour his coffee, Britannia came up behind me and lovingly stroked my balls
Is this a metaphor?!
One had to change the beat: one had to find a rhythm which arrested the rhythm. And the price for this was a certain ruthless good humor, for the audience had, after all, placed themselves in your hands by lacking the courage to imagine about you what you knew too well about them. The people saw you showing your teeth: it escaped their notice that they were also showing theirs—and showing them, furthermore, on the cue delivered by their
One had to change the beat: one had to find a rhythm which arrested the rhythm. And the price for this was a certain ruthless good humor, for the audience had, after all, placed themselves in your hands by lacking the courage to imagine about you what you knew too well about them. The people saw you showing your teeth: it escaped their notice that they were also showing theirs—and showing them, furthermore, on the cue delivered by their Fool.
was, and this was mainly because of Caleb. For some reason, my first memory of Caleb,
For some reason, my first memory of Caleb, after the war was over, connects with another memory, of Barbara and myself; and I find it impossible to tell the one without first telling the other. I don’t know why.
Who is he telling?
I did not refuse to join the Army, but outwitted it by a particular species of ruthless cunning. I was—I say now—prepared to go to jail. The Japanese had already been interned. I was not going to fight for the people who had interned them, who had also destroyed the Indians, who were in the process of destroying everyone I loved: I was not going to defend my murderers. Yet, when my moment came, I did not say any of that. I arrived at the Harlem draft-board with several books under my arm. I deliberately arrived a little late. I pretended that I had just come from the library. I said that I was the only support of my aging parents, and, in fact, I had had the foresight to be working in a shipyard, foresight or luck, it’s hard to say now, I’ve held so many jobs for so many reasons. Anyway, I think I gave a great performance before my draft-board. It was composed, as I knew it would be, of round, brown, respectable old men who had long ago given up any hope of being surprised. Round, brown, respectable old men, whose only real desire, insofar as they still dared desire, was to be white. I knew that, and with my books under my arm, with one brother already in the Army, with two aging people at home, with my impeccable shipyard job, with my flaming youth, and what I could not then have named as a deadly single-mindedness—and using precisely the fact that I was physically improbable—persuaded these round, brown, respectable old men that my potential value to my race—to them; my very improbability contained their hope of power, and I knew that—was infinitely more important than my, after all, trivial value to my country. And they deferred me. I had known that they would: that if I pressed the right buttons, they would have no choice but to defer me. And they checked up on me from time to time, but they never bothered me. I had surprised them, and they were grateful, although some of them grew to hate me later, when they suspected how they had goofed.
I love this story
was on my height, in my dungeon, had entered, as we say, my bag.
I was on my height, in my dungeon, had entered, as we say, my bag.
Wtf does this mean?
Anyway: during the Workshop summer, just after Jerry went away,
... And we're back!
Of all the fears there are, perhaps the fear of physical pain and destruction is the most devastating. For I had to admit to myself that I was simply, ignobly, and abjectly afraid. I didn’t like the taste of my own blood. I didn’t want all my teeth knocked out, didn’t want my nose smashed, my eyes blinded, didn’t want my skull caved in. To drive to town, to walk about, to get through a single day, demanded at least as much energy as would have been demanded for a fifteen-round fight. More: for a fifteen-round fight supposed a winner and a loser, supposed a resolution, and, hence, a release. But there was no release for me, and especially not where it should most certainly have been found, in Barbara’s arms, in bed. Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together. And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty. It’s hard, after all, for a boy to find out who he is, or what he wants, if he is always afraid and always acting, and especially when this fear invades his most private life. Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough—alone, we were doomed. We had only each other, and this fact menaced our relation to each other. We had no relief, we had no one to talk to—far behind us were the days when we had played at being lovers, and laughed at how easily the world was shocked.
Gold gold gold. Fears, relationship, love. Wow
I don’t know what she was seeing as we looked out over the dark valley; but I did not see any future for us; I did not see any future for myself at all. Barbara was young and talented and pretty, and single-minded. There was nothing to prevent her from scaling the heights. Her eminence was but a matter of time. And what could she then do with her sad, dark lover, a boy trapped in the wrong time, the wrong place, and with the wrong ambitions trapped in the wrong skin?
What a moment
The most subtle and perhaps the most deadly of alienations is that which is produced by the fear of being alienated.
Quote of the year
Because I was certain that Barbara could not stay with me, I dared not be committed to Barbara. This fear obscured a great many fears, but it obscured, above all, the question of whether or not I wished to be committed to Barbara, or to anyone else, and it hid the question of whether or not I was capable of commitment. But these questions were hidden from me then, much as the shape of the valley was hidden. I knew that I had to make my way—somehow. No one could help me and I could not call for help. There was no way for me to know if the fear I sometimes felt when with Barbara, a fear which sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, which sometimes made me catch my breath when walking the streets at noon, was a personal fear, produced merely by the convolutions of my own personality, or a public fear, produced by the rage of others. I could not read my symptoms, for I loved her, I knew that, and loved her more than I loved anyone else. We were not always happy, but when I was happy with Barbara I was happier than I had ever been with anyone else. We were at ease with each other, as we were with no one else. And yet, I saw no future for us.
SOo fucking good
“And I know you’ve been practicing the guitar. And there are places in the Village where you could start out. Oh, you know, there’s that West Indian restaurant. I bet they’d be glad to have you start out there.” “If they want people to sing West Indian songs, why would they come to me? I’m not West Indian.” “Oh, Leo, you are too. You’re part West Indian. You’re just putting up objections so I can knock them down. I know you. It’s a damn good idea, and you know it.” I had thought about it before; I began to think about it again. “Maybe.”
Denial of culture until it's helpful. such an immigrant / marginalized person story.
The familiar and yet rather awful heat and pressure rose in my chest and descended to my loins; and I lay there, while the heat wrapped me round, holding Barbara with one arm and feeling her delicate trembling. The heat rose and rose, partly against my will, partly to my delight. For I was beginning to realize that vows were made with the body as sacred as those made with the tongue. And these vows were at once harder to keep, and harder to break. We turned to each other. Everything was still. We began to make love very slowly, more gently and more sorrowfully than we ever had before. We did not say a word. Every caress seemed to drag us up from the depths of ourselves, revealing another nakedness, a nakedness we could scarcely bear. Her face, in the starlight, in the faint light of the embers of our fire, was a face I had never known. I caressed that face, and held it and kissed it, with that passion sometimes produced by memory, the passion of our deepest dreams. I seemed to know, that night, that we were trapped, trapped no matter what we did: we would have to learn to live in the trap. But that night it did not seem impossible. Nothing seemed impossible. Barbara began to moan. It was a black moan, and it was as though, trapped within the flesh I held, there was a black woman moaning, struggling to be free. Perhaps it was because we were beneath the starlight, naked. I had unzipped the sleeping bag, and the August night traveled over my body, as I trembled over Barbara. It was as though we were not only joined to each other, but to the night, the stars, the moon, the sleeping valley, the trees, the earth beneath the stone which was our bed, and the water beneath the earth. With every touch, movement, caress, with every thrust, with every moan and gasp, I came closer to Barbara and closer to myself and closer to something unnameable. And her thighs locked around me, sweeter than water. She held me, held me, held me. And I was very slow. I was very sure. I held it, held it, held it, held it because I knew it could not long be held. All this had nothing to do with time. The moment of our liberation gathered, gathered, crouched, ready to spring, and Barbara sobbed; the wind burned my body, and I felt the unmistakable, the unanswerable retreat, contraction, concentration, the long, poised moment before the long fall. I murmured, Barbara, and seemed to hear her name, my call, ringing through the valley. And her name echoed in the valley for a long time. Then the stars began to grow pale. I zipped the sleeping bag over us. We curled into each other, and slept. We had not spoken.
These love making scenes are wow
As we descended, my fear began to return, like the throb of a remembered toothache before the new toothache begins.
Beautiful Foreshadow
We made the mistake—though I don’t know if one can accurately describe as a mistake what one couldn’t help doing—of returning to Paradise Alley.
! Quote
I am also, I forgot to say, the only bartender.
Is there more written to the reader in part 3?
Here they came:
They look at the other couple, look at me. I leave them in their valley of decision, and light a few candles. They sit down—at a table very near the door. I give them their menus. “Would you like a drink?” “Can you make a Manhattan?” “I believe I still remember. Two?” “Yeah. And make it snappy.”
So infuriating
Here they came:
This section is just bloody brilliant
anger.
Hell, they should have liked it, it was all for free, and of course Hilda liked it because I was good for business. I don’t suppose that the cops liked it, but Hilda and the cops appeared to have a working arrangement and they hardly ever gave us any trouble.
Extortion is a huge part of bostons economy. Mobs.
“How’s it going?” But this was a polite question. It wasn’t the way he would have asked some time ago. He didn’t believe that my studying meant anything. He was just being polite to his kid brother, waiting for the kid to come to his senses. And you can’t really answer a polite question, because actually no question has been asked.
Facts
I remembered that I ducked into one of the movies on 42nd Street and sat in the top row and I let a white boy grope me and stroke me and finally I forced his blond head down on me and I made him give me a blow job.
Ny theatres had this happen often!
watched his face now, wondering if he had ever spied on my life as I had spied on his. “When are you coming up to the house?” “Let’s see—what’s today? Caleb, I don’t see
I watched his face now, wondering if he had ever spied on my life as I had spied on his. “When are you coming up to the house?”
What a time jump. Dipped in and out of time
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.
I just dont want to look surprised
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.
Powerful reason not to hate. Very buddhist
Boston,
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.
Trauma memory anchor
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.
White soap black sugar
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,
Quote
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.
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 true state of being black in america
He watched her. Then he grinned, looking like Caleb again—just for a moment.
Brother Lost to Truama . Prison and war and christianity
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.
Stretching time again. Love it
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
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.
Disembodied
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.
Wild
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
I am beginning to know this feeling
Pete left very soon after dinner, and Barbara and I sat before the fire, as calm, I thought suddenly, almost, as two old people.
Omg the time hopping. Now im dizzy for the first time
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.
Like mother like son
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.
Polyamory at its finest
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.
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.
Pay them no mind
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.
Lol
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.”
Yup
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.