In January of 1989 I boarded a bus from New York City to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to do research for a novel I was writing. I was two months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday. I wore a brand-new brown leather jacket and a gray newsboy-style cap atop my short Afro, and in my bag was a fat paperback copy of James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head.
I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know Baldwin’s name, but it was not until the previous summer that I had taken the plunge into his work. That May I came to the end of my time as an editorial assistant at the book-publishing conglomerate Bantam Doubleday Dell; my boss had been let go, and though I had the option to stay on, instead I accepted the modest severance, used it to purchase my first word processor, and began what would be two and a half years of doing part-time data entry while spending the balance of my time trying to write fiction. With my newly flexible schedule, I turned to the pile of paperbacks given to me months earlier by an older friend, an editor where I worked—copies of nearly a dozen of Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction books, issued by one of the conglomerate’s imprints, Laurel. The gift came my way not long after Baldwin’s death at sixty-three in France, proof that his voice lived on, as it certainly did for me. That summer, 1988, I read those books in Manhattan coffee shops, always had one with me on the subway, made sure to bring one during visits to my family in D.C., fell asleep over them late at night in my mouse-infested one-bedroom apartment in the hinterlands of Brooklyn, and talked about them to anyone who would listen. To put it simply, I had fallen in love.
Raised in an all-black community, immersed in mostly white settings since college, I struggled to make sense of what we like to call race, struggling all the more because, or so it seemed to me, no one else did so at all. So many blacks I encountered, especially in college, were content and confident in their separatism; nearly all of the whites in my circles were liberal, which sometimes seemed a synonym for “apathetic.” Where were the people, outside my own family, who truly believed that skin color was unimportant but felt racism as a personal affront, and were eloquent about it to boot? I found one of those people—the first I ever discovered in print—when I read this passage from the 1963 nonfiction work The Fire Next Time, describing Baldwin’s encounter with Elijah Muhammad and a group of his disciples in the Nation of Islam:
I told Elijah that I did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”
In Baldwin’s novels, blacks suffered because of racism—and made noise about it—but blacks and whites loved each other and hurt each other as only lovers can. At their best, the long, long sentences in his essays just about sang, achieving a three-part harmony of insight, passion, and precision that begged to be read aloud, their music and cadences suggesting Baldwin’s past as a boy preacher. Though I was not yet seven years old when the 1960s ended, his novels of that decade, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, gave me what felt like a taste of that storied time, that brief moment when, even amidst the chaos, Americans of different hues tried together to figure things out. The novels’ homosexual themes and—if the books were any indication—Baldwin’s own queerness did not faze me a bit, hopelessly heterosexual young man though I was. I had met a kindred soul.
So I was already a fan for life when I boarded that bus to Harrisburg and picked up where I’d left off in reading Just Above My Head. And yet. Published in 1979—twenty-six years after his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain—Baldwin’s final full-length work of fiction seemed to me a latecomer to the party, or else a sign that the party itself was reaching its end, however much those remaining longed and strained to keep it going. Once-fresh stories were being retold, already broken thematic ground mined once more. On top of that, the novel felt both plotless and bloated, full of unneeded philosophical asides that—as with the author’s next-to-last novel, If Beale Street Could Talk—seemed to come not from the ostensible narrator but from Baldwin himself. As I rode toward Harrisburg in the service of my own race-related novel, which would never see the light of day, I kept reading Baldwin’s book, even enjoying parts of it, while feeling overall that it was the work of a writer who had run out of things to say.
How differently I see the book now. I reread Just Above My Head for the first time this past summer—not the paperback, which I still have, but in the Library of America volume of Baldwin’s three later novels. Perhaps because I am nearly as old now as Baldwin was when he died, perhaps because of all that has happened since I stepped onto that bus to Harrisburg at twenty-five, I now see the novel not as the work of a writer repeating himself but, in a way, as the opposite: the result of appreciating the life one has lived while also seeking to understand its essence, an act I find myself often engaged in these days. Our twenties often begin the process of making something, or not, of the particular circumstances in which we have been set down, of the particular life we have been given—shaping the raw clay. Should we survive the next three or four decades, we may feel that, while our life is by no means over, we have given it, or allowed it to take, much of the shape that it will ultimately have, and we may feel compelled to trace that shape. What was this middle period of our lives, this time of defining ourselves, of being defined? Did we manage to surmount what produced us? Just Above My Head is a book by a man trying to grasp the themes of his own existence, to see what he had made of what had made him, and it is no less so for being a work of fiction, for Baldwin used the novel form to confront his personal challenges.
There were a number of those. Baldwin, born in 1924, grew up as the oldest of nine children in the impoverished streets of Harlem, helping to raise his siblings. He was a voracious reader from a young age. His psychologically abusive father—who, Baldwin learned much later, was not his biological father—was a preacher, moving “from church to smaller and more improbable church,” as Baldwin writes. As a teen, he himself turned to preaching, though he had already felt the first stirrings of that anathema to the church, his attraction to other males. Nicholas Boggs notes in his excellent new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, that as a preteen Baldwin had formed an attachment to a boy who lived across the street, one that ended when the other boy’s “family moved away, quite likely, [Baldwin] later realized, because their families felt [the boys] needed to be separated.” Baldwin left the church because of what he came to see as its narrow-mindedness and because he preferred writing. His world broadened when he made his way downtown to Greenwich Village and met the painter Beauford Delaney (himself black and gay), who became his mentor and lifelong friend. It was because of Delaney that Baldwin set his sights on living in Europe, leaving behind the legally sanctioned racism of 1940s America. In Paris, Baldwin met perhaps the great love of his life, the young aspiring painter Lucien Happersberger. For a time the two escaped the boozy chaos of Paris, repairing to a remote Swiss chalet owned by Happersberger’s family, where Baldwin finished work on Go Tell It on the Mountain, published when the writer was twenty-nine.
Thus had begun Baldwin’s period of shaping his own raw clay. His celebrated first novel represented his attempt to make sense—and art—of his experiences with the church, with his father, and, more subtly, with his sexuality. That last theme was front and center in his 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin’s single novel without any black characters—writing about blacks would mean writing about race, which he felt would have taken the focus off his main subject). A year earlier he had published his first book in the genre many feel is his strongest, the essay collection Notes of a Native Son, which included his critical writing and the immortal title piece, a meditation on his father, race, and the inevitable fruits of bitterness. Hearing the call of his home country and its emergent civil rights movement, Baldwin returned to the States and for the first time traveled to the South, the land of his father, reporting for magazines on the scene of hope and danger there. He wrote about race as a private matter (the 1962 novel Another Country) and as a public one (The Fire Next Time), and by the mid-1960s, as a novelist, essayist, social critic, and public commentator, he found himself world-famous. As the decade progressed, as the civil rights movement largely gave way to Black Power, and as the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr. caused a shift within Baldwin (Baldwin knew all three men, and Evers was his friend), hope and love ceased to be prominent themes in his work: while Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone features black and white characters who love each other, its final scene has one black character saying to another, “We need guns.”
We can consider Just Above My Head in one of two ways, or both: as a novel, and as Baldwin’s attempt to come to terms with his experience.
A comic novel this is not, but there is something faintly humorous about the writer’s approach to thinking about the various roles he had played in his life, or what we might call his different selves: several of the book’s fairly large number of characters are aspects of Baldwin himself, in a couple of cases even sharing his name. The famous gay artist of the story, a gospel-turned-soul singer, is Arthur Montana, “Arthur” being Baldwin’s middle name. Arthur’s childhood acquaintance and eventual lover and musical accompanist, the younger child in the Miller family, is given Baldwin’s nickname, Jimmy. Arthur’s protective older brother is Hall, a reflection of Baldwin’s position in his own family. Jimmy’s older sister, Julia (whose parents are friendly with Arthur and Hall’s in Harlem), is a preacher in her youth. Arthur and Hall’s father, in sharp contrast to Baldwin’s own, is open-minded, and a musician himself; on the other hand, Julia’s father sexually abuses her, in what might be called a nightmare version of Baldwin’s experience with his actual father.
As a teen, Arthur travels with a male gospel quartet, falling in love with one of the other members. (Two of Baldwin’s brothers also traveled with a quartet, an experience the writer chronicled in the grimly humorous essay “Journey to Atlanta,” included in Notes of a Native Son.) As an adult solo performer, accompanied by Hall and a former member of the quartet, Arthur goes to the South to perform, encountering the racial tensions—and worse than tensions—that Baldwin witnessed during his own journey south. The individual fates of the former members of the quartet, meanwhile, are a kind of catalogue of dangers facing young black men in America.
Hall is the novel’s narrator, often an omniscient one, which is significant for a number of reasons. One is that, of his various “selves,” the self as caretaker is the one Baldwin chose as the spokesperson for this—to use a jazz expression—alternate take on his own life. (In addition to helping to raise his siblings when he himself was very young, Baldwin, who felt guilty about leaving his family for foreign shores, later in life purchased a town house for them on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.) Another is that the heterosexual Hall is happily married with children, a state of domesticity to which, according to Boggs, Baldwin aspired, with one difference: Baldwin dreamt for the rest of his life of recreating the domestic bliss he knew in Switzerland with Happersberger, who appears to have set in motion the pattern of Baldwin’s romances with men attracted primarily to women. His last novel, then, is narrated by a person who has achieved what Baldwin (who had many lovers) always wanted but never had. In a way, Hall is both who Baldwin was and who he wanted to be.
Julia is equally significant, for being both female and an echo of Baldwin’s young-preacher days. As socially forward-thinking as he was in many ways, with his arguments—before they were fashionable—that neither color nor gender mattered between lovers, Baldwin was sometimes taken to task for a kind of male posturing, suggesting that he was, in some ways, also a man of his time. In his 1971 televised interview with the poet Nikki Giovanni, quoted in Boggs’s biography, Baldwin said, “Look, if we’re living in the same house and you’re my wife or my woman, I have to be responsible for that house. If I’m not allowed to be responsible for that house, I’m no longer in my own eyes—it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me—in my own eyes I’m not a man.” As late as 1984, he told the poet Audre Lorde in an interview, part of which appeared in Essence magazine, “No one will turn me into a woman.” It is curious, then, that in his final essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” published the following year in Playboy, Baldwin wrote that “we are all androgynous, not only because we are born of a woman im-pregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other.” It would seem either that Baldwin’s thinking underwent a late, radical shift or that he was never as firm in his position as he had sounded, that he was divided internally over this question. I wonder whether that dividedness is a product of Baldwin’s middle years, and whether a result of that, in turn, is the character Julia—in whom, it might be said, Baldwin turned himself into a woman.
What sets in motion this cocktail of the themes of Baldwin’s adult life—artistry, fame, race, yearning for domesticity, considerations of gender and sexuality—is Arthur’s fatal heart attack at age thirty-nine. Perhaps tellingly, the narrator of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Leo Proudhammer, like Arthur a famous queer performer, also suffers a (nonfatal) heart attack at thirty-nine. A poet once said to me that our work is smarter than we are—that is, it often reveals truths of which we are unaware—and while I have never read a mention of the significance to Baldwin of that age, his work may be said to point to it. Baldwin notes in the text that prefaces the published version of his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie, which was inspired by the murder of Emmett Till, that “something entered into me which I cannot describe” when his friend Evers was killed, less than two months before Baldwin’s thirty-ninth birthday; “it was then,” he adds, “that I resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting this play done.” Did the “something I cannot describe” at the same time strike a blow against the artist in Baldwin from which he never quite recovered? Did he find it more difficult to “keep my own heart free of hatred and despair,” the desire he expresses at the end of his essay “Notes of a Native Son,” and were those emotions corrosive to his abilities? Is any of this suggested by work that was perhaps smarter than he was, by the heart attacks he gave to his two thirty-nine-year-old protagonists at the start of their respective novels? Baldwin continued to write, of course; but, whether because his gifts had suffered or because critics of the 1960s and 1970s simply did not like what he had to say—and that is another question worth asking—his novels were never as well received again. (By the 1970s Baldwin was thought by many to be a has-been; similarly, in Just Above My Head, the press refers to Arthur upon his death as a “nearly forgotten Negro moaner and groaner.”)
Just Above My Head begins with Hall reporting Arthur’s death—“The damn’d blood burst”—and reflecting on his inability to talk to his wife and children about the loss of his brother and what it means to him. Hall’s attempt to tell Arthur’s story, and by necessity the stories of those in his life, makes up the novel, which spans the years from the Korean War era to the late 1970s. We see the lives of the two sets of siblings unfurl. Arthur accepts his sexuality, leaves the world of gospel for mainstream success, becomes famous, and begins to drink heavily and take drugs, discovering along the way the possibility of love across color lines. (As a drinker, Baldwin himself was no slouch.) Julia leaves the church and grows up to become a model and, later, a kind of adventurer, traveling to Africa in search of her heritage, and herself. Jimmy recovers from the wreckage of his family life to become a musician and eventually begins writing a book. And Hall goes to war, returns, has several lovers, works in advertising, starts a family, and worries and philosophizes. For reasons never entirely explained, the main focus of his worry is Arthur, though Arthur’s eventual fate would seem to justify that worry; and if Hall represents Baldwin the caretaker and would-be domestic partner, he is also, perhaps, with all of his side musings to the reader, Baldwin the essayist. There is much crossing of paths, as Hall and Julia become lovers for a time, just as Arthur and Jimmy do. The characters are themselves a kind of quartet, their stories blending like voices, and indeed Jimmy the musician-turned-writer may point to a way of interpreting Baldwin’s novel, saying late in the story, “I don’t know if I’m trying to write a book, or trying to write a symphony.” In a symphony, it could be said, sounds take the place of words, bypassing events as they aim for feeling.
Does this symphony work as a novel? My reaction to the book as a twenty-five-year-old was not completely without foundation, in that there is no plot to speak of, except the plot that makes up most of our lives—we age and move closer to what character and circumstance have in store. Hall, the caretaker, eventually becomes Arthur’s manager; Julia goes from a child with many answers to an adult with many questions; Jimmy finds and pursues his artistic passions; and Arthur follows his own passion where it leads, in the end overshooting the mark. Meanwhile, the novel is not as formless as I once thought, Arthur’s death making up the beginning and end points and creating a symmetry. What compels us forward in the absence of plot, of a driving series of events and choices leading to a resolution, is an emotional investment in these complex characters and the thoughtfulness of the writing, which, in the novel’s finest passages, fuse:
I watched her face. She was older, yes, but it wasn’t really time which had happened in her face—there had not, after all, been that much time—what had happened spoke of lonely, melancholy decision. The price was written in the jawbone and the cheekbone, in the not-quite-false directness and tranquillity [sic] of the eye. Not quite false because too hard won: the struggle was more vivid than the victory.
And the arguable failure of Just Above My Head in the area of plot and resolution may in fact make for the novel’s greatest success. If we see the novel as one character—to an extent the author’s surrogate—trying to figure out what he and those close to him have made of their lives, then that character’s falling short perhaps points to this: that while we may work to shape our lives, those lives themselves, in all their vastness and complexity and endless contradiction, are in their totality beyond our own ability to define. In our look back, we may not be certain of victory, whatever that may be, which does not mean we have not been victorious. All we can do is continue the struggle.
If we learn anything, we learn, paradoxically, that there are always more questions than answers. As I look at the middle period of my own life, at the newsboy cap that gave way to fedoras, at the Afro replaced by close-cropped and thinning hair, at the various ways I have supported myself, at my flailing efforts to make sense of so-called race, at the writing career I have sought to build, at the children my wife and I did our best to raise, I wonder, among many other things, which of my selves speaks for me—and speaks to you.
Clifford Thompson’s book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays was published in October by the University of Georgia Press.