On Reading James Baldwin

         It was Christmas. I was in a three-bedroom, 1960s ranch house set back into the hills of a cute little town south of Yosemite. Many of the buildings in the town were styled as lodges and there were Christmas lights strung up. The rooms of the house I was in were large  and square and carpeted with brown shag. In the living room, where I slept on the carpet with a pillow and a blanket, the only furniture was a giant TV, on which people played Wii bowling or watched DVD box sets of '90s sitcoms, a wood burning stove and three fold-out camping chairs. This was not the kind of house where people talked to each other. The silence wasn't careful or forced. It was more that it didn't occur to anyone to say more than a few phrases because they were all on drugs.
            My boyfriend and I had a terrible stomach flu. I hadn't been able to keep anything down for days and periodically he and the man of this house, a boy of perhaps 20, would go to the store to buy Gatorade. I always asked for the blue kind. 
            My boyfriend wouldn't touch me in front of his friends. We were supposed to pretend we weren't together, although it was probably obvious to everyone, as I had no business being in that house without him. The bedrooms were all filled lights and special air ducts and heaters because there was marijuana growing in them. The plants were tall and strong, and when you opened one of the bedroom doors it was like looking into the sun, and the smell of the plants was so strong that it seemed you could see particles of scent floating in the air like green dust motes.
            I woke up before everyone. It was five or six in the morning and the sun had just barely come up. I went out onto the patio and saw that it had snowed in the night, a velvet six inches that blanketed everything. I lit a cigarette and I was shivering in my pajamas. The concrete was very icy under my bare feet. I decided to call my mother, with whom I had had a falling out. All of her reasons for being angry with me were completely justified, which made it much harder for me. I loved her and I wanted her to love me on Christmas, to tell me I was her little girl and that everything was going to be okay. That wasn't what she said, and as she yelled on the phone, listing all of the true things I had done, the very real ways in which I was a failure and a horrible daughter and unworthy of the least sympathy, I looked out at the snowy yard and I saw a shape. It was a lump in the snow. I kept looking at it, trying to see what it was.
            "So now you aren't talking?" my mother said.
            I walked towards the lump in the snow. My feet hurt terribly from the ice.
            "I can hear you crying," my mother said.
            What was it? That lump in the snow? Was it a pile of clothes?
            "I don't think this conversation is going anywhere," my mother said.
            I leaned down and brushed away the snow from the top of the lump. I was shaking uncontrollably. It was a carcass.
            "I'm going to go now," my mother said.
            A turkey carcass. These people, who lived in this house, had taken their turkey and just thrown it in the yard. There was snow filling up the cavity of its ribcage now.
            "I love you," my mother said, "but I just don't like who you are right now."
            She couldn't see me but I nodded my head. I agreed with her. I wished she could see me, barefoot in the snow, looking at that turkey carcass, terrified. But she couldn't. She hung up the phone.
            I went back inside and lay on my little pile of blankets on the floor. No one would wake up for hours and I was shaking badly from the cold. Even though I was terribly hungry I knew that if I ate I would throw up. I didn't like throwing up in this house where people could hear me. I didn't know these people, I didn't want them to be able to hear the terrible, vulnerable sounds I made in their bathroom. I wrapped a sheet around me and I opened James Baldwin's Another Country to the first page.
            He is probably the only reason that I lived through that Christmas. There were so many options, so many paths to death for me at that time. But I knew I could live in the world if there was a man like James Baldwin in it. I knew he was dead, it wasn't that I cared about the personage of him. But if James Baldwin was a fact of this earth, then I decided I could agree with that. I could consent to the sickness and the brown shag carpeting and the Wii bowling and the frozen over turkey carcass if James Baldwin was part of the equation.
 
            On page 8, I read this:

"[T]he saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question as terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them."

 
            Much later, I wound up in a discussion with one of my professors at graduate school about James Baldwin. I had admitted he was one of my favorite writers, that I would give anything to be able to write like him.
            My professor made a dismissive noise in his throat and then said, "Baldwin was wrong."
            "Wrong?" I said.
            "He was wrong about everything," my professor said.
 
            It was the first time I had been introduced to the idea of certain writers being "wrong" and others of them "being on to something." If I had had the balls, I would have told my professor about the day I first read James Baldwin, that snowy Christmas.
            And then I would have told him what happened later, when everyone woke up.     Outside, we all stood around on the patio, smoking cigarettes and eating fentanyl suckers.
            "No, Africa is a country," the girlfriend of the man of the house said.
            "Africa is a continent," I said.
            "Really?"
            "Yes."
            "Is there more than one country in it?"
            I listed some of the countries in Africa for her.
            "Why are some of them in French?"
            I explained briefly about colonization, the slave trade, the history of Africa.
            "That's crazy!" she said. Her boyfriend was also impressed.
            These were white kids. They had both graduated high school. This was America.
 
            This was where I lived.

Comments

[Jonathan]

I felt compelled to leave a comment. I came to this page while searching for the phrase "sperm-stiffened sheets". The passage you quoted from Baldwin was the very same passage my girlfriend read aloud to me the other night. She noted how intense the words were only eight pages into the book.

Of course I didn't just jump right to the Baldwin passage because I am reading this from my iPhone and had to scroll and scroll to get to the bottom of this page where the quote lived, so along the way I read your other words. Coincidences, realism too real to be passed off as fiction. I have to agree and even relate with much of it.

I too left high school early for college and even moved to California on a whim, leaving friends behind and moving to a place where I knew no one. Six years in California. I experienced quite a bit there and in retelling the stories to people, I always get looks of disbelief.

My mother also birthed me alone and against the advice of her mother who wanted her to abort.

It's amusing how I ended up here reading your words.

[Rufi Cole]

Jonathan,
I wish I were a better blogger so I could have responded in some way at the time you left this. Now it is two years later.
R