I’m reading James Balwin’s,
"Just Above My Head".
I "discovered"
James when I was young, far from home, and trapped between those hard places.
That summer, I read all of his books, except this one, and Giovanni's
Room. I Then passed them along to a homeless New York friend sleeping on
the couch of my shared rented house, that I could barely afford, and didn't
want to even be there because of my really southern and much older roommates.
Years later, my friend, now a
successful Hollywood actor, claimed, I saved his life. Upon receiving this
shocking news, I told him that I was merely the conduit between
James, the true savior, and he. I confessed that I was so
caught up in my own sufferings, I didn’t even know how much he was
hurting.
James kept me moored, it
would have been so easy for me just to let go and drift away, but James turned
the lights on so I could see the monsters. For James had the ability
to "name", what Samuel Beckett labeled “the mess”, which he
said was the responsibility of a true artists to make visible and grapple
with. Dr. Cornel West calls it the “funk” for Black people which
incorporates the existential crisis of the human condition described
by Chekov's work, with the white terror of two hundred years of
chattel slavery and another hundred of Jim Crowism, that's produced this hybrid
polyglot of “mess” and "funk" regurgitated up from the plutocratic
and white supremacist American dungeon, as a demonic cyclone moving back and
forth, back and forth, through Black America or like Edgar Allen Poe's
pendulum, slowly cutting through the American Black body
chained in the bottom of the
pit.
James Baldwin was no ghosts buster.
But his ability to expose the funk, at least gave one a fighting chance.
I always kept James Baldwin close through the years, and it was because of him
that not only did I begin to heal, but became less dangerous to my community,
by finally getting off the fence and firmly rejected homophobia,
specifically in the Black community were it’s most destructive. Now that I've
matured a spell, I understand that Baldwin's work was equally about spreading
Black love, after the "naming" and "exposure" of the
"mess" and the "funk", so that one can not just heal
but began to develop love as a
weapon to heal the Black community.
I’m not going to get deep into this
book. I’ll save that for Goodreads.com when I finish it. But for now as
Chicago's pandemic of Black on Black Rage/Black on Black Violence, finally
winds down for the season, only because of the rapidly fading summer, I’m
focusing on the love, also because I missed it during my first introduction to
James years ago. I know at that time I wasn't ready, because I only wanted to
see the enemy made visible.
All the Black characters in this
novel, both women and men, are deeply masculine in their response to what
was at that time, in the 1960, Black people full submergence in the swamp of
white supremacy.
What's fascinatingly is, while the
Black women are one dimensional in this roll, The men are overly
sensitive and almost feminine. The main character is the narrator’s
brother, Arthur, who is a musician. But not the stereo typical Black jazz
or blues musician, but the lead singer of a gospel quartet named "The
Trumpets of Zion". The members of the group are all from
hard-scrabble Harlem, which makes it somewhat easier to see why they're
"of" the Black church as singers, but not in it as members. So
they have street names, like Crunch and Peanut, but they wear their pain and
suffering on their sleeve and as opposed to hiding it in a bottle wrapped in a
brown paper bag, in a needle, or in violence.
And while they don’t always
vocalize their pain, each member is on the look out for the signs of pain in
the eyes and voices of the other members. And through singing they
broadcast the primordial screams and cries of those Africans locked in the
hauls of slave ships on the middle passage, and in transition to becoming the
“Black race" on the plantations, losing husbands, wives, children, sisters
and brothers, limbs, the whips and chains, etc. In fact at the beginning
of the novel, Arthur and the Trumpets of Zion are singing in a church. Now
gospel songs are mostly beseeching, imploring, and begging God to intervene,
for his mercy, to have pity, etc. But this song is not about begging
, this song paints a picture of midnight in the final hour before a situation
that's already desperate, slides to despicably horrid. This
song aint about prayer. It’s about the faithful believer cashing in all
their chips, this is the mother on the slave ship with child, demanding,
“Savior, Don’t You Pass Me by!
Savior, Savior, Savior, Don't you [dare] Pass Me by!” Arthur's
brother narrates, that his brother[ Arthur] the lead singer, seems
"alone, eyes closed meaning every instant of it, beginning high, like a
scream, then dropping low, like a whisper in a dungeon, "Don’t You Pass Me
By, Savior, Don't You Pass Me By”
In the world James Baldwin creates,
a Black man in New York City, can walk into a crowded bar, as a stranger
on Christmas eve, meet the Black bartender and immediately form a bond so
intense that the former stranger tells the bartender that he's bringing his
girl friend back to meet him on Christmas Day. And the Bartender says "You
better do just that, Baby" And not only does the former stranger bring his
girl to the bar to introduce them, but days later, comes back into the bar
alone, with a look that the bartender can immediately read as
utter despair. The bartender catches and hugs the former stranger
into the bar's back-room, so he can cry and get it together, while
the bartender leaves to prepare and bring back for him, a especial Bloody Mary.
This might sound cheesy, but James
Baldwin pulls it off as a cogent response to such massive suffering, because
this book goes deep with it. One of the subplots, is a fourteen year old child
prodigy evangelical minister, Julia, who is not only the "meal ticket"
for the whole family, but through manipulation and passive aggression runs the
house and ends up basically killing her mother and like Toni Morrison's Pecola
in her novel "Bluest Eye", falls victim as well.
Then there is the revelation by the
novel's "strong man" Crunch, that before he even reveals it, just the
inflection in his voice makes Arthur's "heart jump". Because Black
males in this novel, are so connected that that they can spot those
catastrophic announcements before they even arrive, such as the bomb that
Crunch drops, "every time I see my Momma", he says so quietly
that Arthur's heart leaps almost in terror, "My Moma's a whore,
really. I love her, but that's what she is. It's funny, I don't think I'd mind,
if only she didn't mind. I don't think the other kids would mind-she's our
Momma. She aint got nothing to be ashamed off. She did every thing she could
for us, it aint her fault the world is like it is"
bell hooks writes authentically
about Black on Black love as a scholar. But James Baldwin's characters in this
novel demonstrate it in action, so boldly that I understand the total lack
of it in reality and it's
constant lethal and detrimental consequences to us as a
race and America as a nation. I also understanding the subconscious yearning
for this connection in Black men, trapped in masculinity. Now,
finally I understand the reason why a lot of Black men and boys ( including
myself) born and raised in those "hard places and spaces", no matter
if we've left or are still there, nod to each other when we pass each other in
the street.
"My Dungeon Shook And My
Chains Fell off"
-James Baldwin
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