You've Got to Read This (6 page)

Rai'sa flung herself down on the table, laughing.
"Ce diable de
Polyte..."

"A white spavined mare was harnessed to the carriage. The white hack, its lips pink with age, went forward at a walking pace. The gay sun of France poured down on the ancient coach, screened from the world by a weatherbeaten hood. A lad with a lass; no music necessary . . . "

Rai'sa held out a glass to me. It was the fifth.

"Mori vieux,
to Maupassant."

"And what about having some fun today,
ma belle?"

I reached over to Rai'sa and kissed her on the lips. They quivered and swelled.

"You're funny," she mumbled through her teeth, recoiling.

She pressed herself against the wall, stretching out her bare arms. Spots began to glow on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever put on the crucifix, this was the most ravishing.

"Be so kind as to sit down, Monsieur Polyte."

She pointed to an oblique blue armchair done in Slavonic style. Its back was constructed of carved interlacing bands with colorful pendants. I groped my way to it, stumbling as I went.

Night had blocked the path of my famished youth with a bottle of Muscatel '83 and twenty-nine books, twenty-nine bombs stuffed with pity, genius and passion. I sprang up, knocking over the chair and banging against the shelf. The twenty-nine volumes crashed to the floor, their pages flew open, they fell on their edges . . . and the white mare of my fate went on at a walking pace.

"You are funny," growled Rai'sa.

I left the granite house on the Moyka between eleven and twelve, before the sisters and the husband returned from the theater. I was sober and could have walked a chalk line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented. Through ISAAC BABEL • 27

the tunnels of the streets bounded by lines of street lights the steamy fog bil-lowed. Monsters roared behind the boiling walls. The roads amputated the legs of those walking on them.

Kazantsev was asleep when I got home. He slept sitting up, his thin legs extended in their felt boots. The canary fluff rose on his head. He had fallen asleep by the stove bending over a volume of
Don Quixote,
the edition of 1624. On the title-page of the book was a dedication to the Due de Broglie.

I got into bed quietly, so as not to wake Kazantsev; moved the lamp close to me and began to read a book by Edouard Maynial on Guy de Maupassant's life and work.

Kazantsev's lips moved; his head kept keeling over.

That night I learned from Edouard Maynial that Maupassant was born in 1850, the child of a Normandy gentleman and Laure Lepoiteven, Flaubert's cousin. He was twenty-five when he was first attacked by congenital syphilis. His productivity and
joie de vivre
withstood the onsets of the disease. At first he suffered from headaches and fits of hypochondria. Then the specter of blindness arose before him. His sight weakened. He became suspicious of everyone, unsociable and pettily quarrelsome. He struggled furiously, dashed about the Mediterranean in a yacht, fled to Tunis, Morocco, Central Africa . . . and wrote ceaselessly. He attained fame, and at forty years of age cut his throat; lost a great deal of blood, yet lived through it. He was then put away in a madhouse. There he crawled about on his hands and knees, devouring his own excrement. The last line in his hospital report read:
Monsieur de Maupassant va s'animaliser.
He died at the age of forty-two, his mother surviving him.

I read the book to the end and got out of bed. The fog came close to the window, the world was hidden from me. My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.

Sonny's Blues

by James Baldwin

Introduced by Kenneth A. McClane

29

SONNY'S BLUES" SAVED MY LIFE, AND I AM NOT BEING HYPERBOLIC.

In 1982, my brother Paul killed himself. He was an alcoholic, a brilliant jazz drummer, a tough, truculent kid, and an inspiration to his older brother, who, although not always understanding
who
Paul was, knew who Paul was not—and that was someone who was scared, timid, or obsequious. Paul did not talk much. If anything, he hated where we lived in Harlem; more precisely, he hated
how
we lived; and no one, in all my memory, ever made my brother cower. Life would lead him to more and more improbable scenar-ios—at first he was a college student, then a drifter, and all too soon he was on to drugs and alcohol. And yet Paul was strangely gentle and circumspect: his many girlfriends loved his characteristic good cheer—they knew him to be in their corner, and he had that ability (which is always the provender of the outwardly giving) to love those outside his immediate environs while dismissing those at his feet. If Paul was remote to his family, we were similarly distant. And yet he loved us and we him: one could glimpse it in the messiness of our interactions, the buoyancy which too often became icy. I vividly recall the many times when he walked up to his room, closed the door, and played his drums into the next morning, finally descending to have a bowl of cereal, sometimes providing a slight nod to one of us—and then, always returning to
that
room and its privacy. Paul would go to his drums, as he would travel through Harlem, with a saucy, ragged coolness.

Those of you who know Baldwin's Sonny know my brother Paul.

Two years Paul's senior, I was, in every way, his absolute opposite.

Where he was fearless and an inveterate street-blood, I was cautious, frightened, and retiring. Sometimes, he would push me to go out and I would beg off, suggesting that I wanted to see a movie or read a book. It was a lie, and Paul knew it. As he once said, half jokingly, "You live by not living."

When I began to teach at Cornell, Paul would often call me. We rarely talked about anything serious: Paul would hold court; I would pretend to be more in touch with life than I really was; the whole thing was rather comical. Then, one Friday, I received a call from my father telling me that Paul was dying. It was a surreal conversation, my father understandably uncontrollable, his son lying in a coma, his older son, hardly believing the inevitable:
Your brother is going to die.
Paul was in a New York hospital. I had best come immediately.

As luck would have it, I had been teaching summer school, and a student had suggested that we read James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" for our next class. Needing something to do and feigning to be the dutiful teacher, I read Baldwin's story on the plane ride to the hospital. It was a gift. The story involves an older unnamed man and his younger brother, Sonny, who is a INTRODUCTION BY KENNETH A. McCLANE - 31

jazz pianist and a heroin addict. The older brother is
safe
—that is, he has a job and a wonderful wife and has, at least temporarily, made peace with his existence. He is not rich, nor has he been able to truly escape Harlem—

where he lives and where "dangers loom everywhere"—but he is a teacher.

The younger brother, however, is menaced by his need to make life bearable. The story, of course, is about much more, including love and how human beings cannot protect anyone, the reality that "sorrow never gets stopped," and the inexorable fact that the best among us may not survive—

that life, sadly, often takes those whose dreams are greatest, whose voices are most needed. As the mother tells the far too cocky older brother when he protests that she needn't worry about Sonny, "It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under." The older brother, at this early narrative moment, does not understand his mother; he is too caught in his own needful simplicity; reality is simply too costly. Yet as the story reminds, life is not interested in one's comfort, and the darkness—the terrors inside and outside—loom just above one's head.

"Sonny's Blues" saved my life. When my brother died, I felt terribly guilty. To my thinking I had not done all I could: I hadn't listened with enough passion; I had been too self-concerned, too self-infested. And yet the story admonishes that there is no ultimate safety, that a brother or a loved one may die (no matter what one does), and that, in the mother's wondrous and provident words, "You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's
there"

However tentatively and inappropriately, I did try to be my brother's witness. That I ultimately failed is certainly true: Paul is dead. But I am, at this hour, at this writing,
listening
to Sonny.
Deep water and drowning are
not the same thing.
And yet they can be. And one can fall even further, farther. Baldwin does not lie about the landscape of suffering. Baldwin, quite simply, does not lie.

Sonny's Blues

James B a l d w i n

read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

When he was about as old as the boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he'd had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now. He had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment downtown, for peddling and using heroin.

I couldn't believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I didn't name them, I kept putting them away. I told myself that Sonny was wild, but he wasn't crazy.

And he'd always been a good boy, he hadn't ever turned hard or evil or dis-respectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem. I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in the condition I'd already seen so many others. Yet it had happened and here I was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who might, every one of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head. Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.

I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these boys were now. These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads 32

JAMES BALDWIN • 33

bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

When the last bell rang, the last class ended, I let out my breath. It seemed I'd been holding it for all that time. My clothes were wet—I may have looked as though I'd been sitting in a steam bath, all dressed up, all afternoon. I sat alone in the classroom a long time. I listened to the boys outside, downstairs, shouting and cursing and laughing. Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the joyous laughter which—

God knows why—one associates with children. It was mocking and insular, its intent to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And myself.

One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds.

I stood up and walked over to the window and looked down into the courtyard. It was the beginning of the spring and the sap was rising in the boys. A teacher passed through them every now and again, quickly, as though he or she couldn't wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those boys out of their sight and off their minds. I started collecting my stuff. I thought I'd better get home and talk to Isabel.

The courtyard was almost deserted by the time I got downstairs. I saw this boy standing in the shadow of a doorway, looking just like Sonny. I almost called his name. Then I saw that it wasn't Sonny, but somebody we used to know, a boy from around our block. He'd been Sonny's friend. He'd never been mine, having been too young for me, and, anyway, I'd never liked him. And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corners, was always high and raggy. I used to run into him from time to time and he'd often work around to asking me for a quarter or fifty cents. He always had some real good excuse, too, and I always gave it to him, I don't know why.

But now, abruptly, I hated him. I couldn't stand the way he looked at me, partly like a dog, partly like a cunning child. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in the school courtyard.

He sort of shuffled over to me, and he said, "I see you got the papers.

So you already know about it."

"You mean about Sonny? Yes, I already know about it. How come they didn't get you?"

He grinned. It made him repulsive and it also brought to mind what he'd looked like as a kid. "I wasn't there. I stay away from them people."