4 May 2022
I just finished reading Book 2 of James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. That's 300 pages with close to 200 more to go (Book 3: Black Christopher). Once I start reading Baldwin I can't stop. Book 1 was "The House Ni**er," Book 2, "Is There Anybody There? Said the Traveler." The Wikipedia article for the novel suggests that it has been underrated and misunderstood. So far, though, in my estimation, it is brilliantly written, and not propagandistic at all as some had alleged.
It is written quite differently from Baldwin's previous 'interracial' novel, with the same themes but with a more brutal contrast. Leo Proudhammer, now a famous actor, has a heart attack on stage, and the novel consists largely of flashbacks into his formative periods, gradually connecting these stages of his past together, as the narrative moves back and forth between these stages. The contrasts are stark. His childhood in Harlem is incredibly brutal, reflected especially in his Barbadian father's frustration and the unspeakable brutality meted out to his older brother Caleb by the police and prison guards. We see some time jumps later the moment in which Leo tells Caleb he wants to be an actor, which is only a fantasy at that time, given his poverty and the fact that the only whites he has ever encountered are monsters.
We see Leo in a subsequent phase, a huge contrast in some respects and more of the same in another. He is part of an actors' training retreat. He has a few tight white friends at this point, including two white women who are crazy about him, and an Italian who has not become 'white'. The acting school is not what it's cracked up to be. As for the townspeople, this group meets a couple of friendly black folks, who eventually invite them home, and while they are all mutually friendly, the social barrier of race prevents this from being more than a one-off. Because Leo is more conscious of the reasons for this than anyone, this renders him lonely, and psychologically distant even from his Black hosts.
But the situation turns brutal, as his relationships with the white women land him in the hands of the police, which could have dire or even fatal consequences, if not for his rescue by influential whites. Then, when Barbara, the white woman who has fallen in love with him, makes this known, and she and Leo walk through the town, the onslaught of hostile, insulting and threatening whites put them in great danger. After all this, the acting workshop proves to be a bust.
Even
these close friends do not know the depth of the brutality and
dehumanizing experiences Leo has undergone, and once again Baldwin
shows how the viciousness of this society hammers the natural loving
relations between people that Baldwin obviously believes in, and we
see in uncompromising terms what this society has done to the people
in it. And this makes me angry, 55 years later.
Baldwin wrote this, the final line of the book tells us, in New York, Istanbul, and San Francisco, between 1965 and 1967. This was before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 dashed his hopes for the country, and during the period of riots, growing militancy and tensions in the nation which the landmark civil rights legislation of the time did not mitigate. One does not see this in the first two books of the novel, in which one can place Leo's early years but not exactly the intervening years or the present. Baldwin's own public role was being put under pressure from his involvement in the early phase of the contemporary civil rights movement and the incipient Black power phase. Yet he is still the novelist, painstakingly portraying the complexity of his world and the aching disjunct between the spheres of love and hate, as a witness to the truth that to violate the love between people is to commit an unforgivable crime.
11 May 2022
I addition to everything else, I now have only 35 pages of James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone to go. Now we learn of how he met Black Christopher, and if I'm following the flashbacks correctly, the protagonist has now been released from the hospital following his heart attack. I think there's a punchline somewhere before we reach the end of the novel. Also, here were see more vitriolic hostility towards Christianity than in all of Baldwin's previous works. I think this tendency of Baldwin's in his writings up to this point is obscured either intentionally or because his readers are distracted by his constant use of religious references and metaphors.
* * *
At 5:32 pm EDT today, sitting outside my local library, I finished reading James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968). Nobody can touch Baldwin when it comes to depicting people's psychology and emotions. The man is amazing. And yet this novel appears to have not been well received or understood. It's not as radical in essence, I don't think, as his other 'interracial' novel of the 1960s, Another Country (1962), both of which are completely different from his work of the 1950s and 1970s, but Baldwin is telling his readers something that I don't think they understood. As I read them, both novels weave complex relationships that lead to a punchline in the final pages. I think this novel was misunderstood because readers think the punchline is the statement by Black Christopher in the final pages: "We need guns." But they would be mistaken. That's what Baldwin sees coming in 1965-1967 as he wrote this, and what was happening at that time and a few years after--that came to pass. But that is the generation after him. The novel is about explaining his own journey and what he has come to, at the cusp of a major historical and generational shift, and what horror, oppression, survival, hatred and love are all about, which cannot be summed up by guns, even if they are needed.
11 May 2022, 5:32 pm: finished novel
59:
[after unpleasant encounter with white cops, Leo’s brother Caleb
says]:
“Thanks,” Caleb said. “Thanks, you white cock-sucking dog-shit miserable white mother-fuckers. Thanks, all you scum-bag Christians.” His accent was now as irredeemably of the islands as was the accent of our father. I had never heard this sound in his voice before. He raised his face to the sky. “Thanks, good Jesus Christ. Thanks for letting us go home. I mean, I know you didn’t have to do it. You could have let us just get our brains beat out. Remind me, O lord, to put a extra large nickel in the plate next Sunday.” And then, suddenly, he looked down at me and laughed and hugged me. “Come on, let’s get home before the bastard changes his mind. Little Leo. Were you scared?”
p. 98 [part of a bitter meditation]:
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.
p. 210-211 [Leo with his brother Caleb:]
Never, never, never, I swore it, with Caleb’s breath in my face, his tears drying on my neck, my arms around him, would I ever forgive this world. Never. Never. Never. I would find some way to make them pay. I would do something one day to at least one bland, stupid, happy white face which would change that face forever. If they thought that Caleb was black, and if they thought that I was black, I would show them, yes, I would, one day, exactly what blackness was! I swore it. I swore it. I whispered it to Caleb’s kinky hair. I cursed God from the bottom of my heart, the very bottom of my balls. I called Him the greatest coward in the universe because He did not dare to show Himself and fight me like a man. I fell into a stormy sleep, and awoke to find myself, like Jacob with the angel, struggling with a very different god, and one yet more tyrannical, the god of the flesh. My brother held me close, and he was terribly excited; his excitement excited me. I was briefly surprised, I was briefly afraid. But there was really nothing very surprising in such an event, and if there was any reason to be afraid, well, then, I hoped that God was watching. He probably was. He never did anything else. 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.
p. 220-1 [Leo and Caleb walking]:
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.
p. 224 [Leo reacting to a glance from a fat white man]:
How could we fox them if we could neither bear to look at them, nor
bear it when they looked at us? And who were they, anyway?
which was the really terrible, the boomeranging question. And one
always felt: maybe they’re right. Maybe you are nothing
but a nigger, and the life you lead, or the life they make you lead,
is the only life you deserve. They say that God said so—and if God
said so, then you mean about as much to God as you do to this
red-faced, black-haired, fat white man. Fuck God. Fuck you, too,
mister. But there he sat, just the same, impervious, gleaming and
redolent with safety, rustling, as it were, the Scriptures, in which
I appeared only as the object lesson.
267-8
[Jerry against Catholic Church]:
Jerry poured the beer. “Confession! You know I haven’t been to confession in more than three years? And you know what that means? That means my soul is in mortal danger. It’s the truth I’m telling you.” He handed a glass to Barbara, then handed a glass to me.
“How does it feel to have your soul in mortal danger?” I asked.
“Exciting.” He grinned, and kissed Barbara. “Wicked.” Barbara took her hand from mine. We lit cigarettes. “Every time you make love, you think of the confessional and you say to yourself, Well, I’m just not going to tell the bastard, that’s all. Let him get his own kicks.” We all laughed. “I swear, I believe they sit there, jerking off.”
“Don’t you ever miss it?” I asked.
“What? Going to confession?”
“Well—the church. All of it. You know—the music. the others. The—the faith. I guess—you know—the safety—”
“Well. Sometimes, maybe. Especially when I see my mother. She’s always weeping about it. And that makes me feel bad and then I remember a couple of priests I used to like and some other people and the music and Holy Communion and the way it felt—you know, it was nice. But, then, I look at my mother and she’s not a bad woman but she is a very fucked-up woman and I know that part of what fucked her up is the Church. You know, she believes a whole lot of shit, and I’ve seen her do some very wicked things because she’s so goddamn ignorant. Well—I don’t want to be like that, that’s all. I want to live my own life the way I want to live it. My mother hates Jews and she hates Negroes, and you know, fuck it, I can’t be bothered with all that shit. So they can have it.”
“Did you ever believe it? I mean, you know—the Son of God and heaven and hell and judgment. You know. The whole bit.”
“My mother and my father believed it. And everyone around me believed it. So I believed it, too.”
“You never believed it, did you, Leo?” Barbara asked. “You never even went to church.”
“No. My father didn’t believe it. So none of us believed it. Naturally.” I stood up. “It’s been a rough day. So, you’ll forgive me if I just say good-night now.”
331-2
[God not reliable]:
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.
334-5
[anti-Christian]:
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.
360
[Barbara & Leo: who made the world?]:
“I’m not complaining. You didn’t make the world.”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.” I looked up at the sky. “Sometimes, you know? I still wonder who did. I wonder what whoever it was was thinking about.”
“He wasn’t,” she said, with an unexpected harshness in her voice, “thinking about you and me.”
“No. What rotten casting,” I
said, and we laughed.
365: Caleb wounded, got religion
381-382: no God for Leo
385-393: Caleb in church, art, war
403: Frederick dies, Caleb finds God
449: exploiting need
463-4: why black people churched
469: Christians
479:
the streets,& fuck Jesus
407: anti-God
I was alone all right; for God had taken my brother away from me;
and I was never going to forgive Him for that. As far as the
salvation of my own soul was concerned, Caleb was God’s least
promising missionary. God was not going to do to me what He had done
to Caleb. Never. Not to me.
424-5:
against Caleb and God
Everyone had found the life that suited them; but I hadn’t. Caleb looked safe and handsome that day, he had become a preacher and was now assistant pastor at The New Dispensation House of God.
[…..]
436: mom dies, dad still no religion
BOOK ONE:
59:
Caleb against Christians
98:
Against God
BOOK 2:
152:
Sicilians not white yet
160:
bonds between Italians, Leo alone
180:
racial barrier w/ local acquaintances
208:
just as good
210:
curses God
211:
jerking off his brother
220:
God
221:
Leo wants to be an actor
some passage where Dad bristles at mention of God?
223:
whites afraid we can do better than them
224:
Fuck God!
227:
Reagan
230:
whites clown on film
231:
Reagan
268:
Jerry against Catholic Church
282:
threats to interracial couple
289:
Othello
BOOK
3:
313
317-8
323
330-1:
USA a hostile country
331:
God not reliable
335:
anti-Christian
338-9:
family, religion, white woman not liked
340:
Caleb pro & con
342:
acting for whitey
344:
against the forgiving-Negro role. playing white roles
345:
struck by white surprise at misfortune ... cowards
347:
No Negro girls in his world
348:
draft deferment
350:
strain of interracial relationship
360:
who made the world?
362:
sex with Barbara
363:
WW2 ends
365:
Caleb wounded, got religion
369:
Negroes downtown
382:
no God for Leo
385:
Caleb in church
387-390:
the artist & the self
391ff:
death in war, white friend, killing & finding God, Italian women
in Rome
399:
white friend sabotages Caleb's GF
403:
Frederick dies, Caleb finds God
407:
anti-God
409:
failing at 25
410:
white man gives Leo his big break
414:
the director is for real vs Americans. The Corn is Green
424-5:
against Caleb and God
428:
parents want to see play, not Caleb
433:
first acting a hit
436:
mom dies, dad still no religion
448:
distance between people
449:
exploiting need
454:
Christopher & friends
463-4:
why black people churched
469:
Christians
474:
Barbara, lonely
479:
the streets,& fuck Jesus
480:
young people today
482:
we need guns
From Ralph Dumain’s notes on James Baldwin’s Another Country
James Baldwin Revisited (2): Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin Revisited (1): Prolegomena
James Baldwin
as an American Intellectual:
Talking at the Gates Reviewed by R. Dumain
Ishmael Reed: Literary
Ambulance Chaser?
by Ralph Dumain
Individual Identity,
Historical Meaning, and the Unknown Autodidact
by
Ralph Dumain
Black Studies, Music, America vs Europe Study Guide
Offsite:
James Baldwin @
Reason & Society
(Dumain blog)
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