Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (13 page)

“What,” I asked, a little frightened, and at the same time amused and moved, “are you talking about, Barbara?”

“I'm talking about our journey through hell. I'm talking about Christopher.
You
know what I'm talking about.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you're making too much of it.”

“That's possible. But you're making too little. You always do.” She laughed softly again, looking, against the yellow blinds and in the dimming, changing light, exactly like the Barbara of Paradise Alley—and yet not, that laugh had cost her everything—and then became grave again. “We have come a long way together, you and I,” she said. “
Des kilomètres.
” She looked out of the window for a second, then closed the blinds. She looked briefly at her watch. The room was dark. She switched on the light. “Well. I must get to the theater. The show must go on.”

“Those days with Christopher must have been very hard on you,” I said.

She looked at me. “Oh. They were brutal. But why do anything easy? Those days were very hard on you, too.”

“But I always felt,” I said, smiling, “that you'd done nothing to deserve it.”

“But
you
had. Of course!” She laughed again. “Dear Leo!”

“I have the feeling that you're making fun of me. But I don't know why.”

“Because you're funny,” she said.

“Bon. Bravo pour le clown.”

“Well. It's true. When you were at your funniest, I didn't laugh. I'm sorry for all the things I didn't see. And for all the things
you
didn't see. What you didn't see, I saw, it seemed to me, very clearly. Leo, you always want people to forgive
you.
But we, we others, we need forgiveness, too. We sometimes need it, my dear”—she smiled—“even from so wretched a man as you.” And she watched me very steadily, with that steady smile.

I said, after a moment, with difficulty, “True enough, dear lady. True enough. But I wonder why I feel so depressed.”

“I should think,” she said, dryly, “that the state of your health might have something to do with that. And I've stayed longer than I promised Dr. Evin I would.” She leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “Bye-bye. Is there anything you want me to bring you tomorrow?”

“Only the heads,” I said, “on pikes, of many politicians.”

“Now you sound like Christopher.”

“He'd be proud of me.”

“He was always proud of you. He couldn't understand why you couldn't understand that. Christopher had a rough time, too.”

“How have
you,
” I asked suddenly, “managed to put up with me for all these years?”

“I love you,” she said, “and so I can't really claim to have had much choice in the matter.” She looked at her watch again. “Leo, now I really must run. If the heads of politicians prove to be scarce tomorrow, is there anything else you want?”

“Surprise me.”

“I'm honored. I'm one of the few people left in the world who can still do that. To you. Throw everything out of your mind, Leo, eat your supper, read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there'll still be everything left to do. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

She left, closing the door carefully and softly behind her.

But she had left me, as our much loved Bessie Smith would have been prompt to inform her, with everything on my mind. Christopher had always wished to see Africa; we became friends partly because I had. I told him once that he was certainly black enough to be an African, and even told him that the structure of his face reminded me of faces I had seen in Dakar. This enchanted him: which meant, fatally, that he then invested me with the power of enchantment. I did not want this power. It frightened me. But my fright frightened him, and it made him cruel: for to whom was he to turn, in all this world, if not to an elder brother who was black like him? And I began to see, though I did not want to see it, the validity of Christopher's claim. If it is true, as I suspect, that people turn to each other in the hope of being created by each other then it is absolutely true that the uncreated young turn, to be created, toward their elders. Thus, whoever has been invested with the power of enchantment is guilty of something more base than treachery
whenever he fails to exercise the power on which the yet-to-be-created, as helplessly as newborn birds, depend. Well, yes, I saw at last what was demanded of me. I would have to build a nest out of materials I would simply have to find, and be prepared to guard it with my life; and feed this creature and keep it clean, and keep the nest clean; and watch for the moment when the creature could fly and force those frightened wings to take the air.

On the other hand, any threat to their enchanter, which is simply a threat to life itself, is answered by the young with the implacable intention to kill.

I first realized this—through Christopher—at a monster rally in downtown New York. Thousands of people were gathered in a park near City Hall. We were there to protest the outrages taking place in the city (and also in the nation) against those who, already poor and defenseless, were rendered even more so by the apathy and corruption of the municipality, and by the facts of their ancestry, or color. The rally was guarded by the police, whom we were, in fact, attacking. They were there to make certain that none of the damage which we asserted was being done to the city's morals would so far transform itself as to become damage to the city's property.

I was one of the speakers at this rally. I would have been there anyway, but not as a speaker, as one of the oppressed: but I was seated on the wooden platform because my name can draw crowds. Having never been quite able to consider my name my own, this fact meant something else for Christopher, and also for the crowds, than it could have meant to me: but opportunity and duty are sometimes born together. There I sat on the platform, then, uneasy and indignant, and not altogether at
my ease with the other luminaries, who were certainly not at their ease with me. Our common situation, the fact of my color, had brought us together here; and here we were to speak as one. But our intensities, our apprehensions, were very different. In many ways, perhaps in nearly all ways, they disapproved of me, and I knew it; and they knew that in many ways I disapproved of them. But we were responsible, commonly, for something greater than our differences. These differences, anyway, could be blamed on no one and could never have risen to the pressure of a private quarrel had it not been for the nature of our public roles. Our differences were reducible to one: I was an artist. This is a very curious condition, and only people who never can become artists have ever imagined themselves as desiring it. It cannot be desired, it can only—with difficulty—be supported, and one of the elements to be supported (along with one's own unspeakable terrors) is the envy, rage, and wonder of the world. Yes, we on the platform were united in our social indignation, united in our affliction, united in our responsibility, united in our necessity to change—well, if not the world, at least the condition of some people in the world: but how different were our visions of the world! I had never been at home in the world and had become incapable of imagining that I ever would be. I did not want others to endure my estrangement, that was why I was on the platform; yet was it not, at the least, paradoxical that it was only my estrangement which had placed me there? And I could not flatten out this paradox, I could not hammer it into any usable shape. Everyone else desired to be at home in the world, and so did I—or so
had
I; and they were right in this desire, and so had I been; it was our privilege, to say nothing of our hope, to
attempt to make the world a human dwellingplace for us all; and yet—yet—was it not possible that the mighty gentlemen, my honorable and invaluable confreres, by being unable to imagine such a journey as my own, were leaving something of the utmost importance out of their aspirations? I could not know. I watched Christopher's face. He trusted none of the people with whom I was sitting. Most of them were from five to ten years older than I, and from twenty to thirty years older than Christopher. And nothing we had done, or left undone, had been able to save him.

There was a little black girl on the platform, she was part of a junior choir from a Brooklyn church. They were singing. I knew that when the choir finished singing, I would be on, and this is usually a very difficult moment for me, but the little girl's voice pushed my stage fright far to the side of my mind. They were singing a song about deliverance; she had a heavy, black, huge voice. She was the leader of the song, and her voice, in all that open air, rang against the sky and the trees and the stone walls of office buildings and the faces of the open-mouthed people and the closed faces of the cops, as though she were singing in a cave.
Deliverance will come,
she sang,
I know it will come, He said it would come.
And, again,
Deliverance will come. He said it would come. I know it will come.
I watched her face as she sang, a plain, black, stocky girl, who was, nevertheless, very beautiful. Deliverance will come. I wondered how old she was, and what songs she would be singing, and in what company, a few years from now. Deliverance will come. Would it? We on the platform certainly had no patent on deliverance—it was only because deliverance had
not
come that we sat there in all our uneasy rage and splendor.
Deliverance will come: it had not come for my mother and father, it had not come for Caleb, it had not come for me, it had not come for Christopher, it had not come for this nameless little girl, and it had not come for all these thousands who were listening to her song. I watched the little girl's face, but I saw my father's face, and Caleb's, and Christopher's. Christopher did not believe that deliverance would ever come—he was going to drag it down from heaven or raise it up from hell—for Christopher, the party, that banquet at which we had been being poisoned for so long, was over. Yet, he watched the little girl, and listened to her, with delight. And all my speculations began to paralyze me again, and again I wondered what I could say when I rose. I wanted deliverance—for others even more than for myself:
my
party,
my
banquet, in ways which Christopher could not possibly imagine, was over, too. But I wondered if it was possible, and not only for me, to live without the song. No song could possibly be worth the trap in which so many thousands, undelivered, perished every day. No song could be worth what this singing little girl had already paid for it, and was paying, and would continue to pay. And yet—without a song? Was Christopher's manner of deliverance worth the voices it would silence? Or would new songs come? How could I tell? for the question engaged my life and my responsibilities and perhaps even my love, but it no longer engaged my possibilities. I was defined. I was relieved to recognize that I was not cast down by this quite sufficiently weighty fact, only troubled by the question of how not to fail this little girl, and Christopher. Whatever had happened to me could have no meaning unless it could help to deliver them. But the price for this deliverance, this most ambitious of transactions,
could only be found in a wallet which I had always claimed was not mine. I began to sweat. The little girl's voice rang out. Caleb's face hung steadily in the center of my mind.
Deliverance will come.
Well, if she believed it, then it had to be made possible; though only she, after all, plain, stocky, beautiful, black girl, could really make it true.

I watched Christopher's face as the song ended, watched his big white teeth in his big black face and watched him clap his big black hands. Then, as silence descended, and his face changed, and the master of ceremonies rose, I suddenly realized, with a violent nausea, that it was
my
turn now. Every single orifice in my body first threatened, shamefully, to open, then closed, despairingly, forever, and I began to drip with sweat. Christopher's face was very calm and proud—I was
his
big brother,
his
boy, or my
man!
as we say in Harlem; and my little girl looked very tranquil, too, as though she had just been seated at a fried chicken dinner. But I knew, as I stood up and walked to the dangerous promontory, that she hadn't tasted it yet. Deliverance will come.

There is a truth in the theater and there is a truth in life—they meet, but they are not the same, for life, God help us, is the truth. And those disguises which an artist wears are his means, not of fleeing from the truth, but of attempting to approach it. Who, after all, could believe a word spoken by Prince Hamlet or Ophelia should one encounter this unhappy couple at a cocktail party? Yet, the reason that one would certainly never make the error of inviting them back again is that their story is true—and not only for the Prince and his mad lady; is true, is true, unbearable, unanswerable: and one's disguises are
designed to make the truth a quantity with which one can live—or from which one can hope, by the effort of living, to be delivered. But on that afternoon I was facing the people with no recognizable disguise—though perhaps by this time my disguises were indistinguishable from myself—and I was very frightened. I don't know what I said. I tried to be truthful. I tried to talk to the little girl, and to Christopher, and from time to time, I peeked, so to speak, from the promontory of my despair at their faces. Their faces were very bright. The little girl seemed to be enjoying her fried chicken dinner. Then I wondered if I was right to give her a fried chicken dinner which she could enjoy. Maybe I should have given her a dinner which would cause her to overthrow the table and burn down the house. But I did not want her to vomit or to burn: I wanted her to live. Deliverance, however, was not in my hands. Christopher looked like a black sun when I finished and opened his big black face and clapped his big black hands. The little girl ran over to me with her green autograph book held out. She reminded me of everything I hoped never to forget. I took the autograph book and signed it and I wrote above my name,
Deliverance will come.
It was folly, for I was immediately surrounded and trapped on the platform which the policemen wanted me to leave. I wanted to come down, but I did not know how. I did not see the friends who had driven me to the rally. I could no longer see Christopher. I did not know how to get to the car. Then I saw Christopher's furious and terrified face, struggling to break through the crowd to get to me and in a flash, an awful one, I saw what he saw: the Leo who certainly did not belong to himself and who belonged to the people only on condition that the people were kept
away from him, surrounded by the uncontrollable public madness, and in the very heart of danger. For it was the time of assassins. Christopher could not know, nor, abruptly, could I, who, in the crowd pressing around me, desired my death nor who was willing to execute it. I felt myself being pushed off the platform by the police: it was like being pushed off a cliff. Then Christopher leaped—but it really seemed rather more like flying—onto the platform, placing his body in front of mine, his arms stretched wide on either side; and evidently he had already given a signal to five others of his age and history, who joined him and joined hands, forming a human barricade, and led me to the car—which, however, was also, now, surrounded. Christopher used his shoulders and his elbows ruthlessly, and his voice, and got the car door open, got in first and pulled me in after him. Then two of his friends piled in and slammed the door—so that I was protected on all sides. The driver of this car, and his companion, were both white, and so Christopher had to take out his wrath on me instead of on all the white devils. But he managed to suggest, in that language he had mastered, that not even the white people in the front seat were above wishing that I were dead. What was most vivid to me was how deeply
he
desired that I should live. I was not flattered by this, but frightened; for this was a passion impersonal indeed, and it proved how little I belonged to myself. Not a soul in that crowd mattered for Christopher, nor would a soul have been safe from him as long as that crowd menaced—as he later put it: “my only hope.”