“You have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story. It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished. I have wondered, more than once, why I started it, but—I know why. It is a love song to my brother. It is an attempt to face both love and death.
“I have been very frightened, for: I have had to try to strip myself naked. One does not like what one sees then, and one is afraid of what others will see: and do. To challenge one’s deepest, most nameless fears, is also, to challenge the heavens. It is to drag yourself and everyone and everything and everyone you love, to the attention of the fiercest of the gods: who may not forgive your impertinence, who may not spare you. All that I can offer in extenuation of my boldness is my love.”
Excerpt from Just Above My Head, Book 5, “The Gates of Hell”
Just Above My Head is Baldwin’s last novel. The book comes from the accumulation of Baldwin’s life, the historical moment and time, choices, and world Baldwin inherited and corrected. Baldwin’s life starts the same as any other Black man: from the auction block. Baldwin—in Harlem and his momma and daddy and siblings, to the library, to Paris, then to the freedom movement in the South.
When Baldwin was young he first set out to recognize what he was to do with his work. Baldwin prepares himself by writing Go Tell It on the Mountain. This book is Baldwin’s handshake with destiny. He sees a problem of a white social system where human beings abnormally produce lovelessness, swapping human relationships for profit and moral self-control. It’s Baldwin to pose the question: what happens to man if Man is not able to love; that’s where Giovanni’s Room comes from. As a man who cannot stay in Another Country: Paris, France, Baldwin writes Giovanni’s Room to explain why he comes back to America. To step outside of the novels, a year later Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time. This two-part essay tells us about what Baldwin even meant about the problem of the inability to love in Giovanni’s Room—all this time, Baldwin has been talking about real revolution.
This is why Rufus, in Another Country, dies. The death of Rufus represents the nameless and daily death of all Black men in the face of white supremacy.
It is time for a new world and a new time. A revolution of values would be a complete assertion of emancipated democratic humanity. If Rufus was no longer “just another Black man,” and if the modern world wasn’t controlled by white supremacy, afraid of Rufus, to murder him out of existence; if there was a country where everyone knew Rufus’s name, street, family as their own and realized how he grew up reflects us all and is us (the real world), then Rufus wouldn’t have been a type of martyr. Rufus’s song could be the song of the world. Another Country begins with that song. This song arises from the aching soul for freedom, our human responsibility based in a historic struggle to define and use love to achieve a new personality on which a new country could be made and fought for.
Then, something breaks with Martin Luther King’s Assassination. Baldwin is a fighter in the heart of a Third American Revolution, and like Leo’s heart attack hadn’t completely killed Leo in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Martin Luther King’s Assassination forced a recognition about the price for freedom, which Baldwin stared in the face with his countrymen and accepted.
So: Jesus died and Martin Luther King died “for our sins.” But we are still on this train. Martin was a friend of all, Baldwin included. Baldwin might have wanted it to be himself that died. Maybe we all do, now. There’s a reason why the State Department shot King on that Balcony. Every individual now has the moral obligation to live for Martin’s death—or did he die in vain? For Baldwin, death was to come in 1987—later. There was still time left for Baldwin, and he had to use time for our advantage. There were more questions to resolve, to help us understand about ourselves and our moral responsibility to any human being at all, even if the trains were gone long before we reached the station. In Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Baldwin knows it’s white people’s hearts that need a fix, not the destination of freedom that needs changing. Baldwin writes No Name In the Street soon after Train, wherein he describes that America is heading to achieve the last white nation. Stop one: If Beale Street Could Talk. Fonny, in this book; his Baby is going to be had—he and Tish made that baby, Tish carried that baby, and that baby was born. This happens everyday, and we get the same chance everyday. Baldwin writes: Can we raise this child? Do we love this child enough?
In his journey through life and time, Baldwin found himself, he found the revolutionary struggle that is America, and he located what Black people must do for that kid.
Up above my head (up above my head)
I hear music in the air (I hear music in the air)
Up above my head (up above my head)
I hear music in the air (I hear music in the air)
I really do believe (I really do believe)
There’s a Heaven up there.
Song is important to Black people, and the musician has a role important to Black people. Song is the basis of consciousness and a people’s worldview. For example, Rufus from Another Country was a drummer. Arthur from Just Above My Head is a singer. Both, like all Black people and music, come from the church, the meeting ground. So: Rufus intended to play music to live. Arthur played music to live. “R&B” and “Jazz” are just labels for white people to understand something they don’t, but they come from the same place. The music developed as time and struggle developed. What moves or makes music is synthesis and protraction. Music is heard when it is true. That is the pressure that concentrates Arthur, a requirement in the battle of the gods. He lives by these requirements of the song, for the people, to move and save time.
With a new song emerging, a new time emerging, Just Above My Head is dealing with political and social complexities that emerge from the assassination of Martin Luther King; can Black people protect the song which in it contains the striving to be free? Baldwin explains what has been produced through this struggle; the reality of a Black social system, and explains on what basis does it operate, journey, for: freedom.
Just Above My Head explains the inheritance of a new century, and what we are to become because of our responsibility to it: Young, Gifted and Black.
Meanwhile, Baldwin had commitments to speak, for the freedom movement and after. Baldwin’s work, life, and this commitment were joined—he is but one man. He, who spared nothing but to make the truth known, who called us to make love a reality and told us to learn about it, is the reason why we cannot live so simply anymore. There is no Black television, no white television, and there never really was. White actors act best when they show that they don’t know, and are not the most beautiful, most intelligent people in all of civilization. The whole boy-meets-girl story is done. Titanic had her run but we cannot skate on thin ice anymore. It’s either sink, or swim. The Notebook is as close to a fantasy one could get, and we don’t have to go to Disney or Marvel or any of the other roundabout ways Hollywood wants to avoid this fact: time has run out, love wins or it doesn’t win.
The problem of Western civilization is that it buzzes, skirmishes, and flexes its muscles around love. It has not been able to achieve beauty without Asia and Africa. Baldwin left us with this body of work for us to fight white supremacy. He helps us ask: How is it possible for love to fail? When does love ever really lose out? Why is it logical for love to be for itself and illogical for love not to?
It’s not a question of whether we are here or not—the only reason why we are here asking, could we achieve our maturity, at this late date, is because love still has, and had, the last word.
Who knew? Who knows for sure? Where is the proof? Yes, from our fathers’ fathers and their mothers that raised them, Baldwin let me know that I come from a long line of poets. People who take life seriously enough—to change the entire edifice of what we know of man, like Einstein, or Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, Wagner, Bach, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Gandhi. We might want to say we are a young country, but the record dates the innocence as expired—just as soon as Plymouth Rock landed on us. We haven’t got the right to lose faith in love, that’s what Baldwin is fighting for us to never forget. That’s why Martin Luther King died.
Baldwin’s life was to become a writer, and his work was to help him become a good man—his involvement with the Black Freedom Movement was inseparable from the man that Baldwin is. Baldwin’s life is complete, and this final novel, Just Above My Head, is a testament of what we now call our life-line. This book was written in 1979. This book was written for us. This book was a type of parthenogenesis, from the blood of a slowing heartbeat finding the rhythm to the new. Baldwin knew the price of this book. This book is a salute to the assassination of Martin Luther King, our friend.
“This book has been much delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair. Nor is the American crisis, which is part of the global, historical crisis, likely to resolve itself soon. An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn; the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill. This book is not finished—can never be finished by me. There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man’s sun has set. Period.”
Excerpt from No Name in the Street, “Epilogue: Who Has Believed Our Report?”
Arthur in the book lives until 34 years old. He is loved by his friends, and family—Arthur has a brother Hall, who narrates the story for the most part. Arthur is on a journey to discover his song, and if used, and understood, would give his people a fighting chance at real freedom. This is a process not done by Arthur alone; at the same time, Arthur was forced to be alone because we are individuals, and this man moved through life to achieve his death. He wanted to pay his dues, now. This is what King set out to do, to do his work well even if his life was not long. Martin Luther King’s life—his life is supposed to be fulfilled by the achievement of a new human consciousness, where freedom achieves time, and love powers the will of the soul.
Arthur’s heart was broken by Crunch, way before the people who took Arthur’s song or discarded him, could. Crunch was a Black man. Like many other men, Crunch was unable to love a man because of the fact that Crunch himself could not get over being a man in love with another man. This was the beginning of the makings of a web that trapped and ultimately killed Arthur. A broken heart is what killed Arthur. It was through Jimmy, his last love, that Arthur found Rhythm and Blues. The happiness that Arthur had with Jimmy was too late, or too soon—
“We are left with what we don’t know. It would simplify matters, perhaps if I could say that we don’t know what we don’t want to know: but I, we are not that simple. We know. Almost everything we do is designed to protect us from what we know: consider the uses to which we put the troublesome past tense of the verb. So if I say, I’m left with what I don’t know, I could equally be saying, with tears in my eyes, I Knew! But, Lord, how I hoped I didn’t know—how I hoped my hand could hold up the sky!”
—and on top of all that first hurt, Arthur had wanted to be respected by those whom he respected, as a singer. He was singing to the point when he didn’t know why he was singing in the way that he was. The word from the audience was the last straw. Arthur was worried what others would think about him and Jimmy, overall, because the space Jimmy took up, Arthur had first prepared for Crunch. Arthur became scared of what people would think he would do to their song. Underneath: Jimmy had an argument with Arthur in Paris, and that’s why Arthur left without Jimmy to London. London is where the bar Arthur died alone in was. Arthur was getting strung out because of the pressure to find a way for himself, over harder drugs than weed and alcohol; he was ashamed of Jimmy and ashamed to not just be happy with Jimmy; he didn’t know how to stop singing, or if he could find his song at all and; heartbreak.
For Arthur, as it is for all men and women, this problem is finding the well in your spirit where giving has no end and rest is in eternity. This is the spirit of the land of music—where people are qualitatively different—do not starve for war and eat bread of malnutrition, but sacrifice for the infinite, and knowledge becomes a source for constant renewal. Baldwin is showing that through complexity there’s an answer to completing the struggle for freedom: love.
When one can love: Something is gone, and something is had, remains forever, and changes the air we breathe—forever. This has less to do about loving one person, even less to do with individual romance: and, more to do with what happens when you’re in and surrounded by love, and loved: for it to show what you’re made of—some people have never seen it, let alone use it. To think: that this alone could be the potential of the real basis for all life and human civilization.
“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
Why is this what Baldwin has to write about?
In Just Above My Head, we also meet Julia. Julia’s spirit is a very old, Black, African, prophetic achievement to have happened or continue to happen here in America. Isn’t it something that,
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the Child that’s got his own
Julia shows how much really has happened here, in America. The outcome of her journey is the showcase of an achievement: maturity.
Baldwin says Julia had, as a child preacher, not belonged to herself, nor had the remotest idea of who she was. It was also her and her fathers’ pride and ego that took upon her in becoming a pastor, and she would have to pay for that too. What drove Julia to the Church is the same thing that drives those children who have a profound and close to perfect capability to drive a generation—but instead are caught in the crossfire and limitations of a changing moment within the standards of America. This means there is a newness in Julia, and it resolves or finds itself in a place almost deeper than love. It is love that produces this newness and also produces Julia, but there is something that also produces love, and creates love—Julia knows the depth and transformative nature of sorrow.
When it Thundered and lightnin’d and the wind began to blow
There’s thousands enough of people ain’t got no place to go
Julia gets impregnated twice. Once by Crunch, because Julia needed to be renewed, to be made—not by her father—but in a way, by herself. This was a choice that she made on her own. Her father beat this first child out of her and impregnated her, for the second time. Her father wanted to live off of the fat of the land, and thought Julia would be his ticket while she was a preacher. Julia really believed in God, while her father didn’t believe in anything besides turning his poverty around towards the gates of heaven. Because Julia didn’t want to be a liar, she was encumbered by wanting to know herself, find herself, and become her own. This thrust her forward, leaving the Church at 14 years old—even if the church, or God, or her even being a preacher wouldn’t never leave her!—and when that child implanted in Julia by her Father was also beaten out of her, she was almost killed. Fact is, she did die in a way.
The battles she has faced, and the person she has come to in herself, begin to be very concretized when she reaches her 30s, when her scars begin to show. There isn’t anything sad about this—meaning, Julia isn’t trying to hide from anything in Julia. She, in fact, wanted to face her fears. This is where R&B arrives, to celebrate fear, love, death, and renewal for the personal and public triumph of a made Black man and woman—Black, on their own terms, which spells the striving to be free, and striving to create life. Those Black artists that achieve this much lead as a moral example, for us all.
Julia becomes an example of a personal triumph that comes from the bellies and bowels of the lonely: to be a determining factor upon her journey, affecting it, holding it, playing, fighting, dragging it to cross her gates.
What I’m saying about Julia is more interesting when I think that Baldwin had to write her, as well as all the others in Just Above My Head, in 1979. Baldwin is saying something about the ability to journey. More than where to go, this last novel says that there is already a destination, upon our strivings to realize our real humanity—and just as dependent on our ability to make freedom real; there is a destination coming, all that it depends on is if we hold onto each other.
Just Above My Head is a book for love as a revolutionary force for our times. Does Julia make it or not, does she have a “happy ending” even if she cannot have a child? Arthur’s brother, Hall, wanted and was able to have children whom Julia helps raise, so there’s that. And, Julia has memories. Point being, it’s her access to those memories that helps her, or even Hall, to live.
Julia accessed these memories because people held on to her, and loved her.
“‘How does it feel to be back?’
She pursed her lips looking very somber. ‘I am glad to be back. But—that’s the same question they asked me over there. And they weren’t wrong.’
I watched her.
Again, she seemed to be staring into the bottom of a well.
‘I mean, it wasn’t a bullshit, my-African-sister kind of thing. The ones who came on like that just despised you, and wanted to find a way to use you. No. The question was serious. There was something true in it, though I still don’t know how to put it into words. It comes out of a place, anyway, without words, somewhere where the question is the answer.’
‘But I mean—we’ve been raised to think that a question is one thing, and the answer is another—we always say, the answer. But it may not be like that.’
And I looked at her as though I were already trying to form the words in my mind, or as though I were about to say good-bye. But I had already said good-bye to Julia, and I realized, abruptly, and absolutely, that I was never going to say good-bye to her again, nor she to me. We had done that, and it hadn’t been any fun at all, and we’d never, thank heaven, have to go through that again. We had accepted our terms, or perhaps, we had dictated them; it made no difference now. Too much joined us for us ever to be pulled apart: our love was here to stay.
…
She looked down again. ‘And—I wanted to see you—because—somehow—I feel differently. I’m not happy, but—I’m not tormented, as I was. I wanted you to know. You deserve to know. One day I will tell you other things, Oh it was a nightmare for me, I didn’t know who I was. But that was very important—to know I didn’t know.
‘It was strange to be looked on, not merely as yourself, but as part of something other, older, vaster. I hated it. But now that I’m back here, among all these people, who think that everything begins, and ends, with them, it all begins to make: sense.’ She shook her head, laughed, looked up. ‘I don’t know what that word ‘sense’ means anymore, but I’m learning to trust what I don’t know.’ She leaned over, surprising me, and took my hand. ‘Maybe that’s all I wanted to tell you. So you’d be at ease in your mind about me, and be free.’
I took her hand in both of mine. I know that we looked like lovers, and it was beautiful to realize that, in truth, at last, we were.
‘Thank you for that,’ I said. ‘But what I’m mainly going to do with my freedom is watch over those I love.’
‘That’s a two-way street,’ she said. She watched me for a moment. “You’ve been somewhere, too.”
We left the place around six. I managed to find a taxi, and I put her in it, and I walked home, scarcely believing that I could be so happy, or so free. Nothing, after all, had been lost. We were going to live.”
The characters are never in and of themselves. If they can achieve this curious mentality, so can we. Julia begins to access herself when she comes back to America. She comes back to America with two things. She knows more about what could be called her role in a new time, and she needs to assess her relationship to her people in America. She went to Africa to move forward. Found in Africa, as a stranger in the village, and by another stranger, she was told that sorrow is the key to joy.
Who is Arthur, really, if not the strivings of a new man in a time not ready for his personhood to pursue? What were the qualities of this man that are important—is he new because he’s gay or because of the song that still is yet to be sung? These characters come from somewhere and still have yet to go. Why, and how does Baldwin write these people—what does Baldwin say about us all?
The nature of how this assessment of the journey went is reconciled by time. It is only after a period of time has passed, when it is used, that you find yourself alive, and that you can pick up your bags and start again, in order to live.
How could one’s death allow the same person to live? What does the death of Arthur have anything to do with the journey of the characters in Just Above My Head?
Jimmy asks,
“How could we sing, how could we know that the music comes from us, we build our bridge into eternity, we are the song we sing?
“The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by the song. Ain’t no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song—that is not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the bottom of my balls, baby, that something hears him, something says, come here!”
Presence of mind doesn’t come easy. Presence comes with moral standards, self-confidence—being able to face reality when it hits you—and faith. It comes with heart. There is no time by the sense of measurement, it—it being, when one is able to act accordingly, one is acted upon—is just reality. That is the access to what could be said to be the beat, rhythm, perfect timing:
“…and you love it, and you take care of it, better than you take care of yourself, can you dig it? but you don’t have no mercy on it. You can’t have mercy! That sound you hear, that sound you try to pitch with the utmost precision-and did you hear me? Wow!—is the sound of millions and millions and, who knows, now, listening, where life is, where is death?”
The point of this acknowledgement is to face the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. was very real when he had felt within himself and saw in us all the ability to make a beloved community. This is to say, even if Arthur dies, it is the fact that Arthur, or Martin Luther King Jr., cannot die. They cannot die because the problems are not yet resolved. None of the characters of Just Above My Head can remain forever tormented by the death of Arthur. One has the moral choice, the moral obligation, to live, in order to continue up the road to a new love, to a new humanity, to our rightful claim as heirs of our own identity and of freedom. Our identity as Americans depends upon this moral choice—are we willing to see this choice as life or death?—or we cannot make it up the road. The choice or price of living, in order to live, is this:
“Now, only that work which is love and that love which is work will allow one to come anywhere near obeying dictum laid down by the great Ray Charles, and tell the truth.”
I want to achieve what the characters in Just Above My Head achieved. I do not want to be afraid, I want life to be the only possibility, in the hope that our work brings rain.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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