I’m reading Baldwin. Again. Re-reading Another Country. My introduction to James Baldwin back in college, wedged in amongst the pages of Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. But Baldwin was my favorite. My patron poet. Stripping away the boundaries of love, of labels, tearing the individual out from the collective to stand up and be accountable. At twenty I emerged from the prose of Another Country feeling my horizons broadened, my depths plunged. Another Country was for me, then, a story about the fluidity of human relationships, and love without context or containment.
Funny how ten years later, reading the same copy of the same book — chewed at the edges by my little albino guinea pig, Stephe, long since gone on to feed the tulips — I now read in Baldwin’s words another story. The words come together on the page now to tell a story of loneliness. Of the chasms between people, of love unreachable. Or broken.
Why? Where did all this jadedness come from? What’s become of the Baldwin of my youth? How many other books will I re-read to find the words on the page the same but the meaning changed?
Some solace however in the one passage remained in tact. The passage that grabbed me by the throat at twenty, and then continued to play in dark corners of my sleeping poetmind for years. The passage that made me hear Coltraine.
“…And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and “Well, that’s it,” said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig.”
