Read Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems Page 1




  Copyright

  JIMMY’S BLUES. Copyright © 1983, 1985. by James Baldwin. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press. 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. N.Y. 10010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicalion Data

  Baldwin, James.

  Jimmy’s blues : selected poems / James Baldwin

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-05104-2 (paperback)

  ISBN 0-312-44247-5 (hardcover!

  I. Title.

  [PS3552.A45J5 1990]

  811’.54—dc20

  90-37243

  CIP

  First U.S. Paperback Edition: December 1990

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Staggerlee wonders

  1

  I always wonder

  what they think the niggers are doing

  while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,

  are containing

  Russia

  and defining and re-defining and re-aligning

  China,

  nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,

  from blowing up that earth

  which they have already

  blasphemed into dung:

  the gentle, wide-eyed, cheerful

  ladies, and their men,

  nostalgic for the noble cause of Vietnam,

  nostalgic for noble causes,

  aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages -

  ah - !

  Uncas shall never leave the reservation,

  except to purchase whisky at the State Liquor Store.

  The Panama Canal shall remain forever locked:

  there is a way around every treaty.

  We will turn the tides of the restless

  Caribbean,

  the sun will rise, and set

  on our hotel balconies as we see fit.

  The natives will have nothing to complain about,

  indeed, they will begin to be grateful,

  will be better off than ever before.

  They will learn to defer gratification

  and save up for things, like we do.

  Oh, yes. They will.

  We have only to make an offer

  they cannot refuse.

  This flag has been planted on the moon:

  it will be interesting to see

  what steps the moon will take to be revenged

  for this quite breathtaking presumption.

  This people

  masturbate in winding sheets.

  They have hacked their children to pieces.

  They have never honoured a single treaty

  made with anyone, anywhere.

  The walls of their cities

  are as foul as their children.

  No wonder their children come at them with knives.

  Mad Charlie man’s son was one of their children,

  had got his shit together

  by the time he left kindergarten,

  and, as for Patty, heiress of all the ages,

  she had the greatest vacation

  of any heiress, anywhere:

  Golly-gee, whillikens, Mom, real guns!

  and they come with a real big, black funky stud, too:

  oh, Ma! he’s making eyes at me!

  Oh, noble Duke Wayne,

  be careful in them happy hunting grounds.

  They say the only good Indian

  is a dead Indian,

  but what I say is,

  you can’t be too careful, you hear?

  Oh, towering Ronnie Reagan,

  wise and resigned lover of redwoods,

  deeply beloved, winning man-child of the yearning Republic,

  from diaper to football field to Warner Brothers

  sound-stages,

  be thou our grinning, gently phallic, Big Boy of all the ages!

  Salt peanuts, salt peanuts,

  for dear hearts and gentle people,

  and cheerful, shining, simple Uncle Sam!

  Nigger, read this and run!

  Now, if you can’t read,

  run anyhow!

  From Manifest Destiny

  (Cortez, and all his men

  silent upon a peak in Darien)

  to A Decent Interval,

  and the chopper rises above Saigon,

  abandoning the noble cause

  and the people we have made ignoble

  and whom we leave there, now, to die,

  one moves, With All Deliberate Speed,

  to the South China Sea, and beyond,

  where millions of new niggers

  await glad tidings!

  No, said the Great Man’s Lady,

  I’m against abortion.

  I always feel that’s killing somebody.

  Well, what about capital punishment?

  I think the death penalty helps.

  That’s right.

  Up to our ass in niggers

  on Death Row.

  Oh, Susanna,

  don’t you cry for me!

  2

  Well, I guess what the niggers

  is supposed to be doing

  is putting themselves in the path

  of that old sweet chariot

  and have it swing down and carry us home.

  That would help, as they say,

  and they got ways

  of sort of nudging the chariot.

  They still got influence

  with Wind and Water,

  though they in for some surprises

  with Cloud and Fire.

  My days are not their days.

  My ways are not their ways.

  I would not think of them,

  one way or the other,

  did not they so grotesquely

  block the view

  between me and my brother.

  And, so, I always wonder:

  can blindness be desired?

  Then, what must the blinded eyes have seen

  to wish to see no more!

  For, I have seen,

  in the eyes regarding me,

  or regarding my brother,

  have seen, deep in the farthest valley

  of the eye, have seen

  a flame leap up, then flicker and go out,

  have seen a veil come down,

  leaving myself, and the other,

  alone in that cave

  which every soul remembers, and

  out of which, desperately afraid,

  I turn, turn, stagger, stumble out,

  into the healing air,

  fall flat on the healing ground,

  singing praises, counselling

  my heart, my soul, to praise.

  What is it that this people

  cannot forget?

  Surely, they cannot be so deluded

  as to imagine that their crimes

  are original?

  There is nothing in the least original

  about the fiery tongs to the eyeballs,

  the sex tom from the socket,

  the infant ripped from the womb,

  the brains dashed out against rock,

  nothing original about Judas,

  or Peter, or you or me: nothing:

  we are liars and cowards all,

  or nearly all, or nearly all the time:

  for we also ride the lightning,

  answer the thunder, penetrate whirlwinds,

  curl up on the floor of the sun,

  and pick our teeth with thunderbolts.

  Then, perhaps they imagine


  that their crimes are not crimes?

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps that is why they cannot repent,

  why there is no possibility of repentance.

  Manifest Destiny is a hymn to madness,

  feeding on itself, ending

  (when it ends) in madness:

  the action is blindness and pain,

  pain bringing a torpor so deep

  that every act is willed,

  is desperately forced,

  is willed to be a blow:

  the hand becomes a fist,

  the prick becomes a club,

  the womb a dangerous swamp,

  the hope, and fear, of love

  is acid in the marrow of the bone.

  No, their fire is not quenched,

  nor can be: the oil feeding the flames

  being the unadmitted terror of the wrath of God.

  Yes. But let us put it in another,

  less theological way:

  though theology has absolutely nothing to do

  with what I am trying to say.

  But the moment God is mentioned

  theology is summoned

  to buttress or demolish belief:

  an exercise which renders belief irrelevant

  and adds to the despair of Fifth Avenue

  on any afternoon,

  the people moving, homeless, through the city,

  praying to find sanctuary before the sky

  and the towers come tumbling down,

  before the earth opens, as it does in Superman.

  They know that no one will appear

  to turn back time,

  they know it, just as they know

  that the earth has opened before

  and will open again, just as they know

  that their empire is falling, is doomed,

  nothing can hold it up, nothing.

  We are not talking about belief.

  3

  I wonder how they think

  the niggers made, make it,

  how come the niggers are still here.

  But, then, again, I don’t think they dare

  to think of that: no:

  I’m fairly certain they don’t think of that at all.

  Lord,

  I watch the alabaster lady of the house,

  with Beulah.

  Beulah about sixty, built four-square,

  biceps like Mohammed Ali,

  she at the stove, fixing biscuits,

  scrambling eggs and bacon, fixing coffee,

  pouring juice, and the lady of the house,

  she say, she don’t know how

  she’d get along without Beulah

  and Beulah just silently grunts,

  I reckon you don’t,

  and keeps on keeping on

  and the lady of the house say,

  She’s just like one of the family,

  and Beulah turns, gives me a look,

  sucks her teeth and rolls her eyes

  in the direction of the lady’s back, and

  keeps on keeping on.

  While they are containing

  Russia

  and entering onto the quicksand of

  China

  and patronizing

  Africa,

  and calculating

  the Caribbean plunder, and

  the South China Sea booty,

  the niggers are aware that no one has discussed

  anything at all with the niggers.

  Well. Niggers don’t own nothing,

  got no flag, even our names

  are hand-me-downs

  and you don’t change that

  by calling yourself X:

  sometimes that just makes it worse,

  like obliterating the path that leads back

  to whence you came, and

  to where you can begin.

  And, anyway, none of this changes the reality,

  which is, for example, that I do not want my son

  to die in Guantanamo,

  or anywhere else, for that matter,

  serving the Stars and Stripes.

  (I’ve seen some stars.

  I got some stripes.)

  Neither (incidentally)

  has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers:

  the incoherent feeling is, the less

  the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better:

  the lady of the house

  smiles nervously in your direction

  as though she had just been overheard

  discussing family, or sexual secrets,

  and changes the subject to Education,

  or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls,

  the smile saying, Don’t be dismayed.

  We know how you feel. You can trust us.

  Yeah. I would like to believe you.

  But we are not talking about belief.

  4

  The sons of greed, the heirs of plunder,

  are approaching the end of their journey:

  it is amazing that they approach without wonder,

  as though they have, themselves, become

  that scorched and blasphemed earth,

  the stricken buffalo, the slaughtered tribes,

  the endless, virgin, bloodsoaked plain,

  the famine, the silence, the children’s eyes,

  murder masquerading as salvation,

  seducing every democratic eye,

  the mouths of truth and anguish choked with cotton,

  rape delirious with the fragrance of magnolia,

  the hacking of the fruit of their loins to pieces,

  hey! the tar-baby sons and nephews, the high-yaller nieces,

  and Tom’s black prick hacked off

  to rustle in the crinoline,

  to hang, heaviest of heirlooms,

  between the pink and alabaster breasts

  of the Great Man’s Lady,

  or worked into the sash at the waist

  of the high-yaller Creole bitch, or niece,

  a chunk of shining brown-black satin,

  staring, staring, like the single eye of God:

  creation yearns to re-create a time

  when we were able to recognize a crime.

  Alas,

  my stricken kinsmen,

  the party is over:

  there have never been any white people,

  anywhere: the trick was accomplished with mirrors –

  look: where is your image now?

  where your inheritance,

  on what rock stands this pride?

  Oh,

  I counsel you,

  leave History alone.

  She is exhausted,

  sitting, staring into her dressing-room mirror,

  and wondering what rabbit, now,

  to pull out of what hat,

  and seriously considering retirement,

  even though she knows her public

  dare not let her go.

  She must change.

  Yes. History must change.

  A slow, syncopated

  relentless music begins

  suggesting her re-entry,

  transformed, virginal as she was,

  in the Beginning, untouched,

  as the Word was spoken,

  before the rape which debased her

  to be the whore of multitudes, or,

  as one might say, before she became the Star,

  whose name, above our title,

  carries the Show, making History the patsy,

  responsible for every flubbed line,

  every missed cue, responsible for the life

  and death, of all bright illusions

  and dark delusions,

  Lord, History is weary

  of her unspeakable liaison with Time,

  for Time and History

  have never seen eye to eye:

  Time laughs at History

  and time and time and time again

  Time traps History in a lie
.

  But we always, somehow, managed

  to roar History back onstage

  to take another bow,

  to justify, to sanctify

  the journey until now.

  Time warned us to ask for our money back,

  and disagreed with History

  as concerns colours white and black.

  Not only do we come from further back,

  but the light of the Sun

  marries all colours as one.

  Kinsmen,

  I have seen you betray your Saviour

  (it is you who call Him Saviour)

  so many times, and

  I have spoken to Him about you,

  behind your back.

  Quite a lot has been going on

  behind your back, and,

  if your phone has not yet been disconnected,

  it will soon begin to ring:

  informing you, for example, that a whole generation,

  in Africa, is about to die,

  and a new generation is about to rise,

  and will not need your bribes,

  or your persuasions, any more:

  nor your morality. Nor the plundered gold –

  Ah! Kinsmen, if I could make you see

  the crime is not what you have done to me!

  It is you who are blind,

  you, bowed down with chains,

  you, whose children mock you, and seek another

  master,

  you, who cannot look man or woman or child in the

  eye,

  whose sleep is blank with terror,

  for whom love died long ago,

  somewhere between the airport and the safe-deposit

  box,

  the buying and selling of rising or falling stocks,

  you, who miss Zanzibar and Madagascar and Kilimanjaro

  and lions and tigers and elephants and zebras

  and flying fish and crocodiles and alligators and

  leopards

  and crashing waterfalls and endless rivers,

  flowers fresher than Eden, silence sweeter than the

  grace of God,

  passion at every turning, throbbing in the bush,

  thicker, oh, than honey in the hive,

  dripping

  dripping

  opening, welcoming, aching from toe to bottom

  to spine,

  sweet heaven on the line

  to last forever, yes,

  but, now,

  rejoicing ends, man, a price remains to pay,

  your innocence costs too much

  and we can’t carry you on our books