Free Jimmy's Blues by James Baldwin Page B

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