Free Another Country by James Baldwin Page B

said, nevertheless, after a moment, “You ought to leave him. You ought to leave town.”
    “I tell you, Viv, I keep hoping— it’ll all come all right somehow. He wasn’t like this when I met him, he’s not really like this at all. I know he’s not. Something’s got all twisted up in his mind and he can’t help it.”
    They were standing under a street lamp. Her face was hideous, was unutterably beautiful with grief. Tears rolled down her thin cheeks and she made doomed, sporadic efforts to control the trembling of her little-girl’s mouth.
    “I love him,” she said, helplessly, “I love him, I can’t help it. No matter what he does to me. He’s just lost and he beats me because he can’t find nothing else to hit.”
    He pulled her against him while she wept, a thin, tired girl, unwitting heiress of generations of bitterness. He could think of nothing to say. A light was slowly turning on inside him, a dreadful light. He saw— dimly— dangers, mysteries, chasms which he had never dreamed existed.
    “Here comes a taxi,” he said.
    She straightened and tried to dry her eyes again.
    “I’ll come with you,” he said, “and come right back?”
    “No,” she said, “just give me the keys. I’ll be all right. You go on back to Rufus.”
    “Rufus said he’d kill me,” he said, half-smiling.
    The taxi stopped beside them. He gave her his keys.
    She opened the door, keeping her face away from the driver.
    “Rufus ain’t going to kill nobody but himself,” she said, “if he don’t find a friend to help him.” She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab. “You the only friend he’s got in the world, Vivaldo.”
    He gave her some money for the fare, looking at her with something, after all these months, explicit at last between them. They both loved Rufus. And they were both white. Now that it stared them so hideously in the face, each could see how desperately the other had been trying to avoid this confrontation.
    “You’ll go there now?” he asked. “You’ll go to my place?”
    “Yes. I’ll go. You go on back to Rufus. Maybe you can help him. He needs somebody to help him.”
    Vivaldo gave the driver his address and watched the taxi roll away. He turned and started back the way they had come.
    The way seemed longer, now that he was alone, and darker. His awareness of the policeman, prowling somewhere in the darkness near him, made the silence ominous. He felt threatened. He felt totally estranged from the city in which he had been born; this city for which he sometimes felt a kind of stony affection because it was all he knew of home. Yet he had no home here— the hovel on Bank Street was not a home. He had always supposed that he would, one day, make a home here for himself. Now he began to wonder if anyone could ever put down roots in this rock; or, rather, he began to be aware of the shapes acquired by those who had. He began to wonder about his own shape.
    He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely— and unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.
    At the same time, as he came closer to Rufus’ building, he was trying very hard not to think about Rufus.
    He was in a section of warehouses. Very few people lived down here. By day, trucks choked the streets, laborers stood on these ghostly platforms, moving great weights, and cursing. As he had once; for a long time, he had been one of them. He had been proud of his skill and his muscles and happy to be accepted as a man among men. Only— it was they who saw something in him which they could not accept, which