P.S. (4 page)

A profound sense of loyalty extends to friends as well as to country. When one is in trouble, whether with officialdom (something quite easily resolved; cash in hand, preferably brand-new bills, turneth away such wrath) or with matters of the heart (being cuckolded), he can depend on a small circle of friends.

So is it with Barney, outside Dreamland, on this night in 1924. As Ben calls out, “Kid!” I move toward him uncertainly. The back door of the automobile is open. The two strangers appear to be urging him in. “Hiya, Ben,” I say, for want of anything better. “How ya doin’?” The others see me for the first time. I have a natural tendency to blend into any background.

“Who’re you?” the big one says, slightly puzzled.

“I’m his brother.”

“Beat it.”

“He’s s’posed to be buyin’ me a malted.”

“He ain’t buyin’ ya nothin’.”

“It’s Friday night,” I say, apropos of nothing. I’m trembling.

“Yeah,” says Ben. His voice is shaking. “A chocolate malted at Liggett’s. It’s the best in town, fellas.”

The driver leans back against the seat. He sighs. “Are we goin’ or not?”

“Let’s take him too,” says the short one.

“Are you nuts?” counters the big one.

“Aw, Christ,” moans the chauffeur. “Make up your mind.”

“Where’s Barney?”

“He’s gone off with his pig.”

They look at one another. What’s to be done? Should I suggest we all go for a malted? Always, I’ve been in favor of peaceful solutions.

“My mother is sick,” I blurt out.

“Too bad,” says the big one.

“She’s callin’ for Ben. That’s why I came to get him.”

The big one turns to my brother. “Is that your name?” Ben nods quickly. About five times.

“OK,
Ben
. Get the fuck out of here. If we ever catch you foolin’ around with our women, you’re gonna wind up in the drainage canal. All wrapped in cement. Y’unnerstan’?”

Ben understands.

“Yer lucky you got a little brother.”

Ben nods.

“An’ yer lucky yer mother’s sick.”

Ben nods.

The big one reaches toward his inside pocket, smiles, and says, “Run!” Ben and I take off. We hear laughter as we run and run and run, without once looking back.

Exhausted, we lean against a fence gate. Ben touches my cheek. He pats me on the head. We walk. I reach for his hand.
It is cold and sweaty. Mine is too. It is the final scene from
The Bicycle Thief
. He is the humiliated father and I am the small boy, Bruno Ricci.

Rome, 1962. Vittorio De Sica is seated in his office. His classic face betrays weariness. I observe we’re within hailing distance of the balcony from which Il Duce addressed multitudes. He smiles. He quotes Baudelaire on Napoleon: A dictator is not as dangerous alive as when he lives on after death.

“You had your sorry period,” he says. “McCarthyism. We had a bad one after the war.” Closet Fascists gave him a hard time. They were in high circles of government.

Once a matinee idol, he still acts in films, too many of which are bad ones. Reason: He must raise much of his own money to finance the ones he directs. It is better now, but in the beginning the government was intransigent. They abhorred his chosen themes.

Shoe Shine
: homeless boys, rootless, roaming streets.
The Bicycle Thief
: unemployment.
The Roof
: housing.
Umberto D
: indigent old age.
Miracle in Milan
: a fable of the poor.

“I’ve lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I’m glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like
Umberto D
and
The Bicycle Thief
.”

The Bicycle Thief
is one of my all-time favorites, I tell him. It has affected my life in ways I cannot quite explain. He tells how he chose a simple workingman, a non-actor, as the father. How he began filming without having cast the boy. He had auditioned scores. He was looking for a kid with “human” eyes and a strange, funny little face. As the shooting begins, a crowd gathers. “I see a boy near me. A miracle. ‘Why are you here?’ I say to him. ‘I’m watchin’,’ he says. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Enzo
Staiola.’ How old are you?’ ‘Five.’ ‘Would you like to make a picture with me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Enter. Go.’ ” De Sica laughs.

“Bruno Ricci,” I mumble. “That kid was marvelous.”

De Sica looks at me. His face softens. “You remember the name?”

“Sure.”

“I am so grateful. It is very emotional to me that an American can remember the name of a little boy like Bruno.”

“Mr. De Sica,” I say, “I saw the movie twelve times, for God’s sake.” And for mine, too.

As a farewell token, he offers a poem by the Neapolitan Salvatore di Giacomo. He shuts his eyes and recites. It is a letter to a lost youth and lost love. I don’t understand a word. Why then do I weep?

Ben and I stumble toward Dixieland. The vacant room is not occupied that night; nor for many nights to follow. At least, not by Ben.

[OPENS WITH PIANO and Bessie Smith singing]

 

It’s very hard to describe that feeling. Um . . . [He sighs.] It’s a—

The first time I ever heard this record was in Europe, under very different circumstances than I’d ever listened to Bessie in New York. And what struck me was the fact that she was singing, as you say, about a disaster that had almost killed her.
And she’d accepted it and was going—beyond it. It’s a fantastic kind of understatement in it. It’s the way I want to write, you know. When she says, “My house fell down and I can’t live there no more.” It’s a great—sentence; it’s a great—achievement.

 

The way you want to write, you say. I’m looking now at page five of your new book, and it’s a remarkable one:
Nobody Knows My Name.
It’s a series of essays, articles, opinions of James Baldwin.
More Notes of a Native Son,
the subtitle.

 

Yes.

 

 

Yes, well, how can I put that? That winter in Switzerland, I was working on my first novel, which I thought I would never be able to finish. And I finally realized, in Europe, that one of the reasons that I couldn’t finish this novel was that I was ashamed of where I’d come from and where I’d been. And ashamed of life in the church, and ashamed of my father, and ashamed of
the blues, and ashamed of jazz, and of course ashamed of watermelon. Because it was, you know, all of these stereotypes that the country afflicts on Negroes: that we all eat watermelon; that we all do nothing but sing the blues and all that.

Well, I was afraid of all that and I ran from it. And when I say I was trying to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was little, I realized that I had acquired so many affectations, I had told myself so many lies, that I really had buried myself beneath a whole fantastic image of myself which wasn’t mine, but white people’s image of me. And I realized that I had not always talked—obviously I hadn’t always talked the way I had forced myself to learn how to talk. And I had to find out what I had been like in the beginning. And in order, just technically then, to re-create Negro speech, I realized it was a cadence, it was a beat much more than . . . It was not a question of dropping
S
s or
N
s or
G
s, but a question of the beat, really. And Bessie had the beat, you know.

And in this icy wilderness, as far removed from Harlem as anything you can imagine, with Bessie Smith and me, I began—

 

 

And white snow, and white mountains, and white faces who really thought I was—I had been sent by the devil. It was a very strange . . . They had never seen a Negro before. And in this kind of isolation—it’s very hard to describe—I managed to finish the book. And I played Bessie every day. And really, literally—this may sound strange—a lot of the book is in dialogue, and I corrected things according to . . . what I was able to hear when Bessie . . . sang and when James P. Johnson played. It’s that tone and that sound, you know, jazz, which is in me.