Another Country

by James Baldwin

Rufus

Vivaldo—the only friend he had left in the city, or maybe in the world—but

They could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have borne the sight of Rufus, but they knew why he was in the streets tonight, why he rode subways all night long, why his stomach growled, why his hair was nappy, his armpits funky, his pants and shoes too thin, and why he did not dare to stop and take a leak.

He had been in hiding, really, for nearly a month.

Or, someone would be certain to whisper Isn’t that Rufus Scott?

his sister, Ida,

He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona.

his first set of drums—bought him by his father—his

A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat. Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddamn tambourine.

While he had still been in the Navy, he had brought back from one of his voyages an Indian shawl for Ida.

Ages and ages ago, Ida had not been merely the descendant of slaves. Watching her dark face in the sunlight, softened and shadowed by the glorious shawl, it could be seen that she had once been a monarch.

“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.

he said, “Your name’s not really Anne, is it?” “No,” she said, “it’s Leona.”

“I was born here,” he said, watching her. “I know,” she said, “so it can’t seem as wonderful to you as it does to me.” He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.

He got in trouble for hitting on a white woman?

The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.

He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo,

They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it.” He laughed. “You know, every time they give me one of them great big checks I think to myself, they just giving me back a little bit of what they been stealing all these years, you know what I mean?”

His real name is Daniel Vivaldo Moore. He’s an Irish wop.”

Whenever he was uncomfortable—which was often—his arms and legs seemed to stretch to monstrous proportions and he handled them with bewildered loathing, as though he had been afflicted with them only a few moments before.

“there’s Cass!”

Richard had been Vivaldo’s English instructor in high school, years ago.

Cass Silenski.”

When he had last seen Ida, he had told her that he and Leona were about to make it to Mexico, where, he said, people would leave them alone. But no one had heard from him since then.

He felt that everyone in the place knew what was going on, knew that Rufus was peddling his ass. But nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked at them.

And Rufus stared into the gleaming cup, praying, Lord, don’t let it happen. Don’t let me go home with this man. I’ve got so little left, Lord, don’t let me lose it all.

“I’m not the boy you want, mister,” he said at last, and suddenly remembered having said exactly these words to Eric—long ago.

I don’t think I should put you down just because you acted like a bastard. We’re all bastards. That’s why we need our friends.”

Just next to him, at a table, sat a girl he had balled once or twice, whose name was Belle. She was talking to her boy friend, Lorenzo.

That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie.

“But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here”—and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look—“happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.”

the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane—which

The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of

relief with the minimum of hostility.

It was the way the world treated girls with bad reputations and every colored girl had been born with one.

Eric sat naked in his rented garden.

Yves’ tiny black-and-white kitten stalked the garden as though it were Africa,

house,

He had loved the cook, a black woman named Grace,

he had loved her husband, Henry.

They had long ago given up saying anything which they really felt, had given it up so long ago that they were now incapable of feeling anything which was not felt by a mob.

His name was LeRoy, he was seventeen, a year older than Eric, and he worked as a porter in the courthouse. He was tall and very black, and taciturn;

But now their friendship, their effort to continue an impossible connection, was beginning to be a burden for them both. It would have been simpler—perhaps—if LeRoy had worked for Eric’s family. Then all would have been permitted, would have been covered by the assumption of Eric’s responsibility for his colored boy.

Eric did not know, or perhaps he did not want to know, that he made LeRoy’s life more difficult and increased the danger in which LeRoy walked—for LeRoy was considered “bad,” as lacking, that is, in respect for white people.

People do not take the relations between boys seriously, you know that. We will never know many people who believe we love each other. They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.”

One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never—it was the general complaint—left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.

most men with a sexual bias toward men love their mothers and hate their fathers.” “We haven’t been told much,” he observed, mildly sardonic.

She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one.

Perhaps it was only because she was not white that he dared to bring her the offering of himself. Perhaps he had felt, somewhere, at the very bottom of himself, that she would not dare despise him.

And he also realized that he had become the focus of two very different kinds of attention. The blacks now suspected him of being an ally—though not a friend, never a friend!—and the whites, particularly the neighborhood Italians, now knew that he could not be trusted.