the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt nine)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

“When we saw Rufus’s body, I can’t tell you. My father stared at it, he stared at it, and stared at it. It didn’t look like Rufus, it was—terrible—from the water, and he must have struck something going down, or in the water, because he was so broken and lumpy—and ugly. My brother. And my father stared at it—at it—and he said, They don’t leave a man much, do they? His own father beaten to death with a hammer by a railroad guard. And they brought his father home like that. My mother got frightened, she wanted my father to pray. And he said, he shouted it at the top of his lungs, Pray? Who, pray? I bet you, if I ever get anywhere near that white devil you call God, I’ll tear my son and my father out of his white hide! Don’t you ever say the word Pray to me again, woman, not if you want to live. Then he started to cry. I’ll never forget it. Maybe I hadn’t loved him before, but I loved him then. That was the last time he ever shouted, he hasn’t raised his voice since. He just sits there, he doesn’t even drink any more. Sometimes he goes out and listens to those fellows who make speeches on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. He says he just wants to live long enough—long enough----.”

Vivaldo said, to break the silence which abruptly roared around to them, “To be paid back.”

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt eight)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

“Hope?” The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. “Hope? No, I don’t think there’s any hope. We’re too empty here”—her eyes took in the Sunday crowd—“too empty—here.” She touched her heart. “This isn’t a country at all, it’s a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we’re happy. We’re not. We’re doomed.” She looked at her watch. “I must get back.” She looked at him. “I only wanted to see you for a moment.”

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt seven)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

They reached the first of a labyrinthine series of rooms, shifting and crackling with groups of people, with bright paintings above and around them, and stretching into the far distance, like tombstones with unreadable inscriptions. The people moved in waves, like tourists in a foreign graveyard. Occasionally, a single mourner, dreaming of some vanished relationship, stood alone in adoration or revery before a massive memorial—but they mainly evinced, moving restlessly here and there, the democratic gaiety. Cass and Eric moved in some panic through this crowd, trying to find a quieter place; through fields of French impressionists and cubists and cacophonous modern masters, into a smaller room dominated by an enormous painting, executed, principally, in red, before which two students, a girl and a boy, stood holding hands.

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt six)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

Vivaldo laughed. “No one could ever hate you. You’re much too funny.” He pulled away. “What time are you meeting Cass?”

“At four. At the Museum of Modern Art.”

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt five)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

“You want to turn on?” Harold asked.

It had been a long time. He had become bored by the people with whom one turned on, and really rather bored with marijuana. Either it did not derange his senses enough, or he was already more then sufficiently deranged. And he found the hangover crushing and it interfered with his work and he had never been able to make love on it.

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt four)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

He crossed the Avenue. He wanted to go home and he wanted to eat and he wanted to get drunk and, also, perhaps out of simple fury, he wanted to get laid—but he did not feel that anything good would happen to him tonight. And he felt that if he were a real writer, he would simply go home and work and throw everything else out of his mind, as Balzac had done and Proust and Joyce and James and Faulkner. But perhaps they had never held in their minds the nameless things he held in his. He felt a very peculiar, a deadly resignation: he knew that he would not go home until it was too late for him to go anywhere else, or until Ida answered the phon. Ida: and he felt an eerie premonition, as though he were old, walking years from now through familiar streets where no one knew or noticed him, thinking of his lost love, and wondering, Where is she now? Where is she now? He passed the movie theater and the tough boys and tough men who always stood outside it. It was ten o’clock. He turned west in Waverly Place and walked to a crowded bar where he could get a hamburger. He forced himself to have a hamburger and a beer before he called his apartment again. There was no answer. He went back to the bar and ordered a whiskey and realized that he was running out of money. If he were going to keep on drinking he would have to go to Benno’s, where he had a tab.

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt three)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

She tried to dry her eyes. Vivaldo gave her his handkerchief and put one arm around her shoulders. “You know, the world is hard enough and people is evil enough without all the time looking for it and stirring it up and making it worse. I keep telling him, I know a lot of people don’t like what I’m doing. But I don’t care, let them go their way, I’ll go mine.”

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt two)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

There was some pot on the scene and he was a little high. He was feeling great. And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lung and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and “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.

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt one)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar. The music was loud and empty, no one was doing anything at all, and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction in which not even those who hated most deeply any longer believed. They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after. He wanted to go in and use the bathroom but he was ashamed of the way he looked. He had been in hiding, really, for nearly a month. And he saw himself now, in his mind’s eye, shambling through this crowd to the bathroom and crawling out again while everyone watched him with pitying or scornful or mocking eyes. Or, someone would be certain to whisper Isn’t that Rufus Scott? Someone would look at him with horror, then turn back to his business with a long-draw-out, pitying, Man! He could not do it—and he danced on one foot and then the other and tears came to his eyes.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt twelve)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

I’d read Isherwood’s novel so often I had no trouble inserting myself into its scene. I am the negro boxer—small n of the British 1930s—whom Isherwood sees at the far end of Potsdamerstrasse, working at a fairground, in an attraction of fixed boxing and wrestling matches. I take my turn knocking guys out and getting knocked out. And I, the black boxer in his stance, am going to meet Otto’s brother, Lothar, a smoldering Nazi whose bed Isherwood was given when he moved in with the working-class Nowaks. I am going to guide him to the light and we will never age.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt eleven)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

I am one of the black American leftovers who sit by themselves. We nod to one another, my fellow old heads and I, a veteran session musician, a widowed engineer, that second-rate Beat poet, now a celebrity because of his age, and low-frequency me. I have their general outlines and they pieces of mine. We exchanged them a few years ago, but since the engineer’s German wife died, we have not added to the kitty of information. They don’t come in as regularly as I do, a fat guy again. To gain weight is to become neutered. Yet the crew of dealers I manage in Hasenheide Park is scared of me.

I never tried to belong. I stayed in the great head with the unratified deeds, a phrase I always took to mean the things we do in the dark. I just wanted to be left alone. I was. I have been, my slowed footsteps a perfunctory but familiar chorus. During the worst of the antiforeigner attacks, the neo-Nazis never messed with American-looking blacks, not even at four in the morning. I was still bleary-eyed in Powell’s Bookstore basement with the deutsche taschenbuch verlag editions I couldn’t really read.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt ten)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

East Berlin was so underlit that I could make out the Little Dipper. It suited many like me that the unreal city was surrounded by a society with an inferiority complex. Manfred said that Rosa Luxemburg would have been as nasty as any of them had she gained power. Such people were at their best in the opposition.

The old dream’s yearning had crept comfortably back into my heart. I’d not come to Berlin to be noble and gay. I wasn’t there to get down with history either. I was there to let go in the shadow of either a Teuton or a Tartar thug. My hour, was it coming? I called to it: it’s time, it’s time.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt nine)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

A few years later two commuter trains on the Illinois Central collided outside a station downturn and I understood for the first time the flinty shock of death. A family friend who made what he called antique furniture was among those killed. I didn’t cry, I was so amazed by the discovery. Dad thought I had grown up. I wasn’t paying attention at the funeral. The open casket didn’t faze me. I was fixed on the realization that life was serious it offered no do-overs. You don’t get up from play and head home wondering what happened to the fireflies of childhood.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt eight)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

We heard her cry out. She bumped into Dad as he ran down to her. They panted back up together and turned on the television. Reporters stood in the rain in front of Northwestern Memorial. The tears were already coming down for Chicago’s first black mayor. A press spokesman was saying that Harold Washington had been pronounced dead. He’d had a heart attack at his desk that morning. The phone rang again. Dad pressed Mom into a chair and went to answer.

I’d grown up seeing Mom wipe her face in front of the television, or while she was on the phone, or over a tissue-thin newspaper or a blue letter that folded back up to be its own envelope. In my memory, my dad is in the kitchen, pouring her a glass of water, trying to think of something else to do for her, brought low by news of another assassination, in Jackson, in Birmingham, in Dallas, in New York City, in Memphis, in Orangeburg, in Los Angeles, in Kent, in Munich, in Beirut, in Port Elizabeth, or blocks away, over on troubled Madison Street.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt seven)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

Cello said in German that when Peter Serkin’s father, Rudolf Serkin, made his debut in 1921, he played the fifth Brandenburg. He then asked Adolf Busch what he should play as an encore. The Goldberg Variations, the violinist who would be his father-in-law said. “So Serkin did. All thirty. Busch had been joking. When Serkin finished, six people were left in the hall Adolf and Frieda Busch and Mr. and Mrs. Artur Schnabel and Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein.”

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt six)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

West Berlin had none of the frantic, last-call activity around four in the morning of major American cities. There was no equivalent to that sinking feeling that came over you in a pub in London when the landlord called, “Time, gentlemen.” The bar stools were not hauled up, the doors not bolted. Nobody was hunting for an obscure after-hours joint or passing the hat for a taxi ride to some heard-of place on the edge. The empty streets were ours; they belonged to the young. That was how we knew we were young. Iggy Pop said that there were no children in Berlin and everybody laughed because his observation revealed what time he got up—after children had gone to bed. They called it the Berlin Effect.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt five)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

Line 1, the subway from Zoo Station to Kreuzberg—then the Turkish quarter to the close to the Wall—left its tunnel and become an elevated train by the time it reached Hallesches Tor, more Isherwood territory, but nothing like it had been before the war, given how much of it had been bombed and rebuilt. Sometimes in Berlin, at the right time of day, the bleak apartment towers that I could see from the train at the raised platform of Hallesches Tor would make me think of Chicago, that dog growling at me as I walked along but unable to get at me through the fence.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt four)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

While he read the Hyde Park Herald, Mom sat defiantly with Voices. She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after I learned who I. M. Pei was.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt three)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt two)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

Someone once compared her to Philippa Schuyler, the prodigy whose Harlem Renaissance father, George Schuyler, a black journalist married to a white woman, held her up as an example of biological advancement through the mixing or “invigoration” of the races. Cello never spoke to that someone again. Black girls like Mom followed Shirley Temple’s career in the 1930s and 1940s and had time left over to clip stories about Philippa Schuyler and to tune in to her radio broadcasts. But at some point Schuyler decided that her friendless upbringing on raw food and tour dates had been a form of bondage and she stopped playing the piano. She joined the John Birch Society and died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Her mother committed suicide on the second anniversary of her death.

Cello’s sister was Cello’s only relative invited to her wedding on Lake Constance. Mom was very hurt by that.

the last book I ever read (Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney, excerpt one)

from Black Deutschland: A Novel by Darryl Pinckney:

Her German was as intimidating as everything else about her. I’d once heard a boy from Poland converse in English with a boy with Yugoslavia. It was weird to hear English used as a device, with no cultural inflections. Cello would have said that she was making me practice my German, but she was also canceling out our equality. I didn’t know where she got her accent in German, but I was sure it must have been an upper-class one.

Maybe because she never felt that she could depend on her parents, Cello was not the kind of person to waste an opportunity. She always knew where she was. Her will, her application, never failed to impress adults, and her renown as an achiever made her peers a tad uncomfortable in her presence. I mean us, me. There she was always far ahead, ahead even of my brother. The Negro Achiever was a species of secular saint. To be young, gifted and black, Nina Simone sings.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt twelve)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

We finish the popcorn. He did a good job. Every kernel was popped. I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it out carefully, then take a clean dish towel from a drawer and dry it. It really is an extraordinarily lovely bowl. I don’t know where to put it because I don’t know where it came from.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt eleven)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

The billboard people told me they didn’t know who Rabindranath Tagore was and could not verify anything he might have thought. He was certainly foreign and his sentiments insurrectionary. As well, what he was saying wasn’t advertising anything. This night I see that space I tried to claim depicts black-and-white cows painting the words EAT MORE CHIKEN on the side of a barn.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt ten)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

I had been in jail but a single day and night when they realized they had overlooked the wedding ring on my hand. I wasn’t married anymore but couldn’t get the ring off. My knuckles were swollen possibly because of the prednisone I’d been taking because I was tired, so tired. It was just a cheap gold band but I made a terrible fuss when they said they’d have to cut it off. Some of the girls had gathered around.

“They’re gonna cut off her wedding ring,” one muttered with amused awe.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt nine)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

Loup was going through boxes of manuscripts, a dozen of them that had been on his desk for a month. He was now disposing of them rapidly. He would pick an even-numbered page and give it his full attention. One page could tell him everything. Sometimes the decision was made on a single line. It was all true, what writers suspected.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt eight)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

We went to New York City once. To this day I don’t know why she insisted on it. “Why don’t we go to the Grand Canyon?” I said, but she wanted to do something different. We’d seen the Grand Canyon. She wanted to go to that restaurant, Windows on the World, was it? And she wanted to take in some musical theater. That’s exactly how she put it, “I want to take in some musical theater.” She’s had a job for years with P & R, working with heavy machinery, loppers and saws and stuff, and first thing at LaGuardia she falls on the stairs and sprains her ankle. It’s all she can do to hobble from bed to bathroom in the crummy little hotel room we have. So I’m supposed to be showing the boy New York City. He was around nine. We had just emerged from a subway, the boy and I, totally disoriented, and this Mexican guy passes by and grunts at me and lifts his chin at this woman standing beside us waiting for the light to change and she’s blind with dark glasses and a cane, clearly blind, and the guy’s saying, without speaking—Do your duty, man, I’m going the other way.

The blind don’t grab on to you like you’d think or clutch your hand. She just put her finger on my jacket with the lightest touch.

the last book I ever read (The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, excerpt seven)

from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams:

He was missing a tooth, far back, only noticeable in the way that hardly noticeable things are. “You’ve seen my Harley. Haven’t you just wanted to climb on Fat Boy and go? That bike gets so many compliments. If I ever wanted to sell, the ad would read Consistent compliments, but I’ll never sell. Or maybe you’d want to go somewhere else. I’ll take you anywhere you want. I got another pair of jeans, newer jeans. What? My hearing’s not so good. After Darla died I stuck knives in my ears. You know how they say you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear? It was in honor of Darla because I loved her voice so much and never wanted to hear another’s. I probably hear better than I should but I miss some of the mumble. You were mumbling there, not making yourself clear.”