Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  He accepted this with a tiny, wry smile. With a certain defiance, I sipped my wine. “This is a pretty good job for you, I guess.”

  “It suits me. The people don’t bother me. You know.”

  “What do most of the people around here do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of people. The people I know—well, they mainly all want to be artists of one kind or another.”

  “How do they go about it?”

  “Well—they work at it. Some of them do.”

  “They’re not just kidding themselves?”

  I looked at him. “Some of them are. Naturally.”

  “Leo,” he asked me, after a moment, “can you tell me what it is—an artist? What’s it all about? What does an artist really do?”

  I had never known Caleb to be cruel, and so I couldn’t believe that he was baiting me. I stared at him. “What do you mean, what does an artist do? He—he creates—”

  He stared at me with a little smile, saying nothing.

  “You know,” I said, “paintings, poems, books, plays. Music.”

  “These are all creations,” he said, still with that smile.

  “Well, yes. Not all of them are good.”

  “But those that are good—what do they do? Why are they good, when they’re good?”

  “They make you—feel more alive,” I said. But I did not really trust this answer.

  “That’s what drunkards say about their whiskey,” he said, and he nodded in the direction of my wine.

  “Well. I don’t mean that,” I said.

  He watched me for a long while with his little smile, and he made me very uneasy.

  “Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “Because I want to know. I’m not teasing you. I don’t know anything about it. And you say you want to be an actor. That’s a kind of artist. Isn’t it? Well, I want to know.”

  “I think it—art—can make you less lonely.” I didn’t trust this answer, either.

  “Less lonely.” He smiled. “Little Leo.” Then, “I don’t know anything about it, but I’ve watched some people who claimed to be artists and they all seemed pretty lonely to me. The man I work for has a lot of friends like that. They’re lonely”—he watched me earnestly now—“and they’re half crazy and I’ve seen them do terrible things. Do you really think that people like that, who are really in hell themselves, Leo—do you really think that they can help anybody?”

  “They do.” I said it stoutly, but felt, nevertheless, that my faith was not as strong as Caleb’s. And I realized that Caleb was far from stupid.

  “They do? How do you know they do?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “you read something—or you listen to some music—I don’t know—and you find that this man, who may have been a very unhappy man—and—a man you’ve never seen—well, he tells you something about your life. And it doesn’t seem as awful as it did before.”

  “As awful,” said Caleb, “as it did before.” And he watched me, his face in the candlelight yet more austere and distant than it had been, and, at the same time, somehow—it was as vivid and elusive as a half-heard, half-forgotten bit of music—more than ever the face of my brother. “Has it been as bad as all that, Leo?” But he didn’t wait for me to answer this. “What I thought,” he said, rising and walking up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, “was that a lot of these people didn’t think of anything but self. Maybe they had gifts, but they didn’t think the gift was for others, for the glory of God. They thought it was just for self. And that’s what made them like they were—that they just thought of self. And that offended God, and so they lost the gift.” He looked at me. “We were put on earth to love each other and to praise God, Leo.”

  “All right. But can’t we”—hoping for daylight, hoping for reconciliation—“each praise God in our own way?”

  “Oh, but that’s taken for granted,” he said, with a simple, monumental conviction, “of course we all praise God in our own way. No two people praise God alike. But not to praise Him is a sin.”

  I sipped my wine, feeling beleaguered and lost. Yet—I loved him, this stranger returned from the dead. Something in his face, his voice, something in his attitude as he stood before the fireplace, made him seem, to me, almost helpless, vulnerable, sad, and it made me think of a most melancholy song. I have had my fun, if I don’t get well no more. Really, for a moment, I heard it: he might have been singing it. Don’t send me no doctor, doctor can’t do me no good.

  But he had found his doctor, the Saviour, who was Christ the Lord.

  “Yes, we have to find our way out of the prison of the self,” said Caleb, “we have to release ourselves from all our petty wants, our petty pride, and just see that the will of God is far beyond us—like King David said, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”—and just surrender our will to His will.” He smiled a ruined, radiant smile. “We know He’ll always guide us right. He’ll never let us be lost.” And then his face became both tender and austere, at once old and young. “Until that day, Leo, the soul is a wanderer and it has no hope and can find no peace. I know. I moaned and I moaned, I moaned all night long—you remember that song, Leo?”

  I said, watching him, “I moaned and I moaned until I found the Lord.”

  He smiled. “Yes. My soul could not rest contented. Until I found the Lord.” And he shook his head. “The old folks knew what they were talking about.”

  “The old folks had a lot to bear,” I said.

  “But they bore it,” said Caleb, “they bore it, and they gave us the keys to the kingdom. It comes to you, Leo, it comes to you when you’re all alone in the valley, deep in the valley, and it looks like the deep water is dragging down your soul, something whispers to you, He that overcometh shall receive the crown of life. He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. What a promise that is! And it’s for every man, Leo. For every man.”

  I said nothing. Perhaps I was thinking of what he had had to bear. I watched his face. It was very beautiful. He moved up and down the room.

  “I guess the light comes differently to every man,” he said, in a different tone. He stopped pacing. “Me, I had to almost kill a man. I really wanted to kill a man, Leo. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “You must have killed a lot of men in the war,” I said. I wanted to go to the bar and pour myself a drink, but I didn’t.

  “I don’t mean that. If I killed anybody, I didn’t know it, I didn’t see it.” He stopped. “I suppose I must have. My Lord, you know, men were dying all around you, dying in a second, dying worse than dogs. Lord, Leo, you’d be talking to a man one minute, and when you looked up again, his head would be over yonder and his body God knows where. I remember watching one guy ahead of me one time, running, and a mine caught him and he rose up in the air just as pretty as you please, like he was flying or dancing, and one leg went this way and the other leg went the other way and the rest of him come floating down and he landed on his back. I never saw his face, but I saw lots of other faces. They all looked surprised. They were young. A lot of them were no more than kids. I had hated some of them. But, you know, when you look down on this poor, helpless, stinking mess—death has an odor, Leo, nobody can describe it—well, you know, it all goes out of you. You realize that the poor creature just wanted to live, just like you, and you think about his mother or his wife or his kids or about whoever loved him. And it makes you wonder why you ever bothered to hate anybody. You know, the body just turns into garbage when the gift of life has left it. What a mystery. We have no right to kill. I know that. But I must have killed some people. I was in darkness then, I know my Lord’s forgiven me. I was shooting because I was a soldier, and people were shooting at me. All over this beautiful land where we were fighting, this beautiful land that God had given the people so they could rejoice and be fruitful and multiply, this land He had given them so they could praise His name, there was nothing but bodies and pieces of bodies piled u
p like tinder, nothing but the bombs going off and howling and screaming and moaning and the fear of death and the shadow of death and death all around you, on the right hand, on the left. Leo, the sea was red, it was like something out of the Bible. And it just went on, it just went on, every morning, every day, every night. I just wanted to stay alive. I was surprised every morning and every night that I was still alive. I thought I’d like to go back one day to some of those places where we were, when the war was over, and the people was more themselves, because it was beautiful, Leo, and some of the people were beautiful.” He was silent for a long time. “Our unit got all messed up, and I got sent to Sicily and then we had us a time, baby, all up and down Italy. I’ll never forget it.” He stopped again. He looked a little surprised. “I didn’t want to kill nobody during all that time. But I did want to kill this man.”

  “I’ve wanted to kill, too,” I said. I said it quickly, not in sympathy, but to establish myself as unrepentant; for I felt his presence stifling me.

  “Have you, Leo? Do you still want to? That’s too bad.”

  “Well,” I said, after a moment, “I won’t ever do it. I’ve just felt that way sometimes, and I guess I will again.”

  “I hope you won’t,” he said. “It’s the worst feeling that there is. It’s the most destructive feeling that there is. It fills you with darkness, Leo. It’s the soul turning away from God.”

  How I longed to pour myself a drink! But I did not move. I dreaded hearing any more of his story: dreaded it. I felt myself retreating, moving backward before him. I felt him pursuing me, moving me, inexorably, into a place where I would have to cry out and fall on my knees. I watched him, and said nothing.

  “This was a white man. You know how it is in this man’s army, Leo, they keep the black and the white separated—you know—and, naturally, all my buddies was colored, until I got overseas. I mean, you know, the only white cats we ever talked to was our officers and we didn’t like talking to them. But overseas it was a little different.”

  Now, his face was almost the face that I remembered, surprised, and full of grief.

  “But, like I say, our unit got wiped out, most of my buddies, and, well, you know, the man couldn’t afford to be so particular once we was over there in all this mess together. If you depending on a guy for your life, you don’t really much care what color he is. And we had to depend on each other. We had to.

  “Anyway, by the time we got ourselves out of Cassino, Lord, I was buddies with this white guy from Boston, Hopkins. Frederick Hopkins. He seemed like a nice kid, blond, kind of skinny, real good-natured. He didn’t—he just didn’t—seem like most white guys. That’s what made it so hurtful later. He wasn’t a good soldier, but he wasn’t a bad soldier; but he was quick; something like me. And we’d been buddies all through that slaughter. And he was all right until we got to Rome. I’ll never understand what happened to that kid, when we got to Rome. Well—maybe I do understand it.” And he laughed.

  I didn’t go to the bar, but I lit a cigarette.

  “Did you like Rome?” I asked. I knew it was a foolish question, but I had never seen Rome, I rather envied him for having been there, and I was trying, although I knew I could not succeed, to deflect him.

  “Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I liked Rome. I was in darkness in Rome, but I liked it. I don’t know if I’d like Rome now. I’m not the same now. In Rome, I lived my last days as a sinner.” And now his face was very sad, sad, and, at the same time, proud.

  “Well, you know, we got to Rome. And it is a beautiful city, especially if you’ve never seen it before, and especially after all we’d been through. And the people were very glad to see us, and they were starving. I realized I had never seen starvation until I got to Rome.” He looked at me. “I didn’t know how much I had to praise God for. There wasn’t nothing you couldn’t buy in Rome, you could buy anything or anybody and it wouldn’t cost you no more than cigarettes, stuff like that. And you know soldiers. When you been cooped up with all these men for so many months, cooped up with the smell of all these men, well, then, you want a woman. And I was just like all the others. I wasn’t no better. We hit that town”—he laughed—“like locusts. And, it’s funny, you know, I might have thought at the very back of my mind that I might be kind of shy—because I knew I wasn’t going to meet no colored women in Rome—but I wasn’t shy a bit. Maybe I wasn’t shy because they weren’t shy. They not at all like the women here, Leo. Not a bit. They don’t look at you like women here, like they scared to be in the same street with you. No, they didn’t care, not as long as you had the currency, didn’t nobody care what color you were. And with a lot of them, it wasn’t just the currency. I have to give them that. I got to give them that. A lot of these women, they were really loyal, and it was, you know, it was nice.” He looked very young as he said this. “I had never really seen that before, not between black and white, and I hadn’t seen it too often between those of the same color. If a woman found herself a nice man, be he black, blue or yellow, well, she took care of him and there wasn’t nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Nothing.”

  He sat down at the table again.

  “I forgot,” I said, “to offer you a cup of coffee, Caleb. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “If it’s no trouble. Am I keeping you up?”

  “I told you that sometimes I don’t leave this place until four o’clock in the morning.”

  I went into the kitchen and put a light under the coffee and took out the cups, the sugar and cream; and had to face the fact that I simply did not have the courage, under Caleb’s eyes, to pour myself a drink. This exasperated me, and made me very angry with Caleb. But I was afraid that if I poured myself a drink, I would be doing it only to hurt him.

  He sat very quietly at the table until I came back. I poured the coffee and sat down and lit another cigarette. He watched me with a bright, disapproving smile, but only said, shaking his head, “Little Leo.” Then, “We were in Rome for quite a long while, between you and me I don’t believe that this war was very well managed at all, and by and by I found me a real nice little girl, her name was Pia.”

  Then he stopped—for quite a long while; and his face changed, unreadably; now, it was not merely a private face, but a personal face. He kept his eyes on the table. He sighed once, looked shamefacedly, just like Caleb, up at me, and smiled. He tirred his coffee and blew on it as he picked up the cup. “Ah,” he said, “I have to tell you—I was different in those days. Well, you remember how I was.” He paused again, and sipped his coffee. “And I have to tell you that most of the guys, well, they were still, you know, going from here to yonder. I mean, you know, maybe they had lots of girls, but me, I just had one. She was a pretty girl, she really was, and she was a nice girl. She really was a nice girl.” He blew on his coffee again. “She was a blonde and I didn’t know but that seems to mean something in Italy because there aren’t many, I guess. And she came from a nice family except they’d lost all their money. They expected us to get married. Married! Can you imagine that?” And he looked up at me, with his eyes very big. I said nothing. “And when I look back,” he said, “I guess I wasn’t, you know, very truthful. I wasn’t thinking. I was like a child. I was happy with Pia. I had never been so happy before. I thought maybe I would stay in Italy.”

  Then he was silent again. I felt that he wanted to cry. I sensed tears somewhere in him, dammed up, drying fast. I wished I could have reached out and stroked the place where the tears were hidden; stroked the place and probed it and let the blood-red, salty tears come out. There is a fountain filled with blood. His face would have changed then, and he would have become Caleb again. But he did not want to be Caleb anymore.

  “I was so happy, I didn’t see what was going on around me. Well, the colored guys and the white guys didn’t really get along, not most of us. Frederick and me still hung out together, and he had other colored buddies, mainly because of me, I think, and we had some nice times, but most of the guys, you kn
ow, they just stayed away from each other. Most of the white guys, we tried to stay away from them and they sure stayed away from us.” How careful his voice was now! “Well, we didn’t need them, we weren’t at home. They couldn’t, you know, like in the States, tell you where to sit and when to stand and all that; they couldn’t stop you from going out with a girl if you wanted to; if the girl didn’t care, there wasn’t much they could do. They couldn’t stop you from making friends with the people. If the people wanted to make friends, well, you know, that was it. But they didn’t like it. They gave a whole lot of guys a whole lot of trouble. And they told the people, oh, they told the people ridiculous things, Leo, like we had tails and back home we weren’t allowed on the streets after dark and wouldn’t nobody in the States never sell a black man no liquor because we got savage when we was drunk and started cutting up people just like savages, cannibals, and we was always raping white men’s daughters and wives and mothers and sisters and—and—our—member was so huge that it just tore white people to pieces, you know, ridiculous and childish stuff like that. And a lot of the people believed it, and guys had trouble sometimes, especially with the women, on account of stuff like that. And we was there supposed to be fighting for freedom. Well, it was, you know, it was just ridiculous.

  “But, you see, since I was spending all my time with Pia, I didn’t go to the bars much, and I wasn’t running after women, so what was going on around me didn’t bother me. I just didn’t see it. My free time, I’d go on over to Pia’s house and talk to the folks for awhile. They were really nice old-fashioned people and they seemed to like me, we got on very well. I was really surprised. They treated me like a gentleman. Of course, they was too intelligent to believe any of that stuff the Americans was spreading around. We’d go out and eat dinner, Pia and me, or maybe we’d eat at the house, and we might go dancing someplace. But we wouldn’t go where most of the Americans went. We might go out in the country. We rode out in the country many a night. And sometimes we’d just sit there, under that beautiful Italian sky.”