Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin Read Free Book Online
Authors: James Baldwin
Tags: General Fiction
early,” he said, “by the time I get back home.” The train came into the station. “Here’s where we change,” he said.
    We got out of the train and crossed the platform and waited.
    â€œNow,” he said, “this train stops exactly where you going. Tell me where you going.”
    I stared at him.
    â€œI want you,” he said, “to tell me exactly where you
going.
I can’t be fooling with you all night.”
    I told him.
    â€œYou sure that’s right?”
    I told him I was sure.
    â€œI got a very good memory,” he said. “Give me your address. Just say it, I’ll remember it.”
    So I said it, staring into his face as the train came roaring in.
    â€œIf you don’t go straight home,” he said, “I’m going to come and see your daddy and when we find you, you’ll be mighty sorry.” He pushed me into the train and put one shoulder against the door. “Go on, now,” he said, loud enough for all the car to hear, “your mama’ll meet you at the station where I told you to get off.” He repeated my subway stop, pushed the angry door with his shoulder, and then said gently, “Sit down, Leo.” And heremained in the door until I sat down. “So long, Leo,” he said, then, and stepped backward, out. The doors closed. He grinned at me and waved and the train began to move. I waved back. Then he was gone, the station was gone, and I was on my way back home.
    I never saw that man again but I made up stories in my head about him, I dreamed about him, I even wrote a letter to him and his wife and his little boy, but I never mailed it. I had a feeling that he would not like my father and that my father would not like him. And since Caleb never liked anyone
I
liked, I never mentioned him to Caleb.
    But I never told Caleb anything about my solitary expeditions. I don’t know why. I think that he might have liked to know about them; or perhaps I am only reacting to his own, later, guilty feeling that he
should
have known about them; but, I suppose, finally, at bottom, I said nothing because my expeditions belonged to me. It scarcely seems possible that I could have been as silent and solitary and dangerously self-contained as the melancholy evidence indicates me to have been. For certainly I cried and howled and stormed. Certainly I must have chattered, as children do. Such playmates as I had, in spite of my size and strangeness, my helpless ambiguity, I eventually dominated—without quite knowing how this had come about; I was able to do it, that was all, and, therefore, condemned to do it. I know that, as I grew older, I became tyrannical. I had no choice, my life was in the balance. Whoever went under, it was not going to be me—and I seem to have been very clear about this from the very beginning of my life. To run meant to turn my back—on lions; to run meant the flying tackle which would bring me down; and, anyway, run where? Certainlynot to my father and mother, certainly not to Caleb. Therefore, I had to stand. To stand meant that I had to be insane. People who imagine themselves to be, as they put it, in their “right” minds, have no desire to tangle with the insane. They stay far from them, or they ingratiate them. It took me almost no time to realize this. I used what I knew. I knew that what was sport for others was life or death for me. Therefore, I had to make it a matter of life or death for them. Not many are prepared to go so far, at least not without the sanction of a uniform. But this absolutely single-minded and terrified ruthlessness was masked by my obvious vulnerability, my paradoxical and very real helplessness, and it covered my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be

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