Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin Page B

I’ll give you a ride—hold on, now.”
    He carried me piggyback up the stairs.
    Thereafter, we evolved a system which did not, in fact, work too badly. When things went wrong and he could not be found, I was to leave a message for him at a certain store on the avenue. This store had a bad reputation—more than candy and hot dogs and soda pop were sold there; Caleb himself had told me this and told me not to hang out there. But he said that he would see to it that they treated me all right. I did not know exactly what this meant then, but I was to find out. I had to wait for him in that store many nights; and for years I was to wish that I had never seen it, never heard of it; and for years I was to avoid the store’s alumni, who also had their reasons for not wishing to face me.
    But this store was not the only place I sometimes waited for, or met, Caleb. I went in the store one Saturday night, and one of the boys who was always there, a boy about Caleb’s age, looked up and smiled and said,“You looking for your brother? Come on, I’ll take you to him.”
    This was not the agreed-on formula. I was to be
taken
to Caleb only in cases of real emergency, which was not the case this night. I was there because the show had turned loose a little earlier than usual; and so Caleb was not really late yet, and since it was only about a quarter past eleven, I figured I had about half an hour to wait. But I also knew that the boss, a very dour, silent, black man—he spoke only to curse—was made very nervous by my presence in the store, especially at the hours I would be there, and he sometimes sat me alone in the back room. Otherwise, I must say, they were, in their elegantly philosophical fashion (I was simply another element to be dealt with) very nice to me. They didn’t say much to me, since they didn’t consider that there could be very much in the way of common ground between us—or, insofar as a common ground existed, it was far safer not to attempt to describe it—but they bought me Hershey bars, sometimes, and malted milks, and soda pop. They themselves drank wine and gin and beer, and, very rarely, whiskey.
    This particular Saturday night, when the boy made his invitation, I assumed it was because of some prearrangement with the boss—who looked at me from behind his counter, munching on a toothpick, and said nothing. There were only a couple of boys in the store, silently playing cards.
    I said, “Okay,” and the boy, whose name was Arthur, said, “Come on, sonny. I’m going to take you to a party.” He grinned down in my face as he said this, and then waved, more or less at random, to the store: “Beseeing you!” We walked out. He took my hand and led me across the avenue and into a long, dark block. We walked the length of the block in silence, crossed another avenue, Arthur holding tightly to my hand, and passed two white cops, who looked at us sharply. Arthur muttered under his breath, “You white cock-suckers. I wish all of you were dead.” We slowed our pace a little; I had the feeling, I don’t know why, that this was because of the cops; then Arthur said, “Come on, sonny,” and we walked into a big house in the middle of the block. We were in a big vestibule with four locked apartment doors staring away from each other. It was not really clean, but it was fairly clean. We climbed three flights of stairs. Arthur knocked on the door, a very funny knock, not loud. After a moment, I heard a scraping sound, then the sound of a chain rattling and a bolt being pulled back. The door opened. A lady, very black and rather fat, wearing a blue dress which was very open around the breasts, held the door for us. She said, “Come on in—now, what you doing here with this child?”
    â€œHad to do it. It’s all right. It’s Caleb’s brother.”
    We started down a long, dark hall, with closed rooms