He could not endure being very far from me for very long. I was the only person on God’s cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a knife.
I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.
To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.
For the first time in her life she hated it all. The white city. The white world. She could not that day think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there and she hoped that one day God with tortures inconceivable would grind them utterly into humility and make them know that black boys and black girls whom they treated with such condescension, such distain and such good humor had hearts like human beings too, More human hearts than theirs.
As the years passed, she replied only: “I’m going away from here.” And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.
White America remains unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.
I ain’t ashamed of it – I’m ashamed of you – you done made me feel a shame I ain’t never felt before. I shamed before my God – to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.
The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.
He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.
He stared in a dull paralysis of terror at the body of Elisha. He saw him standing – had Elisha forgotten? – beside Ella Mae before the altar while Father James rebuked him for the evil that lived in the flesh. He looked into Elisha’s face, full of questions he would never ask. And Elisha’s face told him nothing.
I don’t know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort.
Whenever we ate breakfast, and wherever we walked, when we got home we were always too tired to sleep right away. We made coffee and sometimes drank cognac with it; we sat on the bed and talked and smoked.
I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I did not really stay there very long – we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer – but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there.
She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety – as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.
I missed the way the dark face closes, the way the dark eyes watch, the way the dark face opens and lights up the room.
Ca ne manque, les chambres. The work is full of rooms – big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down – all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have? And since when, since when’ – he stopped and beat with his forefinger on my chest – ’have you so hated the room? Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-moi.
The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If he had had a gas oven.
I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.
Whether he is with others or not he is certainly alone.
Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper – or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.