James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

4. The Singer’s Legacy: Just Above My Head

The Singer's Legacy: Just Above My Head Every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise and more and more reverberating. -"An Interview with James Baldwin," David C. Estes, 1986 Just Above My Head (JAMH), published in 1979, five years after If Beale Street Could Talk, is Baldwin's last novel. It is also his longest and most ambitious work, 597 pages in the Dial Press edition.JAMH spans a time period of about thirty years, from the mid-forties to the mid-to-Iate seventies , and follows the lives of four main characters and three generations of the Montana family. The central foci are the life of Arthur Montana, who begins his career as a gospel singer, then gains worldwide fame as the Soul Emperor, and the life of his brother, Hall, who tells the story two years after Arthur's death. The other main characters, Julia and Jimmy Miller (family friends and later lovers of Hall and Arthur, respectively), figure prominently in the events and help Hall tell the story. The complexity of the novel is not simply a matter of the number of characters and stories or the time and space it traverses (locations include Harlem, various points in the American South, San Francisco, Paris, London, and Abidjan), but also its range of thematic and artistic concerns. 120 WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY Just Above My Head continues to explore the relationship between the black artist and the family and the artist's role in the struggle to resist oppression. In Just Above My Head, however, Baldwin revises the "price of success" theme as developed in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. While Train explores the effects of "success" on an individual black actor, who has made it on "the great white way," JAMH explores the effects of success on a black vocal artist whose medium is a specifically black cultural form. Thus, the meditation on success in JAMH takes on implications beyond the life of the individual artist. Arthur Montana rises to international fame singing and signifying on the musical inheritance of his ancestors; yet somewhere along the way he loses the intimate sustaining relationship with his audience and thus loses his "song" and, ultimately, his life. Among other things, Arthur's career demonstrates the way the commercial success of black music alters the dynamic relationship between performer and community, which is at the heart of the gospel impulse. In addition, Just Above My Head continues Baldwin's project of passing on the resources of a resistant and enduring black culture to the next generation. As Hall says about his brother's life: "I am their only key to their uncle, the vessel which contains, for them, his legacy. Only I can read this document for them."1 JAMH combines a celebration of black cultural forms with a cautionary tale, making the novel a more nuanced treatment of the individual's relationship to his or her cultural legacy than Baldwin developed in Beale Street. As Baldwin said in an interview, Arthur's legacy is "an enormous question. The question is: What is history, what has it made of us, and where is a witness to this journey?"2 By reintroducing the figure of the homosexual black artist as the medium through which the legacy is transmitted, Baldwin complicates the cultural project he formulated in Beale Street and reflects on his own challenge as a black artist, identified as homosexual, attempting to write himself into the American and African American literary traditions. Just Above My Head is an extraordinarily self-reflective and self-reflexive novel, which not only revisits Baldwin's earlier fiction and nonfiction, but also represents Baldwin's effort to shape his own personal legacy as well as to challenge historical legacies. The Singer's Legacy 121 As with all of James Baldwin's work from the mid-sixties onward, Just Above My Head received mixed reviews. A few were notably enthusiastic. Edmund White judged JAMH as "the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers."3 Others, however, described the novel pejoratively as "swollen," as "curiously static," even "stillborn," and its language as "pretentious " or "polemical."4 Although a number of reviews portrayed the novel as...