A story of love’s many forms, beset by the specter of death
Just Above My Head was published in 1979 and written in Baldwin’s later life, after his permanent emigration to the South of France and transition from literary civil rights leader to prominent gay rights voice. The expansive novel spends its time generously on the intimate, casting only sideways glances at the social and political upheaval amidst which the characters grasp at the meaning of family and love—what we do learn of the Korean War, desegregation in the American South, and the dynamics of power, money, and fame, we learn through the way these things make the characters feel, the personal experiences they go through as a result, and how they shape the characters over the course of the novel’s thirty year time span.
The places where Just Above My Head shines most wholeheartedly are the intensely personal moments.
Hall Montana recounts, as the novel’s narrator, the events of the lives of himself, his brother, and a cast of their friends and family. From the time they are children in Harlem to Hall’s own middle age, the characters are learning what love means to them in the world they find themselves in. The places where the book shines most wholeheartedly are the intensely personal moments, when society falls away and two characters find themselves discovering something about their relationship to each other—most often how the love between them has blossomed, retracted, or transformed. Think hushed tones in a dark Harlem night club, exuberant reunions on New York City streets, whispers of passion between the sheets.
The story begins in the present, at a family gathering where Hall’s son, in a quiet moment alone with his father, questions him about his uncle. While Hall reveals here and elsewhere that Arthur is dead, his cause of death is withheld, giving Hall’s recounting a target to aim and the story a sense of urgency. The book plods through their lives toward Arthur’s death, the specter of it raised from time to time when Hall reminds us that he’s recounting the story from a place in time where Arthur has already passed. Baldwin moves with an ungraceful pace through the places and people the characters encounter, but the prose meditates in the intimate moments between the friends and family along the way. The writing iis careful and beautiful and compassionate in these intimate passages, which are plentiful, but can be trying and inconsistent in the spaces in between.
Baldwin labors in these moments, draws out the tension and release of emotionally charged moments with compassion for his characters
In his fiction, Baldwin is at his best in these moments, and he knows it. He labors in them, draws out the tension and release of emotionally charged moments with compassion for his characters. In an early scene in which a friend of Arthur’s, one he’s begun a relationship with, reveals that he’s slept with someone else, Baldwin doesn’t shy away from letting us sit with the emotions of the scene. He brings the tension that’s built up for the reader by their foreknowledge of the events and prescient knowledge of what’s about to happen to bear with spare descriptions of the room, the city outside the window, the blocking of the characters, to make room for the careful attention he pays to the words they say to each other, the way they touch each other, and their own inner thoughts. While the benign passages in between these moments can suffer for it, along with the critical analysis of his work as lacking political and sociological teeth, the special moments between lovers, friends, and family and Baldwin’s masterful grasping of what makes them precious, is what we read Baldwin for. And Just Above My Head doesn’t lack for these moments.
