Letter to Jimmy Read Online Free Page B

you carried him on your back countless times in his childhood. Why should he not take his turn in carrying you? 127
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    This sudden affection feeds your distress; distress at leaving behind a shroud of sadness, at not finishing your last sentence. The anguish of telling yourself that you will join the other world, and will have to talk with David Baldwin, your father. You will have to tell him how he was wrong to believe for so long that he was nothing but black trash, and wrong for not knowing that he was beautiful. Hassel, who is very superstitious,admits privately to having seen your shadow on the wall. And so the fatal moment has arrived. Hassel is convinced of it. However, he clings to the idea that he has always seen you cheat death, has always heard you insist that you would leave the earth in a spectacular way, not weakened by illness. Hassel is not unaware that you see Death, and that you are now talking with her. No, you do not want to negotiate your departure date from the world. You have accepted the idea of your death.
    Hassel has many reasons to believe that you will survive the 1st of December 1987. But there is the shadow on the wall that grips him. Can one survive an omen? It is possible. After all, he thinks to himself, you are an exceptional being. Had you not survived two heart attacks? These warnings did not prevent you from attending to your business, honoring your engagements around the world, even though you had to reduce your consumption of tobacco and alcohol.
    You have to live your life. For these reasons, while you are attending a performance of your play The Amen Corner at London’s Tricycle Theater in February 1987, no one could have imagined that you had already reserved a hospital room in Nice for cancer surgery.
    This time the doctors can do nothing more. The situation is desperate. Your entourage conceals from you their despair and the seriousness of your condition. Butyou are not so easily fooled. Your doctors assure you that you will make it through the end-of-year holidays without danger.
    You begin to organize, therefore, a big event in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
    In these final hours when the world must seem very still, a woman appears before you, her face hidden by a dark veil. Your curiosity pushes you to remove the veil: it’s her, your mother. Now she wipes her thick glasses, foggy from tears. Yes, Emma Berdis Jones is somewhere in this room, despite the thousands of miles that separate you. You call her often, and, from Harlem, she listens to you with the despair of a mother who has always known that her child was fragile, and yet predestined to carry the world on his shoulders.
    Your conversations remain unchanging. She offers you advice as she did long ago, when you were a child in Harlem: take care of yourself, don’t stay up too late, above all don’t smoke too much, drink even less, don’t give in to the taunts of those who attack you now that you are a public figure, or because your sexual orientation differs from theirs. For her, despite your international influence, you remain little Jimmy, who followed her around the house . . .
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    At present your world is reduced to the four walls of your bedroom. The biographer James Campbell paints a striking picture of this room that holds the secret of your final hours: a room submerged in soothing darkness, but whose wall paintings create an atmosphere of hallucination. 128 In this confinement, as Campbell points out, there is the feeling that Simone Signoret and your other friends dead long ago have come to bring you news of the other world.
    You still have the strength to give an interview in November 1987 to the writer and professor Quincy Troupe who will publish, two years after your death, a collection of essays dedicated to your memory. 129 In the mix are the voices of Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, William Styron, Chinua Achebe