288
JAMES BALDWIN
the darkness near
him,
made the silence ominous. He felt
threatened. He felt totally estranged from the city in which he
had been born; this city for which he sometimes felt a kind
of stony affection because it was
all
he knew of home. Yet he
had no home here-the hovel on Bank Street was not a home.
He had always supposed that he would, one day, make a home
here for himself. Now he began to wonder if anyone could
ever put down roots in this rock; or, rather, he began to be
aware of the shapes acquired by those who had. He began to
wonder about his own shape.
He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a
condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were
not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely; and unable
to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no
equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified
so many million times, made the night air colder. He remember–
ed to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his lone–
liness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent
emptiness might drive an entire city.
At the same time, as he came closed to Rufus's house, he
was trying very hard not to think about Rufus.
He was in a section of warehouses; very few people lived
down here. By day, trucks choked the streets, laborers stood
on these ghostly platforms, moving great weights, and cursing.
As
he had once, for a long time, he had been one of them. He
had been proud of his skill and his muscles and happy to be
accepted as a man among men. Only it was they who saw some–
thing in him, which they could not accept, which made them
uneasy. Every once in a while a man, lighting his cigarette,
would look at him quizzically, with a little smile. The smile
masked an unwilling, defensive hostility. They said he was a
"bright kid," that he would "go places"; and they made it
clear that they expected
him
to "go," to which places did not
matter-he did not belong to them.
But .at the bottom of his mind the question of Rufus nag-
