love is being able to look them in the eye
7 lessons from Baldwin's "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"
I am constantly on the lookout to learn how to live my life in love. This past semester, I was able to take an entire class on James Baldwin. We read many of Baldwin’s short stories, essays, and novels. Baldwin’s novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone stood out to me because of its examples of love and of rejecting the shame that shows characters how to act in a patriarchal world, wanting them to adhere to strict gender and race roles.
The novel follows Leo Proudhammer, a famous Black actor, who has a heart attack on stage. As he recovers, the novel shifts back and forth in time, showing how Leo grew up and became who he is today. Right after his heart attack, while his friend Barbara is holding his hand, Leo thinks,
“Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. However great the private disasters to which love may lead, love itself is strikingly and mysteriously impersonal; it is a reality which is not altered by anything one does” (Baldwin 8-9).
What a passage! Baldwin really makes me think. So, in this post you’ll find 7 intersecting lessons I learn about love from Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.
1. Love includes a greediness for life, and a need for touch.
After Leo’s heart attack, he muses that, “to come up from the place where one thought one was dead means that one becomes greedy for life, and life is many things, but it is, above all, the touch of another. The touch of another: no matter how transient, and no matter what price” (Baldwin 316).
Life IS the touch of another. To love life, to be greedy for it, includes human touch in some way.
2. Love is a surrender of power (they cannot truly coexist), and love is taking risks.
Barbara and Leo have been the best of friends since they were young adults, poor and dreaming of a life on stage. They’ve been occasional sexual partners, but really have always been lovers. Living at a time when interracial relationships were dangerous, Barbara, with the power afforded her for being a white woman, has given some of that power up to always be by Leo’s side. At the end of the book she says to him,
“I must tell you,” she said, “it has not been easy for me. It has not been easy at all to have lived all these years the life I’ve lived and to know, no matter who I was with, no matter how much I loved them or hoped to love them and no matter what they offered me, it has not been easy to know that if you whistled, called, sang, belched, picked up the telephone, sent a wire, I’d be there. I’d have no choice, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’ve not been free—not all these years. And with time flying—and time’s worse for a woman that it is for a man. No, it’s not been easy…” (Baldwin 475).
This is not to inappropriately praise Barbara. She and I both know Leo is the one dealing with the foundational anti-blackness of the country. But her love for Leo transcends societal expectations, causing her to make trouble when it comes to strict gender and race roles. This unfolds a surrender of some of the power that comes from being white. The love Barbara has for Leo has been the background of her life, forever alive amidst years together and years apart. Leo knows their love hasn’t made Barbara’s life easy. One night he voices his lament and Barbara replies, “I’m not complaining. You didn’t make the world” (Baldwin 360).
Love is risking the hard things of the world, surrendering any desire for power.
3. Love is authenticity and truth as you share life.
Barbara is a constant in Leo’s life. Leo feels safe enough to come out to her.
“I watched her. “Do you know I’m bisexual?”
“Yes. At least, I supposed it.”
…
“It doesn’t bother you?”
She looked at me. “Why should it bother me, Leo? I’m not in your body. I can’t live your life. I only want to share your life.” (Baldwin 274-275).
Love is the desire to share your life, knowing we cannot control another or live another’s life for them. We can only share in all that life has to offer together.
4. Love is rejecting the shame that teaches you how to act in a patriarchal world, wanting you to adhere to strict gender and race roles.
In my term paper, “Shame as Ultimate Patriarch: Hegemonic Masculinity, The Body, and Gender Trouble in James Baldwin” I write on how Leo consistently breaks out of hegemonic masculinity in romantic relationships:
“He constantly flips the script, showcasing a love “as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility” (hooks 136). After recovering from a heart attack, Leo is asked by a reporter how it feels to know that he means so much to people. He replies, “It makes me feel a tremendous obligation to stay well. It makes me know that I did not make myself—I do not belong to me” (Train 324). It is with a semblance of this love ethic that Leo begins a lifelong romantic and platonic relationship with Barbara.
When Leo and Barbara have sex, Leo realizes it is sacred. He muses, “I was beginning to realize that vows were made with the body as sacred as those made with the tongue. And these vows were at once harder to keep, and harder to break” (Train 361). Through this vow made with their bodies, Leo wishes that he and Barbara “no matter what happened, would always love each other and always be able without any bitterness, to look each other in the eye” (Train 361). This longing is tested when Leo falls in love with someone else, Black Christopher, and Barbara sleeps with Christopher as well. They have a discussion and Barbara explains herself, saying that Christopher had reminded her of Leo when they were younger. She makes a point to try to look Leo in the eye. Leo narrates, “she looked at me, seemed to try to look into me, her eyes were enormous” (Train 473). Leo has lived his life creating gender trouble at every turn, and so has Barbara. Leo, a Black man, is openly bisexual, has an on and off again sexual relationship with Barbara while always staying friends, and Barbara is a white woman. American hegemonic masculinity and the gender roles it prescribes are vehemently rejected in the way Leo lives his life. Leo can then live his life without shame, as he recognizes the power of the erotic. Audre Lorde writes, “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world…[to] do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society (Lorde 59). It is because of this that Barbara and Leo are able to have such love and peace within their relationship. Barbara herself “had done something very hard and rare. As though she had known I would need it, and would always need it, she had arranged her life so that my place in it could never be jeopardized” (Train 438). In their relationship, the body is less an object to be fixated on but rather a means by which they can live in love together and without shame” (Abilla 12-13).
Love works to live life without shame, so you can always look those you love in the eye.
5. Love wants you to be kind to yourself. Love knows who you are.
During his heart attack recovery, as everyone comes together to help Leo, one friend named Pete says, “you give us a hard time, man, when we watch you giving yourself a hard time. That’s all. You can’t hide nothing from us, and you damn sure don’t have anything to prove to us. We know you’re Leo Proudhammer. You don’t know it.” (Baldwin 441).
When we love others, we know who they are. It hurts us when they give themselves a hard time. You have nothing to prove. We are in a web of relationship and we know our choices do in fact affect those that we love. We act accordingly. We act to limit the harm and maximize the care.
(this is with a pretext of love. love does not exist if there is abuse)
6. Love is sure of you. Your name is written all over them.
The character Black Christopher is one of the loves of Leo’s life. I love how Leo describes Christopher meeting him. Christopher is immediately sure and confident in him. What a safe place to rest in, that sureness.
“When Christopher first met me, he decided that he needed me: that was that. He needed human arms to hold him, he could see very well, no matter what I said, that mine were empty, and that was that” (Baldwin 442).
He looked very grave. Then irrepressibly, like a very small child, “You know something I was going to tell you before, but didn’t have the nerve? You got your name written all over me. That’s right. I got my name on you, too.” (Baldwin 450-451).
7. Love is learning to bear the love one is given, knowing you deserve it.
Let’s review the quote at the beginning of this post.
“Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. However great the private disasters to which love may lead, love itself is strikingly and mysteriously impersonal; it is a reality which is not altered by anything one does” (Baldwin 8-9).
Bear the love you are given, believing that it is a natural phenomenon of being human.
Works Cited
Abilla, Kameron. “Shame as Ultimate Patriarch: Hegemonic Masculinity, The Body, and Gender Trouble in James Baldwin”. James Baldwin: Mimic and Mastery. Claremont Graduate University, student paper. 2023.
Baldwin, James. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. Vintage Books. 2013.