A character in Just Above My Head

Jimmy Miller

Julia's younger brother, a neighbour of the Montanas, and later Arthur's partner for the rest of his life.

What they want in Hall Montana's account

Arthur, which he says outright at the first opportunity and keeps saying.

The book

Cover of Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

Just Above My HeadJames Baldwin, 1979

A gospel singer is dead in a London basement, and his brother spends six hundred pages telling you who he was.

View the book

At a glance

In the book: Pianist; Arthur Montana's accompanist and partner
Family: Joel and Amy Miller; older sister Julia
Age: About seven when he first appears; four years younger than Arthur
Together: Fourteen years — Jimmy thirty-five, Arthur thirty-nine, at the end
Where they worked: A loft on Dey Street, and a flat on 18th Street
His name for Ruth: Mother Mattie

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Jimmy Miller is an invented character in James Baldwin's Just Above My Head. He is Julia Miller's younger brother, about four years younger than Arthur Montana, and he is about seven the first time the novel puts him in a room with the Montanas. He becomes Arthur's pianist and his partner for the last fourteen years of Arthur's life.

The Miller household organised itself around Julia's calling, and Jimmy was left out of it. In the early chapters he is the sullen child pressing his shoulder against a wall as though hoping to make a hole in it, glancing murderously at his mother, unable to look at his sister. He is sent to his grandmother in New Orleans after his mother dies.

He and Arthur meet again as adults at a Civil Rights benefit in a Florida church, where Jimmy has been working for two years. Jimmy says what he wants, in front of Arthur's brother, and does not stop saying it. Arthur, four years older and worried about the difference, spends the first drink running the other way.

The last long stretch of the novel is Jimmy's own, spoken to Hall Montana in Hall's living room after Arthur's death. It is the closest thing the book has to a summing-up.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

The child in the front rowAt the quartet's Christmas debut he sits on the other side of the aisle from everyone else, shoulder against the wall as though trying to make a hole in it, his face a marvel of sullen resignation. It brightens when Arthur comes in, and by the time Arthur notices him he is pressed against the wall again.
How Arthur first came to matter to himHis mother slapped him at the Montanas' apartment and Hall held him on the stairs while he cried. Arthur, who had been snubbing him all day, took him out for an ice cream soda, made him laugh, and had the grace not to look as though he were making amends.
He looks like his sisterHall recognises it years later: the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same impudent lips. What he had registered before that was the taciturn face and the distant eyes.
In the SouthArthur and Hall find him sitting on a kitchen table in a Florida church house, chewing a bacon sandwich, in a torn green sweater, blue jeans and sneakers, and very thin. He has been working in the South for about two years. Hall does not recognise him; Arthur does.
The night he dressed for ArthurA dark grey suit, a beige shirt, a scarlet tie and gleaming brown pumps, with his scalp still stinging from the scouring and greasing of his hair and his fingernails nearly blinding. Hall, who had never seen him dressed, realises that none of it was for him or for Julia.
He does not hide itArthur is made uncomfortable by Hall's presence in the room. Jimmy is not disturbed by it at all. Hall's judgement is that Jimmy did not care who knew what, trusted his sister more than Arthur trusted his brother, and was perfectly capable of spilling every bean in sight.
The accompanistHe plays piano for Arthur from then on, working around the clock with him at a Dey Street loft. Hall says Arthur never had another accompanist like Jimmy and Jimmy never had another singer like Arthur, and that Jimmy's presence is largely why Arthur became a star.
In the Montana houseHe arrives in canvas boots that have replaced the sneakers, wearing Arthur's duffel coat, blue jeans and a sweater, kisses Ruth — whom he calls Mother Mattie — throws his arms around Hall, complains about the cold and heads straight for the kitchen to cook for everybody.
What he says to HallThat when people talked about the two of them he did not care, and was hurt only because Arthur was hurt. That other people's word for him is freak, and that he did not feel like one in Arthur's arms. That he was in love with Hall's brother, and that every inch of Arthur was sacred to him.
AfterwardsHe was present through the last months, when almost nobody else was. At the funeral Hall describes him as grey, bone-dry and thinned by an acid eating from within. Then he went upstairs in the house where he and Arthur had sometimes lived, and disappeared for a while — a pilgrimage, he calls it later, through Istanbul, London, Berlin, Geneva, Venice and Paris.

Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

He was not there when Arthur died, and the reason is his own doing.

Back to Just Above My Head