Red
The fourth of the quartet. He ends up addicted.
In the present-day chapters, a reason to live: he tells Julia he is keeping on because he is afraid to die.
The book
At a glance
- Singer in The Trumpets of Zion; Peanut's closest friend
- Seventeen or eighteen when Arthur is fifteen or sixteen
- Crunch and Peanut, both distant cousins
- Korea
- His wife Lorna and their two sons, who have left him
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRed is an invented character in James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, the fourth member of the gospel quartet The Trumpets of Zion. He is one of the three older boys, seventeen or eighteen when Arthur Montana is fifteen or sixteen, and he sings the moaning line under the others.
He is Crunch's best friend and distant cousin, and Peanut's too, and the book puts more weight on those two friendships than on anything he does himself. Peanut's account of growing up with him is one of the longest speeches in the novel: Red taught him to swim, made him a sparring partner, sent him out to steal records, and planned that the two of them would buy a ranch out West and send for their grandmothers and mothers.
He is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, then conscripted, then sent to Korea, where he becomes addicted. He reappears twice after that, once in the 1950s and once in the present-day chapters.
How the book draws them
- BuildHall's description is that Red was built close to the ground — square. In the quartet's line-up he stands on Arthur's right with Crunch on the left, both slightly behind him.
- What he sangThe moan. On the quartet's closing number in a small Tennessee town, Crunch takes the lead, Arthur backs him, Peanut plays and Red moans the line underneath: oh, my Lord, what shall I do.
- What he was to PeanutHis heart, in the same word Crunch uses for him. They were distant cousins and grew up together in the city. Peanut's grandmother let him stay at Red's house, and Red's mother came to treat Peanut as her own son.
- The plansIn Peanut's account of their boyhood, Red was going to be a boxer, then a tap dancer, then a rancher out West with horses, once they were old enough and rich enough to send for their grandmother and mother so neither would have to work again.
- The hatTwenty years later Julia recognises him on a Manhattan street corner by a stingy-brim hat she is convinced is the same one, and by his voice saying Sister Julia, so low he might have been saying it to himself.
- How it showedHe came back from Korea skinny, but so did everybody, and a little strange, but so did everybody else. He said he was looking for work without looking like a man looking for work, came in at five or six in the morning and slept until evening. Peanut worked it out only when Red's mother asked whether he thought her son might have a habit.
- Where the book leaves himJust out of jail after an armed robbery that was not his first, on a methadone programme, and working with children in the streets. His wife Lorna has gone and taken their two boys, and he says he knows she was right. Julia reports his own verdict on the programme: it is a bullshit trip, and he is trying anyway.