Caleb Proudhammer
Leo's older brother, worshipped in childhood. Imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, then a soldier, and now a preacher who disapproves of nearly everything about Leo.
To be safe, and to be at peace. After the prison farm and the war he takes the church and says so without embarrassment: what a man has to do, he tells Leo, is find his way out of the prison of the self and give up his petty wants and his petty pride.
The book
At a glance
- Leo's older brother; the person he loved first
- Seventeen when Leo is ten; a little past twenty-one when he comes home; twenty-six when Leo is nineteen
- An East Harlem tenement, top floor
- A high school downtown, outside the neighbourhood, with a part-time job after it
- A boy called Arthur, of a store robbery and a stabbing
- On a prison farm in the Deep South, working in the fields
- Wounded in the lung in the European theatre; a long spell in a military hospital
- In hospital, by letter home, before Leo saw him again
- The New Dispensation House of God, Harlem, where he becomes assistant pastor
- Louise. Leo was best man
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeCaleb Proudhammer is the older brother of Leo Proudhammer, who narrates James Baldwin's fourth novel. Both are invented. Caleb is seven years the elder, and the first thing the book tells us about him is that he was taken away and sent to prison while Leo watched from a fire escape.
In the Harlem chapters he is the best thing in Leo's life. He is big, dark and, by his younger brother's account, beautiful, better-looking than Leo and aware of it. He laughs with his whole body, leaning into whoever is next to him and then careening off across the room. He goes to a high school outside the neighbourhood, works part-time after school, and holds court on the stoop with friends Leo is frightened of. He also takes Leo to the movies, covers for him, and is the only person in the book Leo trusts completely as a child.
The arrest is a mistake and the novel says so. A boy called Arthur tells the police that Caleb was with the group who robbed a store and stabbed a man. Officers come to the tenement with guns drawn and Caleb tells them they do not need them, because he has never shot anybody. He is sent to a prison farm in the Deep South and put to work in the fields.
He comes home a little past twenty-one, when Leo is a little past fourteen, and he is not the same. He drinks with their father until both of them are weeping. He has nightmares that leave him shaking and shouting. He tells Leo, once, what the punishment cellar was like and what a guard named Martin Howell did there. On his first night back the two brothers have sex, and Leo narrates it plainly, as the thing that happened between a boy who had been beaten past bearing and the one person he still trusted.
Then Caleb leaves. He packs a bag, writes Leo a letter saying this is the best way and that when he is older he will see it, and goes into the army. He is shot through the lung in the European theatre, very nearly dies, and spends a long time in a military hospital, from which he writes home to say he has found the Lord. By the time Leo sees him again he has joined The New Dispensation House of God, a former Harlem theatre. He becomes its assistant pastor, marries a woman named Louise, and has children.
The brother Leo knew does not come back with him. Leo's reading is that other people now meet a closed, proud, distant man, and that the raging, laughing, weeping Caleb was put to death somewhere along the way. Caleb himself says he is at peace, and Leo believes him, and cannot forgive it.
How the book draws them
- Seven years olderCaleb is seventeen in the year Leo is ten, and the novel gives that year more room than any other. It holds the Saturday at the movie house in the rain, the police stopping the two of them against a wall on the way home, and the arrest that takes Caleb out of the family.
- How he lookedBig and black, and better-looking than Leo, who calls him beautiful. When he laughed he looked completely helpless with it, touching his shoulder against yours or putting his head on your chest and then rebounding halfway across the room. Leo says he will always hear the laugh.
- Father and sonOn good Saturdays he and their father fought over which of them should carry the watermelon home, the old man claiming his son would ruin himself and the family name. The two of them raced to the tenement steps, and their father usually won because Caleb was carrying the melon. Both big, both black, both laughing.
- The police in the streetWalking Leo home at eleven at night, the brothers are pushed against a wall by officers who have got out of a car. Caleb keeps his voice level, explains that he has just put his girl on the subway and that his brother is ten years old, and holds himself in until the men let them go. Then he thanks them, at length and sarcastically, in an island accent Leo has never heard him use before.
- Named by ArthurA store is robbed and a man stabbed. A boy called Arthur tells the police Caleb was there. Men come to the door asking for Caleb Proudhammer and he answers that he is Caleb Proudhammer and that they do not need the guns, because he has never shot anyone in his life.
- The prison farmThe Deep South, working the fields. There was a cellar they put you in when the guards were displeased, a jail inside the jail, and a guard called Martin Howell who carried a whip and had it in for him. Years later he is still dreaming about the smell of it.
- What Howell tried to doHe tells Leo it was not the beatings that stayed with him. Howell made him feel the way his grandmother would have felt thrown down in a field by a man who rode up and decided to. He says he is a man, that a man can do what he wants but nobody makes him do it, and that he was not about to be raped. He also knew what it meant that he had refused.
- The nightmaresThe first weeks home he dreams so badly he shakes and moans aloud. When Leo shakes him awake he fights back with his eyes open, still asleep, and he is very strong. When he comes to and sees his brother crying he tries to wipe the tears away and asks Leo to hit him back.
- The New Dispensation House of GodA great stone building in Harlem that used to be a theatre, lively on a Monday night. Caleb is at the front with the tambourine, a plain girl at the piano and somebody on the drum. He looks, Leo says, exactly as he always did, big and black, with a light in his face that Leo envies and cannot stand.
- What he thinks of his brother's lifeHe goes at their father about his soul and never gets anywhere. He files Barbara away as a woman beyond saving on the grounds that she is white and a woman and Leo's. When the two of them meet in a restaurant and later in a nightclub, he is glad to see Leo and quite unable to approve of him, and both facts are visible at the same time.
Nothing about the brothers resolves.