The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping.... And, during the last set, the saxophone player took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered he could say it with a saxophone. He stood there, wide-legged...filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn, "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" And again---:"Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?"
The same phrase unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated with all the force the kid had.... The question was terrible and real. The boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; and somewhere in the past, in gutters or gang fights ... in the acrid room, behind marijuana or the needles, under the smell in the precinct basement, he had received a blow from which he would never recover, and this no one wanted to believe.
Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning. . . But each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them.
James Baldwin
The same phrase unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated with all the force the kid had.... The question was terrible and real. The boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; and somewhere in the past, in gutters or gang fights ... in the acrid room, behind marijuana or the needles, under the smell in the precinct basement, he had received a blow from which he would never recover, and this no one wanted to believe.
Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning. . . But each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them.
James Baldwin
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