Summary
Book One, Chapter 1
Rufus is in Times Square, hungry and filthy and wondering where to go. He considers going to Vivaldo, his only friend left in the city, but decides to go to a jazz club instead. As he walks he feels the weight of the cruel city. He comes to the loud club and stands before it. He has been out here on the streets, or in hiding really, for about a month. He wonders if someone will notice him. He used to be one of those inside playing music, getting the women he wanted, seeing family, eating and drinking. Now, though, he has nothing. He thinks of Leona, which also makes him think of his family and Harlem, the place where he first felt “the beat.”
Seven months ago, Rufus was playing music in a place like this. It was a good night, and the saxophone player was doing a terrific solo. After it was over, he noticed a blonde girl whom he could tell was a “southern poor white” (9). They struck up a conversation and he started thinking about spending the night with her. They took a cab to a party. Rufus asked her why she was at the club tonight and she shrugged that she wanted to see Harlem and she heard the music and went in and stayed. He learned it was her first time in New York, and told her he was born here. She explains she came up because she was tired of her terrible husband, who left her, and they took away her kid.
At the party he called his closest friend, Vivaldo, who decided not to join them. They planned to see each other the next day.
The host greeted them. He was a handsome, ruthless, older man. Rufus liked him but was a little afraid of him as well. The crowd was thinning and Rufus knew the party would start to shift itself to something quieter and more intimate.
Rufus and Leona looked at the lights of the Jersey Shore across the way from the apartment. Rufus grew up next to the Harlem River and he and the other children used to wade or dive into the water. He remembered a boy who died there by drowning.
He and Leona got to know each other more, but he wondered privately if he ought not to just leave her alone. They got high and had sex, and he was rough with her but she did not resist. He was confused, wanting to know her more and to not know any more. She told him not to hurt her and told him about her husband who told her she was a bad mother because she drank too much.
Leona spent the night and was there when Vivaldo came over the next morning. He was a little uncomfortable when he saw Leona there. She went into the kitchen while Rufus and Vivaldo talked. Vivaldo explained he was having trouble with Jane, the older woman he was seeing whom Rufus despised. Rufus was annoyed with Vivaldo when he saw him talk to Leona, wondering if he was contemptuous of her and thus of Rufus, or if he was trying to flirt with her.
The three left the apartment, and “encountered the big world when they went out into the Sunday streets” (27). Rufus realized he had not thought “at all about his world and its power to hate and destroy” (27). He thought of how his family, especially his sister Ida, would hate Leona.
In the park, they sat down and watched the people. Vivaldo and Rufus knew many of them well, but it seemed like a past life. When Vivaldo left them, Rufus could feel the gaze of people growing more hostile because of the couple’s Blackness and whiteness. Leona was oblivious, and he tried to think that maybe no one actually cared.
Rufus remembers a night from last winter when he was out with Vivaldo and Jane. Rufus was tired and began to tease Jane, which contained some truth as all teasing does. She was annoyed and eventually implied that Rufus smelled bad because he was Black. He threatened her and she raised her voice and people looked at them, so Vivaldo and Rufus decided to leave. She was contrite then, but they had attracted attention and a large Irishman confronted them, spit on Rufus, and then hit him. The bar devolved into fighting and Vivaldo was hurt. Rufus helped him up and out of the bar and said they needed to go to the hospital. Rufus also saw a doctor and stayed in bed for a week, and the two never talked about this night.
Vivaldo returned to them at the park, also waving at Cass, whom he noticed across the way. Rufus could never quite place Cass, though she always said she comes from plain American New England stock. She was married to Richard and had two sons; Richard had been Vivaldo’s English instructor in high school.
Cass’s smile was chilling and warm, “warm because it was affectionate; it chilled Rufus because it was amused” (36). They all talked amiably, and Cass said Richard was almost done with his novel. Vivaldo was working on one as well. Cass asked how Rufus is and said he ought to come by again sometime. She was kind to Leona, and asked how she likes the city.
Vivaldo said he will walk Cass home and Rufus promised to come by soon. Leona complimented Rufus on his friends and said they clearly think highly of him.
Now Rufus is walking alone, unsure of what to do next. He considers going to Harlem but is worried about the police he might encounter in the city, as well as what he will say to his parents and sister.
A large, well-dressed white man comes out of the bar and espies Rufus. He tries to solicit Rufus but Rufus says he is not the boy he wants, and begs off. This was what he had said to Eric years back, and now he thinks of Eric for the first time in years, wondering if he is also out on the streets. Eric wanted him and Rufus said he was not the boy for him since he did not sleep with men, but eventually told Eric he’d try anything once and slept with him. And, Rufus thinks, he was just as cruel to him as he was to Leona.
Rufus arrives at Vivaldo’s place, and Vivaldo is shocked to see him. He chastises him for going missing and says how worried they all are. Rufus is numbly surprised, especially when Vivaldo says even the police are looking for him. He mumbles that he knows what he did to Leona. He sits and listens to the blues and stares into space. Vivaldo suggests a change of scenery, such as the Coast. Rufus waves this idea away, and becomes irritable. He asks Vivaldo if he blames him for what happened to Leona and Vivaldo replies that he might have acted like a bastard but he will still be his friend. Rufus sighs that he loved Leona, and Vivaldo says he knows.
Vivaldo suggests Rufus stay with him that night and Rufus shrugs that he does not want to bother him. Vivaldo says he has Ida’s phone number but Rufus replies that he will go there in the morning.
Leona and Rufus had fought all the time. He beat her and forced her to have sex with him and picked fights with white men in bars. He does not know what led his body to do such things. Rufus stopped working and they had no money; Leona’s restaurant job barely supported them but soon she lost it. They drank copiously and fought, and when Vivaldo came over one time she cried to him that she did not know why Rufus beat her so much. Rufus threatened Vivaldo, but he talked to Leona and tried to figure out what was going on. She cried and said she knew Rufus was sick and was just looking for reasons to hurt her. He was twisted up inside, but she still loved him. Vivaldo loved him too; they were both white and they realized how much they loved Rufus.
At this time, Vivaldo is lonely and prone to nightmares and feelings of emptiness. He cannot understand Rufus and why he wants to beat up everyone in sight. He remembers a time years back when he took home a Black girl from a bar who turned out to have a white pimp who threatened him.
When Vivaldo had confronted Rufus about Leona, Rufus finally broke down and said this all had to stop and he barely knew what he was doing anymore. Vivaldo comforted him and said he would stay there with him for a bit, but Rufus paced restlessly and proclaimed he hated all the “white sons of bitches out there” (67) who were trying to kill him. He wished the bomb would drop on the city and kill them all. Rufus carried on his anguished string of self-flagellation and angry outbursts, and even though he said he knew Vivaldo was his only friend in the world, Vivaldo wondered if he hated him.
Now they sit together and eat pizza, and Rufus tells Vivaldo what happened. Leona was found one night looking for her baby, was taken to Bellevue and could not get out, and then her brother came and took her back to the South. Vivaldo listens but is tired, tired of the story and other people and their troubles; he wants to get back to the fictional troubles in his novel.
They decide to go to Benno’s for a nightcap. It is dark and crowded with many mixed-race couples. It feels like a place from a dream. Someone recognizes Rufus from his time playing there. They see Cass, elegantly dressed with a drink and cigarette. She explains they are celebrating because Richard sold his novel, and brings the men over to where Richard sits. Richard greets them but his behavior toward Rufus is cold. They talk about Richard’s book and Vivaldo says he would love to read it. The couple asks why Vivaldo does not come over as much and he admits he has had a hard time with Jane and working and drinking too much. Rufus thinks of how people in the audience used to look at him the way Vivaldo looks at Richard.
Vivaldo flirts with a pretty girl. Rufus feels “black, filthy, foolish” and “wished he were miles away, or dead” (78). He hates the look of sympathy on Cass's face. She asks about Leona and he tells her what happened. He says he met the brother, who spit on him and said he would have killed him if they were in the South, but that he felt dead already. Cass says not to blame himself for too long, for everyone commits crimes and the point is not to lie about them but to understand why they were done so you can forgive yourself. Rufus agrees.
When Cass asks if he will go see his family, he says yes. She gives him a bit of money. Jane shows up as Cass and Richard are preparing to leave. She looks better, and says she is still painting and has cut down on her drinking. Jane says she will buy Vivaldo and Rufus drinks since she sold a painting. Rufus says he is going to the bathroom, and for them to order him a Scotch and water.
In the bathroom, he reads the obscene text on the walls and decides to leave. He has $5 from Cass and decides to get a room at the Y. He heads out along West 4th Street. He sees people leaving bars, and it is cold and he feels separate from humanity. He thinks of Eric as he passes a place he once lived. He considers taking the subway but his head fills with visions of water rushing into the train and tunnel and the people turning on each other.
He takes the train nonetheless, going uptown and watching the white and Black people get on and become trapped together in space and history. He is supposed to get off at 125th street but as he sits watching a girl who looks like his sister, he realizes he is never going home again. The train is lighter and emptier as it heads further uptown, and the white people look at him as if he should have gotten off earlier.
He gets off the train at the George Washington Bridge and walks up onto it. He looks at the lights on the Jersey shore and at the “city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire” (87). He knows he can never go down into the city again. He thinks of how the cold water below him is black and he is Black. The wind tears at him as he lifts himself onto the rails. It takes him and he falls and the wind yells.
Analysis
Another Country was a labor of love—and sometimes an albatross—for Baldwin, who worked on it for more than a decade. It is the longest of his novels and one rife with complex ideas and painful, provocative ruminations on race and love. Its frank treatment of marital infidelity, same-sex relationships, and racial tensions made it a controversial work in the 1960s, but those very things make it resonate with contemporary readers.
Baldwin starts his novel with Rufus, but makes the bold choice to have his protagonist commit suicide by the end of the first book. Rufus’s profound, unrelenting misery and psychological and physical disintegration is painful to watch. When we first meet him, he is wandering the streets, hungry, alone, and filled with self-loathing and rage; at one point he ponders, “His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him to such a desolate place” (54). As becomes very clear, Rufus is why he is because of the reality of being a Black man in America. He is acutely aware of how the color of his skin dictates how he is viewed and how he is treated; he is overcome by the injustice, the inhumanity, the grotesqueness of white supremacy and he cannot stop himself from reacting in cruel, sometimes violent and self-flagellating ways. He cries to Vivaldo, his closest friend, “How I hate them—all those white sons of bitches out there. They’re trying to kill me, you don’t think I know? They got the world on a string, the miserable white cock suckers, and they tie that string around my neck, they killing me” (67).
Rufus is also mentally contorted because of his feelings for Leona, a white woman from the South whom he tells himself to leave alone but just cannot. He falls for her, but despises himself for this, and such feelings manifest themselves in insults and violence. He becomes the worst, most craven version of himself and destroys Leona before he destroys himself. He acknowledges that how he treated her was similar to how he treated Eric, a white friend of his who loved him and with whom he had sex once; clearly, his inability to reconcile his positive feelings towards white people with his understanding of how white supremacy has warped his world becomes untenable (not to mention his abhorrence of his own same-sex desires). He manages to stay friends with Vivaldo, but it is still a tempestuous relationship. He is often suspicious of Vivaldo; for example, when Vivaldo encounters Leona in Rufus’s apartment the morning after Rufus and Leona first have sex, Rufus thinks, “Perhaps Vivaldo was contemptuous of her because she was so plain—which meant Vivaldo was contemptuous of him. Or perhaps he was flirting with her because she seemed so simple and available: the proof of her availability being her presence in Rufus’s house” (26).
Rufus’s love for Leona is so consuming and its concomitant self-hatred so powerful that he cannot even play music anymore. Michael Lynch notes that he has to “abandon his art” and he “loses his self-respect as well as the one means for transcending immense pain.” His “abandonment of [his] art dooms him to unendurable pain and self-destruction.”
Having lost his music, alienated himself from his family and friends, and ended up on the streets of a pitiless city, Rufus decides he has nothing left to live for and seeks oblivion in suicide. What do we make of this choice? Critic Katy Ryan writes that “the question of who or what is responsible for Rufus’s death, of what his fall means, remains equally vexed, equally unclear without recourse to American history. Interpretations of his fall within the story, like the previous ones, vary and conflict.” W. Lawrence Hogue suggests “Rufus' death results from his inability to escape oppressive racial, social, religious, gender, and sexual categories and the refusal of society to allow his unacknowledged and unrecognized complex, fluid, multiple, and dynamic subjectivity to exist and thrive. Therefore, he denies, overlooks, and/or evades aspects of his plural subjectivity and sexuality.” He cannot handle his bisexuality, his relationships with white people, his singularity as an individual; he seeks solace in a binary that cannot exist.
The rest of the novel is concerned with other people’s reactions to Rufus’s death, which Michael Lynch sees as sacrificial: “Baldwin does imply a sacrificial aspect to his death, which eventually bears fruit in the lives of those closest to him—after each undergoes a period of suffering and recognizes his or her share of responsibility in Rufus’s fate.” Hogue explains how the suicide is Baldwin’s way of condemning aspects of America as well as providing a template for what the ideal world might look like: “Another Country is the story of the bohemian, jazz drummer Rufus Scott who commits suicide because he could not find his way in a Eurocentric, Puritan, infantile, masculinist American society. The text uses his suicide to examine the pre-requisite for survival, for living whole in the midst of the American whirlwind. To do this, Another Country interrogates naturalized but repressive and stifling American categories such as race, sex, class, region, and gender, as it offers/imagines a social world where racial identity, sexuality, gender identity, and subjectivity are much more fluid, multiple, open, dynamic, and becoming.” Rufus’s death “serves as a catalyst for other characters to confront their conscious and/or unconscious past, to challenge their social labels and categories, to recognize and acknowledge their human needs and desires, their otherness, to take risks, to grow, and to find freedom and fulfillment in the midst of the turbulent, angst-filled, racially balkanized, capitalist, and spiritually empty world of New York City.”
