Though I never met James Baldwin in person, and never even saw him at a public event, he is nonetheless to me like a father, or a beloved uncle, or mentor. That is to say, he is in my mind nearly every day, for the very simple reason that he was instrumental in creating my mind. And to the degree that my life and work have been shaped by my mind, especially in the way it is positioned with regard to race in America, James Baldwin shaped that life and work. Our actual lives never touched, except through his words, which is the most intimate touch of all. And his words expressed in those early essays which later became Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time entered my life at a time when I was a very young man, impressionable, confused, ignorant, and emotionally turbulent. Still a boy, actually, a well-intended white New Englander who had romanticized his sweetly naïve but pragmatically useless youthful idealism so that he could take pride in it, so that he could think better of himself, seated somewhat uncomfortably in a guilt-drenched 1950s white-boy garden of privilege.
However, although I had almost no idea of how to go about becoming either, I wanted to become a writer and a good person. I was a pipe fitter in New Hampshire then with no college and little travel--an unpromising situation. But thanks to my fuzzy, self-serving idealism, and my twin desires to become a writer and a good person, I was reading in those days--the late 1950s, early 1960s--periodicals like Partisan Review, where I read for the first time the mind-altering essay "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South." And then the brilliant dissection "Faulkner and Desegregation," troubling to me, for Faulkner had already been at work creating my mind for several years. I was also reading The Progressive (possibly the only person in Concord, New Hampshire, at that time, certainly the only pipe fitter), where I came upon "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." And then one unforgettable night, I read in The New Yorker, transfixed and transformed, the long essay that we remember now as "The Fire Next Time," called there, "Letter from a Region in My Mind."
Baldwin’s words, his language, trickled into my ear, and became an inner voice that woke me suddenly from a long, mind-numbing, conscience-killing slumber. . . .
|
