PEN America 2: Home and Away
This
talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to
James Baldwin, sponsored by the PEN American Center and Lincoln Center,
with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The New Yorker.
The White Problem
In Go Tell It on the Mountain,
the young protagonist, John Grimes, stands on a hill in Central Park:
“He felt like a long-awaited conqueror, at whose feet flowers would be
strewn, and before whom multitudes cried, Hosanna. He would be, of all,
the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord’s anointed; and he would live
in this shining city which his ancestors had seen with longing from far
away.” The hill in question is one on which the young James Baldwin had
often stood, and the thoughts were the young Baldwin’s, too. The city
was of course New York, but it was also America, the New Jerusalem,
which Baldwin’s ancestors could only long for from far away. John
Grimes’s thoughts are those of a prophet-to-be, of the Lord’s anointed,
who one day would experience both the adulation and the condemnation of
the shining city as he revealed it for what it was.
John
Grimes is James Baldwin, and James Baldwin became that prophet. A black
American, born into the bleakness of poverty and the lie of the
American Dream, who would rise up, with a voice dedicated like those of
Ezekiel and Jeremiah, to tell his people, the American people, where
they had gone wrong. And what a voice it was, and is. It could explode
into fiery life at a meeting with Robert Kennedy, or at a polite dinner
party of liberals at an Upper East Side apartment. Most of all it cried
out in the great essays like “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My
Name,” and “The Fire Next Time” (“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No
more water, the fire next time!”) and in the agonizing dilemmas of
novels and plays like Giovanni’s Room and Another Country and Blues for Mister Charlie.
Baldwin’s voice was uncompromising and unrelenting, like Jeremiah’s,
like Ezekiel’s. It often hurt people, but it always contained the truth
about who and what we are.
When I was working for Baldwin in
New York and Istanbul in the 1960s and discussing a biography with him
in the 1980s, I asked him about his early influences, about who or what
had made him what he used to call “the perfectly impossible man” he
was. Where did he learn to deliver that frightening but somehow loving
rhetoric that could leave people in tears as it broke down comfortable
attitudes and woke up tired minds? “It’s not the Negro problem,” he
said to a sincere student questioner after a Harvard speech, “it’s the
white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.
You’re the nigger, baby.” Where did he learn that there came a time
when it was appropriate to call the president a “motherfucker” from the
pulpit of a great cathedral? Or that it was vitally necessary to keep a
room spellbound and terrified for over eight hours through a long night
while the lettuce on our plates wilted and he described how he had picked the cotton for all of us.
Baldwin
listed several primary influences at various times in our
conversations. The first and most important, he always said, was his
mother. Mrs. Baldwin, whom many of us here knew, was a consistent
source of strength and self-esteem. In letters and at Sunday dinners,
and any way she could, she preached the doctrine of love to her son. It
was she who taught him that racism and hatred hurt the racist and hater
as much as the racist’s victim. If he was to do something important in
the world, he must reach out to both. The man Baldwin always called his
father was an influence, too. In “Notes of a Native Son” we learn that
it was the example of his father that led him to understand just how
self-destructive hatred could be. Mr. Baldwin’s anger ate away at his
mind, said his son. He was defeated long before he died because at the
bottom of his heart he really believed what white people said about
him. He knew that he was black, but did not know that he was beautiful.
And there were school influences. Gertrude Ayer, the first
black principal in New York, who at P.S. 24 recognized something
special in this seemingly lost little boy with big eyes and a funny
walk, and assigned him for special work with a young teacher from the
Midwest who later, with her husband, took her charge to plays and
political meetings that gave foundation to a developing belief in the
power of art and political action. That teacher, Orilla Miller, would
remain a friend for life. At Frederick Douglass Junior High, Jimmy was
taken over by Bill Porter and Countee Cullen. Both Porter and Cullen
encouraged him to write, and through Cullen he absorbed the twilight of
the Harlem Renaissance, an interest in things French, and a sense of an
as yet mysterious, shared, intimate otherness that could be powerful in
its own right.
At DeWitt Clinton High School he continued to
be taken up by teachers and now fellow students who recognized the
growing power of his voice as a speaker and writer. But meanwhile,
another powerful influence was the Pentecostal Church in which Baldwin
had—like John in Go Tell It on the Mountain—been saved, and
in which he became, for a while, an apprentice preacher. Baldwin left
the church in his late teens, but not before absorbing the rhetoric of
the Bible, and the sense of the mysterious power of the Word to move
people and change their views and ways. He always said he left the
pulpit to preach the gospel.
The struggle during his
adolescence between church, spirit, Harlem, and home on one side and
school, art, the world out there, and the growing needs of the flesh on
the other led Baldwin to the first of many emotional crises. But more
important, it led him to the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, and
into the metaphorical and philosophical arms of the great painter
Beauford Delaney. Beauford had been recommended to Baldwin by a friend
as someone who might help him. When Jimmy got up the nerve to knock on
the door of the shabby apartment at 181 Greene Street, he was
confronted by a short, round, brown man, who, “when he had completed
his instant x-ray of my brain, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal
column,” invited him in. I know what that meeting and that examination
were like because years later I would be received at Delaney’s door in
Paris and have much the same experience.
Baldwin always said
he had opened that unusual door not a moment too soon. Here was a gay
black man, like him the son of a preacher, who was nevertheless making
it as an artist. Beauford took on the boy as his primary charge. He
taught him, as Luke teaches his son David in The Amen Corner,
that the church-forbidden jazz and the blues, the music of Ethel Waters
and Ma Rainey, of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, the literal and
metaphorical music of the streets, was just as sacred as the spirituals
and gospel songs of the sanctified. Beauford bridged Baldwin’s two
worlds, his many sides. He became what Baldwin would later call “my
principal witness,” and remained a close friend and mentor, really a
father, if sometimes a very needy father, until he died in Paris in
1979. Perhaps most important, Beauford taught the young James Baldwin
to observe the world around him with meticulous care and to translate
that observation into his art. Through Beauford Delaney, the
prophet-to-be learned that what one sees and cannot see says everything
about you.
There were, of course, other influences on the
early life: the books pored over at the Schomburg library, meetings
with Richard Wright, the legendary Mother Horn, and Marian Anderson.
Perhaps one final influence, however, needs to be mentioned. In
December 1946, Eugene Worth, a young African American whom Baldwin
loved, jumped off the George Washington Bridge, and in so doing,
remained in the writer’s mind until he became Rufus in Another Country.
Eugene’s suicide convinced Baldwin that he had to leave the shining
city, at least for a while, so as to see it from a distance. In his
growing despair over the waywardness of his people, the American
people, he could follow Eugene or he could make his way to Paris, long
the sanctuary of so many black voices in the struggle. In 1948 he took
that leap, and so began another stage of the story we’re here to tell.
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