James Baldwin was not simply a 'black' writer.

James Baldwin was not simply a 'black' writer.

PREFACE:

As a human being now well into the 8th decade of my life, I find myself increasingly engaged at various times and at various levels trying to piece together some of the various experiences and memories of my life — including events that  occurred 40, 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. I still dream and even fantasize of synthesizing such past realities into a consistent whole of self-understanding. The reality is that (1) life is not existentially a sequence of non-contradictory processes and (2) most human beings — such as myself — are not always honest with themselves, let alone with others. Nevertheless, it may be that I can express a few shards of understanding out of the difficulties, struggles, and — especially — pain of my of my own life and the pains of others which might be helpful others on their journals. This very short message (which I may be able to augment later) is such an attempt.

James Baldwin was not simply a 'black' writer.

I recently watched portions of "I Am Not Your Negro" — a film directed by Raul Peck which supplies visual and verbal context to Baldwin's unpublished essay of the same name. The original Baldwin text consists mostly of Baldwin's recollections and memories of Medgar Evers, Malcolm Shabazz ('Malcolm X'), and Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of what I have seen and read in the film, on TV, and on the WEB has been presented by various black authors and commentators and occasional secular commentators of different persuasions and background [usually much younger than I]. The more interesting and more energetic commentators have usually been either 'black' or 'angry' or both. I am myself not 'black' in any of the usually more significant uses of the word in this context. To be sure, however, I have at times since ~1959 or so been properly described as (politically) angry in some of my views and actions. It was at this time that I discovered that my USA government had systematically lied  to me about  pre-Castro Cuba. However, and much more to the point, James Baldwin was very, very helpful to me in the years between 1962 and 1971. During the last 7 of those years I lived and worked mostly as a young 'white' man in what was then called the 'Negro Community' — but is now, usually, referred to as the 'Afroamerican' or 'black' community.

The two primary and interrelated reasons that Baldwin was so helpful to me is that:  One, he understood that there is a deep connection between our public lives, our social and political face-and-commitments in the world and our most intimate, private (and sexual) selves. Secondly, he never forgot that while he was indeed a 'black' man who had grown up in Harlem, the love of his life had been a young caucasian Frenchman (Lucien Happersberger).

In 1962 I began to become aware of Baldwin as a rising 'star' while I lived briefly in New York City and heard him speak on the Lower West Side. Baldwin had written a few essays about Richard Wright and was seen by some as a more up-to-date writer who could enlighten interested ('whites' and others…) people about events as seen in the black community. Baldwin, of course, was always in so many ways such an individual character that he was not really a 'spokesman' per se for any movement. Still, in the early sixties he did lend public support for the Congress of Racial Equality and participated in a few public non-violent demonstrations (March on Washington, Selma). During the 70's and 80's he spent a good deal of time in both France and Turkey and, in his literary work, concentrated on seemingly and sometimes, actually, more particularly 'black' issues. As partial or 'racialized', however, as these particular efforts may have been, he was almost always acutely aware of the deep connections between his own particular ethnic-racial identity and those of other human being including those white people who knowingly or unknowingly had or were participating in the degradation of black Americans (or Amerindians or Africans…). There was nothing 'glib' about his anger because he knew at both an unconscious and conscious level that there were always tensions between the particularities of our individual existences and the more universal flow of all human existence.

This, at least, is my take on Baldwin's understanding of himself as a Black American Human Being.

It was, however, Baldwin's attempts to understanding his own sexuality which was personally most helpful to me. Baldwins's 1956 novel, Giovanni's Room, dealt most directly with such issues, and is recognized today as an important contribution to the genre of gay literature. Let me also stipulate here that virtually all important sexual adventures, joys, temptations and mistakes during my own life have involved persons of the other 'sex'. I do not deny that I have a feminine side, I simply say that during my life women have been paramount in all of my 'mating' efforts. It is the importance of Baldwin's struggles with and sometime successful portrayals of intimacy that have been most helpful to me. I will not say much. And this short piece is not a confessional piece and it is not a record of personal triumphs or disaster.  I simply wish to outline why Baldwin's work was helpful to me with one or two incompletely described instances.

One evening in 1962 as I walking along the street in New York's Lower East Side I saw a young black man walking arm in arm with a young white girl. I immediately felt a flash of jealousy. I was actually taken aback because I very quickly caught myself thinking — I am not supposed to react that way. Now, to be sure, I had been doing some thinking on the subject. And, I had previously thought that I could be a more 'effective' agent of social change by not 'marrying a Negro' [the phrase of the day].  Not that I had had any significant interactions with young dark, nubile females. Furthermore, it was the common unwisdom of the day that children of 'mixed marriages' suffered opprobrium in both the white and black communities. It took time for me to work my way thru some of these issues. Suffice it for me to say that I did figure out that those people who could not be friends with mixed couples would not actually be true friends whatever the eventual ethnicity of my spouse. And, furthermore, I realized in time that the soft wooly hair of the Queen of Sheba was just as attractive as the long blond hair of Lady Godiva or the dark brown hair of Princess Moana…

But I digress. For that matter, I don't really think that Baldwin always got it right. In Another Country Vivaldo(a young white man) is reconciled with Ida (a young black woman) after Ida has had an affair with an older advertising executive. In their reconciliation, Ida strokes Vivaldo gently to remove the blot of Vivaldo's complicit blindness about her affair. Infidelity, marital or otherwise, often involves emotional distance or blindness on the part of the 'aggrieved' party. Without trying to be definitive, extenuating circumstances — such as a spouse or lover's blindness — are indeed almost always components in spousal or lover's betrayals. In this situation, however, Ida's extenuation does not actually equal Ida's total absolution from responsibility.

There are, in my mind, a number of additional themes in Baldwin's work that have and continue to warrant discussion. For me, his work helped me in a journey of nearly seven years in places that seemed to me to be farther way than Paris, France. In 2007 and 2009 I finally had an opportunity to visit Paris — and, for me, it still seems that Baldwin's work was a guide to regions of the heart that remain quite difficult for any person to navigate. Regions in Jackson, New Orleans, Albany, Atlanta, and Washington that were indeed — and may yet remain — "farther away than Paris, France."

One More Thing

After my nearly 7 years in the Afro-american community (by which time most of friends were the children I worked with and a few mothers), it was time for me to move on. For me 4 years in multi-color, multi-color Polynesia helped me to move away from seeing cultural-political in oversimplified 'black' and 'white' terms either literally or metamorphically.

But, of course, Baldwin  — even if in partial eclipse  — was busy at his craft. Recently, I read If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) which I see as a highly 'aspirational' view of love between two people. [The plot is constrained, of course, by exterior and interior realities and the all-too-human frailties of the two Afroamerican protagonists]. First, for me Beale Street moved at a fluid-and-believable pace. But more importantly it seemed to me that Baldwin created a very believable female persona in the narrator, Tish. Baldwin's gay side coupled to his interacting artistic drive  — as it were — enabled him to create a believable-if-aspirational character.

Bibliography

James Baldwin (1955): Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press: Place. 165 pages.

James Baldwin (1956): Giovanni's Room. Dial Press: New York. 159 pages.

James Baldwin (1962): Another Country. Dial Press: New York. 436 pages.

James Baldwin (1974) If Beale Street Could Talk. Michael Joseph: London (?). 197 pages.

James Baldwin (1979; 2017): I Am Not Your Negro. [From Texts by James Baldwin]. Editor, Raoul Peck: Vintage International, Vintage Books. New York. 118 pages.