In a multi-decade career that began during the post-World War II era and lasted through the late 80s, James Baldwin cast an incisive, gimlet-eyed view on everything and everyone whom he encountered, from his birthplace of Harlem to the roiling American South and the rooted white supremacy upon which the U.S. was founded and to which it still desperately clings. The relationship between the U.S. (and the global community) and James Baldwin and his singular body of work, which includes more than 20 novels, collected essays, plays, and poetry was like his own relationship with those same entities—complicated, but enduring.
August 2 marks the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, and in the 35 years since his death in Saint Paul de Vence, France—where he made his home during the last third of his life—Baldwin’s shadow still falls over any meaningful conversation about injustice. That point was made in a December 2018 cover spread in the New York Times Magazine with the heading The Academy, which identified 30 Black (male only) writers spanning several generations as “producing literature that is essential to how we understand our country and its place in the world right now.” Baldwin’s words are sprinkled throughout.
“Nobody wants a writer, till they’re dead,” he bluntly noted in a 1979 interview segment with ABC News journalist Sylvia Chase; the interview went unaired for 40 years. Indeed, when he died of esophageal cancer at home in France with his brother David, former lover Lucien Happsberger, and assistant Bernard Hassell at his bedside, Baldwin was more than just geographically distant from the locus of American intellectual life. Throughout most of the 50s and 60s coming off the explosive success of revelatory works including “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Notes of a Native Son,” and “The Amen Corner,” he’d been a darling of letters and theater.
Nevertheless, it was during his final chapter living in the south of France that he produced some of the most resonant, prophetic work on race, sexuality, and manhood, as well as the possibilities of dismantling the corrosive whiteness that has suffocated people of color since this country’s founding. Through his speeches, appearances in film and television, lectures on college campuses, as well as the brave directions he took his writing in defiance of critics, he laid the foundation for contemporary movements including Black Lives Matter and the anti-war protests of Israel’s siege of Gaza following the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
Last April, over a frenetic, too-short weekend sojourn, I flew to Nice in the south of France to wander around St. Paul de Vence, then took an overnight bus to Paris. Upon arriving in Nice, I made my way by taxi to Cafe de la Place, a storied cafe near a winding, cobblestone entrance into the walled village of Vence, overlooking a Provençale valley dotted with residential dwellings. I collapsed into a wooden chair, dropping my heavy duffel bag on the ground beside my table. The sun hung high and hot. Edgy and nervous, I sat watching the growing stream of tourists making their way from taxis, Vespas, and bicycles. I only had a day there, so I began taking notes on my surroundings and reflecting.
Searching for ghost
James Baldwin has been infused in all but every facet of my life for nearly 40 years since I first read “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” as a high school sophomore in a suffocatingly white, Midwestern suburb. I still believe the slender 1985 study of racial terror both within and beyond the Black community is his most enduring work of reportage, focusing on the so-called “Atlanta child murders” committed by Wayne Williams in the early ‘80s. It wasn’t lost on me when I first heard his name that we share the same initials and variations of a first name. Today on my desk sits no fewer than a dozen written works by and about him, as well as a never-lit candle rendering of Baldwin with flames radiating from behind his head. My youngest daughter’s middle name is his first. Like he had generations before, I, too, have explored and wrestled with proximity to whiteness and traditional masculinity as a Black manchild surviving within a social order dominated by American white supremacy.
Throughout the 1960s, James’ celebratory status was amplified by 1961’s “The Fire Next Time,” and only more so through “Nobody Knows My Name” and “Going to Meet the Man,” as well as plays such as “Blues for Mister Charlie.” He filed dispatches from the South—and North—for publications ranging from Harper’s magazine, the New Yorker, The Nation and Ebony, as an up-close witness to the Civil Rights Movement and unrest following the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom he befriended.
Following their assassinations as well as that of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, in 1963, Baldwin was essentially adrift—creatively and personally. Grappling with health issues and fatigue at the turn of the 60s, his relationship to the emerging Black Power movement and mainline Civil Rights establishment was not as proximate as is his idolization today within the Movement for Black Lives and other social justice efforts.
“The irony, however, was that no matter how much Baldwin sacrificed gifts to gain acceptance from the Black Power movement, his gestures went unrequited: while Baldwin may have been seen as a ‘bad nigger’ by liberal whites, back in the ‘hood he was just another twisted white boy in blackface,” recalled Hilton Als for the New Yorker in “The Enemy Within: The making and unmaking of James Baldwin,” in February 1998. “…many of the civil-rights leaders didn’t want to be associated with Baldwin, because he was so openly gay.” That possible sense of rejection and mourning for the social transition which the movement as well as America itself was undergoing stemming from the law-and-order backlash to urban unrest, the deteriorating war in Vietnam and Baldwin’s diminishing cultural relevance were among the compelling motivations which drove him to France and the centuries-old St. Paul de Vence.
The public intellectual, unbound and abroad
The two-story cottage in which he chose to live and eventually die was rented to him by a caustic, xenophobic Frenchwoman named Jeanne Faure. Not surprisingly, his wit and charm won her over in time. Over the years, he hosted an incessant stream of guests ranging from far-flung friends, ex-lovers, éminence grise from French society, as well as celebrities like Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, and Bobby Short at his “Welcome Table,” in the backyard. At local establishments in Vence such as Café de la Place or Colombe d’Or, he rubbed elbows with local denizens as well as national icons such as Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. In the years following his death, as well as that of Madame Faure, the house and the larger property on which it sat were razed for the development of high-end condominiums. In the St. Paul de Vence years he completed nearly 10 works of fiction and nonfiction, including his only children’s book, 1976’s “Little Man, Little Man,” and his output in the written and spoken word vacillated between anguished, reflective, and fiery, despite critics’ near dismissal of his literary oeuvre. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, with Provence and his home base, Baldwin traveled between the U.S. and Europe craving interaction with the youth as well as his peers.
In 1970, he and anthropologist Margaret Mead sat together for hours- and days-long exchanges on race and identity, which became an academic touchstone titled A Rap on Race. Fifteen months later, Ellis Haizlip, producer of the seminal public television program “Soul!” invited Baldwin to sit down for a no-holds-barred conversation in London for the show with emerging poet and activist Nikki Giovanni. Viscerally, the dialogue, which has become highly viewed over the past several years on YouTube feels like an elder not quite ready to pass the baton to a younger lioness. Baldwin was 46 years old. Giovanni was 28.
Dragging heavily on a cigarette, he leans in at one point and says to her, “It’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if you live long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do. They think it’s important to be white, and you think it’s important to be white; they think it’s a shame to be black, and you think it’s a shame to be black. And you have no corroboration around you of any other sense of life.”
Those sentiments bubbled to the surface nearly a decade later when he visited the University of California, Berkeley in a half-hour long lecture entitled “On Language, Race, and the Black writer.” Many contemporary thought leaders, observers, and present-day activists consider it his most cogent “Black lives matter” speech.
“The intentions of this melancholy country, as concerns Black people, and anyone who doubts me can ask any Indian, have always been genocidal,” he explained to the crowd of mostly Black students. “When you try to slaughter a people and leave them with nothing to lose, you create somebody with nothing to lose. ‘If I ain’t got nothing to lose, what you gonna do to me?’”
Somehow between publishing his now highly respected book of film criticism, “The Devil Finds Work,” and the second-to-last of his novels, “If Beale Street Could Talk” (adapted for the screen in 2018 by director Barry Jenkins), he maintained a rigorous teaching schedule, working with students on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Hampshire College; and Bowling Green State University. At the same time, he seemed to be looking back on his life, his travels, and the Civil Rights Movement, all of which he helped memorialize and define as well as the reverse. The short film “James Baldwin: From Another Place,” produced and directed by Sedat Pakay in 1970, explored his time living in Turkey, while for “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” he journeyed back down South to find surviving veterans of the rights struggle and eulogize its as-yet-unrealized mission.
Uncharted waters
Even in the years leading up to and following his mid-80s cancer diagnosis, Baldwin was compelled to chart new territory. Two critical writings published in Playboy magazine remain especially relevant with the rise of the MAGA movement and its embrace of a fossilized masculinity, then, separately, racism and violence that was both internal and external to the Black community. In 1985’s “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” he dissembled cultural representations of manhood and masculinity against the sexual norms of the 80s in the era of AIDS. At the time of his death in December 1987, he left behind two sadly unfinished works, including a novel, “No Papers for Muhammad,” which delves into the expatriate experience with racism, as well as “The Welcome Table,” a play in which he sought to directly address the specter of HIV/AIDS for gay people and the community at large.
“When he died, [Baldwin] wasn’t especially popular or sought after,” says Tara Phillips,” the American-born head of La Maison Baldwin, a legacy organization based in France. “People all over are excited about him now, and his centennial,”she said, having just spoken to someone in Turkey about Baldwin. Phillips undertook the Herculean task of organizing a multi-day celebration of James Baldwin’s life in Paris, which will follow this summer’s Olympic Games.
We can expect to see an abundance of riches to wrestle with James Baldwin the man, and his public legacy beginning with his birth date on August 2. Raoul Peck’s Academy Award-nominated documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” seeded and watered this hoped-for renaissance. Throughout September in Paris, La Maison Baldwin will mount a centennial festival, while in his beloved Harlem the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will host a program of panel discussions, lectures, and screenings commencing July 31. Grammy-winning singer-bassist Meshell Ndegeocello is set to release her second album on the Blue Note label, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin,” in his honor, while devoted fans hold conflicted feelings about Billy Porter’s upcoming Baldwin biopic.
A month-long group show entitled God Made My Face opened at the Chelsea-David Zwirner Gallery in early 2019. The work of more than a dozen artists, including photographers Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, painter Beauford Delaney, as well works by younger creatives such as Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and Ja’Tovia Gary were shown. Curated by writer and critic Hilton Als, “God Made My Face” was a so-called “collective portrait of literary icon James Baldwin in whose written works the public was taking a renewed interest or discovering in that period.”
One of the pieces shown, “James Baldwin with a bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhander” was a photograph taken by Jane Evelyn Atwood in Paris in 1975. Wolhander’s bust is facing one direction with Baldwin standing in front of it, but looking toward the camera, as if he were more interested in being the one watching others, rather than himself. He noted in his later years that he was neither a member of a tribe, nor one community, but rather the constant observer. The generation of which he was a part and those that follow have ultimately been fed spiritually and intellectually because of that. Regardless of how the critics or public felt about the man and his creations in his lifetime, James Baldwin isn’t going anywhere.