by Glory Edim
There was one exception among all the books assigned in class, a book called Bright April about a Black girl who was smart and fun like other kids in books, and like my real-life friends. In thirteen years of school, that was the only one, and I never forgot it.
As I continued to devour books, I was constantly making adjustments in my mind to account for the distance between me and the white characters, even the ones I liked. Some of my favorite books were the popular Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series. They were delightfully whimsical and satirical. I wondered what it would be like to have some of the adventures that the characters had, but again I was an outsider. It was hard to imagine being with these children. There were no Black kids in the books at all.
Once I started reading biographies, the disconnect was not as profound. Since the subjects were real people who had already lived and died, I was not searching for the same things in them. Abraham Lincoln was just himself. Clara Barton and Jane Addams were just themselves. There was no reason to expect them to be anything but white.
When I started reading teenage novels I enjoyed the more mature themes, but I sometimes resented how the characters and their families lived. They had loads of money and no serious problems. I had similar feelings about TV shows like The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best. Although I was drawn to these depictions of white family life, I knew they had little to do with me.
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In my childhood, both children and adults were mowed down by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. Children were arrested and jailed for demonstrating to get the rights that “Kitten,” “Princess,” and “Bud” took for granted. Emmett Till was fourteen years old. The Little Rock Nine were in high school. Three of the four girls annihilated in Birmingham—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were fourteen. Carol Denise McNair was eleven. Despite everything my family did to protect me, I was exposed to a level of hatred and violence that most of my white peers would find inconceivable.
One of the reasons my family moved to Mount Pleasant in the early 1950s was the quality of the schools. From first grade on, I attended integrated schools because there were both Black and white neighborhoods within the boundaries for those school buildings. As far as proportions, the schools were fairly balanced racially. Most of the white students were working class or lower middle class, and almost all of them were either Eastern European Catholics or Jewish. Economically and even culturally, because religion was so important to our families, we had some significant things in common. I believe I was in junior high when I began to fantasize about becoming a writer. My sister and I had written autobiographies for our eighth grade English class, and our teacher liked them so much that she took them with her to present at an English teachers’ convention during the summer. I was so excited and proud. I could not wait to take journalism in ninth grade so I could write for our school newspaper, called The Federalist because we went to Alexander Hamilton Junior High.
It was probably around this time that my aunt LaRue, who worked as a clerk typist at the main library downtown and had become my legal guardian after our mother died in 1956, introduced us to Langston Hughes and his Simple Stories. I loved these books. Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple’s Uncle Sam, The Best of Simple. They were so funny and vivid, and also sharply political.
My great-aunt Phoebe, who lived with us and was the first person in the family to undertake the journey from Dublin, Georgia, to Cleveland, Ohio, after World War I, used to recite Paul Laurence Dunbar to us. She also spoke with deep admiration about Emperor Haile Selassie and with fury about Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia. I did not pay enough attention to what she wanted to teach us. Because none of this was ever mentioned in school, I did not think it was important.
Fortunately Aunt LaRue led me to the book that changed my life. It was a small paperback with a tan cover: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Just writing the title takes my breath away, as his writing did so long ago. For the first time I found myself reading about someone I recognized. For the first time there was no need to protect myself from the characters in the book.
John Grimes was like me, a Black adolescent growing up in the North whose family had migrated from the rural South. He was smart, awkward, and questioning, including questioning his relationship to the rigid religion that was the center of his family’s life. Like me he wanted a different life from the one that his family expected and that U.S. society ordained. Like me John had to negotiate the minefields of race, and Baldwin made quite clear racism’s tragic toll in his depiction of John’s bitter and unforgiving stepfather, Gabriel. John Grimes, Baldwin’s persona, was an outsider, as was I.
I had never read anything like this. The writing was so passionate, and the world of this book was Black. The most important thing about Go Tell It on the Mountain was that it made me see the possibility of someone like me becoming a writer. I set about reading every single thing that Baldwin ever wrote. I read Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. In the summer of 1963, when I was in eleventh grade, I read Another Country. I know exactly when I read it because of something that happened one morning when I was waiting to go inside for summer school. I was taking a chemistry class to make room in my schedule for AP European History in the fall. Beverly and I were sitting on the low metal fence outside of our high school, and we had a copy of Another Country. The principal of the summer school, a white man who was assistant principal during the regular school year, saw the book. He walked over to us and asked if we thought we should be reading something like that. He wasn’t mean. I do not remember exactly what we said in response, but I do remember feeling flustered and embarrassed because the book had explicit depictions of both heterosexual and homosexual sex, and the principal seemed to know that. He might have even read Another Country himself. Fortunately, there was nothing he could do. Perhaps we replied that our aunt had let us read the book. It might very well have been her copy.
During the sixties Baldwin was at the pinnacle of his career. Because he was a famous author and actively involved in the civil rights movement, he was one of two or three Black people allowed on television—not to sing or dance, but to speak about politics and race. As the 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro shows, he was brilliant and unsparing in his critique of white supremacy.
For those just encountering Baldwin now, those who did not live through Jim Crow, it may be difficult to comprehend what his witness meant to us in the mid-twentieth century. When assumptions about Black inferiority were universal; when Black people were consistently treated as social pariahs and had that status confirmed by de jure and de facto segregation; when virtually every public image of Black people was a debilitating stereotype; when our humanity was routinely debated and then summarily erased, how much James Baldwin mattered was incalculable. His genius embodied the race’s genius, and he unleashed that genius on the entire world. He fought for us with his ideas and his miraculous language. He was heroic.
Only James Baldwin could have answered Mike Wallace’s hostile and condescending question, “What does the Negro want?” (a question on the lips of almost every white person) with the reply, “What do you want, Mike Wallace?” Baldwin dropped the mic before the concept existed.
James Baldwin has been a continuous presence in my life. Since there were no Black courses offered to me in college, I did an independent study my senior year on Black literature titled “Black Writers and the Search for Self.” Baldwin was one of the four male writers I wrote about. Although I did not come out until the mid-1970s, I do not recall being particularly disturbed that he wrote about gay characters, even though I knew of no one else doing it so honestly at the time. I might have thought this was just one more aspect of the sophisticated milieu he created, which included expatriate artists and taboo interracial affairs. I actually stopped reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in 1968 and never finished it because of Cleaver’s homoph
obic attack on Baldwin. When I did come out, my appreciation for Baldwin only increased. I marveled at his courage and what he must have endured as a Black gay man during the repressive era before Stonewall.
As a writer, I always acknowledge Baldwin as a major force in realizing my dream. When I learned that he had died in December 1987, I knew that I had to travel from Albany to New York City to attend his funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. It was a remarkable and extremely emotional experience. I had arranged to write an article about the funeral for the incomparable Boston newspaper, Gay Community News. My article “We Must Always Bury Our Dead Twice” focused on the paradox that not once during a service that lasted more than two hours did any of the famous Black writers who eulogized him mention that Baldwin was gay. At his funeral, homophobia erased an essential part of who Baldwin was. “We Must Always Bury Our Dead Twice” remains my favorite piece of my own writing.
James Baldwin is a classic writer. When I saw I Am Not Your Negro, I was struck by the fact that Baldwin’s ideas are as relevant and insightful today as the day he originally expressed them. Timelessness is a major characteristic of classic creations. Baldwin is a moral philosopher. His work does not merely describe and analyze oppression, but relentlessly asks the reader to examine their individual relationship to evil, to cruelty, bigotry, and white supremacy, and whether they are ready to change.
I am so thankful that I encountered “Jimmy” at the ideal time for him to open up the world to me. I am even more thankful that my family made that encounter possible because of how much they loved me and how much they loved the word.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t relate to words on a page. My mother says my first word was book. My father remembers me reading when I was just two years old. He laughs when he tells the story: I started to speak the words of a book he was reading to me. He thought I had memorized the book, but felt something was different. He switched books, just to see, and lo and behold, I read that one, too. He says I read The New York Times not long after, but I think that’s just father talk.
The first book I remember reading myself was The Berenstains’ B Book. I loved the relentless alliteration—big, big brown bear, big brown bear riding a bicycle, big brown bear riding a bicycle carrying a balloon, big brown bear riding a bicycle carrying a balloon eating a banana—the words all piled on top of one another until the whole family of bears, the whole tower of words, fell down in a pile. The musicality of those words, the way they jumped off the page and out of my mouth, are my earliest memory of literary joy.
I gravitated to other books that came to life on and off the page; other books filled with powerful ideas and move-your-body-to-the-rhythm poetry. I loved Free to Be…You and Me, the book and the record, which I played on my little yellow record player, a gift from my grandmother. Black is brown is tan was another favorite—the refrain of the title at once lyrical and emphatic. The viability of a family comprised of many colors was embedded in both the structure and style of the book; the deceptively simple illustrations calmed and reassured a little mixed race girl whose mother and father occupied such different spots on the color wheel.
And I vividly recall reading my mother’s first children’s book, Langston Hughes: American Poet. The book taught me about the life of an incredibly important writer—a mentor to my mother, no less—but also showed me in red and brown and black and yellow what my mother did every day when she disappeared into her study and made music on her typewriter. American Poet taught me that my mother was more than the woman who showed me how to lotion my legs and fed me collard greens and chocolate cake. She was Alice Walker, author. She was a woman defying erasure by bringing words, people, history itself into the world. She was writing herself, writing me, writing our family, and what we believed, into being. I read about Langston Hughes and saw By Alice Walker on the cover, and I thought, “Oh I get what this whole thing, this whole life we are living, is all about.”
I was the lucky recipient of other literary fortunes. Writers streamed in and out of our house, and a few turned their gazes on me, seeking out and cultivating my creative spark. When I was in elementary school in San Francisco, the great novelist Tillie Olsen showed up at our apartment—her blue eyes shining and shock of white hair windblown and dramatic—to take me on adventures, mostly to stationery and arts and crafts shops. She turned me loose in specialty shops in strange parts of the city and told me to get whatever I wanted. I roamed the shelves for hours, examining each curiosity, every possible prize; I came home with notebooks fat and thin, pens of every color, brown paper bags full of bells, brightly colored feathers, rainbow stickers I carefully mounted on the window above my desk.
June Jordan, who visited us in Jackson, in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Berkeley, in every place we lived, was a different kind of mentor, a quiet, soulful presence. I fell for her collection Things That I Do in the Dark in junior high school and read it over and over again in my own bedroom, in my own dark. Her book for young adults, His Own Where, about a tender brown boy who retreats to the cemetery for solace, became a touchstone. Oh how I loved June, her big laugh and brown eyes deep like wells, taking in everything: color and emotion, story and scene, rhythm and relevance. When June honored me with a glowing blurb for my first memoir, I wept with gratitude. I also felt, for the first time, like I had done something real.
I had joined the Sisterhood.
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But I’m jumping ahead. Because even though I grew up immersed in stories and surrounded by storytellers, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I’m not sure I think of myself that way now. But I do remember the first time I understood that the stories I told could be helpful. I remember that like I remember reading my mother’s children’s book. That moment, that realization, made me, in no small part, who I am today.
It began when I was in the tenth grade, walking home from school, and saw a woman being beaten on the street. It was the middle of the day. People walked past the melee without reaction; cars drove up and down the street as if all was right in the world. I was horrified. I stopped, reacted, threw myself between them. I was fourteen. They were adults. The man threatened me, lifted his hand to hit me too, so I backed down and sat on the curb, waiting for the right moment. Finally the woman sat alone in the street, bleeding, one of her red pumps flung into the middle of the road. I ran over and asked gently if I could help. Did she have a place to go? She looked at me coldly, as if I had interrupted something private and sacrosanct, and said, “That’s my man, and he loves me. I know he’ll be back.”
I went into a kind of shock. I froze and tried to process her words. At that point in my life, I knew only perpetrator and victim. Oppressed and oppressor. I couldn’t imagine the complexity of domestic violence, the internalization of the idea that pain is part of love, that love is defined by possession, that return to the scene of the crime is proof of devotion. I didn’t know what to do with any of it—my feelings about what happened, my feelings about her, my feelings about the upending of everything I knew to be true about men, women, and violence. I walked home, went straight to my desk, and wrote it all down. The piece came very easily—there was a lot of emotion, a lot of description, a lot of flow. Every detail had been seared into my memory; every conflicted emotion was crying to come out.
The piece reached my English teacher, Dan Murphy at the Urban School, another mentor, I suppose, because he recognized something in my writing, my words on the page. Dan insisted I submit the essay to the school newspaper, which led to a school-wide conversation about domestic violence, including invited speakers and breakout sessions. I was deeply moved as I listened to my peers talk about their experiences. My work had opened a space for others to talk honestly about their abuse, to think more deeply about the relationship between love and violence.
That was the first critical beat of so many in my career; the first time I felt a dire
ct link between my own experience and the lives of others. I don’t know if I found my calling that day in the auditorium of my tiny, progressive high school, but I do know that I felt connected to the world in just the right way. I could be of service, I could be of use: My life could matter. My stories could inspire other stories, and all those stories combined could remake the world.
In college, I studied with fearless writers bell hooks and Sylvia Ardyn Boone, both of whom taught me about craft, reminding me that it wasn’t just what I wrote but how I wrote it that made a difference. Craft dictated readership, elevated prose signified commitment; writing well was the difference between mediocrity and genius, between affecting ten and ten thousand.
I will never forget the moment bell hooks told me, without reservation, that I could write. With her big hair, sly laugh, and the most incisive, brilliant mind I have ever witnessed in the flesh, bell was impossibly glamorous. After another session of her groundbreaking class, Black Women and Their Fictions, I struggled to keep up with her as she swept down the hallway, surrounded by worshipful students. And then, to my surprise, she suddenly turned and caught my eye and said, with a seriousness that made me dizzy: “And you, Rebecca! Girl, you can write!”
Bell continues to be instrumental to my writing. I admire her unflinching honesty, and the shattering critique she levels against every piece of art and culture that crosses her path. Her stamina inspires me, as does her relentless quest for the truth and her determination to use it as a form of resistance. In those early days, especially, bell kept me honest. When I sat down to write, I knew I could not look away from my life and how it intersected with the larger realities of race, class, and gender in America. She taught me to see everything, to use everything, to leave it all on the page.