The Cross of Redemption
Page 1
Introduction and headnotes copyright © 2010 by Randall Kenan
Compilation copyright © 2010 by The Estate of James Baldwin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baldwin, James, 1924–1987.
The cross of redemption : uncollected writings / James Baldwin; edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan.
p. cm.
A collection of essays, speeches, letters, reviews, etc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37896-5
I. Kenan, Randall. II. Title.
PS3552.A45C76 2010
818′.54–dc22
2009050897
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover photograph by Carl Mydans/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Cover design by Barbara de Wilde
v3.0_r1
The Estate of James Baldwin would like to extend appreciation to Erroll McDonald, Randall Kenan, Lily Evans, Eileen Ahearn, Douglas Field, Rene Boatman, and Quentin Miller for bringing this collection to fruition.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Looking for James Baldwin
ESSAYS AND SPEECHES
Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes
A Word from Writer Directly to Reader
From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum
Theater: The Negro In and Out
Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?
As Much Truth as One Can Bear
Geraldine Page: Bird of Light
From What’s the Reason Why?: A Symposium by Best-Selling Authors: James Baldwin on Another Country
The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity
We Can Change the Country
Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare
The Uses of the Blues
What Price Freedom?
The White Problem
Black Power
The Price May Be Too High
The Nigger We Invent
Speech from the Soledad Rally
A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates
The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union Is Catastrophic
Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit
On Language, Race, and the Black Writer
Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption
Black English: A Dishonest Argument
This Far and No Further
On Being White … and Other Lies
Blacks and Jews
To Crush a Serpent
PROFILES
The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston
Sidney Poitier
LETTERS
Letters from a Journey
The International War Crimes Tribunal
Anti-Semitism and Black Power
An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
A Letter to Prisoners
The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop
FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS
A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey by Harold Norse
The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–1940, edited by Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
A Lonely Rage by Bobby Seale
BOOK REVIEWS
Best Short Stories by Maxim Gorky
Mother by Maxim Gorky
The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman
The Sure Hand of God by Erskine Caldwell
The Sling and the Arrow by Stuart Engstrand
Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by V. S. Pritchett; and Robert Louis Stevenson by David Daiches
Flood Crest by Hodding Carter
The Moth by James M. Cain
The Portable Russian Reader, edited by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain
The Negro Newspaper by Vishnu V. Oak; Jim Crow America by Earl Conrad; The High Cost of Prejudice by Bucklin Moon; The Protestant Church and the Negro by Frank S. Loescher; Color and Conscience by Buell G. Gallagher; From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin; and The Negro in America by Arnold Rose
The Cool World by Warren Miller
Essays by Seymour Krim
The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
A Man’s Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins
FICTION
The Death of a Prophet
Sources
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Introduction: Looking for James Baldwin
I
IMAGINE: It is 1947, late autumn. You are twenty-three years old. You are black. You are living in New York’s Greenwich Village. You work at a small Caribbean restaurant on MacDougal Street called Calypso. You wait tables. You have worked laying railroad tracks in New Jersey. You hated the job. You hate segregated life and the indignities to which you were subjected on top of your hardscrabble existence. You cannot afford to go to college. You must earn money to send home to your large, impoverished family up in Harlem and to survive. People say you look about fifteen years old. You have interesting friends, paramount among them being the African-American painter Beauford Delaney, worldly and wise. He takes a special interest in you. He is your mentor. A surrogate father. (Your father died in 1943.) You will later write of Delaney, “He opened the unusual door” for you. Delaney introduces you to the writer Henry Miller. At the restaurant you meet Paul Robeson and Burt Lancaster and Eartha Kitt and C. L. R. James and so many others. You become good friends with a young, weird, wild, beautiful midwesterner enthralled by the possibilities of Method acting. His name is Marlon Brando. He is not your lover, but he will remain a lifelong friend.
In this exciting Manhattan Village you meet a lot of politically noisy, rambunctious, revolutionary, bohemian, fun-loving types, people who follow socialist ideals, Trotsky and the like, but also you meet musicians, singers, theater people of all stripes, public intellectuals, writers and editors at places like The Nation, the Partisan Review, the New Leader, Commentary, people like Randall Jarrell and Philip Rahv. You get a job as a messenger for a left-leaning newspaper, PM. The editor of the New Leader, Sol Levitas, takes a liking to you. He knows you’ve been working on a novel, Crying Holy—no, you’ve changed the name to In My Father’s House by now. Levitas suggests you try your hand at writing book reviews. It will give you discipline, he says.
Your first review, of a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, is published in the April 12, 1947, issue of The Nation. You write that Gorky is “far from a careful writer and by no means a great one. He is almost always painfully verbose and frequently threatens to degenerate into simple propaganda.” The review is somewhat brutal; yet you go on to praise Gorky for his “rare sympathy for people,” and further, you chastise “present-day realistic novelists” for their lack of sympathy, for failing to see “the unpredictability and the occasional and amazing splendor of the human being.” You end your first review, which has a somewhat sermonic tone, on the word “salvation.”
IMAGINE: At twenty-three, so much of the James Baldwin the world will come to admire and heed and laud and consider as indispensable was already well formed.
Later that year, in November, in another review of Gorky, of his n
ovel Mother, Baldwin writes:
Art, to be sure, has its roots in the lives of human beings: the weakness, the strength, the absurdity. I doubt that it is limited to our comrades; since we have discovered that art does not belong to what was once the aristocracy, it does not therefore follow that it has become the exclusive property of the common man—which abstraction, by the way, I have yet to meet. Rather, since it is involved with all of us, it belongs to all of us, and this includes our foes, who are as desperate and as vicious and as blind as we are and who can only be as evil as we are ourselves.
He is now only twenty-four; yet the elevated diction, the preoccupation with societal ethics, the syntactical willingness to allow his thoughts to unfurl and take up space, majestically, as they precess toward his hermeneutical ends—looking back, it all feels rather like Athena bursting forth from her daddy’s head, fully made.
Yet, though Baldwin was certainly precocious, he had earned his world vision and his eloquence, as he would go on to essentially document. Rather than springing forth from his stepfather’s brow, he instead wrestled his very gift away from the disapproving Reverend David Baldwin, who saw nothing but ruination in young Jimmy’s fascination with the secular world and with art. It was a fraught relationship, accompanied by severe discipline, harsh beatings, verbal abuse, but also tinged with what Baldwin himself would call love but locked up in a man who did not know how, or who was afraid, to show it.
By the time of his first publication James Baldwin was already onto his second, or even third, life.
II
But of course the fact that he could be such a powerful writer, against such powerful odds, at such a young age, seems to make sense, in retrospect.
His mother, Berdis Emma Jones, had come to New York from Maryland, a young woman. A failed relationship left her with a child. By the time James was three, in 1927, she had wed a Baptist minister turned Pentecostal, David Baldwin, originally from Louisiana. They would have eight children together.
Their life in Harlem, at the height of the Great Depression, was a constant struggle. David worked in factories, when he could find work; but he also continued preaching in storefront churches. Berdis worked cleaning houses and as a laundress. It fell to young James to help with his brothers and sisters.
The world of literature came knock-knock-knocking on James Baldwin’s door early: Reading and rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin before he was ten. Discovering the novels of Charles Dickens at around the same time. The Schomburg Library on 135th Street, which he seemed to haunt when not baby-sitting his siblings. Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he would study with Countee Cullen (“To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”), by then the author of two volumes of poetry. Surely, for Baldwin, already the idea of being a writer, for a black man, was a tangible, possible thing.
Then, 1938, simultaneously: Fireside Pentecostal Assembly and DeWitt Clinton High School. Through one door he was learning to “walk holy,” thus becoming a young minister wielding the power of the Word from the pulpit with the sonorous cadences of the King James Bible and with the force of an Old Testament prophet; through the other door—at a school considered by many to have been among the best in the country—he was experiencing another other world of words, as a short-story writer, playwright, editor, critic.
To be sure, Baldwin gives us vivid portraits of the pressure cooker in which he stewed—not only in his virtuoso first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), but later in literally scores of autobiographical essays, again and again, revisiting that existential struggle he faced, like Saint Augustine or John Donne, warring against visions of the sacred and the profane, fighting to become himself, to find himself. But even with those great testaments, which seem to make his emergence as a literary maven seem inevitable, to clothe his history in Myth, there yet remains an impenetrable mystery, still, surrounding James Baldwin, created in the quintessence of a disadvantaged childhood—almost like that of a character from the very Dickens novels he loved so much—rising up, phoenix-like, on the wings of a literary archangel.
One thinks of Aristotle’s admonition that in a well-made play a probable impossibility is always preferable to an improbable possibility, such is the narrative conundrum that is James Arthur Baldwin. Not that it is improbable that a young black man should struggle out of such unforgiving circumstances to achieve literary fame and fortune—literally hundreds of young men and women have accomplished just that—but it is the staggering quality and sheer magnitude of Baldwin’s achievements that beggar the imagination. Musical prodigies, though few and far between, are numerous and sundry; literary prodigies are rarely ever heard from, and the few who shine forth tend to burn out quite young.
Any new glimpse into the probable impossibility that is James Baldwin is a welcome treat and treasure.
III
As a companion volume to James Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998), the Library of America’s edition of his collected nonfiction, these heretofore uncollected occasional writings give us a different lens through which to view Baldwin’s artistry. A collection of snapshots. A sketchbook. An omnium-gatherum of those ideas he revisited most often. A GPS map of the geography of his mind’s progress. It brings together an eclectic mix of reviews, essays, and public letters from 1947 to 1985 that charts his incredible passage.
The trajectory of James Baldwin’s life has the quality of epic saga. He fled racially intolerant America for France in 1948. He had already become acquainted with Richard Wright, by far the most successful and famous black novelist in America at the time. Wright had intervened on Baldwin’s behalf with his publisher, Harper and Row, to obtain an option for the unfinished first novel. But that novel would not come together. Now in war-scarred France Baldwin tried to try again, yet he quickly found himself in even worse circumstances than he had faced back in his homeland. No money, ill health, and, much to his chagrin, racist encounters with the French police led him to near despair. The famous American colony of intellectuals and artists and writers (now including Richard Wright) soon grew peevish with him. Fortunately for Baldwin, his young Swiss lover, Lucien Happersberger, with the help of his father, was able to spirit Baldwin away to an Alpine village, Loèche-les-Bains, which Baldwin would later write about with great affection in his essay “A Stranger in the Village.” There he would regain his health, his optimism, his creative spark, and, to the gut-bucket blues of Bessie Smith, he would complete the novel now called Go Tell It on the Mountain. He was twenty-nine when Alfred A. Knopf published the book, to great acclaim. This was the story he had been struggling to tell, of a large family in a small Harlem apartment, of a loving mother, of an unreasonable minister father, of communing with the Holy Spirit, of becoming fascinated with the wide world.
His second novel seemed initially to hit a roadblock—a brief, lyrical novel written from the point of view of a white man in love with another white man, an Italian named Giovanni—which led Baldwin’s publisher to abandon the now-too-controversial-to-handle young black writer. In the meantime, Beacon Press brought out a collection of his essays, often written to keep body and soul together while he completed his first novel. That collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), drew even greater attention to James Baldwin, marking him as a skilled essayist and thinker and commentator on the racial scene. The volume contained seminal essays for which he would become known for decades to come, including the title essay, in which he artfully came to some reconciliation with his late stepfather and somehow spun that heartache with larger events dealing with race and politics and humanity. There was that style, part sermon, part nineteenth-century mandarin (Henry James, about whom he had written and felt a certain kinship as a fellow expatriate, now being a profound influence on his prose).
The next year saw the publication of the new novel, Giovanni’s Room, which miraculously survived the firestorm of homophobia and firmly established Baldwin as a hot novelist of note, an important new voice.
Thus began over a decade of a rather h
eady and tumultuous life, dominated not only by tremendous literary production, but by a hands-on involvement in the struggle for civil rights for black folk, particularly in the South, and throughout America. He was commissioned by top-flight national magazines—Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy—to go to North Carolina and Tennessee and Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, foreign lands for him, to write about those increasingly heated battles. There was something about his background—this Northern child of Holy Roller Harlem, this American who had fled racist America for France only to encounter another racism, this gay man (the ultimate outsider)—that gave James Baldwin not only the insight, but a language and a moral vision inflected by the righteous rhythms of Protestantism, that made his writings like none other. The essays collected in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and later in the hugely successful The Fire Next Time, the 1963 account of the Nation of Islam that turned into a national sermon on race, all served to transform Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and the world at large—if the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement’s Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah, despite his protestations of speaking for no one but himself.