I was in the internetless mountains on Saturday, so I did not write anything on his 90th birthday, but his words are never far from me. Literally, in fact - my e-reader which accompanies me everywhere is full of Baldwin's fiction and non-fiction. But even without that, he stays with me.
I don't know when he became my favorite writer; sometime after I read Giovanni's Room and sometime before I read The Fire Next Time, underlining every other word. I think it must have been in "Black English: A Dishonest Argument," which is a speech Baldwin gave at Wayne State University and still one of my favorites of his later pieces. Casually, he refered to a certain kind of simpering white lady teacher as "Greer Garson," and I laughed aloud, because my grandmother hated Greer Garson, and I knew what he meant.
He was funny, that's the thing. That well meaning white teacher is only good for laughing at, and she is perhaps pitiable, but she is never allowed to be an iota as important as the Black children in her care. White people held no sacred place for him, that was clear; individual white people he could like or even love but he never displayed for them the ferocious devotion he reserved for Black people.
That's the other thing, the love. His incredible intelligence, his uncompromising anger, his humor - they matter, they make Baldwin good. He saw things so clearly and made his points with such precision that his prose is a joy. He wrote words like music, full of repetition of theme and motif, adding clauses on top of and inside each other, alluding to his point obliquely, until he sticks the knife in, and breaks your heart open. Look at these lines from "The Artist's Struggle For Integrity:"
It is spectacular for example, to have been forced ultimately to bring the entire whatever-it-was - militia, U.S. marshals - to get James Meredith into school, and from a certain point of view, which I do not at all share, I can see that one could say that no other country would have done it. It's escaped everyone's notice that no other country would have had to.
But I wanted to talk about love, which is a part of everything Baldwin wrote and informed much of his anger. Baldwin didn't love white people, and didn't accept that he should have, and I'm not sure he loved this country where he was never quite at home. But he loved Black people; his family and friends and fellow artists and many others, even when they didn't love him back. My favorite of his shorter pieces is filled with love and hope, and the conviction of their necessity in a cold world:
Well, you were born, here you came, something like fourteen years ago: and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.
It's from "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew On The One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation," and you should read the whole thing.
I won't continue much longer, as reading Baldwin makes me despair of my own writing, though someday with good luck and work I hope to be a tiny fraction as good. We'll see.
One of James Baldwin's greatest legacies was not only his own work, but in the work of the women intellectuals and artists he befriended, supported and mentored throughout his life, including Lorraine Hansberry, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis and many others. He loved them too, and they knew it, and leave it to Toni Morrison to eulogize the man better than I ever could.