James Baldwin's Presence

- By Jim Hicks

Many are the privileges and rewards that come from being an editor. All the more true when you’ve been called into service for a magazine with a storied and lengthy history like the Massachusetts Review. Despite fifteen years in the trenches, I only recently became aware of a conference that had taken place at UMass on April 22-23, 1988, the spring after James Baldwin had passed. His colleagues here had planned a symposium for that semester: they wanted to celebrate having Baldwin together in Amherst with their former colleague, Chinua Achebe, who had been back in Nigeria in recent years.  When Baldwin died that planned symposium became impossible, and the meeting was instead reconceived as a collective tribute to the man, a more formal (and no doubt less hurried) homage than that published in our pages the previous December.

Back in the day, few would have predicted the explosion of Baldwin studies we’ve seen in recent years. In retrospect, perhaps, we realize that “Black Lives Matter” could itself have been a Baldwin title, that the sentiment grounds every line he wrote. Yet the prominence of scholarly work like that of Hilton Als, Eddie Glaude, or Frank Leon Roberts and the international success of the films by Raoul Peck and Barry Jenkins could not have been anticipated; indeed many—including John Edgar Wideman—foresaw with good reason a precisely opposite fate. In 1988, Wideman prognosticated that “James Baldwin will become [. . .] a kind of villain.” For white liberals who saw themselves as allies in the civil rights struggle, he explained, Baldwin, “embodies all [. . .] negative qualities. He does not appreciate progress.” That ilk would say, “He is enraged and bitter. He lost his footing as an artist and simply became a propagandist.” Such, Wideman noted, was the version of Baldwin already being promulgated.

As Irma McClaurin observed, the 1988 conference presented much richer tapestry of viewpoints. Esther Terry set the terms for its concluding roundtable discussion. She asked Wideman, Chinua Achebe, McClaurin, and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell to speak in turn of James Baldwin’s presence in their lives.

Given that today we have shelves full of work bearing Baldwin’s influence, I can’t pass definitive judgement, but I can say I myself have yet to read anything as vivid or penetrating as the stories and commentary delivered during those two days, just a few months after that foundational voice was silenced. As a tribute on the Baldwin centenary, therefore, I’ll offer here a few moments from that unforgettable discussion—and, as the speakers did that day, readers can only hope that Jimmy is again listening in.

John Edgar Wideman, already cited above, was the first into the fray. His fears about Baldwin’s legacy were in no way baseless. He offered two texts as prima facie evidence, both letters to Black men from supposed allies, Pete Hamill’s “Letter to a Black Friend,” published in Esquire in March 1988, and a letter from Marty Goldman, editor of the Boston Ledger, to Julius Lester. (This second example is worth a deep dive of its own, but that rabbit hole would take us too far afield.) Both letters, Wideman tells us, promulgate “a myth about some glorious time in the ’60s when Blacks and Whites got along very well and [. . .] how wonderful things were then.” A Black writer who couldn’t remember, who couldn’t appreciate such fantasies, would be standing in the way of a beautiful dream.

Though such “poison pen letters” painted Baldwin as a villain, Wideman also noted how they were countered by the power of Baldwin himself, who in his own letter to his nephew was “telling who he is through these words [and . . .] also making that nephew into a special kind of person.” Letters, Wideman observed, “not only perform an act of self-revelation, [they] simultaneously make somebody else.”

Such revelations can also come from afar. Next up, Irma McClaurin recounted how she first read Baldwin “10,000 miles away from home, in the former British colonial army town of Kuna, India.” She commented: “To a young Black girl of nineteen years old, disenchanted with her country and unsure of her place in the unfolding drama of Black liberation, Baldwin's words were a map. They spoke direction, guidance.”

Before coming to UMass, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell was, like Esther Terry, a student leader in the civil rights movement. He began by reminding the audience that,

My generation, our generation, was a most momentous and consequential one in the history of Black people. When I was a young man, Africa became independent, threw off nearly a hundred years of alien imposition, colonial rule, and the ravaging and disparaging of its cultures [. . . .] Black people in this country rose up and threw off a hundred years from the end of Reconstruction of racist subjugation and the disparagement of their culture, their identity, the reduction of their presence and the elimination of their future and their aspirations.

Baldwin figures in all this, Thelwell argued, because “you also don't have such a movement taking place on a political front unless there are intellectual warriors helping to define and crystallize the consciousness.”

The professor also cited his colleagues: Baldwin managed, “as my brother, my elder and senior and respected brother Chinua said, [. . . to] refine three hundred years of Black experience, wisdom, learning lessons, and suffering into an instrument of struggle.” Esther Terry—Thelwell also reminded us—names Baldwin’s work as “the inspiration, [. . .] the shield, and the armor that we took with us into struggle.”

Thelwell himself added that, in Baldwin’s work, “for the first time in any real way in the history of this country, in the history of this sorry republic, the voice and weight and momentum of the Black experience addressed this nation directly and it flayed and it lacerated and it inspired and it challenged.” He also noted how

Richard Wright said that literature is really a struggle over the definition of reality. After James Baldwin's contributions, the nature of American reality, the nature of the perception, the terms of that perception have changed forever. And he has left us therefore a basis to advance the struggle, to continue the discourse.

On a less lofty, more personal note, Chinua Achebe offered an anecdote about his initial encounter with Baldwin. He remembered,

That meeting was very dramatic. I had known of him and read him and admired him for at least twenty years before then. In fact, when I read Go Tell It on the Mountain in Nigeria, in the 60s, I went on to the American Information Service Library, whatever it was called, to see if there were other books by him or by people like him. And they didn't have any books by him or anybody like him. They had no Richard Wright, they had nothing at all in that line. And so I made a suggestion that they should consider bringing in such books, and they did.

Achebe added, “And so when I met him in Gainesville, Florida, in 1983, I said, ‘Mr. Baldwin, I presume.’ And he was absolutely delighted with that.” Two explorers, having wound their way through the frozen heart of Whiteness, meet at last, and recognize each other immediately.

Achebe then recalled an offhand quip he’d once heard from a Swedish journalist. He’d been told, “You African authors are very lucky. At least, your governments care enough to put you in prison. Here in this country, no matter what you say, nobody pays any attention.” Somewhat surprisingly, the Nigerian author took the point seriously, observing that,

When you have the emperor not bothering about the poet, you can be sure that something is wrong. Because they should. [. . .] I can't see a novelist in Britain for instance writing a novel that will make Mrs. Thatcher want to lock him or her up. I don’t see a novelist in this country writing a novel that will make Reagan have sleepless nights. And this in itself says something about the quality of the novels being written.

He then tied his anecdote back to the man of the hour:

This is the significance of Baldwin, you know. He stood quite clearly and quite firmly on the side of the artist, using his talent to call things by their name—including saying that the emperor has no clothes. And if you say this, you’re not going to be very popular with the emperor, but you will be doing your work.

Less surprisingly, someone from the audience then asked the other panelists about their first encounters with Baldwin. Professor Thelwell was the first to speak—and also the first to have met Jimmy. That auspicious rendezvous occurred in 1960. One day, a white activist who knew Thelwell happened to ask,

“Does the name James Baldwin mean anything to you?” And I said, “Yeah, he’s a writer, he’s some kind of writer.” “What have you read by him?” “Nothing.” He said, “Listen, he is the most extraordinary little Black man from Harlem you will ever meet”—and he gave about a five-minute description of Jimmy which proved to be quite accurate. [. . .]
                  He’s giving a talk in Georgetown, and he particularly asked that some of the movement kids, which is how we were referred to then, be invited. So, a group of us left Howard University and went over into Georgetown, which was pretty much alien territory
                  [. . .] And the door opens, and about ten of us Black young people walk in and everything comes to a stop, and Jimmy looks up towards the door, sees us and with a kind of spontaneous delight and joy, his whole face just erupted into a smile [. . .]
                  And he said, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Baldwin, and I’m so happy that you came.” And we walked in, and he gave a discourse on the problem of race, and I quite literally had never heard anything like it.

As Thelwell recalled, “At this time he was thirty-five years old, at the very height of his power and his engagement. The years hadn't taken a toll yet. And the country [. . .] was locked in conflict which was about to explode, and everybody could sense that.”

When the lecture that day gave way to questions, the abyss dividing the audience became clear:

White America was bemused. And there was a long pause before the first question, somebody raised their hand, “Were you saying . . .” [. . .] And they kept putting forward the questions, seeking for clarification, hoping maybe that he would back down, that he would retract.

But that was never going to happen. As Thelwell recalled, what Baldwin had done, “essentially, in a way that was indisputable, was place the responsibility for the racial problem.”

First of all, he says, it’s not a Negro problem. Let’s not call it a Negro problem anymore. This is an American problem. He said, in point of fact, “You have a White folks’ problem.” “Since I,” he says, “know that I have never been a nigger, nor my mother, nor my brother. White America has to start thinking about why it needed to create that. What is it in the White American consciousness that needed this myth? Why did it create it, or why have they constructed themselves?” And they never had the responsibility of facing it before. And the ground moved, it really did.

Wideman, like McClaurin, met Baldwin only when they finally crossed paths in Amherst. But at the 1988 conference he also recalled, for those of us who believe in books, that not all events happen in the world. Some only occur on the page.

I’d known him in a way as one writer knows another. I knew him in terms of his language. To read a word like “conundrum”—it was almost as if he had this business that he was in, and he could go out [. . .] like a developer [. . .] and acquire all this language and make a claim to it that nobody could deny and then bring it home. You know, we could buy little plots of it, and it was ours, and he reminded us how this language was something that we were heir to, and that we could not only buy these plots, but then we could make homes on them. We could turn it and use it. So that's the way I knew him, from a distance [. . .] it was extremely exciting for me.

Wideman called Baldwin a “magical proprietor of the language.” Writers become writers when they recognize writing in action.

When Wideman did tell his story of first hearing Baldwin at UMass, he ended by expressing certain reservations. He first noted that, “When somebody on stage says, ‘And then Malcolm said to Martin,’ it gets my attention.” But he also listened to Baldwin’s students, and that made him wonder.

As he put it,

[I]t became clear that people had come to hear Baldwin, but they had brought a lot of baggage with them. And I saw [. . .] in embryo, or in miniature in that audience, what happened to Baldwin’s talk and books when they were introduced to the larger society. People didn't hear them. They kind of wrote letters to one another. This person talked to that person about what they thought Baldwin said. This audience addressed members of the same audience about things that they thought Baldwin had said. And he was the missing turn. Often what he said got lost. And that was so frustrating, so difficult.

Which, in some sense, brings me back to where we began. Back in the sixties, or even in the eighties, who really would have thought that we’d be where we are now? That James Baldwin, at 100, would at last be the one Black writer that everyone—all across the rainbow, all across the globe—knows that they cannot not read? How is it, in this moment where fascism is rising everywhere, in this era where racism is becoming ever more militant, ever more shameless, that somehow we know—that today no one will dispute—Baldwin’s time has finally come?

The last person on earth to answer that question is me. Yet, as I’ve said, there are certain privileges and rewards that come when you get anointed or conned into editing. To conclude, I’ll do once again what I’ve been doing throughout this tribute, what an editor should do—put someone else’s voice front and center.

You see, after John Edgar Wideman spoke up about his reservations, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell responded (graciously, but forcefully), speaking from his own experience. He added another possibility, another layer. As he noted,

I did have the opportunity and the privilege of travelling around with Jimmy on occasion. Wherever he’d go to speak, and places like that, or just being in a bar having a drink or something. His wasn’t the kind of face you could mistake, you know. People would look and then they would say, “Yeah, yes, that’s him.” I mean, they’d walk up in awe. I mean, “Is that really James Baldwin?”

What he added next, testifying to experience he’d had already by the late eighties, set the clock ahead a decade or four:

On these occasions, we didn’t get into a close contextual discussion of the books, but people, Black and White, came up and said with fervor, and with passion in their voice, and sometimes they would go into detail, that in point of fact, the works had moved them, that the works had changed their lives, that the works had redefined their perceptions of the country. And the strangest and most improbable people would go out of their way to come up and testify in that way [. . .] Now what they actually got out of those works, we can't be sure, but you could see in their faces that those works had been effective.

And everywhere that I went with him that happened, and it happened in large numbers. And there were always people of a certain generation—people in their forties or fifties, I don't know if the younger generation has the same exposure, but people who lived through the ’50s and the ’60s and the early ’70s—and in enough numbers to suggest that the work has in fact been very, very consequential.

That there is a generation of Americans who understand the world, certainly at least understand this country and the question of racism, largely in terms given to them by James Baldwin. I think that is true.

We can only hope it is.

CHINUA ACHEBE was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic and the author of, among many works, Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannahs. His 1975 lecture on Joseph Conrad, “An Image of Africa,” was first published in the Massachusetts Review.

IRMA MCCLAURIN is a Black feminist speaker and archive founder, an activist anthropologist, an award-winning author, and CEO of Irma McClaurin Solutions.

EKWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL was director of the Washington office for the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee and first chair of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the novel The Harder They Come and editor of the memoirs of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture).

ESTHER TERRY is a civil rights activist who participated in the sit-ins at Woolworth in Greensboro, NC in 1960. Under her leadership, UMass inaugurated its Ph.D. program in Afro-American Studies in 1966. In 2010, she became the Provost of her alma mater, Bennett College.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is a novelist, memorist, and essayist and the author of, among many other works, the memoir Brothers and Keepers, the short story collection Fever, and the novel Philadephia Fire.

The proceedings of the conference cited in this piece were first edited by the Massachusetts Review's founding editor, Jules Chametzky, published by the University's Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press as Black Writers Redefine the Struggle: A Tribute to James Baldwin (1989).