The Cross of Redemption (3 page)

The forewords and prefaces Baldwin writes are an interesting grab bag, written largely by his goodwill and affection and sense of fellowship toward fellow writers. A generosity of spirit. An odd kiss to a brother in the foreword to Bobby Seale’s 1978 autobiography (“For it is that tremendous journey which Bobby’s book is about: the act of assuming and becoming oneself”). A valentine to a book he recognized as an instant classic, Louise Meriwether’s
Daddy Was a Number Runner
, about his own Harlem. But that tone differs in a brief but powerful preface to
The Negro in New York
. Somehow he links the Dutch to the Industrial Revolution and then to the plight of black folk in present-day Harlem—there is a wicked humor afoot in his anger, bracing and ruefully amusing.

As fascinating and piercing and blood-quickening and exciting as these shorter pieces are, James Baldwin truly shines in the longer form. It is thrilling to see so many of these largely forgotten pieces reintroduced into wider circulation. Many are positively breathtaking. Moreover, my earlier point about Baldwin’s wide and diverse interests is here proven. He writes about literature; he writes about Turkey and Africa and Europe; he writes about music; he writes about the American language; he writes about theater and boxing and child rearing; and yes, he writes at great length about those matters with which he shall always be associated: race, the American empire, justice, and James Baldwin.

A standout piece is one he wrote in 1962, where he comes as close to writing a manifesto for his art as any place else (“As Much Truth As One Can Bear”). Here he takes to task his literary predecessors Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos: “One must be willing—indeed, one must be anxious—to locate, precisely, that American morality of which we boast.”

“Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption” is a lyric praise-song to great African-American song: “It is out of this, and much more than this, that black American music springs. This music begins on the auction block… Music is our witness, and our ally. The ‘beat’ is the confession which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.”

Here, in this volume, are three companion pieces to “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” the essay he wrote in 1979 and which is still widely read today. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer,” and “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” will surely be as equally well read and discussed.

Without exaggeration I must say the 1963 piece of reportage “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston,” about the fabled Chicago prizefight, is easily among the best writing Baldwin ever committed. And no one else could do proper justice to the great Sidney Poitier the way James Baldwin did in
Look
magazine in July of 1968.

Baldwin made no secret of his deep love for his good buddy the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, immortalized in his oft-reprinted reminiscence, “Sweet Lorraine.” Here are two more paeans to the author of
A Raisin in the Sun
, one about that play’s bedrock truths, and the other, his 1979 recounting of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s infamous 1963 meeting in New York with Baldwin, Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and a number of other black activists. This meeting turned into a shouting match recounted in the papers. Sixteen years later, Baldwin’s tone is now wistful, yet piercing, a shot through the heart on many levels.

For years, for some reason, I always thought upon Baldwin’s time during the 1970s as bitter and angry and unhappy. That was the popular narrative that attended him as the Nixon years waned into the Carter years and Ronald Reagan waxed onto the stage. Journalists often quoted the interviews that Baldwin gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam War and in the wake of so much death and an American landscape pockmarked with riot-ruined cities. Clearly his feelings had been injured by his rejection by youthful groups like the Black Panthers. He came off in the press as an aloof, wealthy old warrior who had left the battlefield, his country forsaken, his ministry of love turned into one of bitterness.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s memorable essay/interview simply called “An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin,” written in 1973, did not see print until 1985, and it told a slightly different story. In truth, the piece does end with Baldwin predicting “apocalypse” for America. But again, this was 1973. However, the image one comes away with is one of Baldwin communing with the great Josephine Baker, who, oddly enough, had a much more sanguine attitude toward her faraway country. The two veterans reminisce and a young Skip Gates leaves with a renewed sense of the possible, not only for himself but for his hero, James Baldwin.

Baldwin would go on to write some of his best and some of his less good work:
Just Above My Head
, his last novel, and
The Devil Finds Work
, a funky combination of memoir and movie criticism, representing the best;
The Evidence of Things Not Seen
, his swan song, about the Atlanta child murders, being among his least successful.

Yet life was rich, despite what the media would have led us to believe. Baldwin would begin teaching in the 1980s, in America, where he wound up influencing a number of young African-American women who would go on to important literary careers, one even winning a Pulitzer Prize.

As I have traveled the country in the last several months, back into the fall of 2008, talking to students about the work of James Baldwin and African America, I can always count on one question coming from young people for whom the civil rights movement is a collection of pictures in a textbook, and, if they are lucky, perhaps a few good films about heroic black folk singing “We Shall Overcome.”

What, they ask, would James Baldwin think of Barack Obama?

Now I can tell them I think I know. In a 1961 speech for the Liberation Committee for Africa, Baldwin wrote:

And there’s the rub. He goes on to say that in order for such a seemingly unimaginable event to occur, first the United States must be “revised”; that the then-so-called “Negro problem” would have to be first reinvented and reseen as the problem of the ruling classes (“The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes”); that every switch must be flipped; and then and only then could he see a black man in the White House.

Whether or not America has actually undergone the total revision Baldwin outlines in his peroration, and throughout his works—now more accessible and complete to the eager reader with this timely volume—remains an open question. Yet I’m certain he’d acknowledge that the nearly fifty years between then and now have brought us closer to that Braver Newer World. Barack Obama may not be presiding over a colorblind, gender-equal, economically fair, same-sex-love-affirming, environmentally clean, disease-cleansed, morally upright America—I’m sure even Baldwin would eschew that ultimate possibility as a bit too utopian—but I’m sure he’d believe the possibilities for his country were looking up since he wrote, in 1961:

S
OMEONE ONCE SAID TO ME
that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience. The Italians, for example, during the time that De Sica and Rossellini were revitalizing the Italian cinema industry, showed a marked preference for Rita Hayworth vehicles; the world in which she moved across the screen was like a fairy tale, whereas the world De Sica was describing was one with which they were only too familiar. (And it can be suggested perhaps that the Americans who stood in line for
Shoeshine
and
Open City
were also responding to images which they found exotic, to a reality by which they were not threatened. What passes for the appreciation of serious effort in this country is very often nothing more than an inability to take anything very seriously.)

Now, of course the people cannot bear very much reality, if by this one means their ability to respond to high intellectual or artistic endeavor. I have never in the least understood why they should be expected to. There is a division of labor in the world—as I see it—and the people have quite enough reality to bear, simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death. They do not do this with all the wisdom, foresight, or charity one might wish;
nevertheless, this is what they are always doing and it is what the writer is always describing. There is literally nothing else to describe. This effort at description is itself extraordinarily arduous, and those who are driven to make this effort are by virtue of this fact somewhat removed from the people. It happens, by no means infrequently, that the people hound or stone them to death. They then build statues to them, which does not mean that the next artist will have it any easier.

I am not sure that the cultural level of the people is subject to a steady rise: in fact, quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level, e.g., pre–World War II Germany, or present-day Sweden. And this, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso (or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus) has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level—who rise, that is, into the middle class—is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace—which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved—they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

We cannot possibly expect, and should not desire, that the great bulk of the populace embark on a mental and spiritual voyage for which very few people are equipped and which even fewer have survived. They have, after all, their indispensable work to do, even as you and I. What we are distressed about, and should be, when we speak of the state of mass culture in this country, is the overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people. The people who run the mass media are not all villains and they are not all cowards—though I agree, I must say, with Dwight Macdonald’s forceful suggestion that many of them are not very bright. (Why should they be? They, too, have risen from the streets to a high level of cultural attainment. They, too, are positively afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.) But even those who are bright are handicapped by their audience: I am less appalled by the fact that
Gunsmoke
is produced than I am by the fact that so many people want to see it. In the same way, I must add, that a thrill of terror runs through me when I hear that the favorite author of our President is Zane Grey.

But one must make a living. The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need. If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like
Gunsmoke
, the situation would not be so grave. The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.

For example: neither
The Bridge on the River Kwai
nor
The Defiant Ones
, two definitely superior movies, can really be called serious. They are extraordinarily interesting and deft: but their principal effort is to keep the audience at a safe remove from the experience which these films are not therefore really prepared to convey. The kind of madness sketched in
Kwai
is far more dangerous and widespread than the movie would have us believe. As for
The Defiant Ones
, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

What the mass culture really reflects (as is the case with a “serious” play like
J.B.)
is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are
in
the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys, and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages. And this has everything to do, of course, with what was expected of America: which expectation, so generally disappointed, reveals something we do not want to know about sad human nature, reveals something we do not want to know about the intricacies and inequities of any social structure, reveals, in sum, something we do not want to know about ourselves. The American way of life has failed—to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected); that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants; that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. We are
very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.