In 1976, James Baldwin showed up in Berkeley to visit me and we hung out and had a great time. Although he never mentioned Truman Capote, I am willing to bet that if I had asked him he would have said, “Yeah, I stopped off to see if you were here to see him on my way out of New York.” The fictional truth is a greater truth than any that we have in real life.
With the possible exception of Walt Whitman, no other writer has given the foundational matter of love and democratic life in America such probing attention.
Apparently, Jimmy had been given an advance of $100,000 for If Beale Street Could Talk with the promise of another $200,000 on completion. I gathered that he was anxious to get it done. It seemed as if he needed the seclusion of this special place to write about the tragic life of black Americans.
We have always had much more than our simple notions of who we are and what this world has made us. For Americans, Baldwin pushes us towards the “hard to bear.”
Like Baldwin, Manning seemed to recognize the appeal to security, along with the stories we tell ourselves about how that security was won, as costly fantasies enacted through both the explicit suppression of information and a deep denial of who we are, or have become, as a nation.
The thrill was in the prose, in Baldwin’s capacity to wed the intimate and the universal and to make of his life an offering to generations of readers, including those whose experiences were far removed from his own. But the destabilization mattered more. Baldwin’s language upended the order of my understanding, as a political theorist-in-training, and as a white American.
Baldwin’s love and hope for true democracy is most clear in his consistent attention to black music throughout his work. Especially in “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin underscores the importance of music in embodying and relating racialized trauma.
Although Baldwin did not relish the opportunity to sit across a table from James Jackson Kilpatrick, he felt duty-bound to do so. His example can teach us something valuable about the nature of our duty to confront racism in our own time.
Ten original essays, with preface and introduction, on the relevance of James Baldwin's thought and writings.