James Baldwin and Why We Should Care

While today is 9/11 and the world is once again remembering a great evil that took place and the deaths of almost 3,000 people at the hands of terrorists, I am focused on a different aspect of ‘the tragic’ as I have recently read James Baldwin. During this past summer I read both “The Fire Next Time” and “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” These books were published at the very dawn of the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Baldwin presents, in “The Fire Next Time,” what is essentially a long essay, or actually a couple of them in the form of letters. We get to better understand the experience of black people, and especially during the Jim Crow era. Being a white Midwesterner there was a lot for me to take in. Maybe that’s sad and I should have had more knowledge than I did, but Baldwin’s short book taught me a lot of what I did not know and I’m grateful for that. Please read or maybe re-read it.

“Go Tell It On the Mountain” is a full-fledged novel about black Christian believers and want-to-be believers. This is in many ways a terse novel, but then the lives they navigate are not simple and their deep faith and focus is challenged by the fallen nature of mankind. Whites are still outside and hated and usually cruel unless the black person they see is contrite and trying to be invisible as much as possible. The praise for this novel is mighty and rightfully so. Yet the imperfect nature of even the most faithful Christian is on full display, and whether Baldwin was expressing his own late life doubt about religion or not, we get a reality check. I would argue that white Christians are no less vulnerable to the imperfections of human nature.

In both books, I am taken with the power of narrative. Baldwin’s literary genius is undeniable and literary to the extreme, even when that narrative is as terse as can be, and it can be terse given Baldwin’s unforgiving honesty and willingness to lay out life and people, good, bad, and with all the warts we all have. Meanwhile, the dialog is in the vernacular of the people he is writing about and totally convincing. In fact, we walk along side them as they talk, we get to be in that place at that time, which is both a literary and sociological victory.

So I am a bit torn. Which is more important: The lessons we can learn from what he writes? Or the fact that these are brilliant literary achievements? I guess it’s both. Maybe I should be able to say more, but I am still sifting through the experience of having read them and still coming to grips with the facts that faced and are still facing Black Americans, and my own realization that while at least some forms of overt racism, lynching and the like may no longer be common, their drivers, the racism, is still there, systematically, throughout our society.