"Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances"
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Welcome Table: James Baldwin in Exile
TAKE ONE YOUNG, EAGER, BLACK American journalist-that was
me. One aging actress-singerjstar-that was Josephine Baker. And one
luminary of black letters- James Baldwin. I was twenty-two, a London-
based correspondent for Time magazine, and I felt like a mortal invited
to dine at his personal Mount Olympus.
My story, for which the magazine had sent me to France, was on "The
Black Expatriate." One of my principal subjects was Baldwin. Another
was Josephine Baker who, being a scenarist to her very heart, put a
condition on her meeting with me. I was to arrange her reunion with
Baldwin, whom she hadn't seen since leaving France many years before
to live in Monte Carlo.
Well into her sixties in 1973, Josephine Baker still had a lean dancer's
body. One expected that. She was planning a return to the stage, after all.
What was most surprising was her skin, smooth and soft as a child's. The
French had called her "cafe-au-lait," but that says nothing of the trans-
lucency or the delicate shading of her face. Her makeup was limited to
those kohl-rimmed eyes, elaborately lined and lashed, as if for the stage.
She flirted continually with those eyes, telling her stories with almost as
many facial expressions as words.
I do not know what she made of me, with my gold-rimmed cool-blue
shades and my bodacious Afro, but I was received like a dignitary of a
foreign land who might just be a long-lost son. And so we set off, in my
rented Ford, bearing precious cargo from Monte Carlo to Saint Paul de
Vence, Provence, chez Baldwin. In case I was in any danger of forgetting
that a living legend was my passenger, her fans mobbed our car at regular
intervals. Invariably, she responded with elaborate grace, playing partly
the star who expects to be adored, partly the aging performer who is
simply grateful to be recognized.
Baldwin made his home just outside the tiny ancient walled town
of St. Paul de Vence, nestled in the alpine foothills that rise from the
Mediterranean Sea. The air carries the smells of wild thyme, pine, and
centuries-old olive trees. The light of the region, prized by painters and
vacationers, at once intensifies and subdues colors, so that the terra cotta
tile roofs of the buildings are by turns rosy pink, rust brown, or deep red.
His house - situated among shoulder-high rosemary hedges, grape
arbors, acres of peach and almond orchards, and fields of wild asparagus
and strawberries - was built in the eighteenth century and retained its
original frescoed walls and rough-hewn beams. And yet he had made of
it, somehow, his own Greenwich Village cafe. Always there were guests, a
changing entourage of friends and hangers-on. Always there was drink-
ing and conviviality. "I am not in paradise," he assured readers of the
Black Scholar that year, 1973. "It rains down here too" (Baldwin 1973: 36).
Maybe it did. But it seemed like paradise to me. And if the august com-
pany of Jo Baker and James Baldwin wasn't enough, Cecil Brown was a
guest at St. Paul, as well: Cecil Brown, author of the campus cult classic,
The Life and Loves of Mister Jiveass Nigger, and widely esteemed as one of
the great black hopes of contemporary fiction.
The grape arbors sheltered tables, and it was under one such grape
arbor, at one of the long harvest tables, that we dined. Perhaps there was
no ambrosia, but several bottles of Cantenac Braun provided quite an
adequate substitute. The line from the old gospel song, a line Baldwin
had quoted toward the end of his then latest novel, inevitably suggested
itself: "I'm going to feast at the welcome table." And we did.
I wondered why these famous expatriates had not communicated for
so long, since St. Paul was not far from Monte Carlo. I wondered what
the evening would reveal about them, and I wondered what my role in
this drama would be. It was the first time Jo and Jimmy had seen each
other in years; it would prove the last.
At that long welcome table under the arbor, the wine flowed, food was
served and taken away, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker traded
stories, gossiped about everyone they knew and many people they didn't,
and remembered their lives. Both had been hurt and disillusioned by the
United States and had chosen to live in France. They never forgot, or for-
gave. At the table that long, warm night, they recollected the events that
led to their decisions to leave their country of birth and the consequences
of those decisions: the difficulty of living away from home and family,
of always feeling apart in their chosen homes, the pleasure of choosing
a new life, the possibilities of the untried. A sense of nostalgia pervaded
the evening. For all their misgivings, they shared a sense, curiously, of
being on the winning side of history.
And with nostalgia, anticipation. Both were preparing for a comeback.
Baker would return to the stage in a month or so, and it was on stage that
she would die. Baldwin, whose career had begun so brilliantly, was now
struggling to regain his voice. The best was yet to come, we were given to
understand.
People said Baldwin was ugly; he himself said so. But he was not ugly
to me. There are, of course, faces that we cannot see simply as faces be-
cause they are so familiar that they have become icons to us, and Jimmy's
visage was one of these. As I sat there, in a growing haze of awe and alco-
hol, studying his lined face, I realized that neither the Jimmy I had met-
mischievous, alert, and impishly funny-nor even the Jimmy I might
come to know could ever mean as much to me as James Baldwin, my
own personal oracle, that gimlet-eyed figure who had stared at me out of
a fuzzy dust jacket photograph when I was fourteen. For that was when
I met Baldwin first and discovered that black people, too, wrote books.
You see, that was my Baldwin. And it was strictly Private Property. No
trespassing allowed.
I was attending an Episcopal church camp in eastern West Virginia, high
in the Allegheny Mountains overlooking the South Branch of the Poto-
mac River. It was August 1965, a month shy of my fifteenth birthday. This,
I should say at the outset, was no ordinary church camp. Our themes
that year were "Is God Dead?" and "Can you love two people at once?"
(Dr. Zhivago was big that summer, and Episcopalians were never ones to
let grass grow under their feet.) After a solid week of complete isolation, a
delivery man, bringing milk and bread to the camp, told the head coun-
selor that "all hell had broken loose in Los Angeles" and that the "colored
people had gone crazy." Then he handed him a Sunday paper, which
screamed the news that Negroes were rioting in some place called Watts.
I, for one, was bewildered. I didn't understand what a riot was. Were
colored people being killed by white people, or were they killing white
people? Watching myself being watched by the white campers - there
were only three black kids among hundreds of campers - I experienced
that strange combination of power and powerlessness that you feel when
the actions of another black person affect your own life, simply because
you both are black. For I knew that the actions of people I did not know
had become my responsibility as surely as if the black folk in Watts had
been my relatives in the village of Piedmont, just twenty or so miles away.
Sensing my mixture of pride and discomfiture, an Episcopal priest
from New England handed me a book later that day. From the cover, the
wide-spaced eyes of a black man transfixed me. Notes of a Native Son, the
book was called, by one James Baldwin. Was this man the author, I won-
dered to myself, this man with a closely cropped "natural," brown skin,
splayed nostrils, and wide lips, so very Negro, so comfortable to be so?
It was the first time I had heard a voice capture the terrible exhilara-
tion and anxiety of being a person of African descent in this country.
From the book's first few sentences, I was caught up thoroughly in the
sensibility of another person - a black person. The book performed for
me the Adamic function of naming the complex racial dynamic of the
American cultural imagination. Coming from a tiny, segregated black
community in a white village, I knew both that "black culture" had a tex-
ture, a logic of its own and that it was inextricable from "white culture."
That was the paradox that Baldwin identified and negotiated, and that is
why I say his prose shaped my identity as an Afro-American, as much by
the questions he raised as by the answers he provided. If blackness was a
labyrinth, Baldwin would be my cicerone, my Virgil, my guide. I could
not put the book down.
I raced through this book, then others, filling my commonplace book
with his marvelously long sentences, bristling with commas and qualifi-
cations. Of course, Baldwin's biblical cadences spoke to me with a special
immediacy, for I, too, was to be a minister, having been "saved" in a
small black evangelical church at the age of twelve. (From this fate as
well, the Episcopalians-and, yes, James Baldwin-diverted me.) I de-
voured his books: first Notes, then Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire
Next Time, and then Another Country. I began to imitate his style of writ-
ing, using dependent clauses whenever and wherever I could-much to
my English teacher's chagrin. Consider: "And a really cohesive society,
one of the attributes, perhaps, of what is taken to be a 'healthy' culture,
has, generally, and I suspect, necessarily, a much lower level of tolerance
for the maverick, the dissenter, the man who steals the fire, than have
societies in which, the common ground of belief having all but vanished,
each man, in awful and brutal isolation, is for himself, to flower or to per-
ish." There are sixteen commas in that sentence; in my essays at school I
was busy trying to cram as many commas into my sentences as I could-
until Mrs. Iverson, my high school English teacher, forbade me to use
them "unless absolutely necessary!"
Poring over his essays, I found that the oddest passages stirred my
imagination. There were, for example, those moments of the most un-
Negro knowingness, a cosmopolitanism that moved me to awe, such as
his observation that, unlike Americans, "Europeans have lived with the
idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good
waiter as of being a good actor, and in neither case feel threatened. And
this means that the actor and the waiter can have a freer and more gen-
uinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here.
The waiter does not feel, with obscure resentment, that the actor has
'made it,' and the actor is not tormented by the fear that he may find
himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter" (Baldwin 1961: 20). I remember
the confident authority with which I explained this insight (uncredited,
I suspect) about French and American waiters to a schoolmate. It hardly
mattered that there were no waiters in Piedmont, W.v., unless you
counted the Westvaco Club, which catered to the management of our
one industry, a paper mill. It mattered less that there were no actors.
How far was Paris, really? Baldwin wrote about an epiphany experienced
before the cathedral in Chartres. In Piedmont, true enough, we had no
such imposing monuments, but I struggled to collect his noble senti-
ments as I stood before our small, wooden church, in need though it was
of a fresh coat of white paint.
Of course, I was not alone in my enthrallment and, much as it vexed
me, Baldwin was not my private property. When he wrote The Fire Next
Time in 1963, he was exalted as the voice of black America. The success
of Fire led directly to a cover story in Time in May of 1963; soon he was
spoken of as a contender for the Nobel Prize. ("Opportunity and duty
are sometimes born together," Baldwin wrote later.) Perhaps not since
Frederick Douglass a century earlier had one man been taken to embody
the voice of "the Negro." By the early sixties, his authority seemed nearly
unchallengeable. What did the Negro want? Ask James Baldwin.
The puzzle - as anyone who read him should have recognized - was
that his arguments, richly nuanced and self-consciously ambivalent,
were far too complex to serve straightforwardly political ends. Thus he
would argue in Nobody Knows My Name that
the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver ques-
tion of the self. That is precisely why what we like to call "the Negro problem" is
so tenacious in American life, and so dangerous. But my own experience proves
to me that the connection between American whites and blacks is far deeper and
more passionate than any of us like to think .... The questions which one asks
oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On
this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This
energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only
hope for ours. (Ibid.: l2-13)
One reads a passage like this one with a certain double-take. By pro-
claiming that the color question conceals the graver questions of the self,
Baldwin leads us to expect a transcendence of the contingencies of race,
in the name of a deeper artistic or psychological truth. Instead, with an
abrupt swerve, Baldwin returns us to them.
In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe,
that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an af-
fliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned
out that the question of who I was wasn't solved because I had removed myself
from the social forces which menaced me-anyway, these forces had become in-
terior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who
I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found
in me.
I think that there is always something frightening about this realization. I
know it frightened me. (Ibid.: 11)
Again, these words are easily misread. The day had passed when a seri-
ous novelist could, as had Thomas Mann at thirty-seven, compose his
Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Baldwin proposes not that politics is
merely a projection of private neuroses, but that our private neuroses
are shaped by quite public ones. The retreat to subjectivity, the "graver
questions of the self," would lead not to an escape from the racial drama,
but - and this was the alarming prospect Baldwin wanted to announce-
a rediscovery of it. That traditional liberal dream of a nonracial self, un-
constrained by epidermal contingencies, was hopefully entertained and,
for him at least, reluctantly dismissed. "There are," he observed, "few
things on earth more attractive than the idea of the unspeakable lib-
erty which is allowed the unredeemed. When, beneath the black mask,
a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain
awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is. What one's imagi-
nation makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one's
own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that,
by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black
man is enabled to know who the white man is" (Baldwin 1985b: 452).
This is not a call for "racial understanding"; on the contrary, we under-
stand each other all too well, for we have invented one another, derived
our identities from the ghostly projections of our alter egos. If Bald-
win had a central political argument it was that the destinies of black
America and white were profoundly and irreversibly intertwined. Each
created the other, each defined itself in relation to the other, and each
could destroy the other.
For Baldwin, then, America's interracial drama "not only created a
new black man, it has created a new white man, too." In that sense, he
could argue, "the history of the American Negro problem is not merely
shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the
worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual chal-
lenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met"
(ibid.: 532).
These were not words to speed along a cause. They did not mesh
with the rhetoric of self-affirmation that liberation movements require.
Yet couldn't his sense of the vagaries of identity serve the ends of a still
broader, braver politics? As an intellectual, Baldwin was at his best when
exploring his own equivocal sympathies and clashing allegiances. He was
here to "bear witness," he insisted, not to be spokesman. And he was
right to insist on the distinction. But who had time for such niceties? The
spokesman role was assigned him willy-nilly.
The result was to complicate further his curious position as an Afro-
American intellectual. On the populist Left, the then favored model of
the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the "organic intel-
lectuaL" someone who participated in and was part of the community he
would uplift. And yet Baldwin's basic conception of himself was formed
by the familiar (and still well-entrenched) idea of the alienated artist or
intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from
the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension
between these two models - he would do so in his fiction - but he was
never to resolve it.
A spokesman must have a firm grasp on his role and an unambiguous
message to articulate. Baldwin had neither, and when this was discovered
a few years later, he was relieved of his duties, shunted into the position
of elder, retired statesman. The irony is that he may never fully have re-
covered from this demotion from a status he had always disavowed.
And if I had any doubts about that demotion, I was set straight by my
editor at Time once I returned to London. They were not pleased by my
choice of principal subjects. Josephine Baker, I was told, was a period-
piece, a quaint memory of the twenties and thirties. And as for Baldwin,
well, wasn't he passe now? Hadn't he been for several years?
Baldwin, passe? In fact, the editor, holding a wet finger to the wind,
was absolutely correct, and on some level I knew it. If Baldwin had once
served as a shadow delegate for black America in the congress of culture,
his term had expired. Besides, soldiers, not delegates, were what was
wanted these days. "Pulling rank," Eldridge Cleaver wrote in his essay on
Baldwin, "is a very dangerous business, especially when the troops have
mutinied and the basis of one's authority, or rank, is devoid of that inter-
dictive power and has become suspect" (Cleaver 1968: 104).
Baldwin, who once defined the cutting edge, was now a favorite tar-
get for the new cutting edge. Anyone who was aware of the ferment in
black America was familiar with the attacks. And nothing ages a young
Turk faster than still younger Turks. Baldwin was "Joan of Arc of the
cocktail party," according to the new star of the black arts movement,
Amiri Baraka. His "spavined whine and plea" was "sickening beyond be-
lief" (Jones 1966: 117). He was, according to a youthful Ishmael Reed, "a
hustler who comes on like Job" (Leeming 1994: 304). Eldridge Cleaver,
the Black Panther's Minister of Information, found in Baldwin's work
"the most gruelling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of
himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of
the whites that one can find in any black American writer of note in our
time" (Cleaver 1968: 99). Above all, Baldwin's sexuality represented trea-
son: "Many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish,
are outraged because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by
a white man." Baldwin was thus engaged in "a despicable underground
guerilla war, waged on paper, against black masculinity" (ibid.: 102).
Young militants referred to him, unsmilingly, as Martin Luther Queen.
Baldwin was, of course, hardly a stranger to the sexual battlefield.
"On every street corner," Baldwin would later recall of his early days in
Greenwich Village, "I was called a faggot" (Baldwin 1985d: 684). What
was different this time was a newly sexualized black nationalism that
could stigmatize homosexuality as a capitulation to alien white norms
and correspondingly accredit homophobia - a powerful means of polic-
ing the sexual arena-as a progressive political act.
This new generation, so it seemed, was determined to define itself by
everything Baldwin was not. By the late sixties, Baldwin-bashing was
almost a rite of initiation. And yet Baldwin would not return fire, at least
not in public. He responded with a pose of wounded passivity. If a new
and newly militant generation sought to abandon him, Baldwin would
not abandon them.
In the end, the shift of political climate forced Baldwin to simplify
his rhetoric or else risk internal exile. As his old admirers saw it, Bald-
win was now chasing, with unseemly alacrity, a new vanguard, one that
esteemed rage, not compassion, as our noblest emotion. "It is not neces-
sary for a black man to hate a white man, or to have particular feelings
about him at all, in order to realize that he must kill him," he wrote in No
Name in the Street, a book he started writing in 1967 but did not publish
until 1972. "Yes, we have come, or are coming, to this, and there is no
point in flinching before the prospect of this exceedingly cool species of
fratricide" (Baldwin 1985b: 508). That year he told the New York Times of
his belated realization that "our destinies are in our hands, black hands,
and no one else's." A stirring if commonplace sentiment, this, which an
earlier Baldwin would have been the first to see through.
How far we had come from the author of The Fire Next Time, who had
forecast the rise of black power and yet was certain that "we, the black
and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a
nation - if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as
men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously dif-
ficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black, and
one white" (Baldwin 1962: 131). All such qualms were irrelevant now. In
an offhand but calculated manner, Baldwin affected to dismiss his earlier
positions: "I was, in some way, in those years, without entirely realiz-
ing it, the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father" (Baldwin 1985b:
498). Now he knew better.
In an impossible gambit, the author of No Name in the Street sought
to reclaim his lost authority by signaling his willingness to be instructed
by those who had inherited it: this was Baldwin and the new power gen-
eration. He borrowed the populist slogans of the day and returned them
with a Baldwinian polish. "The powerless, by definition, can never be
'racists,''' he writes, "for they can never make the world pay for what
they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor that makes them fanat-
ics or revolutionaries, or both; whereas those in power can be urbane
and charrring and invite you to those homes which they know you will
never own" (ibid.: 499). This sentiment in its unadorned rendering-
that blacks cannot be racist - is now a familiar one, and often dismissed
as an absurdity. But the key phrase here is "by definition," for this is not a
new factual claim but a rhetorical move. The term "racism" is redefined
to refer to systemic power relations, a social order in which one race is
subordinated to another. (A parallel move is common in much feminist
theory, where "patriarchy" - naming a social order to which Man and
Woman have a fixed and opposed relation - contrasts with "sexism,"
which characterizes the particular acts of particular people.) It cannot,
therefore, be dismissed as a factual error. And it does formulate a widely
accepted truth: the asymmetries of power mean that not all racial insult
is equal. (Not even a Florida jury is much concerned when a black cap-
tive calls his arresting officer a "cracker.")
Nonetheless, it is a grave political error, for black America needs allies
more than it needs absolution. And the slogan - a definition masquer-
ading as an insight - would all too quickly serve as blanket amnesty for
our dankest suspicions and bigotries. It is a slogan Baldwin once would
have repudiated, not for the sake of white America - for them, he would
have argued, the display of black prejudice could only provide a reassur-
ing confirmation of their own - but for the sake of black America. The
Baldwin who knew that the fates of black and white America were inex-
tricable also knew that if racism was to be deplored, it was to be deplored
tout court and without exemption clauses for the oppressed. Wasn't it
this conviction, above all, that explained his repudiation of Malcolm X?
I should be clear. Baldwin's reverence for Malcolm was real, but post-
humous. In a conversation with the psychologist Kenneth Clarke, re-
corded a year and a half before the assassination, Baldwin ventured that
by preaching black supremacy, "what [Malcolm] does is destroy a truth
and invent a myth." Compared to King's appeal, Malcolm's was "much
more sinister because it is much more effective. It is much more effec-
tive, because it is, after all, comparatively easy to invest a population with
false morale by giving them a false sense of superiority, and it will always
break down in a crisis. That is the history of Europe simply-it's one
of the reasons that we are in this terrible place." But, he cautioned, the
country "shouldn't be worried about the Muslim movement, that's not
the problem. The problem is to eliminate the conditions which breed the
Muslim movement." (Five years later, under contract with Columbia Pic-
tures, Baldwin began the task of adapting Malcolm to the silver screen.)
That ethnic scapegoating was an unaffordable luxury had been an-
other of Baldwin's lessons to us. "Georgia has the Negro," he once pithily
wrote, slicing through thickets of rationalization, "and Harlem has the
Jew" (Baldwin 198sa: 72). We have seen where the failure of this vision
has led: the well-nigh surreal spectacle of urban activists who would
rather picket Korean grocery stores than crack houses, presumably on
the assumption that sullen shopkeepers with their pricey tomatoes - not
smily drug dealers and their discount glass vials - are the true threat to
black dignity.
The sad truth is that as the sixties wore on, Baldwin, for all his efforts,
would never be allowed to reclaim the cultural authority he once en-
joyed. To give credit where credit is due, the media can usually tell the
difference between a trend-maker and a trend-follower. What did the
Negro really want? Ask Eldridge Cleaver.
I did. Several months after my visit to St. Paul de Vence, I returned
to France to interview the exiled revolutionary. We had moved with the
times from cosmopolitan expatriates to international fugitives. ("How
GO I know you're not a CIA agent?" he had demanded when we first
talked.) This was not a soiree on the Riviera. It was an apartment on the
Left Bank, where Eldridge and Kathleen lived, and where he put me up
in his study for a couple of weeks; here, ostensibly, was the radical edge
that Baldwin now affected to covet.
Between Cleaver and Baldwin, naturally, no love was lost. Eldridge
complained to me that Baldwin was circulating a story about him im-
pugning his manhood. He wanted me to know it was untrue. He also
wanted me to know that he would soon be returning and would take
up where he had left off. The talk was heady, navigating the dialectical
turns of Fanon and Marx and Mao and Che. (Jesus would be added a few
months later.) His shelves were lined with all the revolutionary classics
but also with W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and, yes, James Baldwin.
Young Baldwin may have warned of "the fire next time," but Cleaver, de-
termined to learn from the failures of his revolutionary forebears, was
busily designing the incendiary devices.
What came as a gradual revelation to me was that Cleaver really
wanted to be a writer and that Baldwin was, perforce, his blueprint of
what a black writer could be. He was at work, he told me, on a memoir,
to be entitled Over My Shoulder; on a novel, to be called Ahmad's Jacket.
But commitment, to be genuine, had to spill over the page. And in case
I forgot our parlous position in the nether-zone of the law, there was
that hijacker- armed, dangerous, and definitely deranged - who had in-
sisted on staying with them, too. Eldridge, who had adopted me as a
younger brother for the nonce, handed me a butcher's knife to keep
under my pillow and made sure I propped a filing cabinet in front of the
door before I went to sleep at night.
Times had changed all right. That, I suppose, was our problem. But
Jimmy wanted to change with them, and that was his.
We lost his skepticism, his critical independence. Baldwin's belated
public response to Cleaver's charges was all too symptomatic. Now, with
slightly disingenuous forbearance, he would turn the other cheek and in-
sist, in No Name in the Street, that he actually admired Cleaver's book.
Cleaver's attack on him was explained away as a regrettable if naIve mis-
understanding: the revolutionary had simply been misled by Baldwin's
public reputation. Beyond that, he wrote,
I also felt that I was confused in his mind with the unutterable debasement of the
male - with all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom,
in prison, must have made him vomit more than once. Well, I certainly hope I
know more about myself, and the intention of my work than that, but I am an
odd quantity. So is Eldridge, so are we all. It is a pity that we won't, probably,
ever have the time to attempt to define once more the relationship of the odd and
disreputable artist to the odd and disreputable revolutionary .... And I think we
need each other, and have much to learn from each other, and, more than ever,
now. (Baldwin 1985b: 539)
It was an exercise in perversely willed magnanimity, meant, no doubt, to
assure us that he was with the program and to suggest, by its serenity,
unrufRed strength. Instead, it read as weakness, an ill-disguised appease-
ment by a creature whose day had come and gone.
Did he know what was happening to him? His essays give no clue, but
then they wouldn't. Increasingly, they came to represent his official voice,
the carefully crafted expression of the public intellectual, James Bald-
win. His fiction became the refuge of his growing self-doubts. In 1968, he
published Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. Formally speaking, it
was his least successful work. But in its protagonist, Leo Proudhammer,
Baldwin created a perfectly Baldwinian alter-ego, a celebrated black art-
ist who, in diction that matched that of Baldwin's essays, could express
the quandaries that came increasingly to trouble his creator. "The day
came," he reflects at one point, "when I wished to break my silence and
found that I could not speak: the actor could no longer be distinguished
from his role" (Baldwin 1968: 57). Thus did Baldwin, our elder states-
man, who knew better than anyone how a mask could deform the face
beneath, chafe beneath his own.
Called to speak before a civil rights rally, Proudhammer ruminates
upon the contradictions of his position. "1 did not want others to endure
my estrangement, that was why 1 was on the platform; yet was it not, at
the least, paradoxical that it was only my estrangement which had placed
me there? ... [I]t was our privilege, to say nothing of our hope, to at-
tempt to make the world a human dwellingplace for us all; and yet-
yet - was it not possible that the mighty gentlemen, my honorable and
invaluable confreres, by being unable to imagine such a journey as my
own, were leaving something of the utmost importance out of their aspi-
rations?" (ibid.: 43).
These are not unpolitical reflections, but they are not the reflections
of a politician. Contrast Leroi Jones's unflappable conviction, in an essay
published in 1963: ''A writer must have a point of view, or he cannot be
a good writer. He must be standing somewhere in the world, or else he
is not one of us, and his commentary then is of little value" (Jones 1966:
118). It was a carefully aimed arrow and it would pierce Baldwin's heart.
The threat of being deemed "not one of us" is a fearful thing. Tell
Me How Long depicts a black artist's growing sense that (in a recurrent
phrase) he no longer belongs to himself, that his public role may have
depleted the rest of him. There is a constituency he must honor, a cause
he must respect; when others protect him, it is not for who he is but what
he stands for. To be sure, what Baldwin once termed "the burden of rep-
resentation" is a common malady in Afro-American literature, but few
have measured its costs - the price of that ticket to ride - as trenchantly
as he. Baldwin risked the fate that Leo Proudhammer most feared: to
be "a Jeremiah without convictions." Desperate to be "one of us," to be
loved by us, Baldwin allowed himself to mouth a script that was not
his own. The connoisseur of complexity tried to become an ideologue.
And with the roaring void left by the murders of Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King, he must have felt the obligation ever more strongly.
However erratic some of his later writing might have been, 1 believe he
could still do anything he wanted with the English essay. The problem
was that he no longer knew what he wanted ... or even what we wanted
from him. Meanwhile, a generation had arrived that didn't want any-
thing from him - except, perhaps, that he lie down and die. And this,
too, has been a consistent dynamic of race and representation in Afro-
America. If someone has anointed a black intellectual, rest assured that
others are busily constructing his tumbrel.
In an essay he published in 1980, he reflected on his role as an elder
statesman: "It is of the utmost importance, for example, that I, the elder,
do not allow myself to be put on the defensive. The young, no matter
how loud they get, have no real desire to humiliate their elders and, if
and when they succeed in doing so, are lonely, crushed, and miserable,
as only the young can be" (Baldwin 1985C: 674). The passage is eloquent,
admirable ... and utterly, utterly unpersuasive.
Baldwin and I stayed in touch, on and off, through the intervening years,
often dining at the Ginger Man when he was in New York. Sometimes
he would introduce me to his current lover or speak of his upcoming
projects. But I did not return to St. Paul de Vence until shortly after his
death in 1987, when my wife and I went to meet his brother, David.
St. Paul had changed remarkably in the twenty or so years since Bald-
win settled there. The demand for vacation homes and rental property
had claimed much of the farmland that once supported the city and
supplied its needs. Luxury homes dotted the landscape on quarter-acre
plots, and in the midst of this congestion stood Baldwin's ten acre oasis,
the only undivided farm acreage left in St. Paul. Only, now the grape
arbors were strung with electric lights.
There we had a reunion with Bernard Hassell, Jimmy's loving friend
of so many decades, and met Lucien Happersberger, the friend to whom
Giovanni's Room is dedicated. After a week of drinking and reminiscing,
David Baldwin asked me just when I had met Jimmy for the first time. As
I recounted the events of our visit in 1973, David's wide eyes grew wider.
He rose from the table, went downstairs into Jimmy's study-where a
wall of works by and about Henry James faces you as you enter - and
emerged with a manuscript in hand. "This is for you," he said.
He handed me a play entitled "The Welcome Table," the last work
Jimmy completed as he suffered through his final illness. The play was
set in the Riviera, at a house much like his own, and among the prin-
cipal characters were "Edith, an actress-singer/star: Creole, from New
Orleans," "Daniel, ex-black Panther, fledgling playwright" with more
than a passing resemblance to Cecil Brown, and "Peter Davis, Black
American journalist." Peter Davis - who has come to interview a famous
star and whose prodding questions lead to the play's revelations - was, I
should say, a far better and more aggressive interviewer than I was, but
of course Baldwin, being Baldwin, had transmuted the occasion into a
searching drama of revelation and crisis. Reading it made me think of all
the questions I had left unasked. It was and is a vain regret. Jimmy loved
to talk and he loved language, but his answers only left me with more
questions.
Narratives of decline have the appeal of simplicity, but Baldwin's career
will not fit that mold. "Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies,
in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death
must always seem untimely," Baldwin wrote in 1961, giving us fair warn-
ing. "This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and
searching" (Baldwin 1961: 187). Reading his late essays, I see him em-
barking on a period of intellectual resurgence. I think he was finding
his course, exploring the instability of all the categories that divide us.
As he wrote in "Here Be Dragons," an essay published two years before
his death and with which he chose to conclude The Price of the Ticket,
his collected nonfiction: "[Elach of us, helplessly and forever, contains
the other-male in female, female in male, white in black, and black
in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear
to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very
often, do 1. But none of us can do anything about it" (Baldwin 1985d:
690). We needed to hear these words two decades ago. We need to hear
them now.
Times change. An influential intellectual avant-garde in black Brit-
ain has resurrected Baldwin as a patron saint, and a new generation of
readers has come to value just those qualities of ambivalence and equivo-
cality, just that sense of the contingency of identity, that made him
useless to the ideologues of liberation and anathema to so many black
nationalists. Even his fiercest antagonists seem now to have welcomed
him back to the fold. Like everyone else, I guess, we like our heroes dead.
REFERENCES
Baldwin, James
1961 Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell).
1962 The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell).
1968 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (New York: Dial Press).
1973 "Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin," Black Scholar 5: 33-42.
1985a [1955] Notes of a Native Son, in The Price of the Ticket, 127-46 (New York:
St. Martin's Press).
This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:11:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms320 HENRY LOUIS GATES JR,
1985b [1972] No Name in the Street, in The Price of the Ticket, 448-552 (New
York: St. Martin's Press),
1985C [1980] "Notes on the House of Bondage," in The Price of the Ticket, 667-
75 (New York: St, Martin's Press),
1985d "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," reprinted as "Here Be
Dragons," in The Price of the Ticket, 677-90 (New York: St. Martin's Press),
Cleaver, Eldridge
1968 Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill),
Jones, Leroi
1966 [1963] "Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots," in Home: Social Essays (New
York: William Morrow),
Leeming, David
1994 James Baldwin (New York: Knopf),