Letter to Jimmy Read online

  ISBN 978-1-61902-421-2 (eBook)

  Copyright © Alain Mabanckou 2014

  Translation Copyright © Sara Meli Ansari 2014

  First published by Editions Fayard, France, 2007

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mabanckou, Alain, 1966– author.

  [Lettre à Jimmy. English]

  Letter to Jimmy : on the twentieth anniversary of your death / Alain Mabanckou ; translated by Sara Meli Ansari.

  pages cm

  1.Baldwin, James, 1924-1987—Criticism and interpretation. 2.African Americans in literature.I. Ansari, Sara Meli, translator. II. Title.

  PS3552.A45Z7813 2014

  818’.5409—dc23

  2014022425

  Cover design by quemadura

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  SOFT SKULL PRESS

  An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Ste. 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  But more important than that, perhaps, was the relationship between American Negroes and Africans and Algerians in Paris . . . . It didn’t demand any spectacular degree of perception to realize that I was treated, insofar as I was noticed at all, differently from them because I had an American passport. I may not have liked this fact: but it was a fact . . . if I were an African, [Paris] would have been a very different city to me.

  JAMES BALDWIN,

  in an interview from December 29, 1961,

  in Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press

  of Mississippi, 1989.

  Contents

  foreword: the Santa Monica wanderer

  1.a brave mother, and a father who did not love himself

  2.the Harlem schoolboy and the Bible

  3.in the footsteps of Professor Wright

  4.the destruction of idols: from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son

  5.black, bastard, gay and a writer

  6.between the black American and the African: misunderstanding

  7.the years of fire

  8.on black anti-semitism

  9.the ghost of Saint-Paul-de-Vence

  10.on the need to read or reread you today

  afterword: dialogue with Ralph, the invisible man

  postscript: James Baldwin the brother, the father

  endnotes

  foreword

  the Santa Monica wanderer

  As the seagulls desert Santa Monica State Beach, and a small boat pitches on the waves in the distance, I sense your presence as I do each time I wander here. I fix my eyes on the horizon, watch the fading of the sun, and I stretch myself out on the sand. The clouds seem to form shadowy figures—today an elderly woman with an unsteady step.

  I want to forget the world around me: the hubbub of the street, images of movies I have recently seen, the books still open on my desk.

  In truth I envy the wanderer I see at the other end of Santa Monica beach, a gray beard he has not shaven in years falling to his chest. Never has a stranger so fully captured my imagination, prompting me to trail him, as if I expected him to reveal the key to the mysteries that confront me when I read your work. I cannot stop myself from wondering about his life, with the secret hope that one day I will find a way to speak to him about you. I know that he will take the time to listen to me; he spends his day conversing with invisible beings, throwing his head back in laughter for no apparent reason, urinating at the foot of a tree, forgetting to zip his pants, getting irritated by a flock of gulls, then sits down on his shoes, worn through from wandering. But the strangest thing, Jimmy, is that he will build colossal sand castles, where he must dream of ruling as king of his own fantasies, with his court, his family, his subjects and his guard. Then suddenly he will demolish his kingdom with a nervous kick of the foot, and again return to being a wreck of a man.

  Dejected, he will roam over toward the great Ferris wheel of Pacific Park, which ordinarily draws the Santa Monica tourists. I have seen him remove a bowl from a pocket in his ragged clothes and beg until nightfall. He seems like a character lifted straight from the pages of one of your novels!

  It is to him, to this wanderer, that I dedicate this letter.

  1.

  a brave mother, and a father who did not love himself

  The photo is in front of me, hanging on the wall. Your eyes are the first to capture my attention. Those big eyes—prominent on your face, that once mocked your father, unaware that they would later peer into souls, or that they would pierce through the darkest part of humanity, before closing forever—still hold their power to search deeply, even from the next life.

  Eyes lifted skyward, eyebrows raised high. What are you thinking at the moment the photographer focuses his lens on you?

  The picture is in black and white.

  It looks to me today like an extension of your characters who share your voice, your mannerisms, your laughter, your anger, your exasperation. I linger in vain over your half-smile, a smile no doubt interrupted by the flash as you lifted your head up to the right; I know its mystery will remain.

  You wear a white collared shirt with long sleeves, your black tie loosened, a cigarette wedged between your index and middle fingers. Each crease on your face casts a spell. Studying you this way, I sometimes imagine that we are building a dialogue, and that you are listening to me, entertained by my unanswerable questions.

  When I turn over the photo—it has become a reflex—I read aloud the few words I have scribbled there: “What’s the weather like in heaven, Jimmy?”

  •••

  The photo carries me back to the 1920s, to the front of a public building, Harlem Hospital, in New York City. Emma Berdis Jones is twenty-eight years old at the time. On the 2nd of August 1924, she delivers a child out of wedlock, who is, as a result, illegitimate—a bastard. And you, you enter the world through the back door. Your eyes are not bothered by the light; they make out the environment, recording for later the wounds of a torn and quartered society built on a patchwork of “ethnicities.” Some people dominate, direct, decide. Others just endure, abide the ghetto borders, and do not have the right to sit next to the white man on public transportation . . .

  Emma Berdis Jones is certain that anyone who comes to this world through the back door will rise up one day. However, at this time in her life, her existence is as unstable as it can be. She takes odd jobs. More often than not, she gets placed as a housekeeper. After your birth, she tells herself that her days of wandering are finally over: she left behind Deal Island, Maryland, then Philadelphia, before dropping anchor in New York. It is there that she met David Baldwin, a man who could have been her father, but who agrees to become yours. This is a man whose oldest daughter, from a first marriage, is older than your mother, while his youngest son, Samuel, is eight years your senior. This is the man who gives you your name. And Emma, to whom you dedicate your masterpiece, No Name in the Street, has only one obsession: to give you a name.

  What is a name, after all? Almost nothing. But a name says everything, and introduces us to the world.

  We wear it with pride if we can attach it to a glorious past. It becomes an embarrassment when it suggests “illegitimacy.” You would not keep your mother’s name, Jones, for very long, since in 1927, three years after your birth, she marries David Baldwin.

  On that day
, you become James Arthur Baldwin . . .

  You would keep this name until the end of your days, without ever rejecting or changing it, unlike other stars of African-American history: Malcolm Little (who became Malcolm El Shabbaz, then Malcolm X) or Marcellus Cassius Clay, Jr. (who became Muhammad Ali), or the playwright and poet Everett LeRoi Jones (who became Amiri Baraka).

  By keeping the name “Baldwin,” you are aware of perpetuating despite yourself a lineage forged of lurid relationships, domination, whipping, and slavery. You are, in reality, just the “Negro” of some Baldwin, a “white slave owner who, several centuries earlier, had entered into possession of one of the ancestors of David.”1

  Between those who advocate a return to roots—captivated by Pan-Africanist leaders like Marcus Garvey—and black Americans who replace their family name with an X to signal their affiliation with the Nation of Islam, you identify your situation as even more complex because of your double illegitimacy: the intimate illegitimacy, through your unknown biological father; and the historic, distant one, a product of slavery. The letter X, in vogue at the time, represents the unknown in an equation that has yet to be solved. It is the symbol of a very long path to be rebuilt, that leads all the way back to the remote village on the “dark continent,” where your African ancestors were captured and torn from their lands by slave traders: “The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as ‘the so-called American Negro’ and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter ‘X.’”2

  Through the name Baldwin, you want to attach a meaning to your descent from a slave owner—and a slave—of history’s transgressions, the violence and humiliation suffered: “I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross.”3

  •••

  Were you born on the right side of things? Do you have the right skin color?

  You admire your mother, a “small courageous woman,” Emma, the epitome of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice. She has nine children to care for, and she fears that she cannot manage to raise them because of the street, because of “this Harlem ghetto” where “rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are carefully shopped for and seldom bought.”4

  The Harlem in which you live is a pile of hovels, a den of prostitution and of drugs, tuberculosis, alcoholism and crime. Above all, it is the scene of the most appalling racial atrocities that often unfold under police watch, when they themselves are not committing the acts or are not pulling the strings behind the curtains. Emma Berdis Jones warns you against “the street” that corrupts, derails and perverts.

  The feeling there is of an abandoned neighborhood, separate from the rest of New York. And when riots erupt on March 19, 1935, after the murder of a black man by a white police officer—several thousand men take it out on white-owned businesses, causing a good portion of the middle-class to flee the neighborhood—you see that, despite the widespread indignation, political figures merely make endless speeches, set up committees, and tear down a few hovels to replace them with housing projects. They still do not take concrete and effective steps to “. . . right the wrong, however, without expanding or demolishing the ghetto.” And this futile activity seems to you “about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”5

  An entire universe exists between the ghetto and the heart of the city, situated only a few blocks apart.

  When you go to the public library on 42nd Street, you get the feeling of entering another world. In this area, most people are homeowners. And they make sure you know it, you outsiders, you people of color. If necessary, the police will also see to it that you understand.

  Under these circumstances, you and your brothers conclude that Emma is too inclined to absolution and indulgence toward her fellow man: the exact opposite of David Baldwin. She is the one who reminds you, “You have lots of brothers and sisters . . . You don’t know what’s going to happen to them. So you’re to treat everybody like your brothers and sisters. Love them.” 6

  Who are these siblings in need of protection? Barbara, Gloria, Paula, Ruth—your sisters. And your brothers: Samuel, George, Wilmer and David. Your father’s obsession with the name David is obvious: not only is it his name, but he already had a son with this name from a previous union at the time he married your mother. He then gives the same name to one of your younger brothers. One might say that yours is “the house of David.”

  While Emma embodies security and familial protection, David is distant and consumed by his religious faith. Although he is a factory worker, he proudly dons a dark jacket and brushed black hat every Sunday. Then, with a Bible tucked under his arm, he preaches in the abandoned warehouses of Harlem.

  To suffer through everything without complaint, is Emma Berdis a saint?

  “I would not describe her as a saint, which is a terrible thing to do. I think she is a beautiful woman . . . When I think about her, I wonder how in the world she did it, how she managed that block, those streets, that subway, nine children. No saint would have gotten through it! But she is a beautiful, a fantastic woman. She saved all our lives.” 7

  So what happened to your biological father?

  You do not know him, and you will never know him. This mystery will be one of the greatest torments of your adolescence. The shadows cast by this dark cloud scatter themselves through most of your writing. Your friend and biographer David Leeming explains how much the idea of “illegitimacy” remained a constant preoccupation for you, to the point that it can be detected in the titles of several of your books: Nobody Knows My Name, Stranger in the Village . . .”8

  Leeming nevertheless specifies that although the search for a father haunted you, it was not just for your biological father—you consider David Baldwin to be your own father, and when you mention him, you express a certain pride in bearing his name. In fact, as your biographer points out, you dreamed of a father who would accompany you on your long path to writing, and in your work as a preacher, to which David Baldwin was particularly attached. But starting in your adolescence and at the time you became a pastor, an even more complicated relationship developed between the two of you, as another of your biographers, Benoît Depardieu, explains: “By entering religion, in becoming a pastor-preacher, young James was turning toward another father, God the Father, and in so doing he hoped not only to escape from David Baldwin, his stepfather, but also to take his place by defying him and surpassing him in his own domain. This desire to compete with the father and to defeat him demonstrates a common oedipal complex.”9

  David Baldwin cannot imagine an existence without his work as a preacher. This is all the more true since he sees before him every day the stigma of what he holds to be the greatest injustice: his own mother who lives with you, Barbara Ann Baldwin, was a former slave. Every black American is linked to the history of slavery. But Barbara Ann Baldwin is there in the flesh, and her history is not confined to textbooks; it is written across the downcast eyes of the old woman.

  David Baldwin draws his entire family into his religious zeal. He has a rigid idea of Biblical teachings. Is it this rigidity that persuades him to have such a large family, since the Bible applauds fertility and mankind’s continuous reproduction?

  In one way or another, it is your relationship with this man that will inform your views on American society and on interracial relations. You feel a sense of urgency to understand what feeds his hatred of the Other. Deep down, even if you devote yourself to admiring this hard and rigid being, you do not share the same understanding of the world, his view of the black man’s place in the world, nor his unwavering hostility toward the white man. The “murder” of the father will be symbolized by the “hatred” you
harbor toward him. But does David Baldwin even love himself? He is not happy, to say the least. Never has anyone despised himself so much, you will tell yourself. He goes so far as to blame himself for the color of his skin. He will spend his life apologizing for it in all of his actions and believing that religion is the only path to salvation. In his mind, Leeming reminds us, even if the “white demon” does not recognize him as a human being in this world, God the Omnipotent, in His goodness and fairness, will rectify the injustice. This explains his antipathy toward IRS agents, landlords, and all whites who, in his mind, exercise a certain abusive power over blacks. However, he gathers through his daily reading of the Holy Book that the power of the white world is ephemeral, and that God will come one day to set the record straight. And on that day, the believers, the true believers, will have the upper hand over the non-believers.

  This Manichean understanding commits him to absolute distrust. Since the world has always been corrupt, there can never be any cooperation between whites and blacks—the latter will always lose in that fool’s errand. As a result, the few whites who ever cross the threshold of your home are social workers or bill collectors. These public employees are not protected from the fury of the master of the house, although your mother still scurries around to receive them. David Baldwin, on the other hand, will bellow about the “violation of his domestic privacy,” and you all fear that his pride will drive him to commit the unthinkable.

  •••

  During your childhood, you have countless opportunities to witness the extent to which your father distrusts the white man, whoever he may be, even if he has the best intentions in the world. For David Baldwin, it is not only the white man who is bad: all white people are, without exception.

  You tell the story of a white school-teacher who had to confront your suspicious father when she got the notion to take you to the theater. You were nine or ten years old, and you had just written a play that the school-teacher, devoted and admiring as she was, had already put on at school. She believed that in order to complement your education in drama, you had to live the theater, watch actors perform, feel the emotion of the audience. But at home, the theater, as well as movies and books, synonyms of perversion and of the grasp of the “white demon,” were forbidden. So was jazz, the “music of bought Negros,” that fascinates men of color who are caught in the trap of the white demon. David Baldwin took the invitation to the theater as an insult, a challenge to his authority, and an intrusion by a malicious force into the house of God. He has the habit of repeating a citation from the Bible: “As my house and myself, we will serve the Lord.” Never mind that he is incapable of meeting the needs of his family, or that his sons are reduced to engaging in an activity that young black men of the time could not shake: they were shoe-shiners, whose “pathetic” image was further perpetuated through advertisements. It was an image as moving as that of a “darky bootblack doing a buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins.”10 Moreover, David Baldwin does not hold it against his wife for working as a maid in white homes. If money does not have a smell, one might add here, too, that it does not have a color . . .