Letter to Jimmy Read online

  That a white woman should offer to take one of David Baldwin’s sons to the theater is nevertheless enough to ignite his indignation. He immediately called into question the school-teacher’s interest in his son, convinced that behind her motivation and zeal there were some diabolical games at play: the white man is always out to get the black man. It was therefore against your father’s will that the school-teacher should help you experience the emotion of a theatrical performance for the first time.

  Would David Baldwin have had the same reaction if the school-teacher had been a woman of color? Certainly not. You would hold on to these words for the rest of your life: “. . . he warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my friends, and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.”11

  •••

  David Baldwin is black, and does not realize that he is beautiful, you point out. You add that he dies with a fierce conviction of his ugliness. No doubt overcome by his own frustration, he makes tasteless jokes about your “ugliness” and your “big eyes” to the point of saying that you are the most unfortunate child he has ever laid eyes on. You were affected for a long time by his idea of ugliness. At a young age, we end up accepting what is said about us, especially when it comes from adults. It remains this way until something comes along to contradict those early notions, to make things right, even if only superficially.

  You study yourself. You think about these eyes, so prominent on your face, that you inherited from Emma Berdis Jones, and you ask yourself if your father might not be right. What purpose could these big eyes serve? Why do they protrude so much? Had Mother Nature really punished you, or was she distinguishing you in some way? Desperation grips you. How many times have you told the story that made you discover that there is always something “uglier” than oneself in this world? In fact, when you were still just a child, you saw in the street, from a window in your apartment, a woman with eyes even more prominent than yours, with, on top of everything, and as if nature had had it in for her, oversized lips. You conclude that she is uglier than you. You run to tell your mother, to console her, to prove to her that you no longer have any reason to be tormented by this physical detail, and that human beings are judged by the quality of their souls . . .

  In fact, when David Baldwin focuses on your supposed ugliness, when he makes it the subject of his frequent tormenting, he hits your weak spot, and from it you draw a painful conclusion about the consequences of being a “bastard”: through his behavior, your step-father is indirectly attacking your biological father . . . This leads you to regret yourself, and to reproach this unknown man, your biological father, for having approached Emma, and having transmitted to you her physical disgrace; impossible to erase, obvious at first glace. From that point forward, when you rest your big eyes on him, you imagine a pathetic being—a very old, frozen statue . . .

  Despite his despicable character that suggests David Baldwin is completely cold to his family—to the point that you describe him as “a monster in the house. Maybe he saved all kinds of souls, but he lost all of his children, every single one of them,” a monster experiencing a visceral aversion toward the white race—you also remember moments where this man seemed to you at last like a devoted father: human, feeling, attentive, managing the best he could for his family. You remember a time when your mother would carry you on her shoulders, and David Baldwin would be walking beside her, smiling at you. You remember, too, the image of this old man offering you candy.

  But very quickly you recall the harsh reality of your father who pronounces you good-for-nothing, and does not hesitate to beat you to a pulp when you lose the change you are given to buy kerosene for heating the family home. Did this hateful man prepare you for life’s battles? You say your father “. . . was perhaps too old to have as many children in a strange land as he had. The world was changing so fast, and he was in such trouble that he could not change with it . . . He had nine children he could hardly feed. His pain was so great that he translated himself into silence, rigidity . . . sometimes into beating us and finally into madness . . . Without him I might be dead because knowing his life and his pain taught me how to fight.”14

  This man sets up barriers between himself and others. He has difficulty maintaining close relationships with his friends who, one by one, distance themselves from him little by little. He is sick for years, but the illness from which he suffers is far from being physical: everything happens in his head, in his mind, to the point that you can no longer grasp the internal pain of a being who slides into the most extreme paranoia, stands in front of the window for hours reciting prayers and humming religious songs. It is in this distant, celestial world that he feels best. From this point forward, his hatred is out in the open. One might even say that he resents his nine children, resents their entry into this repulsive world that does not acknowledge him and that the Lord will make disappear. The paranoia reaches its peak when he begins to refuse to eat at home, convinced that his own family is plotting to poison him . . .

  •••

  You are forced to take the place of your “unfit,” gruff, austere father, distrusting of his own family. You help your mother in her difficult role as mother and head of household, without asking yourself whether this role should fall instead into the hands of Samuel, David Baldwin’s son from his previous marriage and several years your senior. Still, you marvel at his courage, which he displayed when he saved you from drowning, for example . . . Would this episode itself earn you the name “Moses,” who wrote the story of Israel and led his people out of Egypt to deliver them from slavery? Perhaps you, too, have a mission on this Earth, and this mission is passed to you through the knowledge of God, and through the freedom of writing.

  Being saved by Samuel marks you, and you bring this up in No Name in the Street. The figure of this half-brother would run through Go Tell It on the Mountain and again in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, then in Just Above My Head . . . The importance of the brother is magnified, his love nearly Christ-like, his arms protective, pulling you to life while the water is trying to swallow you whole . . . .

  In the end, isn’t life, too, a vast wave that threatens to wash away the home if the father shuts his family out? Because you shoulder nearly the entire burden of father of the house, you become the one to whom the other children turn. You are a savior in your own right. Most of your biographers describe the same image of you from this period: a book in one hand, while tending to one of your brothers or sisters with the other.

  David Baldwin knows that there is nothing more he can do. He knows that he cannot slow down your rush toward independence, nor distract your gaze from the page any more than he can stop your frequent visits to the neighborhood public library, or your increasing distance from religion. For him this is a failure. Until this point, to his great joy, you still belonged to the movement of young preachers, and had preached on countless occasions. You were preaching from the age of fourteen in Baptist churches. It was what David Baldwin wanted. This paternal wish comes through in the introduction to Go Tell It On the Mountain: “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”

  At fourteen years of age, you are considered a good preacher, and very inspired. You become aware of the power of the word. From high on the pulpit, the faith of an entire population hangs from your lips. These black women, men and children are convinced that the words you speak come through your mouth from the Almighty. You know the Bible by heart, and the rhetoric and poetry you breathe into your sermons further inspire the audience, won over by your preaching.15

 
Until that time, the church had been your refuge. You believe it is the only place that can save you from the cruelty of the street. You think of how, in Harlem, police officers stop you, search you; they try to get a rise out of you by yelling insults about your background, the sexuality of black men, even leaving you unconscious in an abandoned lot. It is a violence from which age will not protect you, since already at thirteen, when you are making your way down Fifth Avenue toward the public library on 42nd Street, a policeman shouts at you, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?”16

  Young people your age are wrong, you believe, not to seek shelter in the house of the Lord. You encounter a number of these young, lost souls, given to debauchery, on a daily basis. It is mostly the metamorphosis of the girls and boys you see in choir practice at church that stuns you. They grow and their features change. The girls “give off heat,” their chests swell and their hips become round. The boys drink, smoke and discover the pleasures of the flesh. You imagine what you will be like, what you will become when your body has changed, too, and when your voice becomes deeper. You are wracked with anxiety: will you find yourself in the company of “the most depraved individuals of this world?”17 Your biggest fear is the same one that grips every other black adolescent in the neighborhood: the fear of ending up like a stray dog, no higher on the social ladder than your father: “School therefore began to seem like a game that was impossible to win, so boys stop attending and started looking for work.”18

  Three years more and you would be long gone from the church. Your mind is elsewhere. You can only think of one thing: “to be an honest man and a good writer.”19

  •••

  The reasons for your break with the church? You outline them in The Fire Next Time. You begin to understand that religion as it is will not help you obtain love from your fellow man, at least not as far as people of color are concerned. The Bible itself sews a seed of doubt in your mind: “People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. I was forced, reluctantly, to realize that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read, and I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper.”20

  Your disappointment is immense. You saw how churches operated, whether they were white or black churches. You saw that certain ministers became rich at the expense of the faithful, who are always asked to give more: more faith, more charity work, more alms. From the faithful, everything is squeezed out, down to the “last cent,” you write. You now know that when you preach, Bible in hand, sweat dripping from your forehead, you are no longer held by the force that used to lift your spirits and persuade the poor that a better world was in store; a Heaven where a spot, even a numbered one, was reserved for them on the right-hand side of the Lord. So on this poor, attentive flock you cast a gaze of compassion and guilt: compassion for the degradation of their daily lives, and guilt for being among those who ignore that reality. You feel as though you are leading them astray: “. . . when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike.”21

  How much longer will you be able to hold on?

  At 17, you make your decision. And it is a permanent one, since you feel your grievances grow and grow against the Lord you have been serving for three years. You discover that instead of helping you find the peace you desire, religion throws you into profound loneliness. When called upon, you are nothing more than a puppet, a kind of messenger who goes against the best interests of his people. They are hungry, and you promise them riches in another world. They have no home, and you assure them that God will provide for them.

  Faced with such realizations, your criticisms of the Holy Book are unforgiving. This book had helped brand an eternal curse onto the skin of the black man: “I was aware of the fact that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that according to many Christians, I was a descendent of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave.”22

  •••

  Your “hatred” toward David Baldwin evolves into forgiveness the day that you see him dying on his hospital bed. He is a battered man, almost unrecognizable. Do you have to continue to be angry with him? With some perspective, you declare: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”23

  At the time of his death, on July 29, 1943, you become aware of the affection you felt for this being. As if looking for reasons to love him, you flip through the family photo album: your stepfather dressed to the nines to preach on a Sunday. It is a sublime image, you think. And you imagine David Baldwin “naked, with war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears.”24 The impenetrable forehead, those serious features. It is his bitterness that you do not try to explain to yourself, the bitterness that he would take to the grave, “because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.”25

  When he is hospitalized, you discover that he has a serious case of tuberculosis. But you know that the enemy is not tuberculosis, that it is something else incurable, invisible, far from the diagnosis the doctors have issued from high on their pulpit. The thing that takes David Baldwin away is the “disease of his mind,” the one that has been eating away at him from the inside for years: “. . . the disease of his mind helped the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him.”26

  2.

  the Harlem schoolboy and the Bible

  I am still staring at your photo.

  I blow on it lightly to remove the dust, but I do so with the hope that I will awaken the memories enclosed within it. I see a little black boy, a fragile boy, who is crossing the street to his public school while the world is facing the economic crisis of 1929. Wall Street is not far from where this photo was taken. History will always follow in your footsteps.

  One person in this institution has an impact on you: Gertrude E. Ayer, the first woman of color to become a public school director in New York City. She reaches out to you, watches out for you, guides you. Gertrude appears in Go Tell It on the Mountain, encouraging the young John Grimes in his studies. However, another woman, a white woman, seems to have helped you, and toward her you display an ingratitude that is surprising, to say the least, as Benoît Depardieu seems to reproach: “Strangely, Orilla Miller, a young, white school-teacher, the other key figure in his elementary school years, remains eternally absent from his fiction. He makes reference to her in several of his essays, but she never appears in any of his novels or short stories in any form whatsoever . . . She undertakes the literary, theatrical, and cinematic education of the young James Baldwin, and even went so far as meeting the Baldwin family. [. . .] Orilla Miller played a particularly important role in shaping the way James understood whites and their world.”27

  It is Orilla Miller who puts on your first play. It is she who endures the wrath of your father when she wants to take you to the theater. But her persistence would win out over David Baldwin’s reluctance. She does not stop after the first victory. You visit museums with her, watch films together, share with her a passion for Charles Dickens. Orilla Miller almost becomes a member of your family, and you become a part of hers, where you discuss politics with her husband, Evan Winfield, which broadens your understanding of American society even further. You later admit that you realized, “Whites did not act as they did because they were white, but for other reasons.”28 These social meetings, which, according to Leeming, probably occur unbeknownst to David Baldwin, correct your view of the white world. From this point forward, your view of that world will be based on considering each person
individually, and not on a systematic condemnation of an entire group of people. You refuse the simplistic syllogism: a white man kills a black man, and since Paul is white, Paul also kills black men.

  Are all white people bad? Black Muslims are inclined to say yes.

  Can whites and blacks intermarry? No, would again be the answer from Black Muslims.

  And when, many years later, as an adult, you are invited to the home of the head of the Nation of Islam at the time, Elijah Muhammad, he will warn you of the “holocaust” awaiting the white world. This discourse of the black American Muslims brings up bitter memories for you. You cannot erase the looming figure of David Baldwin from your thoughts. You will feel more solidarity than ever with the “other side,” destined for Gehenna according to Elijah Muhammad: “I felt I was back in my father’s house—as indeed, in a way, I was—and I told Elijah I did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them . . .”29