James Baldwin

• 1. Introduction

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  The FBI file on James Baldwin ran to 1,884 pages, gathered from 1960 until the early 1970s. In that era of surveillance of American writers, agents filled 276 pages on Richard Wright and 110 on Truman Capote. Henry Miller rated just nine. Baldwin wrote essays, novels, plays and poems, and he was also one of the most recognizable speakers of the civil rights years. What made a man whose tools were sentences worth so much attention? The answers lie in Harlem, in Greenwich Village, in Paris, and finally in a house in southern France that did not survive him. Along the way, one question keeps returning. How does a writer turn private humiliation into public argument, and what does it cost him?

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• 2. A Stepfather's House

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  James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones at Harlem Hospital on the 2nd of August 1924. His mother, Emma Berdis Jones, was born on Deal Island, Maryland, in 1903. She reached Harlem at 19, one of many people fleeing Southern segregation during the Great Migration. Emma never told her son who his biological father was. In 1927 she married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. David was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, preached in New Orleans, and left the South for Harlem in 1919.

  Emma and David had eight children together, and James, the eldest, took his stepfather's surname. He called David simply "father" for the rest of his life. He learned the truth about his parentage in late 1940, when he overheard a remark during a conversation between his parents. He told his school friend Emile Capouya about it in tears.

  Even James could not say exactly how old David was. The man was much older than Emma and may have been born before the Emancipation in 1863. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the family until she died when James was seven. David's own father had been born into enslavement.

  The two Baldwins nearly came to blows on several occasions. Biographer David Leeming wrote that they fought because James read books, liked movies and had white friends. David saw all three as threats to the boy's "salvation." Another biographer described a man who hated white people and hoped God would take revenge on them for him.

  David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory in the 1920s and 1930s until he was laid off. His anger seeped into his sermons, and congregations wanted him less. At home the children feared him, though their mother's love balanced some of that. Near the end of his life he grew paranoid. He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on the 29th of July that year. On that same day, Emma gave birth to their last child, Paula.

  James had visited the dying man the day before, at his mother's urging. The funeral fell on his 19th birthday, just as the Harlem riot was beginning. He made a kind of peace on the page in the essay "Notes of a Native Son." He wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him."

  As the oldest child, James took part-time work from an early age to help support the family. Around him he saw poverty and discrimination, and friends from his church pew drifted into drugs, crime and prostitution. Biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs read one of his lines as a verdict on the entire Black experience in America. Baldwin wrote: "I never had a childhood... I did not have any human identity... I was born dead."

  He rarely wrote or spoke about his mother. When he did, he admired her and pointed to her loving smile.

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• 3. Library and Pulpit

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  At five years old, Baldwin was enrolled at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal there was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first Black principal in the city. She and several teachers spotted his brilliance early. Ayer credited his mother, whose notes to school the teachers admired, as the source of his gift. She said the boy learned to write "like an angel, albeit an avenging one."

  By fifth grade he had read Dostoyevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. The Dickens novel started an interest that never left him. A song he wrote earned a letter of praise from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. A short story won a prize and ran in a church newspaper. His teachers sent him to the public library on 135th Street, which became his sanctuary. On his deathbed he asked that his papers and effects be deposited there.

  One teacher at P.S. 24 mattered more than most. Orilla "Bill" Miller was a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest. Baldwin named her as a reason he never really managed to hate white people. She took him to an all-Black production of Orson Welles's Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre. It gave him a lifelong wish to succeed as a playwright. David distrusted the stage and distrusted Miller. Emma insisted anyway, reminding her husband that education mattered. Miller later directed the first play Baldwin ever wrote.

  At Frederick Douglass Junior High, two more mentors appeared. Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Black Harvard graduate, advised the school paper, the Douglass Pilot, which Baldwin came to edit. Porter took him to the library on 42nd Street, and that research became Baldwin's first published essay, on Harlem's past and present, in autumn 1937. Countee Cullen, the Harlem Renaissance poet, taught French at the school. Baldwin said he adored Cullen's poetry, and his dream of living in France traced back to Cullen's influence.

  In 1938 he entered De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white and Jewish school. On the literary magazine, the Magpie, he worked beside Richard Avedon, later a noted photographer. Emile Capouya and Sol Stein, both later renowned publishers, were there too. He earned his diploma in 1941, and his yearbook listed his ambition as "novelist-playwright."

  Church offered a different refuge. During his high school years Baldwin discovered that he was attracted to men, and the discovery made him deeply uncomfortable. In 1937 he had joined Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue. When its preacher, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, known as Mother Horn, moved to Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, he followed her. At 14, as "Brother Baldwin," he first took Fireside's altar. In mostly improvised sermons he learned that he had authority as a speaker and could move a crowd. He preached his last sermon there in 1941.

  Years later, in the essay "Down at the Cross," he called the church a mask for self-hatred and despair. He also remembered a rare moment when he and his stepfather truly spoke to each other. David asked: "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?"

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• 4. The Village Years

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  In 1941 Baldwin left school to earn money, taking a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey. In the middle of 1942, Emile Capouya found him work laying track for the military in Belle Mead. The two friends lived in Rocky Hill and commuted. The white workmen, mostly from the South, mocked his sharp, ironic wit and what they called his uppity ways. The prejudice there angered him so deeply that he later cited it as a partial reason for leaving America.

  Two incidents, both recounted in "Notes of a Native Son," drove the lesson home. In Princeton, a restaurant called the Balt kept him waiting and then said that "colored boys" were not served. On his last night in New Jersey, a diner turned away Baldwin and a friend after a movie. He went to another restaurant, expecting the same, and got it. Humiliation and rage took over, and he hurled a water mug at the waitress. It missed her and shattered the mirror behind her. He and his friend narrowly escaped.

  Fired from the track-laying job, he went home to Harlem in June 1943 and took work in a meat-packing plant. He lost that job after falling asleep at the plant. He drifted between odd jobs, drank heavily, and suffered the first of his nervous breakdowns. He feared he was turning into his stepfather, a man who had been unable to provide for his family.

  Beauford Delaney pulled him out of the gloom. Capouya had introduced them in Greenwich Village in the year before Baldwin left high school. Delaney, a modernist painter, became his friend and mentor. He showed Baldwin that a Black man could make a living in art. Wartime Harlem seemed to be withering, so Baldwin moved to the Village, first living with Delaney and then with a scattering of friends.

  He worked at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated place where many prominent Black people dined, under the Trinidadian restaurateur Connie Williams. There he came out to Capouya and to another friend, Stan Weir. He had many one-night stands with men and several relationships with women. His great love of those years was Eugene Worth, a Black man who seemed to be straight. Worth introduced him to the Young People's Socialist League, and Baldwin briefly became a Trotskyist. Baldwin never told Worth of his desire. Worth died by suicide in 1946, jumping from the George Washington Bridge.

  In 1944, at a theater class at The New School, Baldwin met Marlon Brando, to whom he was also attracted. They became fast friends, and the friendship lasted through the Civil Rights Movement and long after. In 1945 Baldwin started a literary magazine, The Generation, with Claire Burch.

  Near the end of 1945 he met Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son had appeared several years earlier. Baldwin hoped to interest Wright in a manuscript then titled "Crying Holy," the seed of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Wright liked it and urged his editors to consider it. A $500 advance from Harper & Brothers vanished with no book to show for it, and Harper declined to publish.

  Worth also opened doors to New York's liberal literary world. Sol Levitas was at The New Leader, Randall Jarrell at The Nation, Elliot Cohen and Robert Warshow at Commentary, and Philip Rahv at Partisan Review. Baldwin wrote many reviews for The New Leader and made his Nation debut in 1947 with a review of Maxim Gorki's Best Short Stories. A year later came his first essay, "The Harlem Ghetto," in Commentary, on anti-Semitism among Black Americans. Baldwin concluded that Harlem was a parody of white America, anti-Semitism included. Jews were the white group Harlem residents met most often, so they stood in for all white people.

  "Journey to Atlanta" followed in The New Leader. It drew on the diary of his younger brother David, who had gone to Atlanta with a singing group. Baldwin used it to unleash irony and scorn on the South, on white radicals, and on ideology itself. That summer he spent two months at Shanks Village, a writers' colony in Woodstock, New York. In October 1948 Commentary published his first fiction, "Previous Condition." It told of a Black man in his twenties evicted from his apartment, a metaphor for white society. Within weeks, Baldwin would be on a plane out of the country.

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• 5. Paris

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  Baldwin landed in Paris on the 11th of November 1948 with forty dollars to his name. He was 24. The trip was made possible by a $1,500 Rosenwald Fellowship, and he gave most of the money to his mother before leaving. The grant had been meant for Unto the Dying Lamb, a book of photographs and essays cataloguing Harlem's churches. He planned it with the photographer Theodore Pelatowski, whom he met through Richard Avedon. The book was never finished, but the funding let him realize a long-held ambition to live in France.

  Over the years he gave many reasons for going: sex, Calvinism, a hostility he feared would turn inward. Above all stood race and the long list of humiliations it had produced. He also refused to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer."

  He spent nine years in and around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with trips to Switzerland, Spain and back to the United States. He stayed with friends and in hotels, most famously Hôtel Verneuil, which sheltered struggling expatriates, mostly writers. He was very poor for most of that time. Among the people he met were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, Truman Capote and Stephen Spender. He also met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy of 17 who had come to France seeking excitement. Happersberger became his partner, and the two stayed friends for thirty-nine years.

  In December 1949, Baldwin was jailed for receiving stolen goods. An American friend had brought him bedsheets taken from another Paris hotel. The charges were dismissed several days later, to laughter in the courtroom. He wrote about it in "Equal in Paris," published in Commentary in 1950. What astonished him was that he was no longer a despised Black man. He was simply an American, no different from the white friend arrested beside him.

  In those years he also turned on his old model. "Everybody's Protest Novel" appeared in 1949 and "Many Thousands Gone" in 1951, and both criticized Richard Wright. Baldwin took Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin as his examples. Protest writing, he argued, concerned itself with theories and the categorizing of human beings, and so denied life. Freedom lay elsewhere, in "the power that will free us from ourselves," found inside "this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness."

  The essays also stated a theme that would recur in his work. White racism toward Black Americans, he argued, was refracted through self-hatred and self-denial. He wrote: "Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves." The essays earned him the label "the most promising young Negro writer since Richard Wright." His relationship with Wright stayed tense but cordial, though Baldwin stopped seeing him as a mentor.

  From the winter of 1951, Baldwin and Happersberger made several trips to Loèches-les-Bains in Switzerland, where Happersberger's family owned a small chateau. The villagers treated Baldwin in ways he found unsettling, though without malice. They had a racial innocence that few Americans could claim. The experience became "Stranger in the Village," printed in Harper's Magazine in October 1953. In it he wrote of a simplicity Americans could never regain. Here, "white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger."

  Beauford Delaney arrived in France in 1953, which one account calls the most important personal event of Baldwin's year. Around then his circle shifted from white bohemians toward Black American expatriates. He grew close to the dancer Bernard Hassell and spent hours at Gordon Heath's club. He met Maya Angelou during her European tour of Porgy and Bess. He also saw the writers Chester Himes and Richard Gibson.

  In 1954 he accepted a fellowship at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire and won a Guggenheim Fellowship. That year he also published The Amen Corner, a three-act play. Its preacher, Sister Margaret, is a fictionalized Mother Horn, struggling with alienation from the people she loves.

  The summer of 1956 brought his lowest point. After an affair with a Black musician named Arnold seemingly failed, Baldwin overdosed on sleeping pills. He regretted it almost at once and called a friend, who had him vomit the pills before the doctor arrived. That September he attended the Congress of Black Writers and Artists. He found it disappointing, since it leaned on European themes while claiming to celebrate African originality.

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• 6. Three Books

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  On the 26th of February 1952, Baldwin mailed the manuscript of Go Tell It on the Mountain from Paris to Alfred A. Knopf in New York. Knopf showed interest several months later, so in April he sailed to the United States aboard the SS Île de France. Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were also on board, and he talked at length with both. He spent about three months with family he had not seen in almost three years. He served as best man at his younger brother David's wedding on the 27th of June.

  Knopf wanted rewrites. Baldwin agreed to revise parts of the book for a $250 advance and a further $750 on completion. Knopf accepted the revision in July. Excerpts ran as "Exodus" in American Mercury and "Roy's Wound" in New World Writing. He sailed back to Europe on the 28th of August, and the novel appeared in May 1953. It came after years of work and a first attempt at a novel in 1938.

  The book follows John Grimes, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, as he fights for his soul on the "threshing floor." The scene echoes another John, the Baptist, born of another Elizabeth. John's family had been blown north by the Great Migration in search of the American Dream, and every one of them is stifled. Racism drives Elizabeth's lover, Richard, to suicide. Florence's lover, Frank, is destroyed by self-hatred of his own Blackness. Gabriel's abuse of the women around him grows from a society that emasculated him, with pious talk as a cover.

  The phrase "in my father's house" echoes through the book and was once its title. The house stands for the family's Harlem apartment, for Harlem itself, for America and its history, and for the "deep heart's core." John's escape comes in a conversion. He sees a crowd of faces, "the despised and rejected," and fears they will swallow his soul. Then, in the novel's words, John "saw the Lord." Biographer David Leeming reads the lesson as one that shaped all of Baldwin's thinking. Release from the self-hatred and chains of historical racism could come only from love.

  Love, to Baldwin, was never safe. It required a risk of commitment and the removal of the masks and taboos that society imposes. Leeming noted that this applied to individual relationships and to politics, economics and race relations alike.

  Notes of a Native Son came from a friend's push. Sol Stein urged Baldwin to publish an essay collection, and Baldwin protested that he was "too young to publish my memoirs." The book appeared in 1955. All its essays had first run between 1948 and 1955 in Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review, The Reporter and Harper's Magazine. Its title nods to Wright's Native Son and to Henry James's Notes of a Son and Brother.

  The collection has three parts. The first treats Black identity for the artist and the human being. The second addresses Black life in America and holds the title essay, sometimes called his best. The third takes the expatriate's view, looking at America from beyond its shores. For many white Americans this was their first meeting with Baldwin. They kept asking why he did not write more essays like those in it.

  Not every reader approved. In The New York Times Book Review, Langston Hughes complained that "Baldwin's viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused." Baldwin often wrote from a white point of view in these essays. At that stage he saw it as a way to escape the rigid categories of protest literature.

  Shortly after he returned to Paris in 1956, Dial Press accepted Giovanni's Room, and it came out that autumn. The novel caused great controversy because of its explicit homoerotic content. Readers expected a book about African-American experience. Instead it is mostly about white characters. David, in Paris, is engaged to Hella, who is away in Spain. He meets Giovanni in a bar, and the two grow close. Confused by his feelings, David has sex with a woman to reassure himself of his heterosexuality. Giovanni begins to prostitute himself and then commits a murder, for which he is guillotined.

  Biographer James Campbell sums up David's failure as an inability to face love when he finds it. The murder plot drew on a real killing in 1943-44. The Columbia undergraduate Lucien Carr stabbed an older man, David Kammerer, who had made a pass at him. To Baldwin's relief, reviews were positive and his family did not criticize the subject matter. His next novel was already under way, and he would finish Another Country in Istanbul, dating its last page the 10th of December 1961.

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• 7. The Public Witness

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  In July 1957, after a brief visit with Édith Piaf, Baldwin sailed for New York. Beauford Delaney was particularly upset by his departure. Delaney had begun to drink heavily and showed early signs of mental decline. One image moved Baldwin powerfully: Dorothy Counts, a young girl, braving a mob while trying to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina. Philip Rahv of Partisan Review suggested he report on the South. Baldwin was nervous but went, interviewing people in Charlotte, where he met Martin Luther King Jr., and in Montgomery, Alabama. The results were two essays, "The Hard Kind of Courage" in Harper's and "Nobody Knows My Name" in Partisan Review.

  He aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Joining CORE let him travel and lecture across the South. On a 1963 tour that took him to Durham, Greensboro and New Orleans, he spoke to students and white liberals. His position sat between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King Jr.

  In 1962 The New Yorker printed his long essay "Down at the Cross" under the title "Letter from a Region of My Mind." Combined with a shorter piece from The Progressive, it became the 1963 book The Fire Next Time. It examined the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the growing Black Muslim movement. Time put him on its cover on the 17th of May 1963. Time said: "There is not another writer who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South."

  Black nationalists criticized his conciliatory tone. They doubted that a message of love and understanding would change race relations. Meanwhile white readers devoured the book, hunting for an answer to what Black Americans really wanted.

  During the Birmingham riot of 1963, Baldwin cabled Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He blamed the violence on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Senator James Eastland and President Kennedy, who had not used the great prestige of his office as a moral forum. Kennedy invited him to breakfast and then met Baldwin and the guests he had invited at Kennedy's Manhattan apartment. They included the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, who had played a key role in Brown v. Board of Education, along with Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry. Most attendees left feeling "devastated." Still, the meeting presented civil rights as a moral issue and not merely a political one.

  On the 28th of August 1963, Baldwin appeared at the March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and his friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando. He was conspicuously not invited to speak. That was part of a wider exclusion from the movement's inner circles because of his sexuality. The movement was hostile to homosexuals, and the only overtly queer men in it were Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. King's key advisor, Stanley Levison, said the two men were "better qualified to lead a homo-sexual movement than a civil rights movement." King later distanced himself from both.

  Three weeks after the march, a bombing at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church led Baldwin to call for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience. He went to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC ran a voter registration drive. There he watched mothers with babies and elderly people stand for hours in long lines while armed deputies and state troopers looked on. That evening he spoke in a crowded church and blamed "the good white people on the hill" in Washington. In March 1965 he joined the marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery under federal troop protection.

  That same year he debated William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union in the UK. The question was whether the American dream had been achieved at the expense of African Americans. The student audience voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin's favor.

  In 1968 Baldwin signed a pledge refusing to pay income tax in protest of the Vietnam War. His support for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had already led the FBI to open a file on him. Yet he resisted the label "civil rights activist." He agreed with Malcolm X that a citizen should not have to fight for civil rights. In a 1964 interview, he called the movement "a very peculiar revolution." In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, he gave it another name: "the latest slave rebellion."

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• 8. Chez Baldwin

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  In 1970 Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in an old Provençal house beneath the village ramparts. Friends dropped in constantly on trips to the French Riviera. Beauford Delaney made it his second home and set up his easel in the garden, painting several colorful portraits of Baldwin. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were regular guests. During the Jazz à Juan and Nice Jazz Festivals, Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis and Ray Charles stopped by. Davis wrote in his autobiography that he spent a day or two at the house whenever he played Antibes. His verdict was short: "He was a great man."

  Baldwin learned to speak French fluently. His friends there included the actor Yves Montand and the writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated The Amen Corner into French. In the house he wrote his "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" in November 1970, as well as Just Above My Head and The Evidence of Things Not Seen.

  The work of these years drew less notice. No Name in the Street appeared in 1972. It reckoned with the assassinations of three of his friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Critics largely overlooked his writing of the 1970s and 1980s, though it has drawn more attention lately. If Beale Street Could Talk came out in 1974 and stressed the importance of Black American families. Eldridge Cleaver attacked him in Soul on Ice, and Baldwin's return to southern France fed a sense that he had lost touch with readers. Just as he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement.

  Baldwin was an openly queer man who thought sexuality a private matter. He felt the word "gay" was too narrow and refused it for himself. In 1985 he noted that at 22 he "fell in love with, lived with and almost married" a woman. Even so, he considered Lucien Happersberger the one true love of his life. The scholar Dwight A. McBride saw in him an intricate amalgam of identities that he tailored to each circumstance.

  On the 1st of December 1987, Baldwin died of stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City. Fred Nall Hollis, a friend since the early 1970s, cared for him on his deathbed. Hollis told him: "Through your books you liberated me from my guilt about being so bigoted coming from Alabama and because of my homosexuality." Baldwin replied: "No, you liberated me in revealing this to me."

  A few hours after he died, his novel Harlem Quartet won the French-American Friendship Prize. A week earlier it had lost the Prix Femina by a single vote. He left unfinished a memoir called Remember This House, about his dealings with Evers, Malcolm X and King. The publisher McGraw-Hill sued his estate to recover the $200,000 advance it had paid, an unprecedented step, then dropped the suit by 1990. In 2016 the filmmaker Raoul Peck built the documentary I Am Not Your Negro on that manuscript. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary.

  The house itself became a battlefield. Baldwin had been buying it from his landlady, Jeanne Faure, and did not own it outright when he died. She intended it to stay in her family, and a court fight followed. Later efforts to turn it into an artists' residency lacked the backing of the Baldwin estate. In February 2016 Le Monde published an opinion piece by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, which brought activists together in Paris. In June 2016 the writer Shannon Cain squatted at the house for 10 days as a political and artistic protest. From that effort grew Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin, which hoped to buy the house through a campaign funded by American philanthropy. Without the estate's support, it failed.

  Efforts to interest the French government met a flat refusal. The mayor, Joseph Le Chapelain, told the local press that "nobody's ever heard of James Baldwin." Henri Chambon, the owner of the corporation that razed the house, said much the same. By 2019 an apartment complex stood on the site. Even so, the house lives on as a lens. The National Museum of African American History and Culture hosts an online exhibit called "Chez Baldwin," and Magdalena J. Zaborowska's 2018 book Me and My House uses photographs of his home and his collections to explore politics, race, queerness and domesticity.

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