by Colm Toibin
Two years later, in an angry essay about black history, he saw no possibility of change, merely excuses for change.
In the meantime ladies and gentlemen, after a brief intermission – time out for one or two committee reports, time out for an antipoverty pep talk, time out to make a Vietnamese child an orphan and then lovingly raise him to love all our works, time out for a White House conference, time out to brief and augment the police forces, time out to buy some Negroes, jail some, club some, and kill some – after a brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen, the show begins again in the auction room. And you will hear the same old piano, playing the blues.
At other times, he seemed to be amusing himself by preaching to the white population, insisting that whites, in fact, were the group most in need of freedom from tyranny. In 1961 he wrote:
There is a great captive Negro population here, which is well publicized, and what is not known at all, is that there is a great captive white population here too. No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.
In Playboy in January 1964 he wrote: ‘What I’m much more concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves; what has been done to me is irrelevant because there is nothing more you can do to me. But, in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity.’
In an essay called ‘The White Problem’, also published in 1964, he sneered at the icons of white America, insisting that the difference between white and black in America was close to the difference between foolishness and seriousness, childhood and maturity:
In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, but, I think, quite truthfully, can be summed up in the images of Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up in the tone and face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.
In another essay from 1964, ‘Color and American Civilization’, he had more fun at the expense of the neuroses suffered by his white brothers and sisters:
The white man’s unadmitted – and apparently, to him, unspeakable – private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark … I cannot accept that proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now … expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.
Five years later, writing in The New York Times, he was at his most eloquent, insisting once more that the black population’s burden in the United States could not be changed by legislation but only by something more far-reaching in its implications – the total conversion of the white population, whose moral degeneration and distance from themselves he judged to be abject. ‘I will state flatly,’ he wrote,
that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs, and an intolerable violation of myself.
In his fiction, Baldwin sought a new freedom, a freedom to create characters as he pleased. His black characters did not have to be filled with stoical virtue to be destroyed by white forces. His novel Giovanni’s Room did not even have any black characters at all. Nor did his gay characters have their destiny worked out for them by history; he made them too interesting for that. In his journalism he sought to rewrite history before paying attention to politics. In an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he said:
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled.
By 1979 his version of American history had become more alarmed. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, he wrote:
A very brutal thing must be said: The intentions of this melancholic country as concerns black people – and anyone who doubts me can ask any Indian – have always been genocidal. They needed us for labor and for sport. Now they can’t get rid of us. We cannot be exiled and we cannot be accommodated. Something’s got to give. The machinery of this country operates day in and day out, hour by hour, to keep the nigger in his place.
In that article he called the Civil Rights Movement ‘the latest slave rebellion’.
Five years later in an article for Essence, he continued to muse on the idea of American history and genocide:
America became white – the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white – because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle – or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men – from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians – became white by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.
Reading his speeches and his journalism, it is, most of the time, easy to imagine, twenty years after his death, how he would respond to contemporary events. Hardly anything that has happened since 1987 would have surprised him. In 1979 he wrote: ‘If they couldn’t deal with my father, how are they going to deal with the people in the streets of Tehran? I could have told them, if they had asked.’ It would be easy to put Baghdad or Basra in that sentence. In 1964 he wrote: ‘People who do not know who they are privately, accept, as we have accepted for nearly fifteen years, the fantastic disaster which we call American politics and which we call American foreign policy, and the incoherence of the one is an exact reflection of the incoherence of the other.’ It would be merely necessary now to change the dates. He would not have been surprised by the counting of votes in Florida; he would not have been shocked by Abu Ghraib; he would not have been shocked by New Orleans. He would have known each time what to say. On 9/11, however, it is harder to be sure of his response, except to suspect that the soaring pity he was capable of could have been matched by the calm eloquent wisdom that was, most of the time, his hallmark. But it is hard also not to remember what he told William Styron in 1960 when Styron and his friends asked him what was going to happen now. ‘Jimmy’s face would become a mask of imperturbable certitude,’ Styron wrote. ‘ “Baby, burn” he would say softly and glare back with vast glowering eyes, “yes, baby, I mean burn. We will burn your cities down.’ ”
Reading his speeches and journalism now, there seems only one fresh hell that has happened in his country that he did not foresee and that would have shocked him deeply. And this is the huge and merciless increase in the prison population, especially of young black
males. He saw the context for it, however, and made his own position very clear in his 1964 Playboy article:
The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, of anguish, of ambiguity, of death, has turned us into a very peculiar and monstrous people. It means, for one thing, and it’s very serious, that people who have had no experience have no compassion. People who have had no experience suppose that if a man is a thief, he is a thief; but, in fact, that isn’t the most important thing about him. The most important thing about him is that he is a man and, furthermore, that if he’s a thief or a murderer or whatever he is, you could also be and you would know this, anyone would know this who had really dared to live.
He did not see the full implications of this, and so in the same year he wrote something that seems naïve now, perhaps the only truly naïve observation he ever made: ‘There is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course.’ And fifteen years later, in the Los Angeles Times, he ended his article on a note of pure optimism:
But black people hold the trump. When you try to slaughter people, you create people with nothing to lose. And if I have nothing to lose, what are you going to do to me? In truth, we have one thing to lose – our children. Yet we have never lost them, and there is no reason for us to do it now. We hold the trump. I say it: Patience and shuffle the cards.
The cards were shuffled all right; and the idea that there was a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison became a joker; the game included the possibility of ‘three strikes and you’re out’, with all the mindlessness and lack of compassion that that implied. At the end of 2005, there were close to 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States. Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin’s reign. As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole. The United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its prisoners, 737 per 100,000 compared to 100 in Australia and 59 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison. A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group. The general prison numbers in the United States have doubled since 1990.
In his address to Harlem schoolteachers in 1963, Baldwin set the context for crime among young black men. He wrote about every street boy’s relationship to the law.
If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman … They have turned away from the country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.
It seems sad, almost strange, reading his work now, even when its tone was calm and ambiguous and measured, but especially as he grew angry and strident, to realize that, in the twenty years after James Baldwin’s death, brand-new structures made of concrete have gone up all over America with laws to match, and in those buildings much of the beauty he wrote about, and many of the dreams his friends had, lie incarcerated. Baldwin’s legacy is to help us understand how something has happened that even he could not have imagined.
Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers
It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died and that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, begins: ‘On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.’ Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: ‘A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.’
Both men quickly then established their own actual distance from their fathers, which made their grief sharper and more lonely, but also emphasized to the reader that they had a right to speak with authority, to offer this version of themselves partly because they themselves, through force of will and a steely sense of character, had invented the voice they were now using, had not been trained by any other man to be the figure they had become. ‘I had not known my father very well,’ Baldwin wrote. ‘We got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.’
Of his father, Barack Obama wrote: ‘At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told.’ Both men then, using photographs and memories, commented on their fathers’ blackness. In both cases it seemed important to state or suggest that the father was more black than the son. Baldwin wrote that there was something buried in his father that had lent him his ‘tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think – he was very black – with his blackness and his beauty.’
When Obama was a child, he wrote, ‘my father looked nothing like the people around me in that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk’.
In both cases too, the writers sought to make clear that their fathers’ pasts were not their own pasts, but the past as a different country, a country they did not share. ‘He was of the first generation of free men,’ Baldwin wrote. ‘He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.’ Obama’s father was from a place even more distant: ‘He was an African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego.’
Although Obama mentions in passing in Dreams from My Father that he had read Baldwin when he was a young community activist in Chicago, there is no hint in the book that he modelled his own story in any way on Baldwin’s work. In their versions of who they became in America and how, there are considerable similarities and shared moments not because Obama was using Baldwin as a template or an example, but because the same hurdles and similar circumstances and the same moments of truth actually occurred almost naturally for both of them.
Baldwin and Obama, although in different ways, experienced the church and intense religious feeling as key elements in their lives. They both travelled and discovered while abroad, almost as a shock, an essential American identity for themselves while in the company of non-Americans who were black. They both came to see, in a time of political division, some shared values with the other side. They both used eloquence with an exquisite, religious fervour.
As Northerners, they both were shocked by the South. They both had to face up to the anger, the rage, that lay within them, and everyone like them, as a way of taking the poison out of themselves. It is almost as though, in their search for power – Baldwin becoming the finest American prose stylist of his generation, Obama the President of the United States – they would both have to gain wisdom, both bitter and sweet, at the same fount, since no other fount was available. Their story is in some ways the same story because it could hardly have been otherwise.
In the essay ‘Notes of a Native Son’, James Baldwin wrote about rage: ‘There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in
his blood – one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.’ In his speech on race in March 2008, Barack Obama, in tones more measured, more patient, but no less urgent, dealt with the same issues as they were experienced more than fifty years after Baldwin’s essay appeared:
That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
In his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, Baldwin wrote with remarkable eloquence about the power of prayer and preaching for an otherwise powerless community, the sense of time spent in church as a time filled with soaring possibilities in contrast to the bitter world outside. It was as though that very bitterness offered the congregation a unique insight into the suffering of Christ and made the congregation for that time of prayer and preaching a chosen people whose spiritual exaltation, in all its fiery rhetoric and colourful abandon, could never be experienced by white people.
Baldwin matched his novel with an essay, ‘Down at the Cross’, published in 1962, where he wrote about his own conversion as an adolescent filled with doubts and fears and ambitions and a sharp sense of exclusion:
