The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  What makes us want to run away? Or go searching for a life away from ours? The term “black refugees” applies most specifically to the black American men and women who escaped in 1812 to the British navy’s boats and were later taken to freedom in Nova Scotia and Trinidad, but don’t many of us feel like black refugees? Baldwin called these feelings, the sense of displacement and loss that many black Americans ponder, the “heavy” questions, and heavy they are indeed. Sometime in the early ’50s, after being roughed up and harassed by the FBI, James Baldwin realized that while he “loved” his country, he “could not respect it.” He wrote that he “could not, upon my soul, be reconciled to my country as it was.” To survive he would have to find an exit. On the train to Baldwin’s house I thought more about that earlier generation and about the seemingly vast divide between Baldwin and my grandfather. They had very little in common, except they were of the same era, the same race, and were both fearless men, which in black America actually says a lot. Whereas Baldwin spent his life writing against a canon, writing himself into the canon, a black man recording the Homeric legend of his life himself, my grandfather simply wanted to live with dignity.

  It must have been hard then to die the way my grandfather did. I imagine it is not the ending that he expected when he left Louisiana and moved to Watts—to a small, white house near Ninety-Ninth Street and Success Avenue. After his death, I went back to the house in Watts that he had been forced to return to, broke and burned out of his home, and gathered what almost ninety years of black life in America had amounted to for him: a notice saying that his insurance claim from the fire had been denied, two glazed clay bowls, and his hammer (he was a carpenter). My grandfather had worked hard but had made next to nothing. I took a picture of the wall that my grandfather built during his first month in L.A. It was old, cracked, jagged, not pretty at all, but at the time, it was the best evidence I had that my grandfather had ever been here. And as I scattered his ashes near the Hollywood Park racetrack, because he loved horses and had always remained a country boy at heart, I realized that the dust in my hands was the entirety of my inheritance from him. And until recently, I used to carry that memory and his demand for optimism around like an amulet divested of its power, because I had no idea what to do with it. What Baldwin understood, and my grandfather preferred not to focus on, is that to be black in America is to have the demand for dignity be at absolute odds with the national anthem.

  From the outside, Baldwin’s house looks ethereal. The saltwater air from the Mediterranean acts like a delicate scrim over the heat and the horizon, and the dry, craggy yard is wide and long and tall with cypress trees. I had prepared for the day by watching clips of him in his gardens. I read about the medieval frescoes that had once lined the dining room. I imagined the dinners he had hosted for Josephine Baker and Beauford Delaney under a trellis of creeping vines and grape arbors. I imagined a house full of books and life.

  I fell in love with Baldwin all over again in France. There I found out that Baldwin didn’t go to France because he was full of naive, empty admiration for Europe; as he once said in an interview: “If I were twenty-four now, I don’t know if and where I would go. I don’t know if I would go to France, I might go to Africa. You must remember when I was twenty-four there was really no Africa to go to, except Liberia. Now, though, a kid now . . . well, you see, something has happened which no one has really noticed, but it’s very important: Europe is no longer a frame of reference, a standard-bearer, the classic model for literature and for civilization. It’s not the measuring stick. There are other standards in the world.”

  Baldwin left the States for the primary reason that all emigrants do—because anywhere seems better than home. This freedom-seeking gay man, who deeply loved his sisters and brothers—biological and metaphorical—never left them at all. In France, I saw that Baldwin didn’t live the life of a wealthy man, but he did live the life of a man who wanted to travel, to erect an estate of his own design, and write as an outsider, alone in silence. He had preserved himself.

  Decades after Baldwin’s death in 1987, what I found left behind in his house was something similar to what I saw as we waded through my grandfather’s house after it had burned down. In both houses, I found mail strewn in dirt piles in rooms that no longer had doors or windowpanes, and entryways nailed over to prevent trespassers like us. In each case, someone had clearly forced entry in order to drink beer. In Baldwin’s house, the scattered, empty beer cans were recent additions, as were the construction postings from a company tasked with tearing it down. So that nothing would remain. No remembrance of the past. In both places there was not even the sense that a great man had once lived there.

  James Baldwin lived in his house for more than twenty-five years, and all that was left were half a dozen pink teacups and turquoise saucers buried by the house’s rear wall, a chipped fresco on a crumbling wall, and orange trees that were heavy with fruit bitter and sharp to the taste. We see Baldwin’s name in connection to the present condition more often than we see Faulkner’s, Whitman’s, or Thoreau’s. But we can visit the houses and places where they lived and imagine how their geography shaped them and our collective vocabulary. By next year, Baldwin’s house will just be another private memory for those who knew it.

  I do not know if I will ever see his house again. If I will be able to pull sour oranges from his trees and wonder if they were so bitter when he lived there. But I do know that Baldwin died a black death.

  For a while when I came back to the States, I started to send strange, desperate emails to people who knew him that read:

  For the last two days, I’ve basically found myself frantically, maniacally looking for everything that I could find about Baldwin’s life there. To be honest, I’m not at all sure what I am looking for, but when I walked up that steep little hill, past the orange and cypress trees out onto the main road, and looked back at his house I just felt a compulsion to start asking people who knew him about his life in that house. The compound is almost gone, as they are in the process of demolishing it and yet something about it and him seemed to still be very much there.

  Baldwin once wrote: “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

  I sent those notes—feeling as hopeless as I sounded—because I wanted to save that building. I did not want it and him to vanish into the terrifying darkness. Because I was scared that no one else would ever be able to see that Baldwin had a rainbow kitchen—an orange sink and purple shelves—in his guesthouse. I wanted someone else to wonder what he ate from this kitchen, who stayed in this annex of his estate, who he loved, whether his love felt free in this kitchen, in this house where two men could embrace in private behind the ramparts of his home in another country. I wanted someone else to understand the private black language found in one of Baldwin’s last conversations with his brother David. Frail, sick, and being carried to his deathbed in his brother’s arms, what the world thought of him might as well have been an ocean away. In that moment, Baldwin didn’t refer to French poets, or to the cathedrals of his genius, he instead returned to a popular song. He loved music, and he told his brother: So it is true what they say—he is my brother and he’s not heavy.

  There is no great mystery behind why Baldwin’s house isn’t treated like Anna and Sigmund Freud’s in London or rebuilt and replicated like Dante Alighieri’s in Florence. �
��We lost the house because supposedly there was no way to prove that it was his,” his niece Kali-Ma Morrison tells me with a slight edge in her voice. “People contested his right to ownership in the French Supreme Court and after ten years of fighting to save it, we lost.”

  For months, I had wanted to know about the women who read as almost mythical in Baldwin’s life and work, the siblings and nieces who are tasked with being the legal keepers of his legacy. I was also curious because in the strange early hours of the morning just before the bakeries open and the fog lifts herself from the mountains, I sat in a village in the South of France and watched Baldwin defend our future as black women on The Dick Cavett Show in 1968. My god, how I loved his exasperation and anger as he told primetime television, “I don’t know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know that the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now: This is the evidence. And you want me to make an act of faith—risking myself, my life, my woman, my sister, my children—on some idealism which you assure me exists in America which I have never seen?” In 1968 James Baldwin was already asking, What is any movement without all of us? What is a black conversation that divides our concerns?

  Kali-Ma—Baldwin’s niece—is in her late twenties. She is a visual artist and poet, and although she has piercings and tattoos, she looks like the sort of young woman who once appeared in tintype photographs—patient, timeless, and very beautiful in an intoxicatingly demure way. Her grandmother Gloria is Baldwin’s sister, and handles her brother’s estate. Her other grandmother is Toni Morrison. Kali-Ma hands me a cup of green tea, reaches down to stroke her purring cat, who has been clawing her ankles for attention, and then goes over to a bookcase that sags with books and pulls out some of her uncle’s belongings that she retrieved from Saint-Paul-de-Vence. She hands me a faded copy of his book A Dialogue (written with Nikki Giovanni), his copies of Freedomways magazine (including one with Lorraine Hansberry on the cover), and a small brass plaque (engraved in French) awarded to him for his commitment to human rights.

  We are both very quiet. I trace the Greek severe-style angel on the award with my finger until she shrugs and says, “I know I should probably have this stuff locked away, or covered in laminate, but I like him out here, you know, being here with me and mixed in with the other books. Alive.” I came to her place to take a picture of Baldwin’s typewriter. This is what I told her. But I think I also came because I wanted to see someone who is his flesh and blood. I wanted to see that he was really theirs, their Uncle Jimmy. Because if he was theirs, the logic followed, then he was also ours.

  Baldwin’s people have an old-world, sophisticated manner. They offer you three types of tea, whiskey, and their time. They’re patient and generous. They never ask me what I’m doing there. They are tolerant of my desire to find the quiet bibliography that he left behind in the small notations, brushes, and ephemera of his life. Annotations I believed when taken together would tell a private story of his battles and alienations as a gay black man who was born into poverty as the eldest in a solar system of siblings (there were nine of them), but who was also singularly rich, with an agile mind, a louche, lithe body, and a long-eyed gaze.

  In the twenty-first century, black history must shirk any oversimplification. What I unfortunately realized late in the game was that I had allowed myself to understand Baldwin through a series of abstractions, one that was principally based upon how strangers, outsiders, and gatekeepers had interpreted his life. In their telling, I had never heard how Baldwin had felt like he could make peace with his old friend Richard Wright, but it would take a big bottle of booze and a whole night of talking in that garden in Saint-Paul. They never told me just how much Baldwin loved his records—spirituals and Bessie Smith. Or how he had met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to press the government about its callous response to the civil rights movement. No one had ever told me to study with care the Harlem in the way that he could keep a cigarette dangling from his lips, just so, balanced between a blood’s deep blues and a 125th Street cool.

  “The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves,” Baldwin wrote in a foreword to Angela Davis’s book If They Come in the Morning. He signed the letter Brother Jimmy and addressed Angela Davis as Sister Angela. When I was younger, the way Baldwin explained the conditions of “Negroes” to others made me question his devotion, but as I held his copy of Davis’s book in my hands and reread those words, it was evident that America had never triumphed over James Baldwin.

  One afternoon, Trevor Baldwin, Wilmer “Lover” Baldwin’s son (the younger brother of the nephew addressed in Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew”), tells me about “Uncle Jimmy’s” visits back to the States, when he would return to the house that he had purchased for his mother on Seventy-First Street. Trevor is a down-to-earth, forthright Morehouse man, a Harlem man, and he recalls what both he and his father admired most about Uncle Jimmy. “He walked with a certain sense of manhood,” Trevor told me. “You could easily see he was gay but [he] walked with his chest out and he’d cut you with his tongue.”

  “Which is to say he had self-pride?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Trevor said. “He had to move to Europe because he was seriously worried that he was going to kill somebody.”

  Trevor always knew that Uncle Jimmy was in town because suddenly his grandmother’s house would swell with visitors. “Uncle Jimmy,” he laughed, “brought everybody to her, Maya [Angelou] included, and Toni, and said, ‘Here’s something else you don’t need, but I got another sister. You got another child.’

  “He was the man of the house. He was the patriarch of us all.”

  I like this image of Baldwin, it is both vanguard and conventional, but I also enjoy the way Kali-Ma shudders when I ask her if her uncle was a patriarch. Of his sisters? His mother? No, she says.

  She looks for a word to describe what he was. I try to help. We are both writers, but we could not find a single word to describe this man who told his adopted sisters that they had to write down their stories and later pragmatically assisted them in their endeavors, who had best friends in many countries in all professions, and who taught his older brother and young nephews a rare, lasting lesson in bravery—that we must be brilliant and big enough to be ourselves. To have pink teacups and brown typewriters. Baldwin defined what made him a great writer on his own terms. He also ensured that his success was not dependent on his silences. He taught us all that the greatest black art demands that there be no “rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty” or our power. Some people will consider this vain, but isn’t this what all good warriors have always done: venerating, salvaging, and celebrating ourselves in between battles? Is this not our real inheritance?

  I have spent months thinking about something his former agent’s granddaughter Eliza Mills revealed to me after she found out that I had been to his home in France. “James Baldwin used to play dodgeball with my dad and his friends. And he’d stay up and out all night and go to bed when my dad and his sister were going to school in the morning. My grandfather helped sell a couple of his books and would read/edit things. I think he was writing The Fire Next Time while he lived there. I’ve seen a note or two that he wrote to my grandfather in the books he left at their house.”

  Breathless at the idea of all of this, I asked her if she was for real or kidding me.

  “Yeah,” she replied, incredulous to my doubt. “One little inscription is written in rainbow ink and half in French.”

  Last week, when I got back from seeing his brown typewriter, I wrote down the word “joy” and underlined it three times, like it was an obligation, a chore, something that I would have to find, if not fight for. I did this because isn’t the more intimate, tenebrous story the one where we recognize each othe
r not only in our despair but also in our joy? In your rainbow ink and your sleepless nights, in your demands, and in your nieces and nephews who love you like a black god. I will find you—in the enthusiasms of our people’s style, our verve and our wit, the way you slouched in your seat and crossed your legs, in the ways that they will misunderstand you but we will always know you, in the abridgments that we will make to history, changing it forever.

  Because I am telling this now, writing it all down, I am finding time to regard memory and death differently. I’m holding them up in the light and searching them, inspecting them, as they are not as what I want them to be. On that hill, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, I wanted to alter fate, and preserve things. But why? He did not need me—Baldwin seemed to have prepared himself well for his black death, his mortality, and even better, his immortality. Indeed, he bested all of them, because he wrote it all down—both on the page and in his beautiful gestures.