by Studs Terkel
But more important than that, perhaps, was my relationship with Africans and with Algerians there who belonged to France, and it didn’t demand any spectacularly great 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. And I could see very well that if I were an Algerian I would not have been living in the same city in which I imagined myself to be living as Jimmy Baldwin. Or if I were an African, it would have been a very different city for me. And I also began to see that the West, the entire West, was changing, was breaking up; that its power over me, over Africans, was gone and would never come again. So then it seemed that exile was but another way of being in limbo.
But I suppose, finally, the most important thing was that I am a writer, and that sounds grandiloquent, but the truth is that I don’t think that, seriously speaking, anybody in his right mind would want to be a writer. But you do discover that you are one, and then you haven’t got any choice; either you live that life or you don’t live any. And I’m an American writer; this country is my subject. And in working out the forthcoming novel, I began to realize that the New York I was trying to describe was a New York that was by this time nearly twenty years old. I had to come back to check my impressions and to, as it turned out, to be stung again, to look at it again, bear it again, and be reconciled to it again.
Now, I imagine, in my own case, I will have to spend the rest of my life, however long that will be, as a kind of transatlantic commuter. Because at some point when I’m in this country I always get to a place where I realize I don’t see it very clearly anymore. Because it’s very exhausting to spend—after all, you do spend twenty-four hours a day resisting and resenting it, you know, and trying to keep a kind of equilibrium in it. So I suppose that I will keep going away and coming back.
You feel your years in Europe afforded you more of a perspective?
Yeah. I began to see this country for the first time. If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it, and if I hadn’t been able to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.
You know, I’m not mad at this country anymore. I’m very worried about it. And I’m not worried about the Negroes in the country even so much as I’m worried about the country. The country doesn’t know what it’s done to Negroes. But the country has no notion whatever—and this is disastrous—about what it’s done to itself. They have yet to assess the price they paid, North and South, for keeping the Negro in his place. And, from my point of view, it shows in every single level of our lives, from the most public—
Could you expand on this a little, Jim, on what the country has done to itself ?
Well, one of the reasons, for example, I think that our youth is so badly educated—and it is inconceivably badly educated—is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach young people to think, and in order to teach young people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something they cannot think about. If there’s one thing they can’t think about, then very shortly they can’t think about anything, you know.
Now, there’s always something in this country, of course, that one cannot think about, and what one cannot think about is the Negro. Now, this may seem like a very subtle argument, but I don’t think so. I think that really time will prove the connection between the level of the lives we lead, and this extraordinary endeavor to avoid black men. And I think it shows in our public life.
When I was living in Europe, it occurred to me that what Americans in Europe did not know about Europeans is precisely what they didn’t know about me. And what Americans today don’t know about the rest of the world, like Cuba, or Africa, is what they don’t know about me. An incoherent—totally incoherent—foreign policy of this country is a reflection of the incoherence of the private lives here.
So we don’t even know our own names.
No, we don’t. That’s the whole point. And I suggest this: that in order to learn your name, you’re going to have to learn mine. In a way, the American Negro is the key figure in this country. And if we don’t face him, we will never face anything.
If I don’t know your name, I, a white man, will never know mine. Thinking now, as a country—We think of Africa immediately, and you have, again (returning to your work, by the way, may I suggest this work to listeners—James Baldwin’s. Nobody Knows My Name, published by Dial, and even though I say it is a collection of essays, it isn’t that. It is a novel; it is an autobiography, really, in a way), you have a journalistic report, and a very accurate and astute one: “Princes and Powers,” it’s called. You were covering a meeting of Negro writers of the world in Paris, and African writers were speaking, too.
Yeah. It was really an African conference; it was predominantly African. The Negroes were there as Africans, or as, well, the black people of the world, let’s put it that way.
What of the African writer, then? You mentioned Wole here. Isn’t there a problem here? The uncovering of this rich heritage, so long buried, by kidnappers, by colonial people. And at the same time we know that technological advances are taking place, changes, the slums are being cleared—
The twentieth century, in fact—
Now isn’t there loss as well as gain here? It’s a question of things happening at the same time.
It’s a very great question. It’s almost impossible to assess what was lost, which makes it impossible to assess what’s gained. How can I put this? In a way, I almost envy African writers because there’s so much to excavate, you know, and because their relationship to the world, at least from my vantage point—and about this I may be wrong—seems much more direct than mine can ever be. But God knows, the colonial experience destroyed so much, blasted so much, and of course changed forever the African personality. So one doesn’t know what really was there on the other side of the flood. It’s going to take generations before that past can be reestablished and, in effect, used.
And at the same time, of course, all of the African nations are under the obligation, the necessity, of moving into the twentieth century at really some fantastic rate of speed, which is the only way they can survive. And of course all Africans, whether they know it or not, have endured the European experience and have been stained and changed by the European standards.
In a curious way, the unification of Africa, insofar as it can be said to exist, is a white invention. That is to say, the only thing that really unites, as far as I can tell, all black men everywhere, is the fact that white men are on their necks. What I’m curious about is what will happen when this is no longer true and for the first time in the memory of anybody living, black men have their destinies in their own hands. What will come out then, and what the problems and tensions and terrors will be then, is a very great and very loaded question.
I think that if we were more honest here we could do a great deal to aid in this transition. Because we have an advantage, which we certainly consider to be a disadvantage, over all the other Western nations. That is to say, we have created—forgetting, you know, quite apart from anything else—the fact is we have created, and no other nation has, a black man who belongs, who is a part of the West. Now, and in distinction to Belgium or any other European power, we had our slaves on the mainland. And therefore, no matter how we deny it, we couldn’t avoid human involvement with them, which we’ve almost perished denying, but which is, nevertheless, there.
Now, if we could turn about and face this, we could have a tremendous advantage in the world today. But as long as we don’t, there isn’t much hope for the West, really. If one can accept the fact that it is no longer important to be white, it would begin to cease to be important to be black. If one could accept the fact that no nation with twenty million black people in it, for so long and with such depth of involvement—no nation under these circumstances can really be called a white nation, this would be a great ach
ievement and it would change a great many things.
This raises a very interesting point. This is all conjecture, of course, assuming that sanity is maintained, assuming that humanity itself, the humanity in all of us, will triumph. Just as you say there will be no white nation and no black nation, but nations of people, now we come to a question of this long, varied heritage.
At the beginning, a Bessie Smith record was played. You, once upon a time, not knowing who you were, were ashamed of it, and now realize there’s a great pride here in artistry. I’m thinking now of the young African. Again, if a certain identity, and this is an imposed identity from the outside, is lost, will he reject that which was uniquely his for a grayness, perhaps? Even though it be more materially advanced?
I have a tendency to doubt it, but then of course there’s no way of knowing. I have a tendency, judging only from my very limited experience in Paris with a few Africans after all—my tendency is to doubt it.
I think that the real impulse is to excavate that heritage, at no matter what cost, and bring it into the present. And I think that this is a very sound idea, because I think it’s needed. I think that all the things that were destroyed by Europe, which will never really be put in place again, still in that rubble I think there’s something of very great value, not only for Africans, but for all of us.
I really think that we’re living in a moment which is as important as that moment when Constantine became a Christian. I think that all the standards by which the Western world has lived for so long are in the process of breakdown and of revision, and a kind of passion and a kind of beauty and a kind of joy which was in the world before, and has been buried so long, has got to come back.
The passion and beauty and joy once in the world have been buried. Now we come to the matter of dehumanization, don’t we?
Yes, exactly.
The impersonality of our times.
Yes, yes, yes. And obviously this cannot—Well, I would hate to see it continue. I don’t ever intend to make my peace with such a world.
There’s something much more important than Cadillacs, Frigidaires, and IBM machines. And precisely one of the things wrong with this country is this notion that IBM machines and Cadillacs prove something. People are always telling me how many Negroes bought Cadillacs last year, and it terrifies me. I always wonder: Is this what you think the country is for? And do you think this is really what I came here and suffered and died for? A lousy Cadillac?
Whether it’s for white or black, is this what our country’s for?
For white or black, yes, exactly. I think the country’s got to find out what it means by “freedom.” Freedom is a very dangerous thing, you know. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You know, you’ve got to make choices; you’ve got to make very dangerous choices; you’ve got to be taught that your life is in your hands.
A matter of freedom. This leads to another chapter in your book dealing with your meeting with Ingmar Bergman, whom you described as a relatively free artist. Would you mind telling us a bit about that, what you meant by that?
Well, part of his freedom, of course, is just purely economical. It’s based on the social structure, the economic structure of Sweden. So he hasn’t got to worry about the money for his films, which is a very healthy thing for him.
But on another level, he impressed me as being free because he had—and this is a great paradox, it seems to me, about freedom—because he had accepted his limitations, the limitations within himself and the limitations within his society. I don’t mean that he necessarily accepted these limitations; I don’t mean that he was passive in the face of them. But he’d recognized that he was Ingmar Bergman who could do some things, and therefore could not do some others. He was not going to live forever. He had recognized what people in this country have a great deal of trouble recognizing, that life is very difficult, very difficult for anybody, anybody born. Now, I don’t think people can be free until they recognize this.
In the same way Bessie Smith was much freer—always and terrible as this may sound—much freer than the people who murdered her, or let her die, you know. And Big Bill Broonzy was a much freer man than the success-ridden people running around on Madison Avenue today. If you can accept the worst, as someone said to me, then you can see the best. But if you think life is a great big, glorious plum pudding, you’ll end up in the madhouse, which is where, you know . . .
To perhaps even extend the examples you just offered: the little girl who walked into the Little Rock schoolhouse, or the Charlotte, North Carolina, schoolhouse, and was spat on was much freer than the white child who sat there with a misconceived notion.
Yes, yes, exactly. Well, I think the proof that Negroes are much stronger in the South today is simply, you know—
She knew who she was.
She knew who she was. And after all, that child has been coming for a very long time. She didn’t come out of nothing. That Negro families are able to produce such children, whereas the good white people of the South have yet to make any appearance, proves something awful about the moral state of the South. Those people in Tallahassee who are never in the streets when the mobs are there, well, you know, why aren’t they? It’s their town, too.
What about someone like Lillian Smith? 1
Lillian Smith is a great—I think a very great—and heroic, and very lonely figure, obviously. She has very few friends in that little hamlet in Georgia where she carries on so gallantly. She’s paid a tremendous price for trying to do what she thinks is right. And the price is terribly, terribly high. The only way for the price to become a little less is for more people to pay it.
Of course, here is someone of the South, a minority of one, and perhaps there are a few prototypes here and there. This leads to the—I’m looking through your book now, and I feel guilty for not having finished it before interviewing you. I’m sure you have something about majority-minority, perhaps, about the majority is not necessarily right all the time.
The majority is usually—I hate to say this—wrong. I think there’s a great confusion in this country anyway about that.
Ibsen’s Enemy of the People.
Yes, yes. I really think seriously there’s a division of labor in the world. And some people are here to, I can see . . . Let me put it this way: There are so many things I’m not good at. I can’t drive a truck. I couldn’t run a bank. Well, all right. Other people have to do that. Well, in a way they’re responsible to me and I’m responsible to them, you know.
My responsibility to them is to try to tell the truth as I see it—not so much about my private life as about their private lives, you know. So that there is in the world a standard for all of us, which will get you through your trouble. Because your trouble’s always coming, you know. And Cadillacs don’t get you through it. And neither do psychiatrists, incidentally. All that gets you through it, really, is some faith in life, which is not so easy to achieve.
Now, when you talk about majorities and minorities, I always have the feeling that this country’s talking about a kind of popularity contest in which everybody works together toward some absolutely hideous, hideously material end. But in truth, I think that politicians—for example, in the South where it’s shown most clearly—I think all the southern politicians have failed their responsibility to the white people of the South. Somebody in the South must know that obviously the situation, the status quo, will not exist another hundred years. And their responsibility is to prepare the people who are now forming those mobs, to prepare those people for that day. You know, to minimize the damage to them, even.
Now, the majority rule in the South is not a majority rule at all; it’s a mob rule. And what these mobs feel is a moral vacuum, which is created by the lack of a leader. And it seems to me this is the way the world is. And I’m not talking about dictatorships. I mean that—
Statesmen.
Statesmen, and people who are sitting in government are supposed to know more about government
than people who are driving trucks and digging potatoes and trying to raise their children. That’s what you’re in the office for.
Someone, then, with a sense of history, perhaps.
Yes, which is precisely what we don’t have here.
Sense of history.
Yes, if you don’t know what’s happened behind you, you have no idea what’s happening around you. That’s a law.
Earlier, Jim, you mentioned that for a national policy to be straightened out, the private policies, the private lives, the individual lives, must be.
That’s right.
And you spoke, too, of your job as a writer ; you’ve got to write. And in this chapter with Bergman, “The Northern Protestant,” there’s a beautiful comment here: “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they’re to survive, are forced at last to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.” Of whom you speak, of Bergman. But all art is a kind of confession, as you apparently do in all your writings.
