![]() ![]() "He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at higher and higher tempos."Baldwin had given voice to my submerged thoughts about what it meant to be a black person, indissolubly and meaningfully connected to the larger world. It was magical.In a eulogy after Baldwin's death in 1987, poet Amiri Baraka defined this magic."Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that," Baraka wrote. The night before I boarded my flight, he handed me a stack of books.Over the coming months, as I read Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, the anthology Black Voices, and the short stories gathered in Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin's voice and thinking transformed even the way I used language. Still, before I left for Europe, my father, who taught African-American literature at a community college, linked me forever to the exiled writer. ![]() Jim Crow was a bad American memory by then, and there was overtly nothing to flee. I was raised middle class and comfortable in a white St. My family never understood why I wanted to go to France, though there was a history of African-American intellectuals expatriating there during the Jim Crow years. I first became aware of Baldwin during my junior year abroad, years after his urgent usefulness as a civil rights figure had passed. Jackson incants in a deep, gravely voice that is definitely not my own, and definitely not that of the writer.I felt implicated when Baldwin said in the film, "I was in some way in those years, without entirely realizing it, the Great Black Hope of the great white father." In my reverent memory of him, had I, too, made him into the "Negro," the "Great Black Hope," who would save America from itself? Had I, too, leaned too heavily for optimism on the man loving friends called "Jimmy"? The Baldwin of my father's books But I felt none of the hope that I read in his writings hope that somehow the struggle against racism could be won.As I watched the film, I feared that the title of Peck's documentary spoke directly to me, though I had read and reread (almost memorizing) many of the passages from Baldwin's work that actor Samuel L. The despairing James Baldwin on the screen was so different from the hopeful figure I thought I understood."To look around the United States today," Baldwin says at one point, "is enough to make prophets and angels weep."In the film, I deeply felt Baldwin's despair that followed the murders of his friends. Louis, Mo., to footage and photographs taken during the Civil Rights era.The effect of the film on me was staggering. ![]() That work, other famous Baldwin passages, and mesmerizing videotaped interviews provide the soundtrack against stunning images that move the documentary from the recent riots near my home in St. In June, 1979, at the age of 55, Baldwin started work on what the filmmaker called a portrait of America as seen through the stories of three of his friends, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. We were headed to Saint-Paul de Vence, where I'd heard Baldwin lived.My mind reeled back to that trip and that moment of hopeful youth as I watched Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck's documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, which was released for wide distribution on Friday. He was the first writer to help me see clearly that race was a sickness that devoured both the racist and racism's victims.That must have been why, on a spring day in 1983, I jumped into a little red convertible MG, top down, driven by an insane Corsican friend a good-timing lady's man who proceeded to burn rubber around the kind of narrow, twisted, South-of-France mountain roads that had just killed Princess Grace of Monaco. In 1983, I was studying abroad in Nice, France, and while other exchange students were flitting from city to city, checking off items on their bucket lists, I craved only one European cultural experience:I wanted to meet James Baldwin, the mandarin prophet and former boy preacher the African-American expatriate writer who once used his European exile to explore, defy, and decry the delusional fiction of race that has organized our minds, our possibilities, our world, and now leads us toward the precipice of self-annihilation.Baldwin changed the way I saw the world and who I thought I was as an African-American within it.
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