Letter to Jimmy

1. a brave mother, and a father who did not love himself

The photo is in front of me, hanging on the wall. Your eyes are the first to capture my attention. Those big eyes — prominent on your face, that once mocked your father, unaware that they would later peer into souls, or that they would pierce through the darkest part of humanity, before closing forever — still hold their power to search deeply, even from the next life.

Eyes lifted skyward, eyebrows raised high. What are you thinking at the moment the photographer focuses his lens on you?

The picture is in black and white.

It looks to me today like an extension of your characters who share your voice, your mannerisms, your laughter, your anger, your exasperation. I linger in vain over your half-smile, a smile no doubt interrupted by the flash as you lifted your head up to the right; I know its mystery will remain.

You wear a white collared shirt with long sleeves, your black tie loosened, a cigarette wedged between your index and middle fingers. Each crease on your face casts a spell. Studying you this way, I sometimes imagine that we are building a dialogue, and that you are listening to me, entertained by my unanswerable questions.

When I turn over the photo — it has become a reflex — I read aloud the few words I have scribbled there: “What’s the weather like in heaven, Jimmy?”

•••

The photo carries me back to the 1920s, to the front of a public building, Harlem Hospital, in New York City. Emma Berdis Jones is twenty-eight years old at the time. On the 2nd of August 1924, she delivers a child out of wedlock, who is, as a result, illegitimate — a bastard. And you, you enter the world through the back door. Your eyes are not bothered by the light; they make out the environment, recording for later the wounds of a torn and quartered society built on a patchwork of “ethnicities.” Some people dominate, direct, decide. Others just endure, abide the ghetto borders, and do not have the right to sit next to the white man on public transportation. .

Emma Berdis Jones is certain that anyone who comes to this world through the back door will rise up one day. However, at this time in her life, her existence is as unstable as it can be. She takes odd jobs. More often than not, she gets placed as a housekeeper. After your birth, she tells herself that her days of wandering are finally over: she left behind Deal Island, Maryland, then Philadelphia, before dropping anchor in New York. It is there that she met David Baldwin, a man who could have been her father, but who agrees to become yours. This is a man whose oldest daughter, from a first marriage, is older than your mother, while his youngest son, Samuel, is eight years your senior. This is the man who gives you your name. And Emma, to whom you dedicate your masterpiece, No Name in the Street, has only one obsession: to give you a name.

What is a name, after all? Almost nothing. But a name says everything, and introduces us to the world.

We wear it with pride if we can attach it to a glorious past. It becomes an embarrassment when it suggests “illegitimacy.” You would not keep your mother’s name, Jones, for very long, since in 1927, three years after your birth, she marries David Baldwin.

On that day, you become James Arthur Baldwin. .

You would keep this name until the end of your days, without ever rejecting or changing it, unlike other stars of African-American history: Malcolm Little (who became Malcolm El Shabbaz, then Malcolm X) or Marcellus Cassius Clay, Jr. (who became Muhammad Ali), or the playwright and poet Everett LeRoi Jones (who became Amiri Baraka).

By keeping the name “Baldwin,” you are aware of perpetuating despite yourself a lineage forged of lurid relationships, domination, whipping, and slavery. You are, in reality, just the “Negro” of some Baldwin, a “white slave owner who, several centuries earlier, had entered into possession of one of the ancestors of David.”¹

Between those who advocate a return to roots — captivated by Pan-Africanist leaders like Marcus Garvey — and black Americans who replace their family name with an X to signal their affiliation with the Nation of Islam, you identify your situation as even more complex because of your double illegitimacy: the intimate illegitimacy, through your unknown biological father; and the historic, distant one, a product of slavery. The letter X, in vogue at the time, represents the unknown in an equation that has yet to be solved. It is the symbol of a very long path to be rebuilt, that leads all the way back to the remote village on the “dark continent,” where your African ancestors were captured and torn from their lands by slave traders: “The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as ‘the so-called American Negro’ and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter ‘X.’”²

Through the name Baldwin, you want to attach a meaning to your descent from a slave owner — and a slave — of history’s transgressions, the violence and humiliation suffered: “I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross.”³

•••

Were you born on the right side of things? Do you have the right skin color?

You admire your mother, a “small courageous woman,” Emma, the epitome of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice. She has nine children to care for, and she fears that she cannot manage to raise them because of the street, because of “this Harlem ghetto” where “rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are carefully shopped for and seldom bought.”⁴

The Harlem in which you live is a pile of hovels, a den of prostitution and of drugs, tuberculosis, alcoholism and crime. Above all, it is the scene of the most appalling racial atrocities that often unfold under police watch, when they themselves are not committing the acts or are not pulling the strings behind the curtains. Emma Berdis Jones warns you against “the street” that corrupts, derails and perverts.

The feeling there is of an abandoned neighborhood, separate from the rest of New York. And when riots erupt on March 19, 1935, after the murder of a black man by a white police officer — several thousand men take it out on white-owned businesses, causing a good portion of the middle-class to flee the neighborhood — you see that, despite the widespread indignation, political figures merely make endless speeches, set up committees, and tear down a few hovels to replace them with housing projects. They still do not take concrete and effective steps to “. . right the wrong, however, without expanding or demolishing the ghetto.” And this futile activity seems to you “about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”⁵

An entire universe exists between the ghetto and the heart of the city, situated only a few blocks apart.

When you go to the public library on 42nd Street, you get the feeling of entering another world. In this area, most people are homeowners. And they make sure you know it, you outsiders, you people of color. If necessary, the police will also see to it that you understand.

Under these circumstances, you and your brothers conclude that Emma is too inclined to absolution and indulgence toward her fellow man: the exact opposite of David Baldwin. She is the one who reminds you, “You have lots of brothers and sisters. . You don’t know what’s going to happen to them. So you’re to treat everybody like your brothers and sisters. Love them.” ⁶

Who are these siblings in need of protection? Barbara, Gloria, Paula, Ruth — your sisters. And your brothers: Samuel, George, Wilmer and David. Your father’s obsession with the name David is obvious: not only is it his name, but he already had a son with this name from a previous union at the time he married your mother. He then gives the same name to one of your younger brothers. One might say that yours is “the house of David.”

While Emma embodies security and familial protection, David is distant and consumed by his religious faith. Although he is a factory worker, he proudly dons a dark jacket and brushed black hat every Sunday. Then, with a Bible tucked under his arm, he preaches in the abandoned warehouses of Harlem.

To suffer through everything without complaint, is Emma Berdis a saint?

“I would not describe her as a saint, which is a terrible thing to do. I think she is a beautiful woman. . When I think about her, I wonder how in the world she did it, how she managed that block, those streets, that subway, nine children. No saint would have gotten through it! But she is a beautiful, a fantastic woman. She saved all our lives.” ⁷

So what happened to your biological father?

You do not know him, and you will never know him. This mystery will be one of the greatest torments of your adolescence. The shadows cast by this dark cloud scatter themselves through most of your writing. Your friend and biographer David Leeming explains how much the idea of “illegitimacy” remained a constant preoccupation for you, to the point that it can be detected in the titles of several of your books: Nobody Knows My Name, Stranger in the Village. .”⁸

Leeming nevertheless specifies that although the search for a father haunted you, it was not just for your biological father — you consider David Baldwin to be your own father, and when you mention him, you express a certain pride in bearing his name. In fact, as your biographer points out, you dreamed of a father who would accompany you on your long path to writing, and in your work as a preacher, to which David Baldwin was particularly attached. But starting in your adolescence and at the time you became a pastor, an even more complicated relationship developed between the two of you, as another of your biographers, Benoît Depardieu, explains: “By entering religion, in becoming a pastor-preacher, young James was turning toward another father, God the Father, and in so doing he hoped not only to escape from David Baldwin, his stepfather, but also to take his place by defying him and surpassing him in his own domain. This desire to compete with the father and to defeat him demonstrates a common oedipal complex.”⁹

David Baldwin cannot imagine an existence without his work as a preacher. This is all the more true since he sees before him every day the stigma of what he holds to be the greatest injustice: his own mother who lives with you, Barbara Ann Baldwin, was a former slave. Every black American is linked to the history of slavery. But Barbara Ann Baldwin is there in the flesh, and her history is not confined to textbooks; it is written across the downcast eyes of the old woman.

David Baldwin draws his entire family into his religious zeal. He has a rigid idea of Biblical teachings. Is it this rigidity that persuades him to have such a large family, since the Bible applauds fertility and mankind’s continuous reproduction?

In one way or another, it is your relationship with this man that will inform your views on American society and on interracial relations. You feel a sense of urgency to understand what feeds his hatred of the Other. Deep down, even if you devote yourself to admiring this hard and rigid being, you do not share the same understanding of the world, his view of the black man’s place in the world, nor his unwavering hostility toward the white man. The “murder” of the father will be symbolized by the “hatred” you harbor toward him. But does David Baldwin even love himself? He is not happy, to say the least. Never has anyone despised himself so much, you will tell yourself. He goes so far as to blame himself for the color of his skin. He will spend his life apologizing for it in all of his actions and believing that religion is the only path to salvation. In his mind, Leeming reminds us, even if the “white demon” does not recognize him as a human being in this world, God the Omnipotent, in His goodness and fairness, will rectify the injustice. This explains his antipathy toward IRS agents, landlords, and all whites who, in his mind, exercise a certain abusive power over blacks. However, he gathers through his daily reading of the Holy Book that the power of the white world is ephemeral, and that God will come one day to set the record straight. And on that day, the believers, the true believers, will have the upper hand over the non-believers.

This Manichean understanding commits him to absolute distrust. Since the world has always been corrupt, there can never be any cooperation between whites and blacks — the latter will always lose in that fool’s errand. As a result, the few whites who ever cross the threshold of your home are social workers or bill collectors. These public employees are not protected from the fury of the master of the house, although your mother still scurries around to receive them. David Baldwin, on the other hand, will bellow about the “violation of his domestic privacy,” and you all fear that his pride will drive him to commit the unthinkable.

•••

During your childhood, you have countless opportunities to witness the extent to which your father distrusts the white man, whoever he may be, even if he has the best intentions in the world. For David Baldwin, it is not only the white man who is bad: all white people are, without exception.

You tell the story of a white school-teacher who had to confront your suspicious father when she got the notion to take you to the theater. You were nine or ten years old, and you had just written a play that the school-teacher, devoted and admiring as she was, had already put on at school. She believed that in order to complement your education in drama, you had to live the theater, watch actors perform, feel the emotion of the audience. But at home, the theater, as well as movies and books, synonyms of perversion and of the grasp of the “white demon,” were forbidden. So was jazz, the “music of bought Negros,” that fascinates men of color who are caught in the trap of the white demon. David Baldwin took the invitation to the theater as an insult, a challenge to his authority, and an intrusion by a malicious force into the house of God. He has the habit of repeating a citation from the Bible: “As my house and myself, we will serve the Lord.” Never mind that he is incapable of meeting the needs of his family, or that his sons are reduced to engaging in an activity that young black men of the time could not shake: they were shoe-shiners, whose “pathetic” image was further perpetuated through advertisements. It was an image as moving as that of a “darky bootblack doing a buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins.”¹⁰ Moreover, David Baldwin does not hold it against his wife for working as a maid in white homes. If money does not have a smell, one might add here, too, that it does not have a color. .

That a white woman should offer to take one of David Baldwin’s sons to the theater is nevertheless enough to ignite his indignation. He immediately called into question the school-teacher’s interest in his son, convinced that behind her motivation and zeal there were some diabolical games at play: the white man is always out to get the black man. It was therefore against your father’s will that the school-teacher should help you experience the emotion of a theatrical performance for the first time.

Would David Baldwin have had the same reaction if the school-teacher had been a woman of color? Certainly not. You would hold on to these words for the rest of your life: “. . he warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my friends, and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.”¹¹

•••

David Baldwin is black, and does not realize that he is beautiful, you point out. You add that he dies with a fierce conviction of his ugliness. No doubt overcome by his own frustration, he makes tasteless jokes about your “ugliness” and your “big eyes” to the point of saying that you are the most unfortunate child he has ever laid eyes on. You were affected for a long time by his idea of ugliness. At a young age, we end up accepting what is said about us, especially when it comes from adults. It remains this way until something comes along to contradict those early notions, to make things right, even if only superficially.

You study yourself. You think about these eyes, so prominent on your face, that you inherited from Emma Berdis Jones, and you ask yourself if your father might not be right. What purpose could these big eyes serve? Why do they protrude so much? Had Mother Nature really punished you, or was she distinguishing you in some way? Desperation grips you. How many times have you told the story that made you discover that there is always something “uglier” than oneself in this world? In fact, when you were still just a child, you saw in the street, from a window in your apartment, a woman with eyes even more prominent than yours, with, on top of everything, and as if nature had had it in for her, oversized lips. You conclude that she is uglier than you. You run to tell your mother, to console her, to prove to her that you no longer have any reason to be tormented by this physical detail, and that human beings are judged by the quality of their souls. .

In fact, when David Baldwin focuses on your supposed ugliness, when he makes it the subject of his frequent tormenting, he hits your weak spot, and from it you draw a painful conclusion about the consequences of being a “bastard”: through his behavior, your step-father is indirectly attacking your biological father. . This leads you to regret yourself, and to reproach this unknown man, your biological father, for having approached Emma, and having transmitted to you her physical disgrace; impossible to erase, obvious at first glace. From that point forward, when you rest your big eyes on him, you imagine a pathetic being — a very old, frozen statue. .

Despite his despicable character that suggests David Baldwin is completely cold to his family — to the point that you describe him as “a monster in the house. Maybe he saved all kinds of souls, but he lost all of his children, every single one of them,” a monster experiencing a visceral aversion toward the white race — you also remember moments where this man seemed to you at last like a devoted father: human, feeling, attentive, managing the best he could for his family. You remember a time when your mother would carry you on her shoulders, and David Baldwin would be walking beside her, smiling at you. You remember, too, the image of this old man offering you candy.

But very quickly you recall the harsh reality of your father who pronounces you good-for-nothing, and does not hesitate to beat you to a pulp when you lose the change you are given to buy kerosene for heating the family home. Did this hateful man prepare you for life’s battles? You say your father “. . was perhaps too old to have as many children in a strange land as he had. The world was changing so fast, and he was in such trouble that he could not change with it. . He had nine children he could hardly feed. His pain was so great that he translated himself into silence, rigidity. . sometimes into beating us and finally into madness. . Without him I might be dead because knowing his life and his pain taught me how to fight.”¹⁴

This man sets up barriers between himself and others. He has difficulty maintaining close relationships with his friends who, one by one, distance themselves from him little by little. He is sick for years, but the illness from which he suffers is far from being physical: everything happens in his head, in his mind, to the point that you can no longer grasp the internal pain of a being who slides into the most extreme paranoia, stands in front of the window for hours reciting prayers and humming religious songs. It is in this distant, celestial world that he feels best. From this point forward, his hatred is out in the open. One might even say that he resents his nine children, resents their entry into this repulsive world that does not acknowledge him and that the Lord will make disappear. The paranoia reaches its peak when he begins to refuse to eat at home, convinced that his own family is plotting to poison him. .

•••

You are forced to take the place of your “unfit,” gruff, austere father, distrusting of his own family. You help your mother in her difficult role as mother and head of household, without asking yourself whether this role should fall instead into the hands of Samuel, David Baldwin’s son from his previous marriage and several years your senior. Still, you marvel at his courage, which he displayed when he saved you from drowning, for example. . Would this episode itself earn you the name “Moses,” who wrote the story of Israel and led his people out of Egypt to deliver them from slavery? Perhaps you, too, have a mission on this Earth, and this mission is passed to you through the knowledge of God, and through the freedom of writing.

Being saved by Samuel marks you, and you bring this up in No Name in the Street. The figure of this half-brother would run through Go Tell It on the Mountain and again in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, then in Just Above My Head. . The importance of the brother is magnified, his love nearly Christ-like, his arms protective, pulling you to life while the water is trying to swallow you whole. .

In the end, isn’t life, too, a vast wave that threatens to wash away the home if the father shuts his family out? Because you shoulder nearly the entire burden of father of the house, you become the one to whom the other children turn. You are a savior in your own right. Most of your biographers describe the same image of you from this period: a book in one hand, while tending to one of your brothers or sisters with the other.

David Baldwin knows that there is nothing more he can do. He knows that he cannot slow down your rush toward independence, nor distract your gaze from the page any more than he can stop your frequent visits to the neighborhood public library, or your increasing distance from religion. For him this is a failure. Until this point, to his great joy, you still belonged to the movement of young preachers, and had preached on countless occasions. You were preaching from the age of fourteen in Baptist churches. It was what David Baldwin wanted. This paternal wish comes through in the introduction to Go Tell It On the Mountain: “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”

At fourteen years of age, you are considered a good preacher, and very inspired. You become aware of the power of the word. From high on the pulpit, the faith of an entire population hangs from your lips. These black women, men and children are convinced that the words you speak come through your mouth from the Almighty. You know the Bible by heart, and the rhetoric and poetry you breathe into your sermons further inspire the audience, won over by your preaching.¹⁵

Until that time, the church had been your refuge. You believe it is the only place that can save you from the cruelty of the street. You think of how, in Harlem, police officers stop you, search you; they try to get a rise out of you by yelling insults about your background, the sexuality of black men, even leaving you unconscious in an abandoned lot. It is a violence from which age will not protect you, since already at thirteen, when you are making your way down Fifth Avenue toward the public library on 42nd Street, a policeman shouts at you, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?”¹⁶

Young people your age are wrong, you believe, not to seek shelter in the house of the Lord. You encounter a number of these young, lost souls, given to debauchery, on a daily basis. It is mostly the metamorphosis of the girls and boys you see in choir practice at church that stuns you. They grow and their features change. The girls “give off heat,” their chests swell and their hips become round. The boys drink, smoke and discover the pleasures of the flesh. You imagine what you will be like, what you will become when your body has changed, too, and when your voice becomes deeper. You are wracked with anxiety: will you find yourself in the company of “the most depraved individuals of this world?”¹⁷ Your biggest fear is the same one that grips every other black adolescent in the neighborhood: the fear of ending up like a stray dog, no higher on the social ladder than your father: “School therefore began to seem like a game that was impossible to win, so boys stop attending and started looking for work.”¹⁸

Three years more and you would be long gone from the church. Your mind is elsewhere. You can only think of one thing: “to be an honest man and a good writer.”¹⁹

•••

The reasons for your break with the church? You outline them in The Fire Next Time. You begin to understand that religion as it is will not help you obtain love from your fellow man, at least not as far as people of color are concerned. The Bible itself sews a seed of doubt in your mind: “People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. I was forced, reluctantly, to realize that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read, and I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper.”²⁰

Your disappointment is immense. You saw how churches operated, whether they were white or black churches. You saw that certain ministers became rich at the expense of the faithful, who are always asked to give more: more faith, more charity work, more alms. From the faithful, everything is squeezed out, down to the “last cent,” you write. You now know that when you preach, Bible in hand, sweat dripping from your forehead, you are no longer held by the force that used to lift your spirits and persuade the poor that a better world was in store; a Heaven where a spot, even a numbered one, was reserved for them on the right-hand side of the Lord. So on this poor, attentive flock you cast a gaze of compassion and guilt: compassion for the degradation of their daily lives, and guilt for being among those who ignore that reality. You feel as though you are leading them astray: “. . when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike.”²¹

How much longer will you be able to hold on?

At 17, you make your decision. And it is a permanent one, since you feel your grievances grow and grow against the Lord you have been serving for three years. You discover that instead of helping you find the peace you desire, religion throws you into profound loneliness. When called upon, you are nothing more than a puppet, a kind of messenger who goes against the best interests of his people. They are hungry, and you promise them riches in another world. They have no home, and you assure them that God will provide for them.

Faced with such realizations, your criticisms of the Holy Book are unforgiving. This book had helped brand an eternal curse onto the skin of the black man: “I was aware of the fact that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that according to many Christians, I was a descendent of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave.”²²

•••

Your “hatred” toward David Baldwin evolves into forgiveness the day that you see him dying on his hospital bed. He is a battered man, almost unrecognizable. Do you have to continue to be angry with him? With some perspective, you declare: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”²³

At the time of his death, on July 29, 1943, you become aware of the affection you felt for this being. As if looking for reasons to love him, you flip through the family photo album: your stepfather dressed to the nines to preach on a Sunday. It is a sublime image, you think. And you imagine David Baldwin “naked, with war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears.”²⁴ The impenetrable forehead, those serious features. It is his bitterness that you do not try to explain to yourself, the bitterness that he would take to the grave, “because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.”²⁵

When he is hospitalized, you discover that he has a serious case of tuberculosis. But you know that the enemy is not tuberculosis, that it is something else incurable, invisible, far from the diagnosis the doctors have issued from high on their pulpit. The thing that takes David Baldwin away is the “disease of his mind,” the one that has been eating away at him from the inside for years: “. . the disease of his mind helped the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him.”²⁶