Baldwin’s Spell

Harlem histories tell us that the black churches followed their congregations uptown after World War I. I used to put on a suit on Sundays in order to blend in with worshipers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street and avoid being sent up to the balcony with the casually dressed white tourists. I’d come for the famous swells of music, for the thump of gospel choirs. But when the music stopped and the pastor began to strut and shout I found myself wedged into a dark place where the Holy Ghost did not know how to behave.

Meanwhile the oldest black denomination in New York state was reported to be having trouble surviving. Dynamism has departed from Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. A Gothic Revival structure on West 137th Street, Mother Zion’s Harlem home was completed in 1925. Its aging membership has not recovered from the subtractions of the pandemic. The ranks of street vendors in bow ties of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, also seem to have thinned. Harlem has more marijuana shops than storefront churches these days.

When black people first started to move uptown, the principal crosstown artery of Harlem was 135th Street. Harlem spread. White people realized too late what was happening and made the best of the deal by overcharging. Overcrowding in New York called for attitudes of transience, poor people working to move on to a better elsewhere, but that didn’t happen. The color-blind textbook definition of blight was an area of metropolis that had lost out on the utilities and services sweepstakes. Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1966) is the history of a slum, not a cultural Mecca.

The Jazz Age that blasted out of World War I coincided with the Negro Awakening. Harlem became the capital of the Negro world, but that was for a comparatively brief period. Instead, Harlem was for much longer the “symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation,” as Ralph Ellison said in the essay “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948). Harlem continued to spread, up out of its valley, onto the West Side’s rocky ridges. What made Harlem scary in the decades after the riot of 1964 that left bullet holes in the painted terra-cotta of the Hotel Theresa was its ghost town aspect, the dread of what might be lurking behind boarded-up façades.

Uptown’s neglect was not preservation, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts asserted in Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (2011), a haunting work about the district in transition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was as if she had looked up everything about Harlem that she could at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue and then gone outside to see how much of its legacy had survived.

Buildings in Harlem had decayed and collapsed and ended up as empty lots. Rhodes-Pitts came to appreciate them, she said, as places to rest her eyes, as the burial grounds of stories. Then the empty lots got filled in. They acquired building frames. Rhodes-Pitts had been looking at the funeral homes and the faded graffiti, the surprising parades and the photography archives at a time when real estate advertisements promised that Harlem’s brownstones would be delivered “vacant,” their occupants shoved off to the kind of low-income, garden apartment suburbs that Junot Díaz depicts in his fiction. Nothing stopped the sales, the conversions, the property market and its mixed-income housing compromises. Good-bye, Lenox Lounge.

From Harlem River Drive to Columbia University’s new Manhattanville campus beside the Hudson River, construction sites, scaffolds, sheds, and green-painted fences line 125th Street, long since Harlem’s principal east–west thoroughfare. Renewal means that even the work of earlier black architects has been torn down to make way for the future. David Adjaye’s Studio Museum in Harlem, stacked gray boxes of smoked glass, shoulders its way into being as a glamorous neighbor of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, an unattractive fortress finished in 1973 that Wikipedia says was designed in the shape of an African mask. Its concrete plaza, African Square, is a site for concerts, fairs, rallies, drumming. Elsewhere on 125th Street the “liberationist” National Black Theatre, founded in 1968, has been reinvented as a theater housed inside a twenty-story apartment building clad in pink-red brick that, according to its architects’ website, refers to the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria.

The future invades by degrees. Traci Parker’s Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (2019) can explain the Jim Crow history that shaped 125th Street’s character as a strip of discount clothing and furniture stores and pawn shops. Some time ago people suspicious of change frowned on the Whole Foods erected on an empty lot across from the recent Starbucks on 125th Street. Why shouldn’t Harlem have what most of Manhattan took for granted, other people answered. Harlem’s rehabilitation was in becoming like everywhere else.

Violence has become random, an anywhere, anyplace kind of metropolitan event, and Harlem is no longer perceived as more dangerous than elsewhere in the city. Nobody calls Harlem a ghetto anymore; no one is burning it down for the insurance money. But as thick with impatient traffic as 125th Street is during the day, it is dead at night. LED and neon signs of late-night fast food franchises (mostly chicken) make little impression. The thrill has moved on to downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Apollo Theater still hosts amateur nights ninety years after Ella Fitzgerald won her contest and stepped into stardom, and with the support of the Mellon and Ford Foundations it is a cultural venue for worthy programs such as a Festival of Arts and Ideas, led by Ta-Nehisi Coates. But hip-hop didn’t start anywhere near 125th Street. Harlem hasn’t been the center of black culture for a while.

Now Africans are everywhere in Harlem. They have entered the immigrant economy, including global Internet services shops, restaurants, and imported food markets. The delivery guys studying their phones are African, huge plastic mitts attached to their parked electric bicycles; the women chatting on folding chairs on either side of the bright entrances to hair salons are African. The method of braiding hair is called interlocking. Sometimes escaped strands of braided hair float over the sidewalk.

The kaftans, boubous, and embroidered shirts, the syllables of Wolof, French, and Fante along 125th Street at the vendor tables of iPhone covers and earbuds, fruit and vegetables, gold chains and knockoff Nike sweat suits are reminders that not all black people in Harlem share the same story. Except that the diaspora has come to town. Again. African mosques are the new storefront churches. Periodically eruptions of beautiful costumes in the streets announce where Harlem is on the festival calendar.

The variety of skin tones that Langston Hughes celebrated in his poetry about Harlem in the 1920s had to do with the black America of the one-drop rule: one sixteenth of black blood makes a person black. One hundred years later Harlem’s variety of people is the result of its internationalism: lower-case populations, black people and white people, white youth unafraid of black people, followed by upper-case groups of Sub-Saharan Africans, North Africans, Central Americans, South Americans, and unexplained Asians. And then there are storybook side streets blocked to cars that show off Harlem as the home of young middle-class mixed-race families at play. Black Heritage can be child-friendly. Harlem’s mix has always been one of class. The unhoused sleep on the floors of ATM lobbies. They sleep on the sidewalks in front of aluminum can and plastic bottle recycling machines. Chinese women of a certain age appear in large numbers with carts at food banks.

Tourism in New York City is bigger business than manufacturing. The bargain that development made with the black community holds recognition of Harlem’s black history as compensation for its being statistically less and less black day by day. It is the black nationalist past that is the subject of merchandise and creative content, a large part of what Harlem has to sell. Black nationalism once seemed an extreme position, but so many ideas that were on the fringe back then have since moved into the mainstream.

A few blocks north of 125th Street, I am in what had been James Baldwin country. His childhood neighborhood of Jewish shop owners is scarcely within living memory. “Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew,” he said in “The Harlem Ghetto” (1948), an essay about, in part, social scapegoats. The delis are now Hispanic- or Arab-run. Even the urban renewal of the early 1950s that demolished the block between 130th Street and 131st Street where Baldwin grew up is past its sell-by date. The projects that replaced his tenement more than half a century ago look tired, “a monument to the folly, and the cowardice, of good intentions,” as he put it in “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (1960). The playground beside the projects is a memorial to a lost version of urban policy idealism. The street front of one-story shops that were supposed to cater to those projects has been shuttered for years. “Wide, filthy, hostile Fifth Avenue”—Baldwin recalled how he and his brothers and sisters pressed their noses against the glass and longed to go across the street to the not-yet “rehabilitated” side. Progress takes time, he said in his soft, bitter irony.

On August 2, 2024, Baldwin’s centenary, an exuberant crowd of mostly women massing in the lobby of the Schomburg waited to take their turn in an exhibition space upstairs. “JIMMY! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth,” organized by Barrye Brown, a curator of manuscripts at the Schomburg, brought together artifacts from Baldwin’s life: his work published in junior high and high school yearbooks; handwritten and typed pages from his novels; photographs on interactive screens showing him sitting with a very young Bob Dylan, for instance; jacket covers and books; a “Save Our Show” handbill for his play Blues for Mister Charlie. It is an intimate tribute and goes with another display about Baldwin that is on view at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, “Mountain to Fire,” curated by Charles Cuykendall Carter.

Included in the 42nd Street Library display is a postcard to Beauford Delaney in which Baldwin communicates his excitement at the opening of his play The Amen Corner in 1954. In the Schomburg exhibition, there is a letter to Lorraine Hansberry written in 1961 pleading for her to put in a good word for him with the theater producer Lloyd Richards, and another to Maya Angelou from 1975 saying that he’d been walking up and down scared shitless by his new novel that was also walking up and down, making faces at him. Baldwin’s letters are held at the Schomburg, some under embargo until 2037, some not, some who knows. Words of his we’ve not seen.

Baldwin has been well served by his early biographers, David Leeming and James Campbell; the eagerness of the people in front of the 42nd Street and Schomburg display cases looking at what he typed, what he touched, suggested that Baldwin: A Love Story, the forthcoming biography by Nicholas Boggs, is well timed. We want someone to ask and answer again the obvious and the fascinating: What had he been looking for in Harlem, Greenwich Village, Paris, Istanbul, Saint-Paul-de-Vence?

The Harlem Renaissance was not an influence of Baldwin’s youth, even though Countee Cullen had been his French teacher in junior high school. Similarly, his writings about Harlem make no reference to its cultural past or the Jazz Age. His father’s church was a prison and Harlem the prison plantation. The classroom and the library were his first escapes. The uptown thug streets and downtown theater proved not to be ways out as a young adult. Baldwin had an epiphany while in New Jersey on his lousy wartime job: if he stayed in the US he would be murdered, meaning that he felt he would be in danger always of having a confrontation with some aggressive white person. It meant he knew he would never be able to hold his tongue.

The postwar civil rights movement began with the fed-up black GI generation and the women who had served or done war work in the men’s absence, all people who could not be driven back into what had been. For Ellison, to have got to New York from Oklahoma by way of Alabama was enough. Harlem was his Left Bank, he said. But many black GIs stayed on in Europe. In 1948, the year Truman integrated the US Army, Baldwin got a fellowship and used it to move to Paris. His motives were maybe not different from those of the Harlem Renaissance sojourners in Paris. He did not see the black writer in exile as a tradition.

Yet Baldwin was following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, the most famous black writer of his youth. Wright’s wife was Jewish, and they preferred to bring up their children abroad. Because of the cold war and Wright’s radical past, the State Department was sensitive about the interviews he gave concerning the end of colonialism and the racism of US society. He was putting his passport at risk, they told him. Wright died in Paris in 1960. Baldwin wrote of Wright’s unhappy last years. Wright’s late stories and novels were judged failures. You leave someplace and the popular idiom back there can move on without you. Baldwin swore he was not going to end up like Wright.

The war lay like a great wall between what had been before and the after he was going to live in. He had the Oedipus complex, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. He wasn’t in the position of Wright and Ellison’s generation of having to get over disillusionment with leftist politics while fending off the intellectual assault of McCarthyism. Black life may have been existentialist in its essence, but Baldwin hadn’t any of Wright’s public identification with French philosophy. He was also distant from the next generation of Négritude writers then in Paris.

Every page of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) tells us of the mournful discipline it forced on him. It was sold in religious bookstores, alongside C.S. Lewis. Baldwin had come to Paris in the time of the Henry James revival. The structure according to seasons of Giovanni’s Room (1956) shows the influence of James’s The Ambassadors. Baldwin’s love story about a white American man from San Francisco and an Italian street boy has no black characters. The black novelist Willard Motley had made a sensation with his novel Knock on Any Door (1947), a retelling of Wright’s best seller, Native Son (1940), though Motley’s young man in Chicago turned criminal is Italian, not black. The movie version in 1951 was also a hit. Zora Neale Hurston and Wright then tried their hands at all-white novels. So here was Baldwin’s all-white novel of a youth condemned to death. The notion was that not to have black characters would be freeing. But it was also a commercial hope. How to gain access to the mainstream.

Baldwin’s lyric voice didn’t entirely suit the popular forms he sought success with. Meanwhile he loved film. That comes through often enough in The Devil Finds Work (1976), autobiographical writing in the form of remembering the movies he saw as a kid and what they said to him about race. He grew up on film. He studied Leslie Howard. He watched every film with a critic’s eye. He wrote about Bergman. He tried to work in film. A dream defeated.

There may have been some interior watchfulness on his part: years later he spoke of his Paris life as having been more among the Arabs than he’d ever said. The French government had let it be known that public expressions of support for the Algerian Revolution could get black Americans deported. People are just beginning to study what cold war pressures did to black American writers in Paris. Baldwin said he discovered in Europe that he had been preparing himself for America. To be away allowed him to reflect on where he’d come from. His inner call to act as a witness stirred his transatlantic restlessness. His freedom came with responsibilities. He glimpsed the troubled face of Albert Camus in a café.

He went the way of Wright after all, who was called upon to be a spokesman in the 1940s, the age of radio. Baldwin became a witness in the age of television. He appeared on talk shows in the 1960s to discuss the strife that the American public was seeing on the evening news. Writers back then were national figures; their opinions were considered newsworthy. Baldwin on camera sounded like Baldwin on the page.

His rebuke of American society in The Fire Next Time (1963) carried the shock of the exposé. Ishmael Reed in the excerpt from the film The Price of the Ticket that plays on a loop at the Schomburg exhibition explains that “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” Baldwin’s New Yorker essay that formed the major portion of The Fire Next Time, was addressed to a middle-class white audience for which his views on racial oppression were new. The faces of the students in footage of the debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union in 1965 say that they were hearing a language about race and consciousness they hadn’t before. This was the spell of Baldwin the witness armed with thought.

In American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011), David W. Blight makes the point that Baldwin came to prominence at a critical moment in American history: the years of the Civil War Centennial. Into the celebrations, romance, and reconciliation, Baldwin brought his “voice of dissent.” The Civil War memorials and the civil rights demonstrations seemed to be taking place in different countries, Blight notes, making Baldwin’s also a voice of mediation.

Blight observes that Baldwin was not a spokesman for Negro history, that professional historians had been writing for decades the “largely unknown story” of black people shaping American history, but with little impact. However, black people were very aware of the historical background. The contemporary struggle was in itself a legacy of the Civil War, part of an ongoing historical process, which could feel like a revolution.

It would take some time for the books that black people read at home to get on the curriculum of what white students read in school. Much of what they would read hadn’t been lost or forgotten so much as suppressed. But then it is a tradition of black intellectual life in America that every generation finds it necessary to reassess what is going on with black people. Baldwin’s black readers knew as he did the significance of Wright’s stories, novels, and Black Boy (1945), his searing autobiography. Baldwin said he loathed being asked if he thought progress had been made on the race problem.

Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), one of the first black intellectual histories, attacked Baldwin for not offering sociological or economic solutions while calling for a radical reconstruction of American society. Baldwin’s “emotional appeals to conscience, the literary explorations of the American psychic malaise…becomes a rather superficial literary mode of involvement.” Baldwin’s assault on liberals was futile rhetorical exercise, he insisted. Cruse blamed both Marxism and Zionism for thwarting the formulation among Negro intellectuals of a radical black nationalist philosophy. Not even Malcolm X, simply reform-minded in the end, was black enough for Cruse.

Only one black writer per generation was permitted by the white critical establishment to get anywhere, some muttered. Criticism of Baldwin as an innocent, provincial intellectual who talked of redemption instead of power betrayed some jealousy of his fame. Cruse had wanted to be a playwright. He railed that only when black writers won attention in the mainstream did black audiences become interested in them. In 1965 Mary McCarthy said that, given the US occupation of Santo Domingo then underway, she was surprised Baldwin would let the US ambassador to London and his wife give a vast supper in his honor.

For someone who gave such emphasis to individual experience, to the Socratic premise that the unexamined life was not worth living, Baldwin reveals little directly about himself in his work. It is a central paradox of his essays. The social and personal dissolve into one, the spoken and the written become one. His is a voice we know by his sound, like a singer, yet he convinces us of its universality as he tells white people that the race problem is actually a white problem. Enough has been made of the influence of the black church and the King James Bible on Baldwin, but his style of reasoning by paradox, clauses falling in rhythmic waves, belongs to him, to his relationship with words, not the Word.

However, he spoke of having gone into the pulpit as saving himself, of leaving the pulpit in order to save himself, of leaving the US for the same reason. The drive of his argument concerning a turning point in race relations was toward the redemptive possibilities for the nation. But the strength of his argument that racial equality could bring salvation depended on how much people cared about their souls or that of the nation in the first place. Hannah Arendt suspected that Baldwin’s philosophy of love would invite hurt. His life divided into Before 1968 and After 1968—after the assassinations, after the FBI-led destruction of the Black Panther Party. Because of his speeches, he had from time to time been of interest to the FBI himself. He wasn’t an advocate of militant violence so much as an explainer of it as a response to specific conditions.

He who never had need of ideology endorsed in the book-length essay No Name in the Street (1972) an “indigenous socialism” based on

the real needs of the American people. This is not a doctrinaire position, no matter how the Panthers may seem to glorify Mao or Che or Fanon. (It may perhaps be noted that these men have something to say to the century, after all, and may be read with profit, and are not, as public opinion would seem to have it, merely more subtle, or more dangerous, heroin peddlers.)

Before 1968 he’d addressed America as “we” and kept in mind shared human frailties. After 1968 his open invitation to all people to discover their humanity was revoked, but his most reckless paragraphs were still animated by the charm and force of the personality in his prose.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) finds in Baldwin’s late essays a continuity of purpose, though the civil rights movement had collapsed. For him, Baldwin is “a critic of the after times,” steadfast in “revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea.” Glaude reads Baldwin as descended from the Emerson who defied the cruel atmosphere of Jacksonian democracy: “We also have to engage in a critical inventory of who we take ourselves to be and to make a decision to choose life.”

Baldwin’s fiction had always been judged by what felt like extra exact standards in those days when Negro parents cautioned their children that they would have to be twice as good as white students just to break even. Baldwin was a committed realist as a novelist, though he decided in his late novels that he was as free as anyone when it came to uses of the first person and rules about point of view. He wrote novels of ideas, discussion novels. His people are desperate to connect. Talk is their medium; understanding is what they have to offer. Much depends on his ear, on what he gives his characters to say and how they say it.

Homosexuality, masculine desire, plays a major part in all his novels—except If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), about a black family’s struggle not to be destroyed by the justice system—whereas he dealt with male sexuality as his main subject in only two essays. Giovanni’s Room is his one novel in which his sensitivity to the history of women is not in evidence. The narrator of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) categorizes the word “gay” as an instance of “incomprehensible vernacular.” But the right human touch, the honest human touch in Another Country (1962) and Just Above My Head (1979), has healing powers. Baldwin had a bias for butch guys. His novels belong to the big brother figure, the sexualized protector.

These days critics of divergent practices are looking at his fiction for different values and qualities, as In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) by Fred Moten, for instance, demonstrates. He interprets Baldwin’s late fiction as “visible music,” notes that his work is “pierced” with screams, songs, prayers, cries, and groans, and pursues the meanings of the sound and content of Baldwin’s gaze. His gaze may contain the negative weight of our history, Moten says, but it also holds a blessing.

“God’s black revolutionary mouth” is a phrase Amiri Baraka used in his eulogy for Baldwin at his funeral in 1987. When he died at the age of sixty-three, Baldwin’s reputation in the mainstream was at a low ebb. The rage and militancy of his late works were compared unfavorably to the eloquence and patience of his early essays. There had been a time in the mid-1960s when Baraka baited Baldwin as the darling of the white liberal cocktail circuit, but his presence and that of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou as speakers at Baldwin’s funeral said that black people and black literature had taken him back. Black America had a tradition of reclaiming black stars when they fell from grace in the white world.

A recording of Baldwin singing “Precious Lord” was heard on August 2 in the Langston Hughes Auditorium at the Schomburg; the same recording had been played at his funeral. Novella Ford, the Schomburg’s assistant director of public programs and exhibitions, introduced Yahdon Israel, a young senior editor at Simon and Schuster and the founder of Literary Swag, and the Chicago activist and rapper Rhymefest for their onstage conversation inaugurating the “God’s Revolutionary Black Mouth” exhibition. The packed auditorium was ready to be rocked. It was not church, because approbation took the form of row after row of secular jazz finger snapping, but it was spiritual. It was also release day for No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, a recording of music and spoken word by Meshell Ndegeocello and others.

It takes a long time to learn a little, Israel and Rhymefest said Baldwin said. In teaching others, Baldwin allowed himself to be taught. He allowed them to stop punishing themselves for what they didn’t know. Israel and Rhymefest said he had taught them that they are the survivors of something, witnesses of something. They said they respected him as someone who advocated for those who were not represented in the spaces where he got to go. They said Baldwin kept Christianity and took away the dogmatism. We can go back as far as Baldwin and still relate to what we’re hearing as a living truth, not a historical one.

Israel and Rhymefest related strongly to James Baldwin Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue (1973), as a conversation between an elder and a young person. Giovanni was known at the time for some of the most violent, even offensive, poems black militancy justified. Baldwin is careful with her, disarming, appeasing. He doesn’t want to come off as an old head, but he knows more than she does. He tells her that what has changed the most in America is how black people feel about themselves. The long Schomburg afternoon said that a new generation was reading Baldwin as a prophet of identity, who said:

No one knows precisely how identities are forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. It is a long drawn-out and somewhat bewildering and awkward process.

Baldwin came of age in a world after war that believed it could make itself anew. The outcome of the demonstrations, sit-ins, litigation, protests, legislation, and deaths of his prime was far from assured. He walked on, sickened, and died on his bed of angry moralism. A soulless counterrevolution was going on when they buried him, a winter when some black intellectuals amplified their careers by joining the conspiracy to undermine the civil rights movement. A lesson of Baldwin’s story is that education can be made democratic, but the distribution of talent never will be.

I asked Baldwin’s friend Caryl Phillips what Baldwin would have made of the explosion of posthumous attention. “Jimmy would love it.” He was getting his due. Black people are not supposed to get in the way of another black person getting paid.

The summer heat on the street in front of the Schomburg made me nostalgic. I remember being in a potential mood on my first visit to the new building of the Schomburg, designed by Max Bond’s firm Bond Ryder Associates, across from the hospital at Lenox and 135th Street. One afternoon I realized that the remains of Langston Hughes were actually in the zodiac mosaic floor in front of the library’s Langston Hughes Auditorium. I thought the auditorium had been named for him and that was it. But I’d been traipsing over Hughes’s grave. In the Schomburg exhibition dedicated to Baldwin, there was a photograph of Baldwin and Angelou dancing on the very spot.

Now, one hundred years after Baldwin’s birth in Harlem, to have a black mayor of New York City does not feel like a big historical deal. Diversity has been around for decades and is big business. What has happened to the millions of dollars raised in the name of Black Lives Matter does not appear to be a question with much traction. The argument used to be about whether American institutions needed to be torn down or whether they could be changed from within. The charge of systemic racism proved unanswerable as a weapon in committee. Get your absolution here. The bourgeois black nationalism Cruse opposed is victorious. Celebrations of black triumph are not to be deferred.