Diary of an Autodidact: James Baldwin

Three years ago, I read James Baldwin for the first time: his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain. While the depiction of domestic violence and dysfunction was difficult at times, the book really impressed me with its psychological perceptiveness and nuanced view of various political and religious movements.

I had a chance to pick up a collection of Baldwin’s essays in the Library of America format, so I did. I decided to start at the beginning, and read the first collection for Black History Month this year.

This collection was fascinating and thought provoking. It is divided into three sections. The first is essentially critical reviews of books of movies - specifically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Native Son by Richard Wright, and the film version of Bizet’s Carmen starring African Americans, Carmen Jones. (My wife had heard of the last of these despite its obscurity.) The second section looks at the African American experience in the United States. The third is about the author’s experiences in Europe. Preceding all of this is an introduction entitled “Autobiographical Notes,” which is fantastic.

I’ll look at these roughly in the order they are in the book. First are a couple of wonderful lines from the introduction. Baldwin really articulates well the unspoken and unacknowledged role of racism and white supremacy in the very core of our politics. It is impossible to coherently talk about pretty much any issue in our current political discussion - particularly the election of The Toupee Who Shall Not Be Named - without acknowledging the past and its effects on the present. As Baldwin puts it:

I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart.

There is more good stuff about this in the final essay, which I hope to discuss later in this post. The second quote is fantastic, and is one I hope to steal.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

This is a common - and intentional in my opinion - misunderstanding of those of us who criticize America. We love our country, and want to see her live up to her ideals, not degrade to our worst instincts and historical moments. And this is why the Colin Kaepernicks of the world will always be far truer patriots than the jingoistic gun-toting sorts. To love is to expect the best, not enable the worst.

I didn’t note any particular quotes from the literary reviews, but I did want to touch on them. First, Baldwin’s criticisms of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are entirely just. He is right that, to reach her audience, she had to make her Negros either exotic (see: Topsy) or all too perfect to be realistic. As Baldwin notes, they cannot be fully human, with weaknesses and all, or they would be rejected by Stowe’s white audience. And yes, this remains a problem in white portrayals of people of color, from the “magical negro” on down. I won’t get into that further, other than to say that the essay is worth a read. It isn’t so much a takedown of Stowe as a critique of white audiences in general.

I can’t say much about Baldwin’s criticism of Richard Wright’s Native Son, as I have not yet read that. I thought his autobiographical work, Black Boy (American Hunger) was good.

The takedown (and takedown it was) of Carmen Jones appears to be entirely justified. Heck, so much of classic Hollywood has aged extremely badly - particularly on issues of race. I will particularly note his fantastic riff on why Black Carmen - and particularly the black men who desire her - cannot be allowed to be truly sexual. After all, that would get uncomfortably close to the most pernicious stereotypes about African Americans.

The second section is both intriguing and depressing. Baldwin is not much of an optimist, and is pretty much a self-admitted misanthrope in many cases. His view of black politicians is pretty dismal, even as he acknowledges the need for more blacks in politics. Sadly, so much of what he says seems to be true about today as well. Sigh.

I do want to quote one of his percipient statements, at the beginning of his description of the hazards of traveling to the deep south - specifically a horribly botched fundraising campaign involving a friend of his.

It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)

That’s both depressing and far too true these days as well.

In a later essay, Baldwin also makes a thoughtful observation about hate. Baldwin had a vicious, abusive father. In this essay, he mentions that he didn’t want to see his father on his deathbed. Although he told his mother that the reason was that he hated his father, he acknowledges in this essay that the real reason is that he didn’t want to see his father in a condition too pathetic to hate. Baldwin’s level of self-awareness is impressive and admirable. But the quote applies beyond just his situation.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

There is so much truth in this, both on the personal level, and on the broader societal level, as we endure a season where hate has gained a renewed vigor.

The final section was, in many ways, my favorite. If that is the right word. During the Jim Crow era, Europe, particularly Paris, was a bit of a haven for African Americans. It was a place where they would be treated relatively equally, and had access to the mainstream of intellectual and social live. But it wasn’t exactly a utopia, as Baldwin points out. While one wouldn’t be denied food, shelter, or employment, one was always burdened with the assumptions that came with being an American. Baldwin also notes that white supremacy is endemic to Europe too - that whole colonialist enterprise was founded on the idea of white superiority. It just manifests differently.

Perhaps the most horrifying essay is the one that tells the tale of Baldwin’s experience with the French criminal justice system. So, this fellow American runs into Baldwin, and gets his help in finding lodging in the same dive hotel in Paris. Unbeknownst to Baldwin, this guy stole the sheets from his previous lodging. Baldwin borrows these sheets while he does a protest that he can’t get his own sheets washed by the hotel. The cops are called, and an identifying mark is noticed, and Baldwin and his acquaintance end up in a bewildering cycle of bureaucracy and oppression which keeps them incarcerated for weeks on end on what is the most petty of thefts. (And Baldwin didn’t even do anything!) Finally, after an agonizing and seemingly endless series of hearings, Baldwin manages to get a fellow inmate who is released to go contact a lawyer friend of Baldwin’s, who gets things dismissed in fairly short order. The whole episode is a chilling reminder of the challenges - and abuses - faced by immigrants in our own justice system. Forget not sharing a common language. Baldwin is most horrified by the fact that he can’t read the culture like he could at home. Even in the South, he would have been able to kiss the right asses and get out. But in France, it is a bewildering mystery. This is why a bristle at those who claim that immigrants and refugees should somehow be able to master our own system the first time, without mistakes, and that any mistake should result in catastrophic consequences. I wish that each of those persons might find themselves afoul of a justice system they don’t instinctively understand. (Our own would be good enough - but a foreign one would be even better.) I love Baldwin’s observation on culture:

One had, in short, to come in contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal.

I am reminded of Abraham Maslow’s amazing quote about culture:

It is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often.

This is one of the main arguments I have had with people in the last few years. “Culture” is essentially used as a euphemism for race, of course, but more than that is the argument that somehow a culture is superior by definition because it has subjugated other cultures. Rather, cultures and subcultures are as much driven by circumstances as by choice.

Another essay in this section concerns Baldwin’s experience in a tiny Swiss village, where he was essentially the first black person anyone had seen. It is pretty horrifying in many ways, even though it is predictable as to the human behaviors. One of the best lines in this comes from Baldwin’s notice of a missionary collection box - seeking money to “convert the heathen Africans.” As Baldwin contemplates the irony of “buying” souls as black bodies were bought in the recent past, he makes an observation about his own father, who was a devout preacher even as he was abusive to his family.

I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my own father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed.

This is, indeed, the conclusion I myself have come to about white American Evangelicals. They sure believe in their doctrine, in their beliefs, and especially in their white nationalist politics - but they sure as fucking hell do not believe in Jesus Christ. At least not in a way that might possibly affect their behavior toward their fellow humans.

The final four pages of this essay are some of the best writing on race I have ever read. Baldwin takes the reader on a tour-de-force of the history of European chauvinism and the need whites have to remain wilfully ignorant of their own complicity in harming others. He starts with the idea that the American dream, of the equality of mankind, runs directly counter to American behavior. The expansion of equality to include the black man has caused tremendous cognitive dissonance. Let me quote at length.

[T]o betray a belief is not not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be now moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous - dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. The ideas on which American beliefs are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a beak with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

This was, literally, a hard necessity. It was impossible, for one thing, for Americans to abandon their beliefs, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacrifice they had endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs afforded them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.

Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the world’s notice that those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a certain, unprecedented uneasiness over the idea’s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea’s validity. The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.

Dang. The idea of the pathological rationalizations is even more true today of white Evangelicals than when Baldwin wrote it. It goes on:

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.

Baldwin goes on to note the history of lynching and segregation - and calls this an insanity which overtakes white men. Indeed. Baldwin then goes on to get to a really raw nerve. One which is at the heart of both our toxic excuse for religion and our equally toxic politics. I have to quote the final two paragraphs in their entirety, because they are so prophetic in explaining both our current political moment and indeed the way that white Evangelicalism has self-destructed over the last few decades.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not thing, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world - which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white - owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us - very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will - that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact face, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

I have read and re-read these paragraphs over and over a few times, because they are so fantastic. Really, the political and cultural moment we find ourselves in is contained therein. Trump ran on a platform which is essentially what Baldwin describes as “European innocence.” That state in which the existence of non-whites can be denied. MAGA is really - and has always been - “make America white again.” But the world is no longer white, and it never will be again. These warring ideas play out in so many ways, from the debate about immigration, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to our discussion of taxation and public benefits. The undercurrent of white supremacy has yet to be fully addressed, a full 75 years after Baldwin wrote these words. And it is nowhere as fully unaddressed as within white Evangelicalism. So many things here apply, from the naive (or, more likely, malevolent) insistence on a black and white morality (literally and figuratively), to the pathological denial of reality, to the way that moral high-mindedness and false innocence turns one into a monster: these are literally the defining characteristics of white Evangelicalism these days.

This collection of essays is well worth the read. Baldwin, even though he wrote decades ago, seems more prophetic and relevant than ever. His writing seems, like Jean Sibelius’ music, to be “cold, clear water” offering that clarity so needed today.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

It is, once more, Black History Month - okay, the last day, but still - and for the sixth year in a row, I read at least one book by an African American author. Here are my previous selections:

2011: 50 Years and Other Poems by James Weldon Johnson

2012: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2013: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

2014: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2015: Kindred by Octavia Butler

Other notable books by African American or African authors:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Books on Black History by other authors:

Red Tails, Black Wings by John B. Holway

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Photo by Allan Warren

Used pursuant to the Creative Commons License

Go Tell It On The Mountain is James Baldwin’s most autobiographical book, with the characters drawn largely from his own family. I chose this book because it was considered an important one, but without really knowing what it was about. I can say without hesitation that this is an excellent book, and one that spoke to me in unexpected ways.

First, a bit on the structure. I should issue a spoiler warning for those who haven’t read it, although the “plot” is hardly the most important thing in the book. Also, it was published in 1953, the year my father was born, so it is hardly a secret at this point.

The book is told largely from the point of view of John Grimes, a 14 year old young man growing up in Harlem in the 1930s. He is intelligent and sensitive, and fits the mold of a person who sincerely, desperately, wants to be good and to be loved. He was easy for me to identify with, as he has a lot in common with my own personality. John is also the character based on Baldwin himself.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, entitled “The Seventh Day,” sets the stage, introducing the characters, and taking place during the greater part of a typical Saturday in John’s life - but a day that would lead to a great change in him. The central struggle for John is his competing desires. On the one hand, he wishes to break free from his fundamentalist - and fanatical - stepfather; on the other, he is drawn toward his stepfather’s religion and toward the ideal of salvation. Along the way, we are introduced to the stepfather, Gabriel, who is both extremely religious and also violent against his family; the mother, Elizabeth, who has had a hard life, and wishes the best for her children, but is blamed by Gabriel for their faults; John’s half-brother Roy, as stubborn and rebellious as his father was; and Florence, Gabriel’s sister, strong and hard.

The middle section is subdivided into three parts. It is entitled “The Prayers of the Saints,” and each subsection tells the backstory of a character largely from that character’s point of view. So we hear of Florence, who eventually escaped from her life in the South, caring for her invalid mother and putting up with the drunken debauchery of her brother Gabriel. Her life in the North isn’t much better, as she suffers through an abusive marriage and poverty. We next hear of Gabriel, who battles his demons through his religious convictions, but has a humiliating failure that haunts him and that he hopes is not discovered. Finally, we hear from Elizabeth, who experiences a tragic love (which results in the conception of John), and who must balance her own guilt and regret with her duties to her children and husband.

One of the things that I truly loved about this book was Baldwin’s amazing ability to empathize with his characters. His own stepfather was as violent and unloving as Gabriel, and yet, Baldwin portrays him as a complex and startlingly sympathetic character. As far as that goes, he dedicates the book to his mother and father - and I believe he means his stepfather. (He refers to Gabriel as John’s father throughout the book, in recognition of the fact that Gabriel raises John.) To take a person who was abusive, haunted by his own demons, and who was fatally conflicted between his guilt on behalf of his own wayward biological son, and his jealousy of the docile nature of his stepson, and make him into a character that can be understood and pitied takes a level of grace and charity that is rare. (I am reminded to a degree of Anthony Trollope, who likewise understood that utter villains are rare.)

The final section is entitled “The Threshing Floor,” and tells of John’s conversion experience and his own epiphany in his life’s journey.

Baldwin portrays the complex relationship that the African American community has had with religion. On the one hand, it was and remains a source of community, solidarity, and inspiration. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most inspiring ideals sprang in significant part from his faith, and that faith was in so many ways a binding factor in the Civil Rights Movement. On the other hand, though, religion has also served as an agent of repression and an enabler of hypocrisy. Gabriel is able to “rule” his family with a violent hand in large part because of his beliefs. He is convinced that he must beat the wickedness out of his son Roy lest he meet the violent and tragic fate of his illegitimate son - the first Royal. Likewise, Gabriel believes (wrongly) that it is Elizabeth’s softness that has led Roy to rebel, and thus he beats her while blaming her for Roy’s choices. Gabriel cannot see that Roy cannot respect his father, because he realizes that Gabriel is a total hypocrite, unable to control his own passions or be loving to his family.

The thing is, this isn’t just a description of a particular African American experience. I myself recognized the dynamic here. In some ways, there is the experience that I had in my brief days in the Bill Gothard cult - religious fanaticism and hypocrisy are much the same everywhere. In others, I see the lives of friends, acquaintances, and clients who survived abusive family situations that were caused or exacerbated by religious fundamentalism. More than anything, I recognize the guilt. The feeling that the mistakes of the parents justify the most extreme measures against the children, to “save” them from making the same mistakes. And when I read of Roy, several faces come to mind immediately.

Even more than that, though, there is John. John is me. But he is also many others. For all of us who have always had the strong desire to be good, who have always wanted desperately to have love and approval. For those of us who felt in some sense that we could never live up to our own ideals, but also could never truly gain the approval of our parents without losing some crucial part of ourselves.

The story becomes even more interesting, though, when one follows the progression past the end of the book.

At the end, John has his salvation experience. He becomes “saved” both from an outside perspective and from his own. He feels he has met God.

Likewise, James Baldwin had a similar experience at age 14. He would go on to become a pentecostal preacher like his stepfather.

But after that, things changed.

In his late teens, Baldwin became disillusioned with religion. As he later explained to Elijah Mohammed (one of the early leaders of the Nation of Islam), “being in the pulpit was like working in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked.”

It is easy to see this in Go Tell It On The Mountain. On the one hand, John’s experience is treated as being fully genuine. On the other, as Baldwin narrates the story, it is clear that he realizes that much of what is venerated as “true” religion is just smoke and mirrors. It is a craft much like music - or magic. The skilled practitioner can see behind the curtain and explain the emotional manipulation.

I am very much in Baldwin’s camp on this issue. There are indeed many genuine believers, who live out their religion in quiet, largely unnoticed ways. But for the most part, those who garner the attention are all sizzle, and no steak. It is an illusion played to gather money and attention from the masses, with nothing of substance behind it. It is just selling a false promise that everything will be better with a formula of some sort.

One more factor in all of this that struck a chord: Baldwin was gay, as he came to realize. You can see the genesis of this in his obvious attraction to his cousin Elijah, which John sublimates into a religious adoration. Later, Baldwin would write more controversial works about sexuality, which led to him being marginalized in the Civil Rights movement. (At the time, homosexuality was associated with communism and generally treated as suspect, so his existence was inconvenient for the movement.)

The reason, though, that this struck me was this: starting in my early teens, I have known friends who have come out. Of the young men in particular, I can say this: they are like John. They have generally been the sensitive, kind, young men. The ones most drawn to the things of God. Contrary to the stereotype - and the vile slander heaped on them by the James Dobsons and Bryan Fischers and Duggars of the world - they are not a bunch of godless predators. And they have generally been eaten for lunch by the church.

For Baldwin, one can see how he would notice the illusion. As long as the facade of goodness is maintained, one can hide evil and violence behind the curtain of fanaticism. But for the one who makes that fatal misstep, there is nothing but condemnation and marginalization awaiting.

There are some lines I think are worth quoting. First is Roy’s response to his mother who tries to convince him that he is lucky to have a father who works to support him.

“Yeah, we don’t know how lucky we is to have a father what don’t want you to go to movies, and don’t want you to play in the streets, and don’t want you to have no friends, and he don’t want this and he don’t want that, and he don’t want you to do nothing. We so lucky to have a father who just wants us to go to church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar and stay home all nice and quite, like a little mouse. Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don’t know what I done to be so lucky.”

Surprise, surprise! Cultural Fundamentalism is the same everywhere, isn’t it?

A little later, after Roy gets into a fight, Florence takes her brother to task:

“Don’t you worry about my language, brother,” she said with spirit, “you better start worrying about your life. What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see.”

“What they see,” his father muttered, “is a poor man trying to serve the Lord. That’s my life.”

“Then I guarantee you,” she said, “that they going to do their best to keep it from being their life. You mark my words.”

Total truth. I can see this reflected in the many parents I know that feel their children have somehow strayed. In actual fact, they are doing their best to make sure that are not doing what their parents did that damaged them.

This is one of the things it is so hard to do as a parent. We want so much to see them behave that we forget to focus on creating a loving environment.

Near the end of the book, when Florence confronts Gabriel with the way he treated his baby-momma years ago, he tries to wiggle out of it by claiming he is past all of that and just following the Lord.

“And if you have been but a stumbling stone here below?” she said. “If you done caused souls right and left to stumble and fall, and lose their happiness, and lose their souls? What then, prophet? What the, the Lord’s anointed? Ain’t no reckoning going to be called of you? What you going to say when the wagon comes?”

He lifted up his head, and she saw the tears mingled with his sweat. “The Lord,” he said, “He sees the heart--He sees the heart.”

“Yes,” she said, “but I done read the Bible, too, and it tells me you going to know the tree by its fruit. What fruit I seen from you if it ain’t been just sin and sorrow and shame?”

And this is indeed a question for all of us to ponder. If all we have left behind us is a trail of destruction and shame, what matters it if we have keep some sort of theological orthodoxy?

One final one. This comes from the story of the young Gabriel, in his first days as a preacher, when he is naive, and also a bit full of himself. He has not yet taken his first real fall, but he can recognize the hypocrisy in some fellow preachers.

They seemed to him so lax, so nearly worldly; they were not like those holy prophets of old who grew thin and naked in the service of the Lord. These, God’s ministers, had indeed grown fat, and their dress was rich and various. They had been in the field so long that they did not tremble before God anymore. They took God’s power as their due, as something that made the more exciting their own assured, special atmosphere. They each had, it seemed, a bagful of sermons often preached; and they knew, in the careless lifting of an eye, which sermon to bring to which congregation.

The young Gabriel never wants to “hold the gift of God so lightly.” And yet he too, cannot really grasp the point, as he himself cannot learn to show love. It’s either showmanship or hellfire and legalism for Gabriel. He finds he has neither the talent to be a successful showman nor the ability to live up to his own standards, so he compensates by loading rules and pressure on his family.

Again, I highly recommend reading this book. Baldwin’s writing is perceptive and his understanding of family and church dynamics is spot on.

Pages

Monday, February 25, 2019

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Monday, February 29, 2016

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin