James Baldwin: Wake the Children Sleeping

https://www.commondreams.org/further/james-baldwin-wake-the-children-sleeping

James Baldwin: Wake the Children Sleeping

ABBY ZIMET
Aug 5, 2024

Amidst surging racism in what he ruefully called our "glittering republic," we mark the 100th birthday of James Baldwin, the incandescent writer, orator, and "disturber of the peace" fiercely committed to telling the truth about race in America. As a black, queer man who channeled his rage into his work, he called on his countrymen "trapped in a history (they) do not understand (to) make America what America must become," insisting, "You can't swear to the freedom of all mankind, and put me in chains."

A fiery "prophet teacher" present at seminal moments of the Civil Rights Movement from Selma to Washington, Baldwin grew up poor in Harlem, the oldest of nine children to Emma Jones, who at 19 fled the segregated South during the Great Migration. He never knew his biological father; Jones later married David Baldwin, an unstable fire-and-brimstone preacher with whom she had James' eight half-siblings. He had a fraught relationship with his angry, often abusive stepfather, but after he died came to accept that the elder Baldwin "loved his children, who were black (and) menaced like him." James once described a "terrifying" life - people lost to suicide, prison, racism - that sometimes "narrow(ed) to a red circle of rage," but he encountered liberal white teachers who encouraged him to write; as a result, "I never really managed to hate white people."

His masterworks ranged from novels to essays to plays. They included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), “A Report From Occupied Territory” (1966), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968). He spent years self-exiled in Istanbul, Paris and the south of France, where he died of cancer in 1987 at age 63; after multiple relationships with both men and women, he was cared for at the end by his brother David. At his funeral, he was eulogized by literary giants Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, who mourned him as one of the "great black Americans who have lived for us, loved for us and died for us." Now, she wondered, "Who will dare to confront a racist nation (and) sing the song of the voiceless?"

Even as a "small boy with big eyes" who described winter houses "in their little white overcoats,” Baldwin was known for a singular eloquence, for writing that was "unadorned, searing, and unequivocal." "He was fearless," said his youngest sister Paula. "He would say, ‘You have to walk straight into it.'" That clarity extended to his letters to four nephews to whom, when he came home - "It was always great joy to have him home, because he brought all of us together" - he was "Uncle Jimmy," with his "infectious laughter," stentorian preacher's voice, "curiosity about everything." He break-danced with them, taught them chess - "one of the most valuable philosophical lessons of my life" - and as adults endured prison with help from Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption: "My Uncle Jimmy civilized white America for me." They also learned from classmates, "Your uncle is a faggot."

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