Everything Now Is in Our Hands

Baldwin at 100

August 2, 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the writer James Baldwin. 

I have begun this essay a dozen times and started over a dozen times. You can no more write an adequate response to James Baldwin than you could play a set after Coltrane’s band. Everything that follows is noise unless it is silence. 

With every turn of the calendar the world keeps on demanding more words, but so many times I’ve set down The Fire Next Time in the middle of a paragraph, content that there is nothing else to say nor any reason to say it. Baldwin captured it already in just a few words, in the searing detail or the guttural cry. He still erupts off the page, as from the end of The Fire Next Time: “When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty?”¹ Which is the question that a society must put to itself if it is ever to stop believing its own lies and finally determine to become capable of life rather than death. 

Baldwin overwhelms, sometimes to the point where one wonders whether there is much left to say. He might call me a coward for saying that, for there is always more to say, always another way of coaxing the truth out of the world’s ore, and not to try is to fail one’s neighbors, one’s family, one’s self, the world. “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”² I have no right to give up the task, no matter my inadequacy. The world is too serious, and to abounding in beauty, to assume that the work is ever complete. What is to be done is to “dare everything.” It is all too risky; failure is assured, but love compels. And to read Baldwin is to witness love. Within the fire, inside the yearning, always love. Without it there would be little reason to keep quarreling with God or neighbor or country.  

Writers will tell you that you become a good writer mostly by reading. I don’t know if that is right and I don’t know whether anyone would call me that good of a writer, but I know that I’ve spent the past decade reading Baldwin’s long, loping sentences, observing his gaze, mimicking his cadence in hopes that I might one day say something close to true. Each of his books on my shelf is marked all to hell, littered with little yellow and blue flags, dog-eared as though I might remember months later what excited me so or in hopes that I can short circuit the thrill of discovering his electricity by mussing up the book. Sometimes it works. I read this one paragraph, scratched it up, and then spent the past six years of my life trying to fulfill it:

What the writer is always trying to do is utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be. Thus Dostoevsky, in The Possessed, used a small provincial town in order to dramatize the spiritual state of Russia. His particulars were not very attractive, but he did not invent them, he simply used what there was. Our particulars are not very attractive either, but we must use them. They will not go away because we pretend they are not there. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.³ 

I do not know how successful my own project has been. I’ve tried to place the fulcrum of American urban life at the corner of 3rd and Davidson Streets in Charlotte, NC. There sits a forgettable church in an unremarkable building across the street from the boring mid-rise government offices of the most relentlessly mediocre city in the world. But that ground is so damn fascinating. The particulars are not very attractive today, but below the surface is a story of terror and beauty and holiness and love. Which is everything you can hope for in a story. I cannot walk across that corner without sensing that the love that grew that place in its previous lives still seeps through the asphalt though most people seem unaware. Writing is finally, I think, bringing love to speech. Angry love, piss-you-off love, tender love, aching love, fierce love, unafraid love, longing love, mysterious love, refusing-to-be-sentimental love. That is the love that might help us, in Baldwin’s words, “to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

There are other passages I regularly return to: the short story “Sonny’s Blues;” the short book “No Name in the Street;” a dozen different essays; the televised debate with Willam F. Buckley. Some are the fierce, others tender. All of them echo beyond their particular time. Here’s one more that seems urgent in a moment of creeping fascism, a sermon for my people who find themselves tempted by silence or seduced by buffoonery or looking for courage:

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they dare not confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable population, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife–looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.⁴

That’s love, if you can hear it.

1. My quotes of this text are from Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, New York: Vintage, 1993, p. 104.

2. The Fire Next Time, 105.

3. From “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, New York: Vintage, 2011, p. 41-42.

4. From “On Being White…and Other Lies” in The Cross of Redemption, p. 169.