Happy Born Day, Ancestor James Baldwin!

He would have been 100 years old today.

Aug 02, 2024

Art by Victoria Cassinova, https://www.vcassinova.com

Happiest of Happy Birthdays to the one and only James Baldwin!

He would have been 100 years old today. It is very fitting that his family has created a new website to centralize the best of Baldwin. Behold:

You can access The Official James Baldwin website at: https://www.jamesbaldwin.info.

I came to know Baldwin’s work pretty late in life—a fact that I used to be ashamed of, but now realize was for the best; because I encountered his work when I was mature enough to receive it. I was a 31-year-old freshman at Brooklyn College when Professor Emeritus Jerome Krase introduced me to my first glimpse of Baldwin’s genius in the form an essay called “Here Be Dragons.” That essay not only set me on a path to immersing myself in Baldwin’s entire catalog, but also in starting the social media community Son of Baldwin in his honor as I adopted him as the father I always wanted, the mentor I always needed, and, as Toni Morrison might have put it, the friend my mind always deserved.

What astounds me about Baldwin—I mean besides his impeccable literary skill, his command of the mid-Atlantic accent (the theatrics, honey; the drama! Hahaha!), and his enormous intelligence—is that I learn as much from his flaws as I do from his brilliance.

I’m sure everyone has seen by now his discussions with Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde regarding the lives and roles of Black women, and Black men’s responsibilities in regard to our relationships with and to Black women. In these conversations, Baldwin seemed to be committed to the very patriarchal, sexist paradigms he knew were the source of most of humankind’s problems. As a student and admirer of Baldwin’s, I was disappointed in him, which I didn’t think could ever be possible.

And while those showings remain disappointing to me, I also realized something else:

James Baldwin is a human being.

Whatever my expectations, there is no such thing as perfection. To be human is to fuck up sometimes; a lot of times. Further, people are not meant to be worshiped (and we should be suspicious of anyone who wants to be). By whichever name it is called, The Pedestal is a limiting, confining, stultifying space; the point of it is, quite frankly, to place someone on top, but always precariously. And the only way down is to be pushed.

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These Ancestors and Elders who we consider icons and legends certainly didn’t mean for us to replicate their every thought and deed, hold everything they did or said in unassailable esteem, or revere them like people fear gods. No. They simply laid a foundation for us to build upon. They blazed a trail, hacking away brush and bramble, up until a certain point, until they falter and/or tire; at which point they pass the machete on to us to continue ahead.

We have the benefit of being behind them, to witness what was required and what it took: the strength, the stamina, the triumphs; the mistakes, the pitfalls, the tumbles. We have better, though not infallible, insight, then, on how to follow and how to avoid. And if we do this right and reach a hand back to pass the armament on down the line; and if they reach out for it and it is received correctly, then those coming up behind us will have even greater—though still not flawless—insight.

This is why when I learn some things about Baldwin or Audre Lorde or anybody else; things that are disheartening or offensive or heinous enough to give me, or anyone, pause—rather than throwing them away, which I think is the instinctive thing to do in a society as judgmental, schadenfreudian, and unforgiving as ours, I try to continue contending with their art. I try to glean from it what might be useful and attempt to improve upon—within my own self and within my own actions specifically—what might be harmful. It is an imperfect and individual response that inspires much dissonance and requires much discipline to hold onto the both/and, and let go of the either/or that my American indoctrination has made second nature.

All of this is lifelong work; and subject to revision.

Tell your homies!

And Baldwin did something else that seems impossible in this current revisited “Age of Innocence,” this Age of the Internet; where one’s social presence is so perfectly curated and edited that each and every one of us participating believes that we are flawless (and only because we have been successful, some of us, at hiding our flaws from public view) and accountability has become a construct that is meant only to call out other people’s harm, but never our own (in fact, those of us in this new age cannot even conceive of the notion that we could, in any way, be harmful or commit harm):

Baldwin admitted that he was wrong.

No doubt moved by his conversations with Giovanni and Lorde, he conceded. In his final publication, 1985’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an overlooked and underrated work, Baldwin says, in part:

“If women dream less than men—for men know little about a woman’s dreams—it is certainly because they are so swiftly confronted with the reality of men…Women know much more about men than men will ever know about women—which may, at bottom, be the only reason that the race has managed to survive so long.”

So today, I wish to celebrate James Baldwin the human being—in all of his order and all of his chaos; in all of his shining and all of his contradiction. And in celebrating him, I also hope to never forget these particular things he said, which have both guided me and expanded my thinking:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

― James Baldwin, “James Baldwin Recalls His Childhood,” The New York Times, May 31, 1964

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage,” The Nation, November 1, 1980

“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)

May grace and safety be yours sweetly.

Blessings upon blessings,
Robert