While he is justly famous for many things, Baldwin came to my attention when I read a collection of New Yorker pieces, collected under the title The Fire Next Time. The first piece in this slim collection is an open letter to his nephew on the occasion of the nephew's birthday, in which Baldwin tries to explain to the younger man why the boy's father, Baldwin's brother, is who he is. He wants the young man not to hate or despise him, but to understand him, and to use him as an object lesson in becoming more fully human, precisely because Baldwin's brother, living under the too-heavy yoke of white supremacy, has interiorized the lie of his own inferiority. Baldwin broke that particular yoke through the power of books and his own peculiar genius with words. He offers that as an option to the young man.
Baldwin suffered in a nation that hated him because he was black and gay. In the midst of this suffering, Baldwin loved America deeply, passionately enough to leave it for France, knowing in his deepest heart that no matter what he said, or wrote, or did, America would not love him. This kind of unrequited love, that cuts the heart out of one's innermost identity, no doubt left a huge hole in his heart.
As beautiful a writer as Baldwin was; as honest as he was unrepentant for the crime of being what the accident of birth had made him - a gay black man in a time and place that despised both; adamant in his refusal to hate that which hated him most, Baldwin's writings are a testament to the power of real love acting in the world to make it less hostile, less deprecatory, especially for those who are hated the most by the powers that be. In refusing to accept the judgment of the world that his life was of less worth than others, and in repeating his love for a time and place that did not want him, Baldwin's life is a marvelous example of a kind of existentialist heroism - he has made certain choices, accepted certain realities, and makes his own meaning as he moves forward. To read Baldwin at his best - which is usually whenever he puts pen to paper - is to encounter that rare-enough individual: the hero.
Of all the African-American writers who gave us a glimpse in to the heart of Darkness of America, I love Baldwin the most because of his fierce and open discussion of the power of love. Baldwin knew that real love, not the agape of secular liberals for that abstraction "humanity", but real love was, first and foremost, a threat to the lover. It creates real vulnerability. It offers the challenge to live up to the possibility of being oneself without artifice, without mask, and without pretension. While there is a deep romantic strain to much of Baldwin's words, it is tempered by an understanding that, in the end, love is the source of as much pain as pleasure, as much tragedy as triumph. Surrendering to love, for Baldwin is far preferable to other choices we face, even with the threat it poses, precisely because Baldwin understood, as he lays out in "Letter From A Region of my Mind", that all other choices lead only to death and destruction. Rather than live with the knowledge that his love for the land that made him would never be returned, he fled to France. He did so in order that he would not be destroyed by that American refusal to recognize him as one of its most beloved sons.
On this day when we remember the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I wanted to offer a rumination on a contemporary, a compatriot in the pursuit of justice in the name of love.
