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The Legacy of James Baldwin: The Artist as Redemptive Lover and Righteous Witness
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13565 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1988 |
4,354 Words |
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Bernard W. Bell
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest book is The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition (1987). |
"Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real," James Baldwin, my colleague since 1983 at the University of Massachusetts, wrote in 1962. Two years earlier, when I first met him while he was talking to Howard University students in Founders' Library, I was immediately struck by the awesome contrast of so powerful a spiritual force emanating from so small and fragile a physical form. His big, extraordinary eyes flashed fiercely above a wide, warm, infectious smile that evoked memories of the stark, prominent features of a black African mask. His soul seemed to burn with the passion of his eloquent yet unrequited love for his countrymen, while freezing at the terrible evil of their willful innocence and dehumanizing racism. In his writings, as in his talks, which are stylistically more like sermonettes than lectures, the powerful truth of his mixed emotions about the price of a ticket for the journey from darkness to light is a liberating force for those who truly hear it and accept the burden and blessing of the common humanity that it affirms. "The very time I thought I was lost," Baldwin wrote in an open letter to his nephew in commemoration of the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, "my dungeon shook and my chains fell off. You know, and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free."
Novelist, essayist, dramatist, poet … What is the legacy of this manchild of the Promised Land, this artist of redemptive love, this modern black American writer-as-witness called James Arthur Baldwin? Who, finally and inexorably, are the beneficiaries of the tragic yet sublime redemptive love that we find in his twenty-two books, which include 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 Mr. Charlie (1964), and Jimmy's Blues (1985)? In reflecting, at this time and in this place, on these questions, we can most meaningfully understand and appreciate Baldwin's artistic authority, righteous indignation, and place in literature by listening more to his voice than to mine.
Manchild of the Promised Land
"Know whence you came," Baldwin implored his nephew and us one year before the most memorable civil rights march on Washington in modern American history. "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go." Descended of African ancestors, the grandson of a
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