Reviews

Lord. This man does not miss. G-d damn.

This piece is so beautifully written, no review I could write could do it justice. Each Baldwin book I read is equal to, if not better than, the last.

These essays chronicle the life and loss of prominent Black men in Baldwin’s life including his friends and peers Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.. His words honor their legacies and prove how their friendships shaped him.

Spoiler

Baldwin covers a wide array of topics, offering his insight on the Vietnam War, classism, and what Baldwin calls “Black Capitalism” as an insidious tool of white supremacy. He discusses how and why White America is so scared of their private lives, and discusses self-confrontation and self-atonement through the lens of Malcolm X’s teachings. He touches on the foundation of Black Joy, and what Keise Layson would later call “Black Abundance”.

He even talks about time travel?? Well, not really, actually. But he does talk about the nature of time and “kaleidoscopic consciousness.”

The most moving part of the book for me was the tenderness with which he describes Malcolm X. He paints a vivid picture of his kindness and gentleness, which does not negate his courage in challenging the “bitter and unanswerable present.” He describes how Malcolm X didn’t hate White people, but so loved Black people, that he would do anything to help them live and thrive, including tearing down the people who stood as obstacles for their success (namely uninformed White Americans.)

Calling these essays thought-provoking does not do them justice. They are perspective-altering, in a way that is accessible to any reader.

In closing, f#ck the French!

Content Warnings

nickdleblanc's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

in which a brilliant man talks shit about the 60s and early 70s. I left this book with less of a picture of an era and more an impression of a powerful and insightful mind. In it, Baldwin details what blackness means to him, what it is like to travel as a black American, and the struggles of being alive and aware in a corrupt American system where no one properly values their life, black, white, or otherwise. The book has an energetic tone, as if written quickly and angrily. He seems to be responding to a perception that had apparently developed around him at the time—one that I was unaware of—that he was not militant enough and that he was too close to white interests. He explains how both Malcolm and Martin had trepidation when dealing with him due to this reputation. This book reads like a repudiation of that, where he very eloquently and insightfully dives into the psychology of Americans and the system which so powerfully shapes who we are—as well as represses and/or exploits our potential. It is written very clearly with tight, intelligent prose and good vocabulary. A good read, though similar to Dick Gregory’s autobiography in that the social parallels between the 60s/70s and now are almost too much to bear for the thoughtful person.
-
-
tl;dr—More of a fiery hot take sort of journal entry than a memoir, but worth diving into just to hear Baldwin riff about why people think and act the way they do. #2020readsnl

gaybf's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

fav quotes

I had meant no disrespect. I stared at my friend, my old friend, and felt millions of people staring at us both. I tried to make a kind of joke out of it all. But it was too late. The way they looked at me proved that I had tipped my hand. And this hurt me. They should have known be better, or at least enough, to have known that I meant what I said. But the genera reaction to famous people who hold difficult opinions is that they can't really mean it. It's considered, generally, to be merely an astute way of attracting public attention, a way of making oneself interesting: one marches in Montgomery, for example, merely (in my own case) to sell one's books. Well. There's nothing, then, to be said. There went the friendly fried chicken dinner. There went the loving past.
I tried to be understanding about my countrymen's concern for difficult me, and unruly mine--and I really was trying to be understanding, though not without some bewilderment, and, eventually, some malice. I began to be profoundly uncomfortable. It was a strange kind of discomfort, a terrified apprehension that I had lost my bearings. I did not altogether understand where I was heading. I did not trust what I heard myself saying. In very little that I heard did I hear anything that reflected anything which I knew, or had endured, of life. My mother and my father, my brothers and my sisters were not present at the tables at which I sat down, and no one in the company had ever heard of them. My own beginnings, or instincts, began to shift as nervously as the cigarette smoke that wavered around my head. I was not trying to hold on to my wretchedness. On the contrary, if my poverty was coming, at last, to an end, so much the better, and it wasn't happening a moment too soon--and yet, I felt an increasing chill, as though the rest of my life would have to be lived in silence.
(The murder of Malcolm X) The British press said that I had accused innocent people of this murder. What I tried to say then, and will try to repeat now, is that whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet. That bullet was forged in the crucible of the West, that death was dictated by the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world, and its name is white supremacy.
Yet, they spent hours debating whether or not McCarthy was an enemy of domestic liberties. I couldn't but wonder what conceivable further proof they were awaiting: I thought of German Jews sitting around debating whether or not Hitler was a threat to their lives until the debate was summarily resolved for them by a knocking at the door. Nevertheless, this learned, civilized, intellectual-liberal debate cheerfully raged in its vacuum, while every hour brought more distress and confusion--and dishonor--to the country they claimed to love. The pretext for all of this, of course, was the necessity of "containing" Communism, which, they unblushingly informed me, was a threat to the "free" world. I did not say to what extent this free world menaced me, and millions like me. But I wondered how the justification of blatant and mindless tyranny, on any level, could operate in the interests of liberty, and I wondered what interior, unspoken urgencies of these people made necessary so thoroughly unattractice a delusion. I wondered what they really felt about human life, for they were so choked and cloaked with formulas that they no longer seemed to have any connection with it. They were all, for a while anyway, very proud of me, of course, proud that I had been able to crawl up to their level and been "accepted." What I might think of their level, how I might react to this "acceptance," or what this acceptance might cost me, were not among the questions which racked them in the midnight hour. One wondered, indeed if anything could ever disturb their sleep.
Not only Algerians. Everyone in Paris, in those years, who was not, resoundingly, from the north of Europe was suspected of being Algerian; and the police were on every street corner, sometimes armed with machine guns. Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Jews, Italians, American blacks, and Frenchmen from Marseilles, or Nice, were all under constant harassment, and we will never know how many people having not the remotest connection with Algeria were thrown into prison, or murdered, as it were, by accident.
(p46) Faulkner is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed--without that is, any further menacing itself--and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions f people, this history--oneself--has been nothing but an intolerable yoke a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction, of its heirs. And whatever this history my have given to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their presence. The South African coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgment.
I have not seen this man in many years, and I hope that everything I say here has since been proven false. I hope, in short, that he has been able to live. But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. (...) This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call "the Black problem." This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything Black people may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to Black people.
They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black. It was rather as though small Jewish boys and girls, in Hitler's Germany, insisted on getting a German education in order to overthrow the Third Reich. Here they were, nevertheless, scrubbed and shining, in heir never-to-be-forgotten stiff little dresses, in their never-to-be-forgotten little blue suits, facing an army, facing a citizenry, facing white fathers, facing white mothers, facing the progeny of these co-citizens, facing the white past, to say nothing of the white present: small soldiers, armed with stiff, white dresses, and long or short dark blue pants, entering a leper colony, and young enough to believe that the colony could be healed, and saved. They paid a dreadful price, those children, for their missionary work among the heathen.
Some of them reminded me of a moment in my adolescent life when a church sister, not much older than I, who had been my girl friend, went mad, and was incarcerated. I went to visit her, in the women's wing of the asylum, and, coming out into the courtyard, stood there for a moment to catch my breath. Something, eventually, made me turn my head. Then I realized that I was standing in the sight of hundreds of incarcerated women. Behind those bars and windows, I don't know how many pairs of female eyes were riveted on the one male in that courtyard. I could dimly see their faces at the windows all up and down that wall; and they did not make a sound. For a moment I thought that I would never be able to persuade my feet to carry me away from that unspeakable, despairing, captive avidity.
I will never forget Malcolm and that child facing each other, and Malcolm's extraordinary gentleness. And that's the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met. And I am sure that the child remembers him that way.
When, as white cops are fond of pointing out to me, ghetto citizens "ask for more cops, not less," what they are asking for is more police protection: for crimes committed by blacks against blacks have never been taken very seriously. Furthermore, the prevention of crimes such as these is not the reason for the policeman's presence. That black people need protection against the police is indicated by the black community's reaction to the advent of the Panthers. Without community support, the Panthers would have been merely another insignificant street gang. It was the reaction fo the black community which triggered the response of the police: these young men, claiming the right to bear arms, dressed deliberately in guerrilla fashion, standing nearby whenever a black man was accosted by a policeman to inform the black man of his rights and insisting on the right of black people to self-defense, were immediately marked as "trouble-makers."
('the police are honorable, and the courts are just'): It is no accident that Americans cling to this dream. It involves American self-love on some deep, disastrously adolescent level. And Americans are carefully and deliberately conditioned to believe this fantasy: by their politicians, by the news they get and the way they read it, by the movies, and the television screen, and by every aspect of the popular culture. If I learned nothing else in Hollywood, I learned how abjectly purveyors of the popular culture are manipulated.
White America remains unable to believe that Black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all Black people live here, especially the young. No one is more aware of this than the Black Panther leadership. This is why they are so anxious to create work and study prorgrams in the ghetto--everything from hot lunches for school children to academic courses in high schools and colleges to content, format, and distribution of the Black Panther newspapers. (...) This is also why they are taught to bear arms--not, like most white Americans, because they fear their neighbors, though indeed they have the most to fear, but in order, this time, to protect their lives, their women and their children, their homes rather than the life and property of an Uncle Sam who has rarely been able to reat his black nephews with more than a vaguely benign contempt.
(p174) Anyone, under such circumstances, can be pardoned for being rattled or even rude, but Huey was beautiful, and spoke with perfect candor of what was on his mind. Huey believes, and I do, too, in the necessity of establishing a form of socialism in this country--what Bobby Seale would probably call a "Yankee-Doodle type" socialism. This means an indigenous socialism, formed by, and responding to, the real needs of the American people. This is not a doctrinaire position, no matter how the Panthers may seem to glorify Mao or Che or Fanon. (...) The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world's present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.
And, of course, any real commitment to Black freedom in this country would have the effect of reordering all our priorities, and altering our commitments, so that, for horrendous example, we would be supporting Black freedom fighters in South America and Angola, and would not be allied with Portugual, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel, and would never have felt compelled to follow the French into Southeast Asia. But such a course would forever wipe the smile from the face of that friend we all rejoice to have at Chase Manhattan.
(The black students) could not depend on the whites until the whites had a clearer sense of what they had let themselves in for. And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in for, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realization that the Black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American life. They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realized how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defense of the rejected and destitute, they were confronted with the extent of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free.
I know that when certain powerful and blatant enemies of Black people are shoveled, at last, into the ground I may feel a certain pity that they spent their lives so badly, but I certainly do not mourn their passing, nor, when I hear that they are ailing, do I pray for their recovery. I know what I would do if I had a gun and someone had a gun pointed at my brother, and I would not count to ten to do it and there would be no hatred in it, nor any remorse. People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

pamiverson's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

Powerful stories about his experiences as a child and in the 1960's and '70's, in New York, Paris and the American South. Insightful and thought-provoking -- he was an activist, but in different ways than Reverend Martin Luther King, J., or Malcolm X, but he captures his perspectives at a particular point in time. Still relevant.

scrow1022's review against another edition

Go to review page

5.0

More memoir-like than what I have read so far. His usual piercing analysis of American (and French) society but also seen against his own personal griefs (Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Tony).

mschlat's review against another edition

Go to review page

5.0

(Note:I read this as an essay in [b:Collected Essays|17142|Collected Essays|James Baldwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347571461s/17142.jpg|18758].)

I picked this up after seeing the movie I Am Not Your Negro, which was pretty much my first exposure to James Baldwin. The movie is based on a series of notes by Baldwin (for an unpublished book) about his time in the civil rights movement, but this essay covers some of the same material (his returns to the U.S., his meetings with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., his responses to their assassinations) as well as his encounters with and praise of the Black Panthers.

I read Baldwin as a well-to-do white man and what strikes me is the gulf between my experience and his (even more so than when I read [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300129823p2/1214964.jpg]). What Baldwin excels at is exploring the beliefs of white and black Americans and exposing the delusions, the ways that people think about society and roles and race that cover over the sins of the the past and give hope for the future. Because, to be honest, Baldwin does not offer much hope. Part of that is Baldwin's well-honed and precisely phrased skepticism, but part of that (as a reader) is coming across passages written between 1967 and 1971 that seem completely apropos today. Here's one of several that struck me as I read:

White America remains unable to believe that Black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.

One of the most sobering reads I have had in a long time.

jnchnbyreads's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark reflective tense slow-paced

4.25

A book of Baldwin's personal anguish and fragmented memories. It is so painstakingly honest, penetrating, and intimate, that I almost felt like reading his journal. This book feels calmer than The Fire Next Time, and yet no less piercing and aware of the condition the nation was in (and still is in, if I might so boldly add so). Easy 4 stars. Would come back to this one when I know more about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, in the not too distant future.
"The acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill."
"It was as though he were wrestling with the mighty fact that the danger in which he stood was nothing compared to the spiritual horror which drove those who were trying to destroy him. They endangered him, but they doomed themselves."

More...