Collected Essays (Library of America) Book

"My soul looks back and wonders how I got over--indeed: but I find it unexpectedly difficult to remember, in detail, how I got started." First sentence of "The Price of the Ticket"

This book is year 6 of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent


I first read James Baldwin in high school in the middle of the Bush-era when he was all but forgotten in the popular consciousness. I read his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain because it had been recommended in Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison. The book had also mentioned "Everybody's Protest Novel" as an aside, but I did not follow it up at the time. It wouldn't be until the end of my drawn-out college-career that I started on his essays and it was a revelation; I felt embarrassed to have not looked at sooner (thank God for the zeitgeist/hype-train). When he started becoming popular in the middle of 2010s, I made it a point to read him and read The Fire Next Time by October 2014. That would begin me on the Baldwin essay saga."Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration." There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it."That book of essays was amazing and part 1 felt like he was writing it to me in particular. It made me realize that this dude was going to be a part of my life from then on. I was and am still forming my intellectual foundation and this man, this contemporary of Ralph Ellison was like mortar within the bricks that Ellison had made for me--he filled in the gap (he was for me what Hume was for Kant, to give an ironic example). I decided to go through his essays and took it back from the beginning with Notes of a Native Son. This first effort of Baldwin shows how he splashed on to the scene as an intellectual and not simply a novelist. His public rebuke of his mentor Richard Wright became the story of this book, but it also offers his statement of intent and it has most of the themes he would return to examine for the rest of his life: race, literature, humanism, religion, film, and socio-political questions at large."The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other
people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."Two years later (seeing a pattern) I decided to read his book of film criticism The Devil Finds Work. As a black cinephile, one is really made to feel like one is on an island. Besides film-makers, I don't know many people to who critically all through there career about film like James Baldwin. All of his books of essays have film reviews, but TDFW was special for being solely dedicated to film. This book was a special one for me and may be my second-favorite book of essays by him because of how he ended it."To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief.

"For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma'though he can use them all'nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do."The longest book of essays Baldwin ever wrote was Nobody Knows My Name. He wrote it as he was struggling to get Another Country finished and as his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was reaching its climax. It is the most..."writer-ly" of his essays and it introduces the theme of homosexuality into his collected non-fiction of the time (being as it was written after the publication of Giovanni's Room and while he was writing Another Country). This Collected Essays includes an early essay he wrote on homosexuality in the 1940s. Nobody Knows My Name was notable to me for it's moving eulogy to Richard Wright who had died by the time it was published. It was obvious he was remorseful for never closing the riff with Wright (in the same way Ralph Ellison was in Going to the Territory)."'Be careful what you set your heart upon,' someone once said to me, 'for it will surely be yours.' Well, I had said that I was going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi not-withstanding, and that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free. And, here I was, left only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
These essays are a very small part of a private logbook. The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self."The book of essays by Baldwin that I think I like the most is No Name In the Street. This is his most realist view of things and it is the most contemporary in a meta-sense of anything he has written. This is the book for the post-Civil Rights Movement world. Besides giving his standard autobiographic summary of his life growing up which all of his books of essays has, this looks at his time in Paris before the Algerian War of Independence and it looks at his life post-The Fire Next Time. The light is fleeting here. The book ends during the Attica Uprising and introduces us to Tony Maynard, who would be the inspiration for Fony in If Beale Street Could Talk."To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise way honorably defend--which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn --and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspect of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come."The rest of the essays featured in this book were picked by the editor Toni Morrison. They don't represent all his uncollected essays, but the ones she felt important to place here (though many of the ones in this section were published in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985--the final book of essays published in his lifetime). These essays were a journey for me to read through--the best and most terrible kind. I was given a new insight in each part. I saw, as Baldwin said, that the way it was in my ancestors' time is the way it is now. Finishing this book in this point in time may seem like destiny, but Baldwin would not be surprised at all. I remember reading The Fire Next Time after the advent of what would be (though it wasn't called that at the time) Black Lives Matter. His words puts it all together in a way few can do. Though I am, at heart, still an Ellisonian, I have more than enough room on board the train for James Baldwin.

"Later, in the midnight hour, the missing identity aches. One can neither assess nor overcome the storm of the middle passage. One is mysteriously shipwrecked forever, in the Great New World.

"The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white--: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own." - "The Price of the Ticket" 1985.