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JAMES BALDWIN READER A Collection of Essays
JAMES BALDWIN READER a collection of essays Compiled by Jillian Jones Advanced Typography DSGN 220 91 FA20 November 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS U S Consitution Preamble _____________ 01 The Creative Process 1962 ____________ 02 A Letter to My Newphew 1962 _________ 12 If Black English Isn t A Language Then Tell Me What Is _______________________ 22
01 JAMES BALDWIN READER a collection of essays THE U S CONSTITUTION Preamble We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union establish Justice insure domestic Tranquility provide for the common defense promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America
02 THE CREATIVE PROCESS 03 Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist 1962 1962 is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men necessarily must avoid the state of being alone That all men are when the chips are down alone is a banality a banality because it is very frequently stated but very rarely on the evidence believed Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world There are forever swamps to be drained cities to be created mines to be exploited children to be fed None of these things can be done alone But the conquest of the physical world is not man s only duty He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself The precise role of the artist then is to illuminate that darkness blaze roads through that vast forest so that we will not in all our doing lose sight of its purpose which is after all to make the world a more human dwelling place
04 05 The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind The entire purpose of society is to create a merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos The aloneness of which I speak is much more like in order to make life bearable and to keep the the aloneness of birth or death It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering whom we cannot help Or it is like the aloneness of love the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control I put the matter this way not out of any desire to create pity for the artist God forbid but to suggest how nearly after all is his state the state of everyone and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor The state of birth suffering love and death are extreme states extreme universal and inescapable We all know this but we would And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have now or in the future of minimizing human damage human race alive And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved whatever the tradition is the people in general will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity Their reaction when it is suggested that they can or that they must is panic And we see this panic I think everywhere in the world today from the streets of New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria And a higher level of consciousness rather not know it The artist is present to correct among the people is the only hope we have now the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts or in the future of minimizing human damage to avoid this knowledge It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber The artist is distinguished from all other responsible of the peace the artist I doubt that future societies actors in society the politicians legislators educators will get on with him any better and scientists by the fact that he is his own test tube
rules however unstated these may be and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being Society must accept some things as real but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen A society must assume that it is stable but the artist must know and he must let us know that there is nothing stable under heaven One cannot possibly build a school teach a child or drive a car without taking some things for granted The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides I seem to be making extremely grandiloquent claims for a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead But in a way the belated honor that all societies tender their artists proven the reality of the point I am trying to make I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist s responsibility to his society The peculiar nature of this THE CREATIVE PROCESS his own laboratory working according to very rigorous 07 THE CREATIVE PROCESS 06 responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it for its sake and for his own For the truth in spite of appearances and all our hopes is that everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes and further to use them for our health Now anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it anyone for example who has ever been in love knows that the one face that one can never see is one s own face One s lover or one s brother or one s enemy sees the face you wear and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must we are responsible for our actions but we rarely understand them It goes without saying I believe that if we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less But the barrier between oneself and one s knowledge of oneself is high indeed There are so many things one would rather not know We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way But in order to
08 become social there are a great many other things 09 they are very particular These dangers are that we must not become and we are frightened all produced by our history They rest on the fact that of us of these forces within us that perpetually in order to conquer this continent the particular menace our precarious security Yet the forces are there we cannot will them away All we can do is learn to live with them And we cannot leant his aloneness of which I speak the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic and therefore unutterably beautiful could not be permitted And unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves that this prohibition is typical of all emergent and the truth about us is always at variance with what nations will be proved I have no doubt in many we wish to be The human effort is to bring these two realities into ways during the next fifty years This continent now is conquered but our habits and a relationship resembling reconciliation The human our fears remain And in the same way that to become beings whom we respect the most after all and a social human being one modifies and suppresses and sometimes fear the most are those who are most deeply ultimately without great courage lies to oneself about involved in this delicate and strenuous effort for they all one s interior uncharted chaos so have we as a have the unshakable authority that comes only from nation modified or suppressed and lied about all the having looked on and endured and survived the worst darker forces in our history We know in the case of the That nation is healthiest which has the least necessity person that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about to distrust or ostracize these people whom as I say honor once they are gone because somewhere in our his past is trapped in it is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self hearts we know that we cannot live without them This is also true of nations We know how a The dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist anywhere else in the world but person in such a paralysis is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths and how frequently
10 indeed he mistakes the one for the other And this I think we do We are the strongest nation in the Western world but this is not for the reasons that we think It is because we have an opportunity that no other nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste to create finally what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World But the price of this is a long look backward when we came and an unflinching assessment of the record For an artist the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced 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 11 the creative process 1962
12 1962 JAMES BALDWIN A LETTER TO MY NEPHEW 13
14 15 Dear James I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know which is much worse and this is the crime of I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times I keep which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I seeing your face which is also the face of your father and my brother nor time nor history will ever forgive them that they have destroyed I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it my arms and on my shoulders kissed him and spanked him and watched and do not want to know it One can be indeed one must strive to him learn to walk I don t know if you have known anybody from that become tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death far back if you have loved anybody that long first as an infant then for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard as a child then as a man You gain a strange perspective on time and of war remember I said most of mankind but it is not permissible human pain and effort that the authors of devastation should also be innocent It is the A LETTER TO MY NEPHEW Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father s innocence which constitutes the crime face for behind your father s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does Now my dear namesake these innocent and well meaning people your not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his countrymen have caused you to be born under conditions not far present laughter his laughter as a child Let him curse and I remember removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London his falling down the cellar steps and howling and I remember with pain of more than a hundred years ago I hear the chorus of the innocents his tears which my hand or your grandmother s hand so easily wiped screaming No this is not true How bitter you are but I am away but no one s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his handle them for most of them do not yet really know that you exist songs I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there Your
16 countrymen were not there and haven t made it yet Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter I suggest that the innocent check with her She isn t hard to find Your countrymen don t know that she exists either though she has been working for them all their lives 17 This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which in fact it intended that you should perish Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled Well you were born here you came something like fifteen years ago You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and though your father and mother and grandmother looking about the and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human streets through which they were carrying you staring at the walls being You were not expected to aspire to excellence You were into which they brought you had every reason to be heavy hearted expected to make peace with mediocrity Wherever you have yet they were not for here you were big James named for me You turned James in your short time on this earth were a big baby I was not Here you were to be loved To be loved baby hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world Remember that day too Yes we were trembling We have not stopped trembling yet but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived and now you must survive because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children s children what you could do and how you could do it where you could live and whom you that I know how black it looks today for you It looked black you have been told where you could go and could marry You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason You were not expected to aspire to excellence You were expected to make peace with mediocrity I know your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them saying You exaggerate They do not know Harlem and I do So do you Take no one s word for anything including mine but trust your experience Know whence you came If you know whence you came there is really no limit to where you can go The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed
18 to make you believe what white people say about you Please try to remember that what they believe as well as what they do 19 and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear 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 of most white Americans is the loss of their identity Try to imagine how you would feel if trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they you woke up one morning to find the understand it they cannot be released from it They have had to sun shivering and all the stars aflame You believe for many years and for innumerable reasons that would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature Any upheaval in the universe is black men are inferior to white men terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one s sense Many of them indeed know better but as you will discover people find it very difficult to act on what they know To act is to be committed and of one s own reality Well the black man has functioned in the white man s world as a fixed star as an immovable pillar and as he moves out of his place heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations to be committed is to be in danger In this case the danger in the minds and hearts You don t be afraid I said it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man s definition by never being allowed to spell your proper name You have and many of us have defeated this intention and by a terrible law a terrible paradox those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality But these men are your brothers your lost younger brothers and if the word integration means anything this is what it means that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it for this is your home my friend
20 21 Do not be driven from it Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton dammed rivers built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer One of them said The very time I thought I was lost 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 early We cannot be free until they are free God bless you James and Godspeed Your uncle JAMES a letter to my nephew 1962 1962
22 23 IF BLACK ENGLISH ISN T A LANGUAGE THEN TELL ME WHAT IS 1979
24 25 St Paul de Vence France The argument concerning the use or the price for this common language in which as it turns out they are status or the reality of black English is rooted in American history not saying and cannot be saying the same things They each have and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument very different realities to articulate or control supposes itself to be posing The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language Language What joins all languages and all men is the necessity to confront incontestably reveals the speaker Language also far more life in order not inconceivably to outwit death The price for this dubiously is meant to define the other and in this case the is the acceptance and achievement of one s temporal identity So other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able that for example thought it is not taught in the schools and this to recognize him has the potential of becoming a political issue the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Provenal which resists People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate And if they can not articulate it they are submerged A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living being described as a dialect And much of the tension in the Basque countries and in Wales is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at in Marseilles neither sounds very much English hands is the English contempt for their language like a man living in Quebec and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe or Martinique is saying to say nothing of the It goes without saying then that language is also a political instrument man from Senegal although means and proof of the common language of power It is the most vivid and crucial all these areas is French But each has paid and is paying a different key to identify It reveals
26 the private identity and connects one with or divorces one from the larger public or communal identity There have been and are times and places when to speak a certain language could be dangerous even fatal Or one may speak the same language but in such a way that one s antecedents are revealed or one hopes hidden This 27 all hang out and right on Beat to his socks which was once the black s most total and despairing image of poverty was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation which phenomenon was largely composed of uptight middle class white people imitating poverty trying to get down to get with it doing their thing is true in France and is absolutely true in England The range and doing their despairing best to be funky which we the blacks never reign of accents on that damp little island make England coherent dreamed of doing we were funky baby like funk was going out of for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else To style open your mouth in England is if I may use black English to put your business if black english isn t a language Now no one can eat his cake and have it in the street You have confessed your too and it is late in the day to attempt to parents your youth your school your penalize black people for having created a salary your self esteem and alas your future language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality a language without which the nation would be even more Now I do not know what white Americans whipped than it is I say that the present would sound like if there had never skirmish is rooted in American history been any black people in the United and it is Black English is the creation of States but they would not sound the way they sound Jazz for example is a very specific sexual term as in jazz me the black diaspora Blacks came to the United States chained to each other but from different tribes Neither could speak baby but white people purified it the other s language If two black into the Jazz Age Sock it to me which people at that bitter hour of the means roughly the same thing has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne s descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all along with let it world s history had been able to speak to each other the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did then tell me what is
28 Subsequently the slave was given under the eye and the gun of his master Congo Square and the Bible or in other words and under these conditions the slave began the formation of the black church and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed This was not merely as in the European example the adoption of a foreign tongue but an alchemy that 29 intelligence this incredible music the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to or despised by history to have brought this people to their present troubled troubling and unassailable and unanswerable place if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language I am curious to know what definition of transformed ancient elements into a new language language is to be trusted A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey There was a moment in time and in this place when my brother or my mother or my father or my A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey sister had to convey to me for example the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me and to convey this with a A people at the center of the Western world and in the midst of so hostile a population has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a dialect We the blacks are in trouble certainly but we are not doomed and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie speed and in a language that the white man could not possibly understand and that indeed he cannot understand until today He cannot afford to understand it This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people except as this could serve white purposes It is not the black child s language that is in question it is not his language that is despised It is his experience A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him and Now if this passion this skill this to quote Toni Morrison sheer a child cannot afford to be fooled A child cannot be taught by
30 anyone whose demand essentially is that the child repudiate his 31 experience and all that gives him sustenance and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black and in which he knows that he can never become white Black people have lost too many black children that way And after all finally in a country with standards so untrustworthy a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison or on the needle or standing futureless in the streets it may very well be that both the child and his elder have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little if black english isn t a language then tell me what is 1979 1979
BIOGRAPHY james baldwin COLOPHON The typefaces used in this reader are Remingtoned Type and Attribute Text James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2 1924 in Harlem New York to a single mother She later married and had James s eight younger siblings He had a talent for writing from a young age After graduating high school Baldwin began writing poems essays and short stories and in the late 1940s he moved to Paris to pursue this career path His first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in 1953 During his career he wrote and published dozens of essays books and short stories All through his life Baldwin was faced with racial discrimination and prejudice and he became an active part of the U S Civil Rights Movement He passed away at the age of 63 in Saint Paul de Vence France The color palette for this reader includes 151515 9a4443 e2ba7c 94a863 6f93a9 and eff1ec Reader designed by Jillian Jones for Advanced Typography DSGN 220 91 FA20
JAMES BALDWIN READER a collection of essays