TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87mil.bld

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                                                                                December 4, 1987

Bearing Witness to the Truth

James Baldwin:  1924-1987


When TIME Senior Writer Otto Friedrich was living in Paris in
1948, he formed a lasting friendship with the young James
Baldwin. Following are his reminiscences of his old colleague,
who died last week in France at 63.

Late at night in Paris--and it was almost always late at night
in Jimmy Baldwin's Paris--he would occasionally take out a
ball-point pen and start drawing a large rectangle on what was
left of a beer- stained paper tablecloth. Inside the rectangle
he would slowly write, sometimes with a faint smile on his lips,
a series of incantatory words:

Go Tell It on the Mountain A novel By James Baldwin

That was the dream that enabled him to survive the bleak and
penniless early years in Paris, the dream that the chaos of
manuscripts he had piled up in his grimy little hotel room--all
the retyped drafts and new inserts and scribbled
revisions--really was a novel and would someday make him famous.
A short and rather pudgy youth with froggy eyes, Jimmy had
worked on this book about his harlem boyhood for five or six
years back in the U.S. But he had run through a publisher's
advance without getting the novel finished. He had worked at
odd jobs, waiting on tables in Greenwich Village.

Then one day he had walked into a restaurant and asked for a
glass of water, and the waitress looked at him blankly and said,
"We don't serve Negroes here."  After the many snubs and insults
he had received all his life, something snapped. Jimmy threw
a mug of water at the waitress and then ran out, terrified
because "I had been ready to commit murder from the hatred I
carried in my heart."

So he escaped to Paris in 1948 and lived in France for most of
the next 40 years. There he wrote more than 20 books, including
seven novels, four plays and five collections that contain some
lastingly important essays. He defined and demonstrated in a
new way what it meant to be black, and to be white as well. And
when he died last week of stomach cancer at his home in
St.-Paul-de-Vence, he died covered with honors. "It's a love
affair," he said on being made a commander in France's Legion
of Honor in 1986. "This is the place where I grew up, insofar
as you can every say you grow up."  Jimmy did, of course,
finally get that first novel finished. "Mountain is the book
I had to write if I was every going to write anything else," he
later told the New York Times. "I had to deal with what hurt
me most. I had to deal with my father."  His
father--stepfather, actually--had been a Harlem preacher so
possessed by anger that he regularly beat his children. "His
father's arm, rising and falling, might make him cry," Jimmy
wrote in the autobiographical Mountain, "yet his father could
never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that
his father could not reach. It was his hatred and his
intelligence that Johnny cherished, the one feeding the other."
Jimmy had become a preacher too, when he was 14, and that was
to color everything he wrote.

Mountain brought Jimmy a considerable success when it was
finally published in 1953, and that enabled him to put together
a collection of his searing essays, Notes of a Native Son ("Each
generation is promised more than it will get:  which creates,
in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage"). Then came
Giovanni's Room, a rather purple novel about homosexuality. And
then, in 1957, when French friends kept asking him to "explain
Little Rock," where the U.S. Army had been summoned to escort
nine black children to school through screaming mobs of whites,
Jimmy finally decided "that it would be simpler...to go to
Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying
to explain it."

He had never been to the South before. "The South had always
frightened me," he wrote later. "I wondered where children got
their strength--the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs
to get to school."  Those were heroic days in the South, when
obscure and unarmed people with names like Rosa Parks and James
Meredith and Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black rights on
obscure battlefields with names like Selma and Neshoba County.
In one of those rare cases of the right man and time and place,
Jimmy was there too, organizing, encouraging, marching, helping
to "bear witness to the truth."

He bore witness most passionately in The Fire Next Time (1963),
in which he declared that he was determined "never to make my
peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would
let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my 'place'
in this republic."  He also proclaimed there his skepticism
about the value of being "integrated into a burning house."  And
that, as Detroit and Newark soon showed, was what was coming
next time. "White people in this country," he wrote, "will have
quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves
and each other, and when they have achieved this--which will not
be tomorrow and may very well be never- -the Negro problem will
no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

Everything after The Fire Next Time was anticlimax. There were
TV interviews and invitations to the White House and a portrait
on the cover of TIME, but most of what Jimmy wrote after he
became famous lacked the passion of his younger years. That is
part of the price of success.

Jimmy could be very irritating. He borrowed things and didn't
return them. He made appointments that he never kept. He could
be spiteful, and he made use of anybody who could be useful.
But he was also warm and intense and funny, and anyone who
gained his friendship valued it highly. That included an
Englishwoman who once lent him her typewriter because he had
pawned his own. Jimmy did not return it because, he said, he
was in the midst of Go Tell It on the Mountain and "had to
finish the chapter."

He took much the same attitude in his first collection of
essays:  "I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none
greater than this:  to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work
done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer." After
Jimmy was operated on for cancer last spring, he went back to
writing a book about one of his friends, Martin Luther King Jr.,
and until the end, he kept hoping to finish it. That work
didn't get done.