Two James Baldwin experts break down his early fiction and political writing
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Last year, when my editor and I were talking about how to mark James Baldwin's 100th birthday, a lot of angles came up. He was obviously a civil rights activist. He was a TV personality. He was a great debater. And I could talk for hours about how much of a style and fashion icon he was.

But then I was like, let's not forget, he was primarily a writer, a guy who could put together sentences that were beautiful and crushing and thoughtful, and often all at the same time. So

So I hit up a couple of people who are fans of his work, people who could really take it apart and put it back together again. And to mark the end of Black History Month this year, we're bringing you those conversations again. In a bit, we'll hear from the acclaimed writer, Jasmine Ward, talking about Baldwin's book, The Fire Next Time. But first, we're going to have a conversation about Baldwin's first novel after the break.

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When it comes to Baldwin's novels, his fiction work, there are plenty of books worthy of examination. But there's something special about his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. He describes this as the book that he had to write if he was ever going to write anything else.

Here to help us through some key passages from the book is McKinley Milton. He's an associate professor and chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes College and has taught this book in class for more than 20 years. And he says the book marks an important arc in Baldwin's career. In part because it is a deeply autobiographical novel. It is...

A novel that I often think of as a revisitation of his childhood with a kind of narrative perspective that knows and understands all of the things that a young Baldwin wish he had known and understood when he himself was 14. The novel follows a boy named John, and it starts like this. Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father.

It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late. That last clause kind of reads like a horror story. Right? Yeah.

There's something deeply, deeply ominous about the way that that opening paragraph closes. Like many of the great opening lines in literature, the entire thrust of the novel is laid out here. You come into it feeling kind of hopeful and optimistic and, oh, what a beautiful thing that everybody's envisioning this future for this young man. And everybody, you know, we think about everything that it means when people say, oh, that kid's going to be a preacher.

It's like we see him as an orator. We see him as an intellectual. We'll see him as charming. We see him as engaging. We see leader when we look at this kid. And so there's something very optimistic about that opening that then turns by the end of the novel into. But that was actually the source of his doom. Doom permeates throughout the entire book.

John has to navigate how he feels about key aspects of his life, his family, his church, his own sexuality. A few pages in, John is at church, but he's distracted by Elisha. Elisha is a few years older, he's the pastor's nephew, and he teaches Sunday school. But on this Sunday, John has some trouble focusing on the lesson. John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha's voice, much deeper and manlier than his own.

admiring the leanness and grace and strength and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy. But he did not follow the lesson, and when sometimes Elijah paused to ask John a question, John was ashamed and confused, feeling the palms of his hands become wet and his heart pound like a hammer.

Elisha would smile and reprimand him gently, and the lesson would go on. You could read this as a crush, but it's not just a crush. It's a crush that is about the fact that he's got a deeper voice and a manlier voice, and it's the leanness of his body, but it's also grace, and it's also the way he looks in the Sunday suit, and it's also this question of, will I ever be as holy as this? And so I look at this passage and

And because of all of the ways that the kind of different clauses bounce off of one another throughout the sentence, you're kind of leaving this saying, well, is John – does John have the hots for Elisha? Because John is learning that he's probably gay. Right.

Or is John admiring Elisha because he is all of the things that John has been told he's supposed to be? Baldwin broadens the narrative later on in the book, giving readers the perspectives of John's aunt, stepfather, and mother, which for Milton means the novel leaves a multifaceted legacy. On the one hand, as a piece of semi-autobiography, it is a work looking back on the past with pure honesty. What it takes for a writer to be this vulnerable, to be able to write this work,

that so hits at the core of their own life, their own family, their own history, their own experience, their own psychology.

fiction, the novel says something about the future. The fact that our protagonist is a 14-year-old boy, I think is really important, not only for the kids who see themselves in John, but for those who see themselves in the community surrounding John, to say, what is it we're doing to our kids when we teach them and we train them that who they are is unwelcome, is impure, is just wrong?

And what does that do to their ability to find their way in the world? That was McKinley Melton talking to me about James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. Coming up, Jesmyn Ward talks about one of these seminal works in American political writing after the break.

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There are two essays collected in The Fire Next Time. Both were published in the early 1960s, and yet Baldwin's words sounded new to Jesmyn Ward by the time she got around to reading them in grad school in the early 2000s. His honesty was so fierce that it shocked me in a way. Ward is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including Sing, Unburied Sing and her memoir, Men We Reaped. But I called her up to help me break down The Fire Next Time because in 2016, Ward edited a collection of poems and political essays.

They were a response to the killing of Trayvon Martin and everything that happened after. It was titled The Fire This Time as a nod to Baldwin. I wanted to let him know wherever that he may be that there are those of us who look up to him and who are attempting to

do the same work that he did with the same honesty and with the same fearlessness. That honesty and fearlessness that Ward talks about, it's on display right from the beginning of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. The first essay is titled My Dungeon Shook, Letter to My Nephew on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation. And it's exactly that, a letter to Baldwin's own 14-year-old nephew, also named James. And it starts like this. Dear James,

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.

Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody, with a very definite tendency to sound truselent because you want no one to think you are soft. Already, in these first few lines, there are multiple shifts in tone and pacing. In the first sentence, I've begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. Right there, he's signaling to his nephew...

We're about to talk about something that's very difficult. This letter is going to contain really difficult subject matter. The essay is ultimately Baldwin de-romanticizing the institutions in his nephew's life, his family, his faith, his country. It's an act of tough love, but it's love nonetheless. The way that he softens that beginning is with the next line, right? The next sentence, I keep seeing your face.

which is also the face of your father and my brother. Following up with such a careful, close sort of observation, that's love, right? Because I love you enough to see you clearly. Baldwin applies this clarity to how the U.S. treats Black Americans, including his nephew. There are these moments in the text when...

He doesn't use his nephew's name, and he just uses you. He writes, He is so straightforward about what he sees in America. And it feels like he's speaking to me, right? It feels like this wise person speaks to me.

This older, wise person is sitting with me and they're telling me something that I dimly understood but was not able to articulate. Almost as a counter to that, the second essay of the book is titled Down at the Cross, Letter from a Region in My Mind. It's an essay about politics and faith and at the centerpiece is Baldwin visiting Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, for dinner along with his followers. And there are moments where James Baldwin sort of steps back and he says,

sinks into the role of the narrator, right? And he looks at himself as a character. And here, instead of a wise older uncle, he's unsure. He's insecure. He knows he's being courted to join the Black Separatist movement, a movement he finds serious flaws with. And yet, quote, I looked around the table. I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah's authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. He...

sees the human, he observes the human, he understands something of what they are struggling with and something of what they bought to this moment. And it's, I mean, all of that, I think, is what makes him the great writer who he is. Baldwin's political essays work because they pull double duty. They speak to the moment but are worth reading decades later. But in a way, that's a sad fact. Things have definitely changed, but...

I don't know. Sometimes it's sad to me how... How relevant it all is. Right. How relevant it is and how much things haven't changed. My thanks to Jesmyn Ward for talking to me about The Fire Next Time. And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer.

The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Avery Keighley, Adriana Gallardo, Katie Klein, Justine Kennan, Catherine Fink, Melissa Gray, and Ryan Bank. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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