From Harlem, With Love

James Baldwin was widely known as the most eloquent literary spokesperson in the black struggle for equality during the civil rights movement. A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, he was said by reviewers to have been able to "make one begin to feel what it is really like to have a black skin in a white man's world." Among Baldwin's works are Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time. Baldwin died of stomach cancer, on December 1, 1987, at his home in southern France, where he spent much of his life following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. He was 63. The following reflections on James Baldwin are offered by Sojourners contributing editor Vincent Harding, who was a professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado when this article appeared. -- The Editors

We have lost a great lover.

That was clear at the beginning of December when the first telephone call reached me, bearing the stunning news of James Baldwin's death. It is even more apparent now, as the more measured rhythms of monthly journalism deadlines move us beyond the initial shock and sadness, inviting us to extend, and thereby deepen, our mourning and our remembering. Indeed, now it is possible to carry Jimmy's memories into all the ambivalent national celebrations of his friend, Martin King, as well as to let his powerful sense of the humanizing uses of tragedy illuminate the meaning of what we call Black History Month, observed each February.

Such a conjunction of recollection and hope is more than accidental, for Baldwin cared deeply about King and understood his "much-loved and menaced" younger brother far better than most of us. In the same way, it is surely the case that no one in our generation felt more deeply or expressed more eloquently all the harshened beauty and the creative significance of the African-American pilgrimage on this soil. And now Jimmy continues his own journey -- relieved, I trust, of the continuing anguish which inhabited his fragile but resilient being here on earth.

I shall miss him. Having begun where he began, in Harlem (his seven-year start on me and a variety of different life-choices did not allow us to meet consciously until the Southern freedom movement brought us together -- but I know our earlier steps must have met somewhere on the beleaguered streets of our hometown), having crossed paths and shared hopes and fears together in a variety of other times and places, I am tempted to feel a special, personal loss.

But neither Jimmy's pain nor his love could ever be monopolized. He quite literally belonged to us all whether we wanted him or not. And that was his great gift, his awesome, sometimes terrifying, offering -- terrifying, partly because he saw and spoke and wrote so much that we recognized as truth, partly because he challenged all of us to link arms and lives and walk through the purifying fires with him.

Indeed, it may be that The Fire Next Time was the single greatest expression of his anguished love for us, especially as it was expressed in the essay "Down at the Cross," originally published in November 1962, almost 25 years to the day before his death. Like Martin, like so many of us, Jimmy was a child of the black church, and he was steeped in all of its powerful, transformative language, imagery, terror, and hope. Like Martin, he lived out the creative, piercing tension of his multiple vocation as often-misunderstood lover of his broken ancestral community, as embattled lover of the enslaved, enslaving white American majority, and as compassionate lover of the world, especially its oppressed and rising peoples.

And, like Martin -- indeed before Martin -- he discovered the utter vulnerability that such love demands. He discovered what it means to be consumed by an urgent, often unfulfilled longing for truth. (Sometimes he compared himself to the prophet Jeremiah.) So he spoke the truth to us all and frightened many of us with such declarations as, "There is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro's situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure."

BUT HE WOULD NOT ALLOW US to take the easy route of mesmerizing guilt or undemanding fear. For he was a child of the black church who had fought his own demon-possessed interior battles of the wilderness. So in his essay, Jimmy demanded that we hear him when he added to his socio-political challenge these words:

Whoever wishes to become a truly moral being ... must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

And, of course, many of us knew that with Jimmy it was never simply a matter of hurling such words into the darkness and retiring to his typewriter. We knew of his wrestling with the Divine. We had seen him too often on the edges of the Southern battlegrounds, moving in, taking his place in the marches, speaking words of inspiration to us, raising money for the cause -- in other words, experiencing in a variety of ways what it meant to be "down at the cross."

So the last words of that classic essay came in those days -- and they come now -- as no surprise to us. It was true Baldwin, revealing him and us. It was the call that continued to reach our ears and hearts throughout his life.

Whether he was admiring or debating with Malcolm X, whether he was expressing great anger and frustration toward hostile, frightened white people, or sharing his marvelously infectious wide grin with those black and white men and women who really wanted to be human, whether he was feeling like a motherless child a long way from home in France, or visiting imprisoned Black Panthers in California, or mourning the death of Martin in Atlanta -- wherever he was, whatever he was about, we knew that the heart of Jimmy Baldwin, that great, expansive, often crucified heart, was totally present when he wrote the words:

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we -- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others -- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more Water, the fire next time!"

And now he has left us to carry on our work, the perilous work of creation; and we miss him very much. But that is no excuse to miss his message: It is time again to band together across all lines, time to open our lives more fully than ever before to the loving freedom of God and all God's magnificently varied and needy children. It is time again to become utterly vulnerable, to seek the impossible -- beginning within ourselves, time again "to dare everything" to end the racial nightmare, to build the just and loving community of hope, to manifest the dream and change the history of the world.

Only those who have been down at the cross -- in all its universal, self-sacrificing, and loving manifestations -- can leave such a legacy, dare such a call, issue such all invitation, beyond fire and water, into the light.

Can any good thing come out of Harlem?