BY James Peterson
Aug. 01, 2024
This one is for my Mom. My mother brought me into this world, raised me, and for some reason, brought me, at the tender age of 16, to the homegoing services of the late, courageous, James Baldwin.
As a world of writers prepares to celebrate the centennial benchmark of Baldwin’s birth into this world, we are all called to contend with his legacy, his literary wizardry, his love for us — undying — and his longing for us to “be better than we are,” as Baldwin told writer Julius Lester in one of his last interviews, in May of 1984, for The New York Times Book Review. Back then, Lester was by some considered a more radical “son of Baldwin;” his seminal work, “The Angry Children of Malcolm X” delivered discursive disinfectant for Black disillusionment in the face of the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement.
Much like Baldwin, Lester, too, had faith in the power of language. In “The Angry Children of Malcolm X” Lester argues that “Negroes do have a language of their own. The words may be English, but the way a Negro puts them together and the meaning that he gives them creates a new language. He has another language, too, and that language is rhythm.” In Lester’s 1984 interview with Baldwin, love, reverence, and the critical exploration of ideas find their rhythm in discourse like a Socratic session between two giants talking at the intersection of human rights activism and the unmitigated humanity of Black language.
In one of their more revealing exchanges on the wisdom of witness as a political philosophy for Black writers, Baldwin makes things plain. That we can be better than we are, Baldwin argues is “the sum total of my wisdom in all these years. We can also be infinitely worse . . . . There’re two things we have to do,” says Baldwin. “Love each other and raise our children.”
Knowing that we can be better is an infinite metric for the sum total of Baldwin’s wisdom as one of humanity’s most gifted witnesses. This sense that we can be better proposes endless possibility for our humanity. His directives — to “love each other” and to “raise our children” — require an endless commitment to work on ourselves, to work on uplifting our communities, and the tireless and sometimes thankless work of raising “our children.”
Baldwin was childless, but he counted his namesake nephew as one of his own. In one of his most incisive missives – a letter to his younger brother’s son – he sums up the “crux” of his dispute with his 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. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.
I cannot claim to have been born in the same circumstances as either of the James Baldwins (summoned or summoner) in this fiery letter between kin. But I have always read this letter as if Baldwin were speaking to me. I suspect I am not alone here, but the fact that our names are all the same — James — makes the word of James resonate profoundly with me, even as I write this. Whether I claim it or not, I too am a son of Baldwin.
I have had several recent conversations with my mother about our attendance at James Baldwin’s funeral/homegoing service in early December of 1987 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem. I do not remember much more than the atmosphere. I vaguely remember being there, but I also know now that I did not really know where I was; I could not grasp the moment or the momentous ways that Baldwin’s letters would shape my world and my worldview. My Mom knew.
In The Devil Finds Work (1976), Baldwin argues that “[a] child is far too self-centered to relate to any dilemma which does not, somehow, relate to him – to his own evolving dilemma.” The dilemma of the death of a natural force was a loss incalculable for far too many people, even those in attendance at the very service that tried to make sense of it. I suspect that we were there because of my parents’ studious engagement with Black literature. To be in a space with Baldwin (in spirit), Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, was simply a moment that my mother would not pass on in 1987. I thank God for this, even though I could not at the time find the relationship between my dilemma and the dilemma of the recently departed.
This relationship dilemma developed for me over time.
Baldwin taught me that “[t]he civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced.” The bite of “vital interests” exposes an inhumane hierarchy in our political language. Through his words, Baldwin breathes life into those who might dare to exist under the boot of racism, classism, and/or sexism. His writing feeds the skepticism required to live in our world right now. But like much of Baldwin’s work, it feeds skepticism just enough to make it vital without saturating it with the cynicism that ends in political paralysis.
Baldwin teaches us that “. . . these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life . . .” He wrote this when I was barely four years old. I didn’t read it until two decades later. And yet, it is as potable as any other dose of Baldwinian truth serum. He concludes that “[t]here is ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.” No matter the geopolitical alignments and circumstances of this world, we can always be better than bombing children out of existence. Always. (It doesn’t matter if that bombing is on a residential block in Philadelphia — or in Gaza.)
Baldwin tells us that “[d]readful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.” Again, if our vital interests do not feed hungry children, then we are not living up to either of Baldwin’s fundamental directives. Love each other. Raise our children.
Baldwin was thinking with us when he wrote that “[t]he children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded — by their children’s murderers, after all – to cease having children.” This language feels like what a love-centered pro-life political position could be. Baldwin is not casting aspersions at mothers-to-be (or not). Instead, he is exposing the lie that we live in a world that cares at all about the children who are despised and rejected from birth. 333 million children stand hungry behind Baldwin and his words. They are despised and rejected. And they are starving.
For these reasons and many more, the political commentary about Vice President Harris, childless people and the asinine attempts to control women’s reproductive rights are culled from a common well of morally-deficient ideologies. For all of those who would degrade the so-called childless as being unable to participate as equals in our political processes, I can’t help but hear them as fools. In my family, in my community, and in Black communities all over this world, so many of the childless devote their time and treasure to raising other people’s children.
I often tell people that my Mom is a saint for her indefatigable efforts to love and raise other people’s children — some related to us by blood, some not. Some adopted; some not. She has done this for decades, not from a position of economic security or financial wealth. Her wealth rests in a reservoir of love that was built drop by drop from her own experiences of abandonment — and yes, from loving and raising her own children.
No writer could have inherited and extended Baldwin’s legacy in ways more powerful or poignant than Toni Morrison. Her eulogy — Life in His Language — is a legendary charge in its own right and writing. For Morrison, Baldwin left us with three inimitable, if mutable, gifts. 1) He gave us a “language to dwell in.” 2) He gave us “courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges, to see and say what it was, to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it.” And 3) he gave us his tenderness. A tenderness so all-encompassing, so eternal that Morrison tells us that “[i]n the midst of anger it tapped [her] lightly like the child in Tish’s womb.” Tish is the protagonist of Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. She carries her child through the wrongful conviction of her life partner, the child’s father.
The tender tap to which Morrison refers, in her endearing eulogy to Baldwin, is a love tap. It is the love language for (and of) the children who are despised and rejected. They tap all of us on our insides whenever we wrestle with Baldwin’s legacy — whenever we return to his lesson for all of us — to love each other and to raise all of our children.
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