Free Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin

PLAYING BY EAR, PRAYING FOR RAIN: THE POETRY OF JAMES BALDWIN
    Baldwin was never afraid to say it. He made me less afraid to say it too.
    The air of the Republic was already rich with him when I got here. James Arthur Baldwin, the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century, was in the midst of publishing his resolute and prophetic essays and novels:
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953),
The Amen Corner
(1954),
Notes of a Native Son
(1955), and
Giovanni’s Room
(1956). I arrived on planet earth in the middle of his personal and relentless assault on white supremacy and his brilliant, succinct understanding of world and American history. In every direction I turned, my ears filled a little more with what he always had to say. His words, his spirit, mattered to me. Black, gay, bejeweled, eyes like orbs searching, dancing, calling
a spade a spade
, in magazines and on the black-and-white TV of my youth. Baldwin, deep in thought and pulling drags from his companion cigarettes, looking his and our danger in the face and never backing down. My worldview was set in motion by this big, bold heart who understood that he had to leave his America in order to be. Baldwin was dangerous to everybody who had anything to hide. Baldwin was also the priceless inheritance to anybody looking for manumission from who they didn’t want or have to be. Gracious and tender, a man who had no idea or concept of his place, who nurtured conversation with Black Panthers and the white literati all in the same afternoon. So powerful and controversial was his name that one minute it was there on the speaker’s list for the great August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and then, poof, it was off. The country might have been ready to march for things they believed all God’s children should have in this life, but there were people, richly mis-educated by the Republic, who were not ready for James Baldwin to bring truth in those searing ways he always brought truth to the multitudes.
    The eldest of nine, a beloved son of Harlem, his irreverent pride and trust in his own mind, his soul (privately and sometimes publicly warring), all of who he was and believed himself to be, was exposed in his first person, unlimited voice, not for sale, but vulnerable to the Republic. Baldwin’s proud sexuality, and his unwillingness to censor his understanding that sex was a foundational part of this life even in the puritanical Republic and therefore should be written, unclothed, not whispered about, not roped off in some back room, informed all of his work, but especially his poetry. Uninviting Baldwin was often the excuse for the whitewashing of his urgent and necessary brilliance from both the conservative Black community and from whites who had never heard such a dark genius display such rich and sensory antagonism for them. Into the microphone of the world Baldwin leaned—never afraid to say it.
    Only once did I see James Baldwin live and in warm, brilliant person; it was 1984, a packed house at the University of California at Berkeley. I was twenty-seven, he was sixty, and we would never meet. None of us there that night, standing shoulder to shoulder, pushed to the edge of our seats, knew that this was our last embrace with him, that we would only have him walking among us for three more years. I remember the timbre of his voice. Steadfast. Smoky. Serene. His words fell on us like a good rain. A replenishing we badly needed. All of us standing, sitting, spread out before this wise, sharp-witted, all-seeing man.
    I had
met
James Baldwin by way of his “Sweet Lorraine,” a seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word loving manifesto to his friend and comrade, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work,
A Raisin in the Sun
, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959.