Free Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin Page A

Baldwin’s intimate remembrance became the introduction to the book of the same name, a book that, as a girl of fourteen, I was highly uncomfortable ever letting out of my sight. I was the Black girl dreaming of a writing life and Hansberry, the Black woman carving one out. Hansberry had given me two atomic oars to zephyr me further upstream:
I am a writer. I am going to write
. After her untimely death, I had a palpable need to still see and feel her in the world. Baldwin’s lush remembrance brought her to me in powerful living dimension. His way of seeing her, of remembering what was important about her, helped her stay with me.
    I had needed Hansberry to set my determination forward for my journey. And I needed Baldwin to teach me about the power of rain.
    Baldwin wrote poetry throughout his life. He wrote with an engaged, layered, facile hand. The idea being explored first cinched, then stretched out, with just enough tension to bring the light in. His language: informal, inviting; his ideas from the four corners of the earth, beginning, always, with love:
    No man can have a harlot
    for a lover
    nor stay in bed forever
    with a lie
.
    He must rise up
    and face the morning sky
    and himself, in the mirror
    of his lover’s eye
.
    (“A Lover’s Question”)
    Baldwin’s images carry their weight and we, the reader, carry their consequence. In one turn of phrase and line, something lies easy in repose; in the next, he is telling the Lord what to do; the words jump, fall in line, with great and marching verve:
    Lord
,
    when you send the rain
,
    think about it, please
,
    a little?
    Do
    not get carried away
    by the sound of falling water
,
    the marvelous light
    on the falling water
.
    I
    am beneath that water
.
    It falls with great force
    and the light
    Blinds
    me to the light
.
    (“Untitled”)
    Baldwin wrote as the words instructed, never allowing the critics of the Republic to tell him how or how not. They could listen in or they could ignore him, but he was never their boy, writing something they wanted to hear. He fastidiously handed that empty caricature of a Black writer back to them, tipping his hat, turning back to his sweet Harlem alley for more juice.
    James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay—to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated back to someone who perhaps had gone the distance, perhaps had taught him about the rain:
for David (x3), for Jefe, for Lena Horne, for Rico, for Berdis, for Y.S
.
    When the writer Cecil Brown went to see James Baldwin in Paris in the summer of 1982, he found him “busy working on a collection of poems,” quite possibly these poems. Brown reports that Baldwin would work on a poem for a while and then stop from time to time to read one aloud to him. “Staggerlee wonders” was one of those poems, and “Staggerlee wonders” opens
Jimmy’s Blues
, the collection he published in 1983. The poem begins with indefatigable might, setting the tone and temperature for everything else in this volume, as well as the sound and sense found throughout Baldwin’s
oeuvre
. “Baldwin read to me from the poem with great humor and laughter,” Brown wrote in his book
Stagolee Shot Billy
.
    He felt that Black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to