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

love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost.
    I do not believe James Baldwin can be wholly read without first understanding white men and their penchant for tyranny and “unrelenting brutality.” If you read Baldwin without this truth, you will mistake Baldwin’s use of the word
nigger
as how he saw himself, instead of that long-suffering character, imagined, invented, and marched to the conveyor belt as if it was the hanging tree, by the founding fathers of the Republic, in order that they might hold on for as long as possible to “the very last white country the world will ever see” (Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage”).
    I always wonder
    what they think the niggers are doing
    while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists
,
    are containing
    Russia
    and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
    China
,
    nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile
,
    from blowing up that earth
    (“Staggerlee wonders”)
    With prophetic understanding, harmony, and swing, creating his own style and using his own gauges to navigate the journey, Baldwin often wrote counter-metrically, reflecting his African, Southern, Harlem, and Paris roots. “What do you like about Emily Dickinson?” he was once asked in a
Paris Review
interview. His answer: “Her use of language . . . Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny.”
    James Baldwin made laughter of a certain style even as he reported the lies of the Republic. He was so aware of that other face so necessary in this life, that face that was present in all the best human dramatic monologues, the high historic Black art of laughing to keep from crying. He knew that without the blues there would be no jazz. Just as Baldwin dropped you into the fire, there he was extinguishing it with laughter.
    Neither (incidentally)
    has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers:
    the incoherent feeling is, the less
    the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better:
    the lady of the house
    smiles nervously in your direction
    as though she had just been overheard
    discussing family, or sexual secrets
,
    and changes the subject to Education
,
    or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls
,
    the smile saying
, Don’t be dismayed.
    We know how you feel. You can trust us.
    (“Staggerlee wonders”)
    Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his friend and mentor, the great American painter Beauford Delaney, had taught him—to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water. This reliable witnessing eye was the true value of seeing the world for what it really was and not for what someone reported, from afar, that it was.
    When Baldwin took off for Switzerland in 1952, he carried recordings by Bessie Smith, and he would often fall asleep listening to them, taking her in like the sweet Black poetry she sang. It must have been her
Baby don’t worry, I got you
voice and their shared blues that pushed him through to finish
Go Tell It on the Mountain
in three months, after struggling with the story for ten years. Whenever Baldwin abandoned the music of who he was and how that sound was made, he momentarily lost his way. When he lost his way, I believe it was poetry that often brought him back. I