James Baldwin's Understanding of God
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James Baldwin's Understanding of God

Overwhelming Desire and Joy

J. Young

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eBook - ePub

James Baldwin's Understanding of God

Overwhelming Desire and Joy

J. Young

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About This Book

This book focuses on Baldwin's experiences as a gifted black writer who fought valiantly against racism and wrote openly about homosexual relationships. Baldwin's God is a 'mysteriously impersonal' force he calls love- 'something... like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you.'

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Information

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Year
2014
ISBN
9781137454348
Topic
Social Sciences
Subtopic
Sociology of Religion
Index
Social Sciences
1
Introduction
James Arthur Baldwin (1924–1987) was the most well-known African American writer of his generation. He wrote prolifically and received many awards because of the high quality of his work: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award (1945), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1947), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1954), and a Ford Foundation Grant (1959). In 1963, he won the George Polk Memorial Award because of the compelling ways he covered the burgeoning civil rights movement. In May 1963, Time magazine placed his portrait on its cover to acknowledge the stardom he had achieved with Dial Press’s publication of his most famous book, The Fire Next Time. The National Institute of Arts and Letters elected him to its ranks in 1964. The City College of New York awarded him the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal for “lifelong dedication to humanitarian ideals” in 1978. In 1986, the French government made him a commander of the prestigious French Legion of Honor. As an eloquent, precise writer and a mercurially passionate spokesperson for human rights, he made a powerful impression on the world. He thought of himself as a principal witness to African Americans’ struggle for human rights in the United States and sought, particularly through several of his novels, to tear down the racial and the sexual barriers people erect among themselves by exposing what he found to be shaky about them.
He paid a great price for his witness because the ways in which his post-Fire writings tried to tear down barriers left many critics cold. When Dial Press, for instance, published Baldwin’s novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), Time magazine held that he was “in great danger of becoming drearily irrelevant” as “a fictioneer.”1 Although the magazine had acknowledged his talent just five years earlier, it found his characterizations of racial conflicts and sexual ambiguities hard to take. During the last years of his life, Dial rejected his book The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which is about the child murders in Atlanta, Georgia. Dial had been his mainstay publisher. He had made money for the press. The editors’ rejections of Evidence mark a tremendous change in how they perceived him as a writer. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston published the book in 1985, and most critics panned it. To them, the essay was incoherent—the final nail in the coffin of a gifted prose-stylist, who seemed after 1965 to prefer black-power histrionics to the Anglo-Saxon artistry of Henry James and Charles Dickens, who had clearly influenced James Baldwin early in his career.
Since I am not a literary critic, I cannot determine whether his later novels and essays are “good.” I am a theologian who reads him in the light of his religious and theological convictions—his spirituality that has emerged from his struggle against racism and his acceptance of his sexuality. He invented neither racism nor homosexuality, but resolved to bring into the open what others tended to keep in the closet. He was open, and honest, in that way because of his faith in “God . . . some enormous overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you” (CE, 220).2 (Throughout this book, I will place “God” between quotation marks to indicate that I have found no evidence that Baldwin believed in “God” in a traditional sense. He did not, that is, believe in YHWH, the Trinity, or Allah. He believed that “God” revealed, for the most part, who we are rather than a Supreme Being somewhere above us. He did hold, however, that a mysterious force was at work in the cosmos.)
Mrs. Gloria Karefa-Smart, one of Baldwin’s sisters, agrees with me. We talked at length about her brother, his spirituality, his legacy, and his vocation as a writer. In her Washington, DC, home, I saw boxes and boxes of his papers that she has reviewed diligently. In her spacious living room, I saw his framed Legion of Honor commendation and a startling portrait Beauford Delaney had painted of him, startling because of its colors. Photos of his family, particularly a picture of his and Mrs. Karefa-Smart’s father, David Baldwin, rested on a table near the painting. An antique, wooden tambourine—worn and darkened by time—and a tattered King James Bible sat on a bookshelf filled with recent editions of his writings in her den, where we sat and talked. I asked her about the church artifacts, and she said, “Well, that’s my heritage, you know,” and I did.
We sat beneath a large oil painting someone had painted of her brother. The Chartres Cathedral was behind him in the painting, which brought Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” to mind. “Stranger,” a part of his Notes of a Native Son (1955), recounts his experiences in the Swiss village where he finished his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. “The Cathedral at Chartres,” Baldwin writes,
says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth. (CE, 128)
My awareness of the significance of the oil painting—my mention of “Stanger in the Village”—led Mrs. Karefa-Smart to say, “You have read.”
Romare Bearden’s “Baptism” hung on the wall opposite us. The print brought a bit of Mountain to my mind:
On the banks of a river, under the violent light of noon, confessed believers and children . . . waited to be led into the water. Standing out, waist-deep and robed in white, was the preacher, who would hold their heads briefly under water, crying out to Heaven as the baptized held his breath: “I indeed have baptized you with water: but He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.” Then, as they rose sputtering and blinded and were led to the shore, he cried out again: “Go thou and sin no more.” They came up from the water, visibly under the power of the Lord, and on the shore the saints awaited them, beating their tambourines. (ENS, 69–70)3
The contrast between the African American baptism in Mountain and the age-old French cathedral behind us struck me mightily, though I did not mention this to Mrs. Karefa-Smart. I thought to myself, yes, the Europeans have known “God” longer than we have, and many who baptized their black slaves centuries ago did equate their African rituals with the devil’s work.
I thought about another of Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son essays in Mrs. Karefa-Smart’s den, “Many Thousands Gone.” In this essay, he criticizes Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, which is about Bigger Thomas, a young, black man who gets himself in trouble for killing a white woman. Baldwin implies that Bigger Thomas represents—to allude to “Stranger in the Village”—the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. To quote from “Many Thousands Gone,” Bigger Thomas
is the monster created by the American republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way of life which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and strange. It seems to me that this idea carries, implicitly, a most remarkable confession: that is, that Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims, and further, that the use to which Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption—not entirely unsound—that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. (CE, 31–32)
I recalled that I read Native Son twice in my teens. I had become an avid Baldwin reader by the time I began teaching. He had disturbed me greatly when I read him in my late teens. I could not get through Another Country and Giovanni’s Room back then. Those novels seemed to be for gays; so I thought I had no business reading them. It was not until after I read Notes of a Native Son as a professor that I began to pick up on Baldwin’s insights into religion—for me, his theological insights and philosophical musings placed him in the company of thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. I then began to study his erotic novels in a new light. I began to allow James Baldwin to challenge what I had believed about “God,” race, and human sexuality. And he did . . . and still does . . . more and more. To find myself sitting with his sister, and associating the symbols—the pictures, the beaten tambourine, the tattered Bible—with the literature I revere until today was to have a very meaningful experience.
The back door was open as we talked in her den for the first time in early April 2004. A wind chime lent great tranquility to our conversations. I saw James Baldwin in Mrs. Karefa-Smart’s face, especially in the expressive way her eyes moved. I heard his voice in her own speech—eloquent, down to earth, and Harlem, US, to the bone. Through her kindness to me and her profound commitment to her brother’s legacy as an eminently spiritual one, I feel as though I have met James Baldwin himself, at least as far as is humanly possible now. She opened an unusual door for me; and that she let me in more than once humbles me greatly. The fact that she has given her blessings to my book, which is dedicated to her, has made the time I have devoted to it worthwhile.
Baldwin asserts, “One writes out of one thing only”—“one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art” (CE, 8). “Order” for Baldwin has to do with his credo, which one must place firmly in the context of his short life. (He was only 63 years old when he died.) In an effort to write about his credo, I have thus followed his essays, short stories, and novels chronologically. For one cannot discuss his credo apart from his life, which he set before his readers, constantly: as Baldwin put it the year before he died, “Every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise and more and more reverberating.”4
2
Credo
In the book Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred Standley and Louis Pratt, British writer Colin MacInnes asks James Baldwin during a 1965 conversation whether he is “a religious writer.” MacInnes wants to know if “the concept of God” means anything to Baldwin. “Are you a believer in any sense or not?” Baldwin replies that he is not “a believer in any sense which would make sense to any church” and that “any church would” excommunicate him, “throw” him “out.” MacInnes’s question, however, compels Baldwin to pause and ask himself what he does, in fact, believe; a question that has to do with the meaning of his life, his artistry. He concludes that he believes in love and that “we can save each other.” He realizes that his assertion, “I believe in love,” might sound “very corny” to some, still he believes love is necessary if we are to save one another. He believes we “must save each other” and does not count on “anyone else to do it.” Love is not passive to him but active—“something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you.” He means energy—“a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world in which he finds himself.”1
Earlier, in 1963, New York Times reporter M. S. Handler had also asked him whether he was religious. Baldwin had replied that he did not consider himself as a Christian in any conventional sense but believed that all artists are religious if they work with the faith that we human beings “can be better than we are.”2 His assertion brings to mind an etymology of the word religion—from the Latin word religare, which means “to bind again,” reconnect, perhaps to mend, to heal, to make whole. I surely think of Baldwin’s vocation as a writer, an artist, that way. His work clearly shows that he believes that racism and homophobia have torn the human race asunder. He wants to bring us together—to make us one, to make us whole—by helping us to see that we separate ourselves from ourselves with disastrous consequences for all of us.
In reading his works, one sees that Baldwin believes every human being is both unique and very much like other human beings. He believes our commonality centers our individuality. Baldwin thinks it imperative for us to accept both our diversity, the uniqueness of every person, and our kinship—the fact that we are human beings. He wants each of us to respect his or her uniqueness so that we might do the very best with our greatest commonality: death. In The Fire Next Time (1963), he asserts that death “is the only fact we have,” and that “one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn . . . death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life” (CE, 339).3 For Baldwin, the raging passion that can bring us together creatively or drive us apart catastrophically makes up the conundrum of life.
In his “The Creative Process,” a talk he gave in 1962, Baldwin asserts that every individual must also accept “being alone.” His or her aloneness has to do with “birth, suffering, love, and death” (CE, 669). He believes that those states are both imminently personal and “extreme, universal . . . inescapable.” Their acuteness, universality, and inescapability make them common to everyone. He...

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