Who Can Afford to Improvise?

James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners

Ed Pavlić

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823268498
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavli? offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin's work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.Presented in three books — or movements — the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin's career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of "The Hallelujah Chorus, " a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavli? reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin's voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of "lyrical travel" with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin's work invokes into the world.

1

“Not the country we’re sitting in now”

Amputation/Gangrene Past and Present

By May 1963, James Baldwin had become the most visible “spokesman”—a term he hated—for the civil rights movement, a phrase he didn’t like much either. May was an intense month. In an inauspicious beginning, Harper’s magazine published a set of his letters to his agent Bob Mills.1 Early in the month, going from San Francisco “to Sacramento, then to San Diego and Los Angeles and back to San Francisco,” Baldwin traveled with his personal representative, Eddie Fales, and Time magazine correspondent Roger Stone on a tour of California sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality.2 Stone described the schedule as “bone jarring” and, signaling attitudes (in this case, relatively mild ones) that would inflect Baldwin’s life in uncountable ways, Baldwin as “an eloquent pixy with a sharp tongue.”3 Climbing on and off planes, in and out of cars, moving between venues while snatching papers from newsstands to stay abreast of events in Birmingham, and averaging more than two speeches per day, Baldwin sent a telegram to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy on May 12. The message blamed the violence flaring in Birmingham on the apathy of the federal government. Baldwin didn’t go to Alabama during the tumult of that week, but he told Stone: “If I’m called, I will go. I don’t want to get castrated any more than anyone else. But I will go.”4 On May 17, one week after the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine. During that week, he filmed the documentary Take This Hammer in San Francisco.5 On May 22, he traveled to Wesleyan University as a guest of novelist Kay Boyle, an engagement that lasted until 2:30 am. On Thursday May 23, after catching (barely) the 7 am flight from New York’s LaGuardia airport, he had breakfast with Kennedy at the Kennedy home in McLean, Virginia. He returned to New York and spent the rest of the day attending to several business matters, contacting participants for the agreed upon meeting with Kennedy the following day, and then hosting an all-night dance party and planning session for the meeting.

A story titled “At a Crucial Time a Negro Talks Tough” appeared in Life magazine on Friday, May 24.6 It described a recent, “hectic, two-day speaking tour to New Orleans for the Congress of Racial Equality” on which Baldwin “gave five planned and three spontaneous talks.” The same day, Baldwin led a group of friends and family (including Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Rip Torn, his brother David, and freedom rider Jerome Smith) to a meeting with Robert Kennedy in their family’s apartment at 24 Central Park South in New York City. Directly after that (by all accounts) disastrous attempt to communicate with the attorney general, he went directly with Kenneth B. Clark to tape an interview with WGBH-TV in New York. On May 27, agents from the New York office of the FBI attempted to gain and were refused entry to the apartment where Baldwin was staying on East Third Street in the Village, initiating intense surveillance that would continue until 1974 and amass a file nearing two thousand pages.7 A friction at the center of the month’s events offers a lens through which to clarify core angularities in Baldwin’s life and work. Such a point of view, even decades after Baldwin’s death, can also offer valuable perspective on our own lives and the cultural and political worlds around us. In short, Baldwin’s work offers a unique gauge for measuring who has how much, and of what, in the bank. At the end of the dispatch for Time, Stone concluded, “Baldwin has a face that could soon be forgotten, not so his lengthening shadow, as it steals across the nation.”8 What Stone described as a shadow I approach throughout the book as a disruptive clarity and a constantly refocusing analytical lens.

The meeting with Kennedy in New York became famous as a flash point for the tension between mainstream liberal politics and the street-level realities of race and black consciousness in the early 1960s. In his 1979 essay “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” Baldwin recalls Kennedy’s invocation of his own immigrant roots and his attempt to calm the group by saying that “a Negro could be president in 40 years.”9 He adds: “He really didn’t know why black people were so offended by this attempt at reassurance.”10 Of the gap between perspectives, he wrote, “the meeting took place in that panic-stricken vacuum in which black and white, for the most part, meet in this country.”11 Although the complexity of his response was lost on the vast majority of his original readers, the “panic-stricken vacuum” Baldwin notes both does and doesn’t refer to meetings between people of different skin color. Baldwin’s prose is exact. The abstract situation, “when black and white, for the most part, meet in this country,” refers to individual people as well as racialized cultural codes that operate between and within people in American life. As he had begun to do with his earlier essays and as he would continue to do for the rest of his life, Baldwin portrayed meetings of “black and white” as meetings between persons as well as intersections of impersonal, racialized codes that play out on every level of our psychic and civic lives.

Baldwin had already charted the tension produced by these clashing codes of speech, thought, and what, in The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as “the peculiar sensation” of interracial coexistence. The tensions were political, social, and personal. Once more, he understood that all those terms were tangled up with each other. In “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), Baldwin attributes the 1943 Harlem riots to “the Negro’s real relation to the white American” (CE, 82). As happened innumerable times before and since, the peculiar sensation, boiling in a certain way in every resident of Harlem (at least), had simply become “intolerable.” Finally, “Harlem had needed something to smash.” As a result, and as usual, interracial tension surfaced in intraracial (and intrapersonal) violence—“To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other and themselves.” Black Americans, Baldwin held, could not simply embrace white cultural codes, “the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that” (83). And, even privately, rejecting out-of-hand the interracial tangle entailed inordinate costs as well: “one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose” (83).

He concludes his sketch of this social and psychological collision, “when black and white meet in this country,” and the impossible postures it imposes, with the metaphoric risks of gangrene and amputation. Gangrene results as a black American subject negotiates with the “panic-stricken vacuum” thereby absorbing the power, complacency, ignorance, and innocence that characterize the white cultural codes’ regard for the black ones. This is poisonous chemistry. Amputation is the term Baldwin uses to describe the attempt to cease the negotiation and compartmentalize to rid one’s (black) self of the contemptuous assumptions of its white image (and one’s “white” self of the contempt of the black one) in the mirror. Baldwin then sets his terms in motion in his most effective and terrifying mid-twentieth-century portrait of what Du Bois had termed double-consciousness in 1903:

One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always cancelling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. (CE, 83)

In Baldwin’s mind, there are power dynamics to take into account, but no American escapes these impossible negotiations between amputation and gangrene imposed upon them when the “white” components of the sociopsychological terrain of American life regard the “black” ones and vice versa. No matter the level of consciousness or the relative pressure at which that panic-ridden drama plays out, Baldwin knew that every American faced the dilemma that “the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices don’t exist” (83).

Appearances, however, at the surface of behavior and in American self-regard (then and now) seemed to belie Baldwin’s insight. For the most part, at the time of the meeting between Kennedy and Baldwin’s group, most mainstream white Americans claimed not to know much about this at all. Whiteness understood (and still understands) itself as a kind of privilege that allowed people to avoid paying dues in the gangrene/amputation dilemmas of the American inheritance. Baldwin knew better. The results (no matter the income bracket) of not engaging were bankruptcy. His understanding of black style, speech and, more than anything else, music, was founded upon this impossible tangle that was far more difficult for black people to ignore than whites. The key difference is, Baldwin thought, that some of the risks of ignoring the transracial tangle interior to the American subject were more obvious—the alternatives more immediately lethal—to black people than they were to white people.

That white innocence had its costs, of course. In the opening moments of The Fire Next Time, he noted the paradox: “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” (CE, 292). On the other hand, together with the scars, contending with the amputation/gangrene dynamic produced an undeniable form of strength. In No Name in the Street (1972), Baldwin noted both. Of the former, he observed: “White Children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in” (431). Of the black contending, he argued that “it is a very different matter, and results in a very different intelligence, to grow up under the necessity of questioning everything—everything from the question of one’s identity to the literal, brutal question of how to save one’s life in order to live it” (431).

In his biography of Baldwin, about the meeting in New York City, David Leeming writes that...