Chapter 1The Meeting

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about the music. Detroit made me — the radio, the record shops, the church around the corner that I did not attend and could not stop hearing — and for better than thirty years my beat ran from the bebop men to the soul singers who crossed over into pop and paid the toll the crossing demanded. I could tell you how a horn player sits behind the beat and why the sitting is the art. I could tell you what a rhythm section does when the singer is lying and what it does when the singer is telling the truth. That was my subject and my faith both. So when I told people I was writing a book about James Baldwin — a writer, a man of sentences, a man whose instrument was the English paragraph — more than one of them asked me, gently, what a jazz critic thought he was doing.

The honest answer is that I never got to Baldwin. Baldwin got to me. Everywhere I went in the music, he was already there. He was in the gospel underneath the soul records I spent the seventies reviewing. He was in the storefront churches whose sound I kept tracing back and back until the tracing became a kind of trespass. He was in the last long novel, the one about a gospel singer who loves men, which is a book about exactly the collision I had been circling my whole career — the church's music and the church's refusal, the gift and the door it comes through and the door it is shown. And he was in the room. Miles came to the house at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Nina came and stayed. A jazz critic knows that room when he sees it: the long table, the bottles, the arguments going past midnight, the host who listens harder than he talks. It is an after-hours session. It is the bandstand a man builds when no bandstand will have him whole.

That house is why this book is shaped the way it is shaped. I expected, going in, to write about the late years — the salon in the hills, the light the painters came for, the writer holding court in Braque's old studio. What I found, working backward from the house through the public record, the published memoirs of the people who sat at that table, the press archive, and the file the government kept on him for sixteen years, was that the house was not an epilogue. It was an argument. A boy preacher from a crowded Harlem apartment, who held a congregation in his hands at fourteen and left the pulpit at seventeen and left the country at twenty-four, spends his whole life being offered partial welcomes — the movement will have his voice but not his love, the establishment will have his style but not his anger — and at the end of it he signs a lease on twelve stone rooms in Provence and sets a table long enough for everyone the country would not seat. You do not have to be a biographer to read that. You have to be someone who has spent thirty years watching exiles build home out of sound.

What I expected and what I found were not the same book. I expected a stylist. I found a musician — a man whose sentences have a time signature, who phrases the way the great horn players phrase, laying the truth a half-beat behind where the ear wants it so that when it lands, it lands for good. I expected the story of a career. I found the story of a witness: a man who saw everything, said everything, was heard for about eighteen months, and kept saying it for twenty-four more years to a country that had left the room. The country is quoting him now. The country quotes him the way it hums a melody it once refused to buy.

Why is James Baldwin worth a book from a man like me? Because the question I have asked of every musician I ever wrote about — what does the sound cost, and who pays — has no better answer anywhere in American life. Baldwin paid at every window. The church, the movement, the critics, the Bureau with its 1,884 pages. He paid, and the voice held, and the holding is the thing this book is trying to hear.

I came to this life through the ear, the only way I know. I ask the reader to come the same way: not to a monument, but to a table in the south of France, where the talk is going long, and the man at the head of it is listening.

— Calvin Renard, Detroit

Chapter 1 · The Meeting

On May 12, 1963, James Baldwin sent Robert Kennedy a telegram from Los Angeles. Birmingham was burning. Bull Connor's dogs and water cannon had been on the world's front pages for a week. Baldwin's telegram took the Attorney General and the administration to task for allowing the situation to occur, and for treating the question as a matter of region rather than as a matter of the country itself. The political establishment, including the President, had made Bull Connor possible. Nothing would be solved, the telegram argued, until the federal government was willing to recognize that the Black race was composed of real human beings.

Kennedy responded by inviting Baldwin to breakfast. The meeting took place on May 23 at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family home in McLean, Virginia. Baldwin arrived late. In a domestic setting, surrounded by Kennedy's children, the Attorney General struck Baldwin as more available than he had been on television or in the formal precincts of the Justice Department. Kennedy asked questions. What do Negroes want? Which Negroes will other Negroes listen to? Baldwin answered as best he could, in the time available: that Black Americans wanted to be treated as Americans; that the President needed to treat civil rights as a moral issue rather than as a political one; that the people who could be listened to were people like Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, Kenneth Clark, and the Freedom Riders. Kennedy proposed that Baldwin assemble such a group for a longer meeting in New York the next day. Baldwin agreed.

He spent the next twenty-four hours rounding up a delegation. He had dinner that night at El Faro in the Village with his agent Bob Mills, his brother David, the actor Rip Torn, the actress Geraldine Page, and a young CORE field worker named Jerome Smith. He returned to his apartment for a strategy session with his dinner guests and several other associates. By morning he had assembled what would become, by accident more than design, the most-quoted single afternoon of his public life.

On the afternoon of May 24, 1963, the group walked from Mills's office to the Kennedy family's New York apartment at 24 Central Park South. The Attorney General arrived at about the same time, accompanied by his civil rights chief Burke Marshall. Marshall, who in another setting might have been the room's primary government voice, would say almost nothing for the duration of the meeting. Kennedy was effectively alone on the government side of the conversation.

The Black delegation Baldwin had assembled was a mixed company. Lorraine Hansberry, who had written A Raisin in the Sun, was dying of cancer, though she did not yet know it; she had less than two years to live. Lena Horne had spent decades navigating the racial politics of Hollywood and the music industry from the inside. Kenneth Clark was the psychologist whose research on the effects of segregation on Black children had been cited in Brown v. Board of Education. Harry Belafonte was the most commercially successful Black entertainer in America and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest fundraisers. Edwin Berry directed the Chicago Urban League. Clarence Jones was an attorney close to King, and to Baldwin. Rip Torn was there. Baldwin's brother David was there. Eddie Fales, an old Baldwin friend, was there. Henry Morgenthau III had come along to observe; he was producing the WGBH program Clark and Baldwin would tape later that day. King himself could not, or would not, attend; he had asked Clark to represent him. And there was Jerome Smith.

Smith was twenty-five. He was a CORE field worker from New Orleans, a veteran of the Mother's Day Freedom Ride of 1961. He had been beaten attempting to integrate bus terminals in McComb, Mississippi. He had been beaten in Anniston, Alabama. He had been jailed and hospitalized. He walked with a limp and the scars showed. He was the only person in the room whose authority had been earned through the direct application of his body to the machinery of white supremacy, and he had not been brought because he was famous. He had been brought because he was the evidence.

Kennedy began the meeting by describing what his Justice Department had been doing for civil rights. He cited statistics. He listed the appointment of Black judges. He described the desegregation of interstate transportation. He spoke, by all accounts that survive, in the manner of a political operative addressing a room of reasonable people who would appreciate the progress being made and the political risks being taken.

Jerome Smith opened for the other side. It makes me nauseous to have to be here, he said — meaning that it should not have been necessary, in this country, for American citizens to plead with their own government for the right to ride a bus or sit at a lunch counter without being beaten. He told Kennedy he was close to the moment when he would pick up a gun. He said that he could not conceive, after what had happened to him in the South and after the federal government's failure to protect him, of fighting for his country.

Kennedy expressed shock at the lack of patriotism. He suggested that he, too, as the descendant of Irish immigrants, could point to a background of oppression — and that with luck, in forty years, a Black man might be President.

Baldwin, who had been quiet, broke in. The Attorney General's analogy was absurd. The Kennedys' ancestors had come to America as immigrants, but long after Black people had arrived; the point was that a Kennedy could already be President while the Black man, as the present meeting was illustrating, was still required to supplicate and beg for justice.

The meeting began to come apart. Smith returned, when Kennedy tried to address himself past him, to the position of a man who had been beaten while federal officers stood nearby and took notes. When I pull the trigger, he told Kennedy, kiss it goodbye. The line landed in the room as a threat — Kennedy heard it as one — and the Attorney General took offense at Smith's tone and language. From there nothing recovered.

David Baldwin, by Campbell's account, shook a fist in the Attorney General's face. James Baldwin impugned the neutrality of the FBI. Lena Horne, when Kennedy suggested that Black New Yorkers might benefit from his attention if he came up to Harlem, told him: We ain't going … because we don't want to get shot. Horne was not searching for a middle ground. She was telling the Attorney General of the United States that his offer of presence in a Black neighborhood was, at the level she had lived for fifty years, a threat to whoever stood next to him. Kenneth Clark tried to translate the room's anguish into the sociologist's language of systemic analysis. The translation did not take.

Lorraine Hansberry, who had been mostly silent, turned the meeting toward Smith. There were a great many accomplished people in the room, she said in substance, but the most important person there — gesturing toward Smith — was the man who had been on the buses. Leeming, who had Baldwin's account of the day, records the attribution simply: Smith was, Hansberry announced, "the most important person here." Baldwin watched her face as she spoke, and for the rest of his life he would compare the face — still, beautiful, terrifying — to Sojourner Truth's. It was the last time he would see her on her feet.

The meeting did not formally end so much as collapse. Hansberry, near the close, returned to a photograph that had recently been published in Time — the now-famous image of a white policeman in Birmingham pinning a Black woman to the ground with a knee on her neck. She told Kennedy that she was deeply concerned about the state of a civilization that could produce such a photograph. Then she smiled, in a way that Baldwin would remember as having made him glad she was not smiling at him, and shook the Attorney General's hand. Good-bye, Mr. Attorney General. She left the room. Everyone followed.

The meeting had lasted close to three hours. By the testimony of every participant who later spoke about it, the room left feeling devastated. Kennedy left, by the testimony of his own later interviews, feeling that he had been ambushed. He told an interviewer four years later that Hansberry had said the group was going to get guns and start killing white people. The minutes do not support him on the wording. They support him on the fact that he did not understand what he had been told.

The biographical question at the heart of this scene is not how James Baldwin became a great writer. That question has answers involving talent, suffering, discipline, exile, and the English language's capacity to hold more truth than most of its users can tolerate. The biographical question is different. It is: what does it cost a man to see clearly in a country that has organized itself around the refusal to see? What does it do to a mind, a body, a career, a life, to be the person who says the thing that everyone knows and no one will admit — and to say it with such precision and beauty that the country cannot claim it was never told?

James Baldwin saw everything. He saw the storefront churches of Harlem and the theology that sustained them and the theology's failure to contain the full truth of Black life. He saw the racial hatred in the eyes of white Americans and the self-hatred it deposited in Black Americans and the erotic charge that connected the two. He saw the homosexual desire that the culture called deviant and that he recognized as love. He saw the assassinations of three friends and understood what the murders meant about the country that produced them. He saw all of it. He said all of it. He said it in prose so precise and so beautiful that it has outlived every attempt to dismiss it.

The country did not hear him.

The country heard him intermittently. The country heard him in 1963, when The Fire Next Time made him the most visible Black intellectual in America, when Time put his face on the cover, when the Attorney General of the United States asked for a meeting. The country heard him for approximately eighteen months. Then the country stopped hearing him. The Black Power movement questioned his masculinity and his conciliatory impulses. The white literary establishment called him shrill and overly political. By 1970 he was, by the consensus of American cultural opinion, a spent force — a man who had said his best things and was now repeating himself, drinking too much, living in the south of France, irrelevant.

He was not irrelevant. He was writing. He continued to write until the esophageal cancer killed him in 1987. The work he produced after the culture declared him finished — No Name in the Street, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Devil Finds Work, Just Above My Head, the essays, the conversations — is not the work of a man who has run out of things to say. It is the work of a man who has been told that what he is saying is no longer welcome, and who says it anyway, because the seeing does not stop when the audience leaves.

He was born James Arthur Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. His mother, Emma Berdis Jones, had come to Harlem from Deal Island, Maryland, in the early 1920s. His biological father's identity was never revealed to him. In 1927, when James was three, his mother married David Baldwin, a laborer and storefront preacher from Bunkie, Louisiana, who had come north to Harlem in 1919. James took his stepfather's surname. Over the next sixteen years, Emma and David Baldwin would have eight more children — George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr., Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula — and James, the eldest, would help raise all of them in the crowded apartment on 131st Street, in a household governed by poverty, by David Baldwin's religious fury, and by the particular suffering of a man who believed the world was evil and who had, by every account that survives, considerable evidence for the belief.

He was, throughout his life, one of the most physically distinctive figures in American letters. He was short and slight, barely five foot six, with a frame so narrow that the suits he wore in the 1960s hung on him like a boy's costume. But the face was extraordinary. The eyes were enormous, heavy-lidded, protruding slightly, and they dominated every photograph ever taken of him, every room he ever entered. Virtually everyone who met Baldwin described the eyes first: they were the eyes of a man who was seeing more than you wanted seen, and they gave his face a quality that oscillated between vulnerability and ferocity depending on the angle and the light. His voice was deep, melodic, carrying the faintest trace of a stammer that surfaced occasionally under stress and that gave his speech, when it appeared, an involuntary emphasis that audiences found devastating. He smoked constantly, the cigarette a permanent extension of his gesturing hand, the smoke a kind of punctuation in his conversation. Leeming, who knew Baldwin for over two decades, described the physical man with the intimacy of extended observation: "when he ate a meal, smoked a cigarette, sipped on a scotch, or touched another human being, he did so with deep pleasure that was evident and with an incomparable elegance and care." Maya Angelou, who knew him as well as anyone in his later years, described him as built like a "dancer" — the body compact, precise, carrying itself with an awareness that seemed to extend to the tips of his fingers. The gap between his two front teeth was pronounced; when he smiled, it gave his face an openness that disappeared the instant the smile did. In the Paris years he dressed with the studied casualness of the expatriate intellectual. By the Time cover era of 1963, he had adopted the uniform of the public figure: dark suits, narrow ties, the face lean and fierce above the collar. In the late years at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the frame thickened slightly with age and scotch, the face settled into deeper lines, but the eyes never changed. The eyes were always the same.

He died on December 1, 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, of esophageal cancer. He was sixty-three years old.

Between those two dates — the birth in Harlem Hospital and the death in the stone house in Provence — he produced six novels, a collection of short stories, two plays, a screenplay, a children's book, a long poem, and nine works of nonfiction, including some of the finest essays written in English in the twentieth century. He preached in a Pentecostal church at fourteen. He left the church at seventeen. He left the country at twenty-four. He came back. He left again. He came back again. He was surveilled by the FBI for sixteen years; his file became the largest the Bureau compiled on any Black artist of the civil rights era. He was placed on the Security Index — the list of citizens to be arrested first in the event of a national emergency. He was called a prophet by people who admired him and a pervert by the Bureau that tracked him. He loved men. He did not hide it. He did not, after a certain point, apologize for it. The cost of not hiding, in midcentury America, was a form of daily courage that most biographical accounts acknowledge without quite conveying.

The meeting at 24 Central Park South did not end the story. It began a different chapter of it. Within a few weeks of the disastrous afternoon — eighteen days, if the calendar is held strictly — Robert Kennedy urged his brother to act. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address in which he called civil rights a moral issue, not merely a legal one. The language of the address echoed, however imperfectly, what Baldwin's group had said to Robert Kennedy in the apartment. The legislation that followed would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Whether Robert Kennedy was changed by the meeting or hardened by it is a question the documentary record cannot fully settle. The fact pattern is that within the same period he encouraged the FBI to take a serious interest in Baldwin, his concerns, and his movements. Four days after the meeting, J. Edgar Hoover's deputy Clyde Tolson scribbled at the foot of a sheaf of press clippings: What do our files show about James Baldwin? The next day a memorandum titled `JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN/INFORMATION CONCERNING` was circulated to six top bureau offices. The file would grow for the rest of Baldwin's life. The same Attorney General who had asked Baldwin to assemble a group of Black Americans for a private conversation about the state of the country had, within a week of that conversation, set the surveillance machinery moving. Whether the two actions were continuous or contradictory in his mind is not a question the historian can answer. They were both, in the same week, his.

Baldwin's specific role in the meeting itself is worth noting, because it was not the role the subsequent mythology assigned him. He did not dominate the conversation. He was not the loudest voice in the room. He had assembled the group, and he let the group speak, and his contribution was the contribution he always made: the silent, absorptive attention of the man who sees. He watched. He watched Jerome Smith open the meeting with the line about nausea. He watched Hansberry turn toward Smith and name him. He watched Lena Horne refuse, in front of the Attorney General of the United States, the offer of his presence in Harlem. He watched Kennedy go from open to argumentative to angry. Later, in the car on the way to the WGBH taping, he and Clark passed Hansberry walking the other direction; she did not see them. Baldwin took note of what appeared to be her emotional pain — her face "twisted," her eyes "darker than any" he had ever seen.

Baldwin's power in that room was not the power of the speaker but the power of the witness who would later make the room legible to the country. He did not draft the legislation. He did not organize the marches. He was a writer, not a politician, and the distinction mattered to him. But he had assembled the room. He had brought Jerome Smith into the presence of Robert Kennedy. He had created the conditions under which a young man's testimony — kiss it goodbye — could reach, however imperfectly, the conscience of a man who had the power to act. This was what Baldwin did. He did not change minds through argument. He changed them, when he changed them at all, through testimony. He put the truth in front of people who did not want to see it, in language so exact that the not-seeing required more effort than the seeing.

The country, for the most part, chose the effort.

The arc of this biography follows the arc of the witness. Part I traces the Harlem childhood that produced the voice — the stepfather's tyranny, the storefront pulpit, the boy preacher who discovered at fourteen that he could hold a congregation in his hands, and the young man who discovered at seventeen that the church could not hold the truth he needed to tell. Part II follows the escape to Paris in 1948 and the decade of formation that produced the first three books — the autobiographical novel, the homosexual novel, and the essay collection that established him as a writer of the first rank. Part III covers the return to America and the eighteen months in 1962–1963 when the country almost listened — The Fire Next Time, the Time cover, the Kennedy meeting, the March on Washington, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the assassination of the President. Part IV documents the double rejection — dismissed by the Black Power movement for his sexuality, dismissed by the white literary establishment for his anger — and the years of wandering, drinking, and continued writing that followed. Part V is the final act: the unfinished manuscript about three assassinated friends, the death in France, the funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the afterlife — the country that could not hear James Baldwin when he was alive discovering that it cannot stop quoting him now that he is dead.

The witness saw everything. The witness said everything. The country, eventually, read what the witness wrote. Whether it heard him is a question this biography will not be able to answer, because the country has not yet answered it for itself.