James Baldwin – Living in Fire

By: Bill V. Mullen

Published by: Pluto Press

A review

I’ve read many works by outstanding writers, but James Baldwin is my favorite. What I like about Baldwin was his ability to break down the complexities of the problems we face into an understandable language. While Baldwin is known for his fiction writings, I believe that his nonfiction writings are also unique, outstanding, and inspiring.

Bill Mullen has written an important book that gives clear evidence of the revolutionary character of who Baldwin was. In order to appreciate that perspective, I think it is useful to look at the outlines of Baldwin’s life.

The life of James Baldwin

James Baldwin was raised in Harlem, New York and was the oldest of nine children. Oftentimes there was barely enough food for the family. His father didn’t like white people because the only ones who visited their home were bill collectors or social workers. Although James Baldwin didn’t get along with his father, he blamed his father’s problems on the racist system they lived with. 

Because young James was the oldest, he shared responsibility for caring for his younger siblings. Oftentimes while they sat on his lap, young James would be reading a book. Reading became young James escape from this reality. He claimed to have read every book in two libraries.

At the age of fourteen, James was brutalized by New York City police officers. He developed a perspective that this wasn’t a matter of a few “bad cops”, but that the police were a repressive force that is used to intimidate the Black community. These are the words Baldwin used to protest his outrage:

“Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.  .  .

“This is why pious calls to ‘respect the law’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer, and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self respect.”

 

Baldwin also had a white woman teacher who took him to plays and encouraged young James to pursue his writing. That, as well as other experiences, convinced young James that there were some white people who supported the struggle for Black rights.

At an early age, Baldwin joined or worked with several socialist and anarchist organizations. This had an influence on Baldwin throughout his life. Unlike many activists who embraced the Stalinist politics of the Soviet Union, Baldwin found his own way of expressing his ideas in the following passage:

“This means an indigenous socialism, formed by, and responding to, the real needs of the American people.  .  .The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery, that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral, and finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.”

Baldwin also stated clearly how this economic system has historically affected Black people:

“And the man who is now known as the American Negro who is one of the oldest Americans citizens and the only one who never wanted to come here, did the dirty work . . . I think it is not too strong for me to say, let me put it this way: without that strong back, the American economy, the American nation would have had a vast amount of trouble creating its capital. If one did not have the captive toting the barge and lifting the bale as they put it, it would be a very different country, and it would certainly be much poorer.” 

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is not a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been about to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.” 

Here Baldwin strips away the mythology of standard American history textbooks. Those textbooks routinely argue that the Civil War “freed the slaves.” While this is technically true and the end of chattel slavery was a huge advance, that statement gives only part of the story.

Northern capitalists supported the war against the confederacy because the goals of the slave states stood in the way of advancing capitalism. Slaves were the most valuable investment that slave owners had. By making chattel slavery illegal, the slave owners lost their so-called wealth as well as much of their power. Those capitalists never supported the genuine liberation of Black people in this country.

Then, the Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal that effectively gave political power to the Ku Klux Klan in the year 1877. This decision effectively stripped Black people of their citizenship rights in this country. Not until the mid 1960s did the federal government bow to the civil rights movement and overturn the segregationist Jim Crow laws.

However, when we read James Baldwin’s writings about the police, we see that the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s failed to give Black people full rights in this country. Michelle Alexander documented this in her groundbreaking book: The New Jim Crow—Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. This book reports on the facts that while the Jim Crow laws were overturned, Black people are grossly overrepresented in the dungeons of the United States.

In the following passage Baldwin opposed the war against Vietnam by arguing how the struggle of the Vietnamese people has many similarities to the struggles of Black people in this country.

“Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I.  A racist society can’t but fight a racist war¾this is the bitter truth.  The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first ‘Vietcong’ victim.  We were bombed first.  How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?” 

Going to France and then around the world

As an adult James Baldwin became so enraged at the routine racial discrimination he experienced, that he felt compelled to move to France. According to Mullin, Baldwin had writing opportunities in the United States at that time. Moving to France initially made it more difficult to earn a living. However, at that time Baldwin felt it was dangerous for him to remain in this country.

For a time, living in France for Baldwin meant living in poverty. He spent some time in a French prison because he was falsely accused of a petty crime. He also lived in the area where Algerians lived, and witnessed the open discrimination they faced.

Baldwin returned to the United States to become a part of the civil rights movement. By this time he was a well-known author and went on a speaking tour in support of the movement. He gave all of his $20,000 honoraria to organizations that were working to liberate Black people.

James Baldwin was one of the most consistent supporters of Black rights of his generation. He was friends with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. He understood why many Black people became alienated from the Christian church and supported the Black Muslims. He also supported the Black Panther Party.

However, Eldridge Cleaver, who was a leader of the Black Panther Party ridiculed Baldwin for being gay in his book Soul on Ice. Huey Newton, who was also a leader of the Panthers attempted to correct that error by stating that people who are gay were welcomed to join the Panthers. However, this criticism had an effect on Baldwin.

Towards the end of Baldwin’s life, he spent ten productive years living in Turkey. During that time he produced a play about the gay community in Istanbul. Eventually Baldwin felt he needed to leave Turkey because of the increasing repression of the government. He lived his last years in Southern France. Baldwin had this to say about the idea of sexuality in the United States.

“The American ideal then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.”            

Another source for Baldwin’s nonfiction writings is the his 690 page book The Price of the Ticket. Ironically this book happens to be out of print. Amazon has a limited number of hardcover copies at the exorbitant price of: $77.80.

For me one of James Baldwin’s most relevant quotations predicted the times we are living in today. I will conclude this review with those words.

“Power, then, which can have no morality itself, is yet dependent on human energy, on the wills and desires of human beings.  When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt.  When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities––and seas of blood.  The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.  They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them.  They realize this––paradoxically––by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principals on which a new world will be built.”