Simeon Marsalis
In the late-2010’s James Baldwin’s legacy was going through a revival. The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which was structured after Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and the release of Raul Peck’s documentary I am Not Your Negro, based on the author’s recollections of the Civil Rights Movement, had introduced a new generation to Baldwin’s ideas and writings. In 2018, Barry Jenkins released the cinematic version of the author’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, and a couple of months later Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) screened two short documentaries about him. At the time, i was living in Brooklyn while attending the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark and was familiar with Baldwin’s work. I wanted to learn more about him, so i decided to buy a ticket.
In many ways this essay started back then, in an aisle seat at BAM, watching Sedat Pakay’s From Another Place – Baldwin in his underwear drawing the curtains in an apartment in Istanbul, explaining why he left America. “Perhaps, only someone who is outside of the states realizes it is impossible to get out. American power follows one everywhere.” Then, he begins to smoke a cigarette. I didn’t believe him.
In my estimation, James Baldwin had sold out black people. He became famous because he had written negatively about a black writer who had helped him in his early career, Richard Wright, then he cultivated this notoriety among white people while living in Europe. So, it was a relief to me that Baldwin came across as a perpetual outsider in these documentaries. An overly-dressed dilettante struggling through undue paranoia caused by his belief (particularly in Meeting The Man) that the US government was trying to destroy him. I left the screenings with my biases confirmed, having no will to engage with his work any further. Baldwin was easily situated in a pantheon of other flawed writers who were important to the world, and beneath me.
Now, it is clear these feelings stemmed from a desire to diminish the accomplishments of a black author from the past on my journey to become a “Great Black Fiction Writer” – an accusation i had made against Baldwin. By judging historical figures against my aesthetic ideals, i could go on believing in the art i was creating, unbothered by the possibility that my values were completely subjective. Except for the passing conversation at a gathering of people interested in literature, i barely thought about James Baldwin. Then an editor reached out this April and asked me to contribute something that engages or addresses the author’s legacy and / or his impact on my work, and i began to face how uninformed my judgements had been.
2.
Now, i am a professor at the school where i got my master’s in fine arts. I teach jazz literature. The writing spans more widely known cultural movements, namely Modernism (literature of the Jazz Age) Post-Modernism (the Beats) and Post-Colonialism (the Black Arts Movement). Any work is believed to qualify as jazz literature so long as the author engages with the culture, or tries to imitate its musicality through the written word. It is hard to prove that a writer is trying to imitate the sound of “jazz music” because jazz is not a clearly defined genre and music does not easily translate into language. It is far easier to teach the ways authors engage with the culture to create meaning in their works. One of the author’s i teach is James Baldwin.
Baldwin’s novel Another Country is referenced as a work of “jazz fiction” due to the occupation of the main character, Rufus, a jazz drummer who only appears in the first 50 pages of the novel. He is so tortured by his race, class, and sexual orientation in 1950s America that he takes his own life. Rufus’ decision symbolizes the effects the repressive nature of the dominant culture has on the internal lives of its people. It is easier to understand how jazz music functions in the novel, as a vehicle for Baldwin to examine societal norms, then it is to imagine the effect listening to Charlie Parker may have had on the way he concludes his phrases.
As a supposed expert in this field of study, and a fiction writer, i thought the best way to engage with Baldwin would be to write a short story that drew on our proximity to jazz without directly corresponding to the prompt. By responding to the straight-forward request with abstraction, i believed, i could avoid writing about my earlier desire to cannibalize the author, while engaging with themes that were bigger than the both of us. This is what it means to be creative, i thought. All i needed was to find a connection between Baldwin’s life and my work.
3.
The connection was buried in the memory of a meeting i had sometime in 2020 with the Lampblack Literary Collective: a group whose mission is to cultivate and expand the reach of Black literature. Someone suggested we set up a writing retreat at James Baldwin’s villa in France. This was impractical because we did not have the money to start such a program and i believed there were better places to offer black writers the chance to do their work. We abandoned the idea. But now, i am composing a novel about a jazz critic, a comedy really, who is attempting to write “the greatest ethnography about jazz ever written.” If i could find out where Baldwin lived, i could make it a stop on this critic’s journey.
I went on the internet and located where Baldwin had spent his last days and found it was in St. Paul de Vence, a town very close to Nice. Nice, the site of Europe’s “first jazz festival,” was already a place i had written about in my novel. If i could write a scene at the end of the section where my narrator, desiring to contemplate the importance of his work, takes a day trip to Baldwin’s house, i would have the link i needed… But the more i considered this idea the more ridiculous it seemed. Instead of exploring Baldwin’s life and legacy, i was trying to include him in a story i was already writing that had little to do with him. More than ridiculous, it seemed my decision was compounding the lack of respect i’d shown Baldwin earlier. The text made his home the site of a fruitless search for meaning. I couldn’t change the tone of the novel to accommodate Baldwin’s legacy. Maybe this wasn’t the answer.
The assignment wasn’t due until August so i had time to reconsider how i would approach it. Besides, the school year was nearly done. I had grades to finish. Students across the country were camping out in front of their universities demanding administrations divest from Israel as the genocide of Palestinian people intensified. On my phone, i could see the number of dead rising daily. I watched videos of limbless children being recovered from the rubble, and families screaming as US-made bombs rained terror upon them. I could barely focus on the things occurring in my life, let alone grapple with something as seemingly insignificant as my relationship with a literary icon.
4.
In late April, i was part of a Lampblack reading in Brooklyn at Word Is Change bookstore with Brittany Allen and Naomi Jackson. My family was there. I was presenting an excerpt about enslaved people being sold out by the American Revolution. Brittany read a selection about an ex-pat couple living in Eastern Europe. Naomi read a short story about a man in Brooklyn who is hiding his homosexual relationships while living a double life as a church leader. I thought about Baldwin’s legacy then. How far my Hetero-Suburban-Agnostic childhood in the 90s had been from his Queer-Urban-Christian environment in the 50s. I could see how the issues he faced, what he deemed worthy of dramatizing, were outside of what i had considered literary. It reminded me of the disagreement i’d had with Baldwin’s opinion years ago, when i was reading the fifth chapter of Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture.
In this chapter, Woodard details a literary controversy that erupted over William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. The book became a lightning rod in 1968 when it won the Pulitzer Prize just three years after Malcolm X was killed, months after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Styron’s work caused a stir not just because he was a white man writing about a revolutionary black figure, but because he chose to write a scene where Turner kisses and masturbates with a man, even though the revolutionary was not known to have been gay.
The depiction was so controversial that John Henrik Clark organized ten writers to contribute essays to a book denouncing the novel entitled, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Their opinion, that Styron had no business creating this work and his award was disrespectful to black people in America, was not shared by James Baldwin. Baldwin understood fiction to be a place where the homoerotic interactions of enslaved people could be explored. It may help shine a light on queer stories about slavery that we choose to forget. Not to mention, nobody, regardless of their race or sexual orientation, had ownership over the legacy of Nat Turner.
When i first read this chapter i thought a white man in 1968 shouldn’t queer the life of a black revolutionary in a fictional portrayal without any evidence. Now i am not so sure. All of this came to me in that bookstore on Tompkins Avenue during Naomi’s reading about black lives in a Brooklyn that was fast disappearing. I looked over the top of a shelf at my mother, who had been born in this borough in the early 1960s, trying to imagine what she was thinking, searching the room for meaning, wondering whether a legacy could be owned or defamed by a fictional re-interpretation.
5.
Then May arrived and so did the Newark Solidarity Encampment. Nearly 2 weeks after Columbia students occupied their university’s south lawn to get the administration to divest from Israel, students, faculty, and community members from Rutgers Newark did the same. We had 18 demands, some of which were shared with Rutgers New Brunswick: for the university to divest from companies that provide military support to Israel, to break ties with Tel Aviv University, and to admit 10 students from Gaza. Others, like developing a community land trust for displaced Newarkers and creating a free healthcare program for all Newark residents, were locally focused. We were trying to make intelligible the connection between the university’s investment in foreign conflict and its neglect of the communities it inhabits. After days full of rallying, preparing for negotiations, helping with the camp logistics, de-escalating, escalating, and trying to mend community divisions, i would go back to my tent at night and read Kevin Mumford’s Newark: A History of Race, Rights and Riot in America.
i read statistics about the population of Newark and familiarized myself with the racist policies and practices that led to the expansion of Rutgers University into the city. I learned about the ‘Double V” strategy civil rights leaders used during WWII to combat racism at home and abroad. I came to understand the racial divisions that existed before the uprising that would see police beat and detain Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka, and the armed forces murder over 25 people. I tracked the activity of black liberation groups coalescing to fight back against a city hell-bent on erasing its most vulnerable residents.
James Baldwin had been a member of one of those groups: the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He had marched through Alabama and Mississippi, meeting with Baraka in Newark, recording the development of the movement for posterity. He even had a sit-down with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy – a meeting that would land him on an FBI watchlist and contribute to his paranoia throughout the 60s and 70s, eventually driving him to leave this country. Baldwin was part of a continuum that the Newark Solidarity encampment was drawing on to advocate for justice for people in this country and those living underneath the boot of american colonialism outside of its borders. Baldwin, i was beginning to realize, had influenced my path as a writer in ways i had not seen.
6.
In a 1979 article entitled “Open Letter to the Born Again,” Baldwin denounced the state of Israel. This letter was in direct response to the “Andrew Young Affair”, an incident in which United Nation’s Ambassador Andrew Young was forced to resign after meeting with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) because the PLO did not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. In the essay, Baldwin warns Jewish people about aligning themselves with White Christian Zionists. They were colonialists who had time and again put their hatred of the Jewish people on display. He writes, “… The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews but the salvation of Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
If i had known more about James Baldwin then, maybe i wouldn’t have been worried that the administration shut down the Creative Writing Department during the encampment, I wouldn’t have worried that my actions had compromised my livelihood. But i was not thinking about James Baldwin. I was considering again how much power the American Dream had over my perception of reality. I was recognizing that there have been people throughout history, tortured and brutalized out of existence by more powerful forces seeking to exploit them. There are people who have vanished without a trace. The cruelty of empire and history showed itself to me during long nights patrolling the outskirts of the encampment for would-be agitators, looking up at the moon, wondering how long we would be allowed to stay here, doubting that the University would change its position.
The days dragged into weeks. The encampment became known as “The People’s Univercity.” There was a heatwave. The news cycle turned as encampments all over the country were forcibly removed. Talks were beginning to break down between the University and us, as the administration refused to answer our most simple questions: “How much property does Rutgers own in Newark? What is the extent of the relationship Rutgers-Newark and its faculty has with Tel-Aviv University?” As we waited for a response that would not arrive, i was becoming increasingly agitated. I was looking for something to take my mind away from genocide and my employer’s complicity in it. That is when i remembered the opportunity i had been given to write about James Baldwin (an opportunity i was thankful existed, really). I went on the internet and searched for “James Baldwin”, “House”, “France”.
The first thing to appear was an excerpt from a book about Baldwin on LitHub written by Magdalena J. Zaborowska, “The Last Days of James Baldwin’s House in the South of France: Where Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and More Once Met”. In this essay the author outlines her extensive research about Baldwin and how it led her to visit the home in St. Paul de Vence lovingly called “Chez Baldwin.” She describes how dilapidated the villa had become, how the developers that owned the property had already started to demolish it. The writing room he had once occupied had “broken shudders,” the boundaries between what had been his garden and what had been his place of work was completely porous. She determines the house can only exist as a symbol for the fleeting domesticity of a unique writer, a reminder of things past.
Whatever idea i had been developing about using his house as a setting in my novel disappeared. Had the villa been destroyed by the summer of 2022, when the novel i was writing takes place, or was it still existent? If i could not go and see the remains of the place, how could i write about it? What should i do next?
I put my phone down, unzipped the tent, and crossed University Place. I walked beneath the iron banner that reads “Rutgers – Newark” like i had so many times before and ascended the steps between Conklin and Boyden Halls. No one was on the greens outside of the Paul Robeson Campus Center. The well-manicured grass and academic buildings seemed alien to the city. I floated by the tables outside of the library where students usually sat. Once inside the John Cotton Dana library, I showed my id to the armed security, rose to the second floor, and picked up Magdalena’s book, Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France.
A screenshot of Baldwin working from @shikeathism’s X page.
There is a picture of Baldwin writing at his desk in St. Paul De Vence sometime in the late 70s that appears on page 215 of Magdalena’s book. The photo shows us how James Baldwin worked. It gives us an insight into what images, furnishings, and things, made the author feel at home. Just above his head, there is a portrait of Nikki Giovanni. In 1971, the year James moved to St. Paul De Vence, he came back to the states to record a conversation with the younger author.
In the conversation, the two writers start speaking about love. Baldwin tells Giovanni that one cannot love you and lie to you. She responds, “of course you can lie to me. And you will. If you love me and you are going off with Madd[tt?]y, some place, you’re lying to me. What the hell do i care about the truth? I care if you’re there. What did Billie Holiday say, ‘Hush Now Don’t Explain?’” Giovanni is invoking the jazz singer to communicate to Baldwin that one’s actions are more important than one’s words. Your problematic presence is more important than our rosy nostalgia of who you had been. This was an idea that he, with raised eyebrows, seems to agree with.
This conversation and her work had some significant effect on Baldwin, even if he continued to live in St. Paul de Vence, making appearances in the US here and there to comment on the state of things from another country. He couldn’t struggle with black people in America, but James never stopped thinking about black writers, something evidenced by the mantelpiece in Chez Baldwin and his final wishes. He desired to turn his home into a residency for us, even if the idea didn’t come to fruition. When Baldwin passed in 1987, he still had payments left to make on the Villa.
Chez Baldwin was sold off. It went into disrepair. A funeral was held for him in Harlem at one of the world’s largest Cathedrals. Literary icons such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Newark’s own Amiri Baraka eulogized him. In 2014, the year that Magdalena went to see his home in St. Paul de Vence, the block occupied by his elementary school, 128th Street between Madison and 5th Avenues, was renamed James Baldwin Place in his honor.
9.
At 7:00 a.m. on June 9th, i was awakened by the sound of sirens and the voice of Rutgers-Newark Provost Jeffrey Robinson ordering us to get off campus in thirty minutes. I put on my t-shirt and walked out of the tent to find the administrator flanked by Rutgers PD. Newark PD had blocked entry to the campus, established a perimeter to block public entry to the People’s Univercity in all directions. Mayor Ras Baraka (Amiri Baraka’s son) told his followers on X that Newark PD was merely securing the campus and would not interfere with the operations of the University’s Police Department. In the struggle that ensued to get people to safety while moving 40 days’ worth of supplies, an officer wearing a “9/11” badge pushed me. Someone was assaulted by the police, but no one was arrested. We marched down to Harriet Tubman Park to regroup and try to figure out our next steps.
First, we had to find temporary housing for everyone in the encampment who didn’t have a place to sleep. Then, we wanted to help them find permanent housing. How would we respond to the University’s decision to decamp us without fairly addressing the concerns we raised? Israel had killed nearly 40,000 Palestinian people (A number that is skewed because they had already killed more than 100 journalists, and it was almost impossible to get accurate information with all of the people who were still buried beneath the rubble). An end to the conflict was nowhere in sight. Rutgers clearly stated it would not define the ethnic cleansing as such, let alone change anything on an institutional level like rethinking their partnerships or acknowledging their investments in weapons manufacturers, let alone stop them. The university would remain complicit.
10.
Then i was sleeping in my bed again. I was reaching out to friends and family i had not seen in 40 days. I had to check in with the Lampblack editorial team to see if we were still on track to publish our periodical in the fall. I committed to writing something about James Baldwin. I wasn’t sure what form the narrative would take but i had until August to figure it out. I went back to Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s essay and noticed she wrote about another scholar, Ed Pavlic, who had taken the trip to Chez Baldwin. The name was familiar.
I’d never met Ed but somewhere along the way, we had become friends on Facebook. This seemed an unlikely but fated coincidence. I sent a message, and it turned out Ed had the address and aerial pictures of where the villa had been. He told me it was right next to a hotel, Le Hameau, where James had spent time when he first visited town. If i wanted to visit the villa, Ed suggested i get a room at the hotel there if i could, though he warned me it was expensive.
He was right, it was out of my price range, but i found another hotel nearby that i could afford. I arranged to start my trip to visit Chez Baldwin in Montreal because flights to Nice from Montreal were less expensive than ones leaving from New York, and i wanted to stop by the Jazz Festival for its final weekend to see if i could find a connection to Baldwin.
That is how i ended up at the Montreal Jazz Festival for the fourth time in my life. I saw Fred Hirsch play a solo piano show at Gesù – Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Marquis Hill, Brandee Younger, and Shabaka Hutchings at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe. I was thinking about Baldwin. Maybe i could begin, “In a theater just off of Rue St. Catherine in Montreal i was so intently focused on the music that i was transported. James Baldwin, Miles Davis, and Nina Simone sat facing Jerusalem in a garden overlooking the hills just behind the French Riviera wondering how long it would take for the music to reach them.” But that wasn’t it. I was sure the thing i was doing was not about jazz. It was a pilgrimage to a place that held no tangible meaning. A place to remind myself of the past. A past where i wasn’t concerned about the depravity of our nation or my complicity as a citizen (I must say i was always concerned, but really resigned to it then), when i feverishly read Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and The Fire Next Time; A time when i wanted more than anything to become a writer.
11.
The day i left for Nice i decided to visit the longest-running continuous encampment in North America at McGill University. It was sunny. I met my friend B in the Latin Quarter and we walked down Sherbrooke for a mile to the Roddick Gates. three students allowed us to sit with them and discuss what had happened with the Newark encampment, to hear what they were going through. They were strong, brilliant, and kind as i would have assumed – disinterested in being deterred by the police or other outside interference. The struggle was righteous.
I took pictures of their flags asserting the right of Indigenous resistance, and their signs indicting McGill’s Chief Investment Officer Sophie Leblanc, and President Deep Saini for allowing the University to continue investing in Israel’s genocide. I helped students deter a small group of counter-protesters. A Zionist came waving an Israeli flag. Someone ran up on her and stole it. She was yelling. The McGill security guards were not entertaining it, but more and more police officers began to show up on the scene. I was concerned but far removed from the happenings. We didn’t know it at the time, but three days later McGill would hire a private security firm to forcibly decamp the protesters. The struggle has been going on for more than 76 years, and it will continue.
We said our goodbyes, and then walked back to the hotel so i could retrieve my bags. I thanked B for showing me around, then headed to the airport, where my flight was delayed. It wouldn’t be long now. The whole journey was filled with a sense of purpose. As soon as we got on the plane, i opened my copy of Baldwin’s final novel, Just Above My Head, and read until i was too tired to continue.
12.
Saint Paul de Vence is a commune in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur named after the Christian apostle who spread the gospel into Europe. There is a hotel on the Routes Des Blaquières approximately one-and-a-half miles from the medieval village. If you walk along that two-lane highway, then cut across onto Chemin de la Pounchounière for about a half-a-mile, then hook a right onto Chemin de Nice, you will be staring up an incline that will lead you to St. Paul de Vence. If you, like me, approach this walk in the middle of a heat wave, and you experience vertigo, you may need to rest by the side of the road before finishing the last third of your journey.
There is a gate at the top of that hill that permits certain cars to drive up and down the steep incline. Most people access the town from another entrance, just off of the highway. There is a path around the gate for walkers, and when i showed up on the 10th of July, there were two stickers on the gate that made me feel welcome. One was the Intersex Inclusive Pride Flag and the other read, in French, “the extreme right is a mortal danger.” A little further up the road, there is a gate that leads you to the town cemetery. It was open so i entered.
Most of the tombs were above ground and mausoleums cropped up everywhere with names of people and families that had lived in this village for centuries. Marc Chagall, the Franco-Jewish painter once persecuted by the Nazis, was buried there atop his father-in-law and wife because late in life he had converted to Catholicism. People had placed messages on stones around the raised plot atop his casket. I looked up to my left and could see a group of tourists staring over the town ramparts at me. I continued up through the entrance to the cemetery and was faced with people from all over Europe who had come to this popular destination.
In the village i could hear Kendrick Lamar’s “They Not Like Us” playing in one of the shops along the main street. It made me chuckle and look inside at a French man with locs sitting behind a counter selling scarfs. This image would have filled me with contempt for how black culture is engaged in a superficial fashion (here represented by Kendrick Lamar’s record) without showing a real concern for black people (evidenced by the decision not to memorialize James Baldwin by turning his home into a place for black artists in residence), but on this path, i was not particularly concerned with the way working people performed their identity. He nodded at me. I nodded back, continued forward.
I exited the city walls and passed Café de la Place where Baldwin was known to sit in the afternoons, drinking and lounging the day away. I had no desire to use what little French i knew to pester townspeople about whether they had been here when Baldwin was alive, let alone bother them for a story. This trip was primarily about going to see the house that had become more important than any work or single biographical detail about the author, not to reimagine who he had been from others’ memory of their sparse interactions. It wasn’t until i set foot on Chemin Du Pilon, however, that i realized i did not know what i was searching for.
13.
What did the villa look like now? Would it be completely bulldozed? Had the developers halted the demolition? Would i crawl through the tall grass and vegetation i saw in the pictures Magdalena took, scratched by overgrown weeds that seemed to be nature’s defense against bad-intentioned followers? Would i take a souvenir?
Whatever my expectations of Chez Baldwin had been were completely upended by my arrival at the location where his home was supposed to be. There was no “alley type road and side gate” Ed described, where i could enter and approach the house through fruit trees. I had expected Baldwin’s villa to rest alone on a cliffside but what was here was a walled-off compound. I walked to the front gate and read the placard, “Le Jardin Des Artes”, and was bothered by the developers’ decision to memorialize Baldwin’s existence in the most general sense, “The Garden of Arts,” without any mention of the writer. Then i read the names next to doorbells, finding one marked “Bill”, which seemed to be the one i should press, as it was the same name Baldwin had called his first real teacher, Orilla Winfield, who was the inspiration for his essay, The Devil Finds Work.
After some moments a man in a grey t-shirt and black sunglasses appeared at the gate. Just beyond him, i could see another white man poke his head from the door of the building i assumed had been Chez Baldwin. “Bonjour. On peut parler en anglais?” I asked. He nodded. “I was wondering if this was James Baldwin’s house.”
“Yes.”
“But there are many houses here, he only lived in one of them?”
“Yes. That one there. This one belonged to his friend Bernard.”
“I was wondering if i could see the house?” (The man behind the one i was speaking to dipped his head back inside.)
“Usually i let people see the house but someone is there now.”
“Can i just get a better look at it?”
(He hesitated.) “You can’t take pictures.”
“That’s ok,” i said. Then he let me into the gate and followed closely behind me. I walked into the driveway and could see the main part of the house and the modern extension that stood, i assumed, in the place where Baldwin had worked. The piece of the house that was most important to his legacy had been erased.
I edged closer but then the man said something like, “That’s far enough.”
“May i look at the view he had?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“Ok,” I said, but i didn’t like his answer.
Why couldn’t he allow me this small request? I wouldn’t disturb the family who was occupying Baldwin’s home. I wanted to break his rules, pull out my phone and take pictures, walk forward to see the view, or cause some disruption to make him question what his company had done to the home of such a significant black artist. It occurred to me then that my suspicions were correct. This town, these developers, were not particularly interested in Chez Baldwin becoming a residence for black people. Not that they had actively stopped his estate from acquiring the land, but the decision not to ensure his final wishes for the property were granted felt intentional. At the very least, it was another example of the ills of capitalism. The house was more lucrative on the market then it was as a safe-haven for artists. Why didn’t he trust me?
A photo taken on July 9th, 2024 of “Chez Baldwin” from outside of the complex walls.
The only thing that stopped me from walking closer to the property was the recognition that if i disobeyed his request, and this man had allowed Baldwinites to enter the house before, he would be far more hesitant to give them this small grace in the future. I thanked him, then stalked around the outside of Le Jardin Des Artes, until he came out of the gate and waited at his car seemingly to deter me.
14.
In the documentary, The Price of the Ticket James Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming states, “I think it’s important to realize that rhetorically the church is extremely important to Jimmy. The language of the church. The language of the bible. The patterns of the bible. Even the struggles of the bible.” This link is nowhere clearer than in his final novel.
Just Above My Head tells the story of a famous gospel singer named Arthur Montana who dies alone in the men’s room of a London Pub. On page 48 of the Delta trade paperback version of the novel Arthur’s partner, Jimmy, tells us he went on a kind of pilgrimage after the main character passed away. “‘I was in Istanbul. I was in London, and Berlin, and Geneva. I was in Venice. I was in Paris – places Arthur and I had hung out together, or just places where I knew he’d been. I was in Barcelona – we’d been very happy in Barcelona.’ He grins and sips his drink. ‘The stations of the cross.’”
Decoding Baldwin’s use of religious symbolism here helps readers understand the emotional impact the singer has on his lover. The 14 stations of the cross, marking the time between Jesus’ condemnation by Pontius Pilate and his laying to rest in the tomb, are not in the New Testament. They were invented during the Crusades as a way for revelers to imagine the prophet’s last hours. There are more cynical readings of the church’s machinations i am sure, but in this essay that isn’t important. Jimmy’s decision to follow in Arthur’s footsteps changes the dynamic of their relationship from lover/lover to devotee/devoted. Readers are made to consider how the setting of his passing is foretold by the story of his life, and how this demise represents the profaning of something sacred.
Just before Jimmy tells us about his trip, Arthur’s older brother asks why he decided to take the journey. Jimmy says, “I hardly know. Well, I do know.” Nowhere in this passage are we let in on Jimmy’s secret. What does he know about the reason he made his decision? There is an answer that seems obvious: Jimmy misses Arthur, and the only places he can go to ease his grief are the cities where Arthur was happiest. Besides this meaning, however, there seems to be an even more implicit message. We make decisions without knowing why. After we have acted, we can try to understand our purpose, if we are ever meant to comprehend it in the first place.