Unknown
Atlanta, c. sometime in the 1980s
This was before he became a god to some, before that short Black man would become a prophet. Before people—of all shades and cultural backgrounds—who had ignored him, or didn’t know who he was, would share his words on their blogs, articles, and social media timelines, as if he’d always been loved. As if he’d always been worshipped, when he never had.
I wish I could remember the year or even the month that I met him. But I can prove he was in Atlanta at the time, because he was researching the missing and murdered Black children of that city, which at the time, was nothing but a big, country town.
I was a teenager who constantly courted death, laughing when my mama told me, “Be careful. They’re killing Black children out there.”
I ignored that somebody was stalking people who looked like me. I was unafraid of Death. I set out plates at a cozy table for Mr. Square Toes and asked him to take me on a never-ending vacation. I hitchhiked once, getting in the car with a White man more than twice my age. I walked into dark corners with Black boys who would hurt me. I took the bus and roamed downtown Atlanta with girls from my high school—Booker T. Washington, a school that one of the murdered kids attended. The year before, I’d attended Therrell High; one of the murdered boys had attended that school, too.
Death was my friend, then, keeping me company. I was reckless, in those years, coming home way after dark.
“Where were you,” Mama would ask, through tears and anger, her voice ascending in panic.
“Just around,” I’d say. Her anxiety couldn’t touch me.
The kids at Washington said they found one of the murdered boys in the bleachers behind the school’s bleachers. Student of the historical archives that I am, I never did my research to make sure that was true. I’m afraid to go looking for the absent proof that obsessed Mr. Baldwin in his book about the missing and murdered children, Evidence of Things Not Seen.
These days, Death is no longer my friend, though anxiety is. I’ve grown fond of living. Whenever Death comes knocking, I tell him, you’re no longer welcome here: “Nigger get back: go find somebody else’s house.”
Now that my mother is dead, years after Mr. Baldwin died, too, I wonder about that evening when she brought me to his lecture. I’ve tried to find evidence in old newspapers—where was Mr. Baldwin’s lecture, during those years I was a teenager? Was it at Spelman College? Was it at Emory University? Was it at Georgia State or Georgia Tech—but I know it happened. I know there is evidence somewhere, and over the years I have stalked the internet, looking for the date. I know Mr. Baldwin came and went from Atlanta, during Wayne Williams’ trial—Williams was the Black man tried and convicted for the murders of two young Black men, but nobody has ever gone to prison for the murders of the (estimated) twenty-six others, most of whom were children.
But I don’t know why Mama brought me to see Mr. Baldwin. Was it to make me happy or to watch me, to keep me from becoming one of those dead children spoken about on the news? Their pictures showing hopeful smiles and clear brown skin. This is what youth looks like, those images told us. This is how you’ll remember us before we are broken by cynicism or cracked apart from weapons.
Mama wanted to bring a book for Mr. Baldwin to sign. I wished I hadn’t insisted that we didn’t, that it would be tacky to do that. Though my own cynicism had taken root, I remember the books by Mr. Baldwin, the first ones that made me feel as if he were my friend: If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. That made me suspect that Mr. Baldwin loved Black women and Black girls. I’d seen so little love of us in my young life. And I loved Mr. Baldwin back, though I didn’t know him—but I wasn’t going to tell Mama of my affection, of course. I wasn’t going to give her any satisfaction. I was lost in a tangle of self-destruction and depression that she couldn’t understand. Be strong, she would urge me.
“Don’t be weak,” she hissed one night, standing in the doorway of our apartment in the ‘hood. “Stop crying! Get yourself together,” as I lay in my twin bed and cried for no reason that I could remember—or for every reason that I can remember.
There is miserable justification when you are a girl-child who has been abused by your father, the man your mother dearly loves, though she sold wolf tickets about him. She insisted, she’d put two states between us and my father. We were never going back. We had left him for good, but that didn’t matter. It seemed that my father and Death had struck up a bargain: Daddy had destroyed me, and Death would take the spoils.
I can’t remember the details of Mr. Baldwin’s talk, only that he spoke about racism in America. He spoke about how things should be, but they weren’t there yet—how things in our country just weren’t right. I noticed that he was elegant and angry, and before that night, I didn’t know you could be both of those simultaneously.
During the question-and-answer portion, a White man rose and began with a statement, “As a gay man in America…” and I saw Mr. Baldwin shift his body. The atmosphere in the room changed: the audience was no longer warm. I recognized Mr. Baldwin was uncomfortable, because—and I can’t recall how—I knew that he was gay. I was just a teenager, but already, I could see so much.
This was Atlanta in the 1980s. There was no acceptance of Black queer people forty-plus years ago—there’s barely any acceptance now—and I felt protective of Mr. Baldwin. I wasn’t gay, but still, I was different. I knew what it meant to live without the permission to fully be myself. And I felt so tender toward Mr. Baldwin, because even though I didn’t know him—I had only read his words—I had witnessed his tenderness toward Black women and girls. He cherished us and wanted us to be safe, and in turn, I wanted to cover him with safety.
Two decades after Mr. Baldwin died, I’d read what Toni Morrison wrote about him when he died—the depth of her grief—and I’d know I had been right about Mr. Baldwin’s tenderness. Professor Morrison couldn’t have had such a profound love for Mr. Baldwin, unless she had been loved in return.
Somehow, the uncomfortable moment passed: the Q & A was over. Mama gathered her purse—I didn’t carry one back then—and said, we would go to meet Mr. Baldwin. We walked to the reception area. We stood in line, inching forward, and I thought about what I would say to Mr. Baldwin. But when we finally were before him, I was quiet. After over forty years, I know that I suffered from what is called social anxiety, but at the time, I just considered myself stupid.
Mama introduced herself as Lance Jeffers’s wife. It seemed an odd thing to do—who cared who she was married to—but then, Mr. Baldwin asked, “And how is Lance?” There was a lit cigarette between his fingers, and he moved his hand in the most beautiful way.
I wanted to bathe in the glow of that familiarity: Mr. Baldwin knew my father! That made me special. But I couldn’t tell him that the man he was animatedly discussing with Mama was so very cruel. Daddy had abused my mother. He had abused my sisters and me. He had crawled into my bed at night.
I was silent. I didn’t talk about Daddy, or anything at all.
I didn’t say, “Mr. Baldwin, I love you back. I admire you so much. I want to be a writer like you one day.”
As he talked with Mama, a young man came behind him and draped a fur-collared tan coat around his shoulders. Mr. Baldwin pulled the coat closer, then kept talking. He waved his cigarette elegantly and ignored the long line of others waiting to talk to him. He threw back his head and laughed, not like a prophet, but just a regular brother who was right at home with his sisters. I never said a word to him, but every few seconds, Mr. Baldwin would turn and smile at me.