And what has happened to all those people–children I knew then, and what has happened to this country and what does this mean for the world? What does this mean for me? Medgar, Malcolm, Martin dead. This is 1980, and how many years is that? Nearly a quarter of a century. “It was 1957 when I left Paris for Little Rock, Ark. As he turns the page, we hear the voice-over of his whiskey- and cigarette-coated baritone: The film opens with Baldwin sitting in his brother’s apartment looking over photographs of the civil rights movement. I Heard It Through the Grapevine would capture on film the tragic aftertimes of the Black-freedom struggle on the eve of the election of Reagan in 1980. Instead, he worked with an English filmmaker, Dick Fontaine, and his partner, Pat Hartley, to produce a documentary film about his return to the South. He would show that the true “horror is that America … changes all the time, without ever changing at all.” Baldwin, however, never wrote the essay. One goes to the unprotected … and listens to their testimony.”Īs Baldwin imagined it, this essay would take up these themes once again and extend the account through the decade of the ’70s. “If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country,” he writes, “one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. He anticipates the beginnings of mass incarceration and offers a scathing criticism of the way the criminal-justice system crushed Black people with intention. At the level of form, the book mirrors the fragmenting of memory by trauma. It was his answer to how we might respond to the collapse of the Black-freedom movement and to the country’s failures.
If The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s powerful polemic published in 1963, was prophetic, No Name was his own reckoning. No Name in the Street is an extraordinary achievement. No Name represented his effort to make sense of what had happened and to announce his survival. He attempted suicide in 1969 and for a period found himself flailing. Then, Baldwin had sought to pick up the pieces after the assassination of King in 1968, which threw him into a deep depression. It would be an essay about fractured memories, the trauma of loss (of the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and King) and America’s betrayal–an extension of what he had explored seven years earlier in his powerful book No Name in the Street. He would retrace his footsteps from his 1957 trip and tell the story of what had happened since those fateful days. In 1979, Baldwin wanted to write an essay about the South for the New Yorker. And they witnessed King’s dream shattered to pieces like windowpanes facing hurricane-force winds.Ī protester holds a candle following Rayshard Brooks’ death in Atlanta, on June 15 | Chandan Khanna-AFP/Getty Images They watched as friends and fellow travelers ended up at the bottom of the Mississippi River. They suffered the billy stick, fire hoses and police dogs. and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people mattered more than others. We now face a moral reckoning: Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal.
An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken to bring us all to the brink of madness and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change. Perhaps that is the source of the intensity of our current moment.
Theme of grief in another country by james baldwin torrent#
Cell-phone videos have brought us a torrent of cruel images of Black death. Recent years have been particularly tough. In each generation we have to experience the haunting ritual of a Black family grieving in public over the loss of a loved one at the hands of the police. Police violence against Black people in this country is as American as bald cypress trees and Southern magnolias.
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