Jo Durden-Smith, ‘James Baldwin’, INK, July 31, No. 14, 1971, p. 9.

Extensive Interview with Baldwin. [Included in full here]

James Baldwin is an anomaly, but I suspect an anomaly created by whites. There is a kind of moral absolutism on the left which demands of its spokesmen, willy-nilly, that they be constant, fervent and innocent of contradiction. And Baldwin is apparently guilty, to some, of two kinds of exile: the apostasy of a life in Paris, separated, according to orthodox political geography, from what is really going down; and the luxury of being a novelist in an age in which it is felt that fiction is merely fraudulent.

He's also black. And, given the world we live in, blacks are required to be publicly black, passionate and dismissive of white-ness, all under pain of being Uncle-Tommed away into a never-never land of political impotence. I think these are false, distorting categories, but an inevitable symptom of the unease felt when black meets white and left meets left. They introduce into any meeting an undercurrent of expectation, the working out of an unexpressed guilt, an atmosphere, finally, of challenge.

A public figure like Baldwin is a victim of these attitudes, a prisoner of his audience’s demands. Not only is he called upon to be an instant epigrammatist, pumping out truths, we also want him to be above suspicion (Whatever that is), in Baldwin’s case a holy (wholly) revolutionary. And we have broken many good men on the wheel of our demands.

Before this turns into a piece on the methodology of interviewing, I should say that a lot of the foregoing was in my head on the way to the Britannia Hotel, where Baldwin was staying. I’ve heard too many people accuse him of their own crimes of political impunity and detachment not to be aware of the current orthodoxy about him. He attacked Richard Wright for being assimilated by Europe, was himself attached by Elderidge Cleaver for the same betrayal. He is an exile, a salon writer, a European, only a soi-distant revolutionary, a general who leads from behind etc.

He is also, if you think about it, one of the few black Americans of any standing, any substantial clout, left at large. Not exiled, not in prison, not dead. It’s a heavy responsibility. And I wanted to talk about it somewhere away from the hotel (‘too many hotels, too many countries’), somewhere where the microphone wouldn’t limit us to question and answer, where we could pretend to be doing something else. We went to dinner. Two friends, both American, joined us. One was about to go back to New York after four years of what she calls ‘avoidance’. It was an emotional evening. Inevitably we talked about exile.

BALDWIN: You don’t change your skin because you leave a certain ocean, a certain shore, if I had wanted to become a European, it would be like wanting to be white. No doubt at some point in my life I did. I must have wanted to become white when I was little. But I am not white and I cannot turn myself into a white man. I wouldn’t if I could. But it’s the same kind of impossibility. I was born in Harlem Hospital. How in the world could I become a European? You say I have lived the life of at least a partial exile. In Harlem or in Paris? You see, being an American is a very special condition, really by definition. Born already in a kind of exile. That ocean is terrifying. An American is born miles and miles and miles away from his real frame of reference. The American’s real frame of reference is still Europe. He has at the same time to make the world centre on him. And the only way he can do that is to prove that he’s not a savage like me and the Red Indian. The price of being an American is my flesh. My exile pays for his.

INK: What happens to you when you go back, when you go through Kennedy Airport?

BALDWIN: You accept something when you come in. If you're black and a man, you go through customs, and you hang up your cock and your balls. You give them to the customs inspector and say 7 won't need these till I come out. ‘You go in harness and you know you won’t breathe until you come out, if you’re lucky and you do comeout. What has terrified me for many years is not being locked out of America. Though that terrifies me too, but being locked in.

INK: Do you mean simply having your passport taken away?

BALDWIN: No, not that. I’m not worried about that. I’m a very tough street boy and a very good scrapper. And nobody’s going to take my passport away from me, because my father paid for it. That country belongs to me. We paid too much for it, and are paying too much for it. That passport has been bought with my flesh. And no one’s going to drive me out of there or lock me in. Upon my soul. Upon my soul. No, I’m not worried about that at all. I’m worried about the charge, the responsibility on my shoulders, of being American and being black.

INK: But you are out of America.

BALDWIN: Am I? We’re sitting in England. That’s run from where? Who does your Mr Heath belong to? There’s no way of getting out of America.

We talked a lot about responsibility and guilt, which is one of the main themes of his book with Margaret Mead ( A Rap on Race, Michael Joseph, £2.20). How much is an individual responsible for history? I remember what Ella Baker once said to me. ‘An individual is only responsible in so far as he contributes to politics as usual, business as usual.’ Baldwin believes that a man is born into history, carries history inside him from birth, and only with great difficulty ever escapes from it. One key to the prison of history is love. Another perhaps is the attempt to reverse history, to fight. Until that point, a man is not only responsible; he is guilty, he is Mr Charlie:

How do you think we survived? How do you think we survived? Really. Do you really think that people like my mother were working for you? You really think that? My mother, actually and historically, had children to raise and children to save, a man to take care of. She smiled and she scrubbed your floors. She was given your cast-off clothes, your cast-off food. And when she stole from your icebox, you knew, but didn't want to notice, to be involved. So you never heard her sing the blues and now you never will.

His mother is all black women. You are all white men. It’s a difficult, unresolved, slightly unnerving suggestion, and inevitably it sets us off into comparisons between England (me and my responsibility) and American (Phyl and Ed and theirs).

BALDWIN: A cat born in Trinidad thought he was born in a black country, he thoughthe owned it. All he could see around were blacks. There weren 't many whites. But then he came to London, to the only metropolis he has. He comes to London and finds out. I'm lucky. I was born in a white country. And I knew by the time I was seven what I was up against. You can 't live for seven years in my country without being called a nigger. You can be thirty-five years old before you come to London. And you’re called niggerjust the same. Then you realize that you 've been called a nigger all your life. Without anybody articulating it. The English are so discreet.

Two things, I think, explain why a man I admire greatly makes people uneasy. Firstly, he is in his late forties, much older than he seems, and he has been in Europe for much longer than many people realize. He became a writer here, became an American here, became himself here. He is not young, not part of the generation which grew up to become militant in the sixties. He left because there was nowhere else to go to survive. He did not grow up with grudging, small freedoms, or with those who seem to have set for us the cold norm of blackness. Secondly, and he says something like this in A Rap On Race, he is a poet who has been forced by the times to become a politician, to be public. He is responsible, not only for his little nephew and those close to him, but to a people. Writing, speaking, become almost unbearably important. And sometimes the fierceness and directness of the poet is at odds with the cooler rhetoric of the politician.

BALDWIN: It’s happening worldwide. And some people see it. Whoever sees it is doomed to sound a little inarticulate. If I try to convey to you the psychology of a black junkie on the streets of New York today, how he got to be a junkie, what he sees when he walks up and down those streets, how he got there, I don 't know what you 'd think, if there were a language that would tell you. But I know this. This is the most terrible thing anyone can say. He has nothing to lose, nothing to lose. And he has begun to understand, the century has given us this, that the world in which he felt isolated yesterday, is a very small world. And he may be alone in Harlem, but he’s not alone in the world. He knows and I know who is in prison and why. He knows and I know who is the army, why black boys walk off the street and into the army and are sent to the front lines to die in Vietnam. Nobody can tell us any more lies. And it doesn't make any difference what happens to my generation, what the kid on the street corner makes happen to his generation. This is what nobody really sees. When Jonathon Jackson walked into that courthouse, with those guns, he knew very well that he might die. But no one understands what this means. The boy was seven when his brother went to jail. He was seventeen when he dies, trying to save his brother. That is what is happening. And another day another Jonathon Jackson will walk into another courtroom and will walk out alive, you have put yourselves, you as white people, in a situation where black people have no choice. When the rage goes underground, when the rage is silent, when the calculation begins, then no one can find out where the disaffection is. No one's ever going to find out where Porgy’s hidden. When people have understood, really understood, the nature of their oppression, then the future is here. It doesn't matter whether it's this group or that group, SDS, Weathermen or any of that shit. When my mother goes underground, that’s serious.

I went back to the Britannia Hotel next day with Phyl’s son, Billy, to talk about Yashar Kemal, the Turkish writer now in prison in Turkey (see INK 13). The two of them talked happily about hotels and writing and being famous, probably the only conversation in Baldwin’s day that wasn’t a drama of roles assumed, roles demanded. Baldwin is obsessive about his nephew, his family, the brotherhood and sisterhood of his people. He has a terrible hope for the future of the just born. The evening before he and Phyl had talked of their children. Baldwin said: ‘You are never going to touch my child. If you touch my child, I shall kill you. I mean it. I know what your touch means. What happened to me is never going to happen to him.’ Phyl agreed, as fiercely. And for Baldwin, it comes down to that: the future, hope, love. For otherwise the world will end. At the same time, he’s a pessimist, like all men contradictory. We talked about Angela Davis (‘no one has to sign their name when they buy a gun in California’), Jonathon Jackson (‘in actual fact, the murder of those people was not accomplished by Angela Davis or Jonathon Jackson, who is dead, but by the cops, who opened fire') and Bobby Hutton (‘The cops held a shoot-out. The building they were in doesn’t have a speck on it. Go and look at it. And in any case, no one could have a shoot-out from where Cleaver and Hutton were. There’s only one door, a garage door facing the street. The only windows you can shoot out from are in the two alleys on either side, not even in the street at all.’) They are his brothers and sister, and they are in jail, in exile or dead. Being at large is sometimes a terrible burden, in a world of such madness.

INK: You wrote an open letter to Angela Davis. Someone writing to Dalton Trumbo, say, from Paris when he was in jail during the McCarthy ear [spl], could not have used the same tone of voice.

BALDWIN: First of all, she’s twenty years younger than I am. There’s that. I’m a black man, and she’s a black woman. There's that. My baby sister is a little older than her, and it could have been my sister, literally my sister. There's that. The forces of law in America make no distinction between Angela Davis and my sister and me. They made the very great mistake, they always make the same mistake. People who had very little in common a few years ago have a great deal in common now. What they have in common is their children. They're embattled because their children are menaced. Thecop in Sacramento, the cop in Oakland, the cop in Harlem, the cop in New Jersey,doesn't know whether i, my brother, my sister or my mother are Panthers. And we all meet the same fate for the same reason. We are black in a paranoid country. We switched the tape off. It’s an invasive little instrument. It forces you into a play. In any case Baldwin had said: ‘I’m not at my best tonight. I have a lot on my mind. I have my country on my mind, and my family on my mind. And to tell you the truth, I’m weary of these performances, I'm terribly weary of these questions. It all seems to me so obvious.’