David helps you move from your bed to your work-table. Sometimes, in a fit of pride, you refuse his help, which you see as defeat. Sick, yes, but incapable — no. You dread leaving your bed just to have your brother lead you back to it like a child. The persistent David has the gentleness to remind you that you carried him on your back countless times in his childhood. Why should he not take his turn in carrying you?127
•••
This sudden affection feeds your distress; distress at leaving behind a shroud of sadness, at not finishing your last sentence. The anguish of telling yourself that you will join the other world, and will have to talk with David Baldwin, your father. You will have to tell him how he was wrong to believe for so long that he was nothing but black trash, and wrong for not knowing that he was beautiful. Hassel, who is very superstitious, admits privately to having seen your shadow on the wall. And so the fatal moment has arrived. Hassel is convinced of it. However, he clings to the idea that he has always seen you cheat death, has always heard you insist that you would leave the earth in a spectacular way, not weakened by illness. Hassel is not unaware that you see Death, and that you are now talking with her. No, you do not want to negotiate your departure date from the world. You have accepted the idea of your death.
Hassel has many reasons to believe that you will survive the 1st of December 1987. But there is the shadow on the wall that grips him. Can one survive an omen? It is possible. After all, he thinks to himself, you are an exceptional being. Had you not survived two heart attacks? These warnings did not prevent you from attending to your business, honoring your engagements around the world, even though you had to reduce your consumption of tobacco and alcohol.
You have to live your life. For these reasons, while you are attending a performance of your play The Amen Corner at London’s Tricycle Theater in February 1987, no one could have imagined that you had already reserved a hospital room in Nice for cancer surgery.
This time the doctors can do nothing more. The situation is desperate. Your entourage conceals from you their despair and the seriousness of your condition. But you are not so easily fooled. Your doctors assure you that you will make it through the end-of-year holidays without danger.
You begin to organize, therefore, a big event in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
In these final hours when the world must seem very still, a woman appears before you, her face hidden by a dark veil. Your curiosity pushes you to remove the veiclass="underline" it’s her, your mother. Now she wipes her thick glasses, foggy from tears. Yes, Emma Berdis Jones is somewhere in this room, despite the thousands of miles that separate you. You call her often, and, from Harlem, she listens to you with the despair of a mother who has always known that her child was fragile, and yet predestined to carry the world on his shoulders.
Your conversations remain unchanging. She offers you advice as she did long ago, when you were a child in Harlem: take care of yourself, don’t stay up too late, above all don’t smoke too much, drink even less, don’t give in to the taunts of those who attack you now that you are a public figure, or because your sexual orientation differs from theirs. For her, despite your international influence, you remain little Jimmy, who followed her around the house. .
•••
At present your world is reduced to the four walls of your bedroom. The biographer James Campbell paints a striking picture of this room that holds the secret of your final hours: a room submerged in soothing darkness, but whose wall paintings create an atmosphere of hallucination.128 In this confinement, as Campbell points out, there is the feeling that Simone Signoret and your other friends dead long ago have come to bring you news of the other world.
You still have the strength to give an interview in November 1987 to the writer and professor Quincy Troupe who will publish, two years after your death, a collection of essays dedicated to your memory.129 In the mix are the voices of Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, William Styron, Chinua Achebe and Mary McCarthy, among others.
An abundance of project ideas fill your mind. You plan, for example, to write a long introduction for a publisher in London who will publish two paperback editions of Richard Wright’s novels. A large number of critics and biographers would doubtless consider such a presentation as reconciliation between the mentor and the pupil. But you will not have time. .130
In November 1987, you had planned to host a large dinner at your home for Thanksgiving. You imagine that there will be a lot of people there. You and your friends will dine outdoors, you will smoke, crack a few jokes.
Alas, you will not know this farewell filled with laughter and song.
You leave this world on December 1, 1987. After the inhabitants of Saint-Paul-de-Vence have said their goodbyes, your body is brought back to the Harlem of your childhood. There is a viewing at the Episcopal cathedral Saint John the Divine. From your casket you can hear the sobs of cultural icons as well as those of strangers you managed to win over.
You are buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, on December 8, 1987.
10. on the need to read or reread you today
If you return to this world, Jimmy, you will judge your homeland even more severely than you did when you were alive. Inequalities are now more subtle, and more hidden, in a society which has not yet resolved the issue that had been so important to you: redefining American identity, or, in your words, addressing integration through the “power of love.” Happily, Judgment Day is not yet upon us.
On the other hand, if you cast a fleeting glance toward France, our mutually adopted homeland, you will be shocked to discover that your words and writing are as relevant today as they ever were. France is still burdened with the skeleton in the closet — the country’s “colonial activity”—a chapter of its history so controversial that a line has been drawn in the sand between those who would systematically lay claim to memory and the “competition for victimhood,” and those who call for an end to the “tyranny of guilt,” in keeping with the notions of Pascal Bruckner who, in 1983 evokes the “tears of the white man” and his “suspicious tears.”131 By way of introducing The Tyranny of Guilt, the French author and essayist asserts, “Strangely, we are experiencing today a one-way street of guilt: the latter feeling is demanded of only one group, ours, and never of other cultures, of other regimes who cloak themselves in their alleged purity to blame us more easily. But Europe accepts too willingly the blackmail of blame, if we are so taken with self-flagellation, and covering our head with ashes, is it not our secret wish to exit history, to shelter ourselves snugly in the cocoon of contrition, to discontinue action, to escape from our responsibilities? Repentance is perhaps nothing more than a triumph of the spirit of abdication. .”
Later, in the preface to the paperback edition of the same book, Bruckner would reveal the difficulties he encountered upon publication of his article, proving, as if it were necessary, that this subject remains a very sensitive one in a French society that has little by little constructed itself on a vision that is, to say the least, simplistic: executioners on one side, victims on the other. Between the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of its history and the need to curb the volume of grievances against it — grievances that could certainly last for centuries — France is on the brink of an ideological split.