“But I see you every day.”
“Oh really?”
“I even know where you live.”
“How’s that? You’re joking, Ralph!”
“It’s a long story.”
“Can’t we talk about it now?”
“No, I don’t feel like it. . Just know that you live in my old apartment.”
I remained speechless, simultaneously skeptical and gripped by a sudden distress.
“You think I’m crazy, is that it?” he asked.
“You have to admit that. .”
“Ask around and come back to see me.”
“I haven’t seen you in quite awhile!”
“Oh, sometimes I change locations. Last month I dreamed that people were attacking me here. So I went out around Venice Beach to get some rest. It’s nice there, but there are too many people. People also trample my sandcastles and I can’t read my Ralph Ellison in peace.”
“But sometimes you destroy your sandcastles yourself.”
“So? I’m the one who built them! I have the right to do what I want with my castles. I just can’t tolerate people coming to destroy them. They don’t realize how much time it takes me to build them.”
“I’d like to talk to you about someone — an author. This year is the twentieth anniversary of his death. .”
“James Baldwin?”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s written right there, on the paper you’re holding. And I see his picture there, too.”
“Oh, right. . Actually I’ve just dedicated my Letter to Jimmy to you, the text that I’ll publish in France in honor of the author who lived there.”
“No kidding! But why would you dedicate it to me? I’ve never read Baldwin.”
“I’ll give you one of his books tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother, I only read Ralph Ellison. The others aren’t my thing.”
“But why Ralph Ellison?”
“Because I’m an invisible man, too. I’m white, but I’m really black. . And since I’m a white man, people don’t see me; they don’t see my misery because I’m part of the majority. So for a long time I’ve lived this way, hoping that God would give me my true skin color one day.”
“I don’t understand. .”
“You can’t understand. Come see me tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“At one of my castles, I will tell you about the place you live. You will know the whole story, and I’ll show you things.”
“What time?”
“Four o’clock. By the way, don’t forget to bring me one of James Baldwin’s books.”
postscript, James Baldwin the brother, the father
The paths that lead us to a writer are as mysterious as the ways of the Lord. Several years ago, I was far from imagining that I would one day “talk” with the American author James Baldwin, who died in the south of France in 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. I was not drawn to him because we had the same color skin. I was born in Africa, the land of his ancestors. I had lived in France, his land of refuge. And now I live in his homeland: America. Was this reason enough to devote my admiration to him, even though most of the writers I admire often have nothing to do with Africa, France or America? Was I simply in awe before a writer whose uncommon path and chaotic life could not help but move me? More than this, the life of every author is often its own novel, sometimes even a tragic one. This is perhaps why the genre of biography exists. .
And so, in 2007, on the twentieth anniversary of Baldwin’s passing, I devoted a book to him—Letter to Jimmy. As I wrote this “love letter,” I had the feeling that Baldwin was reading the manuscript over my shoulder, without really interfering in the process. At most, he may have been smiling when I lost myself in my theories, or when I surrendered to the notions I had formed while reading his work. His writing encompasses most literary genres with a dazzling skill that made Jimmy one of the most important figures in American literature. This diverse body of work quickly projected the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain to the intellectual forefront of his country’s civil rights movement, with an intensity and a sense of commitment that can be summed up in this phrase from his essay “The Fire Next Time:” “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.” At the same time, the themes Baldwin explored in his various novels go beyond the limits of race, such as in Giovanni’s Room where one notices the absence of the “Negro question,” where taboos are shattered by evoking homosexuality, where there are only white characters, and in a plot that unfolds in Europe — France in particular — not in America as in the novels of his colleagues of that period (Richard Wright, Chester Himes. .). This type of approach was risky at a time when, in Africa as well as in black America, an author of color was expected to champion the black cause and the idea of “negritude,” in vogue in Paris, too, the gathering place for most American intellectuals threatened by racial segregation. Baldwin retaliated against this type of socially mandated literature, and in this way his stance enticed me.
If I imagined Baldwin coughing slightly from time to time when I was writing Letter to Jimmy, or imagined his footsteps near my library, I would lift my eyes and see before me the photo taped to the wall, in front of my desk. This photo is essentially the source of our encounter. I had bought it in the late 80s from a bouquinistes, a used bookseller’s kiosk, along the Seine. Baldwin had looked at me then as if he were begging me to save him from his public display. The bookseller shared with me the information that he had known the author, whom he had seen walking around “over there”—he pointed to the Place Saint-Michel. Should I have believed him? I bought the photo and walked down into a Metro station. .
Sitting in the Metro, I studied Baldwin’s features closely. I was half dozing. My own life appeared to me now in black and white, like the image. I had the feeling that I had known this man, that I had met him in the old quarters of Pointe-Noire, in Congo. He had the face of the brother I would have liked to have had, and of the biological father I had never known — Baldwin had not known his father either, a fact that played an undeniably major role in his work. In essence I was asking Baldwin to adopt me, to take my hand, to lead me to “another country” where “no one knows my name.” And so I invented for myself a brother in his image, and a father in his image. Alas, I would discover that he would make David, his main character in Giovanni’s Room, say: “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” These words echo through my thoughts still today. The destruction they inflicted on my imaginary world was similar to that endured by a kid to whom it has been suddenly revealed that Santa Claus does not exist. To console myself at the time, I tucked Baldwin’s image between the pages of books I was reading, whether they were written by him or by others. In this way we were reading the same books and we were traveling together. Much later — I had already moved to the United States — I came upon the same image in a bookstore in a new edition of one of Baldwin’s novels. I no longer felt the same as I once had in France, since my image of him now hid a story behind it, a chance encounter that could not be reproduced. .
Every time I look again at “my” photo, my eyes linger on the wrinkles of Baldwin’s face. They are furrows, footpaths I have to follow in order to make my way to the clearing where I might hear his voice, where he might share with me at last the secrets he did not reveal during his lifetime. His smile is faint, and changes as often as I try to describe it. But his eyes, most of all! “Those big eyes — prominent on your face, that once mocked your father, unaware that they would later peer into souls, or that they would pierce through the darkest part of humanity, before closing forever — still hold their power to search deeply, even from the next life,” I would write, at the beginning of my Letter to Jimmy. .