May 31, 2021
James Baldwin on Memorial Day
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On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, held his knee to Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. We’ve just commemorated that terrible anniversary and the long year that has followed. Last June, I wrote a long letter to you:
Lament has seemed to be the only appropriate response. We have to name what is terribly and deeply broken in our neighborhoods and nation as a result of racial inequality—and almost impossibly, we have to continue to be people of hope. To me, this is the only fully Christian answer.
As a white American, I confess my learning has been slow and late in terms of our country’s record of racial injustice. I spent many growing up years in the South, still very much segregated in the 1980s. I went to a predominantly white Christian college in the 1990s. Until moving to Toronto in 2011, I’ve spent most of my life in predominantly white churches. If it weren’t for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law having lived most of their adult lives in a black Chicago community and learning from them and their neighbors, I might still think things like: the United States is a land of plenty, a place of unobstructed opportunity for everyone.
Recently, I have been reading an important collection of essays by one of the most important black American writers of the 20th century, James Baldwin. To confess that this is the first time I’ve read Baldwin is to acknowledge just how slow and late my learning has been.
What I find so compelling in this essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, is Baldwin’s ability to name his bitterness as a black man and to understand the violence such bitterness will do to him. This isn’t to say that Baldwin preaches a gospel message of forgiveness and redemption, but it is to say that he knows the cost of hatred and rage.
In the essay for which the collection is named, Baldwin braids together reflections on his father (and his father’s bitterness) with his own coming-of-age as a black man. His father was handsome and chilling, charming and cruel. He was the son of a woman born during slavery; he was “of the first generation of free men.”
“[My father] had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize this bitterness now was mine.” Just hours after his father’s funeral, Harlem erupted in race riots, which accounts for the “ruined streets” Baldwin describes.
Racial tensions, at the time of Baldwin’s father’s death in 1943, were particularly high. (Baldwin was 19 at the time.) On this Memorial Day, it’s worth being reminded the reasons why. Baldwin writes, “Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their military training in the south.” They were subjected to “indignities and dangers,” such that when they were finally shipped overseas, there was palpable relief for them and for their families. “It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen.” Black men were fighting for a country that might just have easily taken their lives.
Using the imagery of fever, of disease, of infection, Baldwin describes the rage he feels as a black man in America. “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.” Growing up, Baldwin had not understood his father’s bitterness. He’d even tried eschewing it. But this essay eventually arrives at Baldwin’s revelation: “This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped.”
What to do with the bitterness? This is one of Baldwin’s preoccupying questions here. “I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.”
After this father’s death, riding through Harlem’s ruined streets, Baldwin concludes: “That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in own’s own destruction. “
“Hatred, which would destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”
You can purchase a copy of Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son here. And if you’re feeling like your own learning has been as slow and late as mine, I’d also recommend: Isabelle Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Jasmine Holmes’s Mother to Son, and David Swanson’s Rediscipling the White Church. If you’re interested to learn more about the practice of lament, I write about it extensively in Surprised by Paradox.