I started YouTube browsing for Baldwin’s recorded appearances on radio and tv in July, and was completely electrified by a 1975 dialog that Baldwin did with Maya Angelou for WNET’s Assignment America. I had by no means seen it earlier than.
A couple of “provenance notes” earlier than I launch into this glorious, fantastic interview: The heat setting of this May 1975 interview was a desk set with bread to be damaged and mugs of what seems to be beer for each Baldwin and Angelou, and bookshelves within the background. Whereas it, I remembered that Baldwin’s closing play was titled The Welcome Desk. It’s a play that was partially based mostly on an precise 1973 dinner that Baldwin had at his St. Paul-de-Vence residence within the south of France, attended by Josephine Baker and a very young Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Gates, who owns one of the four known typescripts of The Welcome Table, wrote an essay about that night time.
The setting of the meal itself was a welcome desk, which Gates known as “a metaphor from the black sacred custom. It’s the place the great go once they die and go to heaven.”
The title itself alludes not merely to “Black sacred traditions,” however to a negro religious that might date back to slavery, and was popularized throughout the Black civil rights motion of the Fifties and Sixties.
The Gazette additionally says that Baldwin’s final unfinished play would possibly originate way back to 1967 and was revised due to that dinner, which in accordance with Gates was the primary and solely time that Josephine Baker ever visited Baldwin at his French residence.
However again to Baldwin’s dialog with Maya Angelou at her “welcome desk.”
One of many issues that made me positively giddy at seeing this video for the primary time was that I don’t recall ever seeing Baldwin this relaxed and authentically himself. The effeminate gestures. The jazzy arms. That smile. The convenience of the dialog.
The occasional rolling of the pinnacle as he contemplates which of possibly two or 5 or 25 instructions he needs to take one among Angelou’s open-ended questions—stopping sometimes midsentence for an extra digression.
Personally, I haven’t been this electrified by Baldwin’s presence since I discovered a small sheet of tackle e-book paper with Baldwin’s identify, his St. Paul de Vence tackle, and his French telephone quantity in Baldwin’s personal handwriting in a used copy of Quincy Troupe’s James Baldwin: The Legacy. I’ve by no means had it authenticated, however I knew then and know now what Baldwin’s signature seems to be like.
Baldwin and the not but “Dr.” Angelou’s dialog runs the gamut. The 2 speak about life, love, demise, growing older, homosexuality, success, and most significantly, household. Actually, Baldwin’s household permeates each topic that Baldwin and Angelou focus on throughout the 29-minute dialog.
My favourite story of the dialog is a narrative that Angelou tells of Baldwin’s household sending him cash whereas he was in Paris within the late Forties.
I do know that once you went to France, that with Mom Baldwin with all these kids, that occasionally—one of many beautiful tales about your loved ones is that—occasionally David and George, the older boys, would work with coal within the winter, ice in the summertime, promoting, and on welfare no matter, no matter, assist, to do one thing sorts of households and nonetheless would handle generally to ship you a bit examine.
In France, I imply to consider a Black American household in Harlem, who had no pretensions to nice literature and so forth, as such, what’s … I am utilizing in pips, nice literature and to have the oldest boy depart residence and go to Paris, France, after which for them to avoid wasting up sufficient pennies and nickels and dimes to ship a examine of a $150 to him, in Paris, France …
And he stated a lot extra.
Baldwin on success: “In a really critical manner, it’s not potential for an artist to be successful.”
Baldwin on the writing of Giovanni’s Room: “… I wrote [Go Tell It On the] Mountain. I wrote Amen Nook. Overlook it. I wrote Notes of a Native Son. Overlook It. It was remaindered. Giovanni’s Room was a sure sort of hit as a result of no one believed the person who wrote Go Inform It On the Mountain …
Angelou: Might additionally or would …
[Baldwin]: … write Giovanni’s Room, or would.
Baldwin on the assassinations of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr.: “… I liked Malcolm and he obtained his head blown off, I liked Medgar and he obtained his head blown off, you realize, and I liked Martin and he obtained his head blown off, I labored with Bobby [Kennedy] and I labored with JFK and Lord have mercy … wow, ain’t nothin’ I’ve finished, typewriter keys which saved no one.”
On this dialog with Angelou, he says these phrases concerning the assassinations whereas mimicking his personal typing arms, a particularly shifting gesture that signifies his personal degree of ache and trauma from these assassinations that he, after all, lived with for the remainder of his life. The survivor’s guilt that Baldwin felt after the assassinations of these Black civil rights leaders is each bit as palpable as something that he wrote in his account of these assassinations in his book-length essay, No Identify within the Avenue.
Honestly, to find this dialog, I really feel as if I’m the one that’s receiving the birthday current this yr.
Completely happy 97th birthday, Mr. Jimmy, and thanks for reminding me, and all of us, that we nonetheless have “numerous work to do,” and {that a} “welcome desk” is obtainable for anybody who searches for it, tough as that search would possibly generally be.