Reading Baldwin on A Milestone Birthday

So already, the other day when Joan Soble: So Already . . . A Blog About Moving Forward, Paying Attention, & Staying Connected turned ten years old, I was reading the final essays in James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. 

It was my friend Berhan Duncan's and my April visit to "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College that had sent me searching for Notes of a Native Son a couple of months ago. At the height of the pandemic, at Berhan's urging, I'd read Baldwin's Another Country; as the pandemic loosened its grip, we'd both read Giovanni's Room. Since we'd been reading and talking Baldwin for a while, we were keen to make the pilgrimage to Amherst.

While we were driving west on that brisk Tuesday, Berhan expressed some anxiety and apprehension: what if the exhibit got Baldwin wrong? what if it failed to convey his complexity, insight, and purpose and vision as a writer? what if it reduced him in order to make him more palatable and digestible for museum-goers interested in learning and appreciating something but not necessarily in being deeply, authentically confronted and engaged--which Baldwin's work generally demands?

The museum was practically empty when Berhan and I arrived, and it largely stayed that way: except for a student studying in comfortable chair in a far corner of one of the exhibit rooms, we generally had the whole Baldwin exhibit to ourselves. 

It featured artistic renderings of Baldwin and his contemporaries as well as works by other African-American artists conveying African-American experience. In one photo, Baldwin encountered a sculpture of of himself.

 

Berhan and I looked separately and silently until we came back together in the large room featuring Glenn Ligon's huge, highly textured black painting entitled "Stranger."

After a few minutes of standing next to each other just looking, Berhan said to me, "This is it. This is what I think I hoped for." (I think I captured the spirit of what Berhan said, but he also can't remember what he said verbatim.)

We sat down on the bench opposite the painting, alternating between looking silently and softly commenting, occasionally getting up to move closer to the painting to examine its texture or identify words featured--or maybe embedded--in it. Periodically, we paused to express how grateful we were that that we had the space and the bench all to ourselves for so long. 

We talked about Ligon's use of coal dust, the challenge of reading the language in the painting (and not knowing how much language there was and how much we needed to look for it), the painting's size, the way the painting was lit and how that lighting contributed to how its blackness shimmered, and the fact that coal pressed hard enough becomes diamond. 

As we left the museum, we realized neither of us had read Notes of Native Son*, which contained the essay "Stranger in the Village" from which some of the quotations in the painting were drawn. So as we headed toward the center of town to eat really good hamburgers and French fries before heading home, I knew I needed to read more--more by James Baldwin and more about Glenn Ligon.

 

I didn't read "Stranger in the Village" right away: recently, I've been reading collections start to finish, my assumption being that the order of the pieces within them is deliberate and important. So I wouldn't be writing this post if I hadn't finally made it to "Stranger in the Village," the last essay in the collection, and then read it again.  

 

I still need to think about it, so for now, I'll simply share three quotations, one about language, Baldwin's medium, and two about the connection between the Swiss village where Baldwin lived as "the only one" and the America that "cannot" and "has not . . . admitted" his "human weight and complexity" (165).

Every legend, moreover, contains a residuum  of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. (170) 

The ideas on which American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening the concept to include black men. (175)

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. (179)

No doubt these ideas spoke to Glenn Ligon, perhaps comforting him, perhaps electrifying him, most definitely inspiring him. Carly Berwick's article "Stranger in America"** discusses the Ligon's "Stranger "series,

begun in 1996 and accounting for nearly 200 works produced over 13 years. . . . Baldwin has particular resonance for Ligon, not only because he was also black and gay but because he emphasized the role of language in creating the “legends” (a Baldwin term) that we make of one another. “Stranger in the Village,” for instance, relates the author’s experience in a small Swiss hamlet, where children, struck by his novelty, touched his hair with fascination or ran after him shouting “Neger!” Baldwin ruminates on what it means to be perceived as black in the village and in America, writing, “The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.” 

 

Some of the quotes taken from Baldwin’s essay are visible in the paintings . . . but most are not. The artist repeatedly stenciled the text in black oil stick, layering in coal dust. He proceeded in regular lines, from top to bottom. The letters rose from the surface and the text thickened until it was nearly illegible. Ligon has said he chose coal dust because he was looking for something with a literal weight. Catching the light and making the raised letters glint like gems, coal dust reminded him of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust. But coal can also be seen to have racial overtones, as in the phrase “coal black,” which in the early 20th century came to be used as a slur. 

Of course, when Berhan and I encountered this painting in Amherst, we'd read none of the above. 

On the morning after after I'd finished reading "Stranger in the Village" on a jam-packed rush-hour train on which we riders were pressed together so tightly for so long that I thought we might all become diamonds, I called Berhan.

"Berhan, I'm thinking about the Ligon painting at the museum in Amherst. I'm trying to remember what you said about why it was so right."

"I remember I felt that way, but I can't remember what I said about it," Berhan said.

"Can you tell me what you think you thought? Or think now?" I asked, and he did.

"Well, first of all, it's black on black, and that matters on a few levels. Also, it used words, and Baldwin used words--the exhibit needed to present him as a writer, and a writer with a mission. And it was hard to read--as Baldwin is. When you read Baldwin, you have to sit with him, and there keeps being more to think about. With the painting, you kept looking and you kept noticing and trying to read--but you kept seeing more and thinking more and feeling more." [Note: I'm majorly paraphrasing Berhan here, with his permission.]

Berhan's "sitting with it" comments made me think of that bench on which he and I had camped out in that gallery, trading observations and thoughts related to them. I wrote the following in my journal soon after our phone call: "There's no speed-reading of Baldwin; and by virtue of what is being described and generalized about, namely who we are as groups and individuals as we share the same space as other groups and individuals, we can't avoid thinking about ourselves--our actions, our attitudes, our assumptions--unless we're determined to. Which some people are."

But why, on my blog's tenth birthday, write about this exhibit, Baldwin and his essay, Ligon and his painting, and Berhan's and my great road trip "out west" to Amherst? 

 

Because this blog, over the last ten years, has been much about "sitting with"--sitting with a whole lot of ideas; places; extraordinary moments and important experiences; works of art; educational issues; books, articles, and poems; religious teachings and spiritual practices; and people who matter a great deal to me. This post represents a lot of these areas of attention and reflection.

 

It's been a pleasure and challenge to blog monthly in So Already, and I so appreciate that so many of you have read my blog from time to time--and some of you often. Thank you for your attention and encouragement over many years. Today's post is my 256th; #257 will be out by the end of July.

 

P.S. While I have your attention, I'd like to recommend a Baldwin essay I read yesterday for the first time: Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes. And just so you know, the last day of the exhibit is July 9, so you can still go visit it.

* Baldwin, J. (1955). Stranger in the village. Notes of a native son (pp. 163-179). Beacon Press.

** Berwick, Carly. (2011, April 23). Stranger in America. Art in America. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/glenn-ligon-62890/