I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely had time to see Sicily before he died and had assuredly never seen the free world.
The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.
Women don’t see men the way men want to be seen. They see all the tender places, all the places where blood could flow.
It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.
It had not really been written to make money – if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.
Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.
On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept – or perhaps not kept – people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulfilled: certainly not fulfilled, or I would not have been standing on that street corner.
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. – “The Crusade of Indignation,” in Nation.
They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American.
Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose: As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world.
I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require my captivity song; They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.
Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world – once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is – some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away.
The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, and I now dared to realize that I loved them more than they loved me. And I do not mean that my love was greater: who dares judge the inexpressible expense another pays for his life? who knows how much one is loved, by whom, or what that love may be called on to do? No, the way the cards had fallen meant that I had to face more about them than they could know about me, knew.
Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself. One has to take hands off the rudder and trust the river of thought as it flows.
He was fond of saying that, since to be in prison was simply not to live, the death penalty was the only merciful verdict any jury could deliver.
I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time. And it seemed, indeed, when one looked out over Christendom, that this was what Christendom effectively believed.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time was indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the driving waste, carried the curse forever.
What a long way, I thought, I’ve come – to be destroyed!
I had never seen the love and respect that men can have for each other. I’ve had time since to think about it. I think that the first time a woman sees this – though I was not yet a woman – she sees it, first of all, only because she loves the man: she could not possibly see it otherwise.