Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, poet, essayist, playwright, novelist, civil rights activist.
Baldwin’s writing was piercing and uncompromising. He wrote with acute insight into how racism has shaped the USA.
His book, The Fire Next Time, contains two essays; the first, a brief letter titled “My Dungeon Shook”, written to his namesake nephew; the second, a longer essay, “Down at the Cross.”
In "My Dungeon Shook,” Baldwin tells his nephew:
There is no reason for you to become like white people and there is no basis whatsoever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
That history is not merely one that white people don’t understand; it is one which they choose not to understand, because to face it fully would be to accept the violence that has been wrought, and continues to be wrought, on Black people by the exercise of white power. It is this criminal “innocence” of the country’s history that allows injustice to continue.
In “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin writes:
White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way.
The wonderful Baldwin & Co bookstore on Elysian Fields in New Orleans.
Then and now
Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time in 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 2024, amidst a craven corporate rollback of diversity and equity policies, at a time when history books that center slavery and racism in American history are being banned and schools in Florida are ordered to teach that some slaves benefitted from slavery, as a national amnesia has swallowed up George Floyd and Ferguson even as we watch Sonia Massey being killed in her home by a white police officer, at a time when many white people are beginning to comprehend how the German people could allow Hitler and Nazism to seize power, at this time it seems appropriate to think about James Baldwin’s “innocent people.”
The places we lock ourselves away
In Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean writes about growing up in the Jim Crow South, submerged in a culture so riddled with racism that she had no knowledge of the world of the Black people who cooked and cleaned and gardened for her family in her childhood home in Baton Rouge.
It was only when the wave of changes that transformed the Catholic Church in the 1960s eventually swept her along and propelled her into the New Orleans Projects, that she encountered the almost entirely separate world inhabited by Black people, and began to shed her innocence.
From my own past, I once lived in Narrandera, a town in New South Wales, Australia, on the Murrumbidgee River, described by one online source as “a substantial and gracious rural centre…enriched by its many historic buildings and cedar-lined streets.”
It certainly is that.
I used to take my dog, Jess—a madcap, energetic cross between a border collie and a kelpie—down to the Murrumbidgee on a hot day and toss the ball into the river, over and over again, trying to tucker her out.
Trickling into the Murrumbidgee right near where we’d play was a tiny tributary. It’s name was Poisoned Waterholes Creek.
In wilful ignorance, I didn’t think to ask any of the locals where the creek got its name, even though I had more than an inkling. I eventually learned its history many years later when Stan Grant, an Australian writer, a Wiradjuri man*, wrote an article for The Guardian titled “At Poisoned Waterholes Creek I tell my son about the slaughter of our people.”
Perhaps this, the hundredth anniversary of a great and confronting writer, is a good time for those of us who are white to contemplate our own “innocence.”
Poisoned Waterholes Creek, Narrandera, photo by Brendan Beirne, from the article, The stillness of Australia’s massacre sites - in pictures.
* Check out the wonderful zoomable map of indigenous Australia on the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies’ website.