Prophet, Preacher, Writer

The Final Section of "James Baldwin: American Prophet"

(Fourth and final section of “James Baldwin: American Prophet.” If you’ve not read the first three parts, I recommend them: “James Baldwin’s American Religion,” “Contingency and Courage,” and “Black Star.” While the first is the most important for America, this last one, “Prophet, Preacher, Writer,” is the most important for me. It’s a mix of philosophy, psychology, and creative literary criticism. In a hopeful, aching, beautifully Baldwinian style, this essay explores suffering and love, parents and children, violence and redemption.)

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Prophet, Preacher, Writer

I have gotten this far quite easily, since I share Baldwin’s belief in an American religion of democratic redemption. But while good literary criticism can extend an author’s writing, it can also brush a hand against the author’s grain.¹ Why does Baldwin write this essay? What makes someone become a prophet, and why would someone want such a painful job?

Suffering is one source of prophecy. For, as black Americans have long known, the school of hard knocks is a hell of a teacher. “That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth— and, indeed, no church— can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable.”² This Emersonian expression of the essential value of experience emphasizes how suffering, for someone it doesn’t break, can strengthen the spirit. “This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.” In an evolutionary sense, the self evolves by overcoming adversity and adapting to its environment; one who’s been through a lot can become over-adapted, stronger than one needs to be to merely survive. This surplus of power can be used proactively, to ‘pre-adapt’ to wider environments imagined at a distance across time and space.

This expanded “responsibility to life” not only helps the individual thrive; it can be used, with love, to make life easier for the tribe, and especially for future generations. The prophet is always concerned for the future, as Baldwin is concerned for his nephew;³ prophets use their ability to “hear the meaning behind the words” in order to foresee possible environments the tribe might adapt to;⁴ they can see the connections between events, imagining how abstractions of the present⁵ might imply certain pragmatically relevant futures. The prophet who has suffered is keenly anxious to avoid pains that could arrive from many steps of causality away; she is spurred to extend her vision in order to keep herself and her loved ones safe. The prophet suffers in advance.

Surviving suffering not only produces the power of the prophet, but the courage required to face the weight of the future. “If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring,” writes Baldwin, “one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.”⁶ The prophet, like Nietzsche’s camel of the spirit, asks for the greatest weight, so that they may bear it. And this courageous bearing of a wider weight for the tribe’s sake does not only serve the tribe; it gives the individual an invaluable sense of meaning. Human beings thrive most when their lives feel meaningful, and serving others is one of the most reliable ways we produce the feeling of meaning. In exchange for accepting responsibility to the tribe, a responsibility that requires suffering, evolution has provided individuals with compensation— meaning. Nietzsche once said that human beings are the greatest sufferers, though he was too much of a loner to understand, unlike fellow Emerson students Whitman and Baldwin, that this unique aptitude for suffering only exists through our existential sociality, our inescapable entanglement with others. To pre-adapt to the breadth and depth of the world beyond our immediate environment for the sake of a future shared with others gives meaning to suffering.

Circumstances of history, politics, and geography are another ingredient in the making of prophets. The painful tension between a minority group and its oppressor has long created fertile ground for prophecy. After all, Christ himself came from that dark and shadowy outpost of history at the far edge of the Roman Empire. Black folk in America have long felt for a lost Jerusalem. It is a necessary part of our story that the rebellious voice of equality booms most powerfully from precisely these peripheries, from those swept under the rug of power, these places and faces we most look away from. The voice says “Look at me! Look me in the eyes, please! You need to see yourself like this.”

But perhaps the most essential fire pressing the coal of prophecy into James Baldwin’s chest is his father.⁷ By putting Baldwin’s Notes From a Native Son in dialogue with The Fire Next Time, we can understand how the internalized struggle between Baldwin and his preacher father created both the need and the fuel for Baldwin’s creative fire.

Baldwin’s father was paranoid, mentally ill, and violent— an unpredictable yet constant threat in his children’s environment. Baldwin writes that “the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished.”⁸ Children in abusive environments are constantly pre-adapting to uncertain fears of future blows that could arrive through all sorts of crazy, unpredictable paths. For those who know what it’s like to come of age in that environment of fear, tension, and language-as-violence, there is always one question beating in the deepest desperation of our minds: Why? As we try to answer that question, we search for a new and larger sense of safety, and “the word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.”⁹ There has long been a psychological, mythical connection between the symbolic ‘Father’ and society, religion, the authority of the past, and the safety of the present. When a boy’s father can no longer be his safety and religion, a new man must make a truer religion for himself; he must blow an ember to life, into a star, desperately, to hitch himself to something real, a source worth burning with. “Whose little boy are you?”

In making his own religion, Baldwin must overcome his father.¹⁰ This deadly struggle of poetic agon rages, not only externally, but within Baldwin’s heart, even long after his father is gone.¹¹ The American religion Baldwin preaches is the result of this struggle; it negates, synthesizes with, and transcends his father’s religion. Competing over their shared Christianity was one way Baldwin could express his growing power over his father;¹² he becomes a preacher as a teenager, drawing far larger crowds than the old man—“I pushed this advantage ruthlessly, for it was the most effective means I had found of breaking his hold over me.”¹³ Becoming a better Christian than his father becomes Baldwin’s way of defeating his father’s violence without violence of his own: after Baldwin’s father hits him, Baldwin defiantly tells him that his Jewish friend is “a better Christian than you are” and walks out of the house.¹⁴

In this overcoming, he is aided by the other great star in the theater of his mind— his mother. For, as we learn in Notes From a Native Son, to be truly christian is his mom’s highest value. Baldwin’s mom praises the white teacher that cares for Baldwin, despite his father’s distrust. “My mother called her by the highest name she knew: she said she was a ‘christian.’”¹⁵ This psychological drama spurs Baldwin to healthily transcend his father’s Christianity by developing his own, wider, deeper Christianity. While his father was defined by an “inability to establish contact with other people,”¹⁶ Baldwin’s American religion is about establishing as much contact with other people as possible. Unlike his father, who built walls around himself in the face of white violence, Baldwin believes that white people can become better, can become friends; he takes down the walls, brick by painful brick, to reveal a more vulnerable Christian love. Baldwin’s American religion takes the Christian commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” all the way.

To accomplish this simultaneous integration and transcendence of the father, Baldwin goes through an important psychological transformation: he discovers that he could kill his father, but chooses not to. In this, James Baldwin is very similar to another of James Woods’ favorite James’s— James Ramsay from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. James Ramsay’s father, Mr. Ramsay, is an unpredictable threat similar to David Baldwin; James always remembers how his father, in an outburst, once threw a knife, scaring him and his mother— as he grows, he gains the power to protect himself and the ones he loves. While sailing towards the Lighthouse, James Ramsay fantasizes about killing his father: “He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart.”¹⁷ James Baldwin, too, knew this feeling. When his father slams him across the face, he feels “all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me.”¹⁸

All boys one day realize their father is human, flawed, and can’t protect them forever— a moment when their knees are gallantly exposed, and they realize they must be men to save themselves.¹⁹ But there are some men in this world— luckily, a minority— who have been transformed through a deeper, darker crucible of tragedy. For these men realize not only that their father cannot protect them, but that, in bare reality, their father is a threat— their father could hurt or kill them, and hurt or kill those they love. A boy becomes a different kind of man in this violent environment, especially when he realizes, typically as a teenager, that he possesses the same power of violence as his father; that he could kill his father; and not just that he could kill him, but that, following the father’s violent example, perhaps he should kill him. Perhaps killing him would end your pain, end your mother’s and siblings’ pain, end your father’s paranoia, delusion, and pain; perhaps, if you only had the courage to press the knife home with a strong arm through your father’s sternum, you could save yourself and those you love. There are some who would even call it good. James Ramsay and James Baldwin know it is not good; in their highest hearts, they know they should never kill their fathers; but they cannot escape the fact that they’ve experienced the desire, the real, sensual memory of the imaginary path the knife would take from hand to heart, the feeling of blood pumping at the thrilling, terrifying thought of really doing it— a live idea we’re responsible to, and an inescapable sin of the heart.

The great danger of this unconsented sin forced upon the child of parental violence is that one may perpetuate the violence to one's own children, and to others. As Baldwin walks the beaten streets of Harlem and beyond, he faces the white violence that was always behind his father’s tension. He, too, feels pain and fear as rage: “I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”²⁰ Precisely by becoming aware of the evil within himself, Baldwin becomes able to discover a deeper sense of the good.²¹ Baldwin knows what King knows and what Christ knows— that to hate your oppressor is the worst sin they could put upon you, for to do violence to another is necessarily, inescapably, to do violence to yourself. To love thy neighbor truly as thyself is hard and painful; but it is not the most difficult of Christ’s core teachings. To love thy enemy, to love those who could harm us as a neighbor and as oneself, is the teaching that’s hardest to live. But precisely because it’s the difficult path, a path of suffering and love, it’s all the more important in becoming the widest selves we could be.

Because Baldwin can know his father as his enemy and still love him, he becomes able to extend this responsible love to America and all humanity. He remembers his fights with his father, but first remembers his scraped knee, “remembered my father’s face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine.”²² He can love his father as a child, his child— all sequoia rings and burnmarks— with the kind of mature love he could later gain for his brother and his nephew, James; for “if you’ve loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort.”²³ In loving his father for the sake of his nephew, and for all children, Baldwin becomes able to love his enemy as his neighbor and as himself— the hardest Christian precept, and the one that the whole possibility of progress towards the Dream of Democracy depends upon. To have his father’s life in his hands, and yet choose to keep him alive in painful love, allowed Baldwin to know his enemy as himself, his father and his child— someone to whom he is responsible.²⁴ To love someone even though they could kill you— this is the essence of King’s entire philosophy of nonviolence, a Christlike turning of vulnerable cheeks in the face of injustice. Only these suffering actions in the hardest moments— our bellies girded in the fire of a story passed down— can build a Beloved Community, can raise the sky over our most creative possible congress of human potential. It’s in these moments of difficult choices that ideals face the pinch of reality, the time when the will to believe makes a difference. The Dream of Democracy hinges on this pinch— on our courage, choices and love.

Baldwin’s beat, blue, and jazz-edged heart, forged by his situation, becomes able to write a spiritual verse as beautiful as almost anything in the New Testament: “When one slapped one’s child in anger the recoil in the heart reverberated through heaven and became part of the pain of the universe.”²⁵ This is Christianity extended all the way, lived through the body, in this world, for this world.

Baldwin is able to achieve this truly agapic love, extended by felt heart through the aching universe, present body by present body,²⁶ individual by beloved individual, out into every whole and through, toward the limit of whatever is real about love, precisely because he has known what it was like to kill love, to feel its opposite, and still choose, choose to still, still love— even though love is suffering in each other’s eyes— for the sake of the child that is in them, and us, and the children that will look like us. For all of us, even the children who have failed, sometimes especially failed, we forgive… we forgive, forgive, forgive. We forgive our innocent children, wipe the tears from their eyes and the wounds on their gallant knees and we do not forget our fathers. In our heartest hearts, though we must stay strong, though reality and death are life and tragic… we forgive our parents, too. We must. We owe eternity that, in its nakedness and unknown wrassling, and all the patchwork beauty that could be.

James Ramsay is able to transcend his father through fusing his father’s hard-edged pursuit of knowledge with his mother’s unifying love, in order to reach a more universal attitude towards injustice. He, too, knows he could kill his father, and that one could even believe it might be good to do so, but still chooses a larger good regardless. James Ramsay sublimates his urge to kill his father into a loving, creative consciousness capable of pursuing unity with a larger whole, capable of realizing that “No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.”²⁷ Though he feels that a “rope seemed to bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by taking a knife and plunging it…”²⁸ he is able to free himself from this bind when “she” (either the boat or the spirit of his dead mother within him) wakes and shoots through the waves. James sublimates his hatred for his father into a healthier hatred of the “tyranny” and “despotism” his father more abstractly represents: “Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill,” but the “black-winged harpy” of violence itself that had descended upon his father and others. James resolves that he will kill, not his father, but the harpy which symbolizes all tyranny.²⁹ He wants to fight righteously against despotism, against “making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak.” This sublimation of rage from one’s father towards the abstract evils that the father merely represents is a powerful psychological motivation for any revolutionary, reformer, or fighter for justice. Instead of hating the person who bears injustice (and who was likely themselves a victim of it), we can learn to say that we are against injustice itself, ignorance itself, violence itself— and not the bearers of it. They, we ultimately, achingly, choose to still love.

James Baldwin similarly sublimates his anger at his father into a healthier, more pragmatically useful anger at the violence of the wider world responsible for engendering his father’s violence. Baldwin, too, learns to abstract the rage he feels for his father away from his father’s flawed personhood, refocusing his rage on the wider injustices that worked on and through his father. People change, and get old; in Notes From a Native Son, Baldwin realizes both his father and him had aged, and that the crimes his father had committed were already irrevocably in the past, where James’ own hatred ought to stay: “It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”³⁰ James realizes that, in a sense, violence is a way of postponing suffering by externalizing it; he determines himself not to pass the same violence to his children. In his maturity, he learns not to hate his father, or even the white people whose violence his father bore and represents; he learns instead to hate the violence itself, and to focus his rage towards the productive end of destroying that societal violence;³¹ he dedicates himself towards a redemptive mission for their children, and all humanity. He forgives his father, and all individuals who bear violence, for he “knows not their wrassling.” After his father dies, he concludes Notes From a Native Son wishing that he “could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”³² We cannot, in the end, save our fathers. We can only, maybe, save our children— and even them less than halfway. But it’s worth it to try. If we love, truly love, we have no choice.

Thus, Baldwin becomes a prophet. Christianity was given to him by the uncaring forces of history, under the name Baldwin, the name of a slaveowner who wouldn’t have recognized his shared Christian divinity. But through transcending his own father, the symbol of all that unconsented past, Baldwin is able to make Christianity his own, turn it towards the problems of his own time and place, and take it farther towards a wider love that crosses all invidious distinctions of race. Baldwin was forced “down at the cross,” kneeling at the feet of Jesus who is both white and black and the blood between. But then he stands, a man, level with Christ— his eyes say “Look at me father, look at me son, look me in the eyes my brother, my neighbor”— an equal.

There are some things certain writers cannot write; thus there is always a role for readers. One thing a literary critic can do is write with a writer, extending what an author might want to say, as if we truly loved them; for example, Baldwin could never call himself a Christlike figure, but I can write in all sincerity that I believe Baldwin is Christlike. I can serve him by filling in with his own spirit the places where, structurally, his text could not stretch past the limitations of his authorship. In a similar vein, but brushing against the grain, a literary critic can look at the lacunae in a text— what is conspicuously missing— which often tells us useful information about what an author can not or will not write about. The details of Baldwin’s father’s abuse of his children— alluded to, but the full scope of which we are spared— is one such drop of oil creating a gap in the spreading water of the text. For, when you truly love your family, and forgive them, you cannot bear to condemn them in your writings for eternity, even if they’ve failed you so badly.³³ Children of abusive parents in families trying to heal might, for their own sake, craving recognition and sympathy, want to publicly divulge the worst details of their formative experiences within the aura of parental fear, but choose not to, because to do so would hurt one’s father and family, would jeopardize chances for healing. There are things one should not say, things one can only say through the voice of another. A loving critic must read into words and silences. All writing is a form of confession.

Because James Baldwin carries so many sins of the heart for himself and for others, he has a lot of writing to do. Baldwin dreams of a world in which language can heal the chasms of violence and ignorance between people, especially between himself and his father. For Baldwin, “it was the Lord who knew what the charged heart endured as the strap was laid to the backside; the Lord alone who knew what one would have said if one had had, like the Lord, the gift of the living word.”³⁴ Baldwin’s God is the Word, the ultimate understanding, the limit of all communication; he believes that one day the living word could sew every wound shut. Baldwin wishes he could communicate powerfully enough to save his father; he wishes he had the words to make them understand one another. A child who’s had to argue, again and again, with an angry, delusional, irrational parent is liable to develop this desperate faith in the potential of language. If only I could say just the right words, then maybe I could make him understand; then maybe the violence could end. One must have endless faith in the living word, for to give up this faith is to give up the chance of redemption, of one day understanding and being understood— this is something we cannot live without.

Language itself thus becomes the medium through which Baldwin is most bonded to his father, and through which he must transcend his father. For it is in Baldwin’s use of the Word that his father was once most proud of him. “I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I had had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended.”³⁵ Language, for Baldwin, is all mixed up with his father’s pride and pain; Baldwin wishes to use words to heal the damage of his father’s words, and through this make peace with himself; he wants to create for the next generation an antidote stronger than the poison of the English language’s violence. He remembers that his father wasn’t always violent, that he once soothed his wounds with iodine; then he remembers “our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence.” Baldwin regrets this silence; he wishes that he had, then, as a youth, enough of the living word to find the right way to heal the gulf between himself and his father; in his later years, he pours himself into this gulf with his essays, attempting with language to make up for his former silence. In the incomplete communication of silence, in his failure to fill the dialectic between silence and everything that might be said to bring about true, mutual, democratic understanding, he himself had committed a sin of omission, a kind of violence, a failing of the Word. He longs for a day when everyone in America might find the right words to heal every wound left by things said and things unsaid.³⁶

Baldwin is a better preacher than his father, but Baldwin does not want to be his father; he becomes a writer rather than a preacher. The Word which Baldwin makes his own is the written word. As a teenager, he begins spending more time writing for school than preaching at the Church; this leads to the one truly honest conversation he ever had with his father as a young man about something that mattered, a conversation which Baldwin highlights as essential to their relationship: “My father asked me abruptly, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?” I was astonished at his question— because it was a real question. I answered, “Yes.” That was all we ever said. It was awful to remember that that was all we ever said.”³⁷ In order to truly transcend his father and extend Christianity, Baldwin needed a medium of his own; by becoming the most eloquent, preacherly, loving writer possible, he attempted to both escape his father and extend his best spirit.

Baldwin was, in the end, a writer more than preacher. The written word was truly his from the start— his choice— his salvation. Though Baldwin was a prophet, he was not shot, did not die King’s death with his arms splayed out and lead split in a cross upon his heart. He died of old age, like a writer.

But writers can be prophets as well as preachers. Often, a great preacher is a flame blossoming from the long-stoked coals of past writers, a campfire breathing with stories, watched through the night, under a complete sky of bright stars— a night we dream into daylight, the stars all suns, an unbelievable blue infinitely lit. We rekindle these banked dreams and fan them again to full flame as another unlimited day dawns anew, and our friends rise from their forgetful sleep, already forgiven, to share with us a nice warm breakfast. The fire this time will be safe but strong, the cold night now a story in sunny pockets. There will be chatter about the day before, the day ahead, the dreams between; we may share a smoke, or good black coffee— with and without sugar.

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1. As critic and writer James Wood says in his Introduction to Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2019, page 2

2. The Fire Next Time (Baldwin Collected Essays Library of America edition) 343

3. It is beautiful, and interesting, that Baldwin is capable of such profoundly-felt love for future generations as a gay man without children himself. I think this says something important about the universality of human altruism; it is not merely built on selfish kin selection.

4. And might need to adapt to.

5. Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time on the idea of the ‘sensual’: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” Ibid 311. Baldwin’s sensuality is his direct contact with the world, and by extending his sensuality, he can ‘touch’ potential future environments in the present, through the extension of his love through felt empathy for others.

6. The Fire Next Time 343

7. See Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet”

8. James Baldwin, Notes From a Native Son, 65

9. The Fire Next Time, 296

10. It’s noteworthy that, in Notes From a Native Son, Baldwin says that his father “had always been so strange and had lived, like a prophet…” 66

11. In The Fire Next Time, after his father hits him, Baldwin says that “The battle between us was out in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun.” Notes From a Native Son 308. This more deadly struggle goes on in Baldwin’s own heart for the rest of his life.

12. They had “got on badly” due to their “stubborn pride.” Notes From a Native Son 63

13. The Fire Next Time 305

14. Ibid 308

15. Notes From a Native Son 68

16. Ibid 65

17. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 184

18. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 308

19. At his father’s funeral, the children are made to look upon their dead father. Baldwin thinks that “there is also something very gallant about children at such moments. It has something to do with their silence and gravity and with the fact that one cannot help them. Their legs, somehow, seem exposed, so that it is at once incredible and terribly clear that their legs are all they have to hold them up.” Notes From a Native Son 80.

20. Notes From a Native Son 72

21. When he was 14, he loses the safety of his father’s religion, and becomes, “for the first time in my life, afraid— afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.” The Fire Next Time 296

22. Notes From a Native Son 79

23. The Fire Next Time 291

24. One might say that, in the Baldwinian American religion, the trinity is the father, the son, and the present spirit.

25. Baldwin, Notes From a Native Son, 78

26. Once again, see Baldwin on the ‘sensual’ in footnote 5. Like the similarly sensuous, embodied, and bisexual Walt Whitman, Baldwin’s great sensual love allows him to make felt contact with others via empathy through time and space, extending his sphere of felt love through a social network towards a democratic ideal.

27. Woolf 186

28. Ibid 187. I am reminded of the scene in Moby-Dick when Ishmael and Queequeg are bound by the monkey rope; Ishmael embraces his entanglement, while Ahab curses his “moral inter-indebtedness.”

29. “That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did— (and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out— tyranny, despotism, he called it— making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak.” Woolf 184

30. Notes From a Native Son 75

31. This is a form of agape anger, as coined by Myisha Cherry in “Love, Anger, and Racial Injustice” (https://www.myishacherry.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Love-Anger-and-Racial-Injustice.pdf). See also Martha Nussbaum on “transition-anger.”

32. Notes From a Native Son 84

33. “Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other and it is what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.” Notes From a Native Son 78

34. Ibid 78

35. Ibid 79

36. In this way, a close reading of Notes From a Native Son helps us to understand why Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time.

37. Ibid 80