"Begin Again" by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

In this picture above, I imagine Baldwin is saying to me “Really? I need to explain this to you again?” No Jimmy, you don’t. We got this.

In the final part of the book, Professor Glaude tells the story of his trip to Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York to visit James Baldwin’s grave. He and a friend who thought she could locate his grave because she was at Baldwin’s funeral spent what sounded like a reflective hour or so wandering rows of graves in the Hillcrest section, unable to locate it. Before they returned to an office to have it pointed out to them on a map, they stopped to ask a group of Black and Latino men that were smoking weed near a mausoleum if they knew where it was. He thought they might work for the cemetery.

Professor Glaude rolled down the car window and asked. A young man replied they did not, but he might be buried near Malcolm X, pointing in the direction of his grave in an adjacent section. Professor Glaude’s companion assured him that Baldwin’s grave was not near Malcolm X’s, so they resolved to go the main office for the cemetery. They were given a map with the exact location highlighted.

They drove directly back to where the group of young men were still standing, the scent of weed still hanging in the air, finding the grave directly behind them. When Professor Glaude found Baldwin’s grave he yelled to his friend to announce this fact.

The young men turned around, and one of them said, with amazement, “He is right there?” I smiled and said, “Yes, he’s right here.” He was right here all along. Hidden in plain sight.

I am those young men.

As a white man I have been blissfully smoking the weed of my confidence in my own morality and understanding of the country I live in. I was a proud protege of Professor Tom Philpott’s at The University of Texas at Austin in the 1980’s, an authority on urban immigrant poverty, the Civil Rights movement, and how that all connects to the Reagan revolution (which I believe ultimately led us directly to the fascist and incompetent rule by President Donald Trump). I have read Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Taylor Branch. On my 55th birthday I read Ta-Nehisi’s Coats Between the World and Me in a single sitting. I don’t remember going to the bathroom until I finished it. I could not put it down. It had been released a few days earlier.

Yet, all these years I have stepped over and around James Baldwin because well, frankly, he’s dead and I was ignorant. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I mean I did not know what treasures were practically underfoot (also literally, since I am a two decade resident of Harlem). Professor Glaude’s stunning new book, which essentially is a book-length abstract of a seminar on Baldwin he has been teaching at Princeton for years, is my map to Baldwin.

I once was blind, but now I see.

Its not like I don’t know Baldwin at all. Of course, I have read essays and excerpts of his work over the years, both as assignments and as I ran across them. I know his writing voice, it feels resonant with my own. I have often relied upon his quotes and excerpts from his works when I needed a particular air of moral authority to make a point of my own.

But I have never read Baldwin. After reading Professor Glaude’s book, that will change. I must read Baldwin. I shall. I’m not sure there is a voice that is more alive for me in these particular times of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and President Trump’s openly fascist speech in front of stolen land and a defaced sacred mountain in South Dakota last night, July 3, 2020.

“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.

Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.

This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore. They defile the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Today, we will set history and history's record straight.”

I wonder, does it sound any better in the original German?

Trump’s openly fascist polemics above could be leveled directly at James Baldwin. This reckoning of American mythology with what actually happened which Trump fears is at the heart of the reconciliation this country requires to survive. The Constitution was drafted in part to preserve slavery, immediately betraying the ideals of what was written in the Declaration of Independence just barely over a decade before. Why? Money. The new colony couldn’t make it without the theft of labor from slaves. It would have quickly choked on it’s own ambition, becoming an easy conquest for a European power in a generation or less.

That’s not what I was taught in school.

Baldwin, along with Professor Glaude, Cornell West, Ta-Nehisi Coats, and legions of others can walk anyone interested through the documentation that outlines the racist foundations of this country. This is not a slant, or interpretation of history, these are the facts.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, a wonderfully exuberant work of Art, is a modern retelling of the White Supremacist American Exceptionalism and American Innocence myths. Despite the seeming color-blind use of non-White actors to play slave-holders, it self-consciously dances around these issues, but never openly reveals the rank hypocrisy of the group of slave-holders who drew legal lines around their ability to own other human beings in the name of their own freedom, liberty, and egalitarianism.

I do love the show Hamilton, like I love Madame Butterfly, but the events depicted in these stories, in both cases, are rank morally. They glorify and excuse the preservation of slavery in the former, and romanticize sexual fetishization of East Asian women in the latter. These are the intoxicating lullabies of White Supremacy, they will only be rendered harmless when they are seen for what they are, so you can still enjoy the music.

I’m never going to like Wagner, though. But, I digress.

Professor Glaude never explains why he alternates between referring to James Baldwin as “Baldwin” and as “Jimmy” in the text, often in the same paragraph. I hoped he would, and I did a survey of the interviews with him following the release of this book, but I can’t find his explanation. It haunts me like the ending of The Sopranos haunted some fans of that show.

I think I know. I think he is telling the story of two men—the scholar and the human behind the scholarship. It is not absolutely clear, but it seems to me as if he is addressing scholar Baldwin he’s known his entire academic life with his surname, and the man he bent down and touched the grave in the final paragraph of this astonishing book.

I didn’t say much at the grave site. I kneeled down and quietly said, “Thank you,” as I touched his grave. I stood up and thought to myself, I’ve been reading Jimmy for thirty years. He has been waiting for us. Waiting to see what this history of ours, once we pass through it, has made us all. He still waits.

Yep, he’s been waiting on me. I’m catching up, Jimmy. My deepest thanks to Professor Glaude for this map.