*   *   *   *   * Selected Works Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953 Notes of a Native Son, 1955 Giovanni's Room, 1956 Nobody Know My Name (, 1962 Another Country, 1962 The Fire Next Time, 1963 Blues for Mister Charlie (a play, produced in 1964) Going to Meet the Man, 1965 Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968 A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead, 1971 If Beale Street Could Talk 1974 The Devil Finds Work, 1976 Just Above My Head, 1979 The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985 The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction, 1948-1985, 1985 Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 1987 Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989 Early Novels and Stories, 1998 Collected Essays, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison)

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As the title suggests (Beale Street in Memphis  was a home of blues composition), the novel is written as a blues lament, a structure that explains the two unbalanced sections: the long lyric-evocation celebration of suffering in the first part (“Troubled About My Soul”) and the brief second section (“Zion’) that does not conclude but plaintively fades away.

This lack of plot resolution that frustrates the reader mirrors the frustration of the black families in their efforts to free Fonny. The love story stresses not the romantic aspect of love but its fidelity, tenacity and cohesive power – the qualities of love that battle frustration. Frustrating it is indeed that the young black man is accused of rape, yet the black community suffers constant violations of its rights and identity. Fonny himself is  eventually beaten up in prison because he will not submit to homosexual rape, and then is placed in solitary confinement. Against these invasions of person and community the strength of love offers the only defense. If Beale Street Could Talk

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It is one thing to prick the conscience of white America, to arouse a sense of guilt for the wrongs that have been done. But guilt feeling by itself is not enough; if it becomes too overwhelming, the human psyche has defense mechanisms that allow the guilt energy to be dissipated outside of any constructive channels. How many thoughtful white Americans, thinking of South Africa, feel in their hearts that the situation in that cursed land is so hopeless that they might as well forget even trying to think of any solution? And how many white Americans get a similar bleak feeling when they consider not only Mississippi but Harlem, Roxbury, New Haven, Gary and a hundred other places where racial relationships have been tied into knots which defy unraveling? The feeling is intensified in practically every case of school integration; for how many parents are willing to jeopardize their children’s education for the principle of equality – or for any principle, no matter how laudable it may be? James Baldwins Jeremiad

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Baldwin was born on Aug. 2, 1924, a day after Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association hosted a massive march past Harlem Hospital where he was born to open the fourth annual International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World. Growing up in abject poverty, Baldwin found his voice through writing at an early age. The poet Countee Cullen was one of his mentors in high school. His break though 1953 autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a coming-of-age saga of a black teen in the African American church.

After a brief stint working menial jobs in New Jersey as a young man, Baldwin hitched his wagon and took off for Paris, where he came into contact with the likes of writers Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. His Paris experience provided partial inspiration for future novels like 1956’s Giovanni’s Room and 1962’s Another Country, which dealt candidly with racial and sexual identities at a time when such topics were still taboo.

Motivated by the growing racial tension back in the United States, Baldwin came home in the early 1960s and threw himself into the fire of the burgeoning civil rights movement. He gave speeches and wrote prolifically for major publications of record about the growing tides of change in America. His groundbreaking 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, and Blues for Mr. Charlie, a play loosely based on the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till, are considered two of the era’s most influential works about race relations.

Over the years, Baldwin’s politics grew more militant. He became more supportive of black nationalists like Angela Davis and Stokley Carmichael. Following the assassination of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, black radicals stormed U.N. headquarters demanding answers to his murder. In a New York Times article written after the incident, Baldwin said the “riot” at the United Nations was “but a small echo of the black discontent now abroad” and “if we are not able, and quickly, to face and begin to eliminate the sources of discontent in our own country, we will never be able to do it in the world at large.” Bay State Banner

updated 2 October 2007