Book and Movie Review: I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary Directed by Raoul Peck, from texts by James Baldwin (2016)

 

Poster and the cover of the book I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, from texts by James Baldwin. (Documentary 2016, book 2017)

Filmmaker Raoul Peck

Author James Baldwin, 1924-1987.

Even though he died more than 30 years ago, James Baldwin’s writing has remained steadily in view over the last few years. People are continually drawn to Baldwin’s powerful prose, and his incisive writing about race in America, which is still very relevant today.

Filmmaker Raoul Peck made the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro by drawing on Baldwin’s writings, published and unpublished, to create a portrait of a writer who had much to say about being a Black man in America. Peck worked with the cooperation of Baldwin’s estate, and found the key to his documentary when Baldwin’s sister Gloria gave him a packet containing Baldwin’s notes for a book to be titled Remember This House. Baldwin never finished the book, but it was to be about three significant Black men who were assassinated during the 1960’s: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin knew all three men, and it’s tantalizing to think what might have been if Baldwin would have completed the book. As it is, even the notes Baldwin took in preparation for the book have a resonant power.

The book I Am Not Your Negro contains the writings that are used in the film, and the book acts as a textual companion to the film. I watched the documentary first, and then read the book. I suppose one could read the book and decide not to watch the movie, but they’re really meant to go together, so discussing the book separately from the movie seems superfluous to me.

In the movie we see many archival film clips of Baldwin speaking—two of the most notable clips are Baldwin’s 1965 appearance at Cambridge University, where he debated William F. Buckley about civil rights, and a 1968 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Baldwin had a very expressive face, with large eyes and a wide grin that seemed to show all his teeth. He also had a charisma that draws you in. Baldwin’s writings are read by Samuel L. Jackson, who does a superb job.

One of the best moments in I Am Not Your Negro is the exchange between Baldwin and Paul Weiss, a white philosophy professor at Yale, on The Dick Cavett Show. Weiss essentially says that he feels that Baldwin makes too big a deal out of race, and that there’s so much that unites us. Baldwin fires back with a heated response, which I’ll paraphrase here:

“I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions…You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.” (p.88-9)

Baldwin has a beautiful and heartbreaking quote about attending Martin Luther King’s funeral: “I did not want to weep for Martin; tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop.” (p.95)

I Am Not Your Negro also features Baldwin’s famous quotation, from a 1962 essay: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (p.103)

I Am Not Your Negro is essential viewing, and once you’ve finished watching it, pick up a James Baldwin book like The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, or Notes of a Native Son.

Book Review: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin (1963)

Reissue paperback cover of The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1963.

Author James Baldwin, 1924-1987.

James Baldwin was a gifted writer of fiction, essays, plays, and poems. Born in 1924, Baldwin was a member of a generation of American writers that produced an astonishing number of public intellectuals-figures like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Styron, and Kurt Vonnegut. By 1963 he had established a reputation as one of America’s most talented young writers, and that year he would appear on the cover of Time magazine.

James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time was an unvarnished look at race in America, and it’s a book that influenced Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me. (I reviewed Between the World and Me here.) I’ve owned a copy of The Fire Next Time for many years, but after reading Coates’ book last month, I decided it was the right time to read Baldwin’s book as well. 

The Fire Next Time is comprised of two essays. The first, titled, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” is a short piece written to Baldwin’s 15 year old nephew. The bulk of the book is the second essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in which Baldwin addresses the pertinent racial issues of the day, including Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam. 

In “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin describes his upbringing in Harlem, and his brief career as a teenage preacher. Baldwin’s language is evocative and memorable throughout the book. Baldwin describes his spiritual crisis at the age of fourteen thus:

“Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell.” (p.17)

One of the passages that struck me the most was Baldwin’s assessment of being black in America:

“The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.” (p.30)

Baldwin is blunt and to the point, and these sentences are unfortunately as relevant in 2016 as they were in 1963: “When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know.” (p.53) 

Another quote that I found very perceptive about race relations was: “Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.” (p.68)

Eventually, Baldwin lost his religious fervor and moved away from the church. In the second half of “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin describes a meeting he had in Chicago with the Honorable Elijah Muhammed, as he was always referred to, the leader of the Nation of Islam, a black separatist movement that had come to prominence in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Elijah Muhammed’s message of black pride and black nationalism was spread by his charismatic national spokesman, Malcolm X. Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammed occurred before Muhammed’s split with Malcolm X in 1964. Baldwin is intrigued by the Nation of Islam, but not willing to convert to all of their ideas. 

One of the reasons for Malcolm X’s split with Elijah Muhammed was the revelation that Muhammed had fathered several illegitimate children, and there are a couple of passages in The Fire Next Time that are somewhat humorous given what we now know about Elijah Muhammed’s behavior that James Baldwin didn’t. Baldwin describes the women in Elijah Muhammed’s house as being “…much occupied by a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women.” (p.61) One can only wonder if that was one of Elijah Muhammad’s illegitimate children. Baldwin also writes that Muhammed “teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance.” (p.63) Well, it wasn’t so great a distance as Baldwin thought.

Ultimately, Baldwin still believes in integration, and during the dinner says to himself, but not to Elijah Muhammad, “’I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?’” (p.71) At the conclusion of the book, Baldwin repudiates the Nation of Islam’s separatist philosophy, writing, “To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white.” (p.97) 

The Fire Next Time and Between the World and Me cover some of the same ground, but I would argue that Baldwin’s message is easier to swallow than Coates’, as Baldwin was in favor of integration, and Coates never gives the reader any easy answers to the continuing issue of race in America. I prefer Baldwin’s more elegant prose to Coates’ plain and unadorned style. However, both books have many important things to say and are essential reading for anyone interested in the issues that America faces.

Book Review: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

Book jacket of Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015.

The journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There is a racial crisis in America right now, as it becomes clearer and clearer that we are not actually living in a “post-racial” America, as some people had hoped after Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Incidents of police brutality against young African American men have become all too commonplace in the headlines over the last few years. Saint Paul, the city where I live, was thrust into these headlines this past summer with the tragic death of Philando Castile. Against the backdrop of this crisis, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote 2015’s Between the World and Me, a long letter to his 15 year old son, and a meditation about race in America.

Whether you agree with what Coates writes in the book or not, Between the World and Me is an extremely important book, one that deserves to be widely read by both black and white readers. Coates tells his story of growing up in Baltimore, and how race has defined and shaped his life. 

I know that as a white person, or as Coates would write, “A person who believes they are white,” I cannot fully understand what it’s like to be black in America. My understanding of Coates’ book is inevitably colored by my race. 

Coates paints a bleak and depressing picture of race in America, telling his son, “So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair.” (p.71) Well, it sounds pretty despairing to me. 

There is a sad truth when Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage.” (p.103) I agree with Coates’ depiction of race relations throughout American history, but what I don’t agree with is Coates’ seeming insistence that we are prisoners of the past, playing out the same rituals of oppression time and time again. I saying seeming insistence because I don’t actually know if Coates thinks we can move beyond racism or not. I suppose I just want to have faith in the idea that we are making progress towards greater equality in this country. If we don’t have faith in that idea, then how do you avoid nihilism and despair?

Coates name-checks Malcolm X many times in the book, and it’s clear that Malcolm is an intellectual hero of his, but since all of the Malcolm X quotes are from the time he was involved with the Nation of Islam, I wondered what Coates would say about the Malcolm X of 1964 and 1965 who believed in integration, rather than black separatism? 

Coates does not give the reader any answers in Between the World and Me, he doesn’t prescribe any solutions. He offers the reader no succor, only a list of ever-growing offenses. I’m okay with that-not every book needs to have the answers for the difficult and complicated questions it raises. And the questions that Between the World and Me raises are essential ones for America in 2016.

Book Review: “Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey,” by Adam Henig (2014)

The cover of "Alex Haley's Roots: An Author's Odyssey," by Adam Henig.

I just finished reading Adam Henig’s newly published e-book “Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey.” Henig takes us on a fascinating journey through Alex Haley’s life after his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published and turned into a highly successful television miniseries. Henig shows us how Haley’s life was turned upside down by the sudden and overwhelming success of both the book and the miniseries. 

Henig begins the book in January of 1977, with Haley watching the first episode of “Roots” with Warren Beatty at Beatty’s suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Beatty turns to Haley after the episode is finished and tells him, “Your life will never be the same again.” Beatty was certainly correct about that. As a big Warren Beatty fan, I found this anecdote very interesting, and it was an attention-getting way to begin the book.

Alex Haley first became well-known as a writer during the 1960’s when he interviewed many celebrities for Playboy, and Haley was the co-author of Malcolm X’s Autobiography of Malcolm X. (Haley finished the Autobiography after Malcolm was assassinated.) But Haley’s previous success as an author did not prepare him for the worldwide phenomenon that Roots would become. Roots was published in late 1976, and it became an immediate best-seller. Once the miniseries starting airing in January of 1977, Roots became even more successful, eventually spending 22 weeks in the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list. When the miniseries had finished airing, seven of the eight episodes of “Roots” were among the top ten most watched television shows ever. Haley became a celebrity overnight, with crowds mobbing his lectures and book signings. 

Roots told the story of Haley’s ancestors, and specifically, Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte, who had been sold into slavery in Africa and crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship. Haley called Roots a book of “faction,” as he acknowledged that he had, out of necessity, invented dialogue and events in order to create a narrative. But Haley claimed that all of the genealogical research in the book was completely true. And since Haley had spent a decade writing and researching the book, most people took him at his word. But once reporters began digging into Haley’s sources, they discovered multiple discrepancies. And other authors noticed similarities in Roots to their own novels. Margaret Walker, author of the novel Jubilee, and Harold Courlander, author of the novel The African, both sued Haley for plagiarism, noting many similarities in Roots to their own novels. Haley claimed that he had never read either book. At the trials, it became obvious that regardless of whether or not Haley’s plagiarism was intentional, his working methods left a lot to be desired, as he carried on his research blithely unconcerned with the fact that the words in his notebooks might have been copied from other sources. Haley won the trial against Walker, but when it became evident that he might lose the Courlander trial, he settled out of court with Courlander, paying him the tidy sum of $650,000, and acknowledging that somehow passages from The African had made their way into Roots.

Henig does a good job of showing how Courlander, a white man, was accused by others of racism in suing an African-American author who was writing about slavery and the black experience in America. Courlander wasn’t pursuing his lawsuit for racial reasons, but it was inevitable that it would appear that way to some onlookers. 

Henig shows us how Haley’s life after Roots became a treadmill of speeches, public appearances, and very little writing. Haley was a public celebrity, but he didn’t have much time to devote to writing anymore, which is the double-edged sword of becoming a celebrity. As John Updike once said, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” Roots made Haley world-famous, but it was also the only thing people wanted Haley to talk about. 

Haley’s fundamental problem with Roots was one of authenticity. Because Haley didn’t cite any sources for his research, it’s impossible to know what’s really true and what’s not. It’s the same problem he had with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, because Malcolm died before the book was published, we don’t really know how much of it was Malcolm’s, and how much of it was Haley’s. We just have to take Haley’s word for it.

Henig does an excellent job in showing us the turmoil that Roots caused in Alex Haley’s life. It was of course his most famous book, but it also caused him a lot of grief as well. Throughout the book, I was reminded of parallels to one of my favorite authors, Truman Capote, whose life started unraveling shortly after his masterpiece In Cold Blood was published. Much like Haley, Capote was an author who had worked enormously hard for his success, and yet when it came it did not bring the happiness it should have. For both Haley and Capote, once the peak was reached, the journey downward began immediately. Sometimes what you wish for isn’t really what you want. Or, to use a quote that inspired the title of Capote’s famously unfinished novel, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”