Letter to Jimmy (2 page)

The Harlem in which you live is a pile of hovels, a den of prostitution and of drugs, tuberculosis, alcoholism and crime. Above all, it is the scene of the most appalling
racial atrocities that often unfold under police watch, when they themselves are not committing the acts or are not pulling the strings behind the curtains. Emma Berdis Jones warns you against “the street” that corrupts, derails and perverts.

The feeling there is of an abandoned neighborhood, separate from the rest of New York. And when riots erupt on March 19, 1935, after the murder of a black man by a white police officer—several thousand men take it out on white-owned businesses, causing a good portion of the middle-class to flee the neighborhood—you see that, despite the widespread indignation, political figures merely make endless speeches, set up committees, and tear down a few hovels to replace them with housing projects. They still do not take concrete and effective steps to “. . . right the wrong, however, without expanding or demolishing the ghetto.” And this futile activity seems to you “about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”
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An entire universe exists between the ghetto and the heart of the city, situated only a few blocks apart.

When you go to the public library on 42nd Street, you get the feeling of entering another world. In this area, most people are homeowners. And they make sure you know it, you outsiders, you people of color. If necessary, the police will also see to it that you understand.

Under these circumstances, you and your brothers conclude that Emma is too inclined to absolution and
indulgence toward her fellow man: the exact opposite of David Baldwin. She is the one who reminds you, “You have lots of brothers and sisters . . . You don't know what's going to happen to them. So you're to treat everybody like your brothers and sisters. Love them.”
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Who are these siblings in need of protection? Barbara, Gloria, Paula, Ruth—your sisters. And your brothers: Samuel, George, Wilmer and David. Your father's obsession with the name David is obvious: not only is it his name, but he already had a son with this name from a previous union at the time he married your mother. He then gives the same name to one of your younger brothers. One might say that yours is “the house of David.”

While Emma embodies security and familial protection, David is distant and consumed by his religious faith. Although he is a factory worker, he proudly dons a dark jacket and brushed black hat every Sunday. Then, with a Bible tucked under his arm, he preaches in the abandoned warehouses of Harlem.

To suffer through everything without complaint, is Emma Berdis a saint?

“I would not describe her as a saint, which is a terrible thing to do. I think she is a beautiful woman . . . When I think about her, I wonder how in the world she did it, how she managed that block, those streets, that subway, nine children. No saint would have gotten through it! But she is a beautiful, a fantastic woman. She saved all our lives.”
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So what happened to your biological father?

You do not know him, and you will never know him. This mystery will be one of the greatest torments of your adolescence. The shadows cast by this dark cloud scatter themselves through most of your writing. Your friend and biographer David Leeming explains how much the idea of “illegitimacy” remained a constant preoccupation for you, to the point that it can be detected in the titles of several of your books:
Nobody Knows My Name, Stranger in the Village
. . .”
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Leeming nevertheless specifies that although the search for a father haunted you, it was not just for your biological father—you consider David Baldwin to be your own father, and when you mention him, you express a certain pride in bearing his name. In fact, as your biographer points out, you dreamed of a father who would accompany you on your long path to writing, and in your work as a preacher, to which David Baldwin was particularly attached. But starting in your adolescence and at the time you became a pastor, an even more complicated relationship developed between the two of you, as another of your biographers, Benoît Depardieu, explains: “By entering religion, in becoming a pastor-preacher, young James was turning toward another father, God the Father, and in so doing he hoped not only to escape from David Baldwin, his stepfather, but also to take his place by defying him and surpassing
him in his own domain. This desire to compete with the father and to defeat him demonstrates a common oedipal complex.”
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David Baldwin cannot imagine an existence without his work as a preacher. This is all the more true since he sees before him every day the stigma of what he holds to be the greatest injustice: his own mother who lives with you, Barbara Ann Baldwin, was a former slave. Every black American is linked to the history of slavery. But Barbara Ann Baldwin is there in the flesh, and her history is not confined to textbooks; it is written across the downcast eyes of the old woman.

David Baldwin draws his entire family into his religious zeal. He has a rigid idea of Biblical teachings. Is it this rigidity that persuades him to have such a large family, since the Bible applauds fertility and mankind's continuous reproduction?

In one way or another, it is your relationship with this man that will inform your views on American society and on interracial relations. You feel a sense of urgency to understand what feeds his hatred of the Other. Deep down, even if you devote yourself to admiring this hard and rigid being, you do not share the same understanding of the world, his view of the black man's place in the world, nor his unwavering hostility toward the white man. The “murder” of the father will be symbolized by the “hatred” you harbor toward him. But does
David Baldwin even love himself? He is not happy, to say the least. Never has anyone despised himself so much, you will tell yourself. He goes so far as to blame himself for the color of his skin. He will spend his life apologizing for it in all of his actions and believing that religion is the only path to salvation. In his mind, Leeming reminds us, even if the “white demon” does not recognize him as a human being in this world, God the Omnipotent, in His goodness and fairness, will rectify the injustice. This explains his antipathy toward IRS agents, landlords, and all whites who, in his mind, exercise a certain abusive power over blacks. However, he gathers through his daily reading of the Holy Book that the power of the white world is ephemeral, and that God will come one day to set the record straight. And on that day, the believers, the true believers, will have the upper hand over the non-believers.

This Manichean understanding commits him to absolute distrust. Since the world has always been corrupt, there can never be any cooperation between whites and blacks—the latter will always lose in that fool's errand. As a result, the few whites who ever cross the threshold of your home are social workers or bill collectors. These public employees are not protected from the fury of the master of the house, although your mother still scurries around to receive them. David Baldwin, on the other hand, will bellow about the “violation of his domestic
privacy,” and you all fear that his pride will drive him to commit the unthinkable.

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During your childhood, you have countless opportunities to witness the extent to which your father distrusts the white man, whoever he may be, even if he has the best intentions in the world. For David Baldwin, it is not only the white man who is bad: all white people are, without exception.

You tell the story of a white school-teacher who had to confront your suspicious father when she got the notion to take you to the theater. You were nine or ten years old, and you had just written a play that the school-teacher, devoted and admiring as she was, had already put on at school. She believed that in order to complement your education in drama, you had to live the theater, watch actors perform, feel the emotion of the audience. But at home, the theater, as well as movies and books, synonyms of perversion and of the grasp of the “white demon,” were forbidden. So was jazz, the “music of bought Negros,” that fascinates men of color who are caught in the trap of the white demon. David Baldwin took the invitation to the theater as an insult, a challenge to his authority, and an intrusion by a malicious force into the house
of God. He has the habit of repeating a citation from the Bible: “As my house and myself, we will serve the Lord.” Never mind that he is incapable of meeting the needs of his family, or that his sons are reduced to engaging in an activity that young black men of the time could not shake: they were shoe-shiners, whose “pathetic” image was further perpetuated through advertisements. It was an image as moving as that of a “darky bootblack doing a buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins.”
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Moreover, David Baldwin does not hold it against his wife for working as a maid in white homes. If money does not have a smell, one might add here, too, that it does not have a color . . .

That a white woman should offer to take one of David Baldwin's sons to the theater is nevertheless enough to ignite his indignation. He immediately called into question the school-teacher's interest in his son, convinced that behind her motivation and zeal there were some diabolical games at play: the white man is always out to get the black man. It was therefore against your father's will that the school-teacher should help you experience the emotion of a theatrical performance for the first time.

Would David Baldwin have had the same reaction if the school-teacher had been a woman of color? Certainly not. You would hold on to these words for the rest of your
life: “. . . he warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my friends, and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.”
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David Baldwin is black, and does not realize that he is beautiful, you point out. You add that he dies with a fierce conviction of his ugliness. No doubt overcome by his own frustration, he makes tasteless jokes about your “ugliness” and your “big eyes” to the point of saying that you are the most unfortunate child he has ever laid eyes on. You were affected for a long time by his idea of ugliness. At a young age, we end up accepting what is said about us, especially when it comes from adults. It remains this way until something comes along to contradict those early notions, to make things right, even if only superficially.

You study yourself. You think about these eyes, so prominent on your face, that you inherited from Emma Berdis Jones, and you ask yourself if your father might not be right. What purpose could these big eyes serve?
Why do they protrude so much? Had Mother Nature really punished you, or was she distinguishing you in some way? Desperation grips you. How many times have you told the story that made you discover that there is always something “uglier” than oneself in this world? In fact, when you were still just a child, you saw in the street, from a window in your apartment, a woman with eyes even more prominent than yours, with, on top of everything, and as if nature had had it in for her, oversized lips. You conclude that she is uglier than you. You run to tell your mother, to console her, to prove to her that you no longer have any reason to be tormented by this physical detail, and that human beings are judged by the quality of their souls . . .

In fact, when David Baldwin focuses on your supposed ugliness, when he makes it the subject of his frequent tormenting, he hits your weak spot, and from it you draw a painful conclusion about the consequences of being a “bastard”: through his behavior, your step-father is indirectly attacking your biological father . . . This leads you to regret yourself, and to reproach this unknown man, your biological father, for having approached Emma, and having transmitted to you her physical disgrace; impossible to erase, obvious at first glace. From that point forward, when you rest your big eyes on him, you imagine a pathetic being—a very old, frozen statue . . .

Despite his despicable character that suggests David
Baldwin is completely cold to his family—to the point that you describe him as “a monster in the house. Maybe he saved all kinds of souls, but he lost all of his children, every single one of them,” a monster experiencing a visceral aversion toward the white race—you also remember moments where this man seemed to you at last like a devoted father: human, feeling, attentive, managing the best he could for his family. You remember a time when your mother would carry you on her shoulders, and David Baldwin would be walking beside her, smiling at you. You remember, too, the image of this old man offering you candy.

But very quickly you recall the harsh reality of your father who pronounces you good-for-nothing, and does not hesitate to beat you to a pulp when you lose the change you are given to buy kerosene for heating the family home. Did this hateful man prepare you for life's battles? You say your father “. . . was perhaps too old to have as many children in a strange land as he had. The world was changing so fast, and he was in such trouble that he could not change with it . . . He had nine children he could hardly feed. His pain was so great that he translated himself into silence, rigidity . . . sometimes into beating us and finally into madness . . . Without him I might be dead because knowing his life and his pain taught me how to fight.”
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